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Online – The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future
Posted by sarahinfo on January 31, 2009
The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future
Aaron Schuster
What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace when these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”?
LEVITATION: WHAT IS IT?
The word levitation has several senses and connotations: miraculous, magical, oneiric, but also scientific and technological. Levitation is equally an affair of mystics and engineers, charlatans and poets. One thinks of the feats of the Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home, who on December 13, 1868 (one of the most auspicious days in the history of levitation) floated out of a third- story window and returned through the window of an adjoining room; or the ascension of Christ, archetype of all saintly air travel; or the magnetic levitation train zipping commuters between Shanghai and the Pudong International Airport at a maximum speed of 431 km/h.
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