“Hyperspace” is the third chapter in Tim Morton’s Spacecraft, a book with four chapters plus an introduction. Let’s start with a passage near the end of the chapter. I’ve not chosen it at random, say by tossing divination sticks in the manner of John Cage I-Chinging his way toward a composition. Nor have I spent a great deal of time choosing just the right passage for this (illustrative) purpose. Because, really, any of various passages would serve.
Here we go (p. 85-86):
To the outside world you disappear when you enter hyperspace. But for you, it’s as if you’ve stepped out of the street into the lounge. Star Wars sensualizes hyperspace in this way too – hyperspace is not a place of cosmic speed and massive realizations, but rather a quiet lounge. There’s an achieved privacy. It’s soft and comfy. You can play chess. You can flirt. You can talk about boyfriends. Suddenly you arrive at your destination and your spacecraft floats a little. It’s as if you’ve been in a traveling lounge that can relocate anywhere. Then you have to get to work and do stuff like fighting or landing.
What do you think as you read that? After all, you’ve not read Spacecraft so you’re not accustomed to Morton’s way of talking. Stepped out of the street into the lounge? What street, and what lounge? What’s this have to do with Star Wars?
Morton opens the chapter in the lounge area at the center of the Millennium Falcon where Chewbacca’s paying holographic chess (p. 53). So the chapter starts in a lounge. A bit later Morton will offer a brief disquisition on lounges in which he informs you, trickster that he is, that the Falcon is itself a lounge that contains a lounge much larger than it is – in the same way that the Tardis, from another science fiction franchise, contains within it much more than could possibly be fit inside a phone booth – and that this much larger lounge is hyperspace (p. 55). How do you get to hyperspace? By hitching a ride on the Falcon. Or you can watch the Tardis tumble thought hyperspace at the beginning of a each episode of Doctor Who.
Honestly, it’s as though all those roads that lead to Rome? When you turn around and look at them all squinty-eyed, it turns out they can to hyperspace as well. Though you might have to click the heels of your red shoes to get the full effect.
Later (p. 56-57): “...hyperspace is definitely not an empty box. [...] hyperspace has a feel. Hyperspace is ‘space-feel’ just like potato chips have ‘mouthfeel’ in the PR business. [...] Hyperspace is a place.”
You are perhaps confused? From hyperspace to mouthfeel to place, that’s just how it goes. How about Claude Monet’s water lilies, Einstein’s spacetime, stream of consciousness (Woolf and Joyce), “Space...has contours...is creamy...a kind of roaring blue and white curdled ocean” – I’m not making this up. I’m just collecting things as I leaf through the book. Then: Hyperspace is the ecological niche of spacecraft – their habitat.” Finally we land, with Morton telling us that the term hyperspace was coined in 1967 (p. 61). Then right back out, we’re off into Gauss and non-Euclidean geometry and “reference mollusks” (Einstein) and then Wham! Han Solo tells us: “Traveling in hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops boy” (p. 62). It sure didn’t feel that way, zipping all over the map in Morton’s OOO-charged prose.
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It’s time to slow down and get serious. What strikes me about this chapter ¬– and it’s why I want to get to Walt Disney – is Morton’s discussion of the way hyperspace is visually presented in Doctor Who (the Tardis tumbling though a tunnel), Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a psychedelic light show), the Star Wars saga, more psychedelia, and the relationship between those tunnels and the ones in near death experiences, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and DMT trips. In some cases the hyperspace tunnel is a way of getting from here to there while in other cases it’s a place where you are (for awhile). Morton discusses the kinesthetic and haptic feel of these tunnels, whether one is penetrating into the tunnel or enveloped by the tunnel (those are gender typed), and so forth. He manages to bring Plato’s cave into play, for it is a tunnel too, no? and therefor implies light, which blinds one upon leaving the tunnel.
And so (pp. 83-4, just three pages short of the passage where we began):
When we enter or “make” hyperspace, it’s also like having an orgasm. The fourth wall collapse I discussed a moment ago is a kind of orgasm of the film stock, a sudden shudder or “petit mort” as the French say about coming: la mort, l’amour. There is a sudden spring or ripple that demonstrates how not in control of our bodies we really are. We move from extreme pleasure into bliss. In the esoteric “tantric” parts of Hinduism and Buddhism bliss is a pathway beyond the ego – into the hyperspace of enlightenment.
Like Han said, it ain’t like dusting crops.
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But it might be like the closing sequence of the “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” episode of Disney’s Fantasia (1941). It is the first episode, of eight (plus in interlude in the middle), in the film.
During the opening toccata we see the orchestra in images like this:
We recognize the images, but we never see them fully rounded. There’s always an element of flattening.
When we move into the fugue we see quasi abstract imagery:
That kind of imagery continues through the end, where we have a remarkable sequence. First:
And then we see, and feel as well, given the rich chords being played in the low brasses, these splotches of orange and red:
Those are immediately followed by a short sequence where some object lurches its way down a tunnel (you have to look closely to see it, though its movement makes it easily visible in the film):
Then, guess what? Of course you know it. The light:
What just happened? It’s not like we’re piloting the Millennium Falcon into hyperspace, though it’s a bit more like watching the Tardis tumble its way though its tunnel.
In voiceover commentary Walt’s brother Roy remarked that there was some discussion in the studio about that mysterious object lurching its way through that tunnel. Some called it a tombstone, presumably because of its shape.
I’m inclined to give it at different reading. Think of it as a rather tight lump of fecal material, large enough to force you to work hard to expel it, large enough to take you to the edge of pain. And then Whoosh! it’s out. And the light comes flooding in.
That makes hyperspace a very primal experience indeed. In that reading, one of the very few things a young infant can actually make is hyperspace. Does that make the Millennium Falcon into a lump of shit? That’s not so very far the garbage that Rey declares it to be in Morton’s first chapter, “Garbage” (p. 29).
But let’s return to Disney. This, “The Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” is the first episode in Fantasia. What does Disney do with it? He starts with realistic imagery of the orchestra, but abstracted, then to abstract imagery, with representational components here and there, and then he tunnels us out into the rest of the film. What’s in the rest of the film, the other seven episodes? Everything! Fairies, the four seasons, magic, the origins of life on earth, dinosaurs, a day in the life on Mount Olympus, dancing hippos and alligators, a hellish demon, hell, and a procession of religious through the forest (another tunnel) to a concluding sunrise. Hyperspace?
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I’ve argued that Fantasia presents us with the cosmos; it is a type of encyclopedic narrative. Here’s a blog post where I made originally made the argument: Disney’s Fantasia as Masterpiece, August 29, 2013, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/disneys-fantasia-as-masterpiece.html.
Here’s a working paper where I go through the whole film: Walt Disney’s Fantasia: The Cosmos and the Mind in Two Hours, November 30, 2011, 99 pp., https://www.academia.edu/1128493/Walt_Disney_s_Fantasia_The_Cosmos_and_the_Mind_in_Two_Hours.
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Reading Spacecraft 1: In what way is Morton’s prose like Shakespeare’s verse? [and why?]
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