Introduction the Reverse Peephole

introduction The Reverse Peephole was glad that the visit to the mock-castle had been a success, I since I’m a mock-tourist. My friend and I were sitting on the terrace of our bed-and-breakfast near Sintra, Portugal. It was the spring of 2008, which means that there were perhaps Couchsurfers down in the valley, but Airbnb was several months shy of its founding. We had just been on a trip to Quinta da Regaleira, the imitation palace, which in the early twentieth century a set designer had built for a coffee and gem merchant. Although I had enjoyed crawling through the watery tunnels on the castle’s estate, I was happier still to be back on the terrace, writing a postcard. The card was a thank-you note to an acquaintance who, a month or so previously, had lent me his empty house. He hadn’t known I was coming, since he was already abroad when I emailed to ask him. His Georgian dwelling on a lonely terrace was not without its Gothic qualities. Every other chandelier worked, xi 843KK_tx.indd 11 05/05/2015 15:36 the four-dimensional human through the barred windows in the dining room lay a forgotten garden, and all the internal doors opened except one, on the second-floor landing. As I turned and shook the handle, it rattled in its frame. I wondered what he kept locked in there, even when no guests were expected. Elsewhere there were touching signs of the absence into which I’d intruded: a bowl and spoon on the desk, smeared with dried yoghurt, maybe, or ice cream, a maga- zine left on the floor by the bath, folded to an article titled ‘The Loveliest Doors’. During my stay I had the recurring dream that he came back suddenly to turn me out, full of a mysterious and inarguable anger. Nevertheless, thanks were due. I finished the postcard and set it aside. My friend, the good traveller, put down her book and we started chatting. As we spoke, I noticed that I kept glancing at the postcard. Its presence on the table was a sort of agitation, gathering around it a subdued but recognisable cluster of feelings. There was a general nervousness and sense of waiting. For a few moments on the warm terrace, with the forested valley below, life was somehow incomplete, as though a bite had been taken from it. Towards my hospitable acquaintance with the broken chandeliers I felt both impatient and afraid of having offended him, a blend that settled itself into a mild strain of resentment. The card was belly-up on the table, drying its ink in the sun. All this wordless agitation, taking me away from my friend and our jokes, voiced itself suddenly in the thought: ‘Why hasn’t he answered it yet?’ In retrospect it seemed as though, in that deranged moment, I had wakened to a process that had been quietly rewiring my life for a decade, more or less since I chose my first, cryptic email address (imagine broadcasting my real name on ‘the internet’). xii 843KK_tx.indd 12 05/05/2015 15:36 t rr o Well known, by the day of the postcard, were the phantom buzz- ings in our pockets and bags; hadn’t we all, by then, seen a butter knife glinting in the corner of our eyes and wondered who was calling? But my unconscious transposing of digital communication onto a much older form was a revelation. This postcard from the edge of reason came to feel like a developmental milestone, an instant of self-consciousness in which it became clear that I was undergoing a transformation. I was being freshly coded with certain expectations of the world, one of which seemed to be an unflagging belief in the responsiveness of others and which never seemed to learn from its disappointments. Digital technology was reshaping my responses, collaborating with my instincts, creating in me, its subject, all kinds of new sensitivities. In that sideways glance at the postcard, I could feel my place in history by the peculiar register of my uneasiness. The Fourth Dimension Over a century ago, as Queen Victoria transformed into King Edward, ‘the fourth dimension’ became an everyday concept. It was postulated in many ways: as ether, as the unconscious, as a duration in time, or as time itself. But most popularly it was a space into which one might travel, a world that could be reached if only the right conduit or portal could be found. The prospect of discovering this dimension was so appetising that it belonged to everyone. It was the intellectual and creative province of math- ematicians, physicists, chemists, psychologists, philosophers and theosophers, psychic mediums, sculptors, painters and writers. xiii 843KK_tx.indd 13 05/05/2015 15:36 the four-dimensional human The fiction of this period reflects a wider fascination with the idea of other dimensions reachable from our own – worlds that appear as enigmatic glimmers, or else are unreliably accessible, through doorways that don’t always open, or which refuse to stay fixed in one place. In Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s co-authored novel The Inheritors (1901), a man called Granger meets a visitor from the Fourth Dimension. The novel begins in Canterbury, where Granger and the Dimensionist are crossing through ‘the old gateway’. They gaze down at the Gothic city, when suddenly the visitor utters a strange sound and the build- ings below them start to change: ‘One seemed to see something beyond, something vaster – vaster than the cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, unrealisable infinity of space.’ A hundred years after its heyday, we’re only now inhabiting space in a way that could be called four-dimensional. When the early, domestic internet appeared in the 1990s, there was a decisive separation between physical reality and that other place, which went by several aliases. The first household modems enforced this separation by acting as though they were grinding up against something hard, squealing and whirring like a drill hitting rock. Sitting next to them, perhaps wearing a t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt, we might have sighed or yawned, looking mildly around the room or prodding at the squidge of the mousepad, but all the while feeling quickened somehow, as on the verge of arrival. The modem’s faithful churn made it seem as if it were tunnelling through to somewhere else, opening up a space for us to inhabit. Once inside we followed our moods, web pages listlessly completing themselves in descending xiv 843KK_tx.indd 14 05/05/2015 15:36 t rr o strips, producing all manner of suspense as the news story or piece of erotica toppled slowly into being. And then someone in the house would need the telephone, the ultimate, old-world trump card. A voice would rise up the stairs, and the tunnel would cave in, Pete Sampras’s Australian Open fate hanging in the balance. So the modems gave the sense of a journey. Through certain designated portals we could move into a specific way of being that felt like entering a new territory. By gaining access to this land- scape on the other side of things, our bold fin de siècle achieved on its own terms a feat of which its predecessor dreamed. But the scene from The Inheritors suggests how discovering the fourth dimension isn’t an experience that you can segregate from everyday life. The tower reeled, the mundane spaces warp and twist. The fourth dimension doesn’t sit neatly above or on the other side of things. It isn’t an attic extension. Rather, it contorts the old dimensions. And so it is with digitisation, which is no longer a space in and out of which we clamber, via the phone lines. The old world itself has taken on, in its essence, a four-dimensionality. Every moment, every object, has been imbued with the capacity for this extra aspect. Just as a geometrical net of squares can be folded into a cube, our daily lives are a series of nets, any of which could be scored and bent at the perpendicular, and thus extended into this other dimension. Increasingly, the moments of our lives audi- tion for digitisation. A view from the window, a meeting with friends, a thought, an instance of leisure or exasperation – they are all candidates, contestants even, for a dimensional upgrade. Social media, for example, makes a moment four-dimensional by scaffolding it with simultaneity, such that it exists in multiple places at once. A truth and cliché of digital life is that our come- liest meals occur both on our table and in the pockets and on the xv 843KK_tx.indd 15 05/05/2015 15:36 the four-dimensional human desks of our international 4D colleagues, a meal to be both eaten and approved of. One quality of the fourth dimension is co- presence, life happening both locally and in the mind of someone elsewhere. With the prospect of this digital fourth dimension, a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself. Then again, to think of a moment as being ‘flat’ is really a throwback from the three-dimensional days. Today, we live with the sense that un-tweeted, un-instagrammed moments might feel somehow cubic, as in boxed in, just these four walls, unless the walls can be contorted along invisible lines and a message smuggled out.

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