Tibor Fischer

Flights of fancy | 10 August 2017

Peter Adey gives us funambulists, flying carpets, ballerinas and even drones in a book that embraces all things elevated

Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book, or as the dust jacket states, ‘the long-standing belief that we could float relatively unaided’. The cover of Levitation has an elegant lady in flowing robes apparently hovering in a bubble over New York. Who could resist a good read about a subject like that? The catch lies in the subtitle: ‘The Science, Myth and Magic of Suspension.’ Suspension: we all know what that is, and it’s not levitation.

The excitement of levitation clearly attracted Adey and his editor, but when it came to knocking out the copy, it was evidently impossible to produce an entire book. So what Adey has done is to move the goalposts so far that the whole world can have a tap-in; he has embraced elevation in its entirety.

So we get elevation whether it’s tight-rope walking, anchorites atop pillars, saints ascending, fakirs clambering up magic ropes, ballerinas leaping, ballooning, astronauts floating in space, giddy poets and even drones.

It’s a definition so loose you wonder if a chapter on the high jump is coming (and there is a name check for the basketball star Michael Jordan and his famous ‘hang time’, which Adey does, with a straight face, classify as levitation).

This open-door policy results in a stimulating mish-mash of information. Houdini, Kafka, Hobbes, Dali, Rabelais, the tutu, magic carpets and Ghostbusters are rarely lumped together. A lot of honest graft has gone into gathering all these elements and Adey does have a sophistic skill in striving to weave them all together: ‘even birth has been viewed as an event of levitation’ (admittedly by a lesser Freudian).

There are some entertaining passages. Allen Ginsberg, for example, chanting in the hope of levitating the Pentagon during a Vietnam war protest in Washington in 1967; Ginsberg didn’t succeed, and I think Adey missed a trick here in not mentioning the Yyippies’ protest at the New York Stock Exchange where they threw down dollar bills at the brokers, who greedily snapped them up.

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