Camp Concentration 016 - The Electrical Wizard

(David Bowie as Nikolas Tesla, in The Prestige)

From Wikipedia:
In 1891, Telluride's L.L. Nunn joined forces with Nikola Tesla (Nunn's home can be found at the corner of Aspen and Columbia Streets, next door is the home he purchased for the "pinheads" to study hydro-electric engineering) and George Westinghouse and built the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant, the world's first commercial-grade alternating-current power plant, near Telluride. The hydro-powered electrical generation plant supplied power to the Gold King Mine 3.5 miles away.

Writing about Telluride, Disch couldn’t ignore the relationship between that city and Nikolas Tesla, and I am sure that “The Alpha Pickup”, the electrical device to which Mordecai and General Haast submit themselves, is inspired as much by Tesla as by the alchemist Nicholas Flamel.

Tesla has become a sort of Electrical Wizard in recent science fiction. In Christopher Priest’s novel (and later Philip Nolan’s film) The Prestige Tesla makes a brief appearance as a sort of wizard. The plot revolves around a feud between two stage magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, in 19th century London. They become enemies and do what they can to sabotage each other’s shows. When Borden seems to have perfected a trick to teleport himself from one point of the stage to another, Angier travels to the US and goes to Colorado Springs in order to meet Nikolas Tesla and ask him: “If electrical energy may be transmitted, could physical matter also be sent from one place to another?” Then, they join forces to accomplish this.

Disch’s question to himself, while writing the novel, may have been: “Couldn’t they have someone like Tesla, doing some Tesla thing in order to build a mind reciprocator?…”

Camp Concentration 011 - The Golden Tomb

(Thomas M. Disch)

“There is one concept that corrupts and perplexes all others. I am not speaking of evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I am speaking of the infinite”. (Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”).

Borges speaks of infinite itself. Disch chooses for his novel a Borgesian version of infinite, and of hell: the labyrinth. His characters are locked in an underground prison which is not infinite, of course, but is claustrophobically organized as a mixture of jail, hospital, research facility and hôtel de luxe. The physical confinement of the body (the clocks; the absence of natural symbols; the cells) is simmetrically opposed to the luxurious living it is offered (the dictates of fashion; the cuisine; movies; other entertainments; team sports). The juxtaposition of such extremes magnify the possibilities of the enhanced mind and is, in itself, a kind of torture..

“We go everywhere we go in elevators” (CC, p. 85, June 18 entry)

They live inside the tunnels of a former goldmine in Telluride, Colorado, which means that Camp Archimedes is located both underground and above sea level (circa 8,700 feet or 2.6 km). They are as much "above" as they are "below".

(Telluride is in the valley below)

“The town was named after the chemical element tellurium, which was never actually found in the mountains of Telluride. Tellurium is a metalloid element sometimes associated with deposits of gold and silver. An alternate theory for the naming of Telluride is that it is a contraction of "to hell you ride". (Wikipedia)

Maybe it is the historical link with gold mining that suggests to Mordecai and the other prisoners the idea of the alchemical for the Magnum Opus, the Philosophical Egg, the Transmutation of Bodies, the Eternal Life. Buried underground, with their bodies rotting and their minds soaring, they are at the very threshold of the Dissociation of Mind and Body, when Mind may be free at last from Space and Time.