him, the cessation of a localized function: 'the most powerful brainof all has stopped thinking'.What this machine of genius was supposed to produce wasequations. Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfullyregained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.Paradoxically, the more the genius of the man was materializedunder the guise of his brain, the more the product of hisinventiveness came to acquire a magical dimension, and gave anew incarnation to the old esoteric image of a science entirelycontained in a few letters. There is a single secret to the world, andthis secret is held in one word; the universe is a safe of whichhumanity seeks the combination: Einstein almost found it, this isthe myth of Einstein. In it, we find all the Gnostic themes: theunity of nature, the ideal possibility of a fundamental reduction ofthe world, the unfastening power of the word, the age-old strugglebetween a secret and an utterance, the idea that total knowledgecan only be discovered all at once, like a lock which suddenlyopens after a thousand unsuccessful attempts. The historic equationE = mc 2 , by its unexpected simplicity, almost embodies the pureidea of the key, bare, linear, made of one metal, opening with awholly magical ease a door which had resisted the desperate effortsof centuries. Popular imagery faithfully expresses this:photographs of Einstein show him standing next to a blackboardcovered with mathematical signs of obvious complexity; butcartoons of Einstein (the sign that he has become a legend) showhim chalk still in hand, and having just written on an emptyblackboard, as if without preparation, the magic formula of, theworld. In this way mythology shows an awareness of the nature ofthe various tasks: research proper brings into play clockwork-likemechanisms and has its seat in a wholly material organ which ismonstrous only by its cybernetic complication; discovery, on thecontrary, has a magical essence, it is simple like a basic element, aprincipial substance, like the philosophers' stone of hermetists, tarwaterfor Berkeley, or oxygen for Schelling.But since the world is still going on, since research is proliferating,and on the other hand since God's share must be preserved, some69failure on the part of Einstein is necessary: Einstein died, it is said,without having been able to verify 'the equation in which the secretof the world was enclosed'. So in the end the world resisted; hardlyopened, the secret closed again, the code was incomplete. In thisway Einstein fulfils all the conditions of myth, which could notcare less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoricsecurity: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher andunfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain andconscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, andmythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature withthe 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without.* 'Science without conscience is but the ruin of the Soul' (Rabelais,Pantagruel II, ch. 8).70
The Jet-manThe jet-man is a jet-pilot. Match has specified that he belongs to anew race in aviation, nearer to the robot than to the hero. Yet thereare in the jet-man several Parsifalian residues, as we shall seeshortly. But what strikes one first in the mythology of the jet-manis the elimination of speed: nothing in the legend alludes to thisexperience. We must here accept a paradox, which is in factadmitted by everyone with the greatest of ease, and even consumedas a proof of modernity. This paradox is that an excess of speedturns into repose. The pilot-hero was made unique by a wholemythology of speed as an experience, of space devoured, ofintoxicating motion; the jet-man, on the other hand, is defined by acoenaesthesis of motionlessness ('at 2,000 km per hour, in levelflight, no impression of speed at all'), as if the extravagance of hisvocation precisely consisted in overtaking motion, in going fasterthan speed. Mythology abandons here a whole imagery of exteriorfriction and enters pure coenaesthesis: motion is no longer theoptical perception of points and surfaces; it has become a kind ofvertical disorder, made of contractions, black-outs, terrors andfaints; it is no longer a gliding but an inner devastation, anunnatural perturbation, a motionless crisis of bodily consciousness.No wonder if, carried to such a pitch, the myth of the aviator losesall humanism. The hero of classical speed could remain a'gentleman', inasmuch as motion was for him an occasional exploit,for which courage alone was required: one went faster in bursts,like a daring amateur, not like a professional, one sought an'intoxication', one came to motion equipped with an age-oldmoralizing which made its perception keener and enabled one toexpress its philosophy. It is inasmuch as speed was an adventurethat it linked the airman to a whole series of human roles.The jet-man, on the other hand, no longer seems to know eitheradventure or destiny, but only a condition. Yet this condition is at71first sight less human than anthropological: mythically, the jet-manis defined less by his courage than by his weight, his diet and hishabits (temperance, frugality, continence). His racial apartness canbe read in his morphology: the anti-G suit of inflatable nylon, theshiny helmet, introduce the jet-man into a novel type of skin inwhich 'even his mother mould not know him'. We are dealing witha true racial conversion, all the more credible since science-fictionhas already largely substantiated this metamorphosis of species:everything happens as if there had been a sudden mutation betweenthe earlier creatures of propeller-mankind and the later ones of jetmankind.In fact, and in spite of the scientific garb of this new mythology,there has merely been a displacement of the sacred: after thehagiographic era (Saints and Martyrs of propeller-aviation) therefollows a monastic period; and what passes at first for meredietetic prescriptions soon appears invested with a sacerdotalsignificance: continence and temperance, abstention andwithdrawal from pleasures, community life, uniform clothing -everything concurs, in the mythology of the jet-man, to makemanifest the plasticity of the flesh, its submission to collectiveends (chastely undefined, by the way), and it is this submissionwhich is offered as a sacrifice to the glamorous singularity of aninhuman condition. Society eventually recognizes, a propos of thejet-man, the old theosophical pact, which has always compensatedpower by an ascetic life, paid for semi-divinity in the coin ofhuman 'happiness'. So truly does the situation of the jet-mancomprise the sense of a religious call, that it is itself the reward ofprevious austerities, of initiatory proceedings, meant to test thepostulant (passage through the altitude chamber and in thecentrifugal machine). Right down to the Instructor, greying,anonymous and inscrutable, who is perfectly suited to the part ofthe necessary mystagogue. As for endurance, we are definitely toldthat, as is the case in all initiations, it is not physical in nature:triumph in preliminary ordeals is, truth to tell, the fruit of aspiritual gift, one is gifted for jet-flying as others are called to God.72
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