On Nikola Tesla

1 September 2010 - Oomen reflects on the personality of Nikola Tesla and the translation of the inventor’s life and work in his opera ‘Nikola’. 1251 words

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Nikola Tesla was an extraordinary person. He combined a mind of almost digital precision with a mysterious, indeterminable intuition and hypersensitivity. In his autobiography, Nikola Tesla writes extensively about the mental affections that were troubling him throughout his life. He experienced phenomena such as synesthesia, visual interventions and perceptions transcending the border between wakefulness and sleep.

”Whenever I close my eyes I invariably observe first, a background of very dark and uniform blue, not unlike the sky on a clear but starless night. In a few seconds this field becomes animated with innumerable scintillating flakes of green, arranged in several layers and advancing towards me. Then there appears, to the right, a beautiful pattern of two systems of parallel and closely spaced lines, at right angles to one another, in all sorts of colours with yellow, green and gold predominating. Immediately thereafter, the lines grow brighter and the whole is thickly sprinkled with dots of twinkling light. This picture moves slowly across the field of vision and in about ten seconds vanishes on the left, leaving behind a ground of rather unpleasant and inert grey until a second phase of the same occurrence is reached.”

During periods of extreme mental tension, Nikola Tesla experienced hypersensitive spatial awareness of the sounds around him:

”I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the timepiece. A fly alighting on the table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat, vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously, I had to support my bed on rubber cushions to get any rest at all.”

Also, Nikola Tesla heard or imagined voices indistinguishable from reality:

”I had the odd habit of talking to myself and would often carry on an animated conversation and indulge in heated argument, changing the tone of my voice. A casual listener might have sworn that several people were in the room”

and

”Roaring noises from near and far often produced the effect of spoken words which would have frightened me had I not been able to resolve them into their accumulated components.”

In my opera, the ‘interior space of thought’ will be a recurring theme. A mental space, where many voices can be heard which together express the flow of ongoing considerations, associations and thoughts of Nikola Tesla. We experience being inside his head.

From this state of disorientation, from where we are not able to differentiate who is who and what is what, more clear and pronounced experiences of memories and desires will evolve. Nikola Tesla writes about the appearances he experienced that interfered with his sense of reality.

”In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which haunted the sight of real objects and interfered with my thoughts and action. They were pictures of things and scenes that I had really seen, never of those imagined. When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. This caused me great discomfort and anxiety”.

These are, so to speak, ‘Proustian’ experiences ‒ the sensory memory performs a complete scene in the consciousness as soon one touches upon a specific memory of smell, sound or colour. According to Nikola Tesla, his mental affections caused him to thoroughly control and discipline his mind from an early age. He trained himself to be freed from the involuntary appearances. He developed mental control up to a point where he was able to design, build and operate inventions entirely in his mind, up until the smallest detail, before he put any note on paper. For him, the functioning of apparatus in reality has never differed from as it did in his imagination.

Tesla trained himself to discipline the body and mind through chosen solitude, privation and celibacy. As he says:

”I have not only preserved my life but derived an intense satisfaction from what most men would consider privation and sacrifice”

Although no psychologist ever found a satisfying explanation for his mental case he himself writes:

”I am convinced that everything is to be explained satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts and in most cases I have been able to do so. I have never had the faintest reason to change my views on psychical and spiritual phenomena, for which there is no foundation.”

This is the alibi of the opera. The dramatic development of Nikola Tesla evolves from a ‘mist of consciousness’ to the clarity of an all-encompassing discovery: a technology that interferes with the frequencies of the nervous system and reproduces digital data in the consciousness of its users. An exchange of digital information and communication conducted by the human body and with the human brain as interface. From then on, people will receive messages, images and sounds from others as a mirage in the mind, indistinguishable from an everyday stream of thoughts, feelings and experiences.

In an opera strongly inspired by autobiographical non-fictional sources, Nikola Tesla makes a fictional discovery. The technology also forms the scientific explanation for Tesla’s mental affections. The explanation that he was convinced of existed, but was simply ‘not yet discovered’. One could also consider it a telepathic, or even a schizophrenic technology.

This discovery in the opera is not exclusively fiction, though, since Tesla already hints in the direction of such technological possibilities:

”If my explanation is correct, it should be possible to project on a screen such objects or scenes one conceived in the mind and make it visible. Such an advance would revolutionize all human relations”

and

”I have managed to reflect such pictures, which I have seen in my mind, to the mind of another person, in another room.”

In the opera Nikola, the audience will be left uncertain whether they are listening to the interior voices of Nikola Tesla’s thoughts, or to a continuous stream of exterior ‘others’ that are trying to connect.

The drama of the opera resides in the confrontation between Tesla’s ultimate vision on an absolute communication beyond the borders of time and space, and the complete solitude he finds himself in throughout his life. While Nikola Tesla imagines spiritual harmony and absolute deliverance of the self - possibilities enclosed in his scientific discovery -, the voices in his head reflect on the emptiness, loss of meaning and seclusion one experiences in a sphere of unlimited access and communication.

Man becomes interface, the mind a bulletin board and our bodies like a sort of antenna. The future, but not too far away. Already in 2004 Microsoft patents ‘human energy’. A mere matter of time before the concept becomes a product.

US Patent 6, 754,472 : “…a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body (...), as a conductive medium over which power and/or data is distributed. The physical resistance offered by the human body could be used to create a virtual keyboard on a patch of skin. According to the patent, the intent is to reduce device redundancy for people carrying multiple devices, such as a phone, headset, handheld, and wristwatch that all include a speaker...”