Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires

In a short story called “Wireless,” published in Scribner’s in 1901, Rudyard Kipling described “a glass tube” with “two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust.” Fiddling with the plugs, Kipling’s protagonist slips into a trance and spontaneously transcribes John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a poem he has never read. In an instant, the man becomes a conduit for the unseen flows of text and speech that circulate continuously in the atmosphere. This machine, he says, “will reveal to us . . . the Power — our unknown Power — kicking and fighting to be let loose.”