Electricity has made angels of us all - not angels in the Sunday school sense of being good or having wings, but spirit freed from flesh, capable of instant transportation anywhere.

The moment we pick up a phone, we're nowhere in space, everywhere in spirit. Nixon on TV is everywhere at once. That is Saint Augustine's definition of God: a Being whose center is everywhere, whose borders are nowhere.

When a clerk stops waiting on us to answer a phone, we accept this without protest, yet it violates one of our most precious values - barbershop democracy. We accept it because pure spirit now takes precedence over spirit in flesh.

I knew a Californian who read his poetry aloud at parties until his friends learned to silence him. But when he played recordings of these same poems, everyone listened.

In New Guinea, when villagers ignore their leader, the government may tape-record his orders. The next day the assembled community hears his voice coming to them from a radio he holds in his own hand. Then they obey him.

Among the Ojibwa Indians, young people eagerly listen to tape recordings of their grandparents' stories, though they don't want to listen to the grandparents telling the same stories in person.

I've seen people practically break down a door to get to a ringing phone, though the call was probably incidental. The phone is said to be the one thing that can interrupt intercourse.

I once saw a man passing a phone booth at the moment it rang. He hesitated & then, at the second ring, answered it. It couldn't possibly have been for him.

I copied down the numbers of several phones in Grand Central Station & Kennedy Airport, and called these numbers. Almost always someone answered. When I asked why they had answered, they said, "Because it rang."

Mordecai Richler tells how, when Lester Pearson took over as prime minister of Canada, he not only removed the emergency telephone linking his office with the White House, he concealed it so carelessly that when it rang one winter's morning in 1964, he couldn't find it. Paul Martin, then minister of external affairs, was with the prime minister at the time.

"My God," Martin exclaimed, "do you realize this could mean war?"

"No," Pearson replied. "They can't start a war if we don't answer it."

Some years ago in New Jersey, a mad sniper killed thirteen people, then barricaded himself in a house while he shot it out with the police. An enterprising reporter found out the phone number of the house and called. The killer put down his rifle and answered the phone. "What is it?" he asked. "I'm very busy."

More recently, a radio announcer called a bank that was being robbed. One of the robbers answered the phone & proceeded to give a radio interview, until he was interrupted by a policeman's shout: "Put up your hands! Put down that phone!" Putting up his hands meant being captured in flesh; putting down that phone meant being captured in spirit.

For Californians, February 9, 1971, was a day of combined cosmic and media theater. It began with an earthquake & included a total eclipse of the sun in the afternoon. Broadcasts throughout the day carried live conversations with astronauts on the moon, including a warning to one not to pick up a rock. Cardiograms relayed to Houston indicated heart strain, something he himself didn't know.

That afternoon, in San Jose, a man successfully held up a TV bank, one of those drive-in banks with closed-circuit TV tellers. The robber pointed his gun at the TV set & warned he would start blasting away, so the bank paid off.

That night, on TV, an Air Force pilot said that air flak over Laos was "just like the Second World War movies on TV," and one newspaper reported that a welfare recipient, accused of wasting money on a color TV set, replied, "But I didn't want my children to grow up not knowing what color was."

A recent full-page magazine ad contained a photograph of a honeymoon lodge, complete with a heart-shaped, double-size tub surrounded by mirrors, and the caption: "We need mirrors to tell us we're really here. And the camera, courtesy of the thoughtful management, to remind us later when we try to recall just what it was like for those strangers ourselves."

In other words, for us, sexual experience is no longer the act but its mirrored or photographic image.

In the past, people called such images "unreal." The word "phony" comes from telephone: "He sounds like a phony to me." They experienced a great need to translate images back into flesh. Mark Twain made his living from public speaking; his readers wanted to see him. Dickens' fans flocked to hear him read works they already knew. Film stars were mobbed in public. Fans wanted to see the "real" Joan Crawford.

No more. TV stars walk the streets unmolested. People seem almost embarrassed to see them. They don't want to see Lorne Greene in a sports shirt on Maple Street. They expect him to stay in Bonanzaland, looking after those three boys, and they hurry home to watch him on TV.