Today I was back at Castle Rock Park in my Monet/bum outfit; canvas strapped to the leather knapsack of paints on my back.
I also brought along some papers about infinity by Hugh Woodin, I’m trying to write this story, “Jack in Alefville”, for a special volume about infinity.
Scrambling up and down ravines, almost like where I lost my glasses last year. Nice trunk and boulder. Yin and yang.
Halfway up this rock called California Ridge I found a ledge leading out to some exposure.
A branching tree. It has c leaves. We don’t limit Alefville to being just countable sets. The higher world isn’t stratified this time. Everything’s mixed together, all the cardinalities. The branching streets lead to c houses.
Around the corner was a giant stone Homer Simpson! D’oh!
It occurs to Jack to check consistency of some theories. Could we have an issue with non-standard integers? The only theory that’s clearly inconsistent is physics.
In order to paint this I had to perch on a tiny spot with fifty foot drops on two sides. I figured if I moved slowly and stayed highly aware it wasn’t actually risky. Just don’t step back from the canvas…
The antagonist crab hides. They look in an infinite restaurant, it’s more than an Escher omega disk, it’s omega to the omega power, with infinite eddies and back rooms like a dream. The crab gets away, flees to his house
I got the underpainting done and took a bunch of pictures to work on at home. Rested lying on the ledge, trying to visualize levels of infinity, getting back into the old White Light head space—but 21st Century style with Woodin in mind.
Out across the San Lorenzo River basin I could see the sun shining on the Pacific Ocean.
They look for a city directory to locate the crab’s house. They find a book of size alef-one but it’s not big enough. They find an alef-two-sized book. It’s not big enough either. Etc.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
is an antagonist crab like a “giant enemy crab”?
November 29th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Yes, Ian. And this particular crab doesn’t believe in infinity. A real spoilsport, and he’s run off with Jack’s wife in his pincers, lying low in the alef-three-miles-wide city of Alefville. Even though the crab LIVES in an infinite city, he won’t admit infinity is real, that’s how messed up he is. Heck, so great is this crustacean kidnapper’s baseness that he believes in quantum mechanics and denies the infinite divisiblility of matter. Boil him!
November 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
so your comment above is along the lines I was going with this. I think the interesting thing is that people, those uneducated in the subtleties of alefs, believe in an infinite-inifinite, or at very least in the continuum, without any real questioning of it. As you allude to above, physics full of this belief.
I made a comment in a livejournal community recently where I was saying that imagining woman finite and god infinite was absurd, not because of our finiteness, but that infinite god could have a relationship with finite me that god found worthwhile. I compared it to sex with a plastic doll — not that I have, but because I liked the metaphor. Anyway … These are Zen sorts of thoughts in the sense that the awakening experience is a shift from identity as finite and temporary to that which is unchanging and all encompassing.
So this guy that insists he is finite (and I would consider just for the fun if making it a woman) might feel rather empty in alefville.
Anyway
December 7th, 2007 at 4:43 am
re “Rudy Can’t Fail”, i googlescholared HughWoodin, and got:
“The Generalized Continuum Hypothesis Can Fail Everywhere”.
makes me think of the utube-vid of “Mobius Transformations” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY&NR=1)
in which one definitely *feels* that ones’ mindmap/brainmap is being stretched (or is even being given a new way of modeling itself)…
is there a new continuum hypothesis in this age of “the current model of god’s mind is a www-like hyper-space mental-metaphorical ‘network’, neither discontinuous nor continous. i mean, if “god’s mind” is anything like (or better than) mine, it is highly hyper-connected in every-way-it-can-think-of and hence far more than a ‘hole-y continuum’ made of holes-held-apart-by anything-but-pointlike ‘ideas’.
December 7th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
so the lobster zapzenned the crabguake & the urth took over thyme a long purple splinter of lagoons in the wildest party they nebula saw the lichts go under daz bridge of thighs in the NU clear thing with blue laces ^ alice 2