I came across some video I shot in Kyoto, Japan, October, 2007, of kids freestyle hiphop dancing to boom boxes on a plaza outside the gym at Kyoto University on a Sunday afternoon. You can see Thuy Nguyen there near the end, dancing.

I finished my story about infinity, “Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory.” I managed to work in a cameo role for a cuttlefish:

A cluster of alef-null easy chairs sat jigsawed around the fireplace, fitting in via odd warps in perspective. But all were occupied, and by a single rude guest, a cuttlefish who was letting his tentacles loll onto each and every one of the chairs as he scribbled inkily in an alef-one-paged notebook.

“Just move each of your limbs three chairs to the right,” Stanley told the cuttlefish.

“No,” snapped the selfish cephalopod. “Too much work.”

It’s too cold this week to paint outside, so now I’m back to working on Hylozoic. It was good for me to take this break and write a story about higher infinities, as I’d kind of like to have infinity in volume 3 of the trilogy (should I get that far).

By way of getting up momentum to dive into writing Chapter 7, I’m revising some of the earlier chapters. Yesterday I found a nice passage that doesn’t fit into the flow anymore, so I’ll just post it here.

Note that this passage addresses a problem with panpsychism, which is the question of how the minds of the components of something mesh with the mind of the whole thing.

Recalling his contact with his cells and atoms this afternoon, Jayjay focused down into himself again. He felt impelled to pick out one particular cell, and one particular atom within that cell. The cell was inside his heart, thump thump; and the atom was a cozy carbon inside the heart-cell’s genetic code.

How did all the silps fit together? Empowered by his contact with Gaia—and coached by the pitchfork—Jayjay had a sudden scientific insight. Objects were more than the sum of their parts. Each object’s contents were wrapped in a knotty net of dark-energy string. An object was more than an inventory, it was an overarching gestalt.

Jayjay’s self, his soul, his I—it was a woven bag: his. The carbon atom was a bag too, and his heart, and the human race, and Gaia, and the Milky Way galaxy—each was a dark-energy string bag of knotty info. And that explained why an object’s silp was more than just a squabbling congress of member silps.

Pleased by Jayjay’s pitchfork-promoted discovery, Gaia flashed an oblique reference to a children’s book, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, in which Mr. McGregor put Flopsy’s six baby bunnies into a cloth sack, Flopsy and her friend Thomasina Tittlemouse chew open a corner of the sack and replace the bunnies with three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blacking-brush and two decayed turnips—fooling Mr. McGregor. Moral: in either case, the sack is the same.

Jayjay was a sack and so was Gaia. The sacks were woven from dark-energy string, each sack a single loop. Jayjay’s loop had a gazillion turnings and Gaia’s had—maybe the same number, or maybe more. Jayjay lost track of Gaia as he focused on tracing the pattern of his own soul’s string.

In order to get Thuy really hitting on all cylinders again, I need to have a notion of what her new metanovel is about. I was, for lack of a better idea, titling Thuy’s new metanovel, Vib. As in:

“Vib,” said Thuy, telling him the name for the first time. “As in vibby.”

“Pure genius,” said Jayjay.

“What’s vib?” said Jil irritably.

“A vib is like a kick,” said Jayjay. “A vibe, but faster.”

“A vib is when your mind spreads out, and the world is thinking you,” said Thuy. “Instead of writing Vib, I want Vib to write me.”

“My best murals are vibs,” said Kittie. “They paint me.”

And that’s hip and snappy, but I don’t think it captures a reasonable notion of where Thuy is actually at. She’s not an addict anymore, she’s trying to write her second metanovel, and to make her marriage work. She’s really interested in the way everything is alive. I think I’ll be calling her new metanovel Hive Mind.

This fits, as having everything alive makes for a hive mind. The “universal mind” that arises from the cosmos can be regarded as a hive mind. And telepathy makes humanity more like a hive. And being in a pair with a spouse puts you into a small hive mind. The street notion of hive minds as dull pits hive minds against natural gnarl (although in fact ant hive minds are indeed very gnarly, and humanity’s hive mind is in fact gnarlier than any individual human.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.