A week or two ago, I did a post called “True Names and Fnoor,” and, thanks in part to the good comments, I’ve been thinking about the notion of fnoor some more.

Is the purple jelly shoe by that little chair a piece of fnoor?

Again, I’m using “fnoor” to mean “some odd aspect of a person’s world that leads a person to suspect that there is more to this world that he or she had imagined.” The fnoor might indicate that the world is in fact a virtual reality. Or the fnoor might suggest that there are holes in the world leading to other realities. Or the fnoor might indicate that there are numerous simultaneously active levels of reality. “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is—Do you Mister Jones?”

Crawlin’ Lichen.

In the blog post mentioned above, I sketched some ideas for a story with the working title, “Fnoor,” but my ideas for the story are still expanding and taking on new shapes. I won’t try and describe the new details of what I’m planning, but I will put down some antic thoughts about fnoor that I’ve been having.

RudySanskritBud in the Rudy set.

Certainly, a natural place to look for fnoor is in deep zooms of heretofore unexplored computer fractals, such as the Rudy set (based on cubic Mandelbrot sets). I found the Sanskrit Bud inside a glob of the RudyRockets image last week, and it fully boggles my mind. What I like especially here is that it has the look of a sacred mandala with Sanskrit ideograms written around it.

Nature’s fnoor is a dewdrop in a spiral.

If one person can find the fnoor with a computer program, another person should be able to perceive it via meditation.

Who actually writes these things?

A wholly different notion of fnoor in fiction is used in Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49-—where the fnoor emerges as signs seen on the street, or on bathroom walls. The signs tell the alert eye that there is indeed another order to reality.

Aha!

Going overboard on this into fully paranoid schizophrenia, you can start seeing messages everywhere and—for the purposes of an SF story in any case—who’s to say your wrong. Is it really a “coincidence” that the dregs in this coffee cup are the same beige as the paint on this quotidien street fixture whose purpose is—what?

Goin’ to heaven…

What if somehow you could break free of your enslavement to the laws of perspective and their insistence that if somethin is small, then it’s far away. What if his ladder did in fact lead directly to the phone pole? Plug into that terabyte cable and hear the Voice of the Sky.

Mon ami Alexandre.

Crooked, warped, unexpected—the fnoor wants to take you someplace new. Imagine finding a heretofore unknown neighborhood of San Francisco called Fnoortown, where you can buy a 20,000 sq. ft. house for $100! There’s plenty of room for everyone, as the houses are the size of atoms or maybe even smaller than that—maybe down below the bogus curtain of the Planck-length limit.

Right this way.

Follow me, baby, it’s just around the before-ner. Everyone’s waiting for you, and the fnoor is fine.

RudyHedgehog, see theRudy set post for explanations, where you can download the params from UltraFractal.

And click here for a humongo 3 Meg RudyHedgehog you can get lost in. One unreliable narrator describes it thus:

It showed a shape like a sea-urchin, with a curlicue dangling down towards it. Endless parades of pastel elephants were marching into the slits between the sea-urchin spikes. St. Elmo’s Fire masts swept up into the terraced space between the urchin and the curlicue.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 6:56 pm 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.