A new story, “Good Night, Moon,” that I wrote with Bruce Sterling is now online for free at Tor.com. And if you want, you can listen to it in podcast form, read by me. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Recently I’ve been reading a book of journals by Alan Ginsberg, edited by Gordon Ball, Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, Grove Press 1977. My idea is to have Alan Turing meet up with Ginsberg in Berkeley in the spring of 1955, at the time when Ginsberg was writing Howl.

I’ve copied out some passages that seem useful in terms of getting Allen G’s character or in terms of fitting him into my novel. The photos today are from the Yellowstone portion of our recent road trip through the Wild West.

[Varicolored algae in a hot-spring stream.]

New York City, March-June, 1952

Alan gets marijuana (“T”) and peyote from a friend, Bill Keck, who says the sense of God is, “When the universal order seems organized—when everything I see seems to belong to one organism, when everything about me swings, together. … With T you are observing everything in unison order harmony swinging organized organism—with peyote you are part of it.”

He eats some peyote at his parents house and sits in the backyard writing notes while his relatives visit with the family inside. “…eyes closed toward light leaves in eye a golden glow hue—which darkens when you pass hand over lidded eye. It made me feel like a very transparent sort of organism.”

“When the wind rushed through the grass you can see the green grass vibrating on the brown ground.”

Still on that trip… “The houses around here seem so primitive, with their poor television antennae tacked on to the patched up chimney—” “And I hear relatives’ honking mechanical voices in the house.”

“…there’s so much to say from the bottom of the heart—but not say in open—people really can’t stand much reality—or me, hate to think of anyone talking back to me.”

“What can you do with such a f*cking universe?”

A dream. “…I am in bed with a [lover] who covers me over with cloth on which are obscene hieroglyphs, one for each part of my body—they are supposed to act on my skin—while he watches I have sex with hieroglyphs.”

[Car mirror reflection of a U-Hal van with Mt. Rushmore painted on the side, seen in the parking lot for Old Faithful.]

In the Yucatan, Mexico, 1954

He dreams a movie of William Burroughs and reconstructs the dream, which is rather apposite for my novel.

“Bill in Europe—but can’t remember the dream O flat horrible reality closing in at morn after night of spectacles…Bill is shadowed by a spy from the future—spy from another dimension in hideous 3rd class train ride—set in background of Europe in the rain and decay…involving cross-passages of time. Fragments of a great ‘routine.’ Bill looks frightened—realizes he’s been followed all along … Then—great change—a look of weariness & boredom, ennui, powerlessness and resentment. Deenergized. Then rage, a look of great annoyance—He lapses into a kind of insanity … Fate or the future was after him with its rational inanity—his insanity defeats their plans—Bill still conscious playing the routine. Like the routine which felled him laughing on kitchen floor…in N.Y.”

[The steaming vents like portals to the underworld.]

In Uxmal alone. “Chichén—the main kick was the wild acoustic—somewhere in the middle of all these buildings is a place where you can clap your hands and be heard in heaven.”

“…only intensest writing is interesting, in which whole life direction is poured for profusion of image & care of surface and stipple & and sensual muscle of soul river thought.”

Worrying about my fate again—that a small breeze of nostalgia fluttered in my heart, thinking a moment past I had someone in the room I loved with me—no ghosts—a man of flesh to talk to and hug.”

“Sudden clearing where the sunlite bursts down as a great white shower.”

[People waiting for Old Faithful to spout.]

Visiting on the finca (ranch) of a woman he’s befriended, Karena Shields. “All the Jungle: all these rocky ruins: And suddenly in the ease and lethargy of monthlong guesthood on the ranch the singleminded conception of a vast Unfathomable god—and writing, the gift of writing thought seems like a candle in the wood.”

He thinks about the reporters at U.P. (United Press) “…thinking how feeble & scrawny those reporters are in their nests, thinking they are men of action, all they do is sit up at their typewriters full of sharpness or wiseacre of cynical knowledge of limited situations priding themselves on scrawny specialties of knowledge like Bullfighting or Railroads etc. & drinking at nite, like fat short man of U.P. I spoke to, full of defensive own paltry pride, small lives up in the News building, their whole actual horizon.”

[The awesomely gnarly staircase in the Old Faithful Lodge.]

Mar 23, 1953, beautiful written Sketch of Salto de Agua, using many unusual or coined words. “tinred & tile rust roofs” “sparsely dotted thatchroofs on little hill on other side” “vasty armadas of white fragmentary clouds in bright sky” “recurring crow of cocks from this side and that challenging and responding in various cockly hoarse tones as if the existed in a world of pure intuitive sound communicating to anonymous hidden familiar chickensouls from hill to hill.”

That evening he sits on the bridge there, “watching moon move over the hill you can see it rising and follow its destination thru the clear dimension of the sky in a slow circle from hill on one horizon to mountain on other, having the whole sky spread out unbroken but by stars in all 360 directions.” [I saw something like this one night camping alone on a hill top in Big Sur.]

[My old painting, “Big Sur”, oil, 30” by 24”, August, 2000. Finding the North Star via the Big Dipper, I noticed how Earth’s turning around the axis through this Pole was bringing up the moon and bringing down the sun. The flies bit me.]

Still in Salto de Agua. “The Kiosk proprietor a civilized looking citizen in a disgusting sort of way—acne and fatso glasses.”

Back on the Shields finca, April 16, 1954, Good Friday. “& palmtrees appearing again in the balmy wind presaging a rain—shifting their fronds in the wind with a dry soft rattle sound, so much like animal hairy windmills—insectlike in fact, like monstrous insects long white bodies encased in scales and at the top conglomerated in the head nerve center all these rattly animal feelers that move lethargically in in the direction of the wind, settling & unsettling as in water.”

[The tourists in the steam like shades in the afterworld.]

“The word Time—Like a great silver wall blocking the sky… One might sit in this Chiapas recording the appearance of time, like painting—the palmtree so much suggesting an animal force spraying up in slow time.”

Dream of walking around New York City with Jack Kerouac. “Impression of the unknown miles of movies & bridges & houses & alien life in Brooklyn, how one could go walking alone (or with others) not to explore but to enjoy & be awed by the vast human scenery just as one goes walking thru mountains in awe. For kicks, not to map the streets.”

[Yellowstone Lake]

Back in California, 1954.

“Of an eternity we have a number of score of years … I have had several months near joy, and of that perhaps one day doing what I inmost want and of that a minute of perfection.”

On June 17, 2954, he’s staying stay with Neal Cassady and his family in Monte Sereno, near San Jose, California. He’s in love with Neal, mooning over him. “I feel like a strange idiot, standing there among wife & children all to whom he gives needs of affection and attention, aching for some special side extra sacrifice of attention to me—as if like some nowhere evil beast intruding I were competing for his care with his own children & wife and job which seems to occupy energize bore & tire him.”

He drafts a poem called “Serenade” with this phrase, “The bomb appeared intolerable, light and radiance, and afterwards the grey world appeared as a ghost.”

In Berkeley, Fall, 1955.

Allen writes some fourteen-syllable haikus.

“The madman
emerges from the movies:
the street at lunchtime.”

“The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.”

I’m nearly done with my latest painting, “Turing and the Skugs.” I’m also going to include some photos from Yellowstone Park.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

I made this painting because I’m gearing up for a novel involving the computer pioneer Alan Turing, the beatniks, some shape-shifting beings called skugs, and possibly some time-travel. Although it would be simpler to do the book without time travel, which what I’m more likely to do. Don’t want too many ingredients in the stew, after all.

I got the word “skug” from my non-identical twin granddaughters, aged three. When I visit my son’s house in Berkeley, I always like to open up his worm farm and study the action with the twins. We find a lot of slugs in there, and we marvel at them. The girls tend to say “skug” rather than “slug,” and I decided I liked the sound of this word so much that I’d use it for some odd beings in my novel.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this kind of thing—the alien ostrich-like beings called “Peng” in my novel Hylozoic take their name from a pet stuffed penguin, also named “Peng,” who’s greatly prized by my other granddaughter, in Madison, Wisconsin.

[Afterworld-like scene at Yellowstone.]

Anyway, for the purposes of Turing & Burroughs, I’m supposing that Turing has carried out some biochemical experiments leading to the creation of slug-like creatures called skugs.

In the painting, we see Turing outside a Rural Supply Hardware garage, with two skugs backing him up. Alan is encountering a handsome man who may well become Alan’s lover. Unless the skugs eat the guy.

As always you can get more information and buy originals at my Paintings site. Prints are available on Imagekind. And, looking ahead, I’ll be having a small show in the Borderlands Cafe in San Francisco in November, 2010, with originals and prints for sale.

I’m thinking that Turing’s skugs become hugely influential. (1) They’re used for prostheses. (2) They act as standalone programmable robots. (3) Some humans switch to skug bodies and enjoy the power of shapeshifting.

[Yellowstone steam pool]

Perhaps any two people who’d taken on skug form could then mate to bear a skug-child—a result which would pretty much eliminate any real distinction between homosexual and heterosexual couples. Not that you’d have to remain physically of one “gender” if you’re a skug—remember that you could shapeshift.

I’m supposing that some people (let’s call them “Skuggers”) become skugs—although there are some fundamentalist hold-outs, who are initially presented as bad, but who maybe are good. The Skuggers revere Turing for having brought skugs about, but the rebels wish he’d never lived.

If I were to do this with time travel, the Skuggers would be in the future. Without time travel, they could simply be an underground group in our present-day world, and we have a more straight-ahead story.

If I were to go with a time-travel scenario, we’d be talking about Futurians. Here, the main group of Futurians are happy Skuggers and they wouldn’t want to go back into the past and mess with Turing’s life. As they see it, everything has worked out well. But a group of the anti-skug Futurians are going back to try and change history and eliminate Turing from the past. Fearful of the outcome, some of the ruling Futurians have banded together as something like “time police commando squad.” But—as they all may eventually come to understand—they can’t actually change anything. I’m going to say that you can’t change the past.

Varicolored algae colonies thrive in different water temperatures around the hot springs of Yellowstone.

As Analog book-reviewer Don Sakers points out in a recent column, we really have two options with time-travel stories. Either the past can’t be changed and we have an invariant timeline or you think you can change the past, but in fact you’re changing the past of some alternate universe and there in fact zillions of these multiverse timelines.

I’d kind of forgotten about the more Golden Age invariant timeline notion, but when I recently reread Robert Heinlein’s Door Into Summer, I was reminded of it. In Door Into Summer, we have a guy going back and changing his past to make things work out the way that, in fact, he knows they really did—in some sense he’s duty-bound to to this. While in the past, he ponders, but steers clear of, paradoxical behavior—e.g. he refrains from slitting his past self’s throat. Heinlein has a nice half-page in the last chapter the character opines that in some sense we can’t create a paradox and that there is, after all, only the one timeline—I’ll copy out Heinlein’s rap for reference and post it here.

[Yellowstone Lake.]

“There’s a [higher reality] that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end…” Just one…but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re allowed to do anything inside the rules…but you come back to your own door.

… I’m not worried about “paradoxes” or “causing anachronisms”—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs [with time travel] and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because [some unknowable forces] designed the universe that way. [We have] two eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can’t be a paradox. [There’s no need of] busybodies to “enforce” [antiparadox] laws; they enforce themselves. …

The control is a negative feedback type, with a built in “fail safe,” because the very existence of [some present situation] depends on [my not changing it in the past]; the apparent possibility that I might have [changed things] is one of the excluded “not possibles” of the basic circuit design.

I edited the Heinlein quote to remove any implicit assumption that a single divinity “designed” the universe. It’s perhaps simpler to regard the universe as a pattern that emerges from some kind of constraint system—like a warped soap film that finds the shape of a minimal surface spanning a curved loop of wire. Or, taking an analogy closer to Heinlein’s heart, think of the universe as a flow of current that arises in a circuit that came from who knows where.

Heading north from Pinedale with Isabel, we spent a night in the Grand Teton National Park.

For awhile I was riding in back with Isabel, and she poked me in the ribs. Just like old times. When our three kids were little, we sometimes called the back of the car the “pigs’ nest.”

What makes the Grand Tetons so impressive is that as seen from the park and the road they rise straight up from the flat valley carved by the Snake River. More commonly, big mountains have a scrim of foothills covering them.

We crossed paths with two elated men returning from nice three-day hike around one of the Tetons, the Cascade Canyon/Paintbrush Canyon loop, I’d like to do that some day if my legs hold up. But, actually, Isabel, as a native, tends to know of equally interesting but less travelled paths.

A moose was lolling around near one of the paths, and there must have been twenty photographers clustered there, many of them with tripods. The shutterbugs looked tense and disgruntled, maybe because the moose was standing up to strike a grand pose. Or maybe becauase they’d already taken their “big picture” and didn’t know what else do to.

I don’t quite get why someone would use a tripod for landscape photography. If nothing much is moving, you don’t really need to stabilize the camera. Maybe they want to use an extreme telephoto, in which the slightest jitter is going to be amplified. Or possibly they like to use long shutter speeds so as to damp down to tiny apertures and get deep depth of field. Or maybe they’re just gear-fetishists. A tripod really slows you down. I’ve learned to do a kind of Zen-moment shutter-squeeze thing so I can shoot a 1/60 or even 1/30 sec exposure fairly reliably. Also I keep an eye on the ISO setting, and dial that up if I want a faster shutter speed so I can get less tele-jiggle and more depth of field.

We looked in at a little chapel in the park, with a stained glass image of the Sacred Heart. Whose heart is that, exactly? The Virgin Mary’s? No, research shows it Jesus’s. It’s a good icon. When I’m tense and unhappy because I’m being a jerk, my heart feels that way, as if it has barbed wire around it. I try not to go there very often.

A few years ago, I blogged a picture from a chuch in Kecskemet, Hungary, they went one step further with the Sacred Heart image, and showed it with a knife sticking through it. More dramatic.

There was some nice morning light on the wood in the church. But really you’d be more inclined to think of God as being up in the mountains. The Grand Tetons. Which is French for the Big Breasts. Nearby is the Gros Ventre range. The Plump Belly mountains. I’m picturing some very lonely fur trappers…

Sylvia and I spent about a week in Pinedale, Wyoming, with our daughter Isabel . Isabel took us on what I came to call a “death march” every day…meaning that it was more exercise than we’re used to, particularly in the mile-high elevation of Pinedale. But I loved it.

We saw an osprey in his or her nest near Half Moon Lake. The big fish hawk rose up and circled, making skirling chirps.

My favorite hike near Pinedale leads to the so-called “Sacred Rim,” a cliff at an elevation of nearly two miles with a sheer drop of perhaps a mile. Sitting on the edge of the cliff, I began getting some serious worries about being unwillingly sucked down by the great volume of empty space, and I moved back.

Pinedale was having a lot of growth a few years ago, due to the boom in natural gas drilling. That’s died down a bit, leaving, for instance, this blank real-estate developer’s sign. It looks like installation art, an abstract painting.

There’s a guy right outside the city limits who keeps a large number of abandoned vehicles in his yard. I like this one thirties-style car of his.

One day we went canoeing at the deserted Willow Lake near Pinedale, and picnicked on a tiny spit of sand halfway down the lake.

As usual, I was happy to look at the gnarly shapes of roots, water, rocks, clouds, and trees. It opens up my head to be so continuously away from the clamor of civilization.

We got back in the canoe soon after we noticed that there were grizzly-bear footprints on the beach.