This week I’ve been working on the final revisions of Nested Scrolls: A Memoir, my autobiography. I’ve contracted for it to come out in a collector’s edition from PS Publishing in England, and then in a trade edition from Tor/Forge Books in the US. I’m not sure about the publication dates yet, either 2011 or 2012.

Today I’m running an excerpt from some material that I just added, a passage about blogging and photography. The photos are mostly from a recent walk on St. Joseph’s hill near Los Gatos.

After five and a half years of blogging, I’ve put up some seven hundred posts which, taken as a whole, bulked to a word count comparable to that of three medium-sized novels.

Have I been wasting my time? What’s the point of a blog?

The issue of wasting time is a straw man. A big part of being a writer is finding harmless things to do when you aren’t writing. To finish a novel in a year, I only have to average a page a day, and writing any given page can take less than an hour. So I do in fact have quite a bit of extra time. Of course a lot of that time goes into getting my head into the right place for the day’s writing—and then contemplating and revising what I wrote. But blogging isn’t a bad thing to do while hanging around waiting for the muse.

[Marble rye sandwich with avocado smears.]

I often post thoughts and links that relate to whatever writing project I’m currently working on. And my readers post comments and further links which can be useful. So to some extent my blog acts as a research tool.

Another thing about a blog is that it serves as a tool for self-promotion. By now, my blog has picked up a certain following, and every month it receives about a hundred thousand visits. The only ads I run are for my own books.

But my blog isn’t really about research or commerce. The main reason I keep doing it is that the form provides a creative outlet. I like editing and tweaking my posts, and I like illustrating them. I alternate text and pictures, usually putting a photo between every few paragraphs.

I need to mention that I switched over to digital photography around the time when I started my blog in 2004. I’ve used a series of pocket-sized SONY Cybershot models, a heavy-duty Canon 5D single-lens reflex camera, and a medium-sized Canon G10.

I carry a camera a lot of the time, and I’m often on the lookout for photographs. I sometimes think of photography as instant transrealism. When it goes well, I’m appropriating something from my immediate surroundings and turning it into a loaded, fantastic image.

When incorporating my photos into my blog, I don’t worry much about whether the images have any obvious relevance to the texts that I pair them with. My feeling is that the human mind is capable of seeing any random set of things as going well together. So any picture can go into any post. It’s like the Surrealist practice of juxtaposition, or like the old Sixties game of putting on music while you watch a TV show with the sound off. Our perceptual system is all about perceiving patterns—even if they’re not there.

This said, if I have enough images on hand, I will do what I can to bring out harmonies and contrasts among the words and the pictures. Subconscious and subtextual links come into play. Assembling each blog post becomes a work of craftsmanship. It gives me a little hit of what the John Malkovich character in Art School Confidential calls “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.”

Having the blog and the digital cameras has revitalized my practice of photography. With the blog as my outlet, I know that my photos will be seen and appreciated. It’s not like I’m just throwing endless packs of photo prints into a drawer. For many years, Sylvia assembled our photos into yearly family albums, but now, with the children gone, she’s let this drop. “The kids don’t want to see albums of us two taking trips,” she points out. And I’ve gone online.

Digital cameras are a whole new game for me, after using film cameras for forty years. I like how my digital cameras give me immediate feedback—I don’t have to wait for a week or a month to learn if my pictures were in focus. And I like using my image-editing software. I crop my pictures, tweak the contrast, mute or intensify the colors, and so on. It’s like being back in the darkroom with, wonderfully, an “Undo” control.

And now that I have my photo-illustrated blog, my camera acts as even more of a companion to me than before. When I’m out on the street, I’ll sometimes slip into a photojournalist mode of searching out apt images while making mental or written notes for a post.

An interesting effect of the internet is that, if you’re a heavy user, your consciousness and sense of self become more distributed and less localized. Even when I don’t have the camera along, the blog is a kind of companion, a virtual presence at my side. My old sense of self used to include my home, my workplace and the coffee shops I frequent—but now it includes my blog and my email. Bill Gibson was right. Cyberspace has become a part of daily life.

It’s raining like a mofo here in California this week. I love the winter rains, I like how every little spot of the landscape gets watered. It reminds me of the hylozoic Zen koan:

Q: “Does a stone have a soul?”
A: “The universal rain moistens all creatures.

It’s absurd how the news-media always try and put a disaster-and-crisis-and-watch-your-television slant on some a healthful and revivifying natural process that is in no sense a harsh surprise. But why even worry about them? The rain is right here, right outside, right now.

I was busy revising Jim and the Flims over the last couple of months, and now I’m ready for the final scramble to the peak.

Revising a book, I’m always anxious that it will be somehow unfixable. But it is always fixable, if I keep an open mind. When revising a book, I often I think of the I Ching hexagram number #18, a figure of six lines, some solid some broken, which looks like this.

This hexagram is Ku / Work on What Has Been Spoiled [Decay] .

It’s composed of two three-line patterns called trigrams . The upper trigram is Kên / Keeping Still, Mountain, and the lower trigram is Sun / The Gentle, Wind.

I like that phrase, “Work on What Has Been Spoiled.” “Spoiled” might suggest the notion of someone interfering with your work, but you don’t have to take it that way. Things can spoil by sitting around and beginning to rot. Or a spontaneous gesture might be spoiled by a slip or a loss of attention during the execution. The point is that you can fix it.

I’ll paste in some of the analysis of this hexagram from an online copy of the classic Richard Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes (Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1950).

The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay. It is come about because the gentle indifference in the lower trigram has come together with the rigid inertia of the upper, and the result is stagnation. Since this implies guilt, the conditions embody a demand for removal of the cause. Hence the meaning of the hexagram is not simply “what has been spoiled” but “work on what has been spoiled”.

WORK ON WHAT HAS BEEN SPOILED
Has supreme success.
It furthers one to cross the great water.
Before the starting point, three days.
After the starting point, three days.

What has been spoiled through man’s fault can be made good again through man’s work. … Work toward improving conditions promises well, because it accords the possibilities of the time. … We must not recoil from work and danger—symbolized by crossing of the great water—but must take hold energetically. Success depends, however, on proper deliberation. … Decisiveness and energy must take the place of inertia and indifference that have led to decay, in order that the ending may be followed by a new beginning.

Write on, aided by the secret machineries of the night!

I’m revising my novel Jim and the Flims this month, getting ready for a final push to the end. I haven’t taken any new pictures since last week, so I’ll just recycle some images from 2009.

In my novel, Jim is in the afterworld (called Flimsy), and he may or may not bring his dead wife Val back to life on Earth. It’s a take on the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, but I’m considering a happy ending, although I keep wondering if a “happily ever after” ending is best.

I gather that, in romance novels, the HEA ending (as they call it) is more or less mandatory. As the romance novel writer Janet Dean says on the writing-advice website Seekerville: Escape from Unpubbed Island: “What I love about romance novels is the guarantee of a happy ending. That’s why I read and write them.” But should I be following writing advice from such a source?

[Speaking of “unpubbed island,” I keep thinking about the stories of how the Inuit supposedly dispose of aged family members who become a burden. Eventually the same fate overtakes older writers. The editors put you on an ice floe with a hunk of blubber. “We’ll be in touch.”]

[Two alien flims: a jiva and a yuel, left to right.]

Back to my plot. What if my character Jim doesn’t in fact get his wife, Val, back at the end of the Jim and the Flims?

At a deep level, Jim and the Flims is about a man coming to terms with his grief over his wife’s death. So it might be a cop-out for Jim to get Val back. Maybe it’s enough if he travels through the whole process, and at the end he’s rounded off a grief cycle. Nobody ever comes back from the dead. You can’t ever go back to the happy person you used to be.

I’d guess that the grief process is the transreal theme of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in the first place. Here’s a link to Vergil’s version in the Georgics, and here’s a link to the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Eurydice is bitten by a poisonous snake soon after her marriage to Orpheus. Orpheus goes down to the underworld and plays his lyre and garners some sympathy. He’s like, “It was unjust, it was too soon.” Pluto, the god of the underworld, gives him Eurydice and tells him to lead her out of the underworld, but not to look back. And, when Orpheus is almost out of the cave entrance, he looks back at his beloved, perhaps worried that she wasn’t following, and now she breathes the world, “Farewell,” and fades like smoke in the air. He never sees her again, and the keepers of the underworld won’t let him come back and try again.

Vergil says Orpheus was soon torn to shreds at a wild Bacchanal, and that his severed head floated down the river to the underworld, the head still calling out for Eurydice. Ovid says that Orpheus “was the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys, and enjoy their brief springtime, and early flowering, this side of manhood.”

In other words, our bereaved poet/singer turns alkie or gay! Gotta love it.

So what about Jim and the Flims? As a half-measure, I’d been entertaining the notion that Jim does in fact get Val back to Earth at the end—but then she frikkin’ divorces him! I was thinking of that as a post-modern twist.

Or maybe it’s heavier if Jim somehow can’t get Val to come back at all. It’s not so much that she wants to come and that he mistakenly he looks at her—like in the Orpheus an Eurydice myth. I think it’s rather that Val wants to go through the zero and start again. I’d need to prefigure this kind of predilection on Val’s part, or show her growing into this mind-set during her stay in Flimsy.

All this said, I might be outsmarting myself if I don’t just do the comfortable, reader-friendly thing and let Jim bring Val back. HEA! What I can do is make this a little hard for him. Like, Val initially doesn’t want to come, and maybe he has to talk her into it. Perhaps the scary ghost of Amenhotep’s mummy shows up near Flimsy’s core and, like, scares Val into Jim’s arms.

Every year the literary agent John Brockman poses a question and gets people who have worked with him to supply answers. This year’s question was:
HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

All the answers can be found at the Edge site. I’ll reprint my answer below, along with some pictures I took in Vasona Park in Los Gatos today.

Search and Emergence

Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times, we imagined that we’d need a huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence to make the global mind work—we thought of it as resembling an extremely smart person. The conventional Hollywood image for the global mind’s interface was a talking head on a wall-sized screen.

And now, in 2010, we have the global mind. Search-engines, user-curated encyclopedias, images of everything under the sun, clever apps to carry out simple computations—it’s all happening. But old-school artificial intelligence is barely involved at all.

As it happens, data, and not algorithms, is where it’s at. Put enough information into the planetary information cloud, crank up a search engine, and you’ve got an all-knowing global mind. The answers emerge.

Initially people resisted understanding this simple fact. Perhaps this was because the task of posting a planet’s worth of data seemed so intractable. There were hopes that some magically simple AI program might be able to extrapolate a full set of information from a few well-chosen basic facts—just a person can figure out another person on the basis of a brief conversation.

At this point, it looks like there aren’t going to be any incredibly concise aha-type AI programs for emulating how we think. The good news is that this doesn’t matter. Given enough data, a computer network can fake intelligence. And—radical notion—maybe that’s what our wetware brains are doing, too. Faking it with search and emergence. Searching a huge data base for patterns.

The seemingly insurmountable task of digitizing the world has been accomplished by ordinary people. This results from the happy miracle that the internet is that it’s unmoderated and cheap to use. Practically anyone can post information onto the web, whether as comments, photos, or full-blown web pages. We’re like worker ants in a global colony, dragging little chunks of data this way and that. We do it for free; it’s something we like to do.

Note that the internet wouldn’t work as a global mind if it were a completely flat and undistinguished sea of data. We need a way to locate the regions that are most desirable in terms of accuracy and elegance. An early, now-discarded, notion was that we would need some kind of information czar or committee to rank the data. But, here again, the anthill does the work for free.

By now it seems obvious that the only feasible way to rank the internet’s offerings is to track the online behaviors of individual users. By now it’s hard to remember how radical and rickety such a dependence upon emergence used to seem. No control! What a crazy idea. But it works. No centralized system could ever keep pace.

An even more surprising success is found in user-curated encyclopedias. When I first heard of this notion, I was sure it wouldn’t work. I assumed that trolls and zealots would infect all the posts. But the internet has a more powerful protection system than I’d realized. Individual users are the primary defenders.

We might compare the internet to a biological system in which new antibodies emerge to combat new pathogens. Malware is forever changing, but our defenses are forever evolving as well.

I am a novelist, and the task of creating a coherent and fresh novel always seems in some sense impossible. What I’ve learned over the course of my career is that I need to trust in emergence—also known as the muse. I assemble a notes document filled with speculations, overheard conversations, story ideas, and flashy phrases. Day after day, I comb through my material, integrating it into my mental net, forging links and ranks. And, fairly reliably, the scenes and chapters of my novel emerge. It’s how my creative process works.

In our highest mental tasks, any dream of an orderly process is a will-o’-the wisp. And there’s no need to feel remorseful about this. Search and emergence are good enough for the global mind—and they’re good enough for us.