I’m thinking about Ancient Egypt for two reasons. For one thing, having seen the King Tut show , I’m thinking of bringing the mummy of Amenhotep into my novel, Jim and the Flims.

And for another, I enjoyed my daughter Isabel’s re-invention of hieroglyphics in some of the panels of her graphic novel Unfurling . I’ll reproduce a couple more images from Isabel’s graphic novel today—if you’re in the San Francisco area, you can still go see the show this month—see Isabel’s Unfurling page for more info.

Several years ago, I gave Isabel a book on hieroglyphics, and she eventually came up with the brilliant notion of using a form of heiroglphyics as the native tongue of the restless street-people known as tweakers. (One of her friends suggested the language might be called Tweakenese.)

I love that there are glyphs for cigarettes and for shopping carts. And only a few different glyphs, really. When you look at ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, it’s like they’re always talking about the same dozen or so things.

I’ve been gleaning more info about Egyptian notions of the afterlife—which I’d calling Flimsy in my novel—and I’ll reproduce some of it here, mostly edited from the Afterlife section of the Wikipedia article on Ancient Egyptian religion.

The ancient Egyptians believed that humans possessed a ka, or life-force, which left the body at the point of death. Even after death, the ka needed offerings of food, whose spiritual essence it could still consume. The ka might be thought of as simple existence or the bare notion of “I am.”

Each person also had a ba, the individual personality—what we might call software. Unlike the ka, the ba by default remained attached to the body after death. Egyptian funeral rituals were intended to release the ba from the body so that it could move freely. After being freed, the ba was believed to return to its mummified body each night to receive new life. Thus the state of the tomb and the mummy were important for the survival of both ka and ba.

[Image taken from a blog post by a programmer named Xaprb.]

Once the ka was free to roam, its goal was to unite with the ba to form a complete soul, called an akh. In order to achieve this, the ba had to pass a judgment known as the Weighing of the Heart, where the jackal-headed god Anubis weighed the heart of the deceased against a feather (which symbolized Maat, the divine principle of fairness and order). The ibis-headed Thoth took notes.

If the heart was heavy, the ba was destroyed by the crocodile-headed demon Ammut, also known as the gobbler. Otherwise the ba united with the ka to form an akh. And then, by the way, you’d want to make sure that the gods gave you back your heart.

Specific beliefs about the activities of the akh varied. The vindicated dead were said to dwell in Osiris’ kingdom, a lush and pleasant land believed to exist somewhere beyond the western horizon, and kings were said to travel with Ra the sun-god in his boat that glides across the sky every day.

[This image is another detail from Unfurling again…I like the SF feel of it. The gnarled fingers tinkering with the broken hi-tech artifact.]

There was also a notion that an akh could also travel in the world of the living and magically affect events.

On a completely different topic, I saw Devo play their whole first album live at the Regency ballroom (about the size of the Fillmore) in San Francisco last week. Here’s a YouTube video that a guy standing in front of me made with his cell phone, it’s of their superficially non-PC (but, at a deeper level, rather empathetic) song “Mongoloid”.

It was great to see Devo come out and kick butt with their music. They’re old, but they’ve gotten very tight and extreme. We had a great cheer session. “Are we not men???” the bass player would bellow, and we’d roar back, “We are Devo!!!” My favorite moment was when they took an instrumental break during this strong, and were just shredding the music.

I still recall how liberating I found that first Devo album. Like the Ramones, Devo made me want to write science-fiction in a certain kind of way. Extreme, rocking, in your face, dadaistic, and easy to absorb.

[“Cave of the Lost Secrets” image by Daniel White.]

Yet another topic: the Mandelbulb, that is the long-sought three-dimensional versions of the Mandelbrot fractal, which I blogged about before in my post, “In Search of the Mandelbulb.” Daniel White has just posted a very nice summary of his work on the Mandelbulb.

“Unfurling” is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by my daughter, Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco.

[Tuesday night: A weary Isabel finishes mounting the show. The scroll is in three 150 foot rolls, mounted one above the other, held in place by wood stripping and protected by Mylar plastic.]

“Unfurling” stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns.

Most of the panels are too long to fit into the narrow column of this blog, so I’ll just post a few details clipped from the panels so you can at least have an idea of the art.

The seven-year project began in 2002, when Isabel decided to free herself from the size of regular pieces of paper, canvas or sketchpad. She was living in a warehouse full of artists near the intersection of Cesar Chavez Street and Third Street in San Francisco at the time.

She fell in love with a young man in Pinedale, Wyoming, and moved out there to live on a ranch with him—and a few years later they married. Pinedale is definitely off the grid, but filled with natural beauty.

“Every day there was something new to see,” as it says on the full-length version of the panel above. Briefly put, “Unfurling” describes Isabel’s journey from San Francisco to Wyoming.

Living in Wyoming seems to have brought her to a level of visionary peace.

The opening party for the Unfurling : This Land show is Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6 p.m.-11 p.m. at SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street, in San Francisco, CA 94103.

The show also includes new pencil drawings by cartoonist Mark Bode for the graphic novel Cobalt 60, and Mike Dingle’s I See the Future, a massive collage work consisting of found objects combined into the general shape of the United States. This opening should draw an interesting crowd.

Directions: SOMArts is near Eighth Street and Brannan, near Trader Joe’s, not far from the the Sixth Street exit from Route 80. Here’s a link to a map.

I hope to see some of you there!

Added November 8…

Here’s a pasted-together and way-too-small photo of the left end of Unfurling as it’s hung. You read the whole top row, then the next row, and then the third row. Awesome. Mabye later we’ll post a big image of the whole thing. Or make it into a book…

This is Isabel at the opening, in the center, with some friends and viewers, standing in front of some of Marc Bode’s comic art.

I’m celebrating Halloween at the World Fantasy Con in San Jose. It’s nice to see so many writer friends and to discuss our craft and biz. I talked about my paintings on a panel yesterday with some other writer-artists.

[See my previous post for info about the Japanese paintings.]

If you have too much fun, Emilio sent in a link to a “lifelogging” article about 22 “lifebox” tools, starting with the SenseCam, which takes a picture of just about every damned thing you see—it’s said to be “aimed at helping Alzheimer’s and dementia patients recall the events of their day.” Where did I put my glasses? Did a ghost take them?

Woooo!

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in my novel-in-progress Jim and the Flims, I’ve been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple!

Really you’d need some SFictional way to amp up the power of the thing—maybe I fall back on that hoary SF-movie expedient of a well-timed stroke of lightning on a nearby power pole. I see this happening on some slacker’s hobby porch, not in an intergovernmental lab. I gather that it’s possible to build your own STM at home.

Somehow he’s virtually riding on his picometer needle and … Zzzzzt!

There’s some nice STM pictures on the IBM Almaden Labs site. (The photo above shows the results, however, of San Francisco graffitti removal, not the machines at IBM.)

Photo by Kenneth Garrett, Copyright (C) 2008, National Geographic

We went to see the King Tut show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco this weekend. It was a good show, with some gorgeous things. I loved this “pectoral” or necklace.

[Photo from www.suite101.com, Credit: Credit: Egyptian Museum/Andreas F. Voegelin]

Even better was the gilded coffin of Tjuya, who may have been Tut’s mother-in-law. Ride the boat to heaven.

I pick up cultural associations of the 1920s and 1960s when I look at Egyptian art. Howard Carter discovered Tut’s tomb in the 1920s—I just read Carter’s fascinating account of it in a Dover reprint called The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen—this is a great little book. And in the 1920s there was a fad for Deco and Egyptian stuff.

[Art by Rick Griffin for Zap #3, (C) Rick Griffin]

The psychedelic rock posters and cartoons of the 1960s often used to feature flying scarabs—I think particularly of the work by Rick Griffin.

[Found on Wikimedia Commons.]

This pair of cartouches contains the hieroglyphic signs that render Tutankhamen’s name. I’ll give an explanation that’s partly or even largely wrong. (A cartoonist named Chris Cooper has posted a more accurate illustrated essay about Tut’s name.)

The cartouche on the left is his more informal name, Tut (chicken) + Ankh (hippie cross) + Amun (earth, air, and sea) and under that a Crook for Ruler, an On (butter churn?) for the city Heliopolis, and a Papyrus plant for Upper Egypt, or Thebes. The cartouche on the right represents his throne name, “Nebkheperura.” Here we have Ra=God (sun disk) + Khephri (Scarab) + Neb (Basket, stands for All).

Sylvia pointed out that one of the ankhs on display had a woman’s lower body sketched on it, right below a Nebkheperura cartouche. I’d never thought of the Ankh that way.

It felt so weird to come out of the tomb-like show into the museum shop, three thousand years later, and a half a world away from Tut’s tomb and everyone is imitating Tut and taking pictures.

[Sarcophagus-like Scanadavian pancake house on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, converted to a sushi resaurant.]

Certainly there should be some Egyptian stuff in my fictional land of Flimsy. A flying snake. A great scarab. But maybe in a diner.