I was so buffaloed about how to depict Bosch, and then, somehow I was able to write him. He’s a mix of Kurt Gödel, my mother, and me. Maybe my father, too.

The chapter came out quite fast; nearly 15,000 words in about two weeks. White heat. I’d outlined a lot. The pitchfork showed up, I like the pitchfork.

The day after I finished I started feeling sick: weak and feverish. Maybe it’s a virus. Or maybe I depleted myself working on this so hard. I really dug down deep into my psyche. Or maybe it’s not so healthy a thing to twink a dead genius like Bosch. In effect, I conjured him up, and I’ve been dancing with his shade, not being all that respectful to him, either. Teasing him, arguing with him, trying to rile him up.

Today I couldn’t write anymore, and I was painting. I started the missing left panel of my Hylozoic triptych. And, without realizing this was what I’d do, I ended up drawing a giant beanstalk that has an arabesque curve like the plant in Bosch’s Saint John the Baptist, which plays a big role in the chapter: Jayjay sneaks into the cathedral and paints that plant over an image of donor that Bosch has fallen out with. Bosch was giving Jayjay lessons on how to paint this vine. And now he’s giving me the lessons. Hi, Yeroon.

I now see the the triptych is telling me what to put in the last three chapters, from right to left

• Chap 6: The subbies under the ground. They’re actually seen by Chu, and not Thuy as depicted, but the picture stays that way as Thuy is so iconic. They’re in the Lobrane where our space is being totally rotted out by Peng runes.

• Chap 7: The Hrull coming to save Jayjay and Thuy with Thuy inside. That’s Jayjay holding the brush, and those glowing dots are hylozoic eddies in the air.

• Chap 8: The beanstalk shooting up through the sea between the worlds and mounting clear to heaven/infinity. Jayjay sees that on the (triumphant) flight back from Hibrane to the victorious cleansing of the Lobrane.

I should mention that in the Hibrane version of the Saint John the Baptist painting, that will be a cuttlefish down on the right, rather than a lamb, as over there, the cuttlefish is the symbol of the Savior Jude Christ who died on the triangle for our redemption.

I used to think John the Baptist is a boring picture, but now I really see it, and it’s just as wild and rich as a Hell picture. Check out those bizarro insects (locusts!) hanging on the plant. (I think John the baptist lived on honey and locusts, no?)

I love John’s face. I figure Bosch might have had this expression sometimes. Alert.

For the longest time, I couldn’t get into Bosch’s world, and now I’m inside it. It was like one of shiny seedpods, and after some 45 years of buzzing around it, I finally found the hole. The seeds intoxicatingly sweet on my mandible mouth-parts.

I’m sad to be done with the chapter, I loved being in that world and feel like I’m just getting to know Bosch now. Well, I can come back to him in Chapter 7, from Thuy’s point of view. But now—unless I change my plan—I have to jump back to be with Chu on Earth.

And for the last chapter, Bosch is telling me to put in a giant beanstalk, they see it on their way back to Earth. It fits as Jayjay dreamed about a giant beanstalk in Chapter One. It wasn’t really a dream, it was a precog vision.

It’ll be very vibby to instantiate the beanstalk at the book’s end. I’ve been obsessed with Jack’s beanstalk my whole life, I saw a cartoon of it in a movie theater when I was a kid and imprinted on it forever. Looking on the web, I find a a 1933 Ub Iwerks animation of the tale which is could the be one I remember. Everything is alive, it’s so hylozoic, maybe the old cartoons are what got me onto this kick. And the Magic Harp is there too. Ub Iwerks — what a name! — also designed Mickey for Walt Disney. And, how cool, you can Google search for video to find a whole bunch more Ub Iwerks cartoons online. I’m gonna watch them all…

There was in fact a later version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” with Donald, Mickey and Goofy, we had it in our house in Geneseo, NY, on a Fisher Price plastic crank-it-yourself cartoon viewer when the kids were small.

I almost put the beanstalk in White Light, and I hinted around the beanstalk in Spaceland, but now I can really do it.

The beanstalk will shoot up through the sea between the worlds, yes, running from the subbies clear to the transfinite.

And the cool thing is, I didn’t know I could do it until I started painting it today. Thanks to Jeroen gibbering over my shoulder.

“You may get some better, but you’ll never be well no more.” — Skip James.

When I worked for John Walker at Autodesk in late 80s and early 90s, John would occasionally get into a creative state where he’d single-handedly turn out a very large and well-designed bunch of computer code in an incredibly short time—for instance our Cellab program (which can find on Walker’s huge web site or on mine , in slightly different versions), or a “fractal forgeries” landscape generator for our Chaos program, complete with a graphical user interface. He referred to this state of extreme focus and obsession as a “bloodlust hacking frenzy.”

I’ve been in that mode on my novel Hylozoic the last couple of weeks, writing my chapter “Hieronymus Bosch’s Apprentice.” I finished the first draft of the chapter today. I’ll post a couple of tastes here for today’s blog entry.

By the way, it really helped that I visited Bosch’s home town this spring.

Today’s illos include a couple of scans from this nice new book I got, edited by Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch — although the image immediately below shows the shoes of the owner of chihuahua depicted further below, spotted where else but the Los Gatos Sunday market.

Jayjay and Thuy followed Azaroth up a staircase to a sunny studio in the front of the house. As it happened, the windows gave directly onto the great triangular marketplace and its articulated hubbub. The room sounded with a hundred conversations, with vendor’s cries, the scuff of shoes and the clack of hooves—all this overlaid by the vile drone of an incompetently played bagpipe.

A cluttered work table sat in the middle of the studio, and beyond that was Jeroen Bosch, standing before the window, brush in hand, the light falling over his shoulder onto a large, square oak panel.

“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Azaroth brings fresh wonders.” His face was lined and quizzical; his mouth and eyebrows were alive with the shadows of his fleeting moods. He looked to be in his mid forties.

Jayjay looked around the studio, fascinated. The work table held seashells and eggshells, drawings of cripples, a bowl of gooseberries, a peacock feather in a cloudy glass jar, and a variety of dried gourds. Upon the wall were a cow skull and a lute, also a stuffed heron and owl perched upon shelves. Two nearly completed paintings leaned against the wall, panels half the width of the big square one that Bosch was working on. The panels were easily four times Jayjay’s height, each of them a mottled microcosm, brimming with incident and life.

“I’m nearly done decorating the harp,” said Jeroen. “But she’s locked up in the attic. She’s too valuable to uncover with so many people about.” He made a gesture towards the bustling marketplace.

“I can’t see her?” said Azaroth, incredulous.

The painter set down his brush and walked over to them, keeping an eye on Jayjay and Thuy. He accepted the dogfish from Azaroth, set it on his work table and propped its mouth open with a porcupine quill. “Hello,” he said to the dogfish, making his voice thin. “Do you bring a message from the King of Hell?”

Bosch was playing—seeking inspiration by enacting a little scene that he might paint. To ingratiate himself, Jayjay responded as if speaking for the fish, flopping his tongue to make his words soft and slimy. “The pitchfork wants to strum the harp,” he said, nothing better popping into his head. “The pitchfork is God.” He reached out with is hand and waggled the fish’s gelatinous brown tail.

Bosch nodded, appreciating the mummery, if not taking the words seriously. He was studying the singular objects on his table, nudging them this way and that with the tip of his delicate, ochre-stained finger—as if composing a scene. “Would it be heresy to say all things have souls?” he said, suddenly fixing his eyes on Jayjay.

… “The Antonite brothers nurse the victims of St. Anthony’s Fire,” said Jayjay. “Do you know that condition is caused by a fungus in brown bread? I had an experience of it last night. I spent part of the night hallucinating in the Antonites’ courtyard.”

“And drinking wine,” said Bosch, with a telling sniff. “Gluttony. The Holy Fire is caused, like any physical affliction, by sin. God abandons the sinner and the devil attacks like the wolf bringing down a wayfarer. Brown bread is the Lord’s wholesome gift to the lower classes. The bread’s essence is pure in and of itself.”

“I want to know if you’ve been inspired by hallucinations from brown bread.”

“Were your drinking companions painting triptychs?”

This was leading nowhere. Studying the picture in progress, Jayjay admired Bosch’s facility at turning realistically rendered objects into bizarre beasts. Here was a jug that was a horse, a tree that was a man, a ship that was a headless duck. “Everything’s alive,” he said, returning to their common ground.

“Yes,” said Jeroen busy with his brush again. “Few understand this. I’m glad we share the knowing.”

When I was writing Postsingular, I thought it would be interesting to have the dominant Western religion of the Hibrane be slightly different from Christianity. So I wrote:

“We like to eat them [cuttlefish],” said Azaroth. “I thought you knew that. Thanks to teeping and omnividence, we fished our own cuttles extinct. Since then, the planetary mind has taught us to be more careful. In any case, our people especially dig eating the Lobrane cuttles since they’re so dense and chewy. I should also mention that cuttlefish symbolize a certain holy cuttlefisherman of ancient times. He rose from death on the triangle to found one of our great world religions.”
***
Relative to little Thuy, the single-story shops and houses were as tall as office buildings. The buildings looked to be assembled from naturally grown components as well. Overhead, shells and shiny seedpods hung upon lines stretched across the street; they’d been crafted into representational forms: a star, a candy cane, a cuttlefish holding a triangle—Thuy recalled Azaroth’s mentioning that the cuttlefish was a symbol for a Hibrane religious figure. Perhaps these were ornaments to celebrate a holiday.
***
“What!” exclaimed Gladax, taking the bait. “I told those flowers they have to stay red right through to the end of the Cuttlemas holidays.”

This change seemed cute and funny at the time, but now it’s coming back to haunt me. Because Hieronymus Bosch’s art is loaded with Christian iconography, and the time he lived in was dominated by the Roman Catholic church.

So I need to think of a Hibrane religion that fits with the cuttlefish/triangle thing and is close enough to Christianity so that my envisioning of Bosch can be comfortably close to my goal, which is our own historical Bosch.

First of all, as a fabulist (and setting aside whatever my realworld religious beliefs might or might not be), I find it interesting to suppose that our religions were indeed founded by otherworldly beings—and I take this class to be a very broad one, extending to higher dimensions as well as to divinities.

In this case, the appearance of Christ wouldn’t simply be an inevitable historical stage, on a par with the emergence of the alphabet. It would, rather, a somewhat arbitrary and unpredictable irruption of a higher reality in our mundane world. On a par, if you will, with the three-dimensional A Sphere choosing to manifest himself to flat A Square in Flatland.

Or, closer to my novel Hylozoic, it might be that some aktualized higher being like the harp or the pitchfork made an appearance as a religious savior in human form, with motives that might be altruistic and benevolent, although the motives might instead be arcane and obscure.

If we take Christ’s life as being the unpredictable intervention of a higher being into human history, then there’s no absolute necessity for a Christ to have appeared in an otherwise identical parallel Earth. Things very much like puffballs and oak trees must evolve, but a monotheistic religion based upon the Beatitudes and clinched with the prophet’s execution and resurrection—maybe that’s not inevitable.

This said, if some higher being is motivated to meddle with our timeline, the same kinds of reasons might drive the being to poke into the parallel line as well. But they might happen to do it a bit differently there. So we can suppose that the Hibrane has something like Christianity, only different.

In other words, I’m supposing that the harp or the pitchfork or some other aktualized higher being did in fact incarnate themselves as a Lord and Savior and founder of a world religion in the Hibrane. Maybe at some point the aktuals will in fact tell us about this.

And, on the evidence of Postsingular, I know that this avatar was a man who was a cuttlefisherman, and who was executed on a wooden triangle.

What was the Hibrane savior’s name?

Jude Christ. According to an online Catholic Encyclopedia, Jesus had four “brothers,” although the orthodox view is that these were in fact cousins. Their names were Joseph, James, Simon, and Jude. I think I’ll use Jude because of the dissonance caused by the echo of Judas the Betrayer, and the positive energies of the Beatles, “Hey Jude,” Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, and my deceased Mondo 2000 friend St. Jude Milhon, “The Saint of Hopeless Causes, Dubious Cases, and Children’s Aspirin.”

How exactly was Jude Christ executed on a triangle?

It’s similar to crucifixion. They nailed together three boards to make an isoceles triangle with its narrow vertex down. Possibly the construction was backed by a cross—indeed many crucifixes have slanting props. In the Hibrane, people just happened to focus on the triangle.

[Photo of a model of the Common European Cuttlefish Sepia Officinalis, to be found in the Mediterranean off the Holy Land.]

How can cuttlefish be made a warm and fuzzy religious symbol like the lamb?

He embraces everyone. He reaches out.

Oh, that’s too scary a picture, I’m just kidding with that. 🙂
I have this thing for cuttlefish…

Click the picture for more about Postsingular!

We visited Rudy, Penny, and the twins in Berkeley yesterday, and I caught a few street images for today’s illos, ending with a paparazzi pair of me trying to get my camera back from Rudy.

Hylozoic is going pretty good these days. I got a contract for it from Tor Books, which is encouraging. I’m always grateful that I can get novels published.

Here’s a draft passage of Jayjay, Thuy, and the not-so-evil-after-all hillbilly pitchfork arriving in the Hibrane. It’s our man Hieronymus Bosch’s home town, 1496, and everything in the Hibrane is six times as big as it is here.

Jayjay took Thuy by the hand, remembering the tower of loops that the pitchfork had taught him. The scale links were still in place: a helix spiraling from below the subbies to beyond the galaxy. Feeling light and nimble, Jayjay revolved the helix to aim its axis in the direction they flew. He reached through his heart to that one particular cell and carbon atom; he reached up past humanity to the Earth and the sky. He and Thuy sped forward as if in a particle accelerator.

And touched down upon a stone street in a town with no lights or teep. The mild, damp night air bore the smell of human waste.

A gentle thump sounded at their side: the pitchfork. Somewhere nearby, men were roaring a slow, deep-voiced song. A fat full moon hung low above the stair-stepped gables, the buildings oddly tall.

Looking up past the walls to the panoply of stars, Jayjay saw familiar constellations. He used the north star to find the points of the compass, noted that the low moon was in the west, recalled that a full moon sets near dawn, and drew the conclusion.

“It’s about 4 a. m.” he told Thuy.

“There’s no teep to check that,” said Thuy fretfully. “This place isn’t right. Last time, the Hibrane was almost like our San Francisco, and they had lazy eight. But this is some kind of primitive backwater with no silps. Everything’s mute. How do people live this way?”

“We’re free,” said Jayjay relishing the bucolic air. Already he was learning to ignore the bad smells. “It’s great here. No Peng, no voices in our heads, no realtime video shows of our lives.”

Dogs barked in courtyards nearby, perhaps annoyed by the pitchfork. He stood beside Jayjay, balancing on his handle, vibrating his prongs at an ultrasonic rate. Now he slid down a few octaves, sculpting his reverberant tones into a voice.

“I got a powerful belief my harp’s somewheres near,” said the aktual. “She’ll answer when she hears me. I know it’s gonna work out. We’ve done all this before.”

“We have?”

“The harp and me are manifesting as time loops. ‘Cept we’re outta synch. Seems like God and the Devil could manage to show up the same scale, place and time—but that harp, she always takes a wrong turn.”

“You’re really saying she’s God?” asked Jayjay.

“Oh, I’m God now,” said the pitchfork. “And the harp’s the Devil. We swap places all the time.”

“Like yin and yang?” said Thuy.

“Out the yinyang for true,” said the pitchfork and went hopping down the street, his handle rapping smartly on the stones. Someone lit a lantern in one of the great houses, the window impossibly high above the ground.

A slow, draggy squeal issued from a faintly visible alley. Horn-shod feet clattered on the stones; a massive bulk was shambling their way. The high window swung open, and the lantern light illumined a muddy hairy beast the size of a an old-style moving van.

“Run, Thuy!” cried Jayjay, and turned to flee. The cobblestones were inordinately broad and high-crowned, with gaping cracks between them. At his very first step, Jayjay, clumsy with exhaustion, caught his foot in a gap and fell.

The monstrous creature was coming closer, slow but ineluctable, snuffling his way through the fetid night.

“Help me, Thuy!” Jayjay moaned. “My foot’s stuck.”

A red-faced man in a nightgown was yelling from the window, but his speech was doubly incomprehensible. The voice was warped like a screwed audio clip, and the words weren’t in any language Jayjay knew. German? Old English?

“Poor Jayjay,” said Thuy, helping him to his feet. In the faint, jiggly light, Jayjay could see that she was smiling. “I’m happy because now I can tell this really is the Hibrane,” she explained. “That means we have an advantage here. It’s like we’re one foot tall, dense as steel, and faster than weasels. I’m gonna kick that hog’s butt.”

And she proceeded to do just this. Thuy trotted towards the giant animal—who was, yes, a twenty foot tall boar. She leapt into the air and gave the charging swine a smack on the snout with her fist. The boar veered ever so slowly to one side. Thuy ran around behind him and planted a volley of sharp kicks, dimpling his muddy hams. Bellowing like drunken molasses, the giant pig bucked his way past Jayjay and further up the street.

“We’re super-gnomes,” said Thuy.

“Or demons,” added Jayjay. “These people are bound to be superstitious.”

—quoted from Rudy Rucker, Hylozoic, draft of a novel in progress.