Someone recently stole samples of fourteen distinct rare earth metals from a Stanford lab. Elements with wild names like ytterbium, praesodymium, and holmium.

Right away I think there’s an SF/Ufological angle to this theft. I think it’s obvious to any reasonable person that a saucer alien, time traveler, or cross-brane hopper needed this stuff to build a device to get back home.

Or maybe the aliens don’t need the rare earth metals to build a device, per se, but rather they plan to use them as a tonic so as to enter a certain quantum computational state of consicousness which permits a teleportation hop.

I recall that my my moldie character Andrea was getting high off rare earths in my novel Freeware. Quoting from the Freeware notes:

Andrea gets high on chelated rare-earth polymers. The rare-earth elements, also called lanthanides, are Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, and Lutetium. Ytterbium was first found in a mineral called yttria in the 1890s near Ytterby, Sweden. “Ytterbium” was first applied to a substance found in yttria that was in fact a compound of the elements lutetium and ytterbium. Yttrium, though not a rare earth, resembles the rare-earth elements and is often associated with them.

And here’s a relevant quote from Freeware itself:

On the sidewalk outside the Boardwalk was Monique’s mother Andrea, spread softly out on the pavement like a Colorado River toad, but a toad in the shape of a giant book lying open on the ground. The Good Book. Big gothic letters scrolled across the two exposed pages. Just now the letters read, Thou Shalt Not Hate Moldies.

“Moldies are sentient beings with genuine religious impulses,” intoned Andrea. “I’m interested in pursuing a dialogue on this issue. Especially with single men!”

“Mom,” said Monique in an encrypted chirp. “One of these days a Heritagist tourist is going to pour alcohol on you and light you. A lot of Heritagists are Christians. Do you really think they dig seeing you, like, imitate their sacred book?”

“Greetings, Monique,” squawked Andrea cheerfully. “I am in an ecstatic state of consciousness today. A potent yttrium-ytterbium-twist compound was provided to me this morning by cousin Emuline. It’s made right here in California, they call it betty, I don’t know why, maybe because ‘betty’ is almost ‘ytterbium’ spelled backwards, well that would be ‘muibretty’. Monique, your mother is lifted on fine, fine, muibretty betty. But what is your request, my dear daughter?”

That’s all….for now. Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for those rare earth element thieves!

I’ve been working on the second panel of my Postsingular triptych. My new picture is based on a particular oak tree that I’ve been looking at for twenty years. It’s on the edge of a gully on St. Joseph’s hill. I used to think it was about to fall down, but it seems pretty stable. This is a photo patched together from two shots, but there’s nothing fake about it.

Here’s the current state of the painting I came up with; it’s called Postsingular. That’s my character Thuy Nguyen there with the pigtails, looking down off the cliff at the nanomachines and at some demonic dancing subdimensional subbies. Need I say that I’ve been studying my Hieronymus Bosch of late?

The central painting of the triptych is Hylozoic, I did that one at the painting workshop in France. When I stretched it, I lost a little of Thuy’s neck, but I’ve gotten used to that. She’s looking at a Hrull flying manta ray with Chu riding inside the ray. I’m not sure who the artist is. Either Bosch, the character Jayjay, or me.

Although the book Postsingular is volume one of my trilogy in progress, and the book Hylozoic is volume two, I’m going to hang the “earlier” one on the right of the “later” one because the patterns match better that way. So you read it right to left, fine. And what goes on the left? That’s gonna be a painting called Transfinite, which will be based on my plans for volume three.

I’ll probably base the third one on this painting by Hieronymus Bosch, The Ascent of the Blessed.

Most scholars think Bosch modeled his image of Heaven’s gate on the reflection of one of the numerous arches on the Binnendieze river in s’Hertogenbosch — which did double duty as a sewer in our man’s heyday, right around 1492 or 1505.

I’m painting these days as I’m hung-up figuring out the rest of the plot of my novel Hylozoic. I have the upcoming Bosch chapter pretty well sketched out. But that damned pitchfork—it’s got me confused. What’s it up to?

I’m thinking maybe it’s not so evil. It’s pals with the harp. But why are these higher beings screwing with our world? I’m looking ahead at the story, figuring out what I’m gonna need to jettison to pull it together.

Zonnnnnngggggg.

I’m at that frightening black point that I always reach in the middle of a novel. Confusion and despair. I fantasize that I can stave this off by outlining, but the black point crops up anyway, heedless as a meteorite. It’s where reality meets dream, where the rubber hits the road.

As Dante puts it in La Commedia Divina,

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi retrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.

I found an interesting web page exploring lots of ways to translate this. One version reads as follows:

Midway in life’s journey
I found myself in a dark wood,
and the straight way was lost.

Another translation might be:

Halfway through my novel
I know I don’t know
What the hell I’m doing.

What the hey, I’m going to the beach. Sooner or later, the Muse is bound to show up and extricate me. She always does. It’s probably just a matter of dropping a few of the candies I’m holding in my greedy monkey-fist.

One of my readers posted a comment about some recent UFO sightings right near where I live. And that made me want to take a UFO photo. So I phtographed a prehistoric stone saucer skimming above on the beach of Taholah, on the Quinault reservation north of Moclips, Washington, this weekend.

The reason we were in Moclips was to attend the wedding of the daughter of our old friends Lee and Susie, who used to live across the street from us in Geneseo, NY, some thirty years ago.

They had the wedding on the beach in Moclips; they built a little symbolic house of bamboo and tulle for the ceremony. It felt very human and classic. I like the symbolic feel of this picture. Gateway to a new life, the sea all unexplored. Rose petals on the pathway.

Afterwards we came up to a beach house they’d rented for a party. Life rolls on. We solemnize it, we witness, we celebrate, we wake up and see it as real.

I keep having to remember to think of everything as being alive, obvious as this is.

I love crows. Speculating about them, identifying with them. This fine specimen is a Pacific Northwest Native American crow on the Taholah beach in the rez. I’d love to be a crow.

But it’s good being an adept in the temple of gnarl.

Digital reality. On the other hand.

The Quinaults had stored their firework stands in a lot; the advertising slogans on these are kind of funny and ironic. Clearly these are the folks you want to get your pyrotechnics from!

Found a peaceful river mouth near the ocean.

Haystack rocks in the mist. Living haiku. Everything is alive.

And God is Love.

I did what may be the final version of my painting, “The Evil Pitchork,” on August 1. I was inspired by some email advice I got from a good artist, Aletha Kuschan. Aletha made the point that you should try and record all the things you see—not by phororealistically copying them, but rather by working for a period of time thinking about each thing. So today I went back to the picture to take account of (if not correctly represent) the fact that the centers of leaf bunches are quite dark in silhouette. Also I added vibration lines around the Evil Pitchfork, as so many of you readers keep comparing it to a tuning fork.

[This was my second draft of my painting, “The Evil Pitchork,” on July 30. There’s always the worry that earlier drafts were better… No Undo key in acrylic painting!]

The harp is more or less good. We need a rival higher being. A male. A pitchfork, like I discussed in the entry before this. The evil pitchfork vs. the magic harp.

The old peasant pitchforks were made all of wood. With no metal. They found a branch that happened to have the two prongs, and then the peeled the bark and hardened the prongs in fire. So we have a smooth twisty piece of gray wood with blackened tines.

Bosch likes to dress up as a peddler so he can hang out with beggars, sketching them. On the outings, he carries Jayjay in a sack like a pet imp.

They go on an outing to a peasant fair. At the party Jayjay sees something that scares him. He has an upset stomach from eating some gnarly pickled herring; he goes off to crap in the woods; and looking out from under a tree at a sunny meadow, he sees a two-tined pitchfork standing on its butt in a field, hopping. The evil pitchfork. It gives off a note, like a tuning-fork.

After seeing the evil pitchfork sunning himself in the meadow, Jayjay starts (correctly?) seeing the pitchfork in every forked branch. He sees the perhaps-not-so-trustworthy-after-all harp in every triangle. Panicking, he finds comfort in the music of a squalling bagpipe made of an inside-out sheep.

So now I’m trying to fit the pitchfork into my tale. At the (boring) logical level I know that this is an arbitrary story pattern that I stumbled upon haphazardly.

But at the (magical) creative level, I feel sure there has to be an underlying reason. A way to make sense of it.

I can’t let myself doubt this too soon. Otherwise I might give up too soon. If I petition the muse for a few days (i. e. obsess over this odd idea), I’ll find a higher picture that contains these shards.

This said, I also know that sometimes a particular set of assumptions and scenarios can’t be pieced together. Sometimes I need to back up and make more thorough-going revisions than I might have expected.

I’m pretty sure I can keep the harp and the pitchfork. But I’m not sure how it’s gonna work.

To begin with, let’s suppose that it was the pitchfork that Jayjay saw in his vision early in Hylozoic when he became a runemaster. Initially, in the vision, the pitchfork, was disguised as the harp, so Jayjay wouldn’t be scared of it.

But—the harp was undergoing a bizarre metamorphosis. One by one her strings were snapping and sinking into her frame. The post at her front end turned to taffy, melted in two, and the stubs sank into the frame leaving a shape like a U. And now, from the butt of the U, a bump grew out and lengthened.

“Surprised?” said the pitchfork mockingly, his tines focusing an unbearable vibration upon Jayjay, a vibration that was at the same time a sound, a teep signal, a teek jostle—plus some oddball fourth ingredient. A higher-dimensional flip.

I want the magic harp and the evil pitchfork be transfinite beings which I’ll call aktuals, after Georg Cantor’s usage, “aktuale Unendliche,” meaning “actual infinity.”

As Cantor said, “The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.” This translation is drawn from my book Infinity and the Mind, p. 43, and the passage I based it on can be found in, “Über die verschiedenen Standpunkte in bezug auf das aktuelle Unendliche,” Cantor’s collected works , pp. 374-375.

Our space is transfinite in the small and in the large. It’s a Hausdorff eta- Ω ordering, that is, an Ω-saturated ordering: between any two sets, you can find more points. Below any sequence of subdivisions lie more subdivisions. The levels go up forever as well.

In the potentially infinite real number line, the whole numbers march out to ω, and you can find an ω sequence running from 1 down to 0 just as well. By the same token in an absolutely continuous space you can march out to א -one on the ordinal line, but you can also find an א -one sequence running from 1 down to 0. And ditto for the Absolute Infinite Ω.

The aktuals don’t need to come from far away, that is, from beyond ω space or ω time. They can be down in the cracks and crevices, right here. The God within.

The harp has unfurled the eighth dimension on Earth, Hrullwelt, and Pengö, among other places. The harp wants these worlds to attain higher planetary minds, and she wants the locals to develop transfinite consciousness so they can be her allies. I might say that maybe it wasn’t her, maybe it was one of her cousins, but remember that, as an aktual, the harp is endlessly large, so she can be in many places at once.

[When Phil Dick called his book Ubik, was he thinking of “ubiquitous?”]

The pitchfork wants to kill off these uplifted worlds. The pitchfork doesn’t want to transfinite consciousness to spread. The pitchfork promotes war to bring suffering and wipe out more minds or at the very least to lower mortals’ consciousness.

Thus the harp and pitchfork play, in some measure, the roles of God and the Devil.

Also consider the harp and pitchfork as mathematical forms: the triangle and the fork. Cycle vs. bifurcation. Reversible vs. irreversible.

And as musical forms: harp is melody, pitchfork is a single tone.

Maybe our time is an illusion for the aktuals. Perhaps they stick a series of body manifestations into our spacetime that seem to link up into a worldline of a body, but which are really a series of still images, like a movie. An aktual seems to twinkle when you look at him or her, as they are disappearing and reappearing over and over.

But, no, taking them out of our time is a bad idea for this book. Why?

For the sake of drama and conflict, we expect characters be embedded in some kind of time flow. So if the aktuals aren’t in our time, then they must be in a higher-dimensional metatime. And if I have a metatime elapsing, then it’s likely that our sheet of spacetime is changing as metatime goes by—like in Mathematicians in Love—and I’d rather not tack on that complication to this book. I don’t want a lot of universes. I just want two: Lobrane and Hibrane. Given that these universes are probably of Absolute Infinite size, it’d be overkill to ask for more of them.

So I’ll submerge the aktuals in our time stream after all.

The harp and pitchfork both do happen to appear as closed temporal loops in the joint spacetime of Lobrane and Hibrane. Perhaps this is inevitable; perhaps this has to do with how they manifest themselves at the finite level.

Studying the spacetime diagrams, I discover that the pitchfork has been in America making trouble since 1492. Vision of it knocking on someone’s door.

I just found this “screwed” version of “Pourin’ Up” made by a fan. It’s pretty vibby, although the fan put her picture over the corner for the whole run, which is cute in a way, also she used a version that has been edited to cut out the cursewords and drug refs. Might as well hear it all, right? Here’s a link to baseline unbowdlerized normal version of “Pourin Up” .The first guy to rap is Pimp C, then comes Mike Jones, andthen comes Bun B. It’s charming when Mike Jones is talking about his car and his friends “Pimp ‘n Bun.” As a mathematician, I like that they have single letter last names. Sometimes I call myself Pig E, with E for Elder.

I still find the lyrics to be too mean to women, but they’re certainly catchy. Maybe to some extent the harshness is just a convention, on the other hand, Pimp C did some jail time for aggravated assault. You can Wikipedia Bun B as well—Wikipedia’s waaay ahead of Britannica…

Relevance? Well, the fact that, for the aktuals the time stream is an Absolute Continuum might be of some significance. If they like, they can make a second of time drag out forever. Like Bun B and Pimp C.

I’m looking for help all over—Bosch, Cantor, Pimp ‘n Bun, whatever. Full court press. Somewhere the Cosmos has hidden the story for me to find.