Where have I been? My wife and I went at our fortieth reunion at Swarthmore College, visited daughter Georgia and family in NYC, and then we flew to Paris, rented a car and drove to the southwest of France in Caunes near Carcasonne and the Pyrenees for a two-week painting workshop with Glen Moriwaki.

I got about five paintings done; one of my favorites is called Hylozoic like my novel. It’s a square meter.

And another favorite is a Theibaud and Hockney influenced landscape called South of France. Wanted to show these two right off, the “big fish” I caught on my expedition. I’ll write more about the painting workshop in a later entry. But today I’ll talk about the journey itself.

At Swarthmore, we did an alumni parade and then were herded into our lovely old commencement amphitheater for a series of talks. Sadly the programming of this alumni event was in the hands of money-grubbing morons. The Alumni Association works hand in glove, or in some even more intimate fashion, with the multiple-layered and ever-expanding bureaucracy that has turned the college into a business for generating money for hiring ever more administrators.

[Iron crabs hold up the “Cleopatra’s Needle” obelisk in Central Park behind the Met.]

After the money-raising talks, my classmates and I were wondering if we were the only class perennially in the grip of reflexive rebelliousness. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that when we graduated, our government wanted to send us to the slaughtering-fields of Viet Nam. They said we were cowards not to go.

[A corner of Chartres cathedral.]

I dream that my classmates and I can plan an insurrection for our 50th reunion. We could drive the money-changers from temple; usurp the stage and speak of art, science, and philosophy. Play some music. Dance and tell jokes. Be silly and sentimental. Give the finger to the establishment one more time. Perhaps our 50th reunion class gift can be a detailed plan for how to cut the number of administrators by half…

After the reunion, we visited daughter Georgia and her husband Courtney and their daughter in NYC.

My granddaughter!

On the way south we spent nights in Chartres, Tours, Rocamadour, and Carcassonne.

[A wall in Chartres. Gnarly ivy.]

The windows at Chartres were wonderful, dating back to the 11th or 12th century.

[This and the next glass image are from the lesser known but awesome Gothic cathedral in Bourges; these windows also from the 12th century.]

I liked thinking the windows are nearly a thousand years old. We even took a little tour, and the guide pointed out that in the Middle ages most people didn’t read, so the cathedral itself was like a book, with the key facts of the religion on display.

The ultimate Sunday funnies. He showed us how to read the windows; bottom row to top row, often reading each row left to right.

Stained glass windows are a great medium, a very heavy means of information transmission. Like runes or glyphs. And so psychedelic. In another church I sat with the sun shining through a stained glass window onto my face and slowly the colors against my eyes changed as the sun moved across the sky.

Standing, I was outlined in colored light.

The portals of the cathedral are ringed with sculptures. I found one alien-like beast, but the guide said it was just a scorpion, for the zodiac sign.

In Tours we had a nice cheap room overlooking a square. I had 3 a. m. jetlag there, light from the square through the window, content to look at my foot’s shadow.

The big thing in Tours is to drive out and see castles of the Loire. We picked off Chateaudun and Chenonceau in particular.

Chateaudun was off the beaten track and medieval. I love the conical tower and the conical-trimmed trees. And a crow in the air.

It rained at the castles. Inside a hall in Chateaudun they had a stone stag over a fireplace that segued into a stuffed stag’s head.

Peaceful and quiet.

Asymmetric arches in the chapel.

Chenonceau was the best, with a long leafy entrance path. The castle stretches across the Loire, a shallow not all that wide river. It has a long ball room set onto what was once a bridge.

Amazing formal gardens.

This was a very romantic day, the clouds coming and going.

Sylvia looked so cute in her white raincoat.

A rose garden on one side of the castle.

In the basement kitchen a special pan for roasting pigs, with snout-extension.

A beautiful little canal with plane trees growing next to it. I’d like to paint this.

Rocamadour was a wild card that I found in the guidebook.

A bunch of chapels set into a cliff, with a castle on top and a little town at the base.

Incredible clouds behind the lacy towers.

Tons of swallows busy in the air all the time—swallows around all the castles, as a matter of fact.

Incredible iron work.

We hit the freeway to head further south. Note the rhino on the hay truck mudflap.

I’m just writing a scene where the Peng make themselves a tulpa house that’s a copy of this structure from Heironymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Thuy gets them to do it for a joke; not being mammals the Peng don’t get it about those two pink towers near the top left, flaccid and turgid.

I’ll be off-line for the rest of June. Meanwhile, here’s some more pictures from Big Sur, along with notes about “matter hologram” tulpa bodies. If you wonder about the made-up words I use, just type them into the blog’s Search box at the top right, press Enter, and you’ll find links to earlier blog entries where I discussed these same words before and perhaps even defined them.

When Charlie Stross writes about sending people as info patterns—like in Glass House—he has a nanotech gate at the targeted location, which builds the incoming person’s body atom-by-atom (after first editing or “redacting” the incoming info pattern, for security’s sake). Let’s call this the nanoLego model of body transmission.

For Hylozoic, I’m proposing a much more baroque way of having the Peng be sent. Their pattern is sent to Earth, same as in the nanoLego method—but then instead of building them a body, I have their info coded into a quadrillion-fold inefficient Peng ranch computation of slaved atoms spitting out paired-fermion De Broglie waves to create a matter hologram of a Peng, said hologram being dynamically updated by the distributed computation.

I’m not doing this because I think it’s more realistic or likely. I’m doing it for exiguous reasons, that is, I want to write a story where aliens are skimming off the gnarl of our natural computations. And it occurred to me that if aliens were going to be mulcting us of our gnarl, they should be using it for something important to them, and what could be more important to them than projecting copies of themselves into our world.

But in the story there has to be an internal motivation for the Peng going all around Robin Hood’s barn like this. If I don’t explain why they’re not using the easier nanoLego method, I’ll seem like I’m foolishly overcomplicating things.

So—let’s address this question in the novel, and claim that being in a tulpa matter hologram body is much better than being in a normal nanoLego solid matter body.

Better how?

Weak answer: it’s a luxury for the Peng to get such obscenely inefficient bodies. Like driving very fuel inefficient cars. Conspicuous consumption. “Oh dear, my body uses a quadrillion times as many atoms as your body. But, ahem, I can afford to.”

Better answer: A tulpa body is very hard to destroy, as it emerges from a million cubic kilometer computation. So it’s a safer body to have on a world with possibly hostile natives. Fine, but we could argue that a nanoLego body could pretty easily be reconstituted , so we need a stronger reason than this.

Best answer: a tulpa matter-hologram body has femtotech powers, which seem like superpowers. If you’re an ioneer in a tulpa body, then you yourself, qua epiphenomenon of a distributed quantum computation, are able to tweak your underlying computation—which fills the million cubic kilometers of Peng ranch surrounding you. Therefore you have telepathic direct matter control, that is, your thoughts can become objects—which are additional matter holograms that (at least as seen from the outside) behave just like normal nanoLego objects. You can build a house from nothing, turn a stone into bread, water into wine, make flowers bloom from your fingertips. You can levitate and move your body around as readily as a video game player moves Mario. (I won’t allow for teleportation though, not even within the volume of the Peng ranch, as, for story purposes, I’m limiting full teleportation power to humanoids.) You can shapeshift and change your form. Perhaps the Peng begin looking like—the horror!—human Realtors. “Call me Ducky. What would it take to earn your business today?”

By virtue of having installed all the tulpaware atom by atom on the Peng ranches, Jayjay could have lasting mental indices of the atoms in both the wilderness and the SF Peng ranches. This data could be stored in his endless lazy eight memory upgrade. But I’ll he didn’t pay close attention. He didn’t bother to remember.

But maybe Chu finds out the atomic programming by watching the Peng tulpas make themselves a tulpa house.

Jay—and he alone of all humans—does know the general mediumistic tulpa-programming technique, so with Chu’s memory help, Jayjay is able to reach out to each and every one of the atoms and put something else into it. Call this antidote the aether wind. It’s about “dusting off” the atoms, decohering them from the unitary quantum state that’s generating the tulpas. It should take our two boys a couple of minutes to psychically blow a puff of aether wind onto each and every atom of a Peng ranch

The Peng ioneers try to kill Jayjay and Chu while they’re decohering their Peng ranch atoms with the aether wind. They’re freeing the silps concentrically from around his house, so they’ll have rings of allies around. For their part, the ioneers are getting telepathic control of some of the low-gnarl animal minds, such as bears and mountain lions. And Gretta shapeshifts into a human woman Realtor to trick the boys.

But then the Peng (and the Realtor) start looking weird. They’re partial series sums now, what mathematicians call “jets”. This means both that the Peng tulpas each have a half dozen ghost images, and that their shapes are overly smooth in spots and with odd sharp cusps in other places. Their thoughts are a bit incoherent as well.

Kakar turns the aether wind back upon Jayjay, decohering his particles effectively pausing his quantum computation in mid-crunch. Jayjay is frozen in the midst of saying something to Thuy—a little like when Han Solo became a silvery sculpture on Jabba the Hutt’s wall.

Bassman Andy Warren sent me a picture of our glorious punk band, “The Dead Pigs,” in action in Lynchburg, VA, 1982, twenty-five years ago. We were playing at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, where most of us then worked—although very few of us were going to be working there much longer. Thus the punk assault.

I was the singer, and that’s Andy behind me, and our townie ringer Tom MacMillan on the left (he could actually play the guitar), and Mike Morris on drums—he was even more of a troublemaker than I was back then. On the right, from the rear, Roland Girling on tambourine and chain-saw, Jack Schewel on trombone, and Mike Gambone and Georgia Grove playing saxophones.

We did a killer version of Duke of Earl.

“Daddy sent me to Randy-Mac.
He bought me a horse and a Cadillac.
I sold the car and bought me a brain.
Now I’m half grown up and I’m goin’ insane.
Duke duke duke, Duke of Earl
duke duke, Duke of Earl,
duke duke, Duke of Earl.”

I have a VHS tape; maybe one of these days I’ll MPG it and post it. By the way, in later years, Mike Morris started a second Dead Pigs band in Florida, but I never got down that way to hear them or jam with them, but Andy did. I see that I blogged on the Dead Pigs once before.

I was at Andrew Molera State Park and Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur the last couple of days. I put together some videos that I shot there this time plus some Big Sur video from two years ago to make an eight minute You Tube video,“What is Gnarl?” Windows Moviemaker is actually a pretty nice tool. I’d like to clean up the soundtrack, but, hey, it’s gnarly as is.

By way of footnote, the bit in “What is Gnarl?” about the seagulls shaking their tailfeathers relates both to Donald Duck in White Light, and to a detail of a drawing that Georgia Rucker did for the Swarthmore College freshman face book, the Cygnet, 1994.

I wrote an essay, “Our Synthetic Futures,” for Newsweek International and it’s online. It describes some possible (fun) outcomes of genomics and synthetic biology. Close students of my work will note that some of these ideas are prefigured in my futurological novel, Saucer Wisdom.

So, like I say, I was in Big Sur the last couple of days. Sitting on a hillock looking at the sea, I had a nice feeling of not thinking. Like what was going on outside didn’t need embellishment. It was exactly what I like. Usually I’m adding ideas, like the little robots watching the bad movies in Mystery Science Theater 3000, or the original Beavis and Butthead commenting on cheesy videos while they play. That’s consciousness, isn’t it, the little comment-bot. But the narrator takes a break when the show is fabulous.

Picture of a ginger root doing yoga from my bottle of Ginger Soother. Here’s a relevant (to not thinking) quote from Pynchon:

“…and now, in the Zone,…after a heavy rain he doesn’t recall, Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow c*ck driven down out of the pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stand crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural… Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Penguin 2000 edition), p. 638.

Now I’m trying to get going on Chapter Three again. I thought about the book a certain amount while at the beach. I remembered having a big insight about the story for Mathematicians in Love on Pfeiffer Beach two years ago, and drawing a diagram on the sand. So, for good luck, even though I didn’t have any big insight this time, I drew a diagram of the chapter sequence of POV (points of view) for Hylozoic, along with a picture of a Peng, the Magic Harp, and a Hrull, nicely framed by a kelp stalk. The letters stand for my characters, Jayjay, Thuy and Chu, and I use them to indicate whose point of view I use for the successive chapters. I see the book breaking into two parts, with the sequences J TCT and J CTC.

All these characters appear in my forthcoming novel Postsingular too, by the way. Speaking of Postsingular, I might mention that I got a copy of Word 2007 free from Microsoft for sending in the (apparantly) pirated Word 2003 disk that I’d bought at Fry’s. Word 2007 does a much better job of converting from DOC to PDF than Adobe Reader Professional ever did for me and, hooray, it fixed all the internal links in my three-hundrd page Postsingular Writing Notes PDF document now—you can find the PDF at the Postsingular site.

And then I drew the slogan that sparked Frek and the Elixir: “Eadem Mutata Resurgo.” The same, yet changed, I rearise. I wrote this on the beach in 2001. It became Professor Bumby the cuttlefish’s slogan.

Some people walking by decided I really was strange. But everyone expects to see weirdos in Big Sur.

Earlier I’d spent about half an hour rolling crossways on a log, face up, massaging my back in this fashion, groaning with pleasure. I chose the log to be a bit out of the way, in a little gully where I always like to go, the same gully where I filmed the eddy and the plant silp for “What Is Gnarl?”

When I was done rolling on the log, and sitting up a bit drunk with chi energy, a couple walked by. The woman said:

“I don’t have my glasses with me and at first when I saw you, I thought you were a mammal.”
“I am a mammal,” I replied.
“I mean like a bobcat or a bear,” she amplified.
“I was getting down to my mammal self,” I said.

Anyway, those were the two who then saw me drawing the Peng’n’Hrull with points-of-view diagram for Hylozoic with my cane.

“Val fisk,” I told them, by way of explanation. But, you know, sometimes it just gets too remote…

By the way, “val fisk” is Swedish for “whale fish,” as “discussed” in my film, “What is Gnarl?”

I just checked on Google, and there are some women actually named Val Fisk, like one is a teaching assistant in Suffolk, England. How great is that?