In the novel that I’m working on, Mathematicians in Love, I’m starting to talk about this special mode of thought called hierophantics. I get that word from a certain Tarot card, a trump of the Major Arcana. I love that esoteric stuff — that’s why I ended up as a mathematician.

The Hierophant card shows a wise woman who explains mysteries. At least I think she’s a woman. The etymology of the word is Hiero + phant = mystery + show; it’s akin to hiero + glyph = mystery + symbol.

In my novel, some cockroach mathematicians from Galaxy Z claim that hierophantics can collapse even the largest exponential search into a few ultraefficient steps. So now I’m trying to figure out a hand-waving explanation of how hierophantics works, and then I’ll want to think about how it would feel to think hierophantically.

A quantum mechanics advocate might suggest that knowing hierophantics means being able see across the multiverse and search all the universes at once. But I'd rather avoid QM, as I think the QM worldview has gotten a free ride for too long as being self-evidently “correct”. QM could be wrong, after all, it could an epiphenomenal view on a par with statistical mechanics. You can have hidden variable as long as you're cool with reverse causation and cosmic synchronicity.

A non-QM way to have hierophantics works might be by having your mind become in some sense infinite. Perhaps some of the gray matter becomes fractalized into an infinite number of sub-particles. (And don’t worry about quantum fuzz, as in my universe quantum mechanics is wrong; it’s merely so we can have arbitrarily small particles.)

The way you learn hierophantics is by eating Nataraja worms, by the way. These creatures live in this other world La Hampa that my characters are visiting. It looks a lot like Micronesia there, transreally enough.

Bela, Paul and Alma are having a luau with some alien mathematicians at the edge of this lagoon. One idea is that the fractal matter of the worms gets into your system. Our heroine Alma is dubious about eating the worms.

“I don’t know,” said Alma. “What if the food’s full of sick eggs that’ll hatch larvae inside us that eat our flesh and burst out — yuuuugh?” She made a rapid gesture to mime something erupting through the wall of her abdomen.

Here I’m referring to the classic first Alien movie. I couldn’t find an image of that scene online, but I did find a terric short cartoon version of Alien re-enacted by bunnies, by Jennifer Shiman.

Do the worms have to “teach” hierophantics by putting a new kind of matter into you? Maybe it could be more of a software change.

As I discuss in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul,

exponential speedups have arisen at several of the stages in the human history of technology. Could it happen again?

The development of a common language, for instance, allows all the members of a society to think faster. The speedup seems more than merely linear, as entirely new kinds of cooperation become possible. And the introduction of writing, of the printing press, of telephony, and of the Web — each of these has brought about a large and possibly exponential speedup in the computation rate of the hive mind as well. My sense is that the introduction of language and the successive communication enhancements have sped up the hive mind’s activities to the same degree that using numbers speeds up the process of arithmetic.

Could there be some new thought mode that would provide us with another exponential speed-up? If you look at the intellectual history of the human race, you’ll notice that there aren’t really all that many new ideas we’ve come up with. A lot of what scientists and artists occupy themselves with is putting old wine in new bottles. Maybe there’s a whole level of thought that simply hasn’t occurred to us yet — a breakthrough as radical as calculus, as radical as positional arithmetic notation, as radical as language.

Hierophantics!

Imagine being a person who knows no language at all trying to imagine language. That's how it is for us to imagine hierophantics. I see it as a system of high-level patterns that provide immense short-cuts, far in excess of the mere linear speedup you'd obtain from any piddling little “Singularity”…

I figure once Bela knows hierophantics he'll be able to figure out how to finally get the Republicans out of power!

This weekend was Mother's Day, and we drove up to San Francisco to visit Rudy, Jr. We saw a cool Robert Williams type car on the drive North, the kind of tuff short that Coochie Cootie might ride around in.

When I was a kid in Louisville my parents were friends with a family called the Duncans; the older son had a street rod like this, and a big collection of the early color Mad magazines, and the younger son had a subscription to “Things of Science” which meant that every month he got this little dark blue box with the fixings for a science experiment in it. He had all the old Things stacked up. The Duncans lived in a big old three-story wood house on Eastern Parkway near downtown Louisville. The older guy had lettered a funny sign on the back of his driver's seat: “Should passengers find fault with the driving of this vehicle, please observe the mistletoe on the driver's coat tail.” He and my big brother Embry went to see Blackboard Jungle together and decided to be juvenile delinquents. What a great family, a real role model.

We wandered around North Beach with Rudy and Penny, and ended up at Coit Tower. Hadn't been there in a few years. We spotted the parrots from “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” flying by overhead — that's a great movie. And we took some time to study the WPA murals inside the tower. Here's a butcher removing hog bristles with a blowtorch. “Today's pig, tomorrow's bacon,” as we used to say in the Sixties.

The WPA was an incredible concept, the government paying artists to make socially conscious art that glorifies laboring people. Seems like in our present dark times, productive workers of any type are slighted by the government. I've been brooding over our Governator's idea of cutting funding for schools so there's bigger classes and less salary for the teachers, and then “making up” for that by (a) giving the teachers less job security, (b) having their raises depend upon the whims of politically motivated administrators and (c) having their evaluations depend solely on Mickey-Mouse standardized tests. We need unions like never before. I'd wanted to like the governor just for being a science-fiction star, but, sadly, he's turning out to be a screw-the-people anti-visionary ego-tripper. Today's pig, tomorrow's bacon.

Here's a Chinatown storefront that precisely captures the technological relevance of the fax machine.

And here's the guy we came to visit, on a bicycle that incorporates a scooter.

Sad news this week, 76-year-old writer Robert Sheckley is in a Ukranian hospital — he was there for a science fiction convention.

Get well, Sheck-man!

I recently downloaded the free Google desktop search engine, which is in some ways close to the Lifebox interface I’m always talking about. That is, I can search through all the aging files on my machine and find, e.g. every mention of Sheckley. Kind of like racking my brain. But the results pop up pretty fast in a nice Google-search-style window, each reference clickable and in context. I don’t have the energy to make up a brand-new econium for my beloved Sheckley just now, but here, in place of that, are some of the bits that came up in my Desktop Search for the Master's name.

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In my story, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the word “geezel” is an homage to the master Robert Sheckley, who once used it to stand for a kind of alien food; and “lesnerize” is from a story where he uses it to mean “sneeze.”

“Faraway Eyes,” “The Man Who Ate Himself,” “Inertia,” and Master of Space and Time all involve characters called Joe Fletcher and Harry Gerber. These are a very traditional SF pair of characters, whose roots go back to Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories, to Henry Kuttner and beyond.

“The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” has an odd history. After writing it, I sent it to Robert Sheckley, who was then the fiction editor at Omni. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. I was overjoyed, as Omni was at that time the top-paying SF market. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, which was great fun. Sheckley suggested the Hamlet quote for the head of the story. My wife and I had dinner with him and his then wife, Jay Rothbel. The waiter behaved like an out-of-control Sheckley robot and Sheckley and I almost got run down crossing the street. It was all perfect. But then I didn’t hear anything from Sheckley for quite some time.

When I next talked to him, he told me that his boss at Omni had told him not to use “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Also Sheckley told me that he was being eased out of the Omni job. So in the end I never did sell a story to Omni.

In my story, “Soft Death,” The character-name “Leckesh” is a near-anagram of Sheckley. For me, the most important SF writer of all is Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Nabokov describes a certain childhood book as being the one that bumped something and set the heavy ball rolling down the corridor of years. For me, that book of books was Sheckley’s Untouched by Human Hands. I first read it in the Spring of 1961, when I was in the hospital recovering from having my ruptured spleen removed.

Around the time I was writing “Soft Death,” about 1985, Sheckley and Jay Rothbel showed up at our Lynchburg house in a camper van and lived in our driveway for a few days, their electric cord plugged into our socket, and their plumbing system connected to our hose. I could hardly believe my good fortune. It was like having ET land his ship in your yard.

An exciting literary feature of moving to California in 1986 was that I got to see my hero Robert Sheckley again. This time he was visiting his writer/comedian friend Marty Olson in Venice Beach. Olson had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about various futuristic things. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, and a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor.

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I haven’t been blogging as much lately as I’ve been busy pushing my novel forward, writing an alien contact scene.

I’m starting to worry that I repeat some of my gimmicks book to book. Well, Bruegel always drew devils and angels the same, too. Maybe at this point I’m more, like, rearranging things at a higher level.

Anther thing I’ve been busy with is in making long skinny bitmaps that might be usable as borders in my forthcoming The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (Sell it, Ru.) The map shown up above is a variation of the so-called 1D BigNabe Heat rule, run on a 64-cell wide world with wrap at the edges, seeded with a hump, and using a striped color palette. Space is horizontal, and time runs down the page. I made this with CAPOW, which you can get from the Lifebox/Seashell/Soul downloads page.

The shapes look kind of like a dog-pile of faces to me, reminiscent of the great eyeball-kicks borders you used to see on Mad or Weirdo covers.

This image is intended as a border for the chapter on “Society”, thus the aptness of the totem-pole dog-pile quality of it.

In Mathematicians in Love I’m working on a scene were my characters surf through a tunnel to a parallel sheet of space.

I first thought about how to do this in Chapter Eight of my 1984 book, The Fourth Dimension. The traditional way for connecting two parallel sheets of space is to imagine a hump that bulges out from one space and merges into the other space as shown in the figure below, which was drawn from one of my sketches by David Povilaitis. This kind of connection is traditionally known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge or a wormhole.

In this scene, by the way, we see the traditional Edwin Abbott Flatland hero A Square about to sneak off into the parallel world of Globland with a married Flatlander woman Una, whom he hopes to seduce. Note that “A” is not an abbreviation, it’s his full first name. (The science writer Ian Stewart recently published an interesting Annotated Flatland as well.)

Although we often think of Flatland as being a two-dimensional world like a table-top, we can also imagine, with Charles Howard Hinton and Kee Dewdney, a 2D world that’s turned upon its edge — like a cross-sectional slice of our planet.

By the way, I once edited a collection of Hinton’s writings called Speculations on the Fourth Dimension which is now out of print, but available used, or (in part) online.

In the Hinton/Dewdney-style 2D world we have a notion of up/down matching the familiar one. In my 2002 novel Spaceland I used this kind of image.

In this picture we see a couple of Flatlanders at a hot-dog stand. They’re drawn with some internal detail instead of just as, like, lines and squares with eyes. Those bumps on the roof are Flatland writing.

Now we get to the new image for today.

This is a three-in-one picture:

(1) A Square on a surfboard in a 2D world, riding a wave towards the shore.

(2) A couple of sketches of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between two parallel universes, and in one of them I’ve drawn in water and air for the two worlds. The water sloshes right through the tunnel.

(3) A Square surfs into one end of an Einstein-Rosen bridge and comes out the other end — now facing away from the shore.

Before drawing this picture I hadn’t realized that the passage through the hypertunnel would turn my surfers away from the shore. That’s why I love math and logic. You set up the system, turn the crank, and, if you’re lucky, you learn something new. It’s like logic is a complicated feeler that we use to reach out and touch invisible part of the mental world. As Kurt G�del once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.”