I camped in the Andrew Molera walk-in campground this weekend at Big Sur with my friend Jon Pearce and his daughter and some of her friends.

Molera used to let an unlimited number of people camp there, which was nice in terms of going there, but the rangers came to feel the site was getting overused. Now there’s only 20 or so sites, no reservation, which is nice for those of a more spontaneous bent, just first-come-first serve. For the weekends, you pretty much have to show up by two or three in the afternoon on Friday; week days is usually easier. This time of year is nice in Molera, the meadow is still green, and the ground squirrels aren’t so ravenous as they are in, like, September when the ground are pretty much naked hard clay. I had a site right under this enormous old poplar tree, in the night the stars hung in it like lites. It’s so great to wake up and already be in Big Sur.

Jon didn’t show up till the second day I was there — I went early on Friday to secure a site — and Saturday morning I went alone to Pfeiffer Beach, thinking about the ending for Mathematicians in Love. I got a nice offer for it from Tor Books just the other day, and it's time to be wrapping it up and trimming it back. You're paid to do a mural, then the mural has to fit the wall. I pretty much figured the whole ending out at last; here’s a table that I drew in the sand.

The three rows are the three characters, the three columns are the three versions of each character (there’s three Earths), and the cells correspond to where that character-version ends up. As I’ve mentioned before, my characters are Bela, Paul, and Alma, and they go to another world called La Hampa by surfing through a “gate” that’s at Pfeiffer Beach. I remembered the gate as being wider, well, it will be in my novel which, after all, starts out on a different Earth and only ends up on ours. Here’s me and the gate.

I made a little 3 Meg MPEG movie of a wave coming through the gate. Click here to view movie.

I worked my way up along the beach and found this great creek running into the ocean; by walking into the gully where the creek comes out, I could get out of the fierce Big Sur beach wind. “Where the pine meets the brine.” It was a very beautiful spot.

I always like taking pictures of gnarly water, clouds, fire. Someday maybe I’ll make a long movie of gnarl.

Meanwhile I’m making MPEGs. This next one is 25 Meg, so don’t think of viewing it unless you have broadband and a few minutes to kill. It’s of me singing to some eddies in the stream. I'm very happy here. Click here to view movie. By the way, on the first run-through, a downloaded MPEG will be jerky, you have to then click the replay button to see it run smooth. The mike noise is air eddies hitting the unshielded holes on my camera. Maybe I'll tape some foam rubber over that spot.

Back on the beach, voila, God a. k. a. the Divine Muse had brought Bela, Paul and Alma to the beach to go out next to the La Hampan gate!

A bit hard to see them in the big picture, so here’s the zoom. Ready for the surfin' hampajump!

In the usual nature of magical apparitions, they disappeared after two or three minutes — they weren’t there when I walked back. They were in La Hampa.

Back at Molera with Jon and the young people, I was struck by a sunset view up the Big Sur River. It reminded be of being at the same spot in late August, 2004, right when I was finishing The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul and being momentarily struck with the fact that, deep down, despite what I argue in the book, I don’t really believe that everything is a computation.

As I write in one draft of the Lifebox book, “It was a hot day, that August, and I had the chance to stand in the cool clear flow of the Big Sur River, up to my neck in a big pool that accumulates right before the river flows across a sand bar into the Pacific. Standing there, I closed my eyes to savor the sensation of water and air. My arms were weightless at my sides, my knees were slightly bent, I was at perfect equilibrium. Each time I exhaled, my breath would ripple the water, and reflections of the noon sun would flicker on my eyelids. I was all there, fully conscious, immersed in the river. And I became powerfully aware of a common sense fact that most readers will have known all along: 'This isn’t a computation. This is water!'”

But, as I’ve mentioned on this blog, I had a follow-up vision in Micronesia when I decided that yes, maybe even water is a computation.

Sitting around the fire this weekend with Jon and the others, I was digging the computational gnarl of the flames, and for the first time tried photographing them.

Oh, one more cool thing. Friday I walked along the incredibly windy beach at Molera, and I propped a stick on a rock to see it balance. I’ve been thinking that as well as photographing gnarl, it’s interesting to photograph native or created bits of order in the wild, as Andy Goldsworthy does.

And then, oh joy, the stick started rocking wildly in the wind. I made a 6 Meg movie of that. Click here to view movie.

I’ll be performing with Phil Curtis at a small-scale event called ELSA, that is, ELectron SAlon #11, on Friday, June 3rd , starting at 8 PM .

I’ll read my story “Ain’t Paint” which appears in my forthcoming The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Phil will create some appropriate heuristic electronic music on the spot, and for video, we’ll use live demos of nine of my CAPOW software Zhabotinsky scrolls; the guys shown below.

This makes sense as “Ain't Paint” is about a kind of wall-paint that looks like Zhabotinsky scrolls…

Phil and I will go first, so if you want to see us, you actually have to be there at 8. Usually at ELSA events there’s some free wine and food. It’s almost like a party.

Set 1: Rudy Rucker and Phil Curtis

Set 2: Run Return, an electronica duo with Kevin Dineen and Tommy Fugelsang

Set 3: The inimitable DJess and mixmaster, Ms Pinky, a. k. a. P. Minsky, with friends.

The venue is Next Door, 1207 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, 831-429-1596. Next Door is next to the Rio Theater, see map.

And here's a slightly outdated page about ELectron SAlon (as of today, it doesn't yet mention our event.)

I finished writing Chapter Five of Mathematicians in Love and now I’m mulling over the best way to wrap the book up. Third act. I think I can do it in two chapters and be outta there in just under a hundred thousand words. The tentative chapter titles would be as follows:

Chapter One: Bela, Paul and Alma

Chapter Two: Cone Shell Aliens

Chapter Three: Rocking With Washer Drop

Chapter Four: Hypertunnel at the Tang Fat Hotel

Chapter Five: Mathematicians from Galaxy Z

Chapter Six: The Oracles and the Hierophant

Chapter Seven: Love on Earth-3

Sometimes when I’m uneasy about what to do next, it’s nice to get off into the visual part of my brain. Sunday I started trying to turn a photo of me in Jellyfish Lake into a painting, partly to get inspiration for Bela’s meeting with the Nataraja jellyfish controlling our world, a. k. a. God. I think it’ll be helpful to divide the photo into a grid and then make a similar set of gridlines on the canvas to use as a guide. Like billboard painters used to do.

In the Photorealist vein, I was up in SF again yesterday and saw this great show at SF MOMA by Robert Bechtle. The link goes to an amazing interactive “book” about him that the museum made. [You have to click on the upper left image or “Start Program” text in the start window to see the show.] I snarfed an image of a 1974 Robert Bechtle painting called “Alameda Gran Torino”. Recall that just recently I was writing a scene about driving one of these suckers off a cliff at Bixby Bridge! Squinty whale. Yes, COOP, the GT is hip, even if it is the “mullet of cars.”

On the wall, this particular painting has a very eerie effect, in that if you move off the left and view the picture edge on, your eye still thinks its seeing an actual car, and the only way your brain can account for the unchanging ratio of the tailgate to the side is to assume that the car is very short. It turns into a Pinto, and then into a Big Daddy Roth Gto-Ktart! Actually you can even get this effect by looking at the screen image from the left, although the effect is much stronger in the gallery.

You don’t realize how great an artist Bechtle is until you actually see the canvases. Because in reproduction they just look like photos! He’s, like, Edward Hopper to the n-th degree. Cars as still-life objects akin to baskets, bottles, and boots. Great art always changes the way you see the world when you come out, and I found SF was full of Bechtles. I snapped this and corrected the perspective with the PhotoShop Crop tool. It needs a car, doesn't it? And an umber underpainting to warm it up.

Saw this graffito in an alley off Sixth St. in the Tenderloin. Ah, doomed poete maudit who wrote this, where are you now? This, too, could of course be a painting, but never forget Beavis and Butthead’s dictum r.e. visual art: “Words Suck.”

I rode home to San Ho on the fast “Baby Bullet” CalTrain. It was indeed fast, as fast as driving, which was great. But it was so full they didn’t have any seats at all and I sat till the first stop on the floor of the bike car. That was okay, I could, like, do yoga, but something that really bugged me was that some asshole has decided it’s okay to “train wrap” or “bus wrap” the trains in ads that fucking cover the windows. You’ve seen those things, with the grids like cheese-graters over the bus or train windows, the grids are in fact glued-on plastic or rubber. And for the yuppies and polluters not on transit, it’s cute, it’s colorful, but for the poor zhlubbs and environmentalists on the inside its — yuuuugh. No line is straight, no edge is sharp, no color is true, looking out the window through the commercial cheese-grid actually gives you a headache, you can’t stand to look out for more than a short quick glance. Maybe the Pig actually knows that and is glad, glad the commuters can't look out, better they you should be staring down at work-papers or your laptop, or listening eyes-closed to music, producing or consuming, and not wasting time idly gazing at Gaia. One of the pleasures of public transportation is, duh, looking at the view. We’re supposed to think covering windows it’s a good idea because it “brings in money” to sell the windows of people’s busses and train? Brings in money for who? The assholes who wrap busses, the assholes who advertise at the expense of the people. How about the cost in lost ridership? How about the fact that bus and window wrap breaks an implicit compact with the taxpayers who support the public transportation in the first place! Down with window-covering bus and train wrap!

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!