So I gave my reading from Nested Scrolls at Borderlands. We had a small, friendly crowd, including several characters from the book.
I made a podcast of the reading. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.
[Advance announcement.]
As I’ve mentioned before, the US edition of my autobiography, Nested Scrolls, is out from Tor Books.
This Saturday, January 14, at 3:00 pm, I’ll be giving a reading from Nested Scrollsat the fabulous and cozy Borderlands Books (and cafe) on Valencia Street in San Francisco. We’ll have a Q & A session after the reading, and we’ll be giving away a large, high-quality art print of one of my paintings.
The idea is that they’re in a nearly telepathic state, sharing a single thought balloon. And in the thought, they’re merged like a yin-yang symbol. Her 1940s bob acquires an infinity symbol, and their lips form a pair of little hearts. An early Valentine’s Day picture!
As always, you can learn more about my work on my Paintings page.
I got a very nice review for my autobioNested Scrolls by Paul Witcover in the January, 2012, issue of Locus, a magazine about the SF & Fantasy field. Here’s an abridged quote.
And now a few more thoughts on my notion of people achieving a supernal Big Aha mental state, probably via their physical body’s quantum computations. Today’s photos are older ones, from Point Reyes, San Francisco, and San Jose
People with Big Aha might develop some new augmented senses. What if you could see radio-waves, electrical charges, neutrinos, Higgs bosons, and/or neutrinos? Maybe these senses would let you see specters, archetypes, dreams, or give you teep into other people’s selves.
One way to go here would be to have the new sense be a very highly developed sense of empathy which emerges, one might suppose, from a conscious awareness of quantum entanglement, or awareness of the overarching wave function that includes both you and me as subsystems.
Grokking, in other words.
I have dreams every night, what do they mean?
I think there’s still a lot of interesting things to be done with dreams. Waking up inside them? Finding out that they’re really happening in a higher dimension?
Maybe with Big Aha I can go into your dreams.
With Big Aha we might see ghosts of dead people. Or we might see heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we’re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—maybe those are alien beings.
Finally, let’s suppose that thinking with the Big Aha leads to levels at which myths and archetypes are real. God’s art studio. Or, best of all, the giant’s castle in the clouds atop the beanstalk.
A Big Aha adept learns to see quantum fluctuations and climbs them like steps, up past the clouds and finds the giant there. He steals the bag of gold and the magic harp, climbs down, cuts the stalk and kills the giant.
And then what? Maybe the universe unravels. The giant was God. He was keeping our whole act together.
After I gave my TEDx talk in Brussels, my wife and I went to Berlin for a week. I didn’t take any journal notes, so I’m just going to paste in my best photos in a fairly random order, with whatever comments come to mind.
Here’s a medieval painting of a wizard. I like this guy.
My mother grew up in Berlin, but I’d never been there before. It was an interesting city, really big, and with the palpable divide between the east and west halves. We stayed in a hotel in the Mitte area in the former east zone, right by an island in the river. On the island was this enormous museum complex, like four or five Met museums in one spot. It’s the Museum island.
We were there at the end of November, with the Christmas thing ramping up. Dig these ornaments on a mirror-topped table in a fancy hotel with columns. Hard to tell where you are. I went into this hotel twice to use their luxurious bathroom.
I get a little tired of photographing the places in the Bay Area where I always go, and it’s fun on a trip to have this big feast of new things to shoot. In this image, I’m into the old stone, the arches, and especially the wobbly reflection in the windows on the left.
One of the big landmarks in the former east zone is this giant TV tower. In principle you can ride an elevator to the top, but there’s a wait, and I generally prefer being down in the streets. I liked getting this triangular roof corner in the foreground.
A certain stretch of the famous street Under Den Linden has the Humboldt University and bunch of amazing old buildings. The one here on the right is a memorial to the WW II dead, both the soldiers and the victims of the Holocaust.
This thing that looks like a temple is actually the pointed tip of one of the Bode museum on the Museum Island.
Like I said, our hotel, the Radisson Blu, was right across the Spree river from the Museum island, and on the island was a 19th century Protestant cathedral, the Berliner Dom. Great flocks of crows gathered on it every night, wheeling and cawing. Sylvia liked this statue of an angel on the Dom roof, blowing that long horn.
As the sun went down behind the Berliner Dom we’d get wild silhouettes.
We went inside the Dom of course. Amazing stained glass window, with ferny fractal designs and maybe the Kaiser’s hat.
We went and saw a stretch of the Berlin Wall in this funky part of the east side called Friederichshain. Lots of younger people there, a very hip spot called the Michaelsberger hotel. A bunch of artists drew semi-permanent graffiti on the Berlin wall—each of them got about twenty meters worth to paint on—this was about twenty years ago, and the murals are still intact. Uncle Scrooge confronts a videogame warrior from a black hole.
Meanwhile back at the Humboldt University on Unter Den Linden we’ve got a marble scholar.
My cousin Christian von Bitter met us in Berlin—his father Conrad was the brother of my mother Marianne von Bitter. Christian drove us out and we saw the house where our parents lived with they were teenagers.
Christian steered me to our great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel’s grave as well. We found it around dusk—it got dark there about 4:30, as Berlin is a far north as Toronto. We were a little worried about getting locked into the graveyard. I was glad to find Hegel’s spot.
While we were at it, Christian led me to a portrait of my great-grandfather Carl Julius Rudolf von Bitter (1846-1914) as well. He was a judge for the Verwaltungsgericht, a court for administrative workers, and when he was older he lived on the top floor of a giant Verwaltungsgericht courthouse built in the early 1900s near the Berlin zoo. His son, also named Rudolf von Bitter, was my mother’s father.
Christian said a lot of the 19th century Bitters had worked in the Prussian government, which wasn’t really how I’d thought of my family background! I thought of them as philosphers and artists. The Bitters were ennobled and given the “von” in front of their name in 1880, in recognition of my great-great-grandfather Hans Rudolf von Bitter (1811-1880), who’d been appointed at the President of the Prussian State Bank.
The Bitter family tree also includes some Jewish people, which was a problem in the 1930s, although my grandfather managed to squeak through. This tree that I have online was made by my mother’s younger brother, yet another Rudolf von Bitter (1918-1941), and it’s drawn so that it converges on my uncle Rudolf at the top. He died on the Russian front in WW II.
Back to one’s roots…too much information! We walk on a forest floor of humus from our uncountable ancestors’ lives.
In the Bode museum on the Museum island we wandered through some Islamic art galleries, with very cool rugs. Note the perennial and ubiquitous Zhabotinsky scrolls.
All around the city were Christmas markets, some with giant Ferris wheels. Sylvia and I actually rode on this one. We sat in little gondola cars. We were in there with a cheerful six year old girl and her parents. She said she wasn’t scared, but we were, a little bit.
So today I’m posting some more about The Big Aha, and I’ll be using images from Brussels and some older images from Point Reyes. As I mentioned, the reason I was in Brussels was to give a TEDx talk.
And here, once again, is a YouTube video of that talk. I felt like it went really well. It’s kind of a preview of the ideas on my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.
Anway, back to my Big Aha rap. The idea is that I’m interested in some kind of quantum-computation-related type of higher conscoiusness that will put us into something like telepathic contact with the world around us.
And it’s not that I expect this to actually happen anytime soon, it’s that I’m looking for an idea for an SF novel. And, okay, yeah, I’m also, as always on the search for peace and enlightenment. So how do I get to the Big Aha?
One scenario is a Henry Kuttner-type flaky scientist/inventor coming up with an oddball physics device. He can stay in the smooth mind groove without having to collapse his consciousness. We don’t get into any multiple universe angles, we play it straight, a person is expanding their mind by getting their particles into an unusual state.
And then—using entanglement and hylozoism—they can edit the physics of the objects around them. Talk to the objects, make them act weird. Wacky matter. You don’t get high, your house gets high for you.
If you’re a close student of my web activity, you’ll noted that some of the material appeared on my guestposts on Charles Stross’s blog recently. But I’ve re-edited them a bit, and they’re illustrated here.
[John Shirley speaking at TEDx Brussels.]
The action of the Big Aha might be like a deeply intoned Om that reaches down to the attometer level. The aethereal vibration. The faint squeak of the Pigg Boson’s curly tail. But it’s not meditation and it’s not drugs. It’s physics.
I see a subcultural group growing up around the Big Aha. I’d rather not see them become stock market wizards like the guy in that movie Limitless. And I don’t want them to be like acidheads. Some other kind of oddness. They have weird senses of humor.
My precise flimflam physics recipe for achieving the Big Aha is still not quite clear to me. I’ll get there. And then in retrospect it’ll be “obvious.”
[Student beer party in Petit Sablon Square outside our hotel window. Even the women were peeing on the ground. Peter Bruegel would have loved it.]
So I keep asking myself how. How would it be to think in an entirely new way? What routes might take you there? Can you stop collapsing the states of your mind?
And—what powers do you get once you have the Big Aha?
One idea is that some higher being is the observer in the quantum interaction. The cosmos, a giant jellyfish, the Big Pig as I called it in Hylozoic, or simply the One. The One is also the observer in our lives. Many of us have problems with this notion because each of us is conditioned to think there is an “I” that is running “my” life.
I can teep you if we both merge into the One.
In conversation, my friend Nick Herbert made two related remarks about contact with the One, or with the universal wave function.
(1) The soul might perhaps be given a scientific meaning as one’s immediate perception of one’s coherent uncollapsed wave function, particularly as it is entangled with the uncollapsed universal wave function of the cosmos.
(2) Synchronicity might be evidence that we’re all parts of some higher being. And the higher mind’s ideas filter down into remote links.
It’s definitely interesting to suppose that you can, by some physical change, get your brain into a state where you are in fact in a continuous-mode, uncollapsed all-is-one, highly entangled, super-empathy-possessing mind state.
So, again, how do we get there?
Certainly it’s true that an advanced meditation technique might get you there—the accomplished masters are said to have siddhis, or special powers, which might be akin to direct access to the uncollapsed universal wave function. But for an SF novel, I want something with a little more bling to it.
How about a quantum computing gadget that fits into a small case attached to a head band, and the band has circuitry in it that entangles the gadget and some part of the brain. (One of my commenters, Brucecohenpdx, suggested this idea and said the device might use TMS or transcranial magnetic stimulation, although I’m not sure I’ll use such a potentially time-bound notion.)
The head band makes me think of the “brain toys” they used to advertise in the pages of magazines like Mondo 2000. What if someone made one of these that really works? In this vein, I’m thinking in terms of, why not, the old strobe approach—a brain toy headband that pulses lights into your eyes, getting your brain into an unusual state. Light itself is, after all, a type of quantum-computational input/output channel. The gizmo would use a sophisticated quantum computation to key the proper pulsation rates.
Or, kicking it up a level, maybe I use a biocomputation, to make it cool. A cunning cuttlefish pet sits on your shoulder, directing the pulsations. Maybe you don’t have any old-school LED lights, and the cuttle pal simply flickers at a nice rate in the tips of two tentacles.
Even better, the tentacle tips are suckered right over your cornea till you achieve lift-off. Users might be called squidders.
And we might as well include music or a warbling hiss in the squiddy Big Aha stimulation biodevice. And maybe even smells and shudders. The more senses you tickle, the more vivid is a fictional scene.
The efficacy of a given Big Aha routine might wear out—a bit like a sex fantasy or one’s joy in a particular song. And you have to keep tweaking the process to be able to get off. A media biz in new improved Big Aha trips.
