A Picasso painting, “Woman in Blue Hat (Dora Maar),” dated October 30, 1939, was stolen from the Picasso show at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last week. And has now been located in the home of a seedy ex-professor, who currently styles himself as a science-fiction writer!!!

“Stolen Picasso”, 18″ x 24″ inches, July, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Software theft that is. I liked this painting so much when I saw it at the show that I found an image of it on the web and copied it as a kind of homage. And to learn a little more about how Picasso did it. The more I worked on the painting, the more little things I saw. I missed quite a few tricks, but by now I’m happy enough with how it looks, and I can stop. In some way it’s become my own. Stolen.

As always, you can get more info about my paintings at my Paintings page.

I do like the way Picasso has the mouth pushing out more, and the irises on the eyes, and the interesting shading around the nose. He makes the thing look more like a real face. I wasn’t actually working from the image shown here, I was making do with a lower-res image that I’d found and printed earlier. I kind of like the SFictional notion of someone building a clone of a person based on a very poor online image of them…

I found this image of the original on an article in the Seattle zine The Stranger when this show was in Seattle in 2010. (Our old friend Bethany Jean Clement works at the The Stranger, by the way, so hi, Bethany, in case you go Google-trolling for your name some time and encounter this post.)

While I was at it I prepared my next canvas by painting it gray with the mixed-together left-over paint from “Stolen Picasso.” I figure if I have the dark background I can make some lighter things pop hard from the picture plane.

Setting the canvas on an easel to dry a bit in the afternoon sun, and a spontaneous bit of process art emerged: a nice shadow of our phone/cable lines on the cloudy canvas.

It’s all art, isn’t it—even a vagrant neon reflection on a bit of glass.

Or three verticals arranged just so in an empty alley, welcoming the manhole cover.

Ten years ago, I was trying to quit smoking, and I’d done a week with no tobacco. I’d also been reading an old paperback of Joseph Campbell’s classic book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, (Bollingen Foundation, 1949) about the Monomyth. Somehow (not being an English major) I’d never read it before. And I began thinking I could use it to help design my next novel—which would turn out to be Frek and the Elixir.

Campbell has 17 stages in the Monomyth, that he breaks into three acts: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The overall arc is fairly clear. A hero or heroine goes to a special place, is transformed, gets something magical, an brings it back.

Departure–
1. Call to Adventure.
2. Refusal of the Call.
3. The Helper (Supernatural Aid).
4. Crossing the First Threshold.
5. The Belly of the Whale.
Initiation
6. The Road of Trials.
7. Meeting with the Goddess.
8. Woman as Temptress.
9. Atonement with the Father.
10. Apotheosis.
11. The Ultimate Boon.
Return
12. Refusal of the Return.
13. The Magic Flight.
14. Rescue from Without.
15. Crossing the Return Threshold.
16. Master of Two Worlds.
17. Freedom to Live.

Campbell views the Monomyth as an ongoing process that can repeat itself over and over and over in a person’s life, a Monomyth cycle. Indeed each day is in some degree a circle around the Monomyth, I’ve started thinking, perhaps even each hour or each breath. The cycle has four stages that might be labeled: Call | Tests, Flight | Elixir, with the “|” indicating passage across the Threshold.

A number of women have remarked to me that the monomyth is sexist and that I should think of a version based on a heroine instead of a hero. There’s discussion of this point in the critical literature as well. I’ll make some remarks about a Monomyth for a heroine further down the page.

How I Decided to Use the Monomyth for Frek and the Elixir

On April 20, 2001, as a reward for not smoking, I’d meant to drive to Santa Cruz and go biking, but it was raining too hard, and I stopped at the summit of the Santa Cruz Mountains on Rt. 17. I did a U-turn and went into a road-stop pizza-restaurant I’d never been in. Doing the turn I was slightly uneasy about the attention paid me by a lurking highway patrolman.

The inn was rustic and cozy. Oakslab table top, rocky walls, pot-belly stove, five Latinos off work for the day playing pool. With Campbell in mind, they took on a mythological status, as if they were a troop of Nibelungen gnomes. The Chinese innkeeper and his wife seemed mythic as well, not quite friendly, the same kind of innkeepers found in tales from earliest times.

I sat there taking it in, hand-writing some notes on Campbell that I typed out above. I thought of a tripping acidhead I’d met at a party in Mill Valley saying, “Let’s be mythic.” How trippy it indeed is to see the world as the working of the Monomyth.

My Boon just then was a Styrofoam cup of coffee I got from the Goddess and Father, i.e. the innkeeper and his wife. The policeman who might have questioned me as I made my turnaround in my car was a Guardian. I decided I’d like to write a novel that is explicitly a seventeen-chapter Campbell Monomyth. I’d set it in the year 3000.

And, thinking ahead a little…I realized that he Helper could be the little dwarf or magic animal of fairy tales. The Helper gives the hero a magic tool like a cloak or an amulet. I was seeing my hero Frek’s Helper as a cuttlefish. “Demure” just like Kerouac always calls Dean Moriarity.

I’d viewed some cuttlefish at the Monterey aquarium only a few days earlier, and the cuttles did indeed look demure, their bunched tentacles pointing tidily down, their hula-skirt a wavering about their middle. Neal Cassady as a cuttlefish, yas. Actually, however, my Frek’s Helper turned out to be a grulloo, who was indeed like a gnome.

Synchronicity alert: the name of the roadhouse where I committed to using Campbell’s 17 stages of the Monomyth for my novel design was…Casa de 17.

The Monomyth in my Other Novels

After I wrote Frek and the Elixir, I realized that, if closely examined, most of my novels seemed to have a Monomyth structure. I mapped this out for some of them, although inevitably one could argue about nearly every entry. I never did get around to fitting all of the novels into the table. (Grad students! Looking for an easy thesis in Science Fiction Studies? Expand upon the table shown above!)

One thing about Campbell’s Monomyth that initially struck me as odd or even ludicrous was the “Belly of the Whale” stage. I mean, up to then it’s fairly reasonable, just things like the Call, the Helper, and so on. And then suddenly a Belly of the Whale?!?!

But, in examining my novels, I saw that the Whale thing really does come up very often. It’s an archetype that I myself use in perhaps every one of my books. The charcter gets inside something and they go somewhere. Inside an alien, inside a UFO, inside a force field.

[Painting by Sylvia Rucker, “Kate Croy,” acrylic, 12” x 17”, 1975]

Monomyth for a Heroine

I mentioned above that we need to think about the Monomyth for a heroine. Campbell doesn’t work this out in his book, although I would suppose that he talked about it in his seminars. Certainly the hero and heroine archetypes overlap, but you would at least have to change the “Nursery Triangle” stages:

Man:   7. Goddess —> 8. Temptress —> 9. Atonement with the Father

Woman: 7. Divine Bridegroom (Prince Charming) —>
     8. Seducer Shows True Colors: Bully, Abuser, Bluebeard —>
     9. Atonement with the Mother

More detail on changing the three stages 7, 8, and 9 so as to tailor the Monomyth to fit a heroine instead of a hero:

7. The Goddess || the Bridegroom] The Goddess: The nurturing mother, viewed at a higher plane than sexuality. I have the mental image of a mother I saw with her baby alone on the beach at Lover’s Cover in Pacific Grove near Monterey. “Just Mommy and Me.” Possibly goddess appears as an ugly or perhaps “dead” woman whom you kiss to deliver and make beautiful. And the the two mother aspects are united, the nurturer and the sex partner: The Wife. For a heroine, you’d switch this to a caring, but distant, father brought close. The ideal suitor.

8. The Temptress || The Tyrant Coupled with or based on or evoking a disgust with the flesh. The punishing, ignoring, sexually active mother. The wife when you’re tired of her and she’s tired of you. The Millstone, the Termagant, the Virago, the Quagmire. For a heroine, this is the Rapist or Pimp, the one who exploits sex against its natural purpose of love and procreation. The Abusive Husband.

9. Atonement with the Father || Atonement with the Mother. The father or mother may appear as a beggar. Or even ogre as in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” True success is peace with father (mother), not their destruction. You get power.

And maybe there are other changes. One would have to look carefully at a bunch of myths about heroines. Persephone comes to mind, with her task of separating millet from sand and the ants who help her. And what about Virgin Mary? In the story of the Virgin Mary, the big deal is having that divine son. Is there anything like that in the Myth of the Hero? Maybe equate the Divine Son with the Ultimate Boon? Or is the Virgin Mary an anomalous tale?

Perhaps a completely different sequence of stages than what Campbell uses would be a better fit for a womanly Monomyth. In this context, I’ll mention The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock.

A Frek 2?

You can find more of my thoughts about specific stages of the Monomyth in my Writing Notes for Frek and the Elixir, available as a free PDF on my Writing page.

Looking ahead, near the end of the Monomyth, we have Stage 14. Master of Two Worlds. I see the Higher Kingdom as a hidden aspect of our world. The character has ongoing lasting access to the Beyond. The two worlds become one. The character presents an elixir which heals and restores the world— for now.

And then, 15. Freedom to Live, the character becomes an anonymous wanderer. His or her work continues. Life goes on. And then…

The Sequel! So the reason I’m doing this mental exercise is that I’m considering a sequel to Frek and the Elixir.

In 2005, I was thinking of doing a Frek sequel, and discussing it with my Tor editor, David Hartwell, and kind of bemoaning the fact that I’d used the Monomyth and that now I wouldn’t know how to structure the sequel. And Dave was like “It’s the Monomyth, Rudy. That means you use it over and over and over!”

Aha.

I did three paintings for my novel, Turing & Burroughs, “Turing and the Skugs,” “A Skugger’s Point of View,” and “V-Bomb Blast, ” which I finished today. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post. As always, more info on my Paintings Page

Note that Turing & Burroughs treats a timely theme, as 2012 is the centennial of the man’s birth, and has been dubbed the Alan Turing Year, with a number of conferences and events planned for that year.

For those of you who just tuned in, Alan Turing was one of the primary inventors of today’s computers. He is believed to have died wretchedly in 1954, a suicide persecuted by the British authorities for his homosexuality. Turing & Burroughs proposes that Turing’s supposed death was a cover-up, and that the man himself escaped to the open city of Tangier.

“Turing and the Skugs”, 40″ x 30″ inches, Oct 2010, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

For the purposes of Turing & Burroughs, I’m supposing that Turing has carried out some biochemical experiments leading to the creation of slug-like creatures called skugs. In “Turing and the Skugs,” we see Turing encountering a handsome man who may well become Alan’s lover. In my novel he’s rather promiscuous.

In Tangier, Turing meets the Beat writer William Burroughs and they become lovers. Turing invents a parasitic biocomputational organism called a skug. Both he and Burroughs welcome skugs into their bodies, thereby becoming skuggers. Skuggers enjoy both telepathy and shapeshifting, that is, a protean ability change their bodies’ forms.

“A Skugger’s Point of View”, 40″ x 30″ inches, January, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

In “A Skugger’s Point of View,” I wanted to render an extreme first-person point of view in which we see the dim zone around a person’s actual visual field. Turing has become a mutant known as a “skugger,” and he has the ability to stretch his limbs like the cartoon character Plastic Man. He is traveling across the West with two friends, a man and a woman.

Turing’s cohort is being attacked by police, one of whom bears a flame-thrower. Turing is responding by sticking his fingers into their heads, perhaps to kill them, or perhaps to convert them into skuggers as well. We can see Turing’s arms extending from the bottom edge of his visual field. Even though it’s not quite logical, I painted in his eyes as well because they make the composition better..

Turing and Burroughs have been busy spreading the skugger infestation to the people around them. My novel takes on aspects of a Fifties invasion story such as The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. The difference is that Turing & Burroughs is told from the point of view of the mutants themselves, and the alienated mutants are a positive force. Society at large becomes consumed by a hysterical hatred of the skuggers, and the authorities seek to exterminate them.

The subtextual kicker is that this mirrors what happened culturally as the 1950s segued into the 1960s. Outcasts such as Beats, artists, radicals and homosexuals began to gain more control, sparking reactionary efforts to suppress them.

“V-Bomb Blast”, 40″ x 30″ inches, July, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for larger version.

Of course no Fifties-style SF novel is complete without a nuclear weapon. At the climax of Turing & Burroughs, Turing and Burroughs are in Los Alamos, New Mexico, working to block the detonation of a V-bomb, which will emit rays to annihilate the skuggers wholesale.

Sacrificing his own life, Turing crawls inside the weapon before ignition. Upon the V-bomb’s detonation, he uses his higher powers to alter its radiation—preserving the lives of his fellow skuggers while removing their parasitic skugs. And in an afterword, Burroughs explains what happened.

The “V-Bomb Blast” painting doesn’t exactly depict what I’m talking about. But reading from right to left, you can view it as three stages of the V-bomb—on the right, someone (who I happened to paint as a woman) is inside the V-bomb, about to pull the detonation cord. In the middle is a semi-happy face nuclear explosion. Oddly enough, the V-bomb fireball shrinks instead of expanding.

And on the left, we see the explosion slipping through a rent in the fabric of reality. “Turing died that we may live.”

My autobiography, Nested Scrolls, is out in a limited edition from PS Press in England. They’re selling hardbacks and a signed collector’s edition.

I just got my copies yesterday which was, synchronistically, the day I finished the first draft of the next book in the pipeline, Turing & Burroughs.

Note that PS used one of my paintings, “Surfin Tiki” for the cover, and my painting “Jellyfish Lake” for the endpapers. They put together a very nice looking book. The Tor edition will look more or less the same on the inside, although it will have a different cover and no colored endpapers.

Starting on December 6, 2011, Nested Scrolls will also be available in hardcover and ebook editions from Tor Books. I see it already listed byAmazon, Barnes&Noble, Borders, and the site for Independent Booksellers.

[By the way, we’re not so fond of Amazon in California as we used to be, now that they want to fund a ballot initiative to block our state from collecting sales tax from them…and now that they’ve stopped paying “finder’s fees” to the so-called associates (such as bloggers) in California who link to their site.]

But never mind such mundane considerations. The mothership of Nested Scrolls is launched. Odd than anyone might ever have mistaken it for a hat!

To fill out today’s post, I’m printing some excerpts from my Notes for Nested Scrolls document. You can read this whole document for free online as a PDF, see the link off my Nested Scrolls page.

By the way, when I started writing these notes, I still wasn’t quite sure if I was working on an autobiographical memoir…or on a transreal novel.

July 11, 2008.

Who would really want to read a memoir by me, after all? It’s not like I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people who have read the existing autobio note online.

There should be some riddle whose answer I’m seeking by writing the memoir—or the memoir-like novel. What is reality? What’s the point of my life? How can I be happy? What did I learn by writing thirty books? What’s the missing book that I need to write? How is it possible to write at all? Can I create a completely pure work of literary art? What has it been like to be alive? What was the point?

July 12, 2008.

Looking around Borders Books today, I was thinking about what kinds of memoirs get published. David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs have a whole thing going with rueful tales of personal dysfunction. Back in the 1930s, Robert Benchley, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker were doing something similar.

Another angle is to present yourself as the Witness to History—for me, this might be the Silicon Valley thing or the cyberpunk thing, though people aren’t responding much to the Silicon Valley idea when I suggest it. It’s like people are sick of Silicon Valley. Maybe if I could clearly cast the memoir as evocations of a bygone era—which certainly it would be. In this context, I think of the Vanished Wild West.

The point of writing a memoir would be to entertain myself, and to gain a bit more self-knowledge. To have some fun. In certain lights, doing a memoir seems easier than grinding away on another novel. But maybe not.

Mainly I want to write, and I don’t care all that much what it is that I’m writing.

July 17-26, 2008.

Back to the current obsession—why bother writing an autobio? What would I get out of it? Self-knowledge. Bragging pleasure. Self-guidance. Publicity.

It’s mattering less and less to me if I actually do write a memoir. There’s such a powerful “why bother” haze surrounding any plan for a memoir.

It might really be more productive to write another novel. Or maybe just a couple of stories first. At the very least, I’m writing in this Notes document.

I’m writing almost at random in these notes. Which could be a good thing. I’ve heard it said that writers are at their best when they have no idea what they’re doing.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

I feel like this is getting nowhere. But you never know.

July 26, 2008.

Today’s title for the book is Nested Scrolls, a phrase I like because it describes the chaotic, self-organizing, artificially alive Belousov-Zhabotinsky simulations that I love. And “scroll” is good, as it refers to a document or even a sacred text, and if the scrolls are “nested” that’s fractal and self-referential and heavy.

I could even get literal with the title, and have the book in the form of a memoir that an aging man is trying to write, and he begins finding extra stuff in the document. Maybe he can somehow zoom in—it’s an electronic document—and he sees stuff that he doesn’t remember writing. And he goes into time-travel flashbacks. And maybe some characters from the past show up. Nested Scrolls.