I haven’t been in a condition to write any fresh blog posts this month, but I should be better soon. In the meantime, just to keep the blog alive, I’m posting an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Turing & Burroughs, which features William Burroughs and Alan Turing in a relationship.

In the following passage, Burroughs describes a 1955 scene where he returns with Alan and their friend Judy Green to the room in the Bounty Bar in Mexico City where Bill shot his wife Joan Vollmer in 1951. He hopes to come to terms with Joan’s ghost. Bill, Alan, and Judy are all “skuggers,” that is telepthic, shape-shifting mutants hosting a parasitic slug-like being called a skug. Judy is an early electronic musician, who creates a kind of artificial sound she calls acousmatics.

The illos for this post are random images that have accumulated in my to-blog folder.
[Begin excerpt of draft for Turing & Burroughs.]

We were nearing the all-night market that we’d passed on the way to the graveyard. Alan trotted over to one of the butchers there and—how horrible—purchased a hundred-pound skinned calf, draping the creature across his shoulders. Uncut protein for Joan.

I’d asked the Bounty bartender for any old room. But—I could hear the unerring ping of synchronicity—he’d given us the very room in which I’d shot Joan in 1951.

The room had become a short-term spot for whores and johns. Where once the lodging had held books, rugs, and a circle of friends, it was now reduced to a bed, a chair, a light bulb, a glass by the sink. Alan threw the slaughtered veal calf onto the dirty floor. A church bell tolled midnight. I closed the door. The intense silence peculiar to Mexico engulfed us—a vibrating, soundless hum.

I spawned a skug off my stomach and laid it upon the veal calf. The bony flesh shuddered and took on life, forming itself into a featureless loaf. I laid Joan’s finger atop the swollen, pulsing pillow—I was like a bishop installing a saint’s bone.

Judy Green sang to the skug, running her odd voice up and down some archaic scale, and vibrating her skin to add dark, low overtones. Guided by the finger’s DNA, and by my teeped hints, the skug morphed into a crude human form, tightened into something like a window-dresser’s mannequin, then locked into a replica of Joan’s final, spindly form. A golem.

I set to work on programming the thing’s mind via teep, reconstructing Joan’s personality from my memories. I remembered the early days—camping on Joan’s vaguely oriental bed with coffee and benzedrine, chattering about decadence and nothingness, Joan alluring in her silks and bandannas. I thought of Joan catching a June bug outside our shack in Louisiana, and tying a thread to the bumbling bug’s foot—Joan called it the beetle’s hoof. She flew it in a circle around our heads. Even in Mexico City, Joan kept her slant humor, seeing the adventure in the squalor, making herself at ease on a pile of six mattresses, calling herself the princess and the pea. A phrase from Allen’s memoriam poem popped into my mind. “She studied me with / clear eyes and downcast smile, her / face restored to a fine beauty.” And now it was so.

Joan’s body sat up and blinked, very jerky, very robotic. This wasn’t going to work. But now I saw the glinting ultraviolet cuttlefish of Joan’s ghost. She was dawdling at the fringes of visibility, twiddling her tentacles and flipping her hula-skirt fin, making up her mind. And now she dove into the skug.

Still sitting on the floor, the Joan-thing shuddered like a wind-riffled pond. She fixed me with her eyes and began talking, her voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street.

“I want to leave. I want to go to paradise. But I’m not done with you, Bill.”

“I’m agonized by regret,” I said. “I writhe abjectly. Go up to heaven, Joan. You deserve it. Forgive me and go.”

“What about little Billy?” asked Joan, rising lithe to her feet. She seemed taller than I remembered. Reaching out, she laid a cool hand on my face.

Immediately I had a physical sense that I was carrying a large covered basket. I’d been carrying it in my arms for a long time. Our son Billy was in the basket. He was going to die.

“I’ll help him!” I cried. “It won’t happen that way.” I stepped back, breaking Joan’s hallucinatory contact.

“You won’t save him,” said Joan, bleakly mournful. “I know you.” She looked around as if only now recognizing this as the spot where I’d shot her.

I stood frozen in place, awaiting her next move, more than ever wishing I hadn’t set this in motion.

“Ooooo,” said Joan, her voice purring up through an octave. “I know. It’s time for our William Tell routine.”

Without moving her arms or her shoulders, she poked her head out on a snaky tendril, scanning the room. Of course she spotted Judy Green’s gun.

“No,” said Judy, guessing what lay ahead. It was like we were playing out a script. Joan held out her hand. In thrall, Judy passed her the pistol. Turing sat goggling like a mute imbecile.

“The glass, Bill,” said Joan, her voice low and firm.

I moved across the room like a fish in heavy water. I set the glass on my head.

A few paces away from me, Joan raised the pistol.

“Don’t,” I said, faint and husky. “Don’t shoot me, Joan.”

She fired. I flinched to the side. The bullet struck my temple. I slumped to the floor: deaf, blind, undead. I could still sense things via teep.

“It’s over!” breathing Joan, with a fading lilt of summer in her voice.

Her ghost wriggled from her skugly flesh and fluttered in the air. Like a dragonfly now, not a cuttlefish. Flying around the borders of my teep, she shrank as if moving far away. Joan’s spurned new body reverted to being a skug. It raised one end, as if sniffing the air, then humped along the floor and out the window.

Brain-scrambled as I was, I hallucinated that I humped my own body after Joan’s skug. Fully into the invisible zone of the astral plane, I slithered out the window and—just for jolly—levitated myself fifty feet high in the air. See me fly?

La policia kicked in our rented room’s door, inevitable as stink on shit. It was like a straight-on replay of 1951, but with me in a new role. As the victim, I lay naked on a marble slab with a spongy erection. Cops all around.

“We need acousmatics,” said Judy. “I memorized the sounds of a race riot in Miami. I’ll pump the replay from my skin, mixing in the shrieks of swine at the slaughterhouse. We’ll raise Bill and rectify those policia pronto.”

My head was splitting in unbearable pain. I retracted my limbs, blanking things out.

“Bill?” said Alan, leaning over me and shaking me. “Bill?”

We were still in the room where I’d been shot. I sat up and spit the bullet from my mouth. The sun was high.

“What a burn,” I said. “Let’s split this scene.”

“Agents everywhere,” said Judy, leaning out the open window. “Like flies on meat. We need more acousmatics.” She emitted a fresh torrent of noise. It was a collage of every sound I’d ever heard in my life—thrown into a rock-tumbler.

The sky went pale green. Hailstones fell past, big as hens’ eggs, shattering on the street. Elephants trumpeted frantic at the drone of an approaching twister. The street-side wall rocked twice and exploded out. Turing and I slid helpless across the floor, pissing our pants. Cars flew through the air with clown-cops behind the wheels. A striped circus tent swept upwards, drawing me into a whirling shattered midway of bleachers and shooting galleries, of sugar skulls and Socco Chico queens…

Poised at the virtual tent-peak of the vortex was Joan, far and wee, the bride on the funeral cake, luminous white, bidding farewell, giving me the finger. Behind her glowed the divine light of a heavenly Missouri sunset.

Cut. I was still in that room we’d rented, lying on the floor in a clotted crust of blood. I’d been here all night, reflexively regrowing my brain. The sunlight lay like pig iron on the ground. The police had dispersed—if they’d ever been there at all.

[End excerpt of draft forTuring & Burroughs]

I’ve lost my rhythm of blogging, so today I’m trying to get started again. I’ll just be posting a variety of stray photos in my files with my comments.

Rudy, Jr., took my picture in a clown wig the other day.

I’ve been to the San Jose airport a couple of times. They have a fairly awesome robot/sculpture at the arrivals gate in terminal A.

A rooftop in Geneva. I love rooftops.

A stone leg in Lisbon, with inlaid tiling.

A beat old roll-up shade in Lisbon. I like how funky Lisbon is.

A plumber’s truck in Lisbon. When the driver’s in the van, the drawing on the door represents his body.

A pipe draining into the flume at Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos. It’s still overflowing a little bit.

Moray eels at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I went there with my big brother Embry. It was jam-packed as usual.

A fence in Berkeley. I’m always a little amazed at how well perspective takes care of itself.

Yet another picture of the Mittens in Monument Valley this summer.

Some laundry in Lisbon. The laundry adds a lot of color to the narrow streets.

The food bar at the Museum of Tiles in Lisbon. This is a great place.

A waterfall near the Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos. I like the contrast between the analog flow of the water and the digital steps of the concrete walls of the fall.

I’m running out of Munich pictures, so you’ll see some Lisbon pictures mixed in with today’s post, which touches on three heavy or philosophical topics.

[Creepy cat in Lisbon graveyard.]

(1) The Germans are, as one would expect, very thorough, and very attentive to rules. One doesn’t cross an empty street if the pedestrian “Walk” light isn’t on. If I show my ID to a museum ticket-seller to get the senior rate, she’s actually going to read the month, day and year of my birthday. When the woman in the grocery-store hands me my bag of food, she admonishes me to hold both handles of the bag lest I spill my purchases. Another woman advised me about how to heat up a Munich-style white hotdog without (auugh!) bursting it. But there’s a cheerful, agreeable quality to all this, a kind of “We’re playing this game together,” attitude.

[Balloon used for lamp fixture in Lisbon church.]

Walking around, I keep admiring how attractive, tidy and cultured the Germans are. In the course of my life, I’ve lived in Germany for about three years, and I’m comfortable here. But, having been away for so long now, I’m also sensitive to the sinister side of Germany—I’m referring of course to the Nazis.

All three of my uncles were officers in the German army—they had no choice but to enlist. My uncle Rudolf von Bitter died on the Russian front, the other two were captured and served time in Russian and English prison camps. My grandfather Rudolf von Bitter is said to have helped the underground resistance against the Nazis. The family sent my mother to America in 1937 so that at least one of them would survive the coming war.

I’m not blindly on the Germans’ side— we even have a few Jewish ancestors far up in our German family tree, and if the Third Reich had gone on indefinitely, my relatives might have ended up in the death camps. Even so, it’s not reasonable to assume that typical Germans are racists and heartless killers—any more than it’s reasonable to think the same about all Americans in the wake of Hiroshima, say, or My Lai.

[A nice patch of wall in Sintra, Portugal.]

But still. Why did the Germans have to act so terribly in the Second World War? It’s undeniable that the Nazis had huge popular support. I found myself wishing that it were somehow possible to change history so that the horror had never happened. I was wishing that my race could be cleared of blood-guilt.

I talked this over with my cousin Rudolf. He, of course, has thought about these questions quite a bit. I’ll condense and paraphrase his remarks.

[Tiled Rossio Square in Lisbon.]

“If you are accused of a crime, or if the group you belong to is accused, it’s better to begin by admitting your guilt. Denial leads nowhere. Hitler is part of the German character. And, yes, we have our fine culture as well, for instance, Goethe. But to imagine that we could somehow keep the Goethe and get rid of the Hitler is a lie. G and H. Next to each other in the alphabet. I also think of Goethe’s story, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice); a meditation on the dark side of intellectual and technological power.”

[Chuch tile with holy candles in Lisbon.]

No real answer.

(2) Looking for things to do that didn’t involve walking, I went to a concert in a former imperial church, a sequence of seven Haydn sonatas based on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words,” these being the seven direct quotes of Him that appear in the Gosper of Saint Luke.

My favorite of these is where the Good Thief says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus seems to agree with that, and says, “Verily I say unto you, today you shall be with me in paradise.”

[German concert crowd.]

I once had an interesting discussion of this passage with my old science-writer mentor, Martin Gardner. Some religious sects have take the exchange between Jesus and the Good Thief to mean that your soul isn’t in fact immortal on its own, but is, rather, a pattern of information that God stores in His memory so that He can resurrect you. Sometimes the word “soul sleep” is associated with this notion, but if you try Googling or looking in Wikipedia, you find a bewildering gamut of variations on this (heretical by some lights) doctrine.

[Me in Lisbon with a statue of poet Fernando Pessoa]

Keeping it simple, to me the Thief/Jesus exchange suggests that the soul can in fact be represented as software, that is, as a pattern of information that God (or a sufficiently large computer memory) can store.

“Remember me!” What a great request.

(3) On my last day, I rode Rudolf’s bike to the Neue Pinakothek, a Munich museum with 19th and early 20th century art. The Neue Pinakothek had a nice Ferdinand Hodler, shown above, and a couple of good van Goghs. Studying his works in awe, I started thinking it might be fun to try some paintings in which I use enough extra paint to build up an impasto relief of brush strokes.

I always wonder why van Gogh killed himself. Wouldn’t you be happy if you could paint that well? I guess he was out there alone on some kind of unbearable edge. It’s hard to visualize just how crazy some artists are. It occurs to me to do an SF move on van Gogh—that is, to imagine a future kind of art with its own kind of crazy artist. The notion of future art forms fasinates me.

I also noticed an Honore Daumier painting of some excited folks goggling at an onstage drama. Antonio Damasio argues in his book The Feeling of What Happens, that the essence of consciousness is to have, get this, a mental image oneself watching one’s life unfold. At level 1, we simply are em embedded in life, we’re like the actors on the stage. At level 2, we can stand aside a bit, and see life as a spectacle. At level 3, which is where Damasio says consciousness kicks in, we are aware of ourselves as detached observers of life’s passing scene. You’re looking at the Daumier painting of yourself. As I discuss in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, (see the online version of the relevant passage here), all of Damasio’s levels can, at least in principle, be modeled in computer software.

[Egyptian style rings at Gold and Silver Market in the Scwabing district of Munich. Like language tokens.]

After the museum, I sat in their very pleasant outdoor cafe for a long time, eating while reading Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, a book I’d dug up at Rudolf’s apartment—I think his daughter had it assigned for her English class. After two and a half weeks, I was kind of done with doing something touristic every minute. I was edging towards the next level—of simply living abroad.

It had been awhile since I’d read Chandler, and I’d forgotten just how wonderful a writer he is. His use of language is exquisite, as in his thumbnail sketches of his characters’ personalities. And his dialog is wonderful, rife with odd-ball 1930s slang—probably nobody ever really talked that way, but the patois makes for a wonderful seamless level of discourse that holds his worlds together.

From Farewell My Lovely: “I felt like an amputed leg.” “…my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck…”

[Water works building near dam in Los Gatos, California]

Chandler’s slang reminds of the way that I often make up a standard slang for my SFictional worlds. I’ve learned that it works best if the words in this alternate language are short, easily spelled, and easy to say, like the well-polished words in actual human speech. Sometimes one can repurpose an existing word, but it’s often better to invent a previously unused word—if you scratch around a bit, you’ll find there’s really quite a few good and usable syllables that don’t happen to be standard English words. In picking a made-up word, you have to be keenly aware of the word’s associations, that is, if it sounds a bit like some real word.

[Theatiner church in Munich.]

Anyway, my time in Munich finally ran out and, next step, next step, next step, I called a taxi to pick me up at 5 am to take me to the station to catch a suburban train to the airport, etc. And now polishing these notes, I’m looking across my desk at our cozy backyard.

Thank you, Cosmos! It was a good trip.