The personable Tamara Vining of Seattle has posted a 50 minute video of my Clarion-sponsored appearance at the University of Washington Bookstore. First I read from the first chapter of Hylozoic for half an hour, and then I do some Q & A.

Thanks, Tamara!

This week I’m cranking up work on my novel Jim and the Flims again. I want my characters Jim and Durkle to tunnel down through purgatory beneath Flimsy and to drop out of a floor hatch in the lowest level of purgatory, and to find themselves falling from the Flimsy sky, that is, from the dome of living water above Flimsy. It’s dramatic. But how do I explain it?

I’d really like to lay this issue to rest, as I’ve been hung up on it for way too long, and I feel like it’s blocking me from proceeding on the book. This said, it could be that there’s something about the issue that’s core to my psyche and my state of resonance with the world of Jim and the Flims.

(Old Explanation: Bent Purgatory) In my July 19, 2009, post “Towards a Topology of the Afterworld,” I entertained the notion of having purgatory somehow bend around past the disk of Flimsy to be on top of it as well as under it, as shown in the reprinted illustration above (my guys enter purgatory at level 1, and exit it at level 3). But this is kludgy, and asymmetrical, and it poses the problem of why the snail-tunnel happens to go through from Flimsy straight to Earth, intersecting the living water, yes, but not intersecting purgatory. Also I want to bring in the notion of having an infinitely expansive center to Flimsy.

In other words, I need a tighter idea. Chip? Dale?

(New Explanation: Living Water Flow) Maybe I suppose that there’s a powerful and rapid flow of the living water, and that when Jim and Durkle tunnel down out of the lowest level of purgatory, they’re rapidly swept up into the sky, and they jump down from there. This is a fairly attractive notion, as it’s pretty easy to understand. And we might suppose that the infinitely distant hole in the center of Flimsy has a recycling fountain-like quality, creating a more or less toroidal flow through the central Helaven, with living water emanating from it, streaming around Flimsy and eventually dropping back into the Helaven from the sky. Okay, fine, let’s go with that. Here’s a picture, followed by some remarks on what I see in the picture.

Note the border snail on the right, sticking through to make a tunnel. Note also that I have an “Endless Sea” around the central Helaven, this can be like the shallow waters of Pyramid Lake.

A fine rain of souls is falling from the sky above Helaven. The souls are absorbed into the light, and new water and souls flow outward below.

More observations: Purgatory is a bunch of corridors and boxes, somewhat randomly accreted, like the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, like an airport terminal forever under construction, or like a repeatedly renovated mall.

Jim and Durkle go through the Monster Pit, through Purgatory, and are swept with the living water in the sky, and they dive back down from there.

The tapering of the landmasses towards the center indicates that the center is, in effect, infinitely far away.

And there might very well be a great leviathian in that great gulf of living water at the bottom. Suppose it’s a gnarly tentacle-laden Supreme Jiva, a puppet-master who in fact controls all the sun-sized jivas in Flimsy—and I may as well suppose that some mid-level jivas are controlling the jivas in Weena, Jim, and so on. (Turns out that thing I was calling the Supreme Jiva a few posts ago was only the Easternmost Jiva.)

Groovy.

The other day I mentioned being inspired by J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, in which he stresses that SF is the best way to write about the present. And while I was on the road, I took this dictum to heart (not for the first time), and started looking for things about society that I might transmogrify into gnarly SFnal objective correlatives.

[Awesome giant graffiti mural in Kamloops, Canada.]

Idea #1: living ideas. The internet is still quite new and undigested, some fresh SF ways of treating it could be good. I’ve discussed telepathy and a global mind in Postsingular and Hylozoic. But for this story, let’s do something more literal and less scientific. I think of ideas that crawl around like slugs. And you can stomp on them. And get rid of the parts of yourself that you don’t like. Only then maybe some parasitic mind-virus slugs move in. Like propaganda and ads. Bad ideas.

[Canadian flag over the Banff Springs Hotel.]

Idea #2: dividing bodies. Being in Canada, I got the feeling that the people there weren’t as tense as my fellow citizens of the US. The US is plagued by a lot of unacknowledged conflicts and internal contradictions—elephants-in-the-living-room relating to matters of class, income and race. (Radicals always talk about capitalism’s internal contradictions.)

So then it struck me that it would be interesting if people started literally breaking up into pieces as the result of their contradictory ideas. Like your left arm secedes from your body, and then gets into internal squabbles with the fingers splitting off, and the arm dividing at the elbow. Due to some mysterious upgrade, your arm can live on its own, it can even grow an eye, a mouth, and a simple digestive tract. I can see using this effect for a kicker ending.

[Kamloops, mon amour.]

This week, I worked these ideas into a story called “Bad Ideas,” for Flurb #8, which will be out in mid September. God, it feels good to be writing again. I did have to fight the thought that I was writing this story for, in some sense, nothing—that is, knowing that I’d quixotically plan to put it straight into Flurb without even trying to market it, even though it’s of primo quality. But I also take some pleasure in doing this.

Having been away from writing pretty much continuously for six weeks, I’ve been missing the Muse very much. And yet, I spend so much time every day avoiding Her…

[The next three pictures are at Moraine Lake in Banff National Park.]

With the story done, I’m edging into restarting my work on Jim and the Flims. I look forward to doing something with that “infinity in the middle” idea that I illustrated in that painting, “Topology of the Afterworld.” I’d needed another effect for the last few chapters, so I’ll have a trip to the anomaly at the center, in order to save our Universe. Maybe I call that central spot Helaven, as I’m not sure if it’s Hell or Heaven. It will be interesting to have Jim fall through the divine light of infinity as way of getting back home—although it has to be different from the somewhat similar scene in White Light. More literal.

In Canada, Sylvia and I were boating on a little lake near Jasper, in the Canadian Rockies, a Pyramid Lake, with a big pyramid-like mountain peak right next to it, meadows and bogs and forests flowing gently up to the base of the stone, a lovely place. Our boat had a quiet electric motor, and we were gliding through some water no more than a foot or two deep, with water plants all around—it reminded me of the sea in the Narnia novel, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is a place that I always wanted to go. It crossed my mind that this would be a nice effect to have for when Jim is going to Helaven in the center of Flimsy.

Naturally I think of a maelstrom around the central anomaly of Helaven—but, gee, I just had a maelstrom in Hylozoic. So calm shallow water is better. I might focus on the curious growths that appear in the shallow water. Mabye Jim has a realization that he’s inside an electron? The afterworld is everywhere.

More visually, I can see black-gloved cartoon hands on long, skinny, multiply-jointed arms, reaching out from Helaven and grabbing at Jim. Scabs and tattoos on the arms, with the zigzag sequence of elbows folding up like lazy-tongs.

“Right this way, sir.”

As I mentioned last month, in my post, “The Afterworld as A Monad with an Infinite Center,” I’ve been working on a painting called Topology of the Afterworld. I finished it yesterday.

As I mentioned before, this painting has to do with my mental image of Flimsy, an afterworld that I’m describing in my novel Jim and the Flims. I wanted to fit an endless world into a finite volume—I’m thinking that maybe a copy of Flimsy is inside each electron. And I used M. C. Escher’s idea for fitting infinity into a nutshell by having things shrink as they approach the middle.

Click on the image to see a larger image.

I started with six streams of beings: humans, cuttlefish, dogs, ants, lizards, and birds. And then, again following Escher, I filled in the blank areas with globby beings designed to fiit the available spaces.

I’m happy with this one. (More info at my Paintings page.)

[Graffiti with fake bricks and a real snowboard in Kamloops, BC, Canada.]

On the cyberpunk front, Paul DiFilippo posted an interesting essay/review, “Aging Chrome: Cyberpunks in 2009” of the latest novels by John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, and me.

So now I’m back home from Clarion and a road trip to the Canadian Rockies. One slogan I forgot to tell them at Clarion: “You’re not doing your job as an SF or fantasy writer unless your readers wonder if you’re crazy.” (The point of the slogan is that it’s interesting when a story goes too far, reveals too much, and dredges surreal images from the subconscious.)

On the trip, I read J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life—my old pal Marc Laidlaw gave it to me, he came in to the Clarion workskhop and gave a fine presentation on his metamorphosis from SF writer to videogame writer at Valve.

Ballard wrote his memoir in the last year or so of his life—he was dying of cancer at age 77. It reminded me of how my own brush with death last year galvanized me into writing a memoir, albeit at age 63. Comparing my memoir to Ballard’s (this mental exercise would be “How To Make Yourself Miserable, Lesson #701,435”), I worry that his life was more interesting than mine—all of Ballard’s stuff about Shanghai and the prison camp, and him seeing beggar at his boyhood front steps dying under an “eiderdown” blanket of snow. Oh well, I have to work with what I have.

[Pyramid Mountain near Jasper, Canada.]

I was particularly interested in Ballard’s remarks about science fiction. I hardly know his SF—I’ve read bits of The Atrocity Exhibition and of Crash, but that’s about it…well, I read his autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, too. I’ll have to read more.

Ballard remarks that SF is “far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day,” and that it’s “often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka.” He says he’s more interested in “what now?” than in “what if?”—meaning that he wanted to use SF as a lens to understand the present, “looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race.”

[African sculpture in the Seattle Art Museum.]

Ballard speaks of SF as having tremendous vitality, and being original, fresh, optimistic and positive. “It was a visionary engine … a hot rod … propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.” He wasn’t interested in space travel. “It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ”˜inner space,’ was where science fiction should be heading.”

This all set me to thinking about ways to try and write something fresh and outrageous, and I ended up sleeping badly one night, with a mixed-up Ballardian SF story cooking in my head. In my half-waking state, I was dithering between calling it “Good Ideas” or “Bad Ideas,” and then settled on the latter.

While I was still asleep, I saw the story as resembling what passes through my head while cruising the web, a series of (superficially) unrelated incidents, a cut-up based on a series of SF vignettes. But, once awake, I decided I’d rather write a conventionally formed story, rather than one with an experimental form. I’ll talk about my ideas for the story in a later post.

In connection with the choice between classic and experimental forms, I think of the choreographer Marc Morris irritably saying, “Why is that whenever people improvise, it always comes out the same?”

[Raven-like Mask of a Huxwhukw, by Mungo Martin, in Seattle Art Museum.]

As another way of reawakening myself as a writer, I’ve been reading Pynchon’s old novel, The Crying of Lot 49, and—as so often with Pynchon—it feels as if the Muse is talking to me through his work. It’s “fortunate” that I happened to bring this particular book along for the trip’s casual reading. Here’s three quotes.

[Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada.]

[Our heroine Oedipa Maas was wondering if there might be] “…a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know…”

[Oedipa’s husband Mucho tells her,] “I can … listen to anything and take it apart again. Spectrum analysis, in my head. I can break down chords, and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but all at once…It’s like I have a separate channel fo reach one…and if I need more I just expand. Add on what I need. I don’t know how it works, but lately I can do it with people talking too. Say ”˜rich, chocolaty goodness.’”

[A bum sleeping in a lineman’s tent by phone wires hears] “…litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnamable act, the recognition, the Word.”

It all fits—somehow.