Last week I finished writing Chapter 6 (out of eight) of Hylozoic, and now I’m writing a “thought experiment” story about infinity for an anthology about infinity for an academic publisher.

[Note the three-eyed skull in a Mission street-poster outside Atlas Cafe for a band called “Psychedelic Horseshi*t”.]

My working title is “The Aktuals.” In German, “actual infinite” is “aktual-unendlich,” and I plan to refer to my transfinite beings as Aktuals, thus the title.

I’d like the story that does for infinity what Flatland does for the fourth dimension. My story will begin with the discovery that we share our world with transfinite beings, followed by the realization that we ourselves are transfinite (or can become transfinite) and a dramatic exfoliation of the consequences.

I’m right at the tricky part that comes after the gerneralized B. S. and before the actual writing — the hard-to-explain transition where the muse comes to see me and I get an actual story.

Looking for input from the world right now. We spent the night in Berkeley after the concert, then killed the day in Berkeley and the Mission, going to a friend’s wedding Sat eve near Borderlands Books. My fans out, seining for visions.

The curry and coconut udon with grilled chicken soup at Noodle Theory.

I did my concert with Roy Whelden’s group last night, the music was lovely, and the projector was strong.

I served as the transducer crystal, connecting the sound to the video. It was a little tricky for me, keeping up with the changes. Like skiing steeply downhill in an unfamiliar videogame. And of course CAPOW, which never crashes, crashed a few times due to “demo effect,” but I was able to recover quickly each time.

I got to meet Karen Clark in the flesh, taller than expected, the woman who sang my words, “Oh man, we are in heaven, for sure, for sure.” Great to see her.

Combing the images of the weekend. The Asian students’ food court in the night off Telegraph Ave; the Bekeley bums screaming curses at me.

Looking out the window of the Durant Hotel this morning, pondering the odd twitching motions of the lower limbs that humans use to move themselves through space (they call it “walking.”)

The sunlight on the pastel walls near the Atlas Cafe in the Mission.

Sat in Ritual Roasters Coffee Shop later on. Some of the framed art on display consists of memoir-fragments hand-written black on white and framed. The closest talks about padding out on a surfboard at Ocean Beach for the first time in a long time. “I almost cried it felt so good.” And I’m like, yeah, I understand. And I’m thinking that in Kyoto I wouldn’t be able to read the writing, and if I could read it, the spot mentioned would mean nothing to me. It’s nice to be where I know what’s going on.

In Modern Times Books on Valencia street, I read a comic by the amazing Jim Woodring comic, “The Lute String, Part I,” in the latest issue of Mome, that shifts POV into a higher world with an elephant god (Ganesh?), and the elephant dances through starry space, leaving a multi-layer trail. One layer of the trail is our ordinary reality, Mom and Dad and the kids; another is a cloud of Hindu deities. Equally unlikely and strange.

Closing the book and looking up I see a guy, his head, he’s behind a bookcase, and I’m thinking how remarkable to be incarnated here, among the humans. I bought this issue of Mome for further study; above is the frame I’m talkin’ about. (In case you don’t know, “mome” means “far from home,” as in “the mome raths did outgrabe,” meaning, “the lost animals-somewhat-like-pigs made a noise like a bellow and a sneeze” —see Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass). I had raths in my novel Freeware, too.

I can think like a mome rath and outgrabe my infinity story now. Joy. I’m glad to be off the road and done with the PR push for Postsingular. My legs hurt. Out of the marketplace and back in the cave.

My writer pal John Shirley sent me a link to an article about mathematical physicist, A. Garrett Lisi, who’s written an exciting paper called, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”. Some physicists are attacking the paper—and I’m not enough of physicist to judge who’s right. But as a mathematician, I like the idea of finding a simple mathy pattern underlying the messy heap that the physicists have made of their theories.

According to Lisi, all the known particles and forces can be regarded as nodes within a complex mathematical object called E8, a symmetric higher-dimensional polyhedron consisting of 248 vertices in eight-dimensional space, first discovered in 1887. I’ll show three different views of E8 taken from Lisi’s paper.

Since E8 is an eight-dimensional object, you can rotate in various ways to pop out new symmetries.

Lovely, huh?

Although E8 has been around for 130 years, it was just in March, 2007, that these funky mathematicians depicted above figured out the full details of it. They were funded by none other than Silicon Valley’s leading retail purveyor of computer hardware and software, Fry’s Electronics, who’ve founded AIM, the American Institute for Mathematics, which has a very nice E8 page.

Something cool about Garrett Lisi is that he spends a lot of time in Hawaii surfing.

This image is by Jeremy Bennett of New Zealand, and will appear on the cover of the January issue of Asimov’s SF for “The Perfect Wave” by Marc Laidlaw and me. The surf looks weird because it’s running a non-linear wave equation, just like CAPOW.

This seems to be Renaissance Man week in Ruckerland.

On Friday night (tomorrow), I’m doing a never-to-be-repeated real-time live computer graphics Capow light show for a Bach concert by the the Galax Quartet, with triple harp by Cheryl Ann Fulton, featuring a new Bach-based composition by Roy Whelden, “Loose Canons.”

I’m renting a honkin’ big 3000 lumen projector.

Time: Friday, November 16, 7:30 pm.

Place (with map link): College Avenue Presbyterian Church, 5951 College Avenue at Claremont Avenue, Oakland, CA.

(Note that this is not the same as the Presbyterian Church up the street in Berkeley!)

Our church is right down the block from one of my favorite restaurants, Noodle Theory, at Claremont and College.

I’d like to be able to put some video of this event online, so if you have a digital video camera and plan to attend and film it, please let me have a copy of the mpg.

Years ago I did some spoken word for a great album by Roy Whelden, “Like a Passing River.” You can buy it in CD or MP3 online, like at Amazon.

I was listening to it again the other day, in particular a piece called “Rucker Songs,” with Roy playing and Karen Clark singing words from my memoir, All the Visions. I’m going to temporarily post this song as a free sample.

Click to hear Roy Whelden and Karen Clark, “Rucker Songs.”

Yes, she’s really saying, “Oh man, we are in heaven. For sure, for sure.” And then, a little later, “Give us this daily rush, on the nod as thou art in heaven.”

I love this fusion of slangy beat prose with high classical music form…

Yesterday I gave a reading from Postsingular at the Booksmith. A small audience, I guess we didn’t promote it enough. I recorded about 35 minutes of me reading from Chapter 3, followed by 20 minutes of me discussing the book. Click the button below to access the MP3 audio file podcast.

On the way into the Haight, where the Booksmith is, I stopped at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate park. It’s kind of a touristy spot, and I hadn’t been there in years. But I’m missing Kyoto just a little bit, and I wanted to check the place out.

It’s really quite lovely. And, yes, it’s a little crowded—but so are most of the places like this in Japan!

I even found a little Zen garden behind the miniature pagoda. I love these setups. The gravel, the rocks, the dwarf trees and—why not?—a bit of lawn. The manicured shrub in back molding herself around the rock.

I spent an hour writing on Hylozoic in their little tea pavilion. Drinking oolong. The waitress was just like in Japan, she wore a kimono and didn’t speak English. It felt like coming home.