After the wedding, we went to DC and stayed in a nice boutique hotel near DuPont circle, the Madera. Seeing the fountain in DuPont circle brought back a big memory rush of the times I hung out in this neighborhood when I was in college and grad school, forty years ago, we used to come in here to see the art movies at the Dupont Cinema and get cool books at the bookstore down the block.

[Bosch’s Death and the Miser, seen at the National Gallery.]

After college my first college roommate “Ron Platek” lived around Dupont Circle; I remember in 1970 my second college roommate “Ace Weston” and I were visiting Ron, a reunion. Ron had a postcard he’d gotten from Charlie Manson; he’d gotten Charlie’s prisoner number from a newspaper photo and had written him the question, “What IS the secret of your success with women?” and Charlie wrote back, “Ronald: Just be real, real, REAL.”

We three wanted to get high, and we met a chatty gay guy our age in Dupont Circle, he said he’d just gotten out of jail for dealing, but since we were so nice he’d take a chance and sell us some mescaline caps that he had buried under a rock in the circle; we paid him, he dug them up, gel caps of pink powder, we ate them and went to see the movie of Woodstock, which kind of made us forget we were high, though when we exited the theater, the trip came up and slobbered on us like a faithful dog that had been waiting outside.

Today, seeing the fountain, and the streams forever cascading off its high marble bowl, I think of the water as being like time itself, flowing on and on whether or not I’m here to watch.

What if the mescaline never really wore off? What if the past thirty-six years of my life have been a single, highly detailed hallucination. And I’m about to come down off my trip.

Yes, the last thirty-six years has been a mescaline hallucination. I find this thought oddly cheering. I’m still watching Woodstock with Ace and Ron. Ace will nudge me and we’ll walk out into the hot July night, it’ll be 1970 and I’ll be 24 again. I won’t quite be able to remember all the things I imagined — my life with my wife, the children, the books, the career, the ups and the downs. I’ll have a fleeting sense of it, a bustling of details within a snow-globe.

And then I suppose I’ll start over and do it all again. And snap out of it again. Infinitely many times on down the regress into the white light. Which brings us to the Now Moment.

That faithful slobbering dog of a trip waiting outside the Woodstock theater was my life.

Maybe when I die, it’ll be like a hallucination ending. The world takes over again. When I die, it’s not so much a matter of me coming down, it’s in fact the world that’s coming down. Coming down off the Rudy hallucination.

Really I’m writing this entry by way of getting the Rudy hallucination going again. I’ve been distracted by this long trip. I’ve been merged into my family and friends. Now, as I look inward, the illusion of being a writer snaps back into focus. “A Promethean figure snatching fire from the heedless gods.”

Back to Postsingular, what if something like that last rap happens to my character Jayjay while he’s jacked into the mind-amplifying Big Pig. He imagines he’s living out a whole life; I might run through this whole hallucinated life in like two pages at the start of the next chapter.

Regarding a Big Pig hallucination, the idea is that you’re extending your consciousness out into the Internet. And the computation can be cranked up to run a billion times as fast, so you do, like 36 years in a couple of seconds. How does that work?

Well, I don’t run my meatware that fast. I am running a sim of myself that fast, I’ve outsourced the computation into the Web. My outsourced consciousness consists of me watching a mental model of yourself reacting to things. And when Jayjay snaps out of it, he happens to have some of the outsourced memories mapped into his personal wetware.

Hi, Ace!

Art in DC

My wife Sylvia and I like going to art museums, so we hit three of them in DC. We went to the Hirshhorn Museum on the Mall. It’s somewhat shabby and run down now, and had a boring ugly show of supersized kakaist canvases and assemblages by the bombastic artist Anselm Kiefer.

The best work I saw in the Hirshhorn was “Video Flag” by the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik. I tried unsuccessfully to photograph it; it’s a wall-sized grid of TVs showing some synchronized tapes Paik made, the garish patterns arranged to resemble the stripes and star-block of the US flag. In the star-block he had a series of 3D models of recent US presidents, the faces shiny and unblemished like plastic or, more to the point, like Silly Putty, for the faces were algorithmically morphing one into the other, LBJ into Bush into Reagan into Clinton and so on. “Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.” The effect was unspeakably sinister. And Paik doesn’t have to tell you it’s serious, in fact he presents it as if its light-weight pop mental junk-food; the display room even has a big comfortable leather couch you can veg out on to watch the tube for a few minutes. See it if you can, as eventually Paik’s works tend to stop working and they don’t always get repaired, what with the parts being obsolete, and, sadly, he’s dead now.

We went to the National Gallery too, which was great. This photo is of Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant’s Favorite of the Emir in the National Gallery. There was another deliciously corny series of canvases, The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole.

The National Gallery building is a people’s art temple, really the best place of all to visit in DC. Good new cafeteria downstairs in the tunnel to the new East Building too.

As an anti-terrorism measure, Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House is closed off to traffic now, and has a run-down deserted feel. Like in the sixties and seventies when cities would try to enhance their shopping districts by turning them into pedestrian-only zones — and the effect was always to utterly kill the blocks. US cities seem to need vehicle traffic to live.

All the government buildings in DC are being ringed with heavy-duty steel bollards anchored to cement, so as to keep out suicidal truck-bombers. It’s depressing to see us under siege like this. And of course it’s the “fault” of the terrorists. But couldn’t we have asked even once after 9/11 what it is that the terrorists actually want? Couldn’t there be some way of finding peace with them instead of jumping into an eternally escalating tit-for-tat?

Union Station is pretty nice now, that’s one of the few things that actually seems better than it used to be. What’s healed it? A Metro stop and a retail mall of chain stores.

Driving through Northern Virginia it was kind of disturbing how every single store is a chain store. It’s like living in a cheaply made virtual reality. There’s a big chain of bars called Ruby Tuesday, it’s so dystopic to see a classic Stones song brought this low.

We ducked into the Library of Congress. They have this beautiful ceiling with vaults and domes and spandrels, all painted with representations of: authors, branches of literature, and golden quotes. A real hodgepodge; it’s so hopeless to categorize human knowledge. What really cracked me up was that, among the muses depicted is that of the genre “Erotica,” a lush pouting woman with her toga pulled off her shoulder. Are our moral watchdogs in Congress aware of this outrage?

The heat and humidity in DC is astonishing. Even late at night, to walk a few blocks is to find yourself swimming in sweat. Lots of people are rushing off to work in suits in the mornings.

It’s nice to have all the Black people around, and to hear their voices. I noticed some of the women have a new (to me) way of doing their hair; they braid most of it tight onto their scalps, and then do something fun with the hanging part in back — actually that hair in the back might be hair extensions.

One woman had hers poufed out into a broom; another woman had hers braided into four tight reddish plaits, giving the over-all effect of there being an octopus sitting on her head.

At another point I watched a pickup brass band of Black youths playing on a traffic island beside Dupont Circle. Trombones mostly, and a tuba or two, inexpensive band instruments, shiny on the inside, dull on the outside. Nice to see the street lights sweeping across the reflective inner horn bells. Black hole dynamics.

We hit the Phillips Gallery at Q and 21st Streets, an old favorite; we used to go there when we were courting in the mid 1960s. One work that caught my attention was Daumier’s painting of a barker touting a strong man. I love the frantic way the barker points at his star, and the way the strong man looks so cool and confident. I think of someone writing an introduction for a book.

And a cool Kandinsky that was originally exhibited alongside some examples of Chinese calligraphy. A great series of glyphs. I like the idea of there being a language of this kind; I often imagine that’s how telepathy would be, that is, compound images or sensation-blocks, the units representing thoughts rather than being phonetic representations of spoken words.

One National Gallery picture that lingers in my mind is Fra Angelico, The Healing of Palladia by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian. I'd like to use this composition in a painting. I didn't get that good a photo of it, but the National Gallery has just about all their pictures online.

So I’m back in CA, thinking about marriage, birth, and death. I was in Virginia for my son’s wedding, our granddaughter’s first birthday, and a visit to my father’s grave. This life is all there is.

Congratulations, Rudy and Penny!

Life is sweet.

A couple of days before the wedding, my big brother Embry and I visited my father’s grave in Herndon, VA. It was very satisfying, and brought me some long-wished-for closure re. Pop’s death. His funeral in 1994 lacked a proper burial service — even though Pop was an Episcopal priest — and I always felt bad about this.

So Embry and rode there with the Book of Common Prayer, and we read the Rite for the Burial of the Dead, taking turns on the prayers, and saying some of them together. It felt good. Such beautiful language. And if Pop’s in any way able to notice it, he would have been so glad. We reminisced about him, and I patted the stone and said, “You were right, Pop,” thinking of some of the advice he’d given me, and Embry chimed in, “You were right about everything, Pop.”

Not only a wedding and a funeral, but our granddaughter’s first birthday! She's amazing.

We had a little party at a friend’s house in Charlottesville. It was very jolly. (This is the baby's aunt!)

A wedding is an emotional peak. When you climb a mountain you’re high enough to see the other peaks clearly, standing out from the foothills. And here at Rudy’s wedding, I could see my wedding with my wife, and our parents’ weddings, and our other children’s weddings.

I see the funerals of our parents and the funerals yet to come. I see our births, and the births of our children and the births of our grandchildren. All these peaks are out there, visible from this exalted moment. And, oddly enough, each of those peaks is in some sense the same peak; and all the great events of our lives are here in this one moment.

Life is a mystery. And so we celebrate, and we open our eyes to notice how touching and tragic and beautiful it is to live this life, with its weddings, its deaths, and its births, generation upon generation.

Sweetest of all, this moment was real, all of us are together in a this lovely grassy meadow beneath a wedding tent in Orange, Virginia.

God bless us all.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from blogging.

Meanwhile here’s something I wrote for Postsingular this weekend, taking off from that outline material I posted last week.

The clothes on display were funkier than at home, each item unique, and everything very colorful. Things weren’t so industrialized here. The leathers and wools, in particular, were individually tweaked by craftspeople called coaxers. Some coaxers got into close telepathic synch with an animal so as to influence the colors and textures of the creature’s skin or hair. Other coaxers worked at affecting the tints in plant fibers such as cottons and linens. As well as affecting the physical qualities of natural materials, coaxers also worked at getting animals and plants to imbue their substances with certain psychic properties.

One shop, for instance, had developed a way to deal with the nosers and pervs who liked to teep inside your clothes. They’d developed silk underwear that emanated unsettling angry-silkworm vibes whenever a mind delved inside. And then they’d leapfrogged the notion to produce undies whose denunciations were in fact designed to position the wearer as forbidden — and therefore alluring — fruit.

Down the block, some well-dressed Highbraners were enjoying a late lunch in a cozy restaurant. Their meals contained huge amounts of information. Each plateful of food was teep-tagged with the history of how the ingredients had been produced, with images of the chef’s preparation process, and with annotations on the order of : “Especially crisp and lemony right here;” “Pry here to get a nice nugget of meat;” or “Be sure to dip this in the sauce.”

Next door was a bar, but Thuy couldn’t teep inside. For the protection of the drinkers, their vibes were screened off by aggressive mental stylings being broadcast by a dazzler. The dazzler was visible in the doorway, a black swami with a shaved head, sitting with muscular arms crossed, and wearing a calfskin coaxed to resemble a leopard pelt. He was like a living internet hub, sending your attention off into contact with the most interesting minds of the nonce. You never made it past him to the interior of the bar.

Thuy noticed a hooker exiting the bar with her john. Teeping in, she picked up the hooker’s name: Balla. Balla’s vibes were an education in themselves; she’d honed the skill of offering her short-term partners the emotional sense of intimacy and shared history — magically divorced from empathy and commitment. Just seeing Balla slowly brush her hair, Thuy had the brief impression that she knew Balla really well, and that Balla was very fond of her — though of course the illusion was as thin as the skin of a balloon.

Deeper abstractions of emotionality were on offer in an art gallery across the street from the auto clinic. Teeping in, Thuy saw some physically non-descript roundish sculptures that were teep-tagged to project the most remarkable states: sense of wonder, raw transcendence, sensual pleasure, the presence of infinity. They were like smooth rocks bearing with them the vibes of years in the bed of a woodland stream, although here the flowing waters were the currents of the gifted artists’ minds.

Near the spot where Metotem Metabooks had stood was something like a bookshop. But it held no reams of paper filled with printed words. Although the telepathic Highbraners could use spoken speech, they seemed never to trouble themselves with writing things out in phonetic form. Highbrane authors were something like cartoonists, blocking out networks of somewhat self-contained mental states. Their books were networks of teep-tag glyphs; and the tags were embedded not in pages, but in plants, stones, scraps of cloth, medallions and pottery cups.

Picking up on Thuy’s vibe, the owner, who actually looked a bit like a giant Darlene, stepped slowly from of the store. “You’re fresh from the Lowbrane?” she boomed, then switched to teeping. “I’m Durga. And you’re a novelist? Would you like to record something for me to sell?”

“Go ahead, Thuy,” urged Ond. “Show Durga what you showed us. It was beautiful. And it’ll enhance understanding between the braneworlds.”

“If we come in, will you give us a snack?” Chu asked Durga.

Durga gave them mugs of tea and enormous spice cookies. Nibbling her cookie, Thuy picked up the vibes of the far-flung islands where the tea and spices had grown. Taking a few minutes to get it right, she arranged her mental representation of Wheenk along the seemingly endless spike of memory that the curious topology of Highbrane space had given her. And then she teeped the images and emotions across to Durga and onto, of all things, five potted cactuses on Durga’s window sill.

“If I sell off all these cactuses, I can make second-impressions,” said Durga. “Or if you’re still around, you can make fresh first-impression ones. But I have a feeling you’ll be going soon.”

Later.