Looking through my image files the other day, I unearthed my oddest fan letter ever—and, believe me, there’s been some stiff competition over the years.

Click on the image to see a larger image.

This arrived in 1981, shortly after my first published novel , White Light. I’d crafted a subtle tale about the 1960s, higher infinities, and the afterlife. And having read my book in a prison library, some guy smeared ink on his foot, stomped on a piece of paper, and sent me the results. In his mind we were literary peers—and I should collaborate on a book with him.

A book about the wrinkle on his foot.

First a word about Father’s Day. I’m lucky enough to have children and to have known my father. It’s wonderful to think about the generations rolling on.

I hope all fathers and sons get some nice hammock time today or a reasonable equivalent thereof. Slack.

When my father died, he had very few possessions. I “inherited” four or five things of his, including a worn cardigan sweater, a Swiss knife, and an egg-cup that my daughter Georgia had made for him.

Thinking about the “rolling onward” and “eternal recurrence” aspects of being a son or a father, I took a picture of Pop’s eggcup with a little can of Royal Baking Powder that happens to be in the Spanish language. The cool thing about the Royal label, well known to mathematicians and cartoonists, is that it incorporates an endless regress.

I think I got hold of this can about 25 years ago, soon after moving to CA, when I was still surprised to see Spanish, and I (with deliberate incongruity) used the name “Polvo Para Hornear” for the name of a landmark in my novel The Hacker And The Ants.

Switching topics now, I’ve been doing research on Stanislaw Ulam this week. He’s going to appear as a character in my novel Turing & Burroughs. I like this photo of Ulam happy with some device he’s cobbled together perhaps to model some arcane physical concept like the notion of a nonlinear springs he discussed in his classic “Fermi-Pasta-Ulam” paper, FPU for short.

For more on this topic, see the software and papers on my Capow page, where I used continuous-valued cellular automata software to run the FPU simulation, reproducing some of Ulam’s results, such as the ergodic long-term reoccurrence of states for the cubic nonlinear CA.

Wikipedia has a good entry on Ulam, but I also found a very interesting essay (although somewhat eccentric and perhaps overly critical) by his mathematician friend (?) Gian-Carlo Rota: The Lost Cafe.

Summary: Rota says Ulam was lazy, didn’t like to work out the details, preferred the flash of insight. He was as sort of alienated and sarcastic, didn’t like authority, felt that ultimately everything was meaningless. Undisciplined. Generous and kind. Liked getting into new fields and picking off the interesting big results. Often didn’t get around to publishing his results, just shared them informally. He had green eyes.

Classic photo of Ulam and the MANIAC computer with his daughter Claire. I first saw this photo in Ulam’s autobiography, Adventures of a Mathematician. I wrote LANL and got permission to use it as an illo in my Lifebox tome.

Ulam is known for his work on the H-bomb, indeed he’s sometimes called the father of the H-bomb. Ulam and Edward Teller made a joint application for a patent on the H-bomb!

In wondering if Ulam was “evil” for helping to invent the H-bomb, keep in mind that he was from a Jewish family in Lwow, Poland, and that he and his brother happened to escape to the US in 1938. The rest of his family died in the holocaust. Perhaps this motivated him to help the military of his new home country.

Another factor in Ulam’s work here was that of scientific obsession. Ulam didn’t get along with Edward Teller, and he developed his design for the H-bomb partly in a desire to demonstrate the Teller’s original design for such a weapon was wrong. Teller then jumped on Ulam’s design and worked on it some more.

Photo of an A-bomb fireball, from a photo-rich Russian site. Note the Joshua trees about to be consumed. I’m intrigued by the irregular spots on the fireball. No natural phenomenon is ever completely uniform.

I’d like to thank Emilio, Steve H, Rick York, and Justin, for their kind and encouraging comments on my previous post, “My Brain Event as a Jump-Cut.”

There’s nothing like a good bull-session about death and immortality! I’ll fuel the discussion with a few further remarks sparked by the comments.

(1) It will never be absolutely certain that death really is the end. There’s so much that we don’t know about the universe. But, given my personal experiences, my inclination these days is to go ahead and accept that death is the end, and see where that leads me. It’s worth mentioning that, throughout history, people have often used the promise of immortality as way to take advantage of their followers. Perhaps it’s just as well to accept the very high probability of total dissolution and find ways to get past the fear.

A related point. It’s very healthy and reasonable to fear and to avoid death—that’s what gets us through our lives! But we might learn to take a different view of the final and unavoidable encounter with the Reaper.

(2) It’s correct that it’s not accurate to use “black” to refer to the experience of total lack of consciousness. That’s just a conventional term for “no visual input”. But if there’s no “eye” and no brain, it isn’t even black. It’s void.

It’s also true that the void is what precedes my birth. (Unless I want to claim that my soul is reincarnated, and that between incarnations I hang out in the Heavenly Clouds, and when, eventually, I get overly interested in watching a man and woman having sex, I get pulled back into the material plane, down into a fertilized egg.)

I would say that the unconsciousness you experience during total anesthesia or as the effects of a brain event does have a different quality from the unconsciousness felt during sleep. There are no dreams and, upon awaking, no sense of an intervening passage of time. Thus my use of the phrase “jump-cut”.

I think it’s a unpleasant sensation at two levels. First of all, we like to feel that, at any time, we’re at some level monitoring our body and keeping it save. Secondly, the experience (or non-experience) of a total mental void is, as I’ve been saying, a stark preview of death.

(3) There are various partial forms of immortality that we comfort ourselves with, such as genetic immortality or software immortality. On the genetic front, we might, if we’re lucky, leave some children behind, bearing our genetic info and some of our memories. On the software front, you might make an impression on people, perhaps as an educator or a social worker. Another form of software immorality is to leave books, recordings or works of art.

These forms of pseudoimmortality mean something to us, even if actual death truly is a matter of lights-out and that’s all she wrote. When you’re younger you’re often concerned about living long enough to do things you feel you need to do—you want to taste the pleasures of life, and it may be that you also want to set up some pseudoimmortality of the genetic or software forms.

I still remember my terror, as a teen, at the prospect that I might die a virgin. If you’re fortunate, you live long enough to check off most of the things on your list. And at this point death begins to lose some of its sting.

(4) The SF notion of creating a replica of oneself, as in my 1982 novel Software, is a perennial favorite, popular these days among Singulatarians and Transhumanists.

Perhaps you save off your brain software and copy it over to a healthy young clone, for instance. Or perhaps, at some later time, as Steve H suggests, some future biohackers do this for you, creating an emulation of your brain software based on whatever lifebox type data you left behind. (“The blog is the road to immortality!”)

I’ve always been intrigued by the existential questions that arise here. Even if I manage to create a new Rudy, my old self still enters the void. My new self may have the illusion of being a continuous extension of my old self, but nonetheless, my old self—(and what does that really mean?)—is annihilated. I delve into this in more detail in my non-fiction books Infinity and the Mind and The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul.

I haven’t directly blogged about this topic before, but on July 1, 2008, right after I finished the final draft of my novel Hylozoic, I had a hemorrhagic stroke. This meant that a blood vessel in the right half of my brain had suddenly burst. The fact that it was prone to bursting was in the nature of a birth defect, a booby-trap that had been waiting for 62 years. I kind of prefer the euphemism “brain event” for it.

Fortunately I didn’t suffer any really dire consequences like paralysis or speech-slurring. For me, the most disturbing thing about the experience was in some sense philosophical. When I awoke in the hospital, I had no sense at all of any intervening time period. And that still bothers me. The interval when I’d been unconscious was like a jump-cut. Bam. And it seemed fairly clear that it would have been entirely possible to never wake up at all.

A couple of months afterwards, on September 12, 2008, I made a painting called, “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” I wasn’t quite that bad off, but it almost felt that way. I like the 3D blob of blood and its shadow on the sheet, also the way the guy’s soul is flowing out through the soles of his feet…with the lobes of his brain piled up on the right like a compost heap, with a terrified, watchful eye on top, twinned with the eye in that starfish-shaped soul.

And I started writing about the stroke that fall in what turned into two books. The first is my autobiography, Nested Scrolls, which starts out with the stroke.

Conditioned by a zillion novels and movies, you tend to think of death as a big drama—with a caped Grim Reaper kicking in your midnight door. But death may be as ordinary as an autumn leaf dropping from a tree. No spiral tunnel, no white light, no welcome from the departed ones. Maybe it’s just that everything goes black.

In those first mornings at the hospital, I’d sit on their patio with an intravenous drip on a little rolling stand, and I’d look at the clouds in the sky. They drifted along, changing shapes, with the golden sunlight on them. The leaves of a potted palm tree rocked chaotically in the gentle airs, the fronds clearly outlined against the marbled blue and white heavens. Somehow I was surprised that the world was still doing gnarly stuff without any active input from me.

As I slowly recuperated in July and August of 2008, I started writing in my journal, and then in a Notes document. At that point I wasn’t yet sure whether I was planning to write a memoir or a novel.

One the one hand, my brush with death had made it very clear that, if I was ever going to write an autobiography, the time was now.

On the other hand, my trains of thought were running very loopy, and it seemed like it might be entertaining to use the stroke as an event in a transreal novel, possibly a novel involving the afterworld.

I actually did a painting before “Cerebral Hemorrhage.” This one, finished July 21, 2008, is called “Collaborators.” I went out to some en plein air painting with my friend Vernon. We were bickering a little about whether or not I’d picked a good spot.

I started out with an image of two painters, and then I had them start choking each other. As I really don’t have any strong hard feelings towards Vernon, I’d say that what I was really depicting is the stroke itself as an external being attacking me. Choking me around the neck. It’s not so uncommon in dreams, or in adventure movies, to have a hero and his demon/double get into a choking contest.

But then I remembered that right before my stroke I’d just finished a rather bruising round of revisions on a story I was co-writing with Bruce Sterling—our fifth short story, “Colliding Branes,” which appeared in Asimov’s in 2009. So it oddly amused me to tell Bruce, who I love, that my attack of “apoplexy” was his fault for being so intransigent and argumentative. He’d pushed me over the edge. He’d nearly killed me. Not falling for the guilt trip, Bruce imperturbably replied that I wouldn’t have any further problems if I would just accept that he was always right. Actually, our sixth collaboration, “Good Night Moon“, in 2010, went much smoother. I’d accepted that Bruce was often (if not always) right.

One of the things bothering me was that I wasn’t feeling as if I had an eternal soul. As I wrote in my journals on July, 20, 2008.

I have a new sense of seeing the street scene without “me” at the center. I used to see the world as if it had a big reflecting ball in the middle, the ball being me and my feelings. But this week it feels like the ball is gone. I’m just seeing a lawn with people. I’m not there at all, or I’m much smaller than before. It’s like there’s a hole in the scene.

I express a related idea in Nested Scrolls.

I think this was when I finally came to accept that the world would indeed continue after I die. Self-centered as I am, this simple fact had always struck me as paradoxical. But now I understood it, right down in my deepest core. The secrets of the life and death are commonplace, yet only rarely can we hear them.

As you can see from a blog post of mine, “Teeming Tales,” by August 4, 2008, I’d pretty much decided to write a novel in parallel to my memoir. Although I had less reason than ever to believe in an actual afterworld, but this only meant that I had more of a reason than ever to fantasize about life after death. Fantasy and science-fiction novels are, after all, to a large degree instruments for authorial wish-fulfillment. You write about the kinds of worlds that you wished you lived in. And I wished more than ever that I lived in a world where there was an afterworld—call it Flimsy.

Some of the stroke material ended up in my novel Jim and the Flims.

I vegged out on my dusty Goodwill couch, reading a paperback fantasy novel. It was a peaceful summer afternoon, with the sunlight lying across the roof and yard like heavy velvet.

After awhile I began having the feeling that I could read the pages of the book without actually looking at them. But I was having trouble making sense of what I read. Thinking I needed a nap, I laid down my book and curled up on my side. I dropped off to sleep.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the living room floor, very confused. It was dark outside. I felt like I’d been—gone. I ached all over, in every muscle and joint. My tongue was bleeding. Something very bad was happening to me.

I crawled across the room to where my cell phone sat with my keys. I didn’t trust myself to walk. It took all my concentration to dial 911. And then everything went black again.

I awoke in a hospital room. It was still night. A nurse was standing over me, a woman with a calm, sympathetic face. She said I’d had two seizures. They weren’t sure why. Maybe I’d be okay. They had me on an IV drip with painkillers and an anti-seizure drug. I needed to rest.

I slept fitfully. In the morning I was able to think a little. I could hardly believe I was in the hospital. How disturbing to think that I’d been to death’s door and back. I hadn’t seen any white light or spiral tunnel or dead relatives while I’d been out—none of that cool, trippy stuff. I’d been nowhere and I’d seen nothing. It just felt like I’d had a couple of time-sequences snipped out of my life. Discouraging.

Two final remarks. First of all, I’m happy to report that I’d made a full recovery from that July 1, 2008, brain hemorrhage by the fall of 2008. I got off easy. I went back to life as usual—writing books, going on trips with my wife, making visits with the kids, writing blog posts. Regular life is such a sweet and wonderful thing.

A second point. It feels like ever since I had my brain hemorrhage, people have been telling me to watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED video talk “A Stroke of Insight”. So today I finally did.

And it’s really a lovely talk. She’s a great speaker, very emotional, funny at times, and with an uplifting message: stay in touch with your non-linear, mystical right brain. The way she gets from the stroke to the message is that the blood vessel that burst in her brain happened to be in the logical, left hemisphere. And it didn’t immediately knock her out. So she had a few minutes more or less like an acid trip, in which she was seeing the world through the right brain.

In my case, the blood vessel burst in the right half of my brain, and I almost immediately blacked out. For me it wasn’t like like an acid trip, it was a jump cut. Bam, everything black, then you’re awake. And at some point, Jill hit the jump-cut, too, although she doesn’t talk about it very much. It’s sort of negative and disturbing thing. And people don’t really want to think about that. They want to push that aside and think about the insight and the high. Let them.

I’m all for living in my right brain and being in touch with the cosmos at large. I was just now outside in our garden watching the fat bumblebees on our salvia flowers. Right-brain joy.

But I’m living in the fairly sure and certain knowledge that at some moment in my future, it’s all going to stop. Bam. And I more or less have to be okay with that. If I worry about it, the fear poisons my life. If I accept it, I can enjoy what I have left. More flowers, food, family, and writing. It’s good while it lasts. For that matter, it’s a miracle and a blessing that we get any life at all.