{"id":13536,"date":"2021-12-29T17:27:36","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T01:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=13536"},"modified":"2021-12-30T13:59:26","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T21:59:26","slug":"everything-is-everything-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2021\/12\/29\/everything-is-everything-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything is Everything. Start."},"content":{"rendered":"

A crazy new SF adventure\u2026with entitled realtors from the infinite subdimensions.<\/em><\/p>\n

So\u00a0 my last novel\u00a0Juicy Ghosts <\/a><\/em>is out there, and I\u2019ve been idle for a few months, so now\u2014what to do? Nescio<\/em>. That\u2019s Latin for \u201cI don\u2019t know, son.\u201d\u009d Don\u2019t know what I\u2019ll write next, don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever write again. But I\u2019ll start groping. As usual, most the photos in my post have no direct connections to the text.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In 2019 I did some work on a story that I called \u201cEverything Is Everything.\u201d\u009d I finished a draft of it, couldn\u2019t sell it to any mainstream SF Zine, and a second draft appeared in the underground zine, Big Echo <\/a>in October, 2020. I’ll be posting a third version on my blog soon. I’m opening it up a little so that it can lead to lead to a larger adventure. Mabye a novel. I’m on the verge of a Chapter Two.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It’s like the way that Juicy Ghosts <\/em>started out as a single short story, and then I wrote a couple more related stories, and then they stuck together and grew out more material to make a novel. \u201cEverything Is Everything\u201d\u009d might be like that. I hope so.<\/p>\n

So now, by way getting going on the next phase of \u201cEverything Is Everything,\u201d\u009d I\u2019ll review some of the notes I made when I was working on the ideas back in 2019 and 2020.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Recurring Dreams<\/b><\/p>\n

Sometimes, as I\u2019m falling asleep, in a liminal state, bobbing up and down beneath the surface of sleep, I\u2019ll feel myself sliding into a dream situation that seems familiar. A background is in place, with familiar scenery, and established characters, and a situation, and I have a sense of knowing a history of what\u2019s going on. What would be the word for this. Not really dej\u00c3\u00a0 vu<\/em>, as in \u201cI saw this before.\u201d\u009d More like dej\u00c3\u00a0 rev\u00c3\u00a9<\/em>. \u201cI dreamed this before.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

When I encounter a seemingly familiar dream, I may drift back towards the surface\u2014 and then sleepily wonder what\u2019s the cause of my remembering the dream from before. I see two options.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Illusion<\/em>. In one fell swoop my dream-mind has created a new stage setting, including <\/em>a sense of having seen it before.<\/p>\n

Recurrence<\/em>. The setting is <\/em>a fragment of a recent dream. The setting was latently present in my subconscious, and it seems familiar because it is <\/em>familiar.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The \u201crecurrence\u201d\u009d option feels more accurate, as I do at these times have such a clear sense of the scenario having a history, and that I\u2019ve been in the scene before, and it seems like wouldn\u2019t \u201chave time\u201d\u009d to invent all of that background-prior-dreaming on the spot. This said, the \u201cillusion\u201d\u009d option is viable. Sometimes my busy mental dream machine might fill in fake histories along with its fake scenes. Why not?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This said, there are <\/em>cases of repeated dreams, like portentous repeated nightmares as in a pulp novel, and this kind of dream is something that you remember and brood over when illusion you\u2019re awake the next day, and then you go back to bed and have that same dream again.<\/p>\n

But the maybe-maybe-not repeat dreams particularly important or epic dreams, and you don\u2019t happen to remember them when you\u2019re awake. Even if you have them night after night, each time with an increasingly dense sense of prior history.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Absolute Continuum <\/b><\/p>\n

In a different vein, I want to write about my kick: we live in an Absolute Continuum. I sampled this rich vein of ore in my story \u201cJack and the Aktuals<\/a>.\u201d\u009d But in that story I didn\u2019t go the whole hog, that is, in \u201cJack and the Aktuals\u201d\u009d I didn\u2019t fanatically insist that our actual, waking-life cosmos is an Absolute Continuum.<\/p>\n

I do claim this in my new preface <\/a>to the fifth edition of my best-selling non-fiction book, Infinity and the Mind<\/em>. I\u2019m old and respected (or ignored?) enough now that I can write prefaces that are close to being certifiably insane.<\/p>\n

And now I want to put this idea into my \u201cEverything Is Everything\u201d\u009d story.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Dream Work
\n<\/b> <\/b>
\nIn a recent \u201crepeat\u201d\u009d dream, I\u2019m living in a rooming-house and working as a salesman\u2014and I know things about the other tenants.<\/p>\n

I see a fantasy-SF-type story here. The guy (or woman) realizes that they\u2019re doing work in their dreams, like as a spammer or telemarketer or focus group or image-recognizer.. It might be nice, if possible, to connect this to a commercial telepathy device, call it a teeper. The guy is . bewildered after his naps. Just like I was after my 45 minute nap on the Santa Cruz Beach the other day, a nap which, by the way, started with a familiar-feeling sensation of returning to a rooming house where I\u2019ve been working long hours of late. I woke unrested. I was tired the rest of the day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A teeper device that resembles one of those hearing aids\u2014and my guy keeps forgetting to take it off when he sleeps. And then he\u2019s doing dream work in that phantom rooming house visions. I in fact ended up putting a lot of this into my Juicy Ghosts novel, where people get \u201cimmortal souls\u201d\u009d that are siloed in a big company\u2019s cloud computer, and they are in fact working for the company.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What if my character Wick had has a consulting gig as a napper. And doing dream work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are <\/em>you doing in these dreams?\u201d\u009d asked his wife Vi. \u201cProgramming?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s more like I\u2019m inventing puzzles.\u201d\u009d said Wick. \u201cThose quizzes you see when you sign onto some websites? The quizzes are called captchas? They\u2019re mining my thoughts for captcha puzzles.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t like that kind of work,\u201d\u009d said Vi.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight,\u201d\u009d said Wick. \u201cMy boss is in my head every night. I call him Pigling Bland. He knows this. It\u2019s hard to cover up anything in brain-to-brain conversation. It just comes out. He\u2019s Pigling Bland and he\u2019s a rah-rah middle-management greed-head with no mind. He calls me Space Case.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But I want something more fantastical for the dream work. Like talking to the dead, or to aliens, or to critters from alef-seven. Or Wick is opening the door to the Absolute Continuum. Like in a fairy tale.<\/p>\n

Maybe the aliens are using his dreaming mind as some kind of amplifier<\/em>.Or a scanner. They\u2019re using us dreamers to \u201csee\u201d\u009d or notice stuff they can\u2019t quite resolve. Like we\u2019re electron microscopes or stethoscopes or infrared film or X-ray plates.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything Is Everything\u201d\u009d <\/b><\/p>\n

I got my title for the story when I heard the hip-hop scripture by Lauryn Hill: her 1998 song \u201cEverything Is Everything.\u201d\u009d I\u2019d forgotten about it, though it\u2019s on an album I own The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill<\/em>. I heard the in an Urban Outfitter store in Berkeley, and at the time I was kind of mentally dismissing it, as the line seemed kind of obvious, and wasn\u2019t initially realizing how heavy it is. And then I realized this could be a good title for my story as, in the Absolute Continuum, everything really is <\/em>everything. \u201cAfter winter must come sprint,\u201d\u009d says Lauren.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything Is Everything\u201d\u009d has a very cool video <\/a>\u2014you need to watch it at least twice, and I\u2019ve actually watched it four or five times now, and will watch it more times. It shows a giant old turntable-type tone-arm dragging a needle along the streets of NYC, playing the track of the street. The record is rotating around the Empire State Building.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I dreamed that my weird physics friend Nick Herbert was giving me a new psychedelic drug, bit the tab or pill was mixed in with a batch of about twenty other pills, dumped on the sofa cushion next to me, and I was too thirsty to get them down, some of the pills nearly the size of pool-cue-chalk blocks, and pale blue. Like a daily dose of AIDS meds. Then inside the dream I saw, in a small pop-up screen in the corner of a news-show, I saw a sidebar type item on the drug I was supposed to be getting, it was called \u201cBuddha Slime,\u201d\u009d and it was a slick gel presented beneath a layer of transparent plastic, like on those old mood ring thingies. I woke up, drank a lot of water, laid down to go back to sleep and earnestly hoped I could return to the same dream and get my Buddha Slime, but didn\u2019t get there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Smeel Egg <\/b><\/p>\n

The Absolute Continuum as the end result that I want to get to. I can reason backwards to find out the nature of our man\u2019s dream work. Wick and Vi meet a pair of entitled pricks in a Mercedes which is actually a UFO from the Absolute Continuum. They resemble a man and a woman with smooth skin instead of faces. The entitled prick woman unlocks her trunk, and Wick takes out an egg. It has a leathery shell like a turtle egg, or maybe a jellied covering like a frog egg.. Maybe the shell has galaxies in it? And it hatches after they get it home and set it on a nest in the chicken pen. Some stuff oozes out. I call it smeel. It looks like whiskey in water and breathing it gets you high. Ta da! Glorp<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Absolute Continuum oozes out, yes. Upshot? Vi and Wick nullify some potential threat from the Absolute Continuum? And they normalize our relations to the One\/Many civilizations of the transfinite cosmos?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cFive Eggs\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, August, 2019, 24\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. More info on my Paintings page.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

I did a painting with five eggs in it. They are, I might now recklessly claim, an objective correlative for the object in my story. I could <\/em>have my egg have a branching fractal Russian Doll sequence of smaller eggs in it. But that\u2019s corny. Plain eggs. They contain, respectively an elephant, a snake, a gnome, sick yolky ylem, and a metaquark. Or, for the last two, how about an anthill, and a congeries of math symbols. Or a squawky bird instead of the symbols. I want a swirly Absolute Continuum. I can hardly wait to imagine and describe our world after the smeel comes out and gets Wick and Vi high. Also anxious that I won\u2019t be able to do it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sylvia and I went to see Paul Simon at the huge 1920s Fox Theater in Oakland. Wonderful concert, very inspiring. \u201cAngels in the architecture\u201d\u009d Paul says in one song. The bright, highly saturated colored stage lights pointing at us some of the time, blinking on and off.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The entitled prick aliens, and the dream, and smeel egg are just a means to the end <\/em>, which is to be flooding our reality with the Absolute Continuum\u2014although the Absolute Continuum was<\/em>, always already here. Because Everything is Everything<\/em>. So, um, if the transfinite\/infinitesimal visons were always here, why didn\u2019t we notice? Well, maybe they\u2019re always here, but it\u2019s hard for the average person to notice <\/em>. Until we get those good old whiskey-in-water smeel swirls from the leathery egg.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Our normal waking state is a type of dream, as G. I. Gurdjieff would say. And if it\u2019s only if we really <\/em>wake up that we can perceive the AC. The scene of smeel wakes us. And the alien denizens of the Absolute Continuum, and they\u2019re fully awake, they can handle the blaze of info and noise and transifnitude. We\u2019re, like, on the nod most of the time, and then we go even deeper on the nod and sleep and have states that even we <\/em>realize are dreams. But, even our waking states are dreams as well. But a nice big whiff of smeel wakes us up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

On the drive back from the beach after the entitled pricks give them a smeel egg, Wick can be like I was on Memorial Day, 1970, when I\u2019d taken acid on the Livingston campus of Rutgers, and Sylvia was driving us a mile or two back to our apartment at 43 Adelaide Avenue in Highland Park, with ten-month-old daughter Georgia in my lap…and I thought I was the one driving<\/em>. And I was telling this to Sylvia. So Wick will think he\u2019s driving the car back to Los Gatos, even though Vi is driving.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Passage that makes me laugh, even though I\u2019m not going to use it:<\/p>\n

Vi and Wick scrambled into their car, with Vi at the wheel. She got the engine roaring, and squealed the tires on the way out. Wick was cradling his giant alien egg in his lap. He unzipped his fly to have sex with the alien egg. \u201cDon\u2019t, Wick,\u201d\u009d said Vi.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pushing it and pushing it, like a car stuck in the snow, not letting up, rocking it, pushing some more. And throwing in some weird crazy shit that seems like fun. Here\u2019s an email note to my mad mathematician friend Nathaniel Hellerstein about where the story is right now.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m working on a story where this guy keeps dreaming of being at a math seminar on the top floor of the math building at Berkeley. The speaker is a large sea anemone with a head at the end of each tentacle. And they guy can never quite understand the talk, but finally he naps long enough to get it, after twenty tires. And then a man and woman with no faces (just smooth lumpy skin) show up and give him a gelatinous egg, said to be a bud off the anemone. He puts it into his chicken coop at home to hatch. Goes to sleep. When he awakes it\u2019s the next morning, and two of the chickens have become real estate agents and are knocking at his door. Also…his space has become Absolutely Continuous. Waiting now to see what happens next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Chickens <\/b><\/p>\n

Maybe the aliens are realtors. And they take on the form of extra chickens in Wick and Vi\u2019s coop. I love the idea of chickens as realtors. Alien realtors is a move I\u2019m lifting from a 1964 P. K. Dick tale called \u201cThe War With The Fnools.\u201d\u009d Wanting to check PKD\u2019s wording, which I could almost <\/em>remember, I found the story on a Russian pirate site called \u201csickmyduck<\/a>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cGood morning, sir,\u201d\u009d the Fnool piped. \u201cCare to look at some choice lots, all with unobstructed views? Can be subdivided into \u2014\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as you\u2019re here,\u201d\u009d the first of the remaining Fnools said to Lightfoot, \u201cwhy don\u2019t you put a small deposit down on some valuable unimproved land we\u2019ve got a listing for? I\u2019ll be glad to run you out to have a look at it. Water and electricity available at a slight additional cost.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s my photographer\/cinematographer friend Eddie Marritz<\/a> that we saw in SF over Xmas. He took the picture of me that’s higher up on the page, passing my new Leica Q2 back and forth.<\/p>\n

And that’s it for Everything Is Everything<\/em> for today. I’m working on a much improved new new draft that I might be posting soon, also more of my notes for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A crazy new SF adventure\u2026with entitled realtors from the infinite subdimensions. So\u00a0 my last novel\u00a0Juicy Ghosts is out there, and I\u2019ve been idle for a few months, so now\u2014what to do? Nescio. That\u2019s Latin for \u201cI don\u2019t know, son.\u201d\u009d Don\u2019t know what I\u2019ll write next, don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll ever write again. But I\u2019ll start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13536"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13556,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13536\/revisions\/13556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}