{"id":4435,"date":"2012-11-05T15:18:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T23:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4435"},"modified":"2013-06-18T12:54:53","modified_gmt":"2013-06-18T20:54:53","slug":"a-night-of-telepathy-hidden-aliens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/05\/a-night-of-telepathy-hidden-aliens\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Night of Telepathy.” Hidden Aliens."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been posting about telepathy or teep <\/a>recently. And in the novel I\u2019m working on, The Big Aha<\/em>, my characters Morton Plant and Loulou Sabado are now connected by teep.<\/p>\n


\n \u201cNight of Telepathy,\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the image.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

And today I finished a big new painting of the couple, and it\u2019s called Night of Telepathy<\/em>. I posted a draft of it the other day. Note that the picture now includes six little rats. They\u2019re alien beings called jumbies. I\u2019ll be talking about then below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Morton and Loulou met at a picnic in Louisville\u2014the scribbly drawing above was my rough plan for the chapter about them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I got interested in the awkwardly drawn figures in the lower right corner of my drawing. It\u2019s hard to draw that badly and childishly if you\u2019re paying attention. Expression at a deeper level. Despite the labeled names in my original sketch, I now think of these two as being my characters Morton and Loulou.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking for something new, I put theses two into a painting that I jokingly called \u201cThe Louisville Artist.\u201d\u009d I\u2019ve posted this image before.<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s up with those six little rats in my \u201cNight of Telepathy\u201d\u009d painting?<\/p>\n


\n \u201cLoulou and Skungy,\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, February, 2012, 30\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the image.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Rats play an integral part in The Big Aha<\/em>. I did a painting involving Loulou and a rat all the way back in February, 2012, when I posted <\/a>about it. Not that I had any solid ideas at all about my novel then. The paintings really do guide me. And then I ended up writing Chapter One about a quantum wetware rat.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the morning after their big Night of Telepathy together, Morton and Loulou are talking about aliens. Morton is narrating.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always had a thing for space aliens,\u201d\u009d I said, sidestepping a capped youth steering a roadhog limo. The six-legged pig had a depression on his back, with two rows of passenger seats. Funny that the limo had a chauffeur driver. An absurd luxury these days.<\/p>\n

Loulou was still thinking about my remark. \u201cIf there\u2019s aliens at all, the likeliest place to find them might be in the cosmic mind mode,\u201d\u009d she said, <\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you mean?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always hear rustling and scrabbling when I\u2019m teeping,\u201d\u009d said Loulou. \u201cLike there\u2019s things that creep around beneath our reality.\u201d\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m deeply into the notion of there being odd critters living behind straight-reality\u2019s sets. Like rats on a sound stage. The unseen, ghostly Qwetland darters.<\/p>\n

It would be too corny to have the secret aliens be bug-eyed-monsters in UFOs. Better if they\u2019re tachyonic, subdimensional, crooked-beetle, spirit-like beings emerging from an alternate view of reality. \u201cMighty Mites From Quantum Land.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Note that I\u2019ve already written about these kinds of aliens as \u201csubbies\u201d\u009d in my novels Postsingular<\/em><\/a>, and its sequel Hylozoic<\/em>, and in \u201cElves of the Subdimensions<\/a>\u201d\u009d with Paul DiFilippo.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The subbies relate to the quantum wetware thing of The Big Aha<\/em>. You plug into the cosmic wave function and it\u2019s wiggy. And you can get stuck in this merged state, you\u2019re hearing the \u201cvoices of the gods,\u201d\u009d you\u2019re lost, talking to all the objects around you.<\/p>\n

Scuttlers behind the baseboards of reality, yeah. I like to do a seen-from-the-corners-of-the-eyes routine about these Qwetland darters, or I might call them jumbies\u2014creatures that live out in the analog mindspace. The heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we\u2019re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes\u2014those are alien beings.<\/p>\n

Putting it differently, the jumbies can be figure\/ground kinds of creatures\u2014they were always here, but we weren\u2019t noticing them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The word jumby, sometime spelled jumbee, is a Caribbean word for ghost. I remember my sister-in-law Noreen telling me about them in Grand Turk in the British West Indies. In the town of Grand Turk, they have zigzag boards on the ridges of houses called \u201cjumby boards.\u201d\u009d These are meant to keep those Qwetland darter spirits from alighting on your house like pigeons.<\/p>\n


\n\u201cThe Lovers,\u201d\u009d by Rudy Rucker, 24 x 20 inches, January, 2012, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

As long as I\u2019m running so many of my Big-Aha<\/em>-related paintings in today\u2019s post, I\u2019ll also put in my painting from January, 2012, called \u201cTelepathy\u201d\u009d or \u201cThe Lovers.\u201d\u009d Here\u2019s a link to my old post <\/a>about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been posting about telepathy or teep recently. And in the novel I\u2019m working on, The Big Aha, my characters Morton Plant and Loulou Sabado are now connected by teep. \u201cNight of Telepathy,\u201d\u009d oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40\u201d\u009d x 30\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the image. And today I finished a big […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-the-big-aha"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435","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=4435"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4725,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions\/4725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}