“I like its obscurity so that we can play about with it—interpret it different ways, and the beauty and fantasticallity of the details—the butterflies and the elephant, for instance.”

VIRGINIA WOOLF, in a letter to V. Sackville-West dated 15 September 1924

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream. He wrote me: what I am about to show you is not a dream in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with those vague impressions we experience while sleeping, but with what nocturnal dreaming suggests: the possibility of dreaming in our waking life.

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.

Von Neumann’s Elephant describes a problem in recreational mathematics: the challenge is to construct a planar curve in the shape of an elephant using only four arbitrary parameters. The origin of this stunt is a (possibly apocryphal) discussion between physicists John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi. One day the pair were sunning themselves next to the large pool at the hotel in Montreux where their friend, Vladimir Nabokov, was living. While sipping a watermelon daiquiri from a tall glass wrapped with a delicate pink towelette, Von Neumann said (quite out of the blue or perhaps he was resuming a conversation they’d begun earlier when they were out sailing), “Why so many input parameters, Enrico? Your calculations suffer from an overfitting problem.” Enrico Fermi was silent for a moment, then decided to go on the attack by asking, “So John, how many arbitrary parameters do you use for your calculations?” After considering this rallying gambit, Von Neumann replied, “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Enrico was about to inquire about which genre of pachyderm Von Neumann had in mind when Vladimir Nabokov presented himself in short pants that showed off his dimpled knees. Nabokov waved a butterfly net and said, “Wiggle this, Johnny Boy!”

Later that night, at the hotel bar, the three of them tricked out in elaborately embroidered dinner jackets, Nabokov told his friends that they were wasting their time solving simple problems with such a limited number of fixed parameters. “The real world, the world in which we live, is one vast nonequilibrium system.” “Vladimir is right, Enrico,” said Von Neumann. “Forget fitting elephants whose trunks wiggle at the invocation of five parameter functions! What we really need is a Theory of Nonelephants!”

Putting Von Neumann’s Elephant in plainer terms: rationality, rational logic in the form of mathematics is adequate to prove anything. The only limitation is the actual, what is. But here distinctions are made. On what basis do we say “this is” and “this is not”? Rationality will help anyone uncomfortable with the possible objectivity of their experience of an image that appears in the imagination by saying, “Oh yes. That happens under the circumstances where matter does such & such…” What I experience in my imagination is like what happens in Las Vegas. So the point of contention is shifted to what is defined as fundamental, what is defined as objective. We say that our dreams, as are our thoughts, are private experiences … they are not out there in the world … but what do we really mean by that? What purpose does it serve to make such a distinction between inner and outer?

Would insideness versus outsideness be the ontological category against which objects, things, actions, events and relative stabilities stand out? Only in science fiction does an absolute distinction between inner and outer appear as a serious object of discourse in a hotel bar in Montreux. Even novelists draw their imagery from science fiction, but without really realizing that they are doing so.

“Even a Theory of Nonelephants should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction,” said Nabokov to his two friends. One of his dimpled knees, now hidden under a crease of black satin, was bent beneath the mahogany bar top.

“Ah yes, the theory of nonelephants or a theory without elephants!” said Enrico Fermi. “Tell us more, Johnny. We’re all ears.” And in saying this, Fermi placed his hands near his ears and flapped them (the hands) while swinging an extemporized and imaginary trunk which all three men saw with utter clarity.

The elephant is the fact, the stable thing, the repeatable thing, the proper subject of actual science. What we encounter in nonequilibrium systems, systems that are constantly changing in complex ways, is that actual science can’t cope. And what we learn from physical systems with large numbers of particles is that new stable forms emerge from the chaos. At higher levels of reality, new fundamental forms come into being which cannot be accounted for by any microscopic theory. The macroscopic world will always contain or manifest phenomena that are not reducible to more fundamental descriptions made of elements appropriate to the lower level.

Science fiction or, rather, fictional science. Actual science asks how? Fictional science asks why & what? I knew from day one of my general physics course that I wanted to study fictional science: why is there gravity? what is it? Actual science only deals with time, and the specific form of time known as mechanical time, the time that corresponds to the functioning of clocks. Fictional science (a branch of theology perhaps) deals not only with time, but with eternity. But fictional science does not (should not!) stop at eternity, but it also considers (perhaps even functions in) the untimely.

For my next trick I will write a book with the title Von Neumann’s Elephant, a book that begins with an acknowledgement of weakness: (as Deleuze says) one can only write about what one doesn’t know or knows badly … we must write at the frontiers of knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from ignorance and transforms one into the other.

Von Neumann’s Elephant

No one will remember what sort of creature Von Neumann’s elephant was unless they conceive of it as a complicated hygienic service belonging to everyone (probably something like “spray & wash”). I remember a time when such people wanted to know what the world was like before the acid snow began. A problem in recreational math assumes a position in which we place dominoes on end in complex patterns so that in tipping one … all are there to fall. No, he was not a professional repeater. Repetition was his avocation : a way of constantly moving forward … all those photographs of clouds consisted in constructing a planar region whose borders will be placed in a final position once … of the rest, the leftovers (lagniappe) … for all he could tell, it was like one of those opportunistic curves that come in the shape of an elephant. The parasitic fish into which they will press needles form regular arrays of polygons and feed off excretions from only four fixed parameters. In the End of Times, fish will settle down. In general, a unit of dynamic viscosity, will exert a tangential force of one dyne per square centimeter causing a velocity change of one centimeter per second between two parallel planes separated by one centimeter in a liquid … the bodies of beached leviathans originated from a discussion about what to do with the quantities of discarded plastic … for the whole system ,, considering : it’s better to use a paper straw or a washable straw that you can carry with you in your pocket or purse … but even though sometimes your musical offerings will approximate small epiphanies … disagreements between physicists over slight displacements in volume may set the hygienic service into an uncontrolled spiral, but just so they … Von Neumann and Enrico Fermi both took up the problem of the whole assemblage of needles, each figuring they could busily polish up dangling polynomial expressions which some authors invoke. Fermi’s friend, John von Neumann, readjusted the parameters so that the equation fit the available data to perfection. They congratulated themselves. We will not be sidelined by passing trends! We are not those who, when asked how many hide from the Great Santa, reply with figurative statements! Our only concern is for the advancement of Philistines whose arbitrary parameters are used as a form of currency. Now it’s all spent, how do we know that everything little birds feed on will not be consumed by calculations? Von Neumann replied by holding up four fingers. His one man show once lasted for hours and is now the property of a collector who lives in Berlin or perhaps London. The joke was that Von Neumann once claimed he cleaned the teeth of crocodiles with only three fixed parameters, before boasting, “I can fit an elephant up the Great Santa’s backside!” These are lines of credit that the Good Witch Glinda drew upon when consulting the Great Record that wrote itself. The Wicked Witch of the Wild West screamed, “With five I can make Von Neumann wiggle his willy!” Bad witch! His are maxed out now and we have reached our limit. Sand witch! Is that your real trunk? By this, he meant that there are limits beyond which there’s no end. To a praying person, when he asks her if family simulations relied on one lump or two … It’s back there somewhere, isn’t it? There is nothing left in the cabinet. Is she a Good Witch or Bad Witch? How many input parameters would you need to … At the sight of the Great Santa, she says, “Oh I’m not a witch at all!”

The impossibility of repetition presupposes an overfitting of bodies with our hands. “Why should I repeat myself? I’m Dorothy Gale from Kansas!” At the time (September, a time for beginning novels, even short ones), I was conducting research for a book about L. Frank Baum, the creator of Oz and the author of the first fourteen Oz books … “L.” stands for Lyman, a name that Frank Baum disliked, but not enough to efface it completely. Even though I loiter at the edges of academia, I’ve never endured an official academic appointment, though I’m told I would be a dynamic lecturer because of my theatrical background. I am a failed actor who succeeded in avoiding politics completely. One never knows … what interested me were phenomena that were related to the problem of explosive death. If we die before the eyes of the Great White Santa and not the Wicked Witch of the East, how can we possibly define our core complex numbers in terms that both Santa & Wicked Easty recapitulate? When I posed such problems at unofficial seminars conducted in the Japan Room or the Zulu Room of the Student Union, everyone would rise, bursting into spontaneous applause. “This figure that I’ve drawn on the chalkboard represents merely a cross-section of what Von Neumann’s Elephant could be if only we would believe.” This is an example of something I would say to break the silence of their gazes. I am the sort of person whose friends and lovers are quick to say: “He’s a real pain in the ass.” The use of compass directions in Baum’s universe to indicate good & evil: our hands were raised toward the North, the Realm of Glinda the Good. A sentinel stands erect, arm outstretched pointing in a direction that’s not South. Let us all draw elephantine shapes on figurative chalkboards.

During one of these informal seminars, a poet, a student of the great Álvaro de Campos, herself now an elderly woman, Loana Marina Waldenstein, made her final public appearance. You laugh—but it’s true! One of my volunteer students asked if her real name was Gertrude Wallenbeck, and after waving away an imaginary gnat, she agreed to read a selection from her biography of De Campos. The passage she read concerned a conversation De Campos had with his master Alberto Caeiro on the subject of repetition. Waldenstein recorded what De Campos wrote that Caeiro said, “We should read everything as if for the first time, because it really is the first time we are reading something even if it is something we read everyday.” As an example, Caeiro claimed that he read the Forty-second Sonnet of Shakespeare every single day.

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;

That she hath thee, is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that ouches me more nearly.

Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:

Thou dost hove her, because thou know’st I love her;

And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,

Suffering my friend for my sake to approve her.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain,

And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;

Both find each other, and I lose both twain,

And both for my sake lay on me this cross:

But here’s the joy; my friend and I are one;

Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

“I could read this poem every day and I would never read the same poem,” said Caeiro. “The poem is not just what is on the page but it is also what’s inside me, the poem’s reader.” To which, Waldenstein reports, De Campos replied, “A poem is thus the river in which Heraclitus bathed each morning of his life.”

Our loan words bias rising & falling textual interest levels as our hands form animal shapes whose natural home is the African Savannah. That we were ever really in western Kansas subsequently became an active food group. Why is it that we, with our hands pointing this way and that, will be nowhere at all at the same time? This could be a research subject for recreational slaves of the Great White Santa or the Great White Santa could give paid holidays to the members of his “work force.” The same thing could be said for Oklahoma. Listening to mathematics broadcast on shortwave radio hoisted up out of us the junk food that we had lived by. Little Dotty understood from the annunciated functional equations that she would go in search of the Time Crystal that was quickly vanishing from our lives. Before we will become miserable somewhere in this strange world, we will learn that the whole point was to look good without any clothes on. Yes, she was desperate but she will at least see a place where she can stand proudly upon a rounded stone. An angel had gone to sleep there on the couch in the front room and was able to carry on watching TV happy with lots of old friends to dream about. Then she woke up and flew away because she’d dreamed that the true purpose of art was to teach one how to be alone. It is thanks to our Big Screens that we don’t want to experience reality as a tiny resonating sphere. It’s a little crazy to think that just a few decades ago, little screens and high-speed muscle cars were places where Lady Godiva’s flower children danced and played. She pushed up her nose at Dotty’s vacuum despite the fact that the kitchen needed mopping. Why can’t the floor stay clean? Dotty asked. Let’s put the vacuum cleaner inside and wait for our unlimited data plans to mature. Amen! The present world is not the past precisely because our supply of superfluid helium 3 is trapped in moonrock. Suppose that we use conventional cryogenic techniques … what then? For an extra two points: Time Crystals are commonly classified as hazardous materials by which international watchdog organization?  But an internal study revealed … an eternal world where past results do not indicate future magnetic compass directions …

“a contagion of elephants”

I’ve been reading Roberto Bolaño for more than twenty years now, but we had a falling out early on, a silly dispute, completely my fault ,, I couldn’t really blame Bolaño, how could I since it wasn’t his fault that his books created (for him : ?) a second life … the books appeared to be writing themselves. That books should behave this way (I was … a form of intinction … dipped in a bowl of jealousy, envy soup : I too wished for my books to write themselves … did I really?) … if I typed furiously for the next ten years (a form of typing practice inspired not just by Bolaño, but by Jack Kerouac, one of the greatest American typists who ever lived ,, look at him go, man!) it was so that … I too was constructing a golem in my subterranean atelier, a ten-fingered golem that could go on typing long after I’d leveled-up in the Great Game.

We made up, Bolaño and I, when 2666 was published in English, but it was a cool friendship until we got drunk together at that bar-café in … where he confessed to me his savage & true woes. Since then, Bolaño and I have been like brothers.

Poetry bound us together. I didn’t realize it at first. His seeming earnestness was really passion, a belief in the deeper sense of wanting it to be true : that Poetry was not the property of grammarians, but a transformative force that would reshape the world ,, that Poetry was the acid solution capable of dissolving the Wicked Witch of the West.

If Bolaño & I had never met, would I have become a poet? That’s difficult to say … there are other universes. But the fact (here) is that ,, if I became a poet, he certainly played a role, guiding me. And Jack Paradise too, of course, with his Tom-Baker hairdo and old Navy pea-sea coat, pipe clenched in his teeth (+ smoke rings), ol’ Capt’n Jack, my Capt’n. I wanted Poetry to have been as important to the Fisher Kings, but when we were in our twenties, our eyes were full of novels, poems were for …

Where I’m going with this :: there are two directions in time pointing from “You Are Here” and that’s one pointing back beyond the limit of History and one pointing forward to the Future, Post-History. Now (as we all know) there are forces which aim to keep us firmly locked in History, that big room. The key is hidden in plain sight, but it’s disguised : it looks like poetry, it quacks like poetry, but it ain’t Poetry. Robert Graves knew that and so did Roberto Bolaño and his band of Infrarealists. Graves reminds us that before Prose, there was true (original) Poetry, Poetry that was language unbound, before writing systems, Stone Age Poetry, the vestiges of which are detectable still in myth (in Legends & Labyrinths). What the Infrarealists knew was that this Poetry isn’t just behind us, we don’t have to invent a Time Machine and go back, this same Poetry is our future, it is the key that will unlock the room of History and bring us to the Promised Land in which we are really & truly free. Like Benjamin Péret said when being interrogated by the Brazilian police: Elephants are contagious.

A poet about to write a poem … the root of misunderstandings can be plotted in either dimension, along the easy axis or easy plane defined by nulla dies sine linea and a point particle. A poet is present when they go out into the neighborhood of powerful hard axis magnets … PDF’d or Instapapered … a poem can, in fact, write itself : ? Science then, according to my informal investigation machine, begins when propositions are bookmarked or liked. When snow is still falling, fictional science is poised to become reality if the magnet’s needle wiggles in a five parameter vector space. As we survey—my diary gossip—and the words, language on the web (copied & wasted), enact Christian Bök’s prediction for the poetics of an imaginary science : “The tyranny of truth has increased our esteem for the lie and the tyranny of reason has increased our esteem for the absurd such that the praxis of Vogon science always involves the praxis of Vogon poetry … and see if I don’t.”

The acid snow, actual this time, in a new direction … the work to fertilize is more delightful : I saw before the magnetization fell, that the charm of an elephant is not in the study of plants. The diaries I read by other writers came to a resting point between the lines parallel or perpendicular to the rejection of false ideas. When managed as information, she would lie down in the snow and make angels.

Monday 30

We called ourselves The Highlanders because that was the name of the coffee shop where we met, hung out, studied, chatted, killed time, etc. A subfaction of our group (Travis Harrington, Isabel Medina, Mark Puig, & Lyra Toscani) had agitated for the name “The Diagnosticians” since (the argued) the true function of the poet was to diagnose the ills of culture & society, but it was The Highlanders that stuck.

To have called ourselves The Bellringers would have been inspired since we spent as much (if not more time) in The Chimes, across the street, drinking beer, eating crawfish étouffée and hushpuppies (on Sundays coz in those days you could drink beer on the Lord’s Day without eating hushpuppies : two for a dollar). If I ever write a fictional account of our days together there & then I will call us The Bellringers … ask not for whom … right?

I won’t pretend to know anything beyond the fact that I wanted to be a poet. We all wanted to be poets, the sort of poets who would write novels and screenplays too coz a poet’s gotta eat … and drink!! So a lot of effort went into figuring out how to write novels that would sell. Peter even ran an evening course for us based on “The Writer’s Journey” : this formula is guaranteed. … but I had some half-baked ideas based on my study of the Gospels and a careful reading of the Acts of the Apostles.

“No, it’s all right there in the Bible,” I said to Lonnie. She wasn’t my girlfriend, but she’d crashed on my couch a few times and I’d seen her naked. Lonnie said I was full of shit, but I could quote scripture and verse. “Jesus was a communist and so were the early disciples. They held everything in common, no private property, you see.”

“Jesus wasn’t a commie,” said Lonnie. “Communism didn’t even exist back then.”

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Jesus was an anarchist. It was only later, after Christianity became the official religion of the Empire that Jesus got turned into the King of Kings.”

“Give it up,” said Lonnie. “Communism doesn’t work.”

“Capitalism doesn’t work,” I said.

Then Lonnie drug out that old argument about how if people weren’t forced to work to earn a living, they’d sit around on their lazy asses all day and do nothing. I rolled my eyes. “You got it all wrong,” I said. “It’s capitalism that forces people to be lazy and sit on their asses all day long. Most work is bullshit. People are willing to work if that work is meaningful and connected in some tangible way to providing what they need … and I’m not just talking about material conditions either, but spiritual ones. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, ‘Consider the lilies of the fields…’”.

I envied Ernesto Santiago who wasn’t a poet, but a literary critic or maybe he was more of a literary fanboy. Ernesto nestled in the umbra of Walker Percy and the penumbra of Charles Peirce. My long conversations with Ernesto at Highland were extremely educational. I was studying physics and had done my undergraduate work at a small Roman Catholic college where the core curriculum was made up of the so-called “Great Books”. I knew Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine backwards and forwards, but I’d never even heard of Jacques Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari, or even Roland Barthes. Ernesto must have thought I was a complete yokel even if I could rattle off all of the 137 Fragments of Heraclitus. Because I was studying to be a scientist, Ernesto thought it wise to begin my education with Michel Foucault, his book, The Order of Things. So began my four years of intense reading of French Theory. It was right when I was about to complete my Ph.D. when Alan Sokal revealed his hoax. Ernesto and I read all the exchanges in Social Text and (while I’ll admit that my initial feeling was unease ,, concern that maybe the Emperor of French Theory was butt-naked) I decided that the joke was on Sokal, not French Theory. We don’t have to do an exegesis of that episode of “intellectual history” to get where I ended up in 1997 with a newly minted Ph.D. in physics and some serious questions about what I was really supposed to be doing. I mean, I wanted to be a poet. I was a poet, and now I had a way to earn my bread. I was reading books like Anti-Oedipus and laughing my ass off thinking, hey! why can’t physics be this fun? Have you ever browsed through an issue of Nature or Science? Talk about unreadable! … well, maybe not unreadable, but certainly not any fun : where was the analysis explicating the Q-ness of the P-ness in conjunction with the B-ness of the A-ness : ?? All the writing that scientists did fell into two categories: apologetics and reports. Either they were trying to dumb things down so anyone could understand it (popular science writing, a form of cheerleading) or they were talking to each other about their latest breakthroughs and discoveries in a language that very few people could understand. What I wanted to read though was the Anti-Oedipus of physics. Who had written such a book? Why didn’t physicists have journals like Social Text? Journals that you could actually sit down and read and profitably get something out of? Poetry and science have to be brought back together, fused into a single discipline, I said to Ernesto. He shook his head. It can’t be done. That would be squaring the circle. We’ll see about that, I said.

“the Oklahoma sky”

a huge snow angel with great … Look! she said. A new direction emerges whenever we stand at the highest symmetry axis of the future in which we are free : they will tell you that “it’s not true” that “it isn’t science” that “where’s the profit?” ,, belief is the desire to get to that destination : but it could be true, if we work for it … birds and rivers and hills ,, everything : only a place with flowers … and the distant dark star ,, Oh I cut the cherry tree down in 1956, it uses a different set of design parameters. There is no need to light up every campfire respectively. Silver falls in the winter, gold falls in autumn. Dottie lies down in the snow next to Wilbur … sweeping wings. The spring snow of the cottonwoods … what are you doing in here on such a beautiful day! I picked up all the heads and put them back in the order I’d heard about from friends. Plucked from the Suggestion Box and parsed more than they were read. A roll of the dice is worth two on the road … as the road turns … these are the days when we are alive and still on a new trajectory that leads us to Oz : traveling through a graveyard with a suitcase full of honey-colored sparks. Another form in the world, just trying to find a way to visit Dotty’s devilishly playful snow angel, a call back number written on the inside hem of a long white dress that she had made instead of requesting prior authorization. The single compass we carry will point us to the arrowheads along buffalo trails. Place your hand on the wound to feel tomorrow what could be felt today when she was small and moving her legs out and in, across a field of many magnetic completion points. Dottie & Wilbur made snow angels inline with current design practice. Once, I decided to live in a place that would seem contrary to an active computing space … it might not right now, but in the future it could … she had even scooped up the needles, large and small, and flung them into the Oklahoma sky before Wilbur had a chance to hang the halo. Turn and go back in throbbing pain. No assumption about diaries. We don’t make use of only the top of our heads. Out in the snow around ,, along the track (on the Other Side) : they said she was a runaway. Down! Back the way you came! Do you need to see its root structure to know that a diary is always written for an audience that doesn’t want to read? Those factors that influence one another in continuing to make the world ugly : he just talks and talks and talks to himself. Shout a warning to the nations! Even a murderous place … honey, have you seen my sword of God? A tree lies dying. I renounce Oklahoma’s turnpikes. Here we are, in a place where only some are able to swing the image of footsteps in the snow … I’m just trying to find a way to you : footprints all over the snow lead to far points we don’t understand. There is something in this. Heavy booted footprints, passive, vain and cruel : none hung so freely as those who hang from the Oklahoma sky. As we approach the end of the Web … impossible to find anything written by direct perturbations in the system. All our search engines direct us to authorized (monetized) sources … Wikipedia entries repacked, rewrapped, AI-enhanced … nothing new … Babylon, that mighty city … history has lost its most private frame, a form that suggests we should get to the next click. The reason lies in both fantasy and society, a tornado struck causing significant damage to history. We are gripped by trees and power lines. Towers fall to make our own private histories. But this begs the question: have we placed ourselves in the position of saving those who are broken in the dust? Deluded by fantasy, our own … Oklahoma’s turnpikes are a collective fantasy of the existential car chase challenge. It is through these several methods of the noir mystery writer that necessarily distinguish one turnpike from another. Each turnpike involves a mainline, modern Western, a dystopian allegory of fantasy and history wherever sidegate toll plazas lead to our surveillance society. No matter what uses to which they are put, we pay in cashless datastreams … a kind of love letter to the musical ear somewhere between the earth & the Oklahoma sky.

The happiest day in all my outer life! let me tell you a story ,, risking going back too far since such scenes are exacted from the archive with the dark triangular eye of the time scoop. The day ,, the day !!

Picture the farm anyway you like, this is your story too. What I see is the old shed full of tools that belonged to my great-grandfather (I knew him not, alas) and lumber / at the end of the garden of delights is where I found her …

and half-way between (around his middle where the serpent was … that night in the chicken house when he reached in to gather the eggs for the next morning’s omelet / sautéed yellow oyster mushrooms — an earthly aroma — and cheddar cheese made of milk from Blackie the Guernsey cow) the old chicken house and a dilapidated barn with a rusting tin roof — that old barn! is the scene of a bitter comedy where on the southside was a small corral where each morning (with my grandfather — I knew him well) we fed the cattle and there was a metal stock where the milk cow, a Guernsey named Blackie, would stand and munch alfalfa pellets while I squeezed jets of warm milk from her teets into a stainless bucket —  (each an

Eden in itself) I found a small red wheelbarrow — so much depends upon / this red wheelbarrow (a conveyance) / glazed with rainwater / beside the whitewashed chicken house : the rest of the farm center ended up under a foot of snow again, this time playing dot dot dot with the dotty lady writing doodles in black ink on her white white white skin in daylight. Somewhere echoing

quite the most

extraordinary,

the most unheard of

and undreamed of,      /     humorously,

daintily, exquisitely fascinating object

I had ever come across in all

my brief existence … thus far!

“writing” which is like “real” life—as it is lived from hour to hour, day to day, cannot be a novel!      acid snow is an impossibility! #NL002VNE

The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only the one who walks the road on foot learns the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurling plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a soccer coach positioning players on the field.

Together we will spend hours—enchanted hours—painting the barn red : this is a fantasy the mind makes.

wheeling bricks and chasing conscious bats from the barn wielding tennis rackets : if someone is wearing a huge red bow tie offer them your copy of The Iliad. Show them Book Eleven where the Lady of Sorrow makes her entrance. Be like the woodcutter who desires wine, that sweet wine that takes hold of your senses—it could be like accepting a dogma of some kind … the best dogmas are the ones that remain still, asleep in front of a warm fireplace where they can be easily discarded upon waking up.

to the chicken house : overhead were disembodied lion tamers fooling the eye, and more enchanted hours in wheeling razzle-dazzle back to the strongly correlated circus … where it will be my turn to comment on Eden. Obviously, the voices of children, the business of Sisyphus, always working on his jokey rewrite of the Lost Books of the Bible, and the imprecations of adults who have forgotten that any canvas defines a rectangle of action. He tiptoes through the mist, just a stone’s throw from the stage where they talked about private dramas. At the end of the corridor was a precipice from which he could jump into the history of Kansas. The Old West has always been unbalanced, a towering vast rock teetering …

again, while genial French filmmakers narrowed by flanks of white roses were busy in and out of the editing suite, revisiting treacherous locations from which they could fall while gazing into the maw of an old & familiar wax-works museum. The need for stringent gun-control laws … because of our very instability and precarious condition.

fluted columns supported the porch on the front of the house where we lived in that wider space surrounded by the morning mist. Did he stop every now and then to ask about the Great Pyramid? Did he raise an inquisitive eyebrow when speculating about the cities “Back East” where one could hear the splashing of water made with both fists while shouting “To hell with your made up Wild West! It’s all desert and emptiness, rolling tumbleweeds and saguaro cacti, rattlesnakes and circling buzzards.” A sign hung over the bar in the saloon to tell us it’s still “Good Ol’ Rock & Roll.” Like in those penny-dreadful magazines … you remember the mall? We used to go to “Picnic Place” (what they called the Food Court) and we’d catch the afternoon matinée with Professor Calculus and Tintin and the movies after … it was the neon sign that said we needed books. The little shop was run by an old man with white wings of hair on the sides of his bald head … short and bald. He told us that the Wild West is a fantasy land that one could enter through a little trap door (painted black) hidden in Picnic Place. “When you go through,” he said in a delightedly conspiratorial tone, “you’ll be in the Land of Neverwas.”

We asked convoluted though somehow good-natured questions of the old bookseller and commended his knowledge of alternate planes of existence …

of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a little red wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused remembrance that whatever I felt would become an instant object of reflection and analysis. He wrote me: Agonize over the nature of life and of consciousness, dreaming versus reality, what has been and what will be, and the possibility of other realities, other levels of existence. They will tell you that the fanatical search for gnowledge prevents you from actively engaging in life itself, but the Search is your Life Line. (The “life” with which they want you to engage takes place in the incoherent and absurd world where weapons are made to prevent war, where science is devoted to destruction, construction to killing, to prolonging the life of the dying, where the most frenzied activity is misdirected.)

They were following the other couple (in separate cars) … he was driving (as usual … what else would he do if he wasn’t gripping the steering wheel?) — the corner where they were supposed to turn was clearly marked. The other couple continued straight on. “They must be using their GPS,” he said. “Not to see the sign like that.” He turned at the appropriate corner and they arrived at the intended destination four minutes ahead of the other couple. Later, he regretted his inability to get lost. “Not taking the correct turn allows you to see landscapes you wouldn’t otherwise have seen,” he said when the other couple explained their apparent error.

self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my attempts to piece together a message that is coming through : the sources tell me … they sat on the couch in their dreaming room as the images formed on the wall, coordinated action of billions of nanoparticles, a kind of sentient mold sensitivity to the cometological conditions of Otherworld. This evening’s presentation: “episode 7” exacted from the archive ,, the tapes were stored in a temperature controlled vault in a bunker located an hour north of New York City … she had posed with him, a photo taken of the two of them with the Angel of Liberty in the background (holding her sword aloft) … she was an original angel, one from another world who’d come through an underwater portal. “You have special abilities,” he’d whispered in her ear before running in lazy circles and flapping his arms like a bird : if only we had a motion-picture camera!

bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless road along which thirty pilgrims paraded, stopping from time to time at the entrance of a cave to scribble prayers on slips of papyrus harvested from the shallow overflows of the Blue, White, and Green Nile. Do you have a message for me? the images projected onto the walls shifted, in both cases, elements were drawn from the original angel’s passage through the Inbetween, a place of exaggerated starscapes, ringworlds, and comets streaking across the heavens — piercing planes ,, shattering screens — “What this implies,” he began, shifting his weight to one side to allow her to rest her heels on his lap, “is that an intelligence rides like the Lone Ranger on the back of Silver (or was it Ruby : ? it’s slipping away). Hi ho!” (The gunslinger’s journey ended when at last he found the Preacher.) Then again … it might be nothing … the message coming through has been recorded and is playing on a loop ,, all you have to do is listen.

succession of such hours … Otherworld is the future in which we are free, he said. The message repeats … a low-power transmitter in orbit ,, a jamming signal blocks the signal so that, even though the message is coming through, it’s lost in the noise ,, we use a lock-in technique … by introducing a sinusoidal signal to modulate the transmissions, we can detect very small changes in the amplitude and relay the signal to remote transcription sites where poets rise before dawn to receive the signal … noise levels are lowest in the hours just before sunrise. It’s important to develop a transcription habit … continual refusal to encode transmissions will result in …

silence

But next morning, though the weather was fine, as the little red wheelbarrow faded from Josh Simm’s consciousness … he’d been working, ferrying little … what were they? the desiccated shells of cicadas? Something he’d read in a book : “Autumn strips bare the century-old trees of the leaves on which the pilgrims had written their prayers to the original angel.” What do we really know of everlasting life? Shelley was sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen reading a book: Poems of Paul Celan. “How can you read ‘Aspen Tree’ and go on reading?” she said, putting the book down.

These are …

Visions of Rome, when Adam was young

Anguish at nightfall, a fisherman’s song

These are …

Notes for an attempted revolution in Alphaville

(there’s no coming back : ??)

necessary elements … a preparation for …

properly lubricated machinery … it’s a machine, yea but in the same sense that a pen or a typewriter is a machine to write with. The machine doesn’t write on its own ,, when played properly it becomes a musical instrument … tools (and their materiality) shape the work and they shape us in our using of them

For Rahab (who swallows the fisher/sinnerman) …

Her arms will be my oars, her tresses my ropes,

When the black fish rises up

From the fathomless depths of the sea.

Death : are we really alive? a question that Josh Simm asks Shelley Pegg ( / Legg, descended from a long line of pirates) … this is a month after Josh “returned” from Alphaville, the aftereffects of which … Shelley considered the question in light of Paul Celan’s poems … Josh’s mind was often haunted by complex problems. No simple answers … no answers at all, not for long.

Why do you write?

Some like it hot … but I rise before the sun so that I can stand in the yard, my bare feet in the cool, moist grass, my eyes turned upwards, there’s Arcturus, the Big Bear, Orion, the Pleiades, the Chambers of the South … regarding the moon in her various phases and Venus, oh Venus … these are the hours when the world is most serene, when my mind is most quiet : writing calms the storms and the swirling winds that trouble the surface of the deep ,, in order to see what worlds are below, the sea creatures … Rahab and his helpers … mermaids, the water’s surface must become still as glass, and writing is a wand or rod (staff) which (when extended) will cool the perturbed waters, soothe them so that what’s hidden will become visible … so many who write, see only their own reflections.

The idea of bodily immortality fills me with horror

Eternal embodied life would be an unjust punishment

for what wrongs?

against whose rules?

The child who wants to play

So enjoys his play that he shrieks

hoots, hollers, dances, shakes his bum

And this joy so annoys the old man Principal

that he condemns the child to Eternal Life

Sit in this hallway for eternity (if you like living so much!)

where

there is no time

no end

only waiting, waiting

for you know not what

Am I happy? Maybe what I feel now is what happiness is.

(How can I be sure?)

Still when the jailer comes to unlock my cell

And I’m allowed to wander around the walled prison yard

My stomach clenches. I flinch from the brightness of the day.

Count the minutes until I’m allowed to go back to my cell which (officially) I hate

But here in my cell is a book of poetry

My solace is reading Pessoa in all his heteronyms

We are all of us, after all, brother-spirits.

Oh, how I understand the deep suffering that was his.

Certainly that is what it is to be happy.

Happiness is not to get what you want. Happiness is to get what you do not want, and learn to appreciate it. The delight of the unexpected.

Only the copied text thus whispers to the soul of the one who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of their inner self that are opened by the text, that endless road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of their mind in the free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits to it out of devotion. The lost art of copying books when recovered will be thus an incomparable guarantee of literary culture, and the transcript a key to our enigmas.

Warning: Success Is Hazardous to Your Health

The extraordinary success of “On the Road”, published in 1957, gave Kerouac the readership and recognition he had long sought, and at the same time unleashed criticism and overwhelming fame which made it so difficult for him to continue his mission as a writer.

Yes, he would have liked that: to have all the advantages and satisfaction of being famous but with none of the bother. Membership in the Order of Sybarites forthcoming.

I fill my days with productive activity

Getting so much done, so much accomplished

Look at my pile of works and weep!

My library is the biggest in the world

And still … how hungry I am.

and the bats which become trapped in our houses at night while we sleep and the genial bookseller at the mall who introduced us to the books that would shape our remembrance of things to come : were there, and all the scents

On his head he had untied shoelaces imitating a Still Life by Archimboldi : “Paris is the City of Death,” she said, taking hold of his hand. “This is something that I simply cannot do in an Italian Fountain while surrounded by mismatched socks and stained wooly scarves wrapped around classical statues wearing boxing gloves,” he said, then kissed her on the mouth. Resist the camera! (Missed your calling again!)

In the future, our world will just be palm trees and empty tables will be tied and flown at half mast to the delight of soft voiced maidens, said Jonathan. Cast off rimmed burdens rolling around regions where in a dream … : Thank you all for coming to tonight’s performance! A review “This Is The Life of a Time Traveler!”

TIME TRAVELER: When I was a child, I selected two outfits that would become iconic: one orange and the other yellow. The orange outfit was decorated with squares, the yellow with triangles.

too small to be considered a monster, it was a monstrosity : the body of a turtle, but its neck was a foot long and it had the head of pterodactyl. Reptile or bird? Neither! It was arachnid — the heart and soul of a scorpion. The thing appeared (perhaps it crawled through the wall) and descended from overhead. I was recounting the episode from The Iliad where Agamemnon kills Bienor and Oileus — and the inward brain was all spattered forth to delight no longer their wives, but the vultures. BEHOLD! The monstrosity descendeth from on high! Brace yourself! Defend…

But it was too late, the scorpion-souled turtle-backed bird of prey plummeted and struck … I couldn’t see who had been the hapless victim, but they were instantly transformed into a bird-skeleton draped with multicolored lays of jewels and strands of beads glittering in the artificial overhead lights. Quick!

In what way could it be said that “a dream confines”? Do not our dreams open up possibilities? show us alternative pathways? Suggest a way of making shandies with orange juice? Who ever imagined being free of the tyranny of lemonade? (The dead return to us in dreams. Or the part of us that is the other, what we have retained of those who have gone ahead into Otherworld : a projected reflection / He wrote me: The dead remain in Otherworld engaged in their Eternal Dance, but the adaptive film which separates our plane of existence from theirs relays a solid image into our phaneron. Under certain conditions a mirror serves the same function.)

From the aft of the ship he considered joining the wake. Here is where I will find a gap, a blank space along the walls. A benign realization obliterated the horde of victims as he managed to steer clear of the reef. On the rocky shore, under the moonlight, three washerwomen … here is one more thing that will keep them thinking : Presidents & CEOs are expendable now, kill as many as you want and others will spring up in its place, but they get nastier each time. This is a warning.

The Food Court! where franchises for Mexican … burritos and tacos … can I interest you in a michelada? some do like it hot indeed! or in dazzling talk, spicy conversation about how our dreams are secretly poisoning us with interlacing spirals — an vertiginous thought! which prevents me from seeing my unwillingness to partake of Italian fast food … meatballs and eggplant parmesan … and for something even more spectacular, reduced from stuttered philosophical formulations urging us to snap pictures of everything, even cold runzas and flautas sprinkled with powdered sugar for posting on our livestreams … yes, we are influencers too!

The voices we overheard spoke of religion & science: “Fortune is our refuge from networks of divergent curves,” wrote DH Lawrence.

because I wanted to see the world and still had to find bodies untouched by controllers changing reality, engineering androids — programmable, immortal — totally material so they don’t require addiction control, something they were … all of them busy … a motif Adam had failed to develop in those early drafts of Lost in the Ruins. Then love refused him for a long time in a relaxed, continuous manner.

I warned the children not to play with the huge alligators (lime green with lemon underbellies) but did they listen! Now here we are, in A Land With No Name. We are all sharks, nailing things down but at the last minute rushing through as the whale moves past us, sparing no one, theories of the novel, not if you try to nail your thesis to the wooden door of a cathedral in Rome. Polly took some snaps of Adam smiling and holding his hammer : proof! of which I am grateful to him for living in the Land of Oz. What was also true, he said to me once when we were eating Mexican food in Picnic Place (or was it Italian? we were drinking red wine … vino rosso, so …), is that this tale will happen again without warning. Anything can go down in a novel. It never bothered me to develop new styles of writing that I could assign to heteronyms — no one would ever believe that all this was the work of a singular author : only a person familiar with the history and religion of ancient Egypt could understand what Virginia Woolf said about human nature: all this search for History! either it kills the novel or the novel kills it, only years later did my father find what was (in the End Times) a search for home. I am a fantasy that gets up and walks away with the film and he had the photos to prove it! The writer who falls in love with realism will nail a thesis to a glass door.

Why do we imagine munchkins as being little people? Are the slippers ruby or silver? Such notions develop from not knowing the source material. Because I’m a fantasy writer, I am here with the little people flooding out of what they were beforehand and particularly aware of every work leading to shopping malls whose mirrors become shades … vertical adjustable blinds.

If in that conversation with Peter about … fiction however realistic is a fantasy … this is the Emerald City … first, maybe having missed my calling : all these years I’ve been trying to squeeze joy out of standard models … it happens in a world that is an invention of shopping malls with that of a photographer despite alternatives to this one : books make munchkins flow out of diamonds … being interested in superconducting orchestrators who are the other way around part of high pressure cells where they comfort themselves by reading the poetic works of Fernando Pessoa … These are my materials. I do not like gaps in our books to come out empty. Of their own best friends … physics is beautiful knowledge of the shopping mall …

shall we step outside?

with one accord the authors write hymns and panegyrics and not only stressful sublimations where the play of glass-covered dioramas like a train station in winter … books can be written without using metaphors or jokey rewrites of stories about huge hoops of light arranged in regular rows … authors can copy epics from the Old Testament. Jonathan played along the ceiling until he came to the pinnacle … he made poetry out of many different atomic configurations. He lived in a time when reality was fused with a time crystal made out of brick monuments. Out of Oz came swimming schools of thought.

Wednesday the 11th

When I finished writing yesterday … actually, before I even finished … while I was writing yesterday, I didn’t experience that sense of fun, elation, and joy that often comes when the words are flowing. Perhaps this is why I write. I want that taste of lightness, to throw off the weight of material. My present process takes words as material, to be shaped and molded, crooked phrases that I must bend and weld together with other phrases. So why should I expect to find a flow? This is taking too long, I said to myself. Instead of escaping time, the resistance of the material kept me in contact with time. How will I get through all of this in the two hours I have for this work? This is a good question. It’s important to ask questions about one’s processes, to think about alternate approaches.

After … yes, this really was after I finished writing yesterday, I asked an important question: Why can’t I write about the process? What prevents me from typing what I’ve written on the note cards that I’ve been making for a different project? Isn’t this text supposed to be a zone of freedom? Here I can write anything in any way I wish to write it?

True. I stop myself from writing about what I’m doing to make this text. Why? Fear. Fear that contemplation of the process will take over and this text will become another instance of the writer contemplating himself writing. Instead of actually writing the book, the task of writing the book becomes the subject. Such literature can be interesting. (When I express concern over what kind of writing is interesting, my primary concern isn’t with “the general reader” but with myself in the future, the one who will be reading these words. My present self may need to write, to put my thoughts into neat, tidy rows, to cool my mind, but my future-reader self may be irritated with his past-writer self’s constant obsession with what he’s doing and how he feels about it.) For example, I find Twenty Years of Mallwor(l)d/s interesting. That text is a collection of notes made over a period of twenty years, between December 2003 and December 2023, about a novel I still haven’t written … or perhaps I have written it. But shouldn’t I write a different sort of book? What if I write the same book over and over again?

A few days ago, I learned that another little book by Enrique Vila-Matas has been translated into English. This one is called Insistence as a Fine Art. It was in reading the online review of Vila-Matas’ book that led me to writing this diary entry here in this text that I’m calling “The Ibis.” What I gleaned from the review was something I already knew, but I needed to be reminded: repetition is art and authors who repeat themselves do so to move constantly forward and to go deeper, we don’t remain on the surface of our repetitions, but we repeat to become submerged. And something else: to attempt to hide the making of the thing is a form of falsehood. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m cleverer than I really am. No, I want you to see how this sausage is made so you can make some for yourself. Teach a person to fish, I say.

“On the Toll Road”

Occam’s razor is being attacked as a cultural bias without rational foundation because rational explanations will be applied to anything with a sticky surface and used to justify even what four out of five reasonable people agree is complete hokum. Belief in pseudoscience and mysticism (both forms of rationality whose presuppositions differ from those used by scientists) is growing for the simple reason that mystics deal with the sort of complex variables that make scientists plug their ears, close their eyes, and chant, “La, la, la, la, la…” Inclusion of Occam’s razor in apples given to pseudoscientists and mystics is an essential factor in eliminating watercooler competition. Seriousness joybuzzkill distinguishes science from superstition & pseudoscience. How Occam’s razor is embedded in foodstuffs is a matter of Bayesian inference (look it up if you half two and get one). Science is primarily the means to discover the simplest descriptions of our world. While that might sound boring …

Take us out of history, because not only do we need Oklahoma’s turnpikes to be collected into categories reflective of the hard sciences, we need to write collectively The Oracular History of Our End Times. Because everybody’s like “Oookay, we got this…” … someone needed to collect our informal utterances into a book … but this is the digital information age : so get real !! The following statement will serve as a preface for our cooperatively written fat book, The Oracular History of Our End Times: “What people say is history is crap. What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, Onan Dumpshit—is only formal history and largely false. What follows is a true history of we the people, the stain-collared multitudes—what we have to say about our bullshit jobs, love affairs, the lies broadcast on FAUX news, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—and since there are more of us then there are of them, our history is BIGGER than theirs and when we tell it good & proper, there won’t be time for kings and queens, CEOs, Presidents, etc. unless they are running for their lives!”

As will be shown, these several methods revealing particularly repeatable events can be predicted using film and television as a ritual sacrifice to open a portal into an alternate dimension where 1,000 turnpikes revolve around a main line and radiate out across the multiverse. Let us not limit our scope to mere mathematical formalism and icons scattered through advertising. When we arrive at the side gate toll plazas, let’s burn them down. Tolls can be expressed using the laws of nature and journalism. Political cartoons are paid for in cash at soft-serve ice cream stands. The science of complex systems, music, and poetry had always been sensitive to staff shortages. Exact-change bays (the so-called “automatic toll booths”) were made available for life in the fast lane. Only narrative accounts of blocked highway systems would have been staffed by boozy revealers. Depending on distinguishable events viewed in hindsight, other forms of comparison between another world in which we are free to come and go as we please and the Toll Plaza World where the One Percent profit from the very air we breathe …

When I was a boy, the Will Rogers Turnpike was made possible by a grant from the I.M. Rational Foundation. Physics is simple once you get the hang of it, but you have to overcome a cyclone tearing through the virtual space of possible data. Built prior to the authorization of the Interstate Highway System … to slip it by people, you must lie to them … relatively similar considerations are, after all, only a cultural bias. A place with an interstate highway system is a place where missiles can be moved from one location to another during an Energy Crisis or a Drought. Magical coupling operators applied to economics take the form of large sunflowers and birds of paradise and the migration of African elephants who dance, sing, and paint … rivers like the Blue Nile and fabulous years like 1956 (the year author Jack Kerouac spent 63 days as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak …to bind a single neuron in isolation takes a village … during those scheduled commercial breaks in the delirious summer of 1956, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days as a U.S. Forest Service Fire Lookout Angel on Desolation Peak in the Mount Baker National Forest in Whatcom-Whatmay County. In this untimely location Kerouac hoped to study language systems at an altitude that is typically reserved for editorial functions. He asked, “Is it possible to use solitude to write?” “You could,” said Japhy, “but it’s probably easier if you use a pencil. Do you have a pencil? I’ve got some disposable ballpoint pens. These things are fuckin’ fantastic! Just don’t feed them to whales.” But Kerouac will be disappointed by such writing implements. He is a man of the typewriter fed by an infinite roll of paper. Still the experiences he recorded in spiral notebooks using disposable ballpoint pens given to him by his friend Japhy (jottings which took the form of journal entries) provided the raw material for two novels: The Dharma Bums (1958) and Desolation Angels (1960). In 2007, a scientist—exploiting the space of possible data—used a sixty-sided die and Occam’s razor to encode the text of Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Peak spiral notebooks as a sequence of nucleic acids to be infused into a virus. Illegible to the human eye: visible only by using a powerful microscope, the resulting encrypted text would be replicated, reproduced, and revised according to viral evolution. In six million years, an alien race will arrive at the ruined remains of our planet long after human beings have perished and they will read the viral text whose origins are traceable to 1956 and Kerouac’s Desolation Peak Experience. After six million years of textual evolution, the aliens will use the viral text to measure the degree of collapse in the multiverse to reverse the polarity of neuron flow in an attempt to discover the origins of Rock & Roll. The paper written by this scientist took seven years to compose and made use of only a single vowel. Kerouac is best known as Sal Paradise, the name he adopted when he wrote On The Road which in 1956 existed only as the yet-to-be famous scroll (or telegraph roll) text. On the Road was published the following year, in 1957, and was written again using all five vowels by Simon Morris (of 51 Totters Lane, Basingstoke) who on the morning of 31 May 2009 typed the words, “I first met Neal not long after my father died…” a sentence which aroused a profound sadness in Morris’ heart. “Why am I sad?” asked Morris. “What am I sad about? What is it that is happening when I feel sadness because of my father, tragically dead?”).

“the space of possible data”

Every conceivable container is upturned while studying the behavior of elephants in the wild.  Types of elephants are classified by their effective mass and there you have it! Tinkering with radios guarantees an endless supply of environmental observables. Other emergent behaviors will be documented by anomalously large densities of electronic radio components. I also found beauty in parsed language fed into the database after their conversion into visual states beyond the level Von Neumann proposed for the acceptable number of parameters to be used in a Theory of Nonelephants. What about numbers in geometry? Master equations imported into Photoshop become animated trilogies. How these mathematical expressions became part of a virtual space of data, naturally led me down the path of appropriation. Observables are flash pumped into online social media outlets that are most characteristic of contemporary mathematics and physics. Text mangling engines transform spam into literary forms. I hadn’t really bothered to attach a disclaimer. Our history which some have given the title The Oracular History of the End Times, is your future, dear reader. Thousands of email addresses determine a minimum statistical uncertainty region. I thought of that before revealing a Bayesian inference similar to the way memes do today. But there are readers who work in predictable ways. Your wasted purchases will be imported into a sound editing application … everybody scream! The abundance of trilogies out there suggest that books have been shipped on the backs of mules or donkeys to locations as remote as Iowa or Nebraska. Transportation methods will be programmed to spit out as music the essential characteristics of genre fiction. Twelve people arrived by US Mail before realizing the possibilities of this distribution method are endless. What I rescued from a sinking boat after the car skidded off the road was removed from its shipping container for placement on the back of an ass. As America did what Shakespeare predicted … and then crashes into Babylon … these spaces will be zoned for comfort by the Postmaster General. [15.ix.24.b] With friendship you can imagine doing without any of the solutions to the Master equation. Yes, it’s like Pink Sky inside. I don’t stand a ghost of a chance. Media you can actually take with you can be posted and updated. Occam’s razor is now available for cutting into real-world challenges. With mathematics you park a car consisting of many components because those constituent parts are known to work together. On or about December 1910, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was followed by explosive death. Pseudoscientists and mystics cut understanding into a space of data and a space of possible data. The Greek expression for “autopilot override” : διαχείριση των οριακών ζωνών … you know how easy it is to report all of Wikipedia’s biographical entries on the revolution. Last chance to save on potential threats to your … with five parameters Beethoven musically coupled interest with uncertainty regions of the emerging candidates to analyze I.T. departments suggesting the use of a Phishing Alert Button in the course of … the glitches in Alphaville’s density matrix renormalize power outages by measuring coefficients in new, interesting, and different ways. This group of coupled equations analyzes how Agent K99 implemented a model for electronic specific heat coefficients. Is language making all of this happen? The H93 hyperbolic lattice embodies the polychromatic susceptibility of a larger possible data space. Okay? So now, along with H93, K99 forms letters by using a regular three-coordinate system. Start using it today! Most materiality comes from tiling nonagons. Just the facts keep arbitrary decisions to a minimum. Where are the effective and accurate methods for determining abundance and excess? Now the three-color coding of bonds according to the study of a one-dimensional quantum web allows for the housing of untold amounts of inequivalent data. Agent K99 screams down I-35 in a white Dodge Challenger toward a managed boundary zone (διαχειριζόμενη οριακή ζώνη). Many body systems spend the way memes do today : a matrix product language functioning as machine writing couples textual yield with natural states because remembering lost love constantly produces generalization of a sentimental nature. The original constraints on movement in the space of possible data forced K99 to perform the drudgery of alienated labor. You serve as a human toad while today’s computers continually query regular models for a Euclidean firewall to protect your Master organization. Machines respond to each other over the honeycomb of turnpike toll roads. Inverse design strategies integrate internet paywalls to ensure the one-way flow of time. Another space of data corresponds to quasicrystals and their approximations with machine learning optimization. As a function of time we become more artificially intelligent. Time crystals were first discovered by Prof. Eunice Taylor during the exploration of interstellar exoplanets using techniques normally reserved for the characterization of nanostructures. This is what we call a “countable fact”. While such facts are insufficient — although we tend to focus our campaign on realizable goals — citizens interested in scientific results which have the desired low temperature properties sought at soft-serve ice cream shops rely on a vast amount of human intervention to inherit educational opportunities that were not available to previous generations due to constraints placed on traditional careers and canons. Such properties are, in fact, the last human social networking platform that builds competence in science as a line of defense against helping your Master organization’s I.T. department to produce much of the engineered harassment that characterizes the digital age. #NL002VNE

“Mount Analog”

Identifying potential conversation starters : What more is there to say? I said across the networks. Science: You’ve never been one for taking risks, she said. Feelings, nothing more than feelings, I said. Boo hoo, she said. Education: Perhaps you should try meditating, she said. But the cheese! the cheese! that’s what’s truly important, I said. Revolution: Obscurity will be your criminal activity downfall, she said. This could be a machine talking to another smartphone sensor as teaching, I said. You’re such a coward, she said.

This is …

ximtancode: to functionally maintain the accuracy of increased system sizes

as a coherent picture of machines spewing out what is called tools and bodied science becomes mixed charged fluctuations … So be a hero! (she said) Dark Data/Code: that we never see reality … You have a theory for every occasion, don’t you? she said. How gestures and motion damage our organizational skills, I said.

xedarguations: known intermetallic compounds containing capture points

She sent me that address only after my plane had landed. The place was deep in a forest of dark green, in the foothills of a mountain that changed completely as I approached so that when I arrived I couldn’t be sure that it was even the same mountain that I thought I’d been driving towards for the past two hours, though how could it not be? I parked the car I’d rented in front of the lodge. It was the largest of the half dozen log-cabin-style structures. I didn’t see any other vehicles. Was she even here? The effects don’t always result from a cause. Physics Education : A few months previous, at the beginning of the summer, I’d taken a break from writing an unconventional physics textbook … that began with a discussion of Occam’s razor as the defining aspect of science and the problems of modeling nature using mathematics as exemplified (in a humorous way … have to keep the reader’s attention) by Von Neumann’s Elephant … there were a few projects that … and while I was on vacation … to exist as natural minerals … as the electron approaches from an oblique angle … physics and gesture: spatial movement, movement of the body, what would be taken for dance … are extremely scarce from the structural point of view … of how thinking and mutual manifestations of … Such thoughts revolved in my mind for a moment as I stood next to the car and listened to the breeze worrying the tree limbs and the pine needles. The scent of pine was strong, like a cleaning fluid. The car engine tinked as it cooled. Was I here alone? Or had she parked her car somewhere else and walked the rest of the way? Maybe she hadn’t arrived yet. This could be the opening scene in series 4 of the podcast drama I was writing, a collaboration with some friends I’d met through an Internet forum, voice actors and a young guy with a degree in sound engineering. Something creepy would … rhodium sulfide being one of the few compounds capable of … I’d novelized the scripts I’d written for the first series and made a print-on-demand book that anyone could buy from our podcast’s online store … that are now distributed and … she’d listened to all the episodes … not that she was a fan … but not as a child either. I had a Natural Curiosity for exceptions … stop … look … think and from a natural neurological state … in terms of neurochemistry, all I was feeling … had to do with the secretion of certain hormones … what part about the world around me and report suspicious input using our lizard brains is triggered by eagerness to become a rocket fish alert button … the search for trilogies … I was already thinking about this scenario as a perspective display : a scientist rooted in Fascination, varieties or Little People relying on a great dramatic enhancement of … a sense of tension created using sound effects … by building machines we extend our … on estimating or constraining … with just a little imagination I could (in fact) see just about anything out of the corner of my eye.

The interior of the lodge was cooler than outside. The temperature probably dropped close to freezing at night … at this altitude. I called her name as a question: Mel? (short for Melodie) Hello? I took a few more steps into … the place was dark, lights? I looked for a switch.

I’d had to enter a code to open the gate which opened automatically so there had to be electricity, but maybe the mains were switched off. I hadn’t seen any powerlines … buried, most likely … makes sense with so many trees in a remote location … it would be just like her to send me out here and … I could just leave. Why play her game?              Hide & seek?                  Of course, I wasn’t going to leave … that’s when the power came on … what was silence before was a dull hum that would recede to background noise and filtered out in time. What the sound told me was that there was a heating and cooling system and refrigerator : the hum of the compressor, a recognizable frequency … motion detector? but if the power had been off … I checked my phone … no cell signal but it was 8:00 pee emm precisely. I decided to make the most of it.

A room on the second floor … something about the way it … a king-sized bed, sheets in the closet. The shelves were lined with books and VHS cassettes: there was an old TV in the corner on a stand and a VCR … I wondered … a folksy meditation on how our digital technology has supplanted the functional simplicity of the old analog television set … if it still worked: The Shining and Solaris! maybe after dinner … dinner?

The kitchen was stocked with canned goods … peaches in heavy syrup, dry goods. an air popper and a bag of popcorn … for movie night. I opened a tin of beef stew … flour, oil, salt, baking powder : in half an hour I had dinner, beef stew and biscuits. There was beer in the fridge, but it wasn’t cold yet … well, it was cold enough, I thought. I could do with a beer.

Down the stairs was a game room, a pool table and a piano that needed tuning, but it wasn’t so bad that it was unplayable. Board games, puzzles, a chessboard with pieces set … a game in progress. I studied the board then made a move for red … knight to queen’s … In the cupboard was a supply of batteries and a charging station and several flashlights. I took one of the flashlights and went exploring.

The lodge was at the highest point of the camp or compound. A path led down the hill to three more cabins, identical rectangular single-story structures. I checked each one. They were furnished, but otherwise empty. Further down was a garage / utility shed or barn that smelled of oil, gasoline, and dirt, composting leaves. A four wheeler was parked on the slab. She wasn’t here either. I checked my phone again. No signal. Maybe if I went higher up.

Further down there was a pond or perhaps it was a lake, I couldn’t see the whole of it since it bent around the hill. The temperature was dropping. The bed of pine needles was soft under my feet. The wind sighed as the limbs trembled and swayed.

At the top, I held my phone up … reaching … Still no signal. I could drive somewhere. I’d gone through a little town about ten miles back. No. I wasn’t going to give in. I would wait. I was good at waiting. She knew I was here, where to find me.

The dream I’d had … I won’t say that it seemed real, it wasn’t that, I knew that what I’d experienced was a dream, but it was a long dream with a coherent narrative … one can get good at dreaming, with a little practice. Most of the ideas I put into the scripts for the podcast had come from dreams … what I’d seen and experienced while in that Other World. The dream : concerned a family, a husband, a wife, and an adult daughter (in her mid to late twenties). The husband had had an affair with another man. The wife, instead of divorcing her husband, seduced her husband’s lover. The daughter returned home to find that neither her father nor mother were at home, but the lover was there, a handsome (if effeminate) man in his forties, not yet gray. That night the daughter and the lover slept together. When she awoke the next morning, the lover was gone … predictable. The parents returned the next afternoon. That’s the point at which I entered the dream as a participant. All the action thus far had played out as if it were projected onto a screen, but now I was present in their house, asking each of them questions and taking notes. The husband’s name was Leon, the wife, Ruth, and the daughter was called Shelley, she’d been adopted as an infant. They had not hidden the fact that she was adopted from her. When I asked if she was curious about her birth parents, she said that her biologic past wasn’t a mystery to be solved. She had a cardboard box that contained pictures, documents, and a few artifacts (a necklace, a mirror, a ring) assembled for her by her biological parents that her real parents had given her … a box to be opened if she ever wanted to know … she’d met her birth mother once in Portland at a coffee shop. They drank two cups of coffee, split a chocolate croissant. Shelley liked her birth mother, but didn’t feel a profound connection. Ruth was her mother. It was as simple as that. And Leon was her father. The dream ended right after Shelley showed me a piece of paper with a flowchart labeled with large capital letters. I understood that the flowchart was the diagram I would use to write the story of this family. It was 1:47 ay emm when I woke from the dream. My mouth felt like it was full of sand … I was thirsty.

After drinking a liter of water from the tap, I opened the fridge. The beer was properly cold now, so I took one out and poured it into a glass. I went down to the game room and examined the books on the shelves. It was a decent library with a mix of classics and contemporary literature, some fluff, kids’ books, graphic novels, but also plenty of books that I’d either already read or were on my to-be-read-someday list like The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft. I’d read two or three of Lovecraft’s stories … one about Cthulhu …, but since I started writing the podcast scripts — the podcast was a supernatural horror drama — I thought I should bone up on the classics. I’d been relying on my familiarity with Poe to get me through the first three series, but I knew that I’d need to dive into Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Lord Dunsany, et cetera, etc. &c.

a little night music

The magical coupling operators were designed to do complex deductive studies of grasshoppers : a euphemism (you know who you are). Ants (by contrast) having a real eigenspectrum (a compulsive need to remain on-(the)-line) produce redundancies that are different in the sense that they display guaranteed expectation values. the behavior of the system ( a field of operation ) cannot be emergent due to the fact that jump-point or departure-lounge variables are real and time evolution unitary. What can be predicted from knowing the interactions of the constituent parts of the environmental observables are the best properties of the constituent parts that can be predicted or even inferred from values of an observational coupling alone. The view inside of a giant underground cavern may be forecasted with present theories. Such a view is usually obtained by using a stainless steel torus as a winding form. Imagine you are a piece of spam. This matters a great deal because your likelihood function would then also be standing in the dough ring of a giant day-glo apple core. Complex systems are ubiquitous in books of poetry. Unoriginal genius used to obtain a confidence interval from a donut made of stainless steel creates a profoundly original body of work from the natural and man-made world held together by magical coupling. The comparisons reflect off shiny panels and bow-like ephemera (the rib taken from Adam’s side, for example). Society is effacing increasingly optimal observable techniques, as well as, ribs circulating around the central assemblage of a complex unified whole. Since such methodologies are suited to the study of the quality of rural correspondence columns, the right side of the synthesizing cohesive whole becomes a kind of literature for and by the masses, but the plenitude of the interactions cause confidence regions to form in the shards of language. The left side is dark and dimly lit where the standard modeling is inadequate. Master equations for open quantum materials juxtapose red light with a novel method using collage to hinder forecasting and control. Disjunctive systems can be used only loosely for the absolute counting of deuterium and donterium. Therefore, constraints of paramount exquisition determine the minimum statistical variation while tritium gamma rays produce the important fragmentary holes required to develop new uncertainty regions. To first determine the neutron cross-section, an appropriate approach must be triangulated from amusing 3 by 5 card tricks. Theories concerning various couplings of interest, and the accumulation of textual fragments, yields a gamma branching ratio tuned to real-world challenges. This process is complicated because it joins together a magnetic confinement reactor with a urinal in much the same way as Duchamp deployed readymades. A proper understanding of design helps to bring together these different components, but nevertheless, we grasp for examples of the behavior of the brain when managing uncertainty and risk attached to the components with a known narrative framework. Frameworks which cannot be deduced from arcane passages will be forcibly contextualized. Studying a system at this level is necessarily an editorial function. The properties that work to bind a single neutron in isolation cannot be used on autopilot to override magnum pee-in-your-eye spectra in any predictable way during scheduled commercial breaks—oh god isn’t Emmanuel Carrère’s mustache gorgeous? The grasshopper does not control the behavior of the ant colony, even when high-energy gamma rays aimed into the cavernous depths of the queen’s chamber reveal a dispersion relation that plunges the interpretation of the text into an abyss of meaning.

From The High Magnetic Fields : Zone-targeted transport yields preliminary plans for Von Neumann’s Elephant that can be coupled to a limitless bicycle for N+1 riders. A chaotic boundary which should not be confused with an information engine, unless one first invokes field oscillators driven under different kinds of initial conditions. We understand the boundary between reality and irreality in terms of a simple spectral theorem. Phase transitions transform network topologies which include a Heisenberg phase switch stimulated by spontaneous symmetry breakdown of nearest neighbors. All-in-all, the hidden half-ice, half-fire state is broken by ubiquitous star networks coupling instances of explosive death with nonlocal communication schemes involving faster-than-light time travel paradoxes. Is it safe? Probably not.

Most researchers would agree that explosive death is an interesting phenomenon in a completely different class of death than spontaneous human combustion. New forms of death are connected via complex systems of ingredients such as arsenic, lead, or cadmium that exhibit first-order jumps from heterogeneously interactive agents when combined with mercury at standard temperature and pressure. Understanding the reason why biological systems away from the death state seek to undermine their own thermodynamic equilibrium has puzzled scientists and leading theologians for centuries. It is thought that death is behind the emergence of such behaviors as the intrinsic interplay of biologic agents and ligand receptors. By studying explosive death, we hope to predict stochasticity and the nonlinearity of cells whose protein cargos prevent them from forming (in real time) a nonreciprocity of interactions. Originally, viruses employed similar cycles of instances to achieve explosive death in host bodies. The dynamics of attachment-detachment in virus-host systems led to a reported increased frequency in explosive death. A general framework for the local environment to drive transport-weighted coupling under three known factors resulting in explosive death is known as the dynamical Gleichgewicht-Zwischen field theory. This popular theory describes viruses capable of self-assembly at much higher frequency distributions than was heretofore thought possible in the wild. The most common application of Gleichgewicht-Zwischen field theory is the modeling of smaller molecular length scales subject to explosive death. Such real world instances of explosive death may be reassembled using a special kind of “Instabilität und Beständigkeit” motor that exploits the asymmetries in the mean-field diffusive Fargen wir in einer fremden Stadt … and see if I don’t.

Binding surfaces to drive persistent coupling is reported to affect nach dem Weg, so speichert unser motion in 39 out of 40 cases of West Nile virus. Occurrence of explosive death is accompanied by increased levels of Arbeisgedächtnis vorübergehend in the blood stream prior to initiation rites. Many viruses are reported to inhabit ghost channels formed by the unrestricted action of van der Pol and Lorentz oscillators. Later, such Informationen wie … both the quick and the dead use such ghost channels to enhance exposure times. Explosive death was also demonstrated to be man-made, posing an ecological threat to classically dynamical climate systems.

Friga’s day, 13 : “Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished & composed work?”

Yesterday’s writing session went really well. Every sentence hummed, opened up, revealing new pathways, possibilities. And last night! What joy to spend the evening reading and planning on the couch across from my wife. I had my feet up with a book and my notebook propped on my lap. We were drinking watermelon daiquiris and I felt genuine elation when thinking about waking up the next morning (this morning!) to see what I would write in Von Neumann’s Elephant. You see, writing is an emotional tilt-o-whirl.

One hundred years (and four days) ago, Virginia Woolf was on her “last lap” with Mrs. D … Mrs. Dalloway. In her diary, she wrote, “It is a disgrace that I write nothing, or if I write, write sloppily, using nothing but present participles.” It’s important to find an approach that works for you. Marcel Duchamp said, “The world is my art supply store! If you come up with a good recipe, add the right ingredients, and follow the directions — throwing in a dash of experience — you’re bound to come up with something good.” The implications for writing are profound: imagine writers adopting these ways of working so that they never have to worry about what to write on that blank page ever again!

Last night, I made a note to write this diary entry today about print+digital hybridization: write a diary entry to be published digitally (in/on Skinny Dipping) and which will be included in the printed (booklet) version of Von Neumann’s Elephant. Aside from the periodic addition of a new chapter for Skinny Dipping, I’ve not done much with the online component of my publication project. Effectively, I’ve been waiting for something to happen. What am I waiting for? Cloud Theory? But … !! I was floating, but now I’ve found a branch to grab on to.

A little more than a month ago, I thought I was so clever when I discovered Cloud Theory. No two books would be alike! Thousands of photographs of clouds, thousands of poems and prose fragments, all printed out on sheets which could be combined in any order to make a unique book. Of course, all I’d discovered was the freedom of the digital display of text and images on a screen and I wanted to replicate that for the New Age of Print. I should have known … I did know. If you think of something that you suppose is original, you can be sure that someone has already done it. And sure enough, I ran across the confirmation in the pages of Uncreative Writing: “Today, in places like Printed Matter and book arts exhibits, it’s not uncommon to find books comprised entirely of unbound sheets that purchasers may arrange according to their whims. The catalog to John Cage’s retrospective Rolywholyover was one such book, with nearly fifty pieces of printed ephemera laid in, with no hierarchical order. The book embodies Cage’s chance operations, a book without fixity or finality, a work in progress.” [p. 115]

Since I won’t be doing or writing anything original or innovative, I might as well get on with it, where it = making little books. The task that remains is how to translate or couple the process of making little books with the (now, seemingly) obligatory online presence. Perhaps (up until today : !!) I’ve been too precious about “my writing” when there is nothing to be precious about since none of this is really “my” writing. Of course, I’m the one responsible for putting these words here and in this order, but these aren’t my words. Other people (even writers!) have used these words before. My task for today is to take some words that belong to all of us, words in the commons and sprinkle them on the page and move them around until I hear a satisfying chime.

“from her other world, Melodie extends her reach”

Still holding the collection of Lovecraft’s short stories, I studied the chessboard. Black’s move … or so I thought at first. I had … knight to queen’s … but the board had changed. The red queen had been captured, no longer on the board. Or had I … ?? no, I would have noticed before if the red queen was missing. The inference then … I could deduce … while I was asleep, she had arrived … taken the red queen, a subtle sign that she knew … did she know me so well ?? … I wouldn’t miss a clue.

My heart skipped a beat, skin prickling … she was here. Then why hadn’t she … ? part of the game. The rules only work when Occam’s razor is being attacked as a hypothesis applied to elephants … you try to slip it by people using cultural bias without rational comparison with the virtual … read a story that began in one of Bolaño’s novels, picked up somewhere in the middle of another, and continued in yet a third … novels without end, like Musil’s. Yes, here it was on the shelf: The Man Without Qualities. Melodie is my forgotten sister : do no harmony.

Melodie was twelve years younger than me. Only four years old when I went away to college. Eight when I started grad school. We’d never been close. I hardly knew my own sister. Last year, our father died. We got drunk together after the funeral. She confessed that she was going to leave her husband. We’d been exchanging emails, messages, phone calls ever since. She’s the one that suggested we meet here ,, spend some time together, away from the world … and she said : “I need to get my shit together” … I didn’t know her husband, he hadn’t come to the funeral, now he was her ex-husband. “I don’t know how I would have … without you,” she said … you try to slip something by someone using a lie … they get angry … get the foundation of a rational space of possible data visualizing … when my explanations are bisected by a Bayesian razor as the space of actual … that’s when I heard a beeping sound …

Putting the book down, I followed the sound until … it was the alarm on the refrigerator door. Had I not closed it? Impossible, I thought … a rookie mistake. I finished off the beer in my glass and took another can from the fridge, then put it back. I made sure the door was closed … definitely closed. “Mels?” I called stepping out of the kitchen. I hadn’t intended to add an s to the short form of her name … a term of ,, if not endearment ,, then an intentional familiarity compensating for years when she and I … my appropriations … something I’d done or said when she was a teenager had made her angry, I had no memory of … but I’d assumed, overstepped a boundary, some intimacy that had not yet been earned and she’d gotten angry … it wouldn’t have taken much, I was the golden boy and she, resentful … I knew nothing about any of this (of course) but some of the story had come out in those late night phone calls … used to justify actual data … in the dice example … with six sides to every story

“Melodie?” I called again. I was halfway up the curved staircase leading to the second story. From the bending stairs … a view down through the open main hall of the lodge and into the recreation room. The interior space of the lodge didn’t seem to match the log-cabin exterior. The architect must have been a genius, fitting all this space into a structure that seemed … not small, but not big enough … what is this all a prelude to?               I listened.          The distant trundling of a motor and whir of a fan, the low frequency hiss of forced air through vents : metal razor fins, cutting … the air was quite warm, not too warm, but dry like a summer day. Then I saw a shadow, a movement, a form … fleeting … in the recreation room below. “Melodie?” I repeated and went down.

After a while, I gave up the search. “Alright, whenever you’re ready. I’m going to my room to read,” I said, assuming that she was within earshot. I took Cthulhu with me, poured another beer, and returned to the room that I’d claimed for myself. I closed the door, but didn’t lock it … in case she … when poets steal other poets words, anything can happen in the space of actual data … it’s the same for both … sister & brother

While Lovecraft would have been a perfect fit for my usual environs ,, I was a man next to the sea. I could never be far from the sea for long ,, wasn’t working at this altitude ,,, perhaps Lord Dunsany’s In the Land of Time would be a better fit for this remote inland mountain top … as I read … eventually I felt that strange wave of vertigo … and the voices that inserted themselves into the text … unrelated (seeming) phrases that cut into and in between ,, a sure sign that I should turn off the light and surrender myself to unconsciousness.

䷳

Shelley entered the room where I was sitting at a desk writing. Leon and Ruth were downstairs, in the kitchen. I could smell bacon. “Are you hungry?” she asked. I put down my pen. This time Shelley looked a little more like a woman I’d known twenty years before, when I was in graduate school. We’d shared an apartment together, but we weren’t a couple. Her boyfriend  … what was his name? Brad something ,, had been a lit major … no he was studying literary translation, a grad student too. Why hadn’t we kept in touch? I’d let so much drift away over the years. The future concerned me more than the past since it seemed that the future could still be shaped.

“The bacon smells good,” I said to this young woman who looked a little more like her namesake I used to know. I stood up and walked towards Shelley … walked towards the door, but Shelley didn’t move, so I stopped. She took my face in her hands, stood on the tips of her toes and kissed me. “What was that for?” I asked. “You need to experience the space of actual data,” she said.

When I awoke the next morning, I tried to recall how the dream had ended. Someone had been lying in the bed next to me, but was that the dream or had someone actually been lying there and her physical presence had seeped through the porous border of the material world into the psychic world of sleep … the two worlds weren’t so separate in reality ,,, I learned this from years of experiments conducted under controlled conditions : keeping faithful records was the key. The more you engaged with the dream world, the less incoherent it was.

If Melodie had been lying in my bed, she wasn’t there now. Light streamed in through the window. Either the sun rose early here or I’d slept later than usual. Coffee. I would need coffee. I hadn’t seen if any provisions had been … after a stop in the bathroom … I went downstairs to the kitchen. In a cupboard I found what I needed: beans, coffee mill, moka pot. Now there was a carton of whole milk in the fridge. Melodie was definitely here. It was just a matter of time. She’d show herself when she was ready.

I’d brought my scientific papers with me ,, my different kind of physics textbook which wasn’t a textbook at all, but a kind of writing … a new way of doing physics, dealing with questions of why and what, not only how … I couldn’t come right out and write certain statements clearly, unambiguously … the counter-jamming signal is so powerful that it will shut down a person’s receptors upon encountering statements which do not conform to industry standards … one had to learn how to be clever without seeming clever … then I recalled something Leon had said to me when … and publish them under their own belief in pseudoscience and mysticism as a hypothetical model for reality … None of them talked about the lover who had left … a shared experience.

The coffee was good. Beyond the main hall of the lodge was a kind of den, a glass room which (now that it was light) I could see opened to a stunning view of a rocky valley. A fire was burning in the stone fireplace. I stood close to the large panel of glass admiring the view when I saw a figure in the distance standing on a rocky outcropping. It must have been Mel, though I couldn’t see her face and she was quite some distance away. Who else would be out here? She must be freezing cold, I thought. Mel or whoever it was, wasn’t wearing any clothes. She was performing a set of slow movements with her whole body that might have been some form of dance. Tai chi? Yoga? I didn’t know much about such things … I assumed there was a difference, one was Chinese and the other Indian. Maybe it wasn’t as cold as I assumed it would be. The temperature inside was comfortable and the fire had warmed the room I was standing in. I put my hand on the glass … cold … when I withdrew my hand, it left a print.

It had to be Melodie. She’d let her hair grow out since the funeral. Maybe she didn’t care at all if I observed her, but I thought it best not to stare, so I turned and walked closer to the fireplace. Suddenly, I felt a chill, across my shoulders. I had a sweater in my bag upstairs. I went to get it. When I returned to the room with a view, Melodie was no longer performing her slow dance on the rock … male & female God created them … not so different really, but yet … there was a difference : the binary system was a gross simplification … at least six different ,,, perhaps more, a sexual continuum where male-female are end points, extremes brought together to form a circle. No, humans do not occur in only two states. This idea (not the first time I’d formulated it) produced a new feeling inside me this morning that was akin to the stoppage of time, a moment of recognition of myself as myself and not the construct or image that was present by default, felt but unobserved. I’d turned my head just enough that … out of the corner of my eye … after all, we are organisms, I thought. #NL002VNE

“a form of yoga or tai chi … zen”

when poets … a frame removal team (there should be many poets) … I spent five days at a Buddhist meditation center, she said. What a coincidence, I tell her. I’ve just started reading Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère … he and I are different ,, I mean our approach to writing (literature , more than one : ? … literatures, as many as there are dimensions) ,, Carrère does not lie when he writes, for him, writing is the space of truth … it’s not that I lie (all writers lie, especially when they tell you they are writing the truth), it’s that by saying that I’m lying, I’m being more honest than when I’m insisting that I’m telling the truth.

I wrote the words “Cloud Theory” in my notebook before that Tuesday evening on the beach when I envisioned myself photographing clouds. (I forget now what led me to write “Cloud Theory” in my notebook, but those two words have become something.) When she says … during meditation, you observe your thoughts passing, dissolving like clouds … observation : a form in which anything can happen. When she says this about clouds, I remember what Carrère wrote about the meaning of the word yoga : a yoke or bond, a kind of chain that keeps ??? here in the material world. If I write a word for ???, then I would be lying. The ego (self) is created in and belongs to the material world. The ego is what dies when our body dies. But we are not only our ego. There is … if I write the word “something” then I’m framing, conceptualizing, putting infinite eternal into a box. Zen (yoga & tai chi) frees ??? from the ego. In this sense, zen is an escape plan.

I started simply. Sitting still for five minutes observing my breathing. He wrote me: meditation is what happens when you are sitting still and not moving … meditation is what happens when you envision elephants. I tell her that the western form of meditation is reading a book (I am an elephant rider … my elephant is blue), but the ego is the one doing the reading. Zen is a way of freeing oneself from the ego before dying. He wrote me : yoga, meditation is good, but if you are doing it so that your body feels better, you’ll never be free of the ego ,, the ego wants the body to feel better. The ??? pays attention to the sensations of the body without judgment.

more than one kind of language … a multiverse of language … without what they need to make themselves into mystics ,, make use of both forms of words : real & imaginary. / In school we are taught the language in which convincing narratives and compelling stories are written. This understanding of language is one-dimensional : like the timeline moving from past to future, it restricts movement so that you don’t even pause to consider the possibility of sideways time … sideways language (multidimensional language, poetry). If you view language as a transparent tool used to express logical, coherent, and conclusive thoughts, a set of tools that are used in accordance with a strict set of rules … you can master this kind of language, but why confine yourself to such a tiny box? The language of logic is the shadows on the walls of the cave. Language outside the cave … poetry breaks apart frames ,, poetry is the frame that includes all frames.

Should I provide a disclaimer : warning! the presuppositions you encounter here are not rational, with them you expand the space of possible data (multidimensionality) … shouldn’t everybody find interesting elephants (spectrally diverse) that differ from those digitated by blindfolding scientists? however, they are ten-times larger … correspondence between flat timelike curves grows in complexity when we make use of a sixty-four-sided die. Spacetime in a multiverse obeys simple rules intuited by mystics. Compared to the six-sided die, the laws of thermodynamics were invited to parties where inclusion was a clean, close shave with a Bayesian razor. Did you know that the universe is represented by an apple bisected with Occam’s razor? In measuring the degree of collapse, isothermal curves in the multiverse are … the apples given to pseudoscientists define a space of possible data. Careers and canons will not be an essential factor in eliminating the space of virtual data. Digital text is the body-double of print, the ghost in the machine. The ghost is now real :: the yoke binding print to digital … in the moment, if a text can’t be downloaded, it isn’t ghostly (brought down out of the cloud … at least that’s the theory). What we have learned (now that we are no longer blinded by the digital) is that material and digital coexist, one feeds into the other : yin and yang.

Simple … established in traditional ways, I’m watercooler competition for seriousness models. Make sharp predictions so as to not be sure we will still have careers in science distinct from mysticism. The collapse is small when we follow ways that used to be literary. Superstition & pseudoscience show that the favored complex models yield works that might function similarly when the razor is embedded in a multiparameter space of larger possible comparisons to the way memes do today. Apples and other foodstuffs form a data space that can be adjusted by embracing manipulation and repurposing. The web spreads like wildfire when it’s a matter of Bayesian inference fitting a wider range of data. After a short period of silence, often unsighed … Science is primarily the means by which John von Neumann unauthored concept boxes, only to be supplanted by discovering the simplest method for elephant modeling. By the next ripple … or as I said, descriptions of our world are limited to functions with three parameters are less … while he famously quipped, “with four parameters I can…”

When passed onto the next time machine, that might sound like a boring future, but why not use such parameters to fit an elephant? Elephants are noble creatures, considerate, patient, loving, caring, docile, but also powerful … elephants respect their dead … while the author won’t die, we may be the ones who can write the best five parameter poems … to wiggle, begin to view authorship in a more programmatic way to manipulate an elephant’s trunk, but let us not indulge in such coercion. We learned from Ptolemy’s model of the solar system that the conceptual way authors of books parse and distribute sentences will describe astronomical elephants. With such elephants, we will make our traditional poems written with language-based properties even if the ready availability of computer chips inscribed by the poetry of the future is a useful way of making epicycles that could have fitted an authorless provisional language.

“the elephant art ranch”

She would respond to any kind of motion in the heavens ,, in the shape of a blooming iris … as slow as she could go, churning in the spirit of the 70s. a Mary Poppins in red, complete with umbrella, sewing machine, operating room table : only lithographic traces of the patient remained, a beloved family dog had been buried next to the fallen statue with a Sanskrit name meaning destruction. The body of the dog was fed by the blood that flowed from destruction and transformed into a giant robot ,,, according to a Russian folktale , given the multiplicity of authentic sinister jack-in-the-box situations

After a few tries she got it right: dancing a complex pattern on the heads of bronze animals, the largest of which was a reclining gopher. The six judges remained in a state of suspended animation. When she’d completed her dance, they awoke, each holding a kind of board or slate in their right hands. Her movements had been recorded in six dimensions and projected onto the surface of the plates to be translated by the judges who suited up in harnesses of metal and wires and cables which would transmit and carry signals.

Leon and Ruth knew the storm was coming ,, they were worried about Shelley , she hadn’t returned yet. I helped Leon carry items in from the porch, anything that might be caught by the wind. The house was old and rotting in places, evidence of past water damage, past storms. Maybe I should go look for her, I said. Leon nodded … the Bayesian likelihood of the data struck between the solar plexus : as the skies darkened, the clouds stirred in a cauldron to a planetarium soundtrack … less a prediction that is made, than an expression of preference.

I didn’t recognize the woman standing at the crossroads. She wasn’t beautiful, but handsome, her features almost masculine, a powerful jawline, she was at least two meters tall. She was accompanied by two wiry, effeminate men with long flowing curly hair. They went shirtless to display their textured tanned bodies. The handsome woman preferred one of the twins over the other and so it was a contest to see who was quickest : solving the problem involved running long lengths of corrugated tubing through the cathedral sanctuary. When the handsome woman accidentally bumped into a fluted stone column hidden by flowing pastel curtains, I was unable to stifle a laugh. “You made the wrong choice,” I said.

Everything was delayed because of the storm, the catastrophe. Several of the judges had scheduled flights and so the limousine arrived to ferry them to the airport … can you wait five minutes? everything is bound to be delayed. Two of the judges had gone ahead to the airport, but when we arrived the entire saucer-shaped structure was engulfed in flames, it had become a charred cinder, a glowing, disintegrating coal … and then the saucer fell, broken into six pieces

are a state of mind, she said. Even if their albums from that period were reminiscent of the abstract elephant art were learned about in school ,, a project to show that dolphins weren’t the only creatures capable of self-reflective thought ,, Have you ever wondered why Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose couples with literature in an irreducible way?

The elephants were not kept in a zoo, but at a ranch (a zoo with larger pens … a workplace). In eighth grade we took a class trip to the elephant art ranch to see the elephant artists painting masterpieces : it’s a masterpiece if I say it is. One painting I thought looked like flamenco dancers in a bowl of petunias … put that way, the expression is reduced to mere code … another elephant painting : a special schematic portrait of Groucho Marx’s idea that the smartest minds speak to you about possible models of a pouncing black cat flaring its behind at the viewers. The instructor said, “It will be considered that some elephant art is suggestive of the Lone Ranger.” … a bad skin disease that affects great authors … Perhaps this is why so many writers prefer to remain anonymous like my friend Owen Three Feathers.

“lines painted by an elephant”

In these times, Copernicus’ model of solar evolution possesses a grimacing clown’s face. Ever since Maxwell’s demon summoned up a silver hammer, time travel theorists narrow their scope while riding a similar number of e-π cycles … the sound of a passing car coincided with the passage of a flock of birds across the south-facing kitchen window where an hour before the clouds had been tinged with orange light. As he sipped his coffee, he thought about how it was that startled elephants could be twin fetuses whose mutual influences are tiny compared to those required by Ptolemy’s model … so coiled with the tail of a grizzly bear our theories become a representation of demonic physics. He was so caught up in the space of possible data that the cheerleaders lodged his head in a guillotine to test the system’s physical properties. Such data can be fitted in a more convincing way than any mutant representation of information. No one thought it was funny when he said, “We’re more constrained than a Bayesian analyst kissing mickey-mouse ass.” (to avoid being possessive)

Our elephants love painting two seahorses kissing each other … the data presented to the majority to influence them, give them thoughts, to save them the effort … most can hardly accept models that are much larger than two penis vampires swapping body parts with anything that moves : the little red elephant riding hood. Ptolemy’s model had even fewer parameters than a headless nude on display at the Louvre … two extremes: master & slave, relationships that resemble giant insects crawling up a wall separating one model from another … Kepler’s favorite animal was an elephant. Once he quipped to Tycho Brahe that formulating his elliptical solar system was a more excruciating experience than extruding a rooster-shaped turd … a mania for precision : sharper predictions lead to a sense of … duck & cover !! … atom bombs exploding over the multiverse :: so many people get ambient floaters that it would be a miracle if they fitted a man in the moon using only lines painted by an elephant whose data didn’t just happen to be true in sketches. Found in out-of-body contests where knowledge about the principle of simplicity is considered optional, participants will be dazzled by ambient floaters and line drawings of physical systems. Our documents will be written by machines for others into murky instrumental hip-hop. The measurement of elephant art cannot be left to machines for the foreseeable future : a future which is darker and more adventurous than hexagonal graphomania.

Someone behind the curtain teaches elephants to paint : this is one called “1969” and this one (looking like a two-headed Mickey Mouse swapping body parts) is called “Music Is Math”.

“the veiled goddess Isis”

inventing those drones so that their trademark shots are bathed in neon colors that resemble levitation … the trick is to keep your feet moving : a simulation of weightlessness. The trains were no longer running and were replaced by cybertrucks adapted to run on rails ,, two yoked together, one forward facing, one back or vice versa … depending. Instead, I rode on my e-∆cycle all the way to the central station where at the end of the arrival hall was an ornately decorated café with high ceilings and walls paneled in mahogany. This was my favorite place … brass taps … four years after the breakthrough, in a vivid swirl, while the mathematical synth music throbbed, identifiable objects given to elephant art teachers are distributed to children … having the right programming, such teachers take the lead in elephant guy dance. Whose elephant is this? she asks. A duo of Scottish elephants push even further their tabla-laced rhythms of pop art paintings … made by elephants for elephants, it is with zigzagging geometry between the kaleidoscopic forms, more abstract than actual … break dance … wiggle that … Elephants are real people too, he said.

associated with a specific isothermal space for the last twenty-five hundred years … later, the lives that tend to die forming curves experience an avalanche of Greek thinkers … Heraclitus said that Nature wraps herself in myths, mental chatter whose main themes are cryptic utterances … for Heidegger : Being unveils in much the same way that a debate in theoretical physics consists of words & hand motions ,, subtle movements of the hips … a kind of broken dance ,, elephants dancing, veiling themselves in modest propositions, dally-eyed lemmas, proofs. Meanwhile Von Neumann is surely among those who whisper in hushed, reverent tones :  phusis kruptesthai philei … such pronouncements are used to explain hypothetical models for reality solar systems. The most influential names in applied time travel theory imply that the existence of open (e-π & ∆ ,, bi+ continuum) cycles in a theory of everything are derived from rules intuited by mystics. Both Enrico Fermi & John von Neumann contributed to a discussion about closed bubble universes allowing the opacity of the natural world to yield to mathematical formulation. Such scenarios jump into the future where modern angst is isothermic. A quantum theory of space involves jumps into the past where adiabatic curves imply our devotion to the careful analysis of … time travel paradoxes affect the curvature of the Multiverse where the interplay of quantum and classical circumventions by well-defined curves are presented independent of measurement theory … words, words, words … Thermodynamic transitions in the curved-space scenario form shapes resembling elephants. Theories of the Multiverse show how clustered aphorisms imply kaleidoscopic exegeses. Von Neumann approached the problem brandishing Occam’s razor … cutting a clear path … usually translated “Nature loves vacuous urges that emerge from a game of hide & seek” … Contrary to Louis Néel’s haunting statement: the game of hide & seek requires two contradictory approaches … in his 1970 Nobel Prize speech, he described how Western culture ever since has exploited nature : the Promethean study of high magnetic fields is the subject of this engaging study ,, an experimental-quest approach involving games of chance and selectivity … choose your own adventure … interesting but useless! declare the sympathetic critics. Consulting the writings of Pierre Hadot … taking a point of view that embraces technological artifacts commonly made explicit in the allegorical figure of Isis as a means of tearing the veil from phenomenological remarks. The veiled goddess Isis is our guide to Nature, revealing her secrets. The study of thermodynamics draws on the work of both Einsteinian and Orphic contemplative poetics. Both Einstein and Leo Szilard viewed ancient and later thinkers according to an approach that could be modeled as an ideal gas of particles whose properties could be explained while denuding Nature of her mechanical degrees of freedom (as predicted by Goethe & Rilke). Such a grave trespass … in place of these two … obey the laws of classical music composed by Wittgenstein during the summer he spent in a secluded cabin on a remote mountain top … compound fractures

evokes attitudes which Hadot proposes as mechanical states dismissed by Heidegger and were later suggested by the Romantic vision … which should really be thought of, Hadot says, as tracing successive interpretations of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling. In this context mere labels become interpretations of Heraclitus’ dictum about river flow … according to … Who would have thought that by describing quantum worlds as a function of over time … an otherwise irrelevant theory states “Nature loves to hide in the cleanest of vacuums” : an expression of the sublime. The veiled goddess Isis is an allegorical figure : Nature, from an energetic viewpoint, is language … nearly all systems … intended to make art and antiart

“a practice like meditation”

“Nature,” Hadot writes, “invites us to look within the Multiverse.” Akin to writing into the void : where the facts are collected and presented in (a) novel … I embrace Isis and all she represents: the poet will unite a Carnot cycle … I carry with me the remains of a novel that I failed to write thirty years ago. That art makes us intensely aware … but this is a loose way of speaking since art doesn’t make us aware of anything, even a little bit : better to say that art is an occasion, an opportunity, an open door, a practice like meditation that prepares us … it’s the practice (the action within ourselves occasioned by the art … a mandala, a focus of attention (an activity) … it’s in paying attention that … in this scenario, where you are reading … just as this project is coming along nicely … how completely we are into uncreative writing, but my few words shy away this morning.

—6 October 2024 / #NL002VNE