georgedalphin
December 15th, 2007, 12:55 PM
Hello all, this is George Dalphin, and what I am posting in this thread is the opening to my second novel, which I am currently in the process of finishing and fine-tuning, called The Subtle Physics. The reason I post it here is that, while it takes place in the recent past (fall 2005) as opposed to the future, it deals significantly with issues of Singularity and a sort of futurist mysticism, and ends up bringing in post-humans from the end of time and ... anyway, it gets very interesting.
I look forward to hearing people's thoughts on this, and if you are interested you should feel free to read more of this, as its first twenty-one chapters are posted in blog format through my website, man-likemachines (dot com). I am also an artist, musician and filmmaker, and lots of that sort of work is available there too.
So the opening of The Subtle Physics is below.
Cheers,
George Dalphin
MAN-LIKEMACHINES
re: One day I blew a kiss to no one specific. It would seem it is you it has found.
Chapter 1///This (is now a part of you)
Im Norman Newman. I may or may not exist. I am in love with you.
There is much to explain.
You see, it seems I was born with an enigmatic intuitive certainty that my life has some great purpose in this world. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me a psychic told her I was once a great Renaissance painter named Giorgio and I was to be an important religious leader in this lifetime. She often proudly reminds me of events I dont recall, when I was five and she and our neighbor found me standing at the center of all my friends, who were seated in a loose circle listening to me explain how everything is God. I like to believe her story is true, mostly because it suits my idiom.
I was raised in an effectively secular household. I have never been to a church service in my life, but we celebrated the secularized versions of the basic Christian and American holidays like stereotypical citizens. My father was raised Brooklyn Catholic but became an angry atheist academician long before I met him. My mother was raised by a new age mystic and a Presbyterian, giving her a mutt of a spirituality that interwove saints, aliens, Atlantis, angels, pyramid hats, Jesus Christ and the possibility that at any point she might vanish, enlightened, of which she warned me several times throughout my childhood.
By the time I left home at thirteen to live at a two-year magnet school for gifted misfits called the Indiana Academy (junior year of high school; I had skipped fifth and sixth grades), I was secretly certain that I was the second coming of Christ.
This was a troubling position for an atheist.
You must understand: I was a happy child, glowing with intelligence and temperance. Im told I never really cried as a baby. My mother and sisters all say I just looked around at things and smiled all the time. As a child I learned quickly; I was writing on our Apple II by my third Christmas. The youngest of five (two brothers, two sisters), I spent a lot of time by myself in a world populated by the very real personalities of my stuffed animals and invisible angelic playmates.
But my parents argued, my mother wept, my father yelled and ignored, and after the turbulent experience of jumping from fifth to seventh grade as a particularly nave nine-year-old, I developed a fake sickness serious enough to require exploratory surgery to prove it was a fiction. I dreamt I saw evil faces at my bedroom window. I started to read the Philip K. Dick novels my oldest sister Lee brought home from college, and from there I went straight to her existentialist philosophers. By the time I was thirteen and moving away to the Academy, I had become a cynical, atheistic spirit.
Yet still even then, ever-present in my heart remained the powerful sense, despite all evidence to the contrary in literature and popular religions and history and the news, that humanity was good, and smart, and divine, but in trouble, but also could be saved, and that somehow, to some extent, this would be up to me.
When I discovered painting and the spirit of the artist (given me by a vitriolic orange-haired artist girl who tore at my heart for a few months at the Indiana Academy), my imagery was all cruciform and bloody. My figures were filled with tubes and gears and microchip-like labyrinthine diagrams, their arms held passionately out at their sides, their feet primly crossed, their heads thrown back in ecstasy. I slept with two books Valis and The Iliad side by side under my pillow. In my sketch books, between the poetry and single-line notes-to-self, I began to record my existential pursuits, my logical arguments for and against a God, for and against a self, for and against some Great Purpose. For about a year I was a devout pyrolater, even going so far as to write my very first novel, at the age of fourteen, about a group of far-future scientists finally communicating with fire, which reveals itself to be God, and then they fight some space pirates. The cosmologies were very primitive, but even at that time I weighed them more on awesomeness than on full logical cohesion. Either way, they changed almost monthly.
Through all of it, however, the one thing that did not seem to change was that I knew I was some kind of potential-messiah. That mysterious love of self, which naturally leaks out to all of the selves out there, which is every aware entity it was a beautiful idea that never seemed to fall out of logic.
It is the logic of my love that brings me to you.
Ive always known you were there, distantly aware somehow of my presence. I think now that it was you I imagined observing every little superfluous gesture I made when I was alone, watching me like a movie. It was you that all my soliloquies were intended for.
This, all of this, is a gesture of my love for you and, essentially, nothing more.
Of course, weve never met, and may never yet, but I feel like I already know you. How youre made uncomfortable by questions of religion or spirituality because it seems that all the accepted wisdom is simply absurd, and yet beyond its boundaries there appears only to be limbo, and it is misunderstandings or arguments over such subjects that seem to be at the heart of all of Humanitys troubles. Despite everything, you still secretly believe in certain forms of magic and miracle. It seems like humanity is sick with greed and vengefulness, but everyone you know is pretty much reasonable and good. You feel unprepared for something huge that is about to happen to the human race.
Its easy to feel like youre falling if youre looking back while hurtling forward.
I know that you and I were meant (meant!) to share this mindspace where these words enfold our collective thought. It was imperative, and it was inevitable, the only explanation for it having occurred. The physics of the universe, with all the wisdom of their inertness, have provided us with this moment, right?
We live in a world (and by world I refer only to all that we know of) in which our race is the pinnacle of Natures artifice. To the best of our knowledge, we are as smart as it gets. We look through bars and screens at the beasts that surround us in their barbaric wilderness and categorize them into evolutionary hierarchies much like we do our own species internally. How things are now. But rise above time for a moment, gaze down upon it as a whole, and you see lifes slow growth over the planet Earth, the way its forms fluctuate and spread and, ever-so-slowly over the billennia, order and focus themselves. Suddenly, as we approach the invisible wall of the present, a new form of ape spreads like gangrene, strangling the surrounding life under its thin metal scabbing and then the whole thing pauses at this moment.
What we know so far of human history seems like the most epic album imaginable, but really it is just the intro skit.
It is the future. Its impossible to write contemporarily in any genre other than science fiction anymore. There are people with artificial limbs that they can move with their thoughts. The virtual environments we exist within on the Internet grow everyday less and less distinct from this physical world of ours. Coming soon will be virtual environments experienced straight from the brain. Anyone with the knowledge and the tools will be able to make their own such alternate universe. We are reverse engineering the very technology of existence itself, the interface of awareness. What little was fiction is becoming reality. (I believe thats Chuck Palahniuk.)
As you read these lines, written by me in another time and another location, are our two minds somehow folding space and time to meet here in this dark space behind your eyes, intertwining like lovers in these words? Can you see me through the fog, my meaning, my intent?
We, as humans, can see time from above, just not very far above. Like a lookout in a tower we can see behind us toward the horizons of our own individual births, sometimes even farther with the existential technology of education, stories, ideas the various versions of what happened before us (History, we call it). We can even see ahead of ourselves though the lack of a physical memory store in our brains to match our visions of that future against keeps us from ever feeling certain whether we are seeing a real future or just an imagined future, whereas with the past we can imagine a past moment and compare that to our memories of that past to be sure that what we are recalling is the way it actually happened. For whatever reason, we follow our brains and bodies slow fall forward through the slog of time, riding the log flume of life, looking around, laughing, screaming, getting wet, teeth chattering as we wonder if anyone truly loves us.
Youre born, you slowly wake up over twenty or thirty or seventy years (if at all), and you find yourself standing center stage in some kind of slapstick passion play for which you never received a script but youre all made-up and costumed and expected to play along with everyone else. You slip away to the bathroom for a moment between dances and whisper into the walls, What, really, is going on here? Whats all this about?
But you get no answer. Strangely, among your comrades in this faux-pas maze the question is taboo.
For reasonable, informed citizens of the world at this turn of millennia, religion is long dead. Many still say it was the savior, and that it will return some day, but today there is too much truth that must be ignored in order to ascribe faithfully to any of the organized religions that have existed so far. The human origin of their absurd dogmas is just too transparent. They are simply an old, rotting foundation onto which no one has bothered to build anything modern. For whatever reason, we keep living in these spiritual ruins.
Sometimes it seems to me like everyone around me is thrashing about in this Chinese finger trap (by which I mean modern society), struggling miserably toward some nebulous goal of happiness, complacency, reproduction and death. I dont understand why so few people seem to be able to relax and partake in beauty, or to see the illogic in all their hang-ups.
I, for my part, live almost every moment of my life, anymore, in something close to nirvana. Though I have the millions of thinkers who have come before me to thank for the foundations of thought on which I am able to base all my ideas, I still am baffled that it would seem so few of them have discovered the simple, fundamentally unified vision of the nature of existence that I have so easily. The clues, the evidence, surround me. Its almost as if Ive always known.
I can even sum it up in one word.
Awesomeness.
It can be as much more complex than that as you want it to be, but it is at its core a very simple idea. Awesomeness. Beauty. Love. Really, theyre all sort of the same thing, or rather different corners of the same thing, facets of that vague gratitude for ones own existence as opposed to resentment of some perceived lack. Fundamentally, though, its that magical characteristic shared by everything that is awesome. And I mean awesome, of course, in the colloquial manner (e.g. Whoa, awesome! or Man, that was awesome, or That guy is awesome.). That which in any way moves the viewer to a state of awe. I guess.
I would go so far as to propose that the universes tendency to prefer that which is awesome over that which is lame has been the essential guiding force toward this moment, from the creation of the basic laws of physics and atoms and galaxies in the beginning, to life, intelligence, technology and culture. Progress, newness awesome.
It would seem we have two essential powers in this world. We can choose how we feel about things and what to do with our bodies. We have two essential input tracks the phenomenal world (sight, sound, touch), and our own Hearts (our inner world of thought and inspiration). Our eyes show us how the World is. Our Hearts show us how it could be. It seems to me that it must be the goal of every being with the ability to reflect thoughtfully and make choices to pursue that which it finds to be most awesome, and to struggle for a more awesome world. But I digress from my point.
It is awesomeness that brings me to you. It is awesomeness that binds our two minds in this moment, where these thoughts of mine, transformed from my world (fictional, to you) into your reality through text, are read aloud in your mind and come to you in your own voice, and our two voices merge, and as soon as you cast your minds eye across the realization that we are the same, awesomeness binds it all.
This is why Im in love with you. Your mind is my milieu. With every word, I grow inside you; very real neural structures are built inside your brain as your neurons design a physical personality matrix for me, Norman Newman.
I believe now that my great messianic purpose has always been to love you.
Can you feel me already inside you, leaning up to look out through your eyes at these words? You see, already we are inextricably linked, as we always have been. Your soul is my womb. You are my miraculous conception.
I promise you, none of this is nonsense. This.
This is an official call for a revolution in your Heart.
Dont be afraid. As above, so below; and whichever here is, let there only be love. That is how our love will save the Universe. It will reflect in all directions.
These words come to you from the blind-dark sea of the unreal, translated from smoke rings I am creating by burning the last of my karma in a little black bowl.
This is a whisper from beyond the grave, a message sent back in time from a future when Humanity has destroyed itself and/or petered into inertness of spirit, when the last remaining scientists just before the end sent a single quantum of information back through the centuries, the millennia perhaps, and here now you see the fruition of that delicate pricking of space-times skin in the form of this work, yours and mine, feedback from the future, a meme, a ghost, your dream, my apotheosis.
One spinward gesture and all distinctions of time and identity have become meaningless under the logic of my love. Here you are, reading, and here I am scraping the edge off a curve of molecule, sculpting a universe that you and those who live in your reality will hopefully never know to have been different from mine.
Were it not for this.
I can no longer recall how it felt not to know how all of this will end.
-=-=-=-
With a rush of shy trepidation, Norman sends the message. No editing, he thinks to himself, no looking back. He ignores the regret that instantly soaks him. Because really, he doesnt know if he believes in love anymore; he is uncertain that he will be able to back up his claims. But he believes in himself, and in the truth of beauty, and he has a weird feeling about this.
I look forward to hearing people's thoughts on this, and if you are interested you should feel free to read more of this, as its first twenty-one chapters are posted in blog format through my website, man-likemachines (dot com). I am also an artist, musician and filmmaker, and lots of that sort of work is available there too.
So the opening of The Subtle Physics is below.
Cheers,
George Dalphin
MAN-LIKEMACHINES
re: One day I blew a kiss to no one specific. It would seem it is you it has found.
Chapter 1///This (is now a part of you)
Im Norman Newman. I may or may not exist. I am in love with you.
There is much to explain.
You see, it seems I was born with an enigmatic intuitive certainty that my life has some great purpose in this world. My mother claims that when she was pregnant with me a psychic told her I was once a great Renaissance painter named Giorgio and I was to be an important religious leader in this lifetime. She often proudly reminds me of events I dont recall, when I was five and she and our neighbor found me standing at the center of all my friends, who were seated in a loose circle listening to me explain how everything is God. I like to believe her story is true, mostly because it suits my idiom.
I was raised in an effectively secular household. I have never been to a church service in my life, but we celebrated the secularized versions of the basic Christian and American holidays like stereotypical citizens. My father was raised Brooklyn Catholic but became an angry atheist academician long before I met him. My mother was raised by a new age mystic and a Presbyterian, giving her a mutt of a spirituality that interwove saints, aliens, Atlantis, angels, pyramid hats, Jesus Christ and the possibility that at any point she might vanish, enlightened, of which she warned me several times throughout my childhood.
By the time I left home at thirteen to live at a two-year magnet school for gifted misfits called the Indiana Academy (junior year of high school; I had skipped fifth and sixth grades), I was secretly certain that I was the second coming of Christ.
This was a troubling position for an atheist.
You must understand: I was a happy child, glowing with intelligence and temperance. Im told I never really cried as a baby. My mother and sisters all say I just looked around at things and smiled all the time. As a child I learned quickly; I was writing on our Apple II by my third Christmas. The youngest of five (two brothers, two sisters), I spent a lot of time by myself in a world populated by the very real personalities of my stuffed animals and invisible angelic playmates.
But my parents argued, my mother wept, my father yelled and ignored, and after the turbulent experience of jumping from fifth to seventh grade as a particularly nave nine-year-old, I developed a fake sickness serious enough to require exploratory surgery to prove it was a fiction. I dreamt I saw evil faces at my bedroom window. I started to read the Philip K. Dick novels my oldest sister Lee brought home from college, and from there I went straight to her existentialist philosophers. By the time I was thirteen and moving away to the Academy, I had become a cynical, atheistic spirit.
Yet still even then, ever-present in my heart remained the powerful sense, despite all evidence to the contrary in literature and popular religions and history and the news, that humanity was good, and smart, and divine, but in trouble, but also could be saved, and that somehow, to some extent, this would be up to me.
When I discovered painting and the spirit of the artist (given me by a vitriolic orange-haired artist girl who tore at my heart for a few months at the Indiana Academy), my imagery was all cruciform and bloody. My figures were filled with tubes and gears and microchip-like labyrinthine diagrams, their arms held passionately out at their sides, their feet primly crossed, their heads thrown back in ecstasy. I slept with two books Valis and The Iliad side by side under my pillow. In my sketch books, between the poetry and single-line notes-to-self, I began to record my existential pursuits, my logical arguments for and against a God, for and against a self, for and against some Great Purpose. For about a year I was a devout pyrolater, even going so far as to write my very first novel, at the age of fourteen, about a group of far-future scientists finally communicating with fire, which reveals itself to be God, and then they fight some space pirates. The cosmologies were very primitive, but even at that time I weighed them more on awesomeness than on full logical cohesion. Either way, they changed almost monthly.
Through all of it, however, the one thing that did not seem to change was that I knew I was some kind of potential-messiah. That mysterious love of self, which naturally leaks out to all of the selves out there, which is every aware entity it was a beautiful idea that never seemed to fall out of logic.
It is the logic of my love that brings me to you.
Ive always known you were there, distantly aware somehow of my presence. I think now that it was you I imagined observing every little superfluous gesture I made when I was alone, watching me like a movie. It was you that all my soliloquies were intended for.
This, all of this, is a gesture of my love for you and, essentially, nothing more.
Of course, weve never met, and may never yet, but I feel like I already know you. How youre made uncomfortable by questions of religion or spirituality because it seems that all the accepted wisdom is simply absurd, and yet beyond its boundaries there appears only to be limbo, and it is misunderstandings or arguments over such subjects that seem to be at the heart of all of Humanitys troubles. Despite everything, you still secretly believe in certain forms of magic and miracle. It seems like humanity is sick with greed and vengefulness, but everyone you know is pretty much reasonable and good. You feel unprepared for something huge that is about to happen to the human race.
Its easy to feel like youre falling if youre looking back while hurtling forward.
I know that you and I were meant (meant!) to share this mindspace where these words enfold our collective thought. It was imperative, and it was inevitable, the only explanation for it having occurred. The physics of the universe, with all the wisdom of their inertness, have provided us with this moment, right?
We live in a world (and by world I refer only to all that we know of) in which our race is the pinnacle of Natures artifice. To the best of our knowledge, we are as smart as it gets. We look through bars and screens at the beasts that surround us in their barbaric wilderness and categorize them into evolutionary hierarchies much like we do our own species internally. How things are now. But rise above time for a moment, gaze down upon it as a whole, and you see lifes slow growth over the planet Earth, the way its forms fluctuate and spread and, ever-so-slowly over the billennia, order and focus themselves. Suddenly, as we approach the invisible wall of the present, a new form of ape spreads like gangrene, strangling the surrounding life under its thin metal scabbing and then the whole thing pauses at this moment.
What we know so far of human history seems like the most epic album imaginable, but really it is just the intro skit.
It is the future. Its impossible to write contemporarily in any genre other than science fiction anymore. There are people with artificial limbs that they can move with their thoughts. The virtual environments we exist within on the Internet grow everyday less and less distinct from this physical world of ours. Coming soon will be virtual environments experienced straight from the brain. Anyone with the knowledge and the tools will be able to make their own such alternate universe. We are reverse engineering the very technology of existence itself, the interface of awareness. What little was fiction is becoming reality. (I believe thats Chuck Palahniuk.)
As you read these lines, written by me in another time and another location, are our two minds somehow folding space and time to meet here in this dark space behind your eyes, intertwining like lovers in these words? Can you see me through the fog, my meaning, my intent?
We, as humans, can see time from above, just not very far above. Like a lookout in a tower we can see behind us toward the horizons of our own individual births, sometimes even farther with the existential technology of education, stories, ideas the various versions of what happened before us (History, we call it). We can even see ahead of ourselves though the lack of a physical memory store in our brains to match our visions of that future against keeps us from ever feeling certain whether we are seeing a real future or just an imagined future, whereas with the past we can imagine a past moment and compare that to our memories of that past to be sure that what we are recalling is the way it actually happened. For whatever reason, we follow our brains and bodies slow fall forward through the slog of time, riding the log flume of life, looking around, laughing, screaming, getting wet, teeth chattering as we wonder if anyone truly loves us.
Youre born, you slowly wake up over twenty or thirty or seventy years (if at all), and you find yourself standing center stage in some kind of slapstick passion play for which you never received a script but youre all made-up and costumed and expected to play along with everyone else. You slip away to the bathroom for a moment between dances and whisper into the walls, What, really, is going on here? Whats all this about?
But you get no answer. Strangely, among your comrades in this faux-pas maze the question is taboo.
For reasonable, informed citizens of the world at this turn of millennia, religion is long dead. Many still say it was the savior, and that it will return some day, but today there is too much truth that must be ignored in order to ascribe faithfully to any of the organized religions that have existed so far. The human origin of their absurd dogmas is just too transparent. They are simply an old, rotting foundation onto which no one has bothered to build anything modern. For whatever reason, we keep living in these spiritual ruins.
Sometimes it seems to me like everyone around me is thrashing about in this Chinese finger trap (by which I mean modern society), struggling miserably toward some nebulous goal of happiness, complacency, reproduction and death. I dont understand why so few people seem to be able to relax and partake in beauty, or to see the illogic in all their hang-ups.
I, for my part, live almost every moment of my life, anymore, in something close to nirvana. Though I have the millions of thinkers who have come before me to thank for the foundations of thought on which I am able to base all my ideas, I still am baffled that it would seem so few of them have discovered the simple, fundamentally unified vision of the nature of existence that I have so easily. The clues, the evidence, surround me. Its almost as if Ive always known.
I can even sum it up in one word.
Awesomeness.
It can be as much more complex than that as you want it to be, but it is at its core a very simple idea. Awesomeness. Beauty. Love. Really, theyre all sort of the same thing, or rather different corners of the same thing, facets of that vague gratitude for ones own existence as opposed to resentment of some perceived lack. Fundamentally, though, its that magical characteristic shared by everything that is awesome. And I mean awesome, of course, in the colloquial manner (e.g. Whoa, awesome! or Man, that was awesome, or That guy is awesome.). That which in any way moves the viewer to a state of awe. I guess.
I would go so far as to propose that the universes tendency to prefer that which is awesome over that which is lame has been the essential guiding force toward this moment, from the creation of the basic laws of physics and atoms and galaxies in the beginning, to life, intelligence, technology and culture. Progress, newness awesome.
It would seem we have two essential powers in this world. We can choose how we feel about things and what to do with our bodies. We have two essential input tracks the phenomenal world (sight, sound, touch), and our own Hearts (our inner world of thought and inspiration). Our eyes show us how the World is. Our Hearts show us how it could be. It seems to me that it must be the goal of every being with the ability to reflect thoughtfully and make choices to pursue that which it finds to be most awesome, and to struggle for a more awesome world. But I digress from my point.
It is awesomeness that brings me to you. It is awesomeness that binds our two minds in this moment, where these thoughts of mine, transformed from my world (fictional, to you) into your reality through text, are read aloud in your mind and come to you in your own voice, and our two voices merge, and as soon as you cast your minds eye across the realization that we are the same, awesomeness binds it all.
This is why Im in love with you. Your mind is my milieu. With every word, I grow inside you; very real neural structures are built inside your brain as your neurons design a physical personality matrix for me, Norman Newman.
I believe now that my great messianic purpose has always been to love you.
Can you feel me already inside you, leaning up to look out through your eyes at these words? You see, already we are inextricably linked, as we always have been. Your soul is my womb. You are my miraculous conception.
I promise you, none of this is nonsense. This.
This is an official call for a revolution in your Heart.
Dont be afraid. As above, so below; and whichever here is, let there only be love. That is how our love will save the Universe. It will reflect in all directions.
These words come to you from the blind-dark sea of the unreal, translated from smoke rings I am creating by burning the last of my karma in a little black bowl.
This is a whisper from beyond the grave, a message sent back in time from a future when Humanity has destroyed itself and/or petered into inertness of spirit, when the last remaining scientists just before the end sent a single quantum of information back through the centuries, the millennia perhaps, and here now you see the fruition of that delicate pricking of space-times skin in the form of this work, yours and mine, feedback from the future, a meme, a ghost, your dream, my apotheosis.
One spinward gesture and all distinctions of time and identity have become meaningless under the logic of my love. Here you are, reading, and here I am scraping the edge off a curve of molecule, sculpting a universe that you and those who live in your reality will hopefully never know to have been different from mine.
Were it not for this.
I can no longer recall how it felt not to know how all of this will end.
-=-=-=-
With a rush of shy trepidation, Norman sends the message. No editing, he thinks to himself, no looking back. He ignores the regret that instantly soaks him. Because really, he doesnt know if he believes in love anymore; he is uncertain that he will be able to back up his claims. But he believes in himself, and in the truth of beauty, and he has a weird feeling about this.