Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

  The incipient nitrogen narcosis of the dive made everything slow and stony. It made me really want to get high. But trace it through - then I'd want a drink. I'd come down. I'd want more. There'd be no end to it. No, instead of getting high, I can be high.

  I was talking to a fellow clean-and-sober type here who said some interesting things. A surfer. He said you have to be fully into your program for sobriety, be really standing on it, like on a board. He also said that we're ninety percent God, just like we're ninety percent water. There's only this little bit of us that's our ego.

  Kauai

  I drew all the time instead of writing on this trip. The illos for Saucer Wisdom. Yesterday I took a last snorkel. A humuhumunukunukuapua'a fish darted in to a hole in the reef to hide. I was wearing my diving gloves, so I poked my finger in and touched him. He grunted really loud, a lot of times, each time I'd touch him. "Unk-unk-unk. Unk unk." My totem fish. Pua'a means pig, referring either to the fish's nose or to the noise he makes, or both.

  Page 273

  Saw a turtle resting on the bottom.

  Staghorn finger coral head, full of damselfish and wrasses. The coral like a brain, the fish like thoughts in the brain.

  Unpublished.

  Handwritten travel notes made in Tonga and Fiji, July 15 through

  August 6, 1996; on the big island of Hawaii, July 28 through

  August 5, 1997; and on the way back from Kauai, June 21, 1998.

  Page 274

  In Search of Bruegel

  August 28, 1998. On the Plane from San Francisco to Geneva.

  I'm flying alone, Audrey went a few days earlier so as to spend a few extra days with her family. It's almost night.

  The landscape of clouds below us is like a hugely plowed field. It's odd that there's no organism that will ever learn the shapes of this particular cloud landscape, the geodesics of its surfaces, its crannies and its nooks. It's completely temporary and in some sense without purpose. Are the clouds random? Yes and no. The furrowed shapes are repetitive, they are the patterns of a chaotic attractor. So not random overall. But, yes, they are random in their small details.

  Then the clouds break up and I can see the night-lit cities of the Bay area. What lovely luminous jellyfish of night. The shapes are built from pinpoints of three kinds of lamp: blue arclights, pink sodium vapor lights, and ordinary incandescent bulbs. Dizzying to think of all the human lives down there doing Friday night: suppers, conversations, parties, sex and TV, TV, TV.

  September 3, 1998. Musée Ariana.

  Finally tomorrow we get to really start our vacation. We've been visiting Audrey's father here. The view out his window is of huge old trees. Oaks, beeches, pines. The chaotic purposeful motion of the beech branches. Like seaweed.

  Now I'm in the Ariana Museum of Ceramics. In the Middle Ages, forks only had one tine. A fork like that was called a "pique de table." In the 1600s they started having two tines. It's like time travel, looking at this stuff. And here's a bouillon bowl, from Nyon, 1790, glazed to look like knotty pine paneling.

  The Ariana Museum is in an old villa with the floor cut out of the second floor so that the main part of the ground floor rises up two stories. There is a mezzanine around the edge of this space with an

  Page 275

  amazing set of eighteen marble columns holding up the barrel-vaulted ceiling. Very odd, twisty, Baroque columns. I've seen this space before and always wanted to come back here to figure out if the columns are all different or not. At first glance it looks as if they are, but now today I find out for sure.

  I assign the letters A through R to the eighteen columns and walk slowly around the mezzanine noting each column's characteristics. The columns are single fat worms, or braids of up to four worms, and the braids twist either clockwise or counterclockwise from bottom to top, making from three to eight full twists between bottom and top. Another distinguishing feature is that the component worms of the columns can be either smooth or grooved.

  I have a lot of fun analyzing all this, it's math in action, the coding up of some pattern by a few numbers, and eventually I've learned that of the eighteen columns, seven are twisted clockwise, ten counterclockwise, and one is not twisted at all. Fourteen of the columns are distinct, and four of them are copies of others. If the four copies had only been mirror-reversed then all could have been different, sigh.

  The spacing of the duplicated pairs has no obvious rhyme or reason to them. If you label the columns A through R, then the pairs are: AM, BP, DL, HN, and IO.

  Wandering around some more, I see several examples of the huge porcelain stoves called poêles. One of them reaches all the way to the ceiling. A few years back I smoked DMT for the first and last time. It was an unbelievable nightmare (my usual reaction to psychedelics!) and the most malignant demon in my hallucinations was, of all things, just such a poêle stove - I'd recently seen one at John Walker's house in Lignieres, Switzerland. That hallucination later made its way into The Hacker and the AntsI used it both in a "dark dream" freakout scene and in a robot ant attack scene, the ants had a nest in the poêle. Even in the sober light of day, the Ariana's gigundo poêle scares me, no logical reason why.

  Out in the park I see a man with a pipe and a furled umbrella gathering up hazelnuts. A giant bell, a gift from Japan, hangs there, I gong it, and it resonates for more than a minute. A deep humming noise that rises and falls.

  Page 276

  September 4, 1998. Fractals and Paint.

  This is our Nth honeymoon. Yee-haw. Audrey is next to me happily writing out a $/franc conversion table. Comfortable seats on a fast train. Audrey's stepmother packed us a good lunch: cheese, tomatoes, radishes, chocolate, grapes. We bought a peasant bread.

  Yesterday I happened across the hotel where my parents, my brother and I stayed when I came to Geneva to marry Audrey in 1967. I looked into the hotel. I seem to see my spectral parents in the breakfast nook.

  I took a ride on a lake boat from Nyon to Geneva the other day, past the Eaux Vives park where we had our wedding lunch. Talk about spectral. I think more than half of the people who were at that lunch are dead now, these 31 years gone. When I was young I saw myself as the unique protagonist of a hero-epic. Time goes by, and now life is more like a chain, a rolling wheel of human seasons, the old trees failing and the saplings coming up.

  I have a mental game I like to play, of thinking of my life as a single cosmic year, and of then viewing my current age as a particular date in this cosmic year. It's the old notion of childhood as spring, youth as summer, middle age as fall, and old age as winter. But, being a mathematician, I like to quantify it. To work out the correspondences, I need to decide on how many actual years I'm likely to live. It's convenient for this to be a multiple of twelve; when I was younger, seventy-two used to seem like a reasonable length of life, but these days eighty-four is looking a lot more reasonable to me. So, okay, if my "life-year" is eighty-four years, then each "life-month" is seven years. This means that my current age of fifty-two is equal to, um, seven and a half months, and seven and a half months from the beginning of the life-year is August 15. This time of year, in fact. Early harvest. I still have some time.

  I talked to Audrey about the idea that as you age, your worldview gets broader. "And then it narrows back down," she reminded me - for, yes, for all four of our parents, when they got old the scope seemed to close down to the most immediate needs of their bodies.

  In Geneva, Audrey and I went to see an exhibit of 19th Century Swiss painting at the Musée Rath, a cute little shrine of a Beaux-Arts building on Place Neuve between the opera and the park that includes

  Page 277

  the university. I noticed one artist in particular: Robert Zünd, 18271909. He did these huge canvases of woodlands, with seemingly every leaf in place. He works down to a much lower level of detail than most painters. Yet, like any other painter, even Zünd hits a bottom level where it's just little crusts of paint. The trick painters use is, at some level or other, to r
eplace the fractality of nature by the physical fractality of paint and canvas. The ancient "As Above, So Below" principle in painting. By practice, a painter perhaps learns to approximate a given target fractal dimension by paint that is handled or manipulated in a certain way. Scumbling. A clever artist can do this at a relatively high level and not bother with so much work as another, and still somehow capture the impression of the scene.

  When I took the lake boat and it passed under the Lake Geneva fountain called the Jet d'Eau I saw such interesting shapes. The sun was behind the fountain, so I saw shadows where the water was thicker. The water came down in big drapes like the drapes in waterfalls.

  September 6, 1998. Paris, Sea Potato, Grand Guignol, Brancusi.

  I'm in a tabac/café alone, about to get breakfast, Audrey is in the hotel doing her hair. A few doors down is the entrance to the Place des Vosges - an amazing 18th Century square. Like stepping into a tinted architectural etching on some genteel wall. But the fountains are alive - four of them - and the plane trees are green and chaotic, albeit trimmed into long multi-trunked rectangular prisms. It feels like really good virtual reality - note how a familiarity with VR makes one appreciate real reality the more.

  Yesterday we had a great - though kind of disgusting - dinner at La Bar des Huîtres. The "plateau géant," about $60, with regular oysters, round oysters, cherrystone clams, big shrimp, tiny shrimp that you eat in the shell, a big crab cut in half, two little crabs that you pick at like you're the crustacean, tiny black snail periwinkles, bigger spiral shell things (whelks?), long razor clams and - la pièce de résistance - a "violet" or "patate de mer" (sea potato) which is a tough black thing cut in half, leather on the outside, then an inch of cartilaginous pearly white material, and in the middle the part that I

  Page 278

  ate, God help me, a beige-yellow mass a bit like sea urchin roe, attached to the thick hide by ligaments and membranes that I severed with some difficulty, finally freeing a soft mass the size of my little finger. Was it eggs? stomach? milt? brain? - whatever, I cut it in half and had it in two mouthfuls. It tasted intensely of the sea, of the fresh sea not the rotten sea, a tang of salt and iodine, like getting blindsided by a wave and sent tumbling over the falls in whitewater surf. I thought uneasily about the sea potato - and about the one bad sewage-reeking oyster I got - for the rest of the evening, my unease compounded by three unwisely consumed balls of ice cream.

  Yesterday we went to see a puppet show at Rond Point on Champs Elysées. Such a pitifully small theatre - so humble next to, say, the Opéra de Paris. The puppet theater was called a ''guignolet," it was the size of a child's playhouse, an old little thing with "M. P. Guentleur, 1818" painted on it. Seated on four benches upon the park sand in attendance were some ten children with their mothers, and Audrey and I - me the only man other than an employee of the enterprise who sat on the back bench to help initiate the correct shouted responses. The chief puppeteer was an attractive, somewhat roughskinned young woman wearing a bowler hat at an angle. She had a loose pullover that was askew, baring one shoulder and a black silk bra strap. Ah Paris! Before the show, this woman walked out to the little knee-high gate ringing a handbell, to admit the mothers, children, Audrey and me, 16 francs apiece, there was one baby in a carriage who I think got in free. We sat on the little benches, she welcomed us, then disappeared into the little playhouse with its faded red velvet curtains. She told us to call for "Guignol" to make him come out. Wonderful.

  I never knew that "Grand Guignol" puppetry was about a puppet named Guignol. The man on the back bench called "Guignol" a few times and the children took it up. Eventually, Guignol came out - he wasn't hook-nosed like Punch, as I'd expected, he was a fairly ordinary-looking man in a green frock coat. His wife was Madelon - with a wonderfully high, squeaky puppet voice - and his son was Guillaume. Eventually he got down to the basics of hitting a policeman puppet with a stout, freshly cut and trimmed stick. A cudgel.

  Later we go see a bunch of Brancusi sculptures set up in a mock-

  Page 279

  up of his studio, "just as he left it," except the walls are glass, we walk around looking into the four rooms. The floors are bare, there's nothing present except one or two hundred of Brancusi's sculptures, he kept the studio this way, he lived somewhere else, used the studio to show his work to guests and customers, like a gallery.

  Imagine if the model of Brancusi's studio had "him" in it, an actor or an android, oblivious to the viewers, arranging things, working a little, maybe fabricating yet another "Bird in Flight." The android Brancusi would of course eventually get out of control.

  Afterwards there's music in the street - a diva's voice singing operatically from a tape store. Endless flowing tones. Across the way a woman sits, her leopard scarf fluttering in the wind. Like the flowing music, like the shapes of Brancusi, like the years that swallowed Brancusi's eighty-year life and flow on, leaving his shapes, his castoff shells.

  September 12, 1998. London Museums.

  In London first we stayed at a YMCA with endless alienating empty halls leading from our tiny wind-rattled room to athlete's-foot-floor hideous-porcelain-bowl-shit-stain copious-pubic-hair bathrooms, it was so gnarly we switched hotels for the second night, me out at dawn trying eight places till I found one that wasn't full or $450 a night.

  We were in the Bloomsbury district, around the corner from the British Museum, with its great Egyptian and Greek sculptures. The British were among the very first to rip off, plunder, and loot the cradle of civilization, back in the sun-never-sets days of the British Empire. The Egyptian holdings of the British Museum make the stuff in the Met in NYC look like the broken shit left on the floor after the burglars got away.

  I had a lot of uneasy feelings about the loot, in other words. But there were some great pieces. A granite Rameses 2, 1270 BC from Thebes. So calm and beautiful, such a wonderful smooth curve in the cheek at the corner of this mouth - yet, really, how different is this Rameses from a plastic sculpture of the hamburger icon Big Boy?

  There was a beautiful queen - Amenophis - and her husband. Really clear lines along the edges of their lips; I could grasp that Egyptians are Africans, black people. Amenophis's husband looked

  Page 280

  like Lightin' Hopkins.

  I saw the best panel of hieroglyphics ever, so clear, so deeply incised. Yet - mystery - couldn't find the panel the next day, although the hall was rather small.

  Outside we saw a classic cameras store with lots of old Leicas, I wandered in, and "What can I tempt you with, sir?" asked the proprietor. So polite, the British. The place was in "Pied Bull Yard," a courtyard, and in there was a pub, "Truckles of Pied Bull Yard."

  I wander into a park near the Embankment tube stop near Trafalgar Square. There are blue-and-white-striped lawn chairs with, mostly, bums in them. I lie in one for awhile, it's free. My legs are giving out from day after day of pounding the pavement. The lawn chairs billow chaotically in the breeze. Chaos is everywhere, if you have the eyes to see it.

  In the National Gallery, I find a good painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Adoration of the Magi of 1564. The signature says BRVEGEL MDLXIII. How clear and fresh the canvas is. The three kings are in a triangle of gaze, each looking at a gift held by one of the other kings. Balthazar looks like Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop festival. He has a beautiful pointed-toe red boot. Fringed chamois leather cape. His gift is a gold ship called a "nef." It holds a green enameled shell, and within the shell is a tiny live monkey.

  The gallery note by the picture says that Bruegel put soldiers in his pictures because for most of his life the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish soldiers. This touch makes it seem so real. Makes me want to write Bruegel's life. The rainy Flemish day.

  Mary looks like a hot number: full lips. A guy whispers in Joseph's ear. Either it's about the gifts or he's saying "You're a cuckold." Joseph looks undisturbed.