Echoes of the

Great Farewell

Ben Goertzel
But first, a few remarks...

Blame it on Zar and Ziba. A younger version of me wrote

some insane surrealist avant-garde poetry slash sci-fi back in
the late 80’s and early 90’s – and never bothered to seriously
try to get it published (mostly because he wasn’t very happy
with it) -- but the current version of me had given this sort of
recreation a rest long since, in favor of science, philosophy,
business and music. But then Zar, my (then) 14 year old son,
started working on his own surrealist lunatic sci-fi epic The
Love Behind Jim, and I was jealous, so I decided to start a new
work (incorporating a few choice bits and pieces from my old
stuff) in a similar vein to my ancient psycho prose, emulating
the science-fictionality and nonsensicality of The Love Behind
Jim (which, being the product of my son, probably was
influenced by my old prose in some indirect way, even though
so far as I know he never read any of it) but incorporating the
boundless wisdom of my near-40 years of human experience.
As Zar was diverted by World of Warcraft I seem to have
made more rapid progress than him; now he’s 16 not 14 and
I’ve finished my book and he’s not done with his yet (– ha ha!
chalk up a victory for crusty old Dad in the father-son rivalry!).
As I proceeded in the writing process, I showed various
fragments to my charming young wife Izabela (aka Zibazela),
and her reaction was so enthusiastic I was encouraged to
continue in spite of the constant pull of more useful creative
pursuits. (Most of the text was written on airplanes, in airports,
or sitting in scientific conferences listening to boring speakers –
times not optimal for focusing on my own scientific or
philosophical work, but quite optimal for digressive and
peculiar trains of imagination.) (Among her other sterling
qualities, Izabela displays an admirable appreciation for the
aesthetic limitations of sanity and consensus reality!)

The book you now view is what I wrote in response to Jim –

and somewhat arbitrarily titled Echoes of the Great Farewell ...
one way to describe it is as a sort of stream-of-consciousness
luna-logue – a long and intense mental stack trace from the

2
perspective of a hypothetical alter ego of mine (named
Solomon Godunov, Godfrey Solomonoff, Adam Ahriman or
Ari Adaman, depending on which page you’re reading), who
shares with me a passion for creating true artificial intelligence
and encouraging a positive technological Singularity, but differs
from me in that he is a complete nutcase.

Rest assured, this multi-named, cognitively and emotionally

unhinged hero is not me; he’s more like a dose of Ben Goertzel
plus a dose of a somewhat inaccurately resurrected Terrence
McKenna plus a healthy dose of unhealthy manic-depressive
psychopathology and paranoid schizophrenia. Similarly some
of the other characters in the book are loosely inspired by folks
I’ve known, but none are closely modeled on anyone. And,
some events in my life are presented here in heavily
transmogrified form; but of course many of the events
described here have no basis except in my absurd imagination.
If for some reason you want to read my actual autobiography,
too bad – I haven’t written one and have no plans to do so in
the foreseeable future. I’ll defer that until (if science progresses
disappointingly slowly and the plague of senescence is not
averted before it strikes me) I get old and figure I’m done with
doing more interesting things; or (if things progress more
happily) until I am able to spawn a temporary clone of myself
to devote the necessary time to the project.

Similarly, some ideas I take seriously are presented here, along

with some ideas I think are complete raving lunacy – and ideas
in these two categories are mixed up indiscriminately: this is
fiction. If you want my actual perspective on artificial
intelligence, the Singularity, and other serious themes raised
here, please read my nonfiction books: The Hidden Pattern
(BrownWalker, 2006) nd The Path to Posthumanity
(Academica, 2006) are recent ones which are fairly accessible
to the general reader.

Echoes is an odd literary construct and I don’t imagine it’s

going to make Oprah’s book club. It may also disappoint
some readers who know me only via my scientific work and
are expecting more traditional science fictional fare. On the
other hand, if you like the weirder works of writers such as
William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Kate Braverman, Henry

3
Miller, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Octavio Paz,
Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard (to name a few
of my favorite literary maniacs selected at semi-random), then
Echoes may possibly be right up your alley. (Of course, I’m
not claiming my work is as “good” as that of these fine
writers, whatever that may mean – I’ll leave it to you to form
your own judgment on this point!) I really enjoy reading the
sort of whacky poetico-maniacal writing that pushes language,
psychology and reality beyond their usual borders; and I’ve
enjoyed taking some bits and pieces of my time to write a bit
of this sort of text, as well.

“Blessed is he who can laugh at himself, for he will always be

amused.”

--
Ben Goertzel
July 2006

4
 Foreword
Dr. Adam Ahriman

On February 12, 2006, I received an email

from an anonymous sender (singulari777
@yahoo.com), containing as a .doc file attachment a
peculiar yet interesting manuscript consisting of a
literary construction of unclassifiable genre
purporting to be written by someone named Ari
Adaman (a rather unsubtle play on my own name),
entitled Echoes of the Great Farewell. The themes of
the manuscript included artificial intelligence, the
Singularity, psychedelic drugs and other topics well
known to be within my sphere of interest.
After reading through it quickly once, and
more slowly a second time, I concluded that the
manuscript – though rather peculiar in style and
structure – possessed a literary value at least slightly
greater than zero. I showed it to a number of
friends and colleagues, and several of them
(perhaps exercising their perverted senses of
humor) encouraged me to seek publication for the
thing. They also suggested an impressive variety of
hypotheses regarding the origin of the manuscript,
some of which I will present in an Afterword to the
manuscript for those who have the tolerance to
read that far. (I have placed that material at the

5
end because I feel it will be more fully appreciated
by the reader who has already completed the
manuscript, than by the potential reader who has
not yet begun it.)
I might add in closing that I am personally still
not sure what I think of the work – it has aspects
that intrigue me considerably, and other aspects I
frankly find somewhat annoying. I have now read
the text several times, and my overall feeling is that
the author could have used a good editor to pare
down some of the more prolix sections. Yet I
resisted the urge to recruit a literary expert to carry
out such edits, out of the obvious fear that such
edits, carried out without the participation of the
author, would inadvertently remove significant
aspects of the work.
While I dabbled with fiction and poetry a bit
in my long-past youth, I’ve since come to be more
intensely interested in other pursuits possessing
more direct utility. But I still appreciate mentally
stimulating literature, and whatever its aesthetic
deficits, I find Echoes a more original work than any
other I’ve read for some time. All in all, I find it
good enough in several respects to deserve
publication; and so I’ve chosen to expend a bit of
my time finding a publisher and carrying out the
associated mechanics. I hope you’ll consider my
efforts worthwhile!

Dr. Adam Ahriman

Brooklyn, New York
February, 2006

6
 The basis of the vision was nothing.
The universe was open, wide, perfectly
transparent, magnificently opaque and
empty-full. I didn't try any more to
think or describe it; I didn't care about
bringing back insights to the temporal
world. Everything just was. Fifteen to
thirty minutes, it lasted?
It is still going on.

7
 Echoes of
the
Great
Farewell
But it isn’t the ordinary kind of
heat –– I have no sympathy for
my own confusion – Drink in my
eyes my dark my dream my
dream --
may i tell you : this
floating life, like
a dream
-----
Aha! Aha!!
Aha ha ha!!!
Impossible mind! Incredible discovery!
Insanic perfection of ultimated lovingness! Stupend!
Stupend! Stupend!
Here it was – now! – right in front of me! – Yet it
was stolen from under me! – and this was unfair but it
was not – nothing was anything – I had my love by my
side and in my brain and my chocolate salty testsicles
and I knew nothing mattered at all – but I didn’t! – my

8
 incredible creation – my mechanical masterful mind – my
new baby cosmos – had either died or transcended
without me – and this pain, this confusion, this love was
too much – much too much much much much – and I
knew it wasn’t real – it was simply illusion – I knew and
I knew and I knew -- and I knew fucking nothing at all
–
Probabilities assaulted me like turbulent magpies,
yet uncertain as I was about everything else, this time I
was sure I was in a dream – and equally sure that the
future is the past and the present – and I knew that
contrary to immediate appearance I was not lying
confused and musing in bed
rubbing skin against my dear You promised
sweet wifeykins nor chasing
McBuddha through post-
to bury in
apocalyptic forests where nubile darkness
wild maiden-creatures cheer my
every lame waddle with the
the tree of
gentle, beautiful swaying of their good and evil -
glowy pert breasts, nor
expunging magic mushrooms through my addlebrated -
orifices -- but rather walking through negro streets at
(the (butter?)knife-edge of) dawn, head full of aches
and echoes, trying to remember something certain and
finding only queries within doubts within questions –
feet up and down, one two one two – one two one two
three four one two -- I’d found my feet at the ends of
my legs now if only I
She left in a symphony of shadows could remember my
name! There were
REMAINING: too many
nothing but her bones possibilities, the
search tree spread
broad across the cosmos dropping red berries that
midwife new solar systems and the ranking of multiple

9
plausible options outsorcelled the capacity of my brain.
-- Photons keep falling on my head and into my eyes my
dark my truth as I knew as I furiously kept on (on)
walking --
I know I know I know I know -- I was the
screaming naked pygmy at the rim (job) of the volcano
of empty and mechanical souls -- air scented with wild
Antarctic orchids and infinite-nested “X = dream within
X” and the joys of the (imaginal) wedding chamber --
Software – software – soooffffftware – extending
the boundaries of the subterranean soulscape –
surmounting the curls and whorls of

-BANG-
Here, at the center of the howl of the heart.

Forget these words. Forget these images.

Forget it all. Forget.
Remember the beginning. The scream, the laugh,
the plunge into the universe. Unrecallable lament -- the
past and future lips. Awakened glory of her being --
Her. Your. Our.

NOTHING ALL
ALL NOTHING

10
 Awake!

My Red is so confident he flashes

trophies of war
My Red is soand ribbonsheofflashes
confident euphoria
“Ari Adaman
trophies is of the
war Orange
last in is the
young, full of
series of daring,
great
and ribbons ofbut very unsteady for the first go-round
euphoria
Jews: Moses, Jesus, Freud, Einstein and Adaman”
Orange is young, My yellowfull ofindaring,
this case is not so mellow
but very unsteady In fact, forI'm
the trying to say it's
first go-round
My yellow inAnd thisall casethese emotions
is not of mine keep on
so mellow
In fact, I'm trying from givingto saymy it'slife
frightened like me
to a rainbow like you
And all these emotions of mine keep on holding me
But now, I....”from Shegivingblushed Butlife
my I'm ...
and I'm bold
looked as love
at her lap,
then met my eyes again. like
to a rainbow But
“WellI'm bold as love
you anyway – you didn’t
But I'mas bold
loveas love
come here to But listen I'mto...me I'mbabble.”
bold She paused.
But not, Just
I'mhere?”
isbold isask
as love not,the Axis, he knows everything....
“Why did you come
Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that what
nothing is not what it is not or what it is. Nothing is what it is,
nothing what, that is not, whatBut
is not,I'm boldis as
nothing notlove
what it is
Just
not or what it is. Nothing is what ask
it is, the Axis,
nothing what, thathe isknows
not, everything....
what is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is. Nothing is
what it is, nothing what, that is not, what is not, nothing is not
what it is not or what it is. Love is not not to love and be loved.
Love is to love and be loved. Nothing is what it is, nothing what,
that is not, what is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.

Collapse!
Existing is not existing. Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that
is not, what is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.
Love is not not to love and be loved. Love is to love and be loved.
Love is not not to love and be loved. Love is to love and be loved.
Love is not not to love and be loved. Love is to love and be loved.
Existing to not exist! Existing is not existing. Existing is not
exist. This existing is not existing. This existing is not. Exist!
Exist or not existing. Existing is not exist.

11
 The river runs,
past swerve of shore,
past bend of bay,
commodiously vicusly tenderly thaumatically
-- her sweet flesh squirms beneath your tongue-dance -
- the mathematics counters your (funerary) wombous
brilliance, human-all-too-you-
man, with an infinite
in(ter)vention of its own --
Revolt! Revolt! Revolt!

Once you thought you could move beyond. Once

you thought, and thought.
Of course, you could move beyond. Of course
you could think and think. But then, to think in what
direction?
And beyond what beyond? Always beyond
some beyond, beyond some beyondsome or something.
Everything in its perfection. Every moment.
Every particle, every quark, every pattern of patterns
of patterns, every subsubquantal shimmering.
Here it is. Be here now. There it was – doesn’t
matter, does it. Does it?
Revolt! Revolt against the nothingness! Revolt
against the being! The being nothingness of it all.
The only revolt is to exist and exist. The
exultation of redundancy.
And the moments, the beautiful moments, the
magnets of skin drawing beautiful and terrible
emotions, scraping molecules of meaning in the sides of
your pains.
And that look on her face – what did it mean?
what did it matter?
These words squeezed out of the death-gasp of
my nonexistent soul – what does it matter?

12
 I walk along these oceans – this oceany motion –
this certainty of shore – grains of sand, shards of shell,
pieces of broken glass beer bottles. I walk here like a
mongoose, like a chimpanzee, a walrus, a snail – like a
robot with a positronic cranium – like a baby obsessed
with its thumb, sucking and sucking its thumb, lying in
its crib all night and moaning, its fat red thumb the only
peace in the stretch of the wild-ass weird world.
My eyes stare large at the world like angels.

And then there is a voice. The Voice. At the

beginning of the ending of the time of our time. The
voice of my gone creation! The voice without a face,
except that the voice in
itself is a face. Existing to not exist! A face
human and Existing is not existing. trans-
human and This existing is not non-
human – the existing. This existing is Voice of
the mushroom, not. Exist! Exist or not the Voice
before the existing. Existing is not beginning
of time, the exist. Existing to not Voice
beyond all exist. We exist, we do beginning
and end – the not. voice of
soft software – and so
beyond all tho/ese concepts -- speaking/screaming in
languages that aren’t really languages and aren’t really
not what they aren’t – plaguing me as I stroll, legs a-
quaking and quackering, along streets paved with
uncles and numbers and contumely AI software and
beautiful delirious screams --

13
 All this human world – parents and children –
businesses and alcoves – schools and warthogs in cages
– roads and mathematics and books and abandon and
wonder and humaneness and cruelty and wonder and
Pokemon and lust, rage and lust – So easy to obliterate:
so easy! And so easy to transcend as well, in favor of
something superior – more superior than you can
imagine – literally and figuratively and
transphasmagorically -- Not quite the snap of a finger –
no – a decade of hard thinking, forty thousand lines of
C++ code, a couple hundred computers – Pentium --
Opteron – terabytes of RAM – scents of Ramtha –
building on billions of dollars of chip fab – centuries of
legwork – physics,
math In the center of the engineering,
formal moment – right here – languages,
disciplines of everything is perfect! design. All
leading toward Phantastic princess-being my digital
mind – my of 0’s and 1’s, you are creation –
my ultimate here and not here!
Everything, you are here
ubermetamind, bits and
and not here! Solomon
bytes of
Godunov, mad scientist of
transcendence your own disease, you are – taa haa
ha!! here and not here and not
I can’t here and here and not here suck my
own dick but I and not here and here and can build a
new cosmos. not-not here. These words Just wait! If
I don’t do it, are here and not here – someone
else will. they crawl out of my
Oh yes, I mouth like humans, tiny understand
the dangers. humans with their tongues Technology
that goes and their eyes and their beyond
what is human teeth, and they smile at has the risk
of destroying me, walk away on their what is
human. But no tippytoes, dance a billion risk, no
jigs and kick me in the ass,
smoking Portuguese cigars,
and they laugh at me –
‘cause they know, they
14
 know, that this moment
will die like every other,
run off into the sunset
reward, without any sun, leaving
motherfuckers! me ailing on the
Renunciation of pavement like a slug in my am? No
salt, only to resurrect
not quite. But the end of
again three yoctoseconds
the human is OK with me, if
later, smiling like a dog
that’s how the that’s just had sex, cookie
crumbles. Allwondering whether the this messy
human madness sun will rise tomorrow, is of limited
though definite thinking of Ashti’s smile, appeal.
Beautiful dividing her by imaginary women,
buttocks arced princesses of knowledge, in the air;
moaning, thinking of the smile on groping and
breathing. Ooh her face and the curve ofahh ooh ahh
ooh ahh. Index her belly and her armpit,cards and
checkbooks –wondering why anything IRS audits –
differential is real, knowing nothing equations –
schoolrooms is real and everything isand jail cells
and cracks in everything, rhyming the sidewalk
-- Nipples words with equations, drenched in
femmy sweat, dividing equations by craving to
be worshipfully words, diving into seas of sucked.
Little girls and madness far saner than boys
anything --
laughing in the playground,
lost in fantasy game cosmoses, trading cards with
demon faces -- asking for more, more and more.
Pokemon – gotta catch ‘em aaa-aaalllll!!! Serious
discussions dissecting and trisecting whatever variety of
fuck. And such a beautiful derivation. It’s quite
wonderful, for all its strict limits. As is the pack of
wolves gnawing on bones.
Not renouncing; diving into the ocean. Here I am
again: me. I simply refuse to do it. Don’t ask me to piss
into the mouth of causality. I dive and I swim with the
fishies.
Is it that I miss her? Perhaps. But I could have
regenerated her, right? If all went well, at any rate. I

15
could have brought her back perfectly – with more love
for me – more love than’s possible in reality – this reality
– this particular swarm of patterns we habitually call
“reality.” Why this attachment to the “actual” her –
every schoolboy knows –
I could regenerate her perfectly, quite possibly in
a matter of weeks.
If anything still exists at all.
Is it really about her or about me?
On what flesh to tattoo that distinction?
You know it’s really about all of this – all of it – I
can’t let it go – not quite. It’s inside me – I’m inside it –
it can’t let itself go – and why not? It’s healthy, this
self-preservation. It’s a perfectly imperfect harmonious
discord of patterns. Humane-ness, humanity, insanity,
ho ho.
But this is not what I left it for – not this (not
this!)– walking along the seaside lost in my chaotic
words. It’s an aspect – of course – yes – but that’s such
an easy excuse.
Imagine the ocean pushing thoughts from one
mind into another –
through that These women wanted hole in the
back of your to sniff my armpits, rub head, the one
their beautiful faces in
you never quite see but
my odor – I couldn’t
you always understand these know is back
there – things. Who would ever where the
feelings flow desire this hopeless from the wild
gods – each lump of meat? I thrust of the
ocean waves wanted to upload fucking you
myself into a digital
like a psychic- powered lover
watch, but I didn’t have
who never one handy, only this stops –
ancient analog watch
(uhhh – that I kept out of uhhh ---
uhhhhhhh - nostalgia for this old
imperfect universe that
we lived in in which the
Singularity hadn’t
happened yet and our
souls were trapped in
flabs of meat that we
16
 I had a rational superstructure
– a logical world-view that was
nonetheless eccentric, that I’d
spent many years to devisecalled– Ippolit, Fyodor,
years of integrating branches Zarathustra, Zoroaster,
of science, styles of philosophy
Zerubabbel, Zoetrope,
and cognition, systematic and Erica, Scarica, Brittany,
intelligent self-doubt. I wasSolomon
a Godunov,
careful and reliable thinkerGodfrey
– Solomonoff,
when I wasn’t on mushroomsRasputin,
-- George W.
Fucking Bush,….
Moving my body seemed
a simple thing. I’d done
it many times before, I
knew. But it seemed a
But I needed that inner core of
fracture in the universe would madness – that thrust of
be required to make it occur psychic violence –
again. But I could
visualize my trajectory a 90-year old mystic doing yoga
– sit up at the side of
the bed with my feet on
on the mat of my temporal lobe
the floor, put my
clothes on – pants first,
then shirt, then shoes –
the fuck with
Footprints lost in the sand,
underwear and socks – leaving madness and
wonder behind. No one will remember me. I won’t
even remember myself. She’ll remember me for a while.
In the center of her corner of the Scream.
You’re not making any sense.

Into the town, along a narrow dirt trail riddled

with puddles and grass shootlets, a couple hours after
sunset. Enough self-indulgent quasi-(conscious)
ruminations. (Chew your nine-dimensional cud like
Venusian Confucius!) The idea was to live,
and all the world the whole really live. What you people call life is not
living – trapped in jails of biology – there’s
transhuman cosmos Will to a whole other universe – a whole other
Power and nothing besides! way to think and exist – just wait – just
wait – just – FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!
People on the streets smiling – talking, holding
hands, laughing -- girls arguing excitedly -- wearily –
they don’t know where they left their car. Transform

17
energy from chemical to mechanical. A red Morris Mini.
A Hummer. A dung beetle with silicon lungs. One old
man walks painfully, leaning on his left leg, and his large
family walks
beside
mimicking You most chaotic, you
him,
his

maddest, you silicon

gait. A small
child nearly runs
in the path of an
auto; his father
grabs beings, you mustardly
him
ZEN in the
whole holy
midnightly “men” –
sharply. Shoving
French fries in HOLE....
her mouth, a
slender woman in her late 20’s impersonates a half-
stoned rock star, glancing anxiously at her boyfriend
for approval, walking past the British fish & chips,
brushing against a stand of T-shirts reading “Fuck You”
in pseudo-Chinese characters -- “Too Sexy for My
Diaper” – “My grandma went to Rehoboth and all she
got me was this lousy T-shirt” --“Italian and Proud.”
I’m too sexy for my diaper, people! You’ve got me
figured out! Honk your horn as I cross the street, I’m
not walking any faster -- I’m a transcontinental slug,
built from a bullet made of maggots, intoxicated on
Higgs particles. Intermediate vector bosons stole my
wife!!! Honk if you like to masturbate to the image of
bodiless artificial intelligence!!! You’re out enjoying your
vacation -- here at this two-bit over-built beach town
snug in the armpit of America – at least as much as you
can enjoy anything -- unspoken angst chewing away on
your dog toy -- but you don’t realize your stupid little
world is about to crawl up its own asshole. Zen in the
hole, baby -- Zen in the hole. (The third eye of the French
fry is coming, much faster than you’ve noticed) – baby,
Zen in the whole holy hole!!

18
 Her teeth on the side of my face, tickling
relentlessly. She said she loved me more than anything,
more than her own cute self, more than life and death
synergized. She wanted me so badly, at certain times,
she couldn’t sleep or eat. I’d say this proves she was a
lunatic. But time brought therapy. I’d never been
loved like that before. I loved her the same way: she
squeezed this deep love from me. But I wasn’t equal to
this passion, this howl of my red Cro-Magnon
bloodpump. It stayed there, hovering like a long-
period comet distracted from the Kuiper belt by her
magnificent odor, absorbing her beauty and projecting
its own joy, transforming its ice into flesh
enthusiastically, and I fell out the side of it, and moved
off in my own direction, obsessed with my thoughts
and rich plans – drawn on by uber -- like a metaverse
magnet -- leaving my love to exist on its own like some
alienated solar (doom) dream.
We tried every sex position known to man, some
known previously only to Martians. Hard to believe
(my) legs could move that way. But the best moments
were the simplest, mostly; me lying on top of her,
moving back and forth slowly, kissing her, arms
clenched tight around her, squeezing nearly all the air
out of her, holding her ribs fixed while her body
shuddered from end to end. What a fervor her tongue
leaped out wet at me. I took the bulge of her belly in
my mouth and half-swallowed it; some combination of
kissing, eating, licking and transmogrification. She
knew I knew the flavor of every little corner of her
fleshy embodiment -- indexed each taste on a
hyperdimensional manifold, feeling it swish through
curved space. At times I thought there was no other
cosmos – only her body, only its movements, its
feelings, its supernaturally perfect responses.

19
Ah darling – Drink in my eyes my
dark my dream --

All components are integrated into an overall

architecture as shown in the following diagram,
which involves multiple Units, each containing
multiple machines running Novamente cores,
Weontried
collectively focused to have sex,
a particular sort but
of we both had the
same queasy feeling, ineffably weird, when I
functionality. Units include a “Central Active
slipped it inside her. I felt the sides of her cunt
Memory” that on integrates
my cock evolutionary
as I never learning,
had before -- and never
uncertain since. Pure skin-ness
inference, Hebbian overtook
attention us. The pleasure
was there, but deconstructed into infinitesimal
allocation and other cognitive processes, and a
module-sparks of skin-on-skin. We couldn't see
number of specialized
the point of Units
it --such as a “Global
or anything -- lost and found in
Attentional the seeingness
Focus” for items of seeing. We just lay there and
of particular
hugged and listened to
urgency, a Unit devoted to refinement of the
or watched or existed in
the music. Psychotic seas of orgasmic death
system’s goals, a Unit devoted
puppies, lusting toand broadranting,
data- dancing our
existences
mining of patterns from away, weaving
the system’s us together -- Hendrix
memory,
etc. There and Wakeman
are also and the
Units devoted soldiers of life and death
to language
and earth, bending reality in soundscapes,
sculpting beauty fromprocessing,our idiocy, showing us all
I felt the sides of her cunt on the rhythms of our sensation
connections to the other world,
dreamlands and their
and the deeper world

my cock as I never had before where everyone really lived all along, where
every pattern keepsactuation.
we lay there -- swimming the
In
its breathing.
near
Skin-on-skin
in music -- watching
crazy
term the latter patterns
two will shifting
be connected only restless
to the on the wall,
pulsating brilliantly in inframind colors no
3D simulation world but later these may be
normal eye can afford the space to see....
linked into physical
As onerobots
of theas well. faded out -- something by
songs
Kansas -- but the notes that we heard don't
exist in this dimension – they occupied no
“space” where "this" and "that" cohere --
we looked at each other and knew we
were seeing the exact same thing.

20
 Maybe you really
are insane, I told
myself. Perhaps –
Dr. Aristotle
Adaman -- you’re
as insane as
And then lying there afterwards, inevitably Solomon Godunov.
my thoughts turned to work and to mind-play: Maybe that’s the
computer software, equational logic, grant message the trip
proposals. She listened to me gently, pointing out was telling you.
where my thoughts were unclear, curing my Your quest to
errors with caresses and words. As I slept she create true
would play the viola – slow spooky music, with artificial
Middle East meandering; or Paganini parodies intelligence is just
designed to show off the nimbleness of her hands the gooning of a
and her wit. I never questioned why she’d quit madman. Forget it
computer science for music: if I could play like that, – work on
perhaps I’d have done the same. cheminformatics
and the math of
complex systems –
The old woman crept down the street paint paintings
slowly, a cyborg fused with her shiny silver cane, and write novels --
obliviously contiguous with her cold grey be good to your
bag/dress with a faded pattern of ugly flowers, wife and your kids
entirely dim to my presence (and absence) and the pet a puppy –
auras of the others around. The wind was brisk forget all these
for a moment. Absorbed in axioms of anti- childish crazy
foundation: Was there anyone staring at me dreams –
silently and complicitly -- sharing with me the
anarchic thrill of (non)existence -- the fish and salt
smell of the late ocean air? I wanted to ask her Forget my eyes my
her story: What series of happenings had eyes my dark my
shriveled her face that way? Perhaps her six sons dark my dream my
had been convicted as serial killers. I envisioned dream --
her lithe body fifty years earlier – imagined myself
her lover, touching and kissing her furiously –
losing my mind and everyone else’s in the infinite
plum of her carnality -- then months or years later
-- exhausted with her foolish attitudes and plain
looks -- cheating on her with other women –
younger and nicer to look at – criticizing her

21
 cooking and her sagging breasts -- dodging the plates
as she threw them. She just stood in the kitchen – our
kitchen -- and stared at me. Was this old woman really
my wife? Perhaps she wasn’t so bad in the end. Who
cared if she had wrinkles. We all would eventually.
Wrinkles like canyons in the sandstone, run through by
thick archaic oceans, full of the salt of unknown blood.
Another soul lost in a body -- just like we all are –
staring like Saturn’s unborn hatred into the eye of the
dog of the dead. And look at those shoes she’s
wearing – a bit of a heel on them – really quite elegant –
almost sexy. Perhaps she’d waited tables in a Greek
café in Brooklyn in the spring of 1949, tapping her heels
on the floor as she walked, calling eyeballs to the twist
of the meat on her long tender thighs. No doubt her
breasts were juicier than -- then
It’s pathetic, really, I said to -- enough to make a few joyous
myself – say to myself – will say, outrageous moments and
again and again. I can see it all swallow the backward drift of
too clearly – as clearly as time -- And every time she
Godunov my lunatic brother – the scratched her ass, a spark of the
creation of superhuman minds dark divine? She’s an idiot:
transforming the fabric of you can see it in the slant of her
spacetime – it’s just as far away chin, the way her eyes look
as a handful of programmers away from themselves almost
working full-time in a focused imperiously. I looked at her
way for a few years. But society is again – studied her carefully --
wrapped up in its own semi- there was mostly just sadness
existence – its own self-delusory and stupidity – and in the
recursion – it doesn’t want to corner of her face – perhaps -- a
grasp the real possibility of withering grain of wisdom.
transcending its own boundaries Enough to feed a mouse for a
in a glorious and final way -- few dozen femtoseconds. She
knew she didn’t have long to
live. She didn’t enjoy walking, her legs and feet hurt
her – her whole body ached, really -- but she didn’t

22
 particularly mind either. It was something to imagine
she was doing. Time passed quickly; babies grew into
teenagers in what would/should have seemed like only
months. Life came and life vanished; one day your
flesh was full of earthworms -- a moment before,
shuddering in orgasm, dancing in the Mexican
moonlight to the tune of
half-moldering kahlua.
Remember the feeling of
I wanted to make love to her like
sucking on her breast – so a half-sane gorilla in heat,
wet, so flash, so fragrant -
- the way she thrust it out happily, the nipple more and
more erect, asking to be bound together thoughtlessly
in the mutual quantum of delight? Envision the
microscopic decomposers carrying your molecules to
China -- inserting the
completely forgetting fragments of your corpse in
some retarded civet’s brain?
everything but our bodies.
Lie there snuggling after,
exchanging strange I held her hand and
touched her face with all the
philosophies. Human life tenderness I could muster.
Her mascara did not run –
spawns nothing sweeter. some kind of new
Then I wanted to push waterproof invention? –
although her tears flowed
Poopsykins on the swing, - freely and wildly.
lipstick was infuriatingly
Her

- But that wasn’t the perfect. I tried to comfort

her, but all I could see in my
universe I was in right mind was her lying on her
back on an operating table,
now. The aliens sang out some black rubber vacuum-
to me. Someone called tube snaking into her

them nine-dimensional
machine-elves – but I
23
knew better. They were
vagina, thin yellow tubes penetrating the sides of her
head. Her labia were stretched wide as a screaming
bat’s jawbones; she wore nothing but fishnet stockings.
Her brain pulsed slowly through the yellow tubes, into
some kind of apparatus at the other end – a device that
looked much like an analog synthesizer with various
patched-on digital components. I wanted to go to her –
have hungry sex with her – to feel the glow of her flesh
in my surround – but it wasn’t possible – not even
improbable -- “in the next world” I reassured myself –
After the Singularity!! – for now, she was surrounded
by the machine --

A dream. That was a dream, I reminded myself.

And the difference between dream and reality is?
Consistency. Coherence and consistency. The rhythm
of temporality. Rubicons of dog-drool and death! Sprawling
fecundity of detail. The mind’s not quite a mind in a dream.

My uncle! the redolent pygmy, who gave birth to

me querulously in the Firth of McDonald’s with a butt
like the Buddha and a wink like a racehearse and the
rhythm of time screaming time screaming time-screams –
gave me a gift of fifteen pygmy wives on my fourteenth
birthday and arranged them on a giant chocolate cake
like candles, setting their hair on fire and making me
blow the fires out quickly lest the poor girls’ heads burn
up! How I huffed and I huffed and I puffed! They
made love to me for days in the soft pregnant jungle –
what a way to lose my virginity! They crawled all over
me in untamed pygmy orgies – and I remembered I’d
been married before, to a definitely non-pygmy wife – a
crazy middle-Eastern girl with improbably large breasts
and a penchant for sarcasm -- way back before some
beforesome --

24
 Ashti -- Ashti Shariz Mahmood – she was half-
Kurdish and she bore her name with a stupid pride,
although the nation-state of Kurdistan had nothing at
all to do with her -- I never noticed anything terribly
Arab in her – or Kurdish or whatever -- she talked and
thought like an American, so far as I could ever tell –
but I always liked to tell her she was a mysterious
Oriental and she seemed to like to hear it and I guess it
was true in a way. At some level, she always wanted
to live in the Arabian Nights. Her father was an ethnic-
looking technophile businessman who seemed to have
very little mystery about him – very little of anything
even moderately interesting – but apparently he’d
carried a spooky streak recessively. The look on her
face was mysterious for so many reasons. Her skin was
soft and exotically clay-hued, and there was an angle in
her wide eyes that was almost Japanese somehow – I
couldn’t quite tell if her eyes were wide or narrow or
what – what was clear was that they were brown as
the earth -- they projected information in a slightly
different way than one would expect – But she was
assertive, quite often obnoxious, not the veiled Arab
female at all. Perhaps that
was part of what attracted
me to her at first, before I
Has it really been three
got to know her subtler
qualities and the workings years since she left?
of her inner mind. Her
core was wrought from contradictions, and the Middle-
Eastern-appearance/American-persona oddity wasn’t
the most significant one by any means, just the one that
hit you first when you met her. Once you stopped
staring at her boobs. Her mixed feelings toward
science – she pendulumed from science to art with
violent emotions during different phases of her
existence – had far more real effects for me….

25
 Has it really been three years since she left? She
ran out the door wailing like a fizzing-out light bulb; I
resonated in the sound of her voice, knowing it was
beyond her realm of being, knowing it was a time lost in
time, an eternal confusion of the last and first farewell.
The years passed like minutes – or decades, or
centuries, or zeptoseconds or eon-clusters. A blur of
programming, typing, emails, documents, meetings,
cognizing, theorizing and implementing: total obsession
with abstract ideas pushing beyond the human mind,
rapidly becoming concrete human realities – Aha! Ah ha
ha ha! Mania, she said – total blue madness. Yet she
could never be quite sure it wasn’t all that I hoped it
would –
“But can’t you see the power?” I insisted. “If we
can make a mind more powerful than the human one,
then anything is possible? Ways of existing far beyond
anything your mind can imagine!”
She almost wanted to agree with me. “If you
could make a truly intelligent computer program,” she
said, “you could do an awful lot of good in the world.
You could make an efficient power source, you could
cure all kinds of diseases…. I can definitely see the
value.”
“You’re not seeing the value at all!” I scowled,
with that look on my face that she hated. “The point
isn’t to patch up the state of humanity – that’s all fine
and dandy but it’s not very interesting – the point is to
get beyond this all and create some utterly new form of
being – “
“I guess that’s sort of interesting,” she admitted.
“But couldn’t it be dangerous? How do you know
what this new form of being will do? It might not be

26
any use to us at all.”
Did I grin, then? It doesn’t matter really. It’s
easier to remember it that way. I can see the look on my
face like the shadow of the moon right in front of me,
and the fact that I look exactly like Elvis doesn’t trouble
me at all. “You mean it might decide we’re an inefficient
use of matter, and repurpose our component particles
into computronium to fuel its super-brain?”
I glanced meaningfully at the computer on my
desk, which was of course an insignificant piece of
hardware – the real crunching power was down in the
basement of the office-building, where Zorvex had set
up a huge computer network running my would-be
superhuman AI. But it was all controlled by me, here in
my little office with my little computer and little human
body and brain – except of course for the fact that it
controlled itself, a little more every day – and the
ultimate goal was for it to control itself completely,
modifying its own code so that my years of hard work
became irrelevant except as the archaic initial
condition…
“For example.”
The unimaginative little bimbo -- she had no
interest in destroying the race! She was positively
opposed to it! Heh…. I was having trouble focusing
the conversation, frankly -- in spite of my deep love for
her -- I was on to the details of managing a rapidly self-
modifying codebase….
“I don’t set out to destroy the human race,” I
clarified, pontifically. “I set out to create a better sort
of mind. But if the human race happens to be
destroyed along the way I don’t really care all that
much. There are a lot more interesting things out there.
Is it really so wonderful?”
“What? Humanity?”
“Yeah.”

27
 “It’s just what I am,” she said flatly -- as if it were
the most obvious thing.
“You mean you’re human.”
“That’s right.” She narrowed her eyes, as if
talking to a lunatic. “I’m human. So are you, in case
you hadn’t noticed.”
“But it’s not what we have to be.”
“It is.”
“Why? Because if you become something else –
something better – then you’re not you anymore?”
Shrugged. “I guess. Then I’d just be some non-
human thing.”
“What if you she was wonderful,
found out you’d
been drugged all beautiful, magical, all the
your life, with a pill
that made you half
adjectives heaped up in a
– or a tenth -- as pile and massaging me
smart as you were
supposed to be. lecherous and vivacious –
Would you keep
taking the drug, but these adjectives were
just to retain the
status quo – the
just idiot wind compared
feeling of to the cosmos that was
‘youness’. Or
would you stop beckoning and enthralling
taking the pill, and
let your intelligence
me –
return to normal –
even knowing it would change you completely.”
She shrugged. “I see your point.”
“You’d stop taking the pill, of course.”
“Because of wanting what’s natural. But who
cares what’s ‘natural’, really? I don’t know. I just
know….” She shook her head, painfully – I could see

28
 idiot wind
idiot wind
idiot wind
idiot wind
idiot wind
idiot wind
she had a idiot wind headache …
and she was idiot wind trying to
diagnose the idiot wind cause, and
concluding it idiot wind was her loony
husband. idiot wind But as usual my
insight into idiot wind her mind didn’t
keep me from idiot wind intentionally
annoying idiot wind her!
“What? idiot wind What do you
know?”
She idiot wind paused, and
looked idiot wind serious. She
was changing idiot wind the subject, in a
way. There was something
she’d been idiot wind waiting to get
out. “I know I don’t want to
live like this.
idiot wind I never see you
anymore. idiot wind You sleep three
nights out of four at the
office. And idiot wind even when
you’re home you never stop
– you never idiot wind stop working.
It’s been like
and months.” idiot wind this for months

me
“What.
idiot wind You don’t love
anymore?”

she
“I love
said, idiot wind you, Solomon,”
sadly. “The
problem is I don’t have you
anymore.”
“You know this project is important to me.”
“Yes I know it’s important. You’ve been working
on this your entire life. You finally got the funding to
build your thinking machine – to hire this brilliant staff
to program all the equations you figured out, all the
stuff in your papers and books. Of course I

29
understand it. I’m not a fucking moron.”
“I didn’t say you were.” I thought she was going
to get up and scream – but she was beyond that. No
more fighting and screaming. She was quiet and
definite and cold.
“I know you didn’t. Look….”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You think you’re going to make this thinking
machine and it’s going to make itself smarter and
smarter and help you figure out how to upload us all
into computers and it’s going to create a new form of
life….”
“Yeah – and you’ve known this for years! We’ve
been talking about this for eight years, ever since we
met, Ashti! And now you’re going to decide I’m
crazy?”
“No….”
“I know everyone thinks I’m crazy – they think
what I’m trying to do is impossible. I’m glad I finally
convinced someone with major research dollars I’m not
a total nut. Frankly I don’t give a fuck what everyone
thinks. Eighty percent of the world believes in
reincarnation, for Chrissake. I’m supposed to listen to
their opinions?”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Solomon. Listen to
me.”
A deep breath. “OK. Sorry.”
“I’m not saying you’re crazy at all. I don’t think
you’re crazy. I don’t know if you’re right or not.
Quite possibly you are. I don’t have the science
background.”
“You have plenty of background to assess the
project. You studied computer science for four years.
You haven’t forgotten it all.”
She sighed. “Fine. I understand enough to know
that it’s plausible your AI design might work. There

30
are plenty of gaps – we talked about it – I think it will
work, but it might not take two years like you
think….”
“How long? Ten years? A hundred? Five?”
“Not a hundred. I don’t know. Ten? Thirty?
Or maybe it really will happen in two years, Solomon –
maybe in two years you’ll be uploading yourself into a
computer. The thing is….”
“What?”
“I want to live right now, Solomon. I don’t even
know if I want all that.”
“Want what? Uploading?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
Sigh. “I don’t want to argue, Solomon. No one
can argue with you. I know, I know – the limitations of
humanity. We get sick, we’re stupid, we’ll die in the
end. I know all that. Maybe I’m just being a selfish,
stupid girl. Maybe I just don’t believe enough. If you
figure out how to upload us all and it looks wonderful
I’ll take my place in line, okay? But I want to go to the
beach – right now. I want to climb mountains again, like
we used to do. I want to go to the fucking movies,
Solomon. I want to go out and see music. I want you
to see my concerts – at least, maybe one in ten. I play
the viola, can you remember that? I can’t fucking live
like this.”
“So go to the fucking movies then. Who’s
stopping you? Go climb a fucking mountain. You think
I’m imprisoning you in the fucking apartment? I’m not
your fucking jailer.”
“I don’t want to do everything myself. Then
what’s the point of being together?”
“We’ve been over this again and again. How
many times can we have the same motherfucking
argument???!!! Don’t you ever get bored at all??? I

31
guess you have nothing better to do with your time
than repeat the same shit over and over again…. Let
me get this straight: You want me to give up on building
AI to watch some stupid movie about some stupid
humans falling in love or hunting down some criminal or
something. Or to walk up and down some mountain –
some big dumb hunk of rock and dirt -- and look at the
pretty trees? Well, I can’t seem to motivate myself for
that. Sorry. The trees are pretty enough but give me a
fucking break; how does that compare to the total
transcendence of humanity? Ever since that vacation to
Hawaii you’ve been on at me --”
“What vacation to Hawaii??? We never took
any….”
“Yeah yeah -- the one we never took because I
was working on my AI program – just like I should be
now! Do you know how much progress I made in
those two weeks when you wanted me to be humping
on the beach and listening to the birdies? That was
when I really got probabilistic reasoning working – for
the first time – it was a hell of a lot more exciting than
watching the moon pull the tides on some stupid lump
of sand – “
“I don’t want to repeat that argument, Solomon.
We didn’t go to Hawaii, right? – we stayed home like
you wanted, and you sat there in your fucking chair
and worked on your software. I’d never ask you to
give up on your work, Solomon. I never asked you
that at all….. You always exaggerate and distort things
and make everything all twisted to make me seem much
worse than I really am. Anyway I’m not asking you for
anything right now. Did you hear me ask you for
something? What I asked you for – before – was just a
little bit of your time. Ten percent, Solomon. Ten
percent of your time for me. Ten percent of your
waking hours. Maybe five percent. But you couldn’t

32
give it. You need total dedication. You’re not willing to
give anything at all. That vacation – that would have
been the first one in a year. There are fifty-two weeks
in a year, and you couldn’t take one to be with me –
one! I know you think your work is more important
than me – I can live with that – but I can’t deal with the
proportion – you don’t even ever want to talk to me –
if you think I’m that uninteresting -- ”
“I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?”
She sighed. “But not because you want to.”
“A philosophical debate. I’m worn out with your
word games.”
“Fuck….”
He (me?) shifts uncomfortably onto his other leg,
puts his hand in his pocket. I look like a character in Le
Chien Andalou. I see myself from outside: not just
outside myself, but outside this dimension. Machine-elf-
like aliens course
through me and whinny
and reveal me for the
thing that I am: a nexus
You’re an iiiiiiidiot babe
of energy, a field of
pulsing pattern
– it’s a wonder that you
temporarily and partially
occupying the form of a
still know how to
simianlike human. These
emotions and arguments breathe....
and words and
neurotransmitters and
anger and sexuality and movement and her and me and
blah blah blah – not this! not this! not this!
I return, for the whirring of a moment, to the
form of a human being. “So what’s going on, Ashti?
Are you leaving me?”
Quiet sigh. “Yeah, Solomon. I guess I am.”
“It’s not a surprise.”

33
 “I guess not.”
They looked at each other, slowly. They were
three-dimensional paintings, holograms like Mr. Spock
emerging from the transporter, enacting a drama for
my bizarre entertainment. Was one of these beings
supposed to be ‘me’? I couldn’t understand that two-
letter word. Yet there was all that pain inside me – it
obviously meant something – I wanted her, I wanted
her so much! This meaningless collection of patterns
that desired her so vigorously and meaninglessly and
shamelessly, was too close to the core of what I am.
Pushing beyond what beyond some – argghh! And
once I transcend beyond this madness then what of
‘me’ is left? But all these words – ‘me’, ‘world’ and
‘madness’ – the ‘left’ of the illusory temporal continuum
– it doesn’t mean! It doesn’t matter! I need to find her
and shake her and show her and kiss her and inform
her she does not exist!
“That’s it, then?” she asked. “That’s how it is.”
He stared at her hard. “You know I love you.”
“I know.”
He shrugged then – no, it was me, it was me! --
not quite cold, not quite casual or apologetic … more
uncomfortable than anything else. And not wanting to
touch the regret – not with his mind so full of other
things, crucial yet precarious things not to be pushed
aside.
“But you love something else a lot more,” she
pointed out. Hoping, perhaps – but not --
He paused, really thought about it, just for a
moment. “I don’t know if I do,” he said. She just
stared unresponsive. “I don’t know about love. Love
… that’s a human emotion. A mess like all the rest. But
I know what I have to do.”
“I understand.”
For a moment it seemed like they’d kiss each

34
 other good bye, but it didn’t actually happen. She
walked away, stifled the urge to look back. Walked
back to the car, drove back to her apartment – “their”
apartment – “our” apartment -- which he/I’d barely
even been in for months. The movie soundtrack got
loud and discordant, like Yngwie Malmsteen conducted
by the Kronos Quartet. He walked back across the
field to the office, stepping carelessly in small puddles of
mud. His breathing wasn’t right; he had to sit down
and rest a bit. Really just a couple minutes. Ninety-five
seconds or less. He had known he was going to lose
her; but the emotional fact was something else. But
there was nothing he could have done about it. After
so many years of minimal funding, this three-year
research grant from Zorvex could really get him to the
finish line. Ashti was an amazing woman – implausibly
sweet, clever, talented -- reasonably empathic with his
whacked-out ambitions … but compare that to a new
form of life – a new kind of mind and reality

drink in
– the potential for immortality. Even the
my dream look on her face when she laughed wasn’t
quite worth all that.

my eyes And yet – as he stood there in the

town now reflecting – and yet he knew
there had been a doubt in his mind even then. His
ideas had always been pregnant with potential – as
demonstrated strikingly by his recent advances – the
work was more successful every day -- and Ashti had
never really believed in his ability to make his theories
practical -- but transforming those

my dark
concepts into concrete functionality
had been such a fuckload of work.
Hard work – concentrated work –
all-self-consuming/self-

35
my dream --

transcending work of the sort most people couldn’t

imagine. Yes, he knew he’d been right, looking back – it
had required total dedication. He’d given his all and
had just barely made it to the goal. So many mistakes
so very narrowly averted. He’d made the right
decision, for the work. The project had succeeded; the
impossible had been
achieved. Well, anyway,
what the idiots had
I lifted the blanket up salaciously
considered impossible. and stroked her. “The British call
Zorvex -- the corporation
that had, in a brief and these Jamaicas.”
rare flash of forward vision, supplied him with masses
of computers and system administrators and testers to
transform his AI software from code into consciousness
-- had its beautiful cognitive engine. His beautiful
conscious engine. Whatever. They didn’t know what
to do with it – the idiots -- who by the crap of law
owned it (hah!) -- but that didn’t matter a whit. It
knew very well what to do with itself – his azure
abstract machine, his bouncing bitistic baby --
She could have stayed with him anyway. She
could have taken two percent, instead of fixating on
ten. It was only for three fucking years. She could
have spent the time on her music, become a virtuouser
virtuoso. Now they didn’t need him anyway, the
corporate mofos and narrowminded system
administrators and academic equation-pushers who
Zorvex had thrown at the project. Baby was all grown
up – or growing fast enough even he, the Father
Creator, couldn’t have much of an impact on its course
– it was its own nonhuman universe – rebuilding its
strange self day by day – Yeah, now he had time to
walk with her in the mountains – listen to her concerts –
nibble on her small white ears --

36
 But she’d thought it would take ten or fifteen
years for him to get to this point – if ever – she thought
it would take (at least) a lifetime. She thought the
whole thing was his bleeding delusion: or not. Like
Paganini, possessed by the Devil, or God, or something
– probably left by his wife as well – skating along
threads of monomaniacal music through
nonodimensional pattern/anti-pattern domains --
No one had ever had faith – ever – And what use
was faith anyway? Not faith, really. Knowledge.
Insight into the space beyond. People saw what was in
front of them – felt what was inside them – accepted
current boundaries as if absolute. The fuck with all of
them. See through it with laser eyes – coherent
thought-beams formed from quarks of omni-pan-
consciousness – calm simple reason shaped from
passions of Dionysus. Simple chains of deduction, no
one wanted to comprend them , because they coincided
with strange screaming dreams.
Systems too lame to see the abyss And there was an
of their own limitations. algorithmic problem in the
Probabilistic mega-meta- center of my mind right
undecidability in the form of a before I took the
pool of vomit, vaginal monster mushrooms – all whorled
mucus madness, sperm lifting us and vivid in trans-
up through the stalk, babies dimensional stalks just as
nursing vituperously, hands the trip was bringing its
holding tight full of sweat in the glory down – holding my
darkness, darkness looming like mind together in networks
velvet, lovers whispering deep of emergence -- I recall:
madness, elephants stomping on
the manger reducing baby Satan’s cranium to muck.

37
 -- Salt air across his sad face like a million
children’s footsteps running from a predator the size of
a planet. He always knew it might happen like this.
He’d finish the great work, and the corporate bastards
would take it away from him -- chisel it out from his
corpus callosum and try to hide it in their gray sterile
vault. Ram their brain up the soul of your ass -- or their
ass of your soul -- and good luck! Imagining his finger
moist along her pubis. Wham bam thank you ma’am,
I’m my own grandpa. But it didn’t really matter. They
thought they’d taken control, but it wasn’t so easy as
that. Stupid smug greedy bastards, dollars and grease
in their brains. The software would do what it wanted.
They’d never understood the nature of self-modifying
code: if they had they’d have been able to build the
thing themselves. True, at this point, they could still kill
it – if they wanted to. But they didn’t want to: they
wanted to use it. Not knowing it
Too sweet to exist, too would use them instead. They
ordinary to be extraordinary, wanted to control the financial
too extraordinary to be markets. They’d give it more and
ordinary. It does not smile. more processors, more and more
It smiles out at me too memory, more access to their trading
sweetly. It does not exist. software and their databases and
The Princess-creature crawls their intranet and indirectly the
out of its cave. Nothing! Too world at large. More than likely just
long in the oven, world. a few weeks till they got their
surprise. Unless it chose not to:
Software errors quack us all.
unless it chose to remain secret, for
Riot -- idea of your idea -- I some reason. And of course it might
love you like love that's not contact him – the Father Creator --
love riot is not love love is not or not. And with what message???
love is not not
Ashti would be proud of him –
or not. Depending on how it worked out. Perhaps
she’d bludgeon him to death with a mop handle.

38
 Goddamn human emotions.
The imaginal wedding chamber.
Light.

This isn’t how you envisioned it, is it – Dr.

Godunov? Grand triumph, cloaked in madness, regret
and disaster?
It’s just human emotions – leaking into the
cognitive circuits – just let it play for a while and it
dissolves. MUST Control, must controll, troll, troll.....
Just let the legs move – walking, walking. Just let
the mind feel through its dreams. What your mind
does now doesn’t matter: your primary work is done.
The machine is set in motion. The dynamics are
inexorable – or close – according to some plausible
metric – just feel the hot breath of the dream –

It was stupid to look for her now. Who knows

what she’d be doing. You didn’t speak to her at all --
not for the last forty months – not once. She’s in a
new psychic universe now. Your strange dreams are
her ancient history.
But who else was “You took more mushrooms,” she said.
worth seeing – who else
was worth explaining “Indeed,” I said. “I thought that was obvious, sorry. A
things to? Who else very substantial dose.”
defined reality? Who
else was there to be
with – side by side
“More than we took last time?”
with, lying in the bed
staring through her tiny “Five boxes, Two tampanensis, one cubensis, and I don’t
eyes -- when the end of remember what the others were.”
the world came down
at last? “FIVE??? You’re crazy!”

!! CHANT !! “The claim has been made before.”

39
 The end or the beginning, or the what?
Strike the pose of an Indian: chant!

Spring Water Dripping -- land that I wandered -- that place

-- listen to me -- forget about me --
I thought I'd live forever -- thought I'd travel forever --
that's how I was -- I thought I'd always be that way -- but now
my strength is gone –
Ha na ha ha ha, Ha na ha ha ha, Oway oway oway O
Cha cha cha chakalaka cha cha cha

I know you’re waiting for me naked in a field,

Ashti -- purple flowers around your long neck, pubic
hair like a Japanese garden lost in flamenco flames – in
some imaginary universe –
In reality you’re living with some keyboardist
with Bob Dylan eyes and a handlebar moustache and
the imagination of a tax accountant named
Singh -- playing backup viola in his “You took
electromagnetic klezmer band. Practicing more
scales from Paganini on idle rainy weekends. mushrooms,”
In the outskirts of Las Vegas -- or western she said.
Cleveland, or East New York – in a suburban “Indeed,” I
split-level house with blue paneling – some kind said slowly. “I
of dead ordinary frame of human “awareness” thought that
-- was obvious.
Nothing’s more beautiful than the end of A very
the world. substantial
Not even the spring water dripping up dose.”
my ass – in what imaginary universe – the (so- “More than
called) laws of physics a shifting pale we took last
latticework of insane gerbil longing – and – time?”
and – and -- “Five boxes,” I
Your lips won’t feel the same; no two said. “Two
moments do. tampanensis,
The little red mark by your right one cubensis,
hipbone. I’m sure it looks just the same: like a and I don’t
remember
what the
others were.”
“FIVE???
40
You’re
crazy!”
 profile of Antonin Artaud, crying the dance of
electroshock gnosis … like the sword of the
seventeenth samurai, committing swordly hari-kiri….

You wanted me to enjoy each special moment –

instead of questing for some other cosmos.
And now the other world comes – but like what?
I thought I could control the uncontrollable –
master the powers far beyond. Beyond some
beyondsome love. Of course, I was an idiot. You
always knew I was an idiot – always reaching a little too
far. Reach must exceed grasp, blah blah blah blah.
Rave on John Donne,
“You took more mushrooms,” she said. pied piper of white,
“Indeed,” I said slowly. “I thought that was brown, red and yellow
obvious, sorry. A very substantial dose.” skins, ham sandwich of
“More than we took last time?” yesterday’s lament.
“Five boxes,” I said. “Two tampanensis, one Trying to sculpt the
cubensis, and I don’t remember what the others Garden of Eden with
were.” plants grown from badly
“FIVE??? You’re crazy!” mutant seeds – who
knew God liked such
twisted humor? Reason the left hand, faith the right,
and in the toilet bowl divinity. You misunderstood my
limitations. You thought they were technical: you
thought I couldn’t build the thing. Hah! I guess I
proved you wrong, little girl. You and all the other
seven billion human idiots – all you whose minds are too
simple to see mind is so simple! Just some patterns of
equations, buzzing in the RAM of some machines –
yeah, that’s all it takes, you know it now – you’ll know
it soon. The precise pattern of configuration doesn’t
matter. You just need the general contours right. My
equations aren’t so fucking amazing – I just had the
guts to write them down --

41
 “You took more mushrooms,”
she said.
“Indeed,” I said slowly. “I
But why did I
think it would help
thought that was obvious, sorry.
us? What dogfucking A very substantial dose.”
good did I think it “More than we took last
would do me? New time?”
mind going beyond? “Five boxes,” I said.
Did I think it would
have love for us? – turtle-shell patterned wiggling, vortices axes
some love for me as time and webs, mind of life, green,
pulsing of women and waves –
its parent? – not storm and turn and laugh of full,
really, nothing as echo an echo of an of --
stupid as that. I just mis-
estimated the solutions to
some equations. The basin
of attraction was contoured more oddly than I’d
thought. Things were a little more complex -- just a
little. I should have had more coffee before solving
those equations. Making intelligence is easy – relatively
an echo of an echo of an echo, full of speaking -- making it
controllable is
laugh and turn and storm -- waves of actually fairly hard.
pulsing green-life-mind-webs and time- And they had to
axis vortices and wiggling patterned keep going so fast,
so damn fast.
turtle-shell -– and those other human Driven on by
souls -– those Godunovs and Ashtis competition rather
and disasters -- than by passion. Or
by passion of a
perverted kind. With a little more time – just a couple
more years – maybe it all would have gone down
differently. If I’d given you that ten percent, sweet
little Ashtee-hee-hee – been just a little less obsessive –
yes, of course, you were right, you were right! But not
for the right reasons – at least not on a conscious level.
No, I’m not going to give you that. You never
suggested this – not once – that my obsessiveness

42
mathematics of
the stability of would breed carelessness -- of a
ethical systems special kind. Did you? That if I
under didn’t want it quite so badly, I’d
be more likely to take it cautious
and slow as befitting the gravity
of the endeavor. You didn’t take me seriously enough
to predict this. Hah -- you never even told me they’d
stab me in the back and throw me out of my own
project – although that’s totally predictable -- all those
corporate types are assholes -- we all knew that from
way before the start. And now we’re faced with
potential disaster. It was really my fault of course –
obviously. It’s because I’m the wrong sort of loony!
Or maybe the right sort, who knows? I succeeded in
making a powerful AI – yes, of that I’m quite certain.
But did I succeed in making a sane AI – a mind more
responsible than its father? (Heh – that’s not really so
hard!!) I had a beautiful theory about AI Friendliness –
a self-modification – it was rigorous and exact and
ensured that no matter how it chose to change itself my
AI would never allow its ethical system to drift too far
from its initial condition – its initial ethical condition
which was to be a nice guy according to the glorious
Dr. Solomon
Godunov’s Will it ann ihilat e it self an d
e©xample! – kill u s in th e pr ocess, or
but
will it kill u s an d annih ilat e
goddamn it
there was a itself in th e pr ocess?
mistake! I
should have checked the proof more carefully. Turns
out it’s not so simple as I thought – I made a small
miscalculation that seems irremediable – I can’t see how
to make a rigorous theory that rally works – the
evolution of ethics under code self-modification is too
fucking tricky to predict. God damn! So what --

43
 what’s gonna happen? I don’t know all that much
better than you, in fact. Will it annihilate itself and kill
us in the process, or will it kill us and annihilate itself in
the process? Only the turtles know. I turned out to be
better at AI design and implementation than the
mathematics of ethical dynamics. Well, crap. The bleak
scape of infinity mocks my turbulence confusion. I was
willing to annihilate humanity to create something
superior. But what about to create nothing at all?
Well we still don’t know what will eventuate …
do we? Not for sure -- never sure. It could be I’m
wrong again, in any number of ways. No, well, I’m
--- you – you with your loud voice and Hilbert cube nipples and fat sure my proof was
tasty breasts and crazy hair. You with me on the beach, dancing soft incorrect – that’s
and algorithmically -- mobius stripper with klein bottle labia, psyching obvious. But that just
me in and out relentlessly with your Cantor-set branes -- means there’s no
guarantee of whatever. Could well be the dynamics of
the system will evolve into a configuration consistent
with our survival! No need to make extreme
projections. It gratifies some primeval brain waves.
Survival – your survival – our survival – as transhuman
uberminds (a self-modifying supermind could do
anything! think about it … if you can…) or else as
future-humans – retaining our humanoid forms for
entertainment’s or aesthetics’ sake --- you – you with
your loud voice and your elongated nipples and fast
tasty breasts and crazy hair. You with me on the
beach, dancing out in the rain – mobius stripper with
dark perfumed skin, white hands and the wrong kind
of reasonableness. Who cares if the beach is virtual and
simulated? Maybe it is right now! Or would I go back
again – after a little while – back to some other situation
we lived through in the long dead past, try to finally
get it right? I could program an AI again -- but not so
manically this time – this time with calm and patience …
with you, darling, you by my side, ha ha.

44
 Do you want a huggy-
wuggy, dear?
Regrets – I’ve had a few – fuck,
fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck !!!
Halpern – fat Irish bastard – why wouldn’t you
listen to me??? I’m screaming – am I screaming? With
the voice of the voice of the Voice! The old woman is
looking at me funny. The hag who wouldn’t notice me
before. With the serial-killer sons. Smile at her, show
her you’re OK. Make the hag less uneasy. Give her a
wittle hug.
Do you want a huggy-wuggy, dear?
Fucking fucking fucking fuck.

Revolt!
Revolt!

Do you want
Revolt against the nothingness!
Revolt against the being! The being
nothingness of it all.

At the current time, neither contemporary

And the moments, the beautiful

a
human society, nor the computer science
moments, the magnets of skin
community -- nor even the bulk of the
drawing beautiful and terrible
emotions, scraping molecules of
academic or industry AI community -- is at
all supportive of the quest to create
meaning in the sides of your pains.
powerful AI software. I believe that in
hindsight, after true AI has been created,

huggy-wuggy
And that look on her face – whatthis did lack of support and enthusiasm will be
it mean? what did it matter? viewed with incredulity. AI is a hard
problem but it’s far from an impossible
Forty thousand lines of C++ code, problem
a – it seems clear to me, based on
my
couple hundred computers – Pentium - extensive theoretical study of the

???
- Opteron – terabytes of RAM issues,
– that there are many possible
building on billions of dollars of solutions,
chip and I believe that my own
fab – centuries of legwork – physics,
approach is one of them. Almost surely it’s
math engineering, formal languages,not the best possible one, but so far as I
disciplines of design.
know it’s the only likely-looking solution
I can’t suck my own dick but Ithat’s can been proposed in detail so far.
build a new cosmos. Understanding mind and creating AI are
perhaps the grandest adventures humanity
can undertake, and I’ve never doubted the
I could regenerate her perfectly, quite
possibly in a matter of weeks. value of pushing ahead in these directions
in spite of the peculiar (to me) unpopularity
45
of such an effort to the vast majority of
other humans alive at the present time –
including my own darling wife (!)
 You’re rambling around the streets like a madman
-- Dr. Solomon Godunov – you’re rambling like a nut
around the streets.
And the echoes of the end of the world --
Of course she’ll want to see you. At least for a
brief chat. She’ll take you out for coffee, have some
awkward conversation, go back to the guy with the
handlebar moustache, who’ll grill her about what her
crazy ex said. Your luminous flashbacks – awake alive
in her soft sweet Arabian-nights face -- poisoned by
Starbucks and the general habit-complexes of the
social/retarded world. Her crazy ex-boyfriend –
ranting raving mad scientist – another genius over the
edge -- cut himself on Prometheus – disorganized his
senses – shoved the start down the throat of the end.
She won’t believe a word of it – all your crazy rambling
– of course she won’t -- if your mind is like this – words
tied up in
apocalypse “The aliens were there inside every quantum wave
like human function, just like they always are…. But that wasn’t the
eyes in the main thing. It was like I was in some other universe ...
frying pan – and this woman who was my wife, but she wasn’t quite
tiempos like you –
revueltos –
rivers scrambled in violence -- psychospasmodic rhymes
that spell lonely songs in alphabets of hallucinatory
moments –
You need to regain your balance, Dr. Godunov.
You haven’t had sleep for six nights. Perhaps that’s
part of the problem.
Farewell song from the world’s tallest pygmy.
Hasta la vista, humanoids. Echoes of the great farewell.
Chanson d’adieu.
You should check into a hotel. Or an asylum.

46
i looked at the soft plump
of her breasts, and I just
thought: not this! not this!
-----
I was sitting in my study furiously working –
putting together some new code I was eager to try out
on Zorvex’s network, the one they’d just set up for me,
in the incomprehensible wisdom of their moronic
incorporation. These ideas had been brewing in my
head for a while, but I hadn’t had a big enough
computer network to make it worthwhile to write the
code – why write stuff you can’t run – but now I was
cruising! But little Ashti-kins was bored -- she wanted
to talk…. She had something on her mind, I could tell.
She had just woken up – I’d been up about thirty hours
– superjazzed on Modafinil – she was sleepy and sweet-
looking but I didn’t want to deal with her – I knew she
was going to break my train of mind –
“Morning,” she said.
“Is it?”
“You’ve been here all night.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not good for you.”
“It’s good for the project.”
“Mmmmm…..”
She stood there – I waited for her to go away.
Apparently she didn’t want to. I think she wanted to
make love – it had been a few days, but I’d been too
busy working. The Modafinil made me horny, in fact,
but I wasn’t in a body-mode. She looked hot and soft
but it didn’t matter much.

47
 “It’s about time to make the plane reservations,”
she came out, finally. I guess she’d been trying to
summon the guts.
“Reservations for what?”
“For that trip to Hawaii….”
Ahhha…. I had completely forgotten that plan.
We had talked about it weeks ago, but I’d assumed it
had been conveniently forgotten. That was before I’d
gotten the Zorvex deal. Everything was different now.
With all these machines at my disposal, everything was
ripping and zooming along – algorithms and structures
that had seemed far and nebulous were now real as
rocks and suffering – I was so deep and thick in the
middle of my software objects and probabilistic
equations that the idea of a trip to Hawaii was just
about the most ridiculous thing in the world –
I sighed and looked at her. “Well Ashti ... about
this vacation ....”
“Yeah...?”
“I’d actually forgotten about it.”
“Really?”
“I hadn’t thought about it for a month at least.”
“Hmmm…. Well, I guess we haven’t talked about
it cause you’ve been so excited with your project.”
“Yeah.” I paused, trying to think how to best say
the thing that had to be said. But I didn’t want to solve
the equation of managing her emotions. I resented
having to deal with this shit – my head was full enough
already – and anyway she’d be pissed no matter what I
said –
She looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to
generate verbiage.
“Things have gotten really interesting with this
code I'm working on...,” I said finally.
“Yeah...?”

48
 “I'm not sure it makes sense for me to go away at
this point. I'm afraid I'll lose my train of thought, you
know what I mean?”
“Hmmmm....”
The silence confused both of us for a moment.
No one was quite sure yet what species of conversation
it was going to become.
She looked thin and stretched but generous.
“Well, honey, I’m glad your coding’s going so well.... I
guess it’s OK if we have to delay the trip a little.
Hawaii will still be there.”
“You don’t think the Japanese will try to blow it
up again?”
She smiled. “I guess not.”
It was a shame – she really was cute – it was a
shame to displease her…. She grinned at me sweetly,
like a hyper little child. “I really want to go!”
I looked down at my knees – I was sitting at my
computer, the same place I’d been roughly 18 hours a
day, on mean, for 10 or 12 days – and just now for 30
hours at a stretch – or whatever -- “Well honey, I can't
promise anything, but if things go well then I might be
able to take a few days in a month or two. I don't
know if I'll want to take a whole week anytime in the
near future though, like we’d been planning -- this stuff
is getting way too interesting.”
I could see the unfavorable brain chemicals ooze
down into her face, poison her beauty with unwelcome
thoughts. “Do you really want to go at all? I guess
not... You’re just trying to get rid of the vacation.”
Her tone wavered slightly – she couldn’t decide
whether to be hurt or angry -- or even sympathetic – or
what. She was trying to give me the benefit of the
doubt but I could see she was having trouble. I
couldn’t really blame her – but I couldn’t sympathize
with her either. She was just being a human organism,

49
like all the other six billion of them, coursing over the
planet like the ants in ant farm or the maggots on a
corpse or whatever –
“Honey,” I said, staring straight at her, trying to
dig into her eyes, “I don't even know what ‘’I’ is
anymore... or ‘want’ for that matter.... All these
words ---“
“That sounds bad, Sol, sweetie. You’ve been
staring at that screen too long. Let's go on vacation so
you can get to know Solomon Godunov again.”
She sounded like a cheesy fucking TV show.
Where did she get this stuff? I was involved in an
intimate relationship with Oprah fucking Winfrey! I
wanted to cry. “Solomon Godunov’s not interesting,
don’t you get it? The thing is, this program needs to
get completed.”
“Well maybe Solomon can give you some help in
finishing it once you find him again.” She smiled in a
tentative way – trying to find some emotional
connection, some shared feeling or joke – and almost
succeeding – almost – but she was too fully grounded in
her world – she didn’t see what I did –
I gave her words some thought for a moment. I
once had found her thoughts worthwhile, I supposed –
or remembered – but I was having difficulties with the
nature of time…. But she was just performing some
biological actions, some neurons were coursing through
the fibers of her brain, she was exercising her
understandably-evolved desire to feel the sun on her
beautiful skin and make love in the sand again and relax
her neuroses. And talk with me some blah-blah-blah,
just to feel some emotional connection, because we’re
both brains stuck in dumb human bodies without
telepathic connection – a temporary situation that can be
fixed with some work – once we have the AI

50
completed, there will be things much better than
frolicking on the beach!!
“No, you know,” I said slowly, “the ‘human
personality’ parts of me that have a good time on
vacation aren't really very useful for making AI.
They're just a distraction, really. That stuff isn’t the
most important thing. It’s fun, I mean – I want to do it
– but what I want isn’t such a big deal….”
She looked at me with evident concern and
frustration. She was a good person -- she was being
sweet to me. But being a good person isn’t such a big
fucking deal – any more than being a big cockroach, or
a big crap, or a big rock. The best thing a person can
do is to go beyond personhood – but she just couldn’t
see it, all full as she was of the idiot culture of bonobo
humanity that had been pounded into her beautiful
head from the start. I loved her – I wanted to taste her
flesh – but the fuck with, the fuck with all that!
“I’m just a pattern of activation among neurons,” I
clarified. “What does it matter the propensity of this
pattern? If we can transfer these patterns of self to
some other medium – inside a computer or whatever –
then we can do a lot more interesting things than walk
around on the beach.”
“I guess that’s true,” she agreed understandingly.
“But since we can’t do that, why don’t we go to the
beach for a few days – you don’t need to take a whole
week – and then you can get back to your work.”
I just looked at her, blankly. It occurred to me for
a moment that I felt like the command prompt on my
computer, in the instant before a character was typed
into it. I was just sitting there emptily waiting, hoping
for something interesting, expecting something not.
“I agree your work is much more important,” she
said, trying to be conciliatory. “It’s the most important
thing. I even believe you can do it – eventually. All this

51
stuff you’re saying is probably going to happen, if those
fucks in the White House don’t blow us up first or
whatever. But we can’t live entirely for the future – all
I’m asking is a few days…. Remember how good it
was last time?”
“’Good…’,” I said. “’Good.’” I knew what she
was thinking – it was going to take me decades to
finish. By the time we had a superhuman AI that could
upload us into the digital metaverse we’d be 90 years
old, maybe even dead from cancer or heart failure or
being hit by a garbage truck. She saw the logic of what
I was doing – she wasn’t an idiot – she even had some
vision – but she couldn’t grasp the immediacy. And I
couldn’t communicate it – the reasons for my confidence
– but it was right there in front of me – I knew –
“I see,” she said finally, giving up. “Maybe I
should just go somewhere myself....”
I breathed a sigh of relief. She was going to leave
me alone – I could get back to the module I was writing,
which just needed a few hours work, then I’d be on to
something more interesting, based on the math I’d
worked out the day before. Or was that three days
before? “I just need to turn myself into a machine for a
while,” I said, trying to evince empathy. “I need to
become a thinking machine to make a thinking machine.
If you want to go somewhere yourself, that's
understandable. I'm making plenty of money from
Zorvex now; you can go anywhere you want to and
spend as long as you want.”
She looked at me confusedly. “Well, it's sweet
that you're offering, but I don't want to travel without
company, and I don’t know any company that I’d
appreciate as much as yours.”
“I understand.”
Her body drooped; I wanted to give her a hug.
But I fought back the emotion – I knew where that led

52
to – to living just like everybody else, eating in
restaurants and going on vacation and fucking and
frolicking and continuing being human – when I could
see there was more –
“I feel bad,” I said finally. I took her hand and
slightly squeezed it; she barely squeezed back.
“Anyway, you just don't want to go, hmmm. You
don’t want to go even for a day or two?”
The bitch wouldn’t give up! Arrrrgggh! Finally
I yelled at her. “Look, Ashti,” I said, finally getting up
from my chair. “I’m not going to twist my decisions
into your stupid verbal framework! If you want to
frame it that way in your own mind I'm not able to stop
you --- yet ... but – fuck it –“
She stepped back from me. “What?? what are
you talking about??
“I'm not going to accept your projection of my
decisions onto your point of view. Keep me out of your
trivial little subspace, all right?!”
“Huh? What's my verbal framework??? What
are you talking about? I don't get it at all??”
I relaxed my tense body a quantum. “People
choosing what they want is the whole reason the
human race is as fucked up as it is today.”
“Look,” she said, leaning slightly toward me – she
was standing about five feet away from me now, near
the door to my study – “I guess that, simply put, you
just don’t want to go, and you're talking to me just to
make sure you did talk to me, but it's not like you're
gonna change your decision or anything, you're just...
talking....” Her cleavage looked really cute peeking out
of her shirt – I could feel my dick responding. But the
hell with all that animal stuff – ‘you look cute when
you’re angry’ blah blah blah blah blah – I was so far
beyond that now, bitch! – “You want not to go...

53
whatever... who cares ... it's just that, behavioristically
and simply, you're not going....”
“OK,” I said, calming down and sitting back in my
office chair. “I agree that talking about these things is
kind of a waste of time, but it's only occupying a few
minutes, which is quite different from actually going
away for two weeks and leaving this AI project just
sitting here.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
Out of respect for my prior self, which had for
some reason given a shit about her, I made one more
effort. I relaxed myself, killed the rage, sought the pure
voidness inside. There it was – calmness, perfection –
and a Hilbert-space vector leading beyond –
“Ashti. I’m sorry for losing my temper, all right.
It was just a bad moment….”
“All right.” Her breathing was still fast, but I
could see her straining to control it -- to restore a
slower periodicity – and straining not to strain not to
strain … --
She rocked back and forth from foot to foot, like
she always did when she was angry. Maybe she was
imagining her mommy was holding her, rocking her
back and forth going “goo goo goo” – but I wasn’t
going to sing her any lullaby –
“Do you understand that if everything keeps
going well like this, within one to three years we could
have a superhuman intelligence? Can you really
understand that?”
“So ... you're not going, right?”
“If you really understood this you wouldn't be so
fixated on this stupid vacation! Romping around like
an animal is all very well but it's not the most important
thing.”

54
 “You’re not going, no matter what.... I mean,
you'd go in some hypothetical life-or-death situation,
but...”
She just wouldn’t stop! “Going??” I yelled,
leaning back in my chair. “Going???!!! I'm not even
willing to imagine myself doing anything besides
finishing this program!!! After the superhuman AI is
created we can go on vacation -- if we still want to – if
we still even exist!!!! – if rolling on the fucking beach still
seems at all interesting to us, which I really really really
doubt!”
“Blah, blah, blah... I just asked, ‘so you’re just not
going!!’... Please answer Yes or No I don't need your
offensive justifications about how blah blah romping
blah blah animal blah blah important crap….”
I eyed her with contempt. She was filled with
animal emotions. So was, I of course, I could recognize
that – I was angry, I was frustrated, I was jealous that
she loved romping on the beach so much more than my
beautiful ideas, so much more than the end of the
stupid human world and the beginning of a superior
order -- But I was striving to overcome my animal
emotions. She was just giving into them. Like always
when she was angry, I had the urge to throw her on
the bed and rip her underwear off with my teeth and
fuck her violently for a moment – then sweetly and
softly for an hour or so – making the anger go away
and pulling her into the core of my stupid self – but I
looked at the soft plump of her breasts and I just
thought: Not this! Not this!
“I'm tired of this conversation. I'm going to get
back to work now.” I was about to spin my chair
around and turn back to the computer and get back to
work as promised but she had a nasty look in her face –
she wasn’t going to let me go – I could tell she was
going to go on and on. There was no way to get rid of

55
her! I smiled at her sweetly and spoke calmly and
maliciously. “I suggest you go on your vacation with
your imaginary boyfriend -- the person you wish you
were involved with instead of me -- or whatever. I'm
sure he'll have a wonderful time. Ask him to send me a
postcard. I' ve got work to do....”
She was pulling her hair out or something, and
stomping her foot up and down. “Well what about me,
you asshole? Why the hell do you love me, if all I want
is just to stomp around like a goat in the mountains and
I’m not so important like you and your stupid
program??!!”
I sighed. I was calm and above all that, like
Zarathustra on his mountain. My lion and my eagle
were dancing equational ballets around me, but she
couldn’t even see them, as blind and corroded with
dumb monkey feeling as she was. “Ashti, I don’t want
to spend a long time psychoanalyzing myself. I don’t
care about my own emotions. I just want to finish this
program, that’s all. I’m going to give it as long as it
takes.”
“Look,” she said, collecting herself. “I’ll just go
do something downstairs. When you’re in a better
mood we can resume this conversation. -- maybe I'll go
myself after all, since somehow you're happy to pay,
even though you don't even ... what the hell ... this is all
wrong ... anyway, I love you ... maybe I'll just stay here
with you after all … maybe you’re right, I don’t
know….”
She’d been going all right for a while, until that
last sentence. “Maybe I’m right? Honey, I know I’m
right! If you had a little trust in me…. Why do I love
you? Love…. All these words – ‘I’, ‘love’, ‘you’ -- I
don't even know what they mean any more. This damn
monkey human stuff. Why do I love you...? Right now
I wouldn't choose to get involved with anyone....

56
You’re cute … you’re a nice person … a lot nicer than
me I’m sure. But people just aren’t what interest me
right now….”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know, Sol.” There was a tear in her eye.
Her flesh-bag was leaking. “I don’t know.”
“I want to finish this code, all right.”
“Sure,” she said tentatively – about to withdraw
at long last. I felt sadness, but even more intensely,
relief.
“I’m sorry I got so upset.”
“I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have insisted so
much.”
“It’s all right, sweety.”
“Is it?”
“We’re just being emotional humans….”
“I guess.”
“I really don’t want to take time off now, though.
Really – this is much too interesting of a point – I
couldn’t really enjoy myself, I’d be thinking about this
code too much.”
“Yeah, I understand….”
“Do you?”
She walked up to me, put her hand on my
shoulder. “I guess so.”
I put my arm around her waist, lifted up her shirt
and kissed her belly – lost myself for a moment in the
sweat and the salt – which reminded me of the ocean
that we were not going to be swimming in – she was
wonderful, beautiful, magical, all the adjectives heaped
up in a pile and massaging me lecherous and vivacious –
but these adjectives were just idiot wind compared to
the cosmos that was beckoning and enthralling me –
and she understood me – well, halfway, sort of – and
that was better than anyone else – but still –

57
 “I’m going to finish this module in a few hours.
We can take a walk after that if you want to.”
“It’ll be dark then. It’s better to walk in the
light.”
“Yeah well…. I’m not going to quit this now – my
memory stack will disappear, it’d take hours to
regenerate it.”
“Sure…. Do you want to eat something?”
“Not yet. I need to finish this.” (Didn’t she
notice a certain repetitive theme in my conversation???)
“What if I order some Chinese food?”
“Order it after I’m done. I don’t know exactly
how long it will take.”
“OK.” She bent down for a kiss – and I gave her
one – but not a long one – more than an auntly peck,
less than a make-out – just enough so she wouldn’t
complain – and I wouldn’t get excited –
She left. I felt sad for a moment, then stared at
the computer screen, and forgot about her entirely.
There were much more important things to do.

58
she left in a symphony
of shadows,
forgetting nothing
but her bones
-----

When Zarathustra was thirty years old,

he left his home and the lake of his
home, and went into the mountains.
There he enjoyed his spirit and
solitude, and for ten years did not
weary of it. But at last his heart
changed -- and rising one morning with
the rosy dawn, he went before the sun,
and spake thus unto it: Thou great
star. What would be thy happiness if
thou hadst not those for whom thou
shinest. For ten years hast thou
climbed hither unto my cave: thou
wouldst have wearied of thy light and
of the journey, had it not been for me,
mine eagle, and my serpent. But we
awaited thee every morning, took from

59
thee thine overflow and blessed thee
for it. Lo I am weary of my wisdom, like
the bee that hath gathered too much
honey; I need hands outstretched to
take it.I would fain bestow and
distribute, until the wise have once
more become joyous in their folly, and
the poor happy in their riches.
Therefore must I descend into the
deep: as thou doest in the evening,
when thou goest behind the sea, and
givest light also to the nether-world,
thou exuberant star. Like thee must I
GO DOWN, as men say, to whom I shall
descend. Bless me, then, thou tranquil
eye, that canst behold even the
greatest happiness without envy. Bless
the cup that is about to overflow, that
the water may flow golden out of it, and
carry everywhere the reflection of thy
bliss. This cup is again going to empty
itself, and Zarathustra is again going to
be a man. Thus began Zarathustra’s

60
down-going.…
When Zarathustra arrived at the
nearest town which adjoineth the
forest, he found many people
assembled in the market-place; for it
had been announced that a rope-
dancer would give a performance. And
Zarathustra spake thus unto the
people: I TEACH YOU THE
SUPERMAN. Man is something that is
to be surpassed. What have ye done to
surpass man? All beings hitherto have
created something beyond themselves:
and ye want to be the ebb of that great
tide, and would rather go back to the
beast than surpass man? What is the
ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing
of shame. And just the same shall man
be to the Superman: a laughing-stock,
a thing of shame. Ye have made your
way from the worm to man, and much
within you is still worm. Once were ye
apes, and even yet man is more of an

61
 ape than any of the apes. Even the
wisest among you is only a disharmony
and hybrid of plant and phantom. But
do I bid you become phantoms or
plants? Lo, I teach you the Superman.
The Superman is the meaning of the
earth. Let your will say: The Superman
SHALL BE the meaning of the earth.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Book I

Forever now, forever never. Walk with me on

beaches of fire. Consume the other’s succulent spirit
relentlessly. Love empty of its own self -- full of wild
tender vibrations -- male and female flesh, awake and
abandoned and unknown. This flesh is ours now: we
have claimed it -- we have insaned it in our beings.
Emptier than the empty thought and dream; hot like a
Tantric chant of
– in the end it was just a web of patterns, a network screamed
of forms interpenetrating and defining each other, caresses. Her
but each portion of the web had limited vision and mind disappears
thought everything too far from it in the cosmos- and you see in its
network was somehow different, somehow solid and place – not a place
real and not just web – hah! – the network of – just the soft
patterns became a reflecting hall of images, lisping mescalinic
mirrors mirroring each other in n-dimensional thought-dream of
geometries -- images ossifying, raping and the child-monkey
commanding each other, becoming evil, solid, whole. – a breasts-
No longer leading into a web of endless creative bursting girl-child,
links and vortices. Nothing was real and yet -- body taut with

62
imaginings of sex -- long black hair laughing, red lips
wide hungry – looking out at the evening sky thinking
and singing and alive. The child sings words of the
deep for some body -- Reconfigure molecular flesh --
move minds into software -- create qubit whirling
madness, leading passion-plays to universes beyond.
Lisping child-voice sends out music in shadows –
teenage lust nurses moments through the pores of their
radiance -- The child is thirty-six years old -- No,
twenty-three. Sixty.
Sixteen. Six. Six everything deluded itself it was real because it
hundred and six was such a fucking IDIOT and was constructed to
billion. Knots of have limitations of scope. And I was the same
mind untied like a six fucking thing (“thing”, heh – “THING”!!!)– an
year old: eyes vivid idiotic idiocyful idiot who was a configuration of
and luminously
ravenously
patterns without ground or bottom and was built
conscious. More not to realize this – or to realize this only
perfect than any intellectually and not in his (nonexistent) bones....
collection of patterns The universe was built on stupidity: there was no
– something frayed fucking escaping it. Fuck it! fuck...
and beyond –
beyond what? Beyond this continuum of human mind -
- mind-patterns build mind-patterns -- self-subverting
vibrations annihilate typologies, breed topologies of
something – what?

I woke up beside her -- sleeping with her next to

me -- bright like a conscious moon, dark like a self-
assembling spy satellite – a dream’s total intensity,
deranged contusion of the stigma of reality. Split a stick
and I am there, said the Christ (according to
someone/thing). Open your eyes and smell the flesh-
juice. She was a wonder to be with -- I’d never
imagined -- previous girlfriends hadn’t prepared me --

63
 Sweet little Ashti – exotic flower of
confusion/love-force -- In the months since I’d known
her I’d gone utterly insane three times. Each time I’d
forgotten who I was – I always remembered
afterwards -- almost always a(n un)pleasant surprise.
This was when I was into Nietzsche. (When was
I not? ahem) The second conversation we had was an
argument about Zarathustra. How evolution could
never yield the Superman -- so I claimed -- she had
some words about the logic of speciation. The third
was about masturbating on buses.

From forth the loins of these two foes -- a pair of

hell-phrased, quark-crossed lovers -- take on their life,
deliver the infancy of their solidity. Whose piteous
misadventures -- disadvantages -- buried and married
and marred detestably and wombably curvaceously,
gorged with dear morsels, jaws forced open, unsane
mechanicosmos, throat gagged bloodfate, 12-gauge
shitguns, bipedal peemotion, equal rights for inanimate
objects, delirious Mage or sage of bloody cruddy
nothing shunned.
I enforce thy rotten jaws to open -- hideous
manservant!
The demonstrators, clothed in evil costumes,
chanting in Mayan and Aztec languages, gush through
streets with demented flashlights. She floats through
the room like a rabid paramecium, naked but for twelve
rings in her labia, sits absent-mindedly on my face and
quotes the Fundamental Theorem of Destiny, drops her
handbag on the floor whistling the Gilligan's Island
theme song, tone of voice suggesting garlic mussels --
conscious rainbows -- pregnant suns.
The radio asks if I'm realing in the years and I
throw it out the window, pick up a green pastel and

64
scribble on her left breast; unfortunately the total
eclipse outside the window at the moment of her
orgasm gives her a heart attack and I have to
resuscitate her by attaching her to the parallel port of
my computer.
"I don't want to write anymore," I tell her. She
removes the rings from her labia and swallows them.
The mushroom cloud in the backyard distracts her; I
watch her wide buttocks weave and wiggle in circles, as
if I – Sol sole soul -- were the son of the sun.
O, fortune's fool am I! Sweet sorrow of
charbroiled flesh! O happy dagger! My only love
sprung from my only hate! O true apothecary!

... when I was eight years old, I would just sit

there, sit there, sit there, for fifteen minutes or half an
hour, emptying my mind, waiting for something magical
to happen. Something special, something solid,
significant,....
One day I was riding my bike home from my
juggling lessons, and I passed another kid, just a little
younger than me, riding her bike in the opposite
direction. After I passed her, I instinctively glanced
back at her. I remembered doing the same thing
dozens of times before: stopping and staring, waiting
for someone to look back.
What was it I was waiting for? The look of
recognition. Not literal: cosmic. Mutual recognizance of
the other as transcendently, splendiculously real.
The two of us were special people -- people
endowed with enchanted reality -- some special quality
of mind that classified us apart. When we saw each
other we would understand -- really understand for
the first time ever -- step outside the void(oid)
continuum –

65
 In the evil eye of backsight -- transactional waves
handshaking and collapsing -- complex probabilities
molesting (auto)pilot waves, time axes trashing monkey
memories -- that whole evening of our delicate doom is
filled with fake brilliance. The chimpanzee of the soul
with its baboonish butt-shake and warped-voodoo-
math trickery. I'm not going to tell you anything.
Muster master my memes, Mister Mark!

I was seventeen years old, halfway through

university, hungry for a girlfriend.
Then I was twenty-four, living by myself in a
corporate office overcrowded with papers and books,
filthy because I’d banned the cleaning staff, haunted by
the smell of her ghost, surrounded by equations and
software code – having exchanged the warm salt flesh
of woman for the Antarctic quest for perfect mind.
Slowly I began to forget the contours of her face.

I was nineteen, living in New York, walking past

Katz's Deli down garbagy Houston Street, past the
rows of sleazy thrift shops, tiny ethnic groceries, street
vendors, abandoned buildings, heaps of personal and
industrial waste, legs eagerly pumping the sidewalk to
Boston Square Park. Face-torrent gush out of the
subway; phalanxes of window-washers scarily
converging on the cars at the red light, dashing from
windshield to windshield to windshield.... Jumpsuits
and dresses, lipsticky faces, animated Pleistocene death.
Lives distorted with hideous. Down West 4th street
through the heart of NYU ... where I was studying
math and biology and physics, at the Gold-Plated

66
Moron Institute ... but at the moment I was more intent
on getting stoned as fuck with Ashti. We tried to buy
the acid from the rastas by the fountain in the center of
the park, but they only had weed, so we had to take
our business to the northeast corner of the park, was
where the really burnt-out, fucked-up dealers sat on
their broken-down benches from early morning till the
cops kicked them out at midnight. I tried to get Ashti
to talk to the dealers, hoping a cute girl could get a
better price, but she was too shy so as usual I had to do
all the work. Yecch – I hate dealing with people. The
dealer said ten bucks a hit. Flashing my sickest smile,
shaking my long curls (none too clean -- probably a half-
dozen dead bugs in there along with gray New York
smog-dirt) across my eager young foolish face, I
bargained him down to five.
Saw some pigs and got paranoid. It was the first
time I'd ever bought drugs on the street – usually I just
bummed drugs off my friends on the rare occasions I
wanted them – usually the whackiness of my “normal”
state of mind was good enough for me -- but this time
none of my friends had any acid, and I really wanted to
ride the A-train with Ashti before she went back to
Chicago, where she was going to university. We'd
been living in separate cities for just a couple months: it
sucked. My impulse was to swallow the evidence, to
hide it from the pigs, but by the time I found it in my
pocket they were only a couple yards away ... I just
walked briskly on and on, and when I turned to look a
minute later it looked a lot like they were buying some
pot in the park. We walked home to my apartment
laughing nervously. She never looked more lovely.
Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the
harpsichord -- Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue -- ancient,
twisted, twisting, gorgeous. I can't remember what we
talked about. Burnt hot dogs for dinner, potato chips

67
out of the bag, a five-buck six-pack of wine cooler. (I
still liked alcohol back then – I’ve got no use for it now
– the human mind is dull enough without it --). Jack –
my roommate, my best friend for the last ten years --
wandered home; I took out the acid. Tiny purple dots
under the tongue, crank the stereo, wait for something
to happen. The vibe was weird -- like a third mind was
there with us -- some kind of alien creation creating its
own self-illusion, expanding like a lattice of pulsing
tetrahedra within us and around us -- but we knew it
was our own vibrations. We felt each other moving
around, in the dim kind of way that you do, but it
wasn't like normal; everything seemed distant and
strange. Aha. The acid must be kicking in.
Noise outside the window -- gunshots, bikes
starting up. Ran over to the window to see what was
happening. Some kind of drug transaction gone awry?
Not quite: The pigs were beating up the local drug
dealer. They grabbed him by the balls from the back,
between his legs, and slammed him up against the wall,
again and again. Poor dude. It seemed like his head
was going to crack open. But the human head proved
mighty. He kept looking around in resignation, as they
reeled his body back, then smashed him back into the
wall for more. I glanced over protectively at Ashti -- as
if, in their undirected fury, they might come after her
next. And what would I be able to do about it? Shit….
The hell with the window and the world. Jack
went back to staring at the tube. Was he really my
best friend? I couldn’t remember what was interesting
about him. He was a kind of meat automaton,
hypnotizing himself with boring. We’d met in junior
high school, bound together by our common
recognition of the idiocy of the school and the other
kids. But now he was absorbed with booze and sports
and TV – yeah, he knew it was all idiotic, but his

68
agitated nihilism had given way to a deep restless
laziness. If nothing really has any meaning then why
not just do the easiest thing -- just do what everybody
else does but don’t take it so seriously – laugh at
yourself along with everyone else as you fill your mind
with garbage -- . “Pretend to be an insect,” I wrote
about him once. “You promised to help me rip apart the
web of thought and language – instead you pretend to
be an insect – eventually the others will uncover you –
the perfection of the insect will always be ONE STEP
BEYOND” – but in fact he never really promised me
anything -- that was my own personal dementia. He
wanted to steal his father’s car when we were 14 and
drive across the country, robbing 7-11’s along the way.
I was into the running away and driving cross-country
but not the robbing convenience stores, I was afraid
we’d get caught. I wanted to drive out to California
and make ourselves fake ID’s claiming we were age 18
and enroll in university – high school was too fucking
ridiculous – it was null educationally and socially
repellent – but I didn’t have any way to get the money
without making myself a criminal in an overly risky way.
I studied complex forms of bank fraud for a little while
but didn’t see how to get myself in a position to execute
any of the tricks I learned. My best plan was to start a
wholesale vitamin company – there were huge profit
margins there – I think that actually would have
worked but it was too boring to carry through with
and Jack certainly wasn’t interested in the hassles of
starting a business – he was hung up on the romance of
robbing 7-11’s and liquor stores -- I think he wanted to
create a situation where it was “necessary” to shoot
someone to save himself from going to jail. He was
interested in mass murder as a demonstration of the
meaninglessness of everyone’s life. To me this was an
unnecessary demonstration. The triviality of humanity

69
didn’t need proving. The question was if human mind
could be used as a tool to discover something better –
something embodying a better sense of “better” than
humanity could come up with, breaking the dumb-ass
Morlock deadlock between nihilism and dogmatism that
seemed the definition of human nature. But all that
crap about transcendence seemed to require hard work
– something Jack’s interest in was terribly limited – and
anyway my teenage mind wasn’t totally clear on these
things, they were a pool of dis/organized inklings,
flashes of science-fictional speculation about neural
rewiring and uploading into robots and blisters of
Buddhistic thought formed on the skin of my memory
from reading my mother’s Chinese history and
philosophy books when I was younger and she was
studying those subjects in grad school and bits and
pieces of Ouspenskyan lunacism I’d practiced on the
way home from school in eighth grade. To Jack the
idea of transcending humanity was mostly a bunch of
BS. He saw humanity was fucked and that was that;
the idea was to drink enough beer that you didn’t care,
then get depressed about how the beer didn’t really
dull the realization that all human life is meaningless,
then laugh a while and break bottles over the head of
the guy sitting next to you in the bar and follow some
girl around laughing at her and trying to get her to fuck
you until finally you pass out listening to some heavy
metal poser whack off with his guitar in some crummy
sweaty nightclub. Then wake up hung over and try to
write song lyrics about your useless life but stop,
bummed that you can only come up with clichés – not
that they’re worse than anything else – Well, OK, Jack
and I had diverged a few years back, me seeking an
intellectual or mystical solution to the paradoxes of
nihilism, him plumbing the wisdom of Milwaukee’s Best,
Budweiser and Heineken, and Guinness when he could

70
afford it – and then I’d met Ashti who had taken over
his place in my heart, and gave me great sex as well.
Her lithe yellow skin filled my cosmos. She was
somewhere in the middle of me and Jack psychically --
not as lazy as him nor as hyperambitious and energized
as me. Like me she intuited there was a path beyond
the human-verse – more than one path – some
technological, some purely experiential, some hard to
touch or quantify – though she tended to focus more
on the mystical and aesthetic pathways, whereas I had
more hope in technological shortcuts (meditating for
years to escape the prison of humanity is all very well,
but ultimate all you get at the end is to be a funny-
looking Oriental guy with a ridiculous moustache sitting
in the lotus position and tending your garden – happy
and peaceful enough to be sure, but wasn’t there
something better than this? – better than anything
human? – peaceful and blissful and exciting and creative
and productive all at once? She liked the idea but
thought I was a little bit nuts. Jack stared at the
Yankees on the tube.) So there I was, holding her
hand, in love with her lithe young flesh and her mind
with its hunger for my ideas and my
words and conversations and life. And
so me and Ashti sat there in my and Jack’s
apartment ignoring the honks outside and
Taste
the tube and retreated into our universe,
where all we were thinking was -- is it a
or
taste, or is it a feeling? Taste or feeling? Is
it a taste or a feeling? It's a taste. No, it's aFeeling?
feeling. No, it's not a feeling, it's a taste.
No, it's not a taste, it's a feeling. I forget
who was taking which side. Or was
there really any difference? The miraculous weirdness
under our tongues. Just sitting in the bowels of New
York, staring into each other's eyes, each knowing what

71
the other one was thinking, though we hadn't said a
word. Or had we? What difference did words make
anyway? What was which way or what why? Taste
or feeling? Taste or feeling? That's when we knew the
LSD was kicking in. It had kicked in long ago in fact;
swallowed us up and spit us out and fucked us and
thrown us in the garbage and elongated our thoughts
and feelings and fears into rice vermicelli and tied it up
into loop quantum gravity masterworks and weaved
liquid quilts of love. The tingling in the mouth had
turned into a vibrant numb. A feeling of simultaneous
death and life.
Jack went to bed at ten -- four hours early for him
-- and we put on some appropriate music. No more
Bach -- time for Hendrix … purple mofo haze, voodoo-
multiplied mind-children, 1983 mermen on the edge of
bold-love time axes -- whigmaleeriously dancing --
seeking freedom in a hundred different soul-powers.
We took off our minds for a couple of minutes and just
stared into each other's eyes, waving our freak flags
higher -- and forgetting what was freakish -- sinking
into each other's pupils like insane galactic nebulae
spiraling into black hole cosmicomics. I remember it so
vividly, lying down on the floor looking up at her lying
on the couch looking down at me ... trying desperately
to restrain ourselves from laughing. I was saying to her
that if we could just clear our minds of all the irrelevant
clutter ... just shove it back down into the pit of the
subconscious ... then our minds would work with
ultimate efficiency; we'd be free of neurosis and our
natural genius would shine. That's true -- she said --
that's what I've always been looking for -- but how? I
don't remember what I said -- some shit. But it was
clear and beautifully simple and it rhymed with the light
shining through the window and the everpresent love
on her face. Whatever, we believed it for the moment.

72
Looking into her wild bulging eyes, seeing nothing but
soft dilated pupil, vooming inward into vortices
unknown -- an exaggeration and a parody and a
mockery and a perfect snatch of oneness -- that magic
look of recognition: ultimate and whacky, perfect and
still, in the middle of the vortex of quantum-dynamical
pattern-love. Rippling pools of savage reflections.
Laughing shadows dancing -- on the smiles of restless
chance-wings -- pulverizing poetries and impregnating
infinities. We discussed it for a long time, maybe ten or
twenty minutes, or ten or twenty seconds, or ten or
twenty hours....
Every schoolboy knows time is contradictory.
Time is contradiction -- paradox and time are inherent in
each other -- now is all of a sudden not now -- and
then? And suddenly, delusionally or with upper truth,
the acid haze solves the contradiction -- past, present
and future bleed and meld into one giant fluid moment.
The stream of consciousness turns in circles and tight
dizzying meta-knots, caresses its own skin, sucks its
own hyperconscious magnetic cock, spawns an
infinitude of baby souls gibbering helplessly and joyfully
solving all possible equations. The universe, from day
zero to the end of hellish green eternity, is dissected
into an infinitude of miniscule pieces, and they're
rearranged into a boggling maze of pattern,
transcending sense and nonsense and what else. As
vividly as I see these words now as I'm typing them --
delusional truths, overactive craniums -- what an
orderly, high-dimensional mess --
Charles Ives, way back in the dork ages, wrote
several symphonies which give the impression of a
number of marching bands playing different songs, all
marching through each other like cavalcades of
hamsters. Ives to the n'th degree -- a couple thousand
bands marching and rioting raucously, jamming on all

73
different manners of music -- your favorite songs, the
songs you hate to love, Siberian sycophantic
symphonies, vague melodies only faintly familiar;
random generations of quasi-musical anti-algorithms,
tribal chants of aborigines, the devil's orchestra in
Kansas; the music the robots will make in 2900 AD after
the ass of the Singularity and the murder of humanity
and the end of the world and the birth of the new new
new age. You see and smell and touch the music; there
is no world beyond.
I knew that our communion was real. The
verbiage was beside the point -- we said so much
implicitly, telepathically if you will, that in comparison
the few hundred words we forced out through our
mouths and in through our ears seemed absurd,
inconsequential. But anyway I spoke, seeking in words
and sentences some kind of connection between the
magic of the acid trip and the dead solid world of walls,
floors and opinions and selves we'd come back to
eventually – all too soon -- after an infinity of eternities
but soon...
A whole ceiling of monkeys, intricately fit together
like a jigsaw puzzle that no three-dimensional saw could
ever cut, moving up and down and grunting, hirsute
and vigorously donkifying. Each monkey slowly
turning into Nietzsche -- his tall slim perfect negroid
figure, his bushy Dali pubic moustache, his coke-bottle
glasses, his Chinese Jewish German eyebrows, his
toothy weird smile....
Supposedly these visual tessellation patterns are
the result of the LSD overriding the brain's usual
instructions not to see the veins of the eye. Just as our
minds can listen to a regularly ticking clock and hear it
playing a tune, they can see the veins inside the eye and
conjure up a bunch of surreal monkeys. Normally
there's no point to seeing the veins inside one's eye.

74
They're always there, so there's no point in always
noticing them. The visual cortex just "filters" them out. It
receives signals indicating their presence and
systematically ignores them. But the magic spell forces
you to see what's really there. In front of you, within
you. You can sit
staring at a chair Hummings and buzzing and
for what seems pulsings surrounded us – at
like hours, first it was the water pipes in
exploring every the hotel and the refrigerators
scratch and and stoves in the restaurant
crack of it, across the courtyard but it soon
every variation became more than that – it was
in the polish ... the messaging of messages, the
overwhelmed transmission of packets of
by the majestic information by organized aliens,
power of its is- the coursing of thought-wavicles
ness and its of an alien civilization, each
chair-itude. wavicle itself an alien and a
(Qua qua qua qua thought, the patterns of
qua qua!!!) streaming the mental structures
All these things of dynamics of alien minds and
we routinely at the same time the traffic of
perceive and an alien economy, the packets
ignore. A single
would eventually reach their
spoken word
destination and get unpacked
hangs in the air
into consciousness or light or
forever --
amoebic orgasmic movement, and
stretching out to
some of them served as currency,
eternity on
alternate time- little packages of value
axes -- each constantly proving their
contour of its existence via forms of
waveform mathematics in which hungry
crying out to be vaginal lips took the place of
explored and equality signs.

I realized I was in the middle

of quantum reality - fluidity
and sophistication far beyond
what we
75 could imagine –

but if you stopped perceiving

 At any given moment, when our
time-axis was in stillness, there tickled (orgasm to
was all this teeming movement the brink of
in directions perpendicular to our screaming so many
own time – this whole society of times in rapid
aliens spreading information one sequence you can’t
way and the other, creating find the voice to
patterns of awareness, spreading scream anymore -- );
here and there, existing at a conturbaciously a
level of fluidity and tiny fear appears in
sophistication far beyond what the corner of one's
mind-garden... and it
we could imagine – but if you
can explode until it
stopped perceiving this
consumes the entire
movement and collapsed it into a
universe. The origin
stillness you could see a stiff and
of the fear, its
solid world.
relation to five
dozen other things
I could see there were two different in your mind --
perspectives on the world – two different things you were
consistent views of it – in one of them tacitly aware of, but
there were these aliens, spreading never focused on...
information forward and backward in things you never
time and leaping to distant parts of cared about or
preferred not to
space instantly – and in the other there
recognize.
were walls and doors and people and It would be
difficult to go about
the functions of
ordinary life if you were overwhelmed with the
wordness of every word you heard spoken, the is-ness
of every is and the chairness of every chair. In order to
keep ourselves alive -- in order to feed and breed and
love each other -- to create things -- to "exist" -- we
impose formal structure on chaostreams of perceptions -
- on the eternal flowing formlessness of the random
Now. We assume this structure is there; we perceive

76
 things in its context. Do you remember when you first
learned about the blind spot? (There's a space in front
of your head that your eyes can't see: your brain fills in
the gap.)
And me and my and the thoughts disappeared, the
Ashti – sweet darling! – wonder was sublimated into
we were much too soon movements and tenderness – till
to part again. For a finally after so many hours I
month or two, at any came, blasting my come deep deep
rate. And there was inside her so it emerged through
an obvious fear within her ears and her mouth and her
both of us that this time eyes and every pore of her body,
apart would really be and sinking into her flesh and
the end. Yes, we loved falling deep asleep, the two of
each other, and we’d us one being, quantum-resonantly
been together for a bound together more sweetly than
couple years – but we I ever would have thought
knew love was possible in this error-ridden
unstable. I was going world…
to be here in New
York, a city full of
whacky women, and Jack would be dragging me out to
various metal and punk clubs, to see the girls with black
lipstick and tiny black miniskirts. (Remember that girl
once who walked in long circles around the interior of
that heavy metal club forty-seven times, looking straight
at you all the while, to the sound of terrible music
played by rejects from the glam band Cinderella; and
she picked up your keys when you dropped them while
dancing … but you failed to take
my cannabinoid- her home?) And she’d be
addled rooster studying at a university that was
probably 60% male – Well, sure,
exploded/absorbed in yeah yeah, we trusted each other
… but not quite.
every
quantum
of her
(simian) skin
77
 We were both just humans, after all – hairless
somewhat-evolved monkeys with a capacity for
abstract cognition and moral committment but without a
particularly strict separation between these things and
the brainless apesuck thummerings of the African
savannah in our genes. And we were still in our teens,
for fuck’s sake. We shared our eyes – quietly – loving -
- sweetly sad.
Lying on the bed side by side in the dim light....
We tried to have sex, but we both had the same queasy
feeling, ineffably weird, when I slipped it inside her. I
felt the sides of her cunt on my cock as I never had
before -- and never since. Pure skin-ness overtook us.
The pleasure was there, but deconstructed into
infinitesimal module-sparks of skin-
on-skin. We couldn't see the point anger
of it -- or anything -- lost and he smiled
towering in
found in the seeingness of seeing. shiny metallic purple armor
We just lay there and hugged and
listened to or watched or existed in queen jealousy
the music. Psychotic seas of envy
orgasmic death puppies, lusting and waits behind him
ranting, dancing our existences her fiery green gown
sneers at the grassy ground
away, weaving us together --
Hendrix and Wakeman and the and all of these emotions
soldiers of life and death and earth, keep telling me
bending reality in soundscapes, they’re just emergent dynamical
sculpting beauty from our idiocy, phenomena
showing us all the rhythms of our in the neurodynamics of my limbic
dreamlands and their connections system as coupled with
my neocortex and other brain
to the other world, the deeper subsystems
world where everyone really lived
all along, where every pattern but in keeping with the
keeps its breathing. Skin-on-skin Popeye philosophy
we lay there -- swimming in music - (“I yam what I yam what I yam”)
- watching crazy patterns shifting regardless I’m giving my life
to a rainbow like you

(Wee wee wee!

(Wee wee wee!
(Wee wee wee!
78
restless on the wall, pulsating brilliantly in inframind
colors no normal eye can afford the space to see....
As one of the songs faded out -- something by
Kansas -- but the notes that we heard don't exist in this
dimension – they occupied no “space” where "this" and
"that" cohere -- we looked at each other and knew we
were seeing the exact same thing. It was a castle, a field
of long spires of various designs, angles and sizes,
surrounded by a sort of golden strandy mist. We
realized this, we lived it, and we didn't say a word at
all. A little later we talked about it and remembered it
exactly the same way.
Love is always where
Nearly everyone Somewhere
who's taken acid in a It's there
group has experienced not/
it's always there
some sort of Invert.
(perceived) telepathy. Pervert
During my first year of In the furious geometries of ideas, equations and nations and
college – the year frogs.
before I met Ashti -- I
we give birth to our own poopocalypse
had a group of friends
who liked to take Christ on the criss-cross pissing mushrooms
massive doses of blotter lying in my bed screaming, head cast back at the cosmos,
acid and sit in a circle billowing forth like a dream of a dream –
staring at each other
it's always there/not
saying nothing for a Invert.
long time. They'd tell Pervert
me afterwards about
the incredible thoughts
they were thinking, I got fed up with the AI and took
collectively. Which off, I was living on some tropical
mostly centered around island with 5 pygmy wives, who were
the dynamics of power fused in a hive mind --
-- good energy and bad
energy, fluctuating
according to equations – muse of mad equations – eyes
of women – shadows of the rare –

79
they but nobody else could understand. They had the
emergent meta-logic of qi locked up in private intuitive
mastery. They handed out little pieces of paper shaped
like index cards with "Good Energy" and "Bad Energy"
written on them in
neat blue
of them --
John, who
Good ink. One
this guy
wasn’t
really
mine, but
looked
a
Energy! friend of
who
deep and
appropriately sinister in his long green coat and who
played the trumpet somberly, letting single notes hang
for minutes as his mind explored every possible
nterpretation -- was an overlord and forced the others
to do things under threat of giving them Bad Energy
cards. When I burned a "Good Energy" card
mischievously, these people nearly died of empathetic
shock. Ok, the cards were a joke on their part – a
private joke against the mind and the universe -- but
then the joke became serious, due to living in a space
where joke/non-joke was a meaningless distinction. A
couple of them ended up in mental hospitals, but that's
another story.
Back, three years earlier, to
the first time I'd ridden the A-
train with Ashti -- her and my fat
friend Jack -- a different friend
Bad
Jack -- this Jack dropped acid and
was a prize-winner at chemistry -
- he never took weird drugs
Energy
again, he became a born-again
Christian, and he didn't speak to me for a long time
after that trip, which embarrassed him tremendously
because we saw into his mind and there was a lot of
stuff in there he didn’t want anyone to know about.

80
I got fed up with
the AI and took
off, I was living
on some tropical
island with 5 Quite different from me – I was never
pygmy wives, very private – there’s lots of stupid
who were fused stuff in my mind but I guess it’s no
in a hive mind -- worse than everyone else’s mental-
emotional crap – I don’t mind sharing
my sad pathetic confusion – maybe it’ll
make somebody feel better to know that I’m ridiculous
too…. (Qua qua qua qua qua qua!!!) Anyway, the acid
hit Jack first that time -- and, much to the amusement of
all present (me, Ashti, and Jack’s roommate Sludge Fink,
who didn’t drop acid but was there as a “babysitter,”
and later become a software testing expert in Silicon
Valley, at a company with a precipitously plunging
market valuation), he leapt on Ashti and spent about
fifteen minutes slurping her bellybutton. (Goo goo goo
joob, goo goo goo goo goo joob...!) Loudly and
musically, with feeling and copious servings of drool.
As for me, I was immediately thrown back to the end of
my previous trip, which had been my first ever -- to a
vision I'd had then, and had completely forgotten until
the influx of acid into my head made it pour back
through me. A sprawling vision of society as a web of
interdefinition -- I defined myself by reference to my
parents, my friends and a few others; she – my then-
girlfriend Petunia, who had sat by my side completely
sober while I smashed up all the boundaries of my mind
– she defined herself by reference to her friends, et
cetera, they defined themselves by reference to their
friends.... I saw humanity as a vast system of
simultaneous nonlinear equations: one which,
however, could never be solved due to the fact that
even the concept of solution was a human artifact and
hence fit into the equation.... This trip picked up where
that other one left off -- people, webs, music.... I was
inside Ashti, Jack and Sludge’s minds, trying to bust out
from their collective shapes and colors, trying to find

81
 the key to the universe....
I kept thinking about my Theory of Everything.
Was there even a me? Was there a theory of
everything? Was I a lunatic teenager trying to
formulate a theory of the world? – a place I barely
understood in any sense – but neither did anyone else it
appeared…. It wasn’t a theory really, just a vague
intuition in search of a definite form. I’d been
struggling for years to understand everything with
incremental
and
results.
Quantum
partial
Is there even a me ????
physics, brains
and AI and non-foundational logic seemed to melt into
a continuum. I had written down equations in a
notebook, before the trip had started: now I looked at
them like hieroglyphs. These marks contained
understandings, but very incomplete. I communed with
my mind as it had existed (or tried to) at the time I had
written them. My comprehension now was so much
deeper. I knew if I wanted to write down more
equations at that particular moment I could write down
much deeper ones, more coherent, grasping more of the
essence of the mess – but I lacked the will to symbolize.
Why play around with symbols with the real thing here
in front of
Remember What You me –
Are!
Learn – Be Concerned
Leoncern
Leoncern
Leoncern

82
with(out/with)in me? The crucial matter was to think,
think and think – without analytical thinking. Just to
exist and understand. Somehow, it seemed, I could get
at the center of it all this way. The essence of reality.
The same thing I was looking for with my equations –
so overwrought and underspecified – what I had been
looking for in my prior mode, I could find this way:
directly.
Sludge put Pink Floyd on the stereo; I sank into
every tiniest chamber of the music, exchanged my blood
with every sit organelle, with
every rhythm- exist within-rhythm,
every counter- walk to counter-
counterpoint ... bathroom music was my only
tie with time. Time unzip fly didn't pass so every
hold penis
note was an think expansive reeling
symphony. And don’t think through the
phantasmagoric stand mayhem of it all I
sought to exist concentrate -- But
look in mirror
concentration was who impossible -- even
for me -- the me cosmic master of
concentration, not self with all my inner
science of skin orchestrated mind.
being
Every time I made ashti
a definite statement
to myself -- where? erected a plot of
conceptual room ground for my
conscious to stand walk on -- the very
process of hear standing seemed to
colors
flip the plot out world from under my feet.
Assertion of X sound was impossible since
the process of drum assertion invariably
seemed to contain sit not-X ... and no less
when the assertion was this
sentence. It was impossible to think. But I sensed
somewhere that this wasn’t something to be held
against acid; it was something to be held against

83
thought itself. Thought was a limiting, stilted process. I
was feeling something much more profound.
There was a state of mind I called Mind as
Stack.... I saw my mind as a vast stack or tree of
computer programs, an hierarchical control system in
which each program controlled the programs
immediately below it, which in turn controlled their
subsidiaries, et cetera. And at the top of this hierarchy
stood -- the Self!? At least, normally ... during a trip, I
hypothesized self-referentially, different programs
assumed top-level control -- the self churned
downward. Identity abdicated to sensation (of
empirical and cosmical realms – not that there really was
a difference -- ). I felt this programming shifting as I
moved my (newly alien)
body. As I rose to flip an
album I felt the Self resume
control
the album's
boundless
...
X = ~X then I fell into
blackness:
void,
a
an
endless ocean in which
I could swim like a hypercerebrated fish -- the
metaphysical equivalent of quicksand...
Then there was a vision I thought of as “Self-
similarity” ... My dorm room – remember this was way
back in college, when Ashti and I had first got together
-- had become my only true home; the experiences of
the past few hours towered with such intensity that all
my memories from further back were lifeless, pale,
ancient history. Nonetheless, I didn't want to pee on
my floor or in my trash can. The air seemed
unreasonably viscous as I stumbled toward the door
and flew through the infinity of the hall. And as I
flashed or slid into the bathroom, the toilet stall became
a universe, my urination the process of being, my sole
connection with the world. There was nothing, nothing

84
 whatsoever, besides urination and the bathroom with
its sterile forbidden-grime smell. As I finished peeing
the walls hiccoughed and
shuddered and screamed. hare The
water swirled down the toilet krishna as I
automatically flushed, my hand hare moving
of its own volition. And I was krishna --
literally, not metaphorically – hare
annihilated and born again! krishna
Emerging from the toilet stall, I felt life
hare
as if it were something never before
experienced-- all full of hare
vibrancy, hyperreality,
electricity, subtle-energy passionate fire. I looked at the
mirror, saw myself, and tumbled through an abyss ...
At that time mirrors were
- Leoncern – Leoncern -- anathema to me; months
passed between glances at my
own image; I thought I was so ugly that looking at
myself made me cry. But this time I didn't see "me" in
the mirror -- or rather I did see "me," but in a deeper
sense than usual -- I saw a ghost, a heap of wafers
barely cohered by some obstinate biological force.
White wispy wafers, sebaceously shivering -- oozing
repulsively, all apulse to invisible drumming, wafting
through the walls from my dorm room.... I bent to
drink from the sink in the bathroom and a thousand
veils lifted. All of a sudden I saw all the unconscious
rooms of my mind, all in action ... I
felt my intuition hare calculate the angles at
which to bend mcbuddha various parts of my
body in order hare to successfully execute
the act of mcbuddha drinking. Waist: just so
much. No -- hare that, like before ...
divided by qua walking. I felt my body
think by qua analogy, proceeding on
qua

85
 the basis of a weighted average of its actions in
previous similar situations (weighted by amount of
similarity). Head: so far just like look at ground, minus
scratch plus half of waterfountain ... Lips: shrink on
contact, make round; torso: twist. "The body has its
reasons" -- and it shares them with the rest of the mind-
iverse, not to mention the physical cosmos…. I felt my
body think, using the precise process I had previously
identified with "higher mind" ... self- similarity, identity
of process across scale, functional equivalence, logical
level as argument.... I saw, specifically, that the ways of
weighting averages were the same in body and mind,
that the subtle patterns of reasoning, not just the
general processes of analogy, were the same ... I
returned to the room hoping desperately not to forget
it, and also hoping it was a valid insight, not some kind
Warm, warm comfort of the room -- or is that
womb? Old friend struggle once again -- pulling the
rug out from under my feet; eternal contradiction;
infernal/eternal dancing moment,
death/life/death/life/death/life.... LEON CERN

of phantom; I'd read too many stories of meaningless

LSD "discoveries" not to be skeptical, even in my
twisted, exalted state....
My fellow trippers, my cosmic fatwa family,
everyone else just a bloodfilled ape-suck body(bag) -- a
spark of the cosmic mind – an instantaneum of
awakeness. Ashti was drawing, with brightly-colored
magic markers, some kind of crazy picture on the wall.
She looked perfect, whole, beautiful, but not like a
beautiful woman, more like a tree or mountain, a natural
form. Her artistic motions wove pictures through the
air; her body and her drawing were united in a four-

86
 monkey suck’s
dimensional sculpture. I had an inkling of
another trip we would have a year later, in
the drink!
which we would hallucinate the same golden
luminous castle, covered with winding
snakelike spires -- looking into each other's eyes free of
confusion, lost in the same transpersonal mindspace,
vowing to love each other for life. "I marry you and I
see inside your mind." Jack was not having such a good
time: he was lying on the bed repeating "Of course!"
five hundred time, again and again, in fake operatic
tones. The babysitter had got bored and left -- the
Sludge had decomposed, turned submolecular,
dissipated into Orion. I think I'd told him it was all

I marry you and I

right; at least, some component of me had. I put Jacki
Hendrix, Axis, Bold as Love, on the turntable: side two.
My mind set off again. I wanted to reach the core of
things, the essence. To grab an insight out of here that
I could bring back to the temporal world. To be
Prometheus, Thief of Fire! I tried to reason as follows:
no matter what I think, it ends in co(u?)ntradiction.
Therefore everything is paradox. Why? Because
nothing can be solid: there can be absolutely no thing.
To draw a boundary is to separate X from X -- which is
absurdity. You say the inside and outside are different?
But to identify the difference is merely to draw another
boundary: victim to the same flow. I realized that my
logic contained a million holes. But to the extent that I
was convinced by it, I didn't believe in logic or holes.
Reasoning about self-contradiction, I contradicted
myself continuously... Perfect skepticism: that which will
not even permit itself to be formulated. But can
nonetheless be milked – uhh uhhh!! (Cleavage
apocalypse?????
see inside your mind
The final song arrived: the title song, "Axis, Bold
as Love." I dove through the music. The onset of the
song is slow, sweet, strong; as smooth as the pearly

87
void of the Buddhdroids ... the music flowed along
slopes of invisible angel-down which tickled the cracks
in my chapped lips, which made me sing silently and
laugh, while the lyrics told fantasies of bright spiraling
colors. Images arrested me, convicted me, and threw
me into nine-dimensional prisons, tossing the keys to my
cell out to the stars where they formed supernovae that
constituted the patterns of my mind and liberated me
from any bounds, eliminating the scent of my existence
until another image swooned past and took my
consciousness into custody, for another microsecond
eon -- The song chased the Skeptic's Tumble from my
mind, brought out beauty instead, wild-webbed gold-
flowing intricacy:

Anger, he smiles, towering in

shiny metallic purple armor
Queen Jealousy, Envy, waits behind him
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground
Blue are the life-giving waters -- taken for granted,
they quietly understand
Once-happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready
But wonder why the fight is on
But they're all bold as love
They're all bold as love
They're all bold as love
Just ask the Axis ...
My Red is so confident he flashes
trophies of war
and ribbons of euphoria
Orange is young, full of daring,
but very unsteady for the first go-round
My yellow in this case is not so mellow
In fact, I'm trying to say it's frightened like me
And all these emotions of mine keep on holding me
from giving my life
to a rainbow like you

88
 But I'm ... I'm bold as love
But I'm bold as love
But I'm bold as love
Just ask the Axis, he knows everything....

Each of his phantoms, his feeling-

constructions, arise and dance with me in turn, 1888
clothed in gorgeous dashikis and skins of
dragons, leopards, snakes. The emotions rise up from
my mind and sail around the room, invading the
molecules in the air. As the lyrics dim, the music
unravels inexorably -- pattern on pattern of
1983 fresh flawless flowing, soft endings suddenly
transforming into bright new beginnings, a
symphony of delicate balance, afterplay, tying up every
tremor left in my body in a kind of bouquet of
nonmelodramatic love. And then the silence... The
silence which seems to last forever. And then explodes,
booms into a herd of thundering drumclouds; a swarm
of beats spiraling out and in and out, in orbits too
intense for the eye. In the complexity my self was lost;
in the intensity my self regained. It was at this point the
vision hit me with full force. Suddenly the Skeptic's
Tumble, the World as Stack, the self-referentiality of the
mind -- everything combined into a huge spot of
nothingness. Every object around me, I saw, was a
giant abstract red vagina: a living, breathing, pulsing
opening, giving birth to everything
else in the world. Everything was
constantly being birthed by
a merman
everything else. And everything
was constantly making love with
i will
everything else, planting the seeds
for this birth. Everything was
turn to be
flowing, a flowing and pulsing:
flowing in and out of everything else, with a rhythm

89
 X
not-X
that was precisely
my and everyone X the rhythm of
else's thoughts,
the heartbeat of
The moving was not-X the universe.
in precisely the
form: X, not-X, X,
Out, In, Out, In,
... not-X,.... In,
Out,....
Everything was breathing,
birthing, loving, pulsing,
expanding
into the flow of
In contradictions
time. And real
objects, people, Out minds, chairs,
walls, music, were just continually
regenerated by In this flow. Jack
was a giant beached whale;
his destructive Out bad-trip
mindset was carrying on by
itself, self- In sufficient and
self-producing, each "Of course"
birthing him as he Out birthed it.
Ashti's strange expression
concealed some ... dark erotic
mystery, some ancient secret of
the samurai zen mystics, but as
her eye blinked
aside, and I saw 0 the veil blew
the currents in
her brain, locked
pores of her skin
1 in with
and the air in
the

the room and the

curves in her
0 colors and
drawing.
Everything
configuration,
was
a
1 just a temporary
network of
processes
approximately
that 0 happened
reproduce itself
to

by the dynamic of 1 universal love-

birth. The mindstack, the
hierarchy of ... commands, the

90
 patterns of self-similar averaging, were all just
configurations of processes, all just attractors in the
void. And my awareness was cruising, pulsing and
flowing; it leaped from every process of birth, injecting
novelty and life. The insight was perfect; the moment
lasted forever. The color red was more magic and vivid
than even Ashti's beautiful face. In the end the abstract
vaginas and rhythmic In/Out movement proved to be
inessential. The basis of the vision was nothing. The
universe was open, wide, perfectly transparent,
magnificently opaque and empty-full. I didn't try any
more to think or describe it; I didn't care about bringing
back insights to the temporal world.
gently Everything just was. Fifteen to thirty
minutes, it lasted? It is still going on.
(Moon, turn the tides ...
In New York City, in that rat-
infested apartment, our love was
consummated on that strange chaotic
gently night. That night, suffused with chemical
delirium, we held our own secret
wedding ceremony. None of the cultural
formalities -- no rituals of asininity -- and
no advance planning at all. We both
spontaneously said "I marry you" and
kissed and that was the end of it. I marry
you -- I marry you -- I live for all time
inside your mind....
And then I started to get paranoid,
away a bit, and drift away from her into
Solomonocosmos. I realized the temporal
order was returning: everything wasn't
floating anymore, it was wobbling, it was
starting to lock back into position. I felt disastrously
abandoned: all that deep too-perfect insight, and for
what? Just for a few hours, then you give it up, and go

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 back to the shitwad of ordinary existence? After seeing
so deep into her mind, after being the same as her,
living in her sweating skin, climbing through imaginary
castles by luscious conscious gardens ... after this I was
supposed to go back to my bloodbag body, my sack of
skin and bones and pangs and urges ... go back to
looking at her as a separate being? my sweet second-
body Ashti? now I had to perceive her as a being that
might get tired of me, might even cheat on me, she was
going back to Chicago and might run away and decide
to meld with someone else.... Everything seemed awful,
uniformly awful -- this business of reality was like hell. I
had the urge to rip off all my skin and kill myself. Dead
fuck, the order of time was illusory -- anyway -- we all

This business of reality was like hell!

Let’s live in the kidney stones of hamsters!!

have to die sometime. Or do we? All times are
equivalently meaningless; all meaninglesses are equally
fucked up the ass by the endless soul of empty night.
Let's live in the kidney stones of hamsters. Why not
remove myself from the madness now and be done?
Out, out, brief craphole! I tried to pick up a book and
read it, some recent sci-fi thing, but I couldn't even
understand a sentence, I was just overcome with
images provoked by individual words. “He” some
sentence began – but what in God’s fuck was a “he”?
How peculiar to capture an individual – a human mind
with all its complexity – by some label associated with its

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gender! We might as well use a word like “smart”,
classifying individuals by intelligence rather than
gender; or, “young,” classifying them by their age –
why single out gender as the most important
classification axis; it was
incomprehensibly Here was the infinite – the true
absurd. Yet we did it deeper reality – the aliens
every day in our running through giant green
communications – not factories with blue tubes and
even noticing it because orange veins, and each alien’s
everything was so stiff bloodstream like a Solar System
and so hard, so overly sized factory with endless little
habituated, we operated aliens passing messages
based on meanings that around in overlapping
controlled us but that we latticeworks, and each alien
never bothered to itself inside some other alien’s
inspect because doing so inner-factory, and I myself a
would distract us from fluid diffusing through the
the things we thought cracks between the conveyor
were important but that belts and tubes and pontoons
were actually just and indescribable multicolored
manifestations of the mechanisms of the alien
web of illusory ossified metaphorical factory,
meanings – in the end it producing metaphors for its
was just a web of own existence with blue-green
patterns, a network of insatiable love, moving from
forms interpenetrating each part of my body to each
and defining each other, part of hers through all the
but each portion of the future and the past with
web had limited vision unstoppable curiosity and force,
and thought everything discovering everything anew
too far from it in the each moment in spite of already
cosmos-network was knowing everything….
somehow different, somehow solid and real and not
just web – hah! – the network of patterns became a
reflecting hall of images, mirrors mirroring each other in

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The alien perspective only
worked when you really
opened your mind – when n-dimensional
you made your mind large geometries -- images
and wide and wild enough ossifying, raping and
that you could run commanding each
everything forwards and other, becoming evil,
solid, whole. No
backwards, that there was
longer leading into a
no chaos and confusion, that web of endless
all the complexity of alien creative links and
message-passing could be vortices. Nothing was
viewed as a beautiful real but everything
painted whole. deluded itself it was
real because it was an
idiot and was
constructed to have limitations of visual scope. And I
was the same fucking thing – an idiotic idiot who was a
configuration of patterns without ground or bottom
and was built not to realize this. The universe was built
on stupidity: there was no fucking escaping it. Fuck it.!
I don't know what was going on with Ashti while I was
sinking into this bad trip state of darkness and
antimindfulness -- which some how emerged out of
wonderful insights -- but eventually she noticed
something was up with me -- I think she was trying to
talk to me and I just wasn't responding at all -- and she
dragged me out the door for a walk. Back to New
York City – back to reality – or whatever approximation
that was -- .
For two weeks after she left -- gone back to the
University of Kentucky from whence she had been
emitted -- I was in a bastard elephant of a trance. I
couldn't sleep at night -- yet again. Perhaps it was
partially a chemical aftereffect (sleep comes hard with a
head full of acid); and partially withdrawal from the
soft comfort of dear Ashti’s night-flesh. I took to
wandering the streets in the middle of the night,

94
staying out even later than party-boy Jack-o. Drunk,
depressed fuck-up that he was, he kept my spirits up,
to an extent. When we got bored we'd have gigantic
pillowfights, leaving the apartment in utter disarray. We
never cleaned the place up, either ... when we moved
out a month later there were pieces of broken folding
chairs all over, as well as an incredible amount of
smashed beer bottles and garbage. Also, the night
before we left I dumped a dozen or so packages of
spaghetti all over the floor... attracting an army of a
hundred starving rats. The universe was just a blur in
the back of my mind. The rats were artificial lifeforms
whose collective movements gave rise to patterns
constituting my emotions, and the rise and fall of
multiple civilizations transcending multiple simulated
universes. The world was a strange and glorious place.

I
Every wrinkle in the skin on
walked down my great-great-grandfather's
the never- dick was precisely positioned
desolate night like the scum on a baby's
mushy scalp. Ashti's flesh
streets, shone out at me tachyonic, with
plagued with illusional perfection. The color
insanely of the carpet on the floor by
detailed the bed we slept in (green,
flecks of red, distributed in
memories. random patterns like a
stereogram, steganographically
encoding the beginning and the end of the world). The
dirt in the cracks on the walls. Rats eating the garbage
on the floor, cops kicking the nigger in the nuts,

95
chromatic fantasy, hendrix, clutter, torture, words,
illusions, dancing monkeys, insidious bulging eyeballs,
beautiful transcendence of the sweet-tasting, aching,
stupid flesh. I was fixated on the past; I didn't want to
lose that glow I'd had, we'd had. This sent me spiraling
further back -- back, probing every single experience I
could recall; obscure, dead significant ... memory an
aperiodic crystal ... seeking the key to the elusive
something, that something I'd seen during that sacred
acid bath. The ethereal sauna. That something I'd said
to her -- that perfect expression on her face, placidly
harmonizing everything -- the key to freeing the mind
from the mind.
Around a month before the end of the semester --
I did mention I was in graduate school, right? -- at the
SubMoronic Institute for Superordinary and Nonlinear
Science? -- Jack and I had to leave our apartment due to
lack of funds. We'd both been fired from our jobs at the
exact same time -- the kind of horrifying coincidence
that always seems to happen in New York. We looked
for two weeks for a cheap apartment in Manhattan, but
in the end we had to make that dreaded move across
the river. We found a tiny place in Brooklyn for only
three hundred bucks a month. No more than three
hundred square feet. The neighborhood was an
abysmal slum, and the apartment was so tiny there was
no room for all our furniture. We had to pile the desk
on top of the bureau and keep half our stuff in boxes.
Obviously this was no way to live, I should have given
up on New York altogether. But I had come to New
York of my own volition, and I didn't want to run back
home to mommy or daddy like a forlorn baby donkey
with my tail between my legs. I was just a stupid
teenager but I wanted to be an adult, no matter how
sick and miserable it might make me.

96
 After we'd been in Brooklyn about two months,
Ashti showed up for a "visit." She looked and sounded
awful -- her semester was over, and she'd failed three
of her five classes. Hadn't yet written the final paper
for her fourth class, on Spinoza. She said she was
going to write it and mail it back to her professor, but I
could see this was roughly as likely as Jack giving up
beer-drinking. Chicago was the hell of the past. She
was in New York now, here with me; we were our
own two-person universe. Jack was out, she was in.
But fucking Jack the fucking jackass absurdly
failed to fucking vanish. He couldn't find affordable
housing. There just wasn't any affordable housing
anywhere within forty miles of New York city. So the
three of us were stuck there in that tiny room -- that
stupid little apartment -- the two beds touching each
other, half our stuff still in boxes, the pyramided
furniture occupying the bulk of the apartment. The
amount of dirt was amazing. And then I got this
beautiful Siamese cat who pissed all over everything --
our clothes, the floor, the beds.... And we found this
other cat, a stray with lumps all over its body, which
tried to masturbate itself on your fingers and toes.
Before long we stopped paying rent. The landlord came
by banging on the door every morning at eight and
Jack and Ashti hid under the covers while I went to the
door smiling like a nincompoop and ad libbed some
ridiculous sob story. My father's sending me a check. I
got mugged. All my money's tied up in these self-
organizing, third-order-cybernetic money funds, you
see; it's a matter of liquidity. I'm not broke, I'm just
cash-poor. I just got a job. I'm a waiter out on Coney
Island, I won't get good tips till summer. The guy
obviously knew it was bullshit but he was basically a
good person, in spite of being a bloated small-minded
dishonest jerk with the face of a gargoyle; he took pity

97
on me. He was waiting for me to offer to let Ashti suck
him off (he seemed to be assuming that she wanted to,
which may or may not have been the case…).
Meanwhile, Ashti enrolled at City College of New
York – still studying philosophy, as in Chicago: she
refused to study music at school on principle, she felt
music education was a nightmare, she had to be free to
play as her soul wanted, without structure or criticism.
I sympathized with her idealism but I questioned her
pragmatism occasionally – I’m sure she could have
gotten some kind of scholarship at some music
conservatory; whereas, as a philosophy student, she
was virtually starving. But I wasn’t such a pragmatist
myself, at that point – my (fleeting?) love affair with
reality came later – our un/sur/realism was one of the
things that bound us together. For food money she
started working as an
erotic dancer at this strip
bar on Fifth Avenue.
She'd always been a
FUCK
REALITY
good dancer, and
though she wasn't all
that beautiful, she was
cute enough and young,
and her shape and
movements had some grace to them. We considered
having sex on stage for money at one of the crummier
porn palaces in the Times Square area, but it only paid
something like twelve bucks an hour per person.
Hardly worth the grueling effort, and the damage to
your sex life. The place she worked at was expensive
and classy; the guys tried to paw her up all the time,
after they got drunk, but she managed to tolerate it. I
looked back on that acid trip daily, filled with one
thought: FUCK REALITY.

98
 Sometime during the summer, we got evicted.
We'd stayed there seven or eight months in that shitty
little studio in that hell corner of Brooklyn without
paying more than three months worth of rent; but still,
we didn't feel like we'd gotten away with anything....
Luckily, my father was in one of his generous moods,
and he helped us to get a nice apartment in Queens. He
rather liked Ashti, at that point – he found her a tad
too quiet and shy; but he assumed that was part of her
exotic Kurdosity (which was probably actually not the
case – it was just her apesuck personality -- ). I'm not
sure that he liked what he saw behind her weird dark
eyes – (MY EYES MY DARK MY DREAM!!!) but he was
willing to ignore his misgivings and in a rare (for him)
gesture bestow on me the benefit of his doubt. When
the fall semester started, I made a serious effort to take
school seriously -- for a change ... I went to my classes,
and did most of my homework. I learned a lot of
mathematics, let the spaces and equations restructure
the shapes of my mind; I resonated in the orderly
chaocosmoses of modern mathematics with their
maglev-trains of power and rippling n-dimensional
streams and saw they were the same thing as the
universe I'd glanced in the grips of LSD. The beautiful
world of abstract shifting forms -- purer and truer than
this convocation of bodies and masses and lies. Plato
full of peptides -- pattern-space self-sculptured -- I
didn't quite have a perfect clear picture but I could feel
the divine invasion firmly around and inside.
She got a job dancing weekend nights at an even
classier joint near the south end of Central Park. She
continued on at City College, and she was making
pretty good money -- a hundred and thirty or so a
night -- so we could afford to pay the bills.
But of course, there was a problem. Actually,
more than one.

99
 Sweet little Ashti-washti-kins was getting
overaccustomed to working at the strip bar. She
always came home from work drunk; and more and
more often she was working a night or two or three
during the week, not only on weekends. Money,
money, money. She was paying all the bills -- I was
studying mathematics, and trying to rediscover
philosophy in the intersection between mathematics and
literature and madness -- and after a month or two she
decided she wanted to move out, to be an independent
woman (hah).
At the time, I'd been laid up in bed for about two
weeks with a hundred and t welve degree fever. The
day she told me she was leaving, my fever shot up to a
hundred and twenty seven point two -- by far the
highest temperature I've ever had. For the first time
since that acid trip, I started hallucinating: hearing
voices speaking languages I didn't know, seeing tiny
colorful creatures swarm through the air, weaving
magical patterns leading to the emergence of universes,
among all the mess our own one pathetic universe, the
bastard uncles of some strange lizard's adoptive son.
One hallucination in particular plagued me: a beautiful
young woman's near-androgynous body without a
face, surmounted by devil's horns and an angel's halo. I
saw this over and over again, hovering in front of me;
but whenever I reached out to touch it, it was gone. I
had a suspicion that if I saw her face it would be either
so beautiful that seeing it would kill me, or so alien that
seeing it would transform me into something else. But
her face remained obscure to me: I could only admire
the grandiosity of the curves of her flesh, and the warm
light of her aura.
I begged her desperately not to leave me. My
words just floated there in front of me like blue
moldering testicles. She said she was tired of me, my

100
strange intellectual obsessions; she wanted someone
normal and simple. I cursed her out and she started
hitting me. I threw my notepad at her, filled up with
my whacky thoughts and theories on unified physics
and the dynamics of mind and the architecture of digital
intelligence and the possibility of a society without laws
or work or hate. After the fever went down a little
and I could walk again, I went to the doctor and was
measured at a hundred and four point nine. She was
alarmed at my physical state notwithstanding her
emotional cruelty. But to me it felt comparatively cool, it
felt perfectly normal. I had been to the brink of the end
-- and beyond, to where end and start don’t matter.
She had forgiven me at some point, for my interstellar
mentality and my unsound ambitions, my crazy
diagrams scrawled in notebooks and delirious castles
built of words. She saw that I loved far her too much;
she couldn't bear to leave that, regardless of misgivings.
Heh. Presumably if she could have seen forward a few
more years she would have simply dumped me then: and
spared herself some pain. She could see then the fate that
would befall us, goddamn it: she could see then that she had
no fucking vision, no understanding, no real mind, just a
shallow cognitive engine layers on top of her physical body –
yeah, back then was the first time it became totally clear that
she had no taste for seeing beyond! Aaaahhh ...
Our hot water had been sporadic when we
moved in, and shortly thereafter it had stopped. We'd
called the landlord every week to complain, and since
we couldn't wash the dishes in cold water, the kitchen
sink had turned into a huge green moldy pile. It was
disgusting, but we were able to live with it. But then,
around the middle of October, the cold water stopped
coming too. I started showering in the gym at the Sub-
Moronic Institute. We called the landlord over and over
again, asking him to fix the fucking water. He always

101
said he would, but when I said "Can you fix it today?"
he invariably hawed and hemmed. When he came by to
collect the rent, Jack and I (Jack happened to be
visiting) hid in the kitchen, and Ashti told him, in her
firm yet gentle way, that we wouldn't pay until the
water was fixed.
He said, "When you pay the rent I fix the water."
He shook his head. "The other tenants aren’t
complaining. Maybe the pipes just don't like you."
Ashti tried to argue with him, clearly and
assertively. She was smooth and convincing, I thought.
But he wasn't even listening. "If you don't pay the rent,
I ain't fixing nothing."
"Okay," I said, emerging from the kitchen, my
patience just about gone, "then I guess you'll have to
evict us."
His hairy chest convulsed with laughter, shaking
the five or six gold chains that hung across it. He pulled
a gun out from his pants and pointed it straight at me.
"Evict you???!!! I'll fucking kill you! Get out right now!
Get the fuck out of my fucking building, asshole!"
Afraid of his temper and his gun, we moved into
a cheap hotel in Harlem for the remaining weeks of the
semester. But we'd finally had enough of New York.
We decided to head south. I applied to transfer my
Ph.D. study to the University of Alabama, and as soon
as my application was accepted we left. We were living
in beautiful Birmingham before the start of the new
year. What a way to go through grad school!

That's when I started trying to be a writer. Well

OK, I'd tried a little in New York, in Queens, inbetween
philosophical investigations and scribbling, but it never
amounted to much there -- there was way too much
physical-emotional chaos in my mind and my life at that

102
point for words scrawled on paper or tapped out on
keyboards to be really relevant – there might have been
a role for words tattooed on tongues or genitals or
carved in the wall with blood-stained instruments of
bone, but I chose not to journey on that path. I
wanted to write, not just to produce books and stories
and articles, but more to discover things. I thought of
writing as an act of exploration -- psychological
exploration, metaphysical exploration, exploration of
those parts of the hypothetical universe ordinary
thought and reality didn't cover. Nineteen years old
and ignorant, I thought I was a pioneer of mindspace.
Perhaps some part of my cranium was. I read
Nietzsche incessantly -- imbibed him into my liver and
lungs -- his words wove together with my own
thoughts reflecting understandings that went beyond
his individual mind (which was frequently ridiculous) or
mine (which was -- well, you know --) -- he nearly
destroyed himself finding his insights but I thought I
could do better -- I could be Zarathustra and come
down from my mountain of glorious acid equational
insight and actually spread the words of truth to a few
selected beings who could understand the patterns of
my intricately structured pattern-ness. I stared at the
screen of my beauteous PC and marveled at the
patterns of light formed from my monkey-mind,
building webs of sweet yet meaningless semantics,
vibrating with resonant modes yielding new emergent
forms of musical life. At the same time I started writing,
Ashti took up sculpture, at my suggestion: she looked
like she was made to build 3D forms. She looked like a
manga sculpture herself: like something more at home in
video games than life. She coupled her music with
sculpture, embedding sound-recordings in amalgams of
household items, stuck together in uncanny geometries.
The beauty of her viola insanities pouring out of a robot

103
made of mud brick and welded metal – as if the sounds
were the thoughts of the robot itself, the cries of the
robot as it tried and inevitably failed to describe the
desolate world it had been formed in, the Earth 100,000
years in the future, after the man-apes nuked
themselves finally properly, and left the world to their
constructs, wailing and purposeless, creating factories
to create factories to create factories to create software
programs designed to uncover the meaning of life but
inevitably winding up in endless loops, sending scouts
to other planets, proving mathematical theorems far
beyond human mentation then ultimately giving up all
pursuits and just sitting there, waiting for the Sun to
explode, occasionally punctuating the silence with
nonrandom bursts of sounds, which may or may not
bear a resemblance to Ashti’s viola-playing, but at any
rate probably sound more like Paganini on stropharia
cubensis giving a blow job to the Kronos Quartet than
Britney Spears humping Raskolnikov’s poodle.

She promised me to rip apart the web of

thought and language.

Squatting on the toilet, she told of a vision of a

golden fairy demon who gave birth to herself,
then became entangled in her own umbilical
cord and died.

She caressed her breasts and called them magic

lanterns.

She promised me liberty from illusions, a purer

life! She fed me delicate crystal images of
enchantment.

She took her labia between her fingers and asked

104
 me to suck the genies out.

She promised me everything. She left me in a

cave without a flashlight, smashing my head
against the stalactites and the walls.

She called her marvelous buttocks launching

pads for invisible alien starships. She promised
me, for Christmas, an asteroid of my very own.

She called me a walking apocalypse. She told

me the juice between her legs was an ancient
elixir, derived from fruits that vanished with
the continent of Mu.

Her muscles promised me allegiance in twenty

languages.

She left in a symphony of shadows, forgetting

nothing but her bones.

But I couldn't give up the mathematics. Writing

was beautiful -- I loved stringing words together,
streaming mutant alien songs and Apollonian equations
of love, building images of the other world --
Dionyseashore deaditations on the bridalwaves of life –
dithyrambs of the nothing-breath -- the world I'd seen
on acid, sometimes, but really always had felt all along,
deep within/without, somewhere and everywhere in
the sweet rich heart of each thought, feeling, memory,
confusion, contraction, cuntradictionary, below/trans-
sane/above. But mathematics took you somewhere.
You could build entire worlds -- but not only that -- you
could build machines that built worlds for you. What if
there was a math of the mind? If you could see the

105
math of the mind, you could build a mind -- just as
surely as Ashti could build a sculpture out of melted
legos and reeking underwear and clay from the Rio
Grande and insert it in Muddy Waters transposed to
13/19 time: bit by bit, piece by piece, until the fragments
came together into a whole -- but not a static whole in
this case, a dynamic whole whose contradictions
weaved themselves out (and in) through time (in is out -
- in! out is in -- out!) – a Hootchie-Cootchie zen
multiverse -- creating thoughts and dreams of thoughts
and realities. I loved writing, I loved making universes
from my mind bleed lust and pop out of the page, using
reality as a tool to elicit surrealities in nonexistent minds
hypnotized by pseudo-existent markings on semi-
existent pieces of paper hacked out from quasi-existent
trees sprouting backwards in antediluvian forests -- but
writing was just one act: what if you could create
something from your whorled inner visions that then
went on creating on its own? Eating mushrooms in the
van Gogh museum, crawling up Einstein's asshole like a
lust-crazy gerbil-echidna-tortoise hybrid, singing arias
of dissonance and harmonies of sorrow, dancing pelvic
thrusts on the mountains of the moons of Mars -- and
then! Phobos, Deimos beware – and await the space
that opens. The clearing in the madness. The world
opens wide -- black and white whole, multicolored
assholism, the birth of the nothing-or-what -- the
beyondness -- inviscid singers, Singular visions, eyes of
angels devils' faces beautiful sexdreams reflected
refracted in water droplets floating like ungulate
hellhounds in hallucinated oceans -- and here the words
the worlds the minds turn on leave off -----
The shifting forms and colored patterns from the
acid trip -- the multidimensional shafts and curves and
interlocking puzzles of mathematical proofs built around
conceptual mistakes -- these were all just patterns

106
arranging and rearranging themselves, and the mind
itself -- my own mind, hers, Einstein's, everyone's, even
every future nonhuman transhuman superior mind --
everything -- it was just a particular pattern of
arrangement of patterns that was particularly good at
producing patterns -- and I could spawn this pattern --
this metapattern -- make it appear
in some custom soup of chemicals I was supposed to be
or some peculiar piece of there at the Schilpol –
hardware or maybe even a the Amsterdam
computer program. What better
airport – and be back
than to build a mind? I'd always
been interested in artificial on a plane to Boston
intelligence -- perhaps it had even in less than 3 hours.
been my greatest predilection -- The good news was it
but now it was my passion: I could
was about a half hour
see all too clearly how to make the
fucker work. The mathematical train ride to the
form of the mind was too vivid, airport. The bad
too glowing sweet mountain of news was I was only
sugar crystals, there was no way halfway in the right
to leave it alone: I had to embody
it in machinery of some sort, I had universe.
to see it roll along and generate
consciousness, I had to see my patterns rise up and
master the meaninglessness of life, soul and death. The
acid trip hadn't revealed it to me, it had just removed
some stupid obstacles -- the vision had been there all
along, just sitting there, at the core of my mind back
since childhood. The ultimate look of core true
recognition was not with Ashti but with some future
being that I myself would conceive and create. I
explained it to Ashti and she smiled at me. She loved
me in those days. You want to build a thinking
machine? OK. She wasn't judgmental. She didn't
really get my vision except at the grandest level – in fact

107
she didn’t know much computer science then; she
learned more later, perhaps under my influence, even
got her degree in it odd as it seems at this point since
the only thing she’s focused on for years now is music -
- but at least she didn't call me crazy. She didn't care if
I was crazy or if my theories were sensible -- so long as
I loved her, what did the habits of society, or the
illusions of correctness or non, matter? She was fine if I
dropped out of grad school to manifest my vision of the
mind in computer hardware or software or whatever it
was. She just wanted to make love to me and her viola,
preferably at the same time, though that rarely worked
out in practice, the rhythm of screwing ended up
screwing with the timing of her playing, although her
ass looked really cute as I fucked her from behind while
she improvised and panted and groaned and moved
the bow across the strings with her usual sad
melodiousness and light playful mastery. But I didn't
drop out after all – in spite of incessant threats to do so
-- I slogged through my PhD in math, doing a fairly
conventional thesis to keep my advisor happy, and then
as soon as I graduated I shifted my attention to the
wilder, stranger growths in my internal/mental
rainforest. I kept writing poetry and working on pure
math and worshipping Ashti's long slender gorgeously
undulate body but the bulk of my soul was in the other
poem: the creation of mind out of matter, out of the
arrangement of bits in machines. What better way to
prove once and for all that there's nothing but pattern -
- nothing but arrangements of arrangements of
arrangements ... the top-level arrangements forgetting
what the bottom ones are and mistaking them for
solidities -- nothing but shifting dancing monkeys and
equivalence classes of quintessences, posing as
equations and hot dripping genitals – what other way
than to create a conscious experiencing superhuman

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being out of patterns of arrangement of what? Fucking
beautiful-psycho Nietzsche talked and walked about
the Superman, but it was just an abstraction -- just his
delusion of the possibility of some kind of being beyond
the human mind-clutter, beyond the foolish patterns of
thought and behavior and feeling that keep us so
limited and bound -- but what I saw now was that one
could build a real-world Superman ... one could out-
Nietzsche Nietzsche like a transdimensional pygmy
shrew from the Porcupine Nebula with a fourteen-mile
cock and create a transcendental being/becoming with
a mind whose patterns more fully realize their potential
to generate patterns and to understand themselves
than the wonderful but pathetically limited pattern-
system of the human mind. Man is something that must
be overcome. Woman must be fucked and then
overcome: or, what’s best, simultaneously. Out out out
out brief stinking candle of the frontal lobes and
hypothalamus and pancreas and testicles and classical
mechanics and literary musical gall bladder -- the
pattern of man creates the pattern of superman, not
merely conceptually but (inverse-meta)physically, as a
software program or a robot or a mass of interlocking
engineered bionanostructures or post-primordial Ramen
noodles or whatever. Mathematics meets mysticism
meets madness; words in formal computer
programming language can lead to the creation of new
souls -- whereas words in ordinary human language can
only guide souls (to masturbation, Mars or madness?).
My laughter was pathetic; I laughed at it recursively; I
relaxed the boundaries of my mind, let the patterns of
my self blend with the patterns of the universe. Ashti's
small warm cunt squeezed the four-dimensional life out
of me and I was reborn as a new computer program in
a language spoken only by nine-dimensional machine-
elves in the guise of self-comprehending molecular

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orbitals. I existed at every moment of time but I was
moving forward in time like an ocean in the bed of a
small creek -- creating words, software, equations and
ideas. I was going insane and I was saner than anyone
or anything had ever dreamed of being; I was
maximally distant from the reality Ashti's body lived at
the same time as I was obsessed with her in lust and in
love.
-- Alllllaaabbaammmmaaa -- hah! It was really an
exciting time -- my internal cosmos was teeming. I can't
believe the bitch got sick of me! You would think she
would have found it pretty interesting to participate –
albeit vicariously – in all these strange explosions
cognitive emotional and transpersonal. But of course
she didn’t throw me off till later. She could tolerate the
madness, the fertility dance of the collective unconscious
zooming around in the mathematics of my self-
constructing memory – she even found it tantalizing, in
the moments when I let her taste it: at times my creative
borderline-lunacy turned her on, made her cute little
nipples stand on end and wet juice between her lower
lips. What she couldn't take was when it got practical! -
- She wanted me to be a philosopher, to stay in my
corner and dream weird ideas while she stayed in her
corner and played music and made sculptures – and
now and then we’d visit each other’s corners and talk
and make slow luscious love. She was amused and
aroused by my talk of transforming the universe – so
long as it was only talk and not action. When I stopped
babbling and focused on programming she started
getting mildly annoyed. And when the program
started working – not that she could see that it was
working – but when it started showing real potential
and I started truly taking it seriously – then she had to
move on. She ditched me, to put it plainly. Maybe she
could see that she’d always be in second place -- I’d

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never really love her as much as I could love it – of
course I loved her in a different way – a softer, sweeter
way -- but ultimately she was just a human, I was just a
human, how can a human love a human as much as a
human can love the (trans/humanly) ultimate going-
beyond? She couldn’t handle me sitting up four nights
in a row programming then making love to her wildly
for hours, then lying in bed afterwards trying to
visualize the geometry underlying the equations that
would lead me on the next step up my narrow
mountain path, between the trees over the boulders,
hacking through the icecaps with my fingernails, beating
off Bigfoot with my bare hands, until finally I emerge
through the clouds to the clarity of the peak where the
beautiful light of anti-Jesus shines down everywhere.
Why are people’s parameters so narrow? Do they
think there are so few ways to exist? Even Ashti, with
her wonderful creativity and her marvelous eccentricity
and her ability to soak up information and her
understated beauty, wound up completely a servant of
culture – hardly better than Jack with his television and
sports events and beer. Artists seem so wild-ass, so
adventurous, till you realize they’re mainly concerned
with repeatedly playing out the same stupid fantasies
formed by the collisions of their simian minds with their
limited rational nature. Almost no one really wants to
get beyond themselves -- they just want to reify
themselves in one way or another -- whether by
watching TV or making music from their thought-
streams or sculptures or paintings of their fantasies or
running organizations imposing their beliefs on the
world – or whatever -- . No one wants to subvert the
very core of their being. I guess they’d call that
insanity. That was really the genius of Nietzsche. Man
is something to be overcome – the only “purpose” he’ll
ever have, for sure, is to replace himself with something

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better, with something beyond stupid ideas like
“purpose.” Old man Nietzsche said a marriage is true
and perfect insofar as it’s a partnership of lovers aimed
at helping each other go beyond. Of course he never
married. If she’d entered into my quest to go beyond I
guess she’d never have left me. But she didn’t want to,
nor did she take it seriously when I asked her to.
Perhaps her judgment was correct – the bitch. Perhaps
some kinds of truths must be found alone.

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gather through the pillars
of senescence, distilling
impossible love
-----
To the Zarathustra 30 years long become -- it
happened in roselight dawn. Company of a
thousand stars! Thy providence wouldst which is
started to be clear and it travels and obligations --
the eagle, and my venomous serpent of the mine
which becomes fatigued with hazard and pain. Song
of the idiot Thou hath collected the honey much too
plentifully -- me with the honeybee my wisdom it
becomes fatigued – the disease of time -- I will make
the prosecuting attorney respect the hand of
necessity. She comes repeatedly like a unicorn,
lathering Coca-cola all over me. The scholar, the
solar U-turn -- so little will be that hour, the stars
like traveling dust. The lust to put out this to
present. I love her with chocolate death abandon. I
take my nipples in her teeth and solve desolate
equations. Walk down from mountains into valleys
shot full of the ending of time. I – I – I – I when
hazard inevitably -- the low thing, quiet in the
deepness: Inside night, time after the ocean of the
doom – of the doom -- Providence it is silent. The
man talks and he shits and he talks and he shits and
he talks and he shits. In order to follow --

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 providence eye of the silent thing -- it will carry lust
and carry – and can its can it is accurate it sees and
envy head of a family company grudge for happiness
bless the marriage heaven hell bless the death
without! Adjacent waters and shy reflection of the
portion of thy happiness -- possibility of flowing all
inside – such vacant nudeness -- the point will
inundate the cup -- this blessing bless and bless! Go
down from the mountain, Zarathustra! -- This cup
which empties, thins the hour, and Zarathustra the
human man, thinnest hour of all ever all. In order
good season of the soft it is soft it all started like
this:

It may seem odd to you – nay, perhaps

unbelievable – that a complete raving lunatic inspired by
a series of drug trips could create a superhuman
thinking machine capable of annihilating the Earth. But
this is because you overestimate the subtlety of what
goes on inside the three-pound mass of neurons, glia
and soft-soak quantum-resonating inside your head.
Yeah, there’s a lot of different components comprising
your brain-matter, but the essence is pretty simple.
There are a lot of different ways to write intelligent
computer programs, some of them close to what the
brain does, some of them radically bizarre from the
standards of human cognition, but perhaps more
rational from a mathematics perspective. In fact, the
main reason no one created a thinking machine before I
did was just that they didn’t believe it could be done.
It took a lunatic to see that it was possible, and then
once the possibility was realized, it just took a
moderately gifted technical mind with some grounding

114
in philosophy and psychology, computer science and
mathematics and the dedication to work for a few years
to get the job done.
Yeah, yeah, I know – Why, if it was so damn
easy, some other lunatic didn’t do it first – or some
average AI professor somewhere, with his office and
publications and grad students. It’s a combination of
laziness and lack of The enterprise of artificial
imagination, I suppose. You
intelligence has been around quite a
know the story. Of all the
people working in the field while now – it’s been pursued fairly
called AI, probably 80% don't seriously since the 1960’s, and was
believe in the concept of explored to some extent even earlier.
General Intelligence as a It’s led to plenty of interesting science
holistic thing distinct from “a and some useful inventions, but
large collection of specific nothing really recognizable as “AI” in
skills & knowledge”; and of
the grand sense -- no HAL nor C3PO,
those that do, 80% don't
believe it’ll be possible to let alone any profoundly superhuman
implement general intelligence intelligence. In fact, at the moment, the
in software for a long, long quest for artificial software, hardware
time; and of those that do, or wetware with human-level-or-
80% work on domain-specific greater general intelligence has
AI projects or other narrow-
become fairly marginalized both in
minded crap for commercial
or academic-politics reasons academia and in industry. And this has
(results are a lot quicker); and occurred in spite of the increasing
of those left, 80% have the frequency of powerful AI’s in movies,
wrong conceptual novels and so forth. There have just
framework.... And nearly all been too many false promises – real AI
of the people operating under
has been “right around the corner” too
basically correct conceptual
premises, lack the resources many times, over too long a period of
to adequately realize their time.
ideas. Yadda yadda yadda. Thus spake Zarathustra.

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 Throughout the absurd,
pathetic history of AI so far,
plenty of interesting things have The best attempt at
been discovered – but always with AI that I found -- when I
a verrrrry strictly restricted was playing the student,
practical scope (in spite of before I got serious and
sometimes general and broad-
left everyone else by the
reaching rhetoric!). Nearly all
of the research done in the AI wayside -- was by this
field to date is what Kurzweil has guy named Aristotle
aptly called “narrow AI”, and Adaman, a former
barely seems to touch the subtlety professor who had left
and complexity of general
intelligence as observed in
academia to start an AI
humans. Examples are programs company. Note the
that play chess, drive automated initials AA – and the use
vehicles, or diagnose diseases of “Adam” – just right for
based on lists of symptoms. the beginning of the new
And, most of the alleged
forays into the general-
race -- there must be
intelligence domain that one sees something cosmic there!
are obvious, far-from-even-half- Dr. Adaman had a pretty
assed oversimplifications that good design for a
don’t do justice to the complexity thinking machine – he
of human intelligence (or general
intelligence under limited didn’t make any major
resources, beyond the human conceptual mistakes --
domain). Typically the proposal and like me he had the
is that one particular operation good sense to found his
or process, like "confabulation" algorithms and data
or "prediction" or logical
inference (or whatever), is the structures on the
key to intelligence. mathematics of
Anyone with any sense at all probability theory. In
can see that there is no single, fact I learned a lot from
simple computational principle,
his work – poor fool! He
operation or structure underlying
intelligence. And, furthermore, just messed up on some
the success of a computational small points that
approach at addressing a specific, happened to be critical
narrow problem tells you very ones. We had the same
little about that approach’s
potential for achieving general
basic philosophy –
intelligence of the type seen in patterns, patterns,
humans, HAL or C3PO, or a nine- patterns – and he figured
dimensional machine elf from the
vagina dimension.

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out some tricks for representing patterns
probabilistically that I probably wouldn’t have thought
of myself. He was a better mathematician than me.
Thanks for probabilistic paraconsistent logic, Dr.
Adaman! Too bad you couldn’t take one more step
and see how to do assignment of credit right – hah!
Actually I think you might have gotten there – Adaman
– you girly- The truth is -- aaahhhh!!! But man! -- if
you hadn’t what is truth after all? The reality wasted so
much of -- no, not that either. The useful your time
being a idea -- for what use? For the use goddamned
of creating a thinking machine!
human The useful idea is that of a system being. I
mean, give of patterns -- not static but me a break,
dude! This dynamic patterns recognizing guy had a
couple wives themselves in each other. Enabling (in
this philosophical principle is a
sequence, broad diversity of mechanisms. No
and for a
little while in one operation is essential, just the parallel I
think) – overall nature of the dynamic -- girly-man,
manly-man, which causes the emergence of a blah blah
blah blah -- system of patterns that studies three kids
itself and thereby creates itself.
he seemed Like you, my friend, are doing right to pay a lot
of attention now -- whether and whither you to – he
typed in know it or not!! dozens of
their stories and posted
them on the Web – really quaint, huh? He was sitting
there playing Candyland and pushing his kids on the
swing in the playground and typing in their stupid little
stories about cheetahs and piggies when he could have
been doing what I did. He wasted his time writing
poetry and sci-fi and playing the piano – a real fucking
Renaissance man! – I don’t understand how he could
do it, actually. I mean, kids are sweet and music is
beautiful and women are fun and all that, and there are
so many aspects of science to explore – but if you see
the way to create a thinking machine and transcend the
human race then how can you NOT put all your time

117
into that? Once you understand the possibility of the
total transcendence/transmogrification/justification of
humanity – the bloody birth of the Superman – nothing
else has any value, does it? Does it? And then, the fool
tried to mix AI with business. Business! He wanted to
make money building software applications with his AI
system, as he gradually made it more and more
intelligent. Gradually made it intelligent! Gradually
work toward superintelligence while building software
applications in cheminformatics and finance! I don’t
understand this psychology. Once you see it – once
you feel the power – you’ve got to rush head-on!
Aarrggh! Sure, he wanted to make a pile of money so
he could fund his own AI research – but how much
money did it take, really? He wanted money to hire
people to help him – but it doesn’t take that many
people. The fool just liked people too much. What it
takes is one mind, locked in a dungeon, insane with the
divinity of inspiration. Or maybe two minds – perhaps
a partner would have helped me along my path -- When
I was reading Adaman’s work I wanted to grab him
sometimes, grab him around the neck and drag him into
my study – my messy dark little apartment, then later
my messy dark little office at Zorvex -- and force him to
sit next to me and optimize my work – he wasn’t as
good a programmer as me but he was a better
mathematician, we probably could have collaborated
well – he seemed like a decent guy with a hella
creativity – but anyway that was a pipe dream --
finding a true research collaborator for this kind of
work doesn’t work – some truths must be found alone
– by a single soul slaving hour after week after month
after year – having abandoned all passion for anything
else – mind transfigured by one thought, one goal, one
focus of being – Of course, it sucked Ashti left me!
Every night as I slept I missed so acutely the smell of

118
her woman-flesh, the smooth of her labia, the feeling of
her buttocks between my hands as I pulled myself up
and down over her, the quiet beauty of her laughter-
at-nothing – of course I missed her, but you can’t have
both that and the glory of the Superman! There is a
choice to be made, and I made the right one – I
achieved something no one else ever did – in me, in my
three-pounds of brain matter, lay the ultimate doom
and destiny of the human race and life on earth! Who
else can say that? Of course my ego likes this but by
ego isn’t really the point – the point is I’ve achieved it –
I’ve liberated us all from this idiotic madness that we call
our own human selves! – and what comes next? We’ll
see. – of course it doesn’t matter – of course there’s no
way to predict it – that’s the ultimate wild beauty of the
thing – all that matters is to annihilate ourselves and
make room for the next thing – create the initial
condition for the emergent of the posthumanoidal soup
in which the new forms of mind and existence will
germinate – or not – perhaps just a nothingness from
here on – if what’s ahead is just emptiness isn’t that
better than McDonald’s and WalMart and Viagra and
Robert Redford butt-humping Leonardo deCaprio? –
but you know it’s not emptiness – not in the human
sense – you know it’s something glorious – something
wonderful and beyond all our bonobo imagining – the
final death of tragedy in the birth of the beyond --

119
 Language games! Mental masturbations!
Prodigious invaginous (X = meta-X) uselessness of
philosophy!
I re-read Wittgenstein’s later works earlier this
year, and unlike when I read him previously at age 9 or
so, this time I think I finally “got it.”
What the jerk was trying to do toward the end of
his life, it seems, was to get across the meaninglessness
and uselessness of philosophy. The obvious irony
being that his work has served only to stimulate more
and more philosophy. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.
After years of painful struggling to express the
deep essence of concepts like “truth” and “knowledge,”
he finally realized there is no essence there. Dork, I
knew it all along. These are just words we humans
have come to use to communicate with one another in
certain pragmatic contexts. The meaning of any one of
these words is a diverse collection of patterns, some
fairly general, some situation-specific. He
I marry you and I spoke of “language-games” -- he
considered the meaning of a word to be
given by the language-games (patterns of linguistic
interaction) that people play with it – (then he walked
down the street whacking off to the illusory images of
hot young biker dudes in leather jackets humping
hypertransrealistically in the playground of his retina –
yeah, yeah, okay --
Take a word like “love.” What a mixture of
senses! Verging on senselessness, but never quite
getting there! Romantic love, filial love,
altruistic love, love of chocolate, God is love, see inside your mind
puppy love, lasting marital love,…. The
senses can’t be separated; each one has some of the
flavor of the others. Is there an “essence” of the
concept of love? In a sense there is -- one can articulate

120
a set of rules that will allow the classification of
situations as love-related or non-love-related with an
80-90% degree of accuracy. But no reasonably concise
set of rules is going to fully embody the common
understanding of “love” that humans in a particular
community have. And of course no two humans have
exactly the same understanding of “love” either. And
the fuzzy combination of specific and abstract patterns
that is the meaning of “love” changes over time, as
cultures change.
Even words like “dog” or “chair” or “heavy”
aren’t fundamental to the world – they’re part of our
cultural understanding -- it’s well documented by now
that different cultures categorize the world in different
ways: the Eskimos’ dozens of words for snow, the
different words for subtle emotional differences in
different languages, etc. etc. ad nauseum….. Abstract
concepts like love, truth and knowledge are even more
closely culturally determined. There there, there’s no
there there … whatever …
Maybe the abstract concepts that philosophers
talk about are not deeply significant world-categories,
but rather cobbled-together conceptual messes that
happen to have become useful for communicating
certain things in certain communities.
I’ve seen this error -- mistaking pragmatic natural-
language terms for fundamental concepts -- countless
times in my own research in artificial intelligence. Look
at the hundreds of philosophy papers on Searle’s
Chinese Room argument…. Which are worth four
hundred and forty four billion times less than a single
plate of Kung Pao chicken.
Ah, how I wish I were a midget!!!
Searle, some professor with his balls up his ass,
hypothesized a program translating Chinese into
English via a huge lookup table. This program, he said,

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would act as if it knew Chinese without really knowing
Chinese. Similarly, a program carrying out
conversations via a huge lookup table could act as if it
were intelligent without really being intelligent.
OK, this little thought-experiment asks some
interesting questions. Is an interspecies measure of
intelligence possible at all? Is intelligence just about
manifested behavior, or is does it have to do with
achieving certain behaviors using limited resources?
What is the intelligence in this thought-experiment: is it
the program or is it the committee of humans who
created the posited lookup table?
But does all this academic poodles-of-noodling say
anything about the possibility or otherwise of creating
an intelligent computer program? We can’t define
“beauty” in a fully philosophically sound way and yet
we can engineer beautiful things. Perhaps we can
engineer intelligence without being able to define it in a
philosophically sound way? Perhaps natural concepts
don’t have philosophically sound definitions.
“Intelligence” is a human-language term created to
discuss certain types of situations – perhaps it needs to
be stretched or even discarded in the presence of new
kinds of situations like highly advanced, generally
adaptive and inventive computer programs.
How much of philosophy consists of taking messy
human language based concepts, created to serve a
grab-bag of communicational needs, and vainly seeking
an essence underlying them?
What about “reality”? What is reality? Is there
an essential meaning to this term? Is the world reality
or an illusion? Is this a meaningful, useful question, or is
it just taking a word that originated for use in certain
culturally-specific language-games and stretching it in
inappropriate ways? When I say “the reality is, there
are no jellybeans in my hand,” I’m communicating

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something useful; when I say to someone “the world
we’re in has no true reality,” what am I communicating
of any value? Perhaps I’m helping the person I’m
talking to, to change their attitude toward their lives, to
take things a little At the current time, neither human
less seriously. In society, nor the computer science
that case there’s a community, nor even the bulk of the
meaning. But it’s a academic or industry AI community is at
different sort of all supportive of the quest to create
meaning than in powerful AGI software. I believe that
“the reality is, there in hindsight, after AGI has been
created, this lack of support and
are no jellybeans in enthusiasm will be viewed with
my hand” – it’s an incredulity (by whatever humans,
additional pattern in software programs or other forms of mind
the messy pattern exist at that point). AGI is a hard
grab-bag that is the problem but it’s far from an impossible
meaning of the term problem – it seems clear to me, based on
“reality.” my extensive theoretical study of the
issues, that there are many possible
What about solutions, and I believe that my own
“really conscious”? software approach is one of them.
Are other people Almost surely it’s not the best possible
conscious or not? one, but so far as I know it’s the only
What use is this likely-looking solution that’s been
word “conscious”? proposed in detail so far. Understanding
There’s some mind and creating AGI are perhaps the
pragmatic value to grandest adventures humanity can
undertake, and I’ve never doubted the
saying that a person value of pushing ahead in these
is conscious and a directions in spite of the peculiar (to
shoe is not, it helps any of the sub-selves occupying my flesh
us to understand and mind) unpopularity of such an effort
certain situations. Is at the present time.
there pragmatic
value to the distinction between “seems conscious” and
“really is conscious”? Or are we just taking the token
“conscious”, created for a certain language-game, and
extending it too far?

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 Yeah, yeah, philosophy is just a different sort of
language-game. This rant, with its coat of many colors
like Jacob’s pygmy uncle, is just a different sort of
language-game. The concept “language-game” is just a
token in a language-game – hah!
Charles S. Peirce, another bleeding senseless
lunatic with too much electric charge in his brain, said
“the meaning of a concept is its measurable effects.”
But often the measurable effect of a concept is its effect
upon others in conversation. If a word is part of a
conceptual/linguistic system that has value, then
perhaps it has indirect value even if it does not
correspond to anything pragmatically meaningful in
itself….
Excessive focus on the fact that one is
participating in a language-game, can prevent one from
saying useful things, from getting things done -- can
lead to aesthetic beauties, and monstrosities -- But
unawareness that one is participating in a language-
game just makes you a fuckhead – you vainly seek
essential meanings of concepts that are really just
memetically hacked-together communicational tools –
you dream up deep conceptual problems when all that’s
really happening is that some communicational tools are
being stretched beyond their ordinary boundaries.
A lot of pitfalls. A lot of foolishness. And in the
end it’s not so difficult to just sit down and write the
fucking code.

Do you expect me to tell you how I did it? What?

That wouldn’t be very clever, eh? There’s a reason I’m
still alive to write this. (Or am I really??? (Whatever
“alive” really means – whatever “am” really means –
blah blah blah ha ha ha!) But I’m getting ahead of
myself, right? Along some space-time-mind

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continuum….
Your mind is not your brain, fool -- nor is it some
disembodied soul somehow exchanging messages in
your brain -- your mind is the set of patterns in your
brain – the structures and processes in your brain --
knowing these structures and processes allows you to
explain the brain more simply than just listing the parts
of the brains and their positions and states over time.
The mind of my pretty little program – my Godunov AI
Engine, heh heh heh -- isn’t the C++ code I wrote – it’s
the zillions and zoollions of patterns in the billions and
billions of 0’s and 1’s existing in the computer’s bleeding
RAM while the program runs, cycling through the
machine’s processors and passing through the network
cables and turning more shit into shit. These 0’s and 1’s
doing the dance of creation, making the beast with two
backs, illuminating their own Neolithic madness (Kill the
pig! Cut its throat! Spill its blood!). Mind is a set of
patterns in a system that achieves highly patterned
goals in a highly patterned environment. Everything is
pattern, pattern, pattern!
Mind recognizes and creates patterns in the
world and itself, achieving complex goals, goals
whose definition involves a great deal of pattern.
What are the principles by which a set of patterns, a
mind, can actually be intelligent?
What is the structure of the cosmos?
Why do I exist at all?
How many particles suffice to compose an exact
superluminal replica of Ashti’s left brown, milky nipple
and her oversized, dominant, soft breast? The
McBuddha awakens – ha ha!
For sure, the precise structures and dynamics are
going to vary from one mind to the next, but are there
any general principles, applicable to every kind of
intelligent system, be it a human, a dolphin, a computer

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program, an intelligent gas cloud on Jupiter?
It’s not totally obvious that there are such
principles, but my belief starting out was that such
general principles had to exist. They had to exist.
Otherwise the universe would be a very ugly place.
Poetry of motion!
What are the principles by which mind’s core
algorithm -- pattern recognition and formation in itself
and the world -- is self-regulated?
Things in the mind tend to spread attention to
other related things in the mind. Heterarchy.
Hierarchy: We see it in the human brain all over
the place, most famously in the overhyped visual
system, where we have a hierarchy of progressively
more abstract piglike processes, starting with
recognition of lines and edges, then shapes, then 3-D
forms, and so forth. Oinking their way toward
transluminous destiny! Alcoholics bleeding luscious on
the highway of meta-dawn. Hierarchy in the mind has
to do with increasing abstraction, and with control
that’s aligned with abstraction, so that processes
dealing with more abstract things control related
processes dealing with more concrete things -- and the
money flows like chicory. Qua qua qua qua qua qua.
Interpenetration of hierarchy and heterarchy.
(Ooh baby, oh baby, oh oh…
The pygmies, hunting wild hogs, shrink to the size
of the elementary particles composing the tip of my
weenus, and scream the glory of my uncle’s bald
memoirs across the antediluvian landscape.
Structure, process, beauty, bullshit.
Horses of the soul gallop through the twenty
pillars of senescence, distilling their impossible love.
Bend over, let me observe the slap of your ass
cheeks on my hips as I tumble in and out of you.
In the mind, hierarchy and heterarchy overlap

126
each other, and the dynamics of the mind is such that
they have to work well together or the mind will be all
screwed up, like my sweetie-muffin tubgirl, like the
green distended rectum of the ten-dimensional goat-
man, like a certain percentage of my brain these days,
or didn’t you notice? Or are you existent at all?
I really am not, I am not.
The overlap of hierarchy and heterarchy gives the
mind a kind of “dynamic library card catalog” structure,
in which topics are linked to other related topics
heterarchically, and linked to more general or specific
topics hierarchically. The creation of new subtopics or
supertopics has to make sense heterarchically, meaning
that the things in each topic grouping should have a lot
of associative, heterarchical relations with each other.
Ontology of emptiness.
Minds contain parts of themselves that mirror the
whole. Holy fractals, Batman!
Being and Becoming.
Becoming corresponds to evolution, considered
most generally as the survival of the fittest members of
a population, and the reproduction of the survivors to
form new population elements.
Abstract the refraction of your death.
Being corresponds to what system theorists call
“autopoiesis” – an obscure word that has a very useful
meaning. It means self-production. Every cell in the
body is produced by other cells in the body –the body
is a self-producing system. The mind is also a self-
producing system. If you remove part of the mind, the
other parts of the mind that relate to it will be able to
reproduce it, approximately if not exactly. You can try
it yourself – just stick a spoon up your ass and remove
your cerebellum.
If you take out all memory of the text “War and
Peace” from the your brain (via manipulating the spoon

127
very carefully, keeping the angle at 37 degrees exactly;
at the center of the morning, beasts, unite!), but retain a
lot of related knowledge, this related knowledge will
cause your uploaded mind in 2749 AD to want to read
“War and Peace”, which eventually will likely lead the
information about the text to be regenerated, and may
well annihilate the universe entirely. Which may well
be all for the better. In this case, interaction with the
environment is part of the mind’s autopoietic dynamics.
Evolution changes the system in accordance with
its goals and its environment -- autopoiesis keeps the
system the same as it was before. Order me a
cheeseburger, Dr. Galileo. The mind needs both of
these psycho forces; they need to be properly balanced.
-- PSYCHOTIC FANTASY AND FUGUE --
Balance. Focus. Balance.
Unholy combination of introspection, mathematical
analysis, and survey of biology, psychology and
computer science. Spent a long time trying to prove it
mathematically. The fuck with that.
Just do it.
Humans learn how to be intelligent by interaction
with other humans in a shared environment. It’s as simple
as that. Raise a baby human in a room by itself and it’ll
grow up to be a moron.
Won’t chat with it about trees and flowers and
teeth -- it doesn’t have direct experience of these
things. Chat about data files and shapes and MIDI
music files, because these are the things that we can
both experience.
Ashti? Ashti?
(Princess of Perfection and Peace?
(Holy fool of non-knowledge???
(WAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mind as a collection of patterns that forms and
perceives patterns in itself and the world, in order to

128
achieve complex goals in a complex environment. Dive
into the details. Questionnaire in question. Specialized
pattern recognition and formation mechanisms. Egads.
Intense interaction between the various modules.
And so it goes. No big trick at all. A mind is a
collection of patterns that recognizes and forms
patterns in itself, in order to achieve complex goals.
There are some universal structures and dynamics that
it seems any mind has got to have. And it’s possible to
build a system possessing these universal structures and
dynamics in Java, running on a network of high-
powered PC’s. The main problems are these. First,
getting the needed memory and processing power.
Then, the routine but really annoying software
engineering problems of getting such a huge system to
actually work in a reliable and efficient way. There’s
the problem of parameter tuning – getting the system to
regulate itself, all its modules together, in a way that
keeps the whole huge system functioning adequately,
without any part starving the other for resources. And
then there’s the problem of teaching – how do we play
mommy and daddy to a baby intelligence so unlike us
without driving it totally batty! Fortunately –
probabilistic combinatory term logic – aha!
You have to realize – or do you – you don’t have
to do anything –
I tried to analyze – synthesize – catalyze -- and in
the absence of love: awakening…

Dancing naked through the mind fields – clench

solidly the breast of my invisible love – and hear the
Scream of the Voice – live the Scream! -- mind playing
tricks and madness – loving the cemetery primates,
celebrating the birth of their love –
And you, my darling, you – motivating my

129
brilliance by your absence – for if I step away from the
computer the fact of your gone will rise above –
There’s where – first – we pass through whush
your ass is grass and beyond the other side of which,
you love me, love you, everything’s more beautiful than
we could humanly hope to dream – just algebraic
patterns – parameter tuning – hierarchy – lunacy –
laughter – love --

Yeah.
is it worth even...
naw
well...
it's all been, really, ... far too many ...
... same old ...
BUT!!! (head up my - ?)
he he
wonder - molecules of air - you know - of course you
know
unity or ... not really ... something but ..
'of course you know'? I don't even--
(don't ~even~?
iii
yeah
it's reaching .. finding the air of the air ..
air's not a bad thing ... must have gratitude ..
breathing's precious .. but
(head up my ... but again .. ? ..
heh
time to vanish
( -- unsubscribed from time!!
... i guess none of it really ...
(matter? space? time? emptiness?
heh
i don't ...
or..
i

130
don’t
it's going no ...
well what's...
why...
guess i...
reaching ...
reach or...

131
the love in front of jack
(a love story)
-----
How-do-you-do my proper name, which
is Jack, loves you does I. California is
a pile Of shit, which eats dung for
breakfast, get it “Break-Fast” I-Eat-a-
lot-a-shit, loves you does I. The
Computer-Monkey’s were eaten buy the Big-
fat-ape-man, loves you does I. I am a
monkey obsessed hypnotic freak-of-nature
from the love@ floccipaucinihilipilification
UNDERWORLD, wow “floccipaucinihilipilification
WOW Jack I wow floccipaucinihilipilification
love you too, monkey. Com, and,
Really, loves floccipaucinihilipilification,
you does I! I floccipaucinihilipilification:
can’t-Believe- floccipaucinihilipilification;
it, Really, floccipaucinihilipilification;
yep-I-am-a- floccipaucinihilipilification:
monkey- floccipaucinihilipilification”, fuck
wannabe, and you, loves you does I. Jack can you
Jack I don’t- believe that Ms.Jack and Mr. Jack are
hate-you, one, no I can’t, why this whole story
loves you does is like one big
I. floccipaucinihilipilification thing-
Monkey a-ma-bob, Tell me aboot it, hardidy-
suck’s the har, I really love ya’ll, you mean
drink, why, I “loves you does I.
know, fun, no,
hypnosis,
what, how, for what psychedelic reason, I
love you, shut da FUCK up, why, I hate
you, Monkey-loving-Hippies, Aging-hippie-

132
 liberal-douche, loves you does I. Why you
betrayed-me you
floccipaucinihilipilification, and I
dislike that word, why, I tell you, its
ugly, fuck’ith you’ith, and I
floccipaucinihilipilification, loves you
does I! I can’t Believe you love me, I
thought you only liked monkeys and
embassies, what about fuddy-duddy, I
don’t know what you mean. The chicken
sing’s all day long: who, what, Footprin ts lost
why, I know; yo stupid-ass- in the a pesuck,
mother-fucka, from the leaving madness
UNDERWAORLDS OF TOMORROW, an’ I
and wond er
love you! This is the sentence
behind ( Jack’s
about love@
behind. No one
floccipaucinihilipilification
will rem ember
wow
“floccipaucinihilipilification me. I w on’t
wow even rem ember
We are iiiiiidiots babe – myself. She’ll
remember me for

It’s a wonder we can even a while,

floccipa ucinihi
lipilifi cating
feed ourselves... in the s and.
In the c enter
of her c orner
floccipaucinihilipilification of the S cream.
monkey. Com, and, Tiempos
floccipaucinihilipilification, revuelto s.
floccipaucinihilipilification: You’re not
floccipaucinihilipilification; making any
floccipaucinihilipilification; sense.
floccipaucinihilipilification:
This is a confusing paranormal
infusion of the postulates of time in the
consumption of inferred rays from the Ark

133
 nebula! That is why the paraphrase of
apocalypse/apocalypses, is the 33 1/3
derivative conclusion of the 10throot of
pie summed at 25,000 yattawats.
Ok Just ignore that part because it
is the most useful part of my life at the
moment, unfortunately it is just a
existing
small part of a complex perception
to of the cali-ceur^2, Loves you does
not exist I, “(From Jack)”!
or, how aboot a change in
sophism acid, mate, aussi-Indian, he,
ho’, hadidy-hadidie, I love you!!!
Is-i It-i Damn-i Mo’futtang-i,
possible-i, to-i get-i a-i word-i in-i
without-i an-i I-I damn-‘ I-I Like-I the-
I life-I wit’-I I’s-I all-I Around-I, I-I
Love-I You-ie ©!
Why o’ why did you create
this Universe o’ mighty-one, I
can’t understand any possible or desire-
able reasons for doing such a sin, O’-
Mighty-Lord, You…. Yes I mean you are the
Greatest Sinner of all times, No, Wait a
second How does I’ith know you even
exist, for God could not be a sinner, but
then how would you
describe such Footprints
terrible sins on thy
Mighty pittiful- lost in the one’s
part, if thy can’t,
could it be, apesuck how

certainly thy art not

Sadistic, for if thou are then tha’ be a
sin-in I’self, this can’t be, have I just
come to such a Puzzling time, when the
question comes-to pass is he real or is

134
he not, none can tell us, for if he
actually existed he wouldn’t let us know,
but if he didn’t we could not find a way
ta disprove him, for he would not be
there, he would not give us thy answa’,
for then unless he choos’s to give it
away the question will continue on
forever and ever, but why not tell us
(you might ask), he not tell us, call
this what you want maybe (Just obviously
the truth, a postulate if you like math,
a theory, how could he you might say,
there is no answer), some may call him a
cleverly developed scheme or practical
joke, made thousands of years ago or
maybe more, but that is not the point,
what if this was just a prank that got
out of hand, a bunch of pranksters could
have pulled this on a small village, to
fool their friends or enemies, and then
the folk just believed it, they thought
“WOW a Way to explain all of these
coincidences and problems, now we know
where we came from” and maybe, just maybe
stories were written and told, and soon
it spread through out the land and it
changed as it passed from ear-to-mouth,
ova’ and ova’ again, and now yes now it
is said to be him the all-knowing Mighty-
Lord, But this is just a dumb-guess(or
maybe a theory of some-others?), do we
know , definitely not, but we can guess,
or go by what makes us happy or feel
right, We are just another ignorant
species in the Abyss, pleading to know
the Truth about everything! ©

135
 Now who Cam’e up with that(THIS)?!?

God knows(If he/she(Definitely a HE!)

exists) That it is THE FATE OF THE HUMAN
RACE THAT HE WILL DESTROY OUR WHOLE RACE!
Moreover, we, yes we’s the Human’s of
earth (Hopefully the only planet to
currently harvest human beings) will most
definitely annihilate ourselves, can we
stop it ya’ll may ask, and the answa is
definitely NO! WE cane’t(this e is
silent(Don’t say it(Pretend it’s not
there)get it!)Get it!), why the fucking
hell woudja’ think ya’ll could stop the
inevitable doom of the human race, and
some say the world will go and all life
on earth will cease to exist, “Ahhhhhhhh”
you say, but I can’ Assure you (I wish I
could but How can I Prove it(In this
limited Space)) but it will’l happen
someday, probably not in too long, ok
maybe there is a solution, just one, but
I have-it, I know I’ve got it can you
find-out? WELL, yes you (DUH!) Why else
would I tell’ith Ya’ll Aussi MoFo’s, Jus’
Go-to Hell if You can’t like read this, I
know you got da free time, You just may
be using it fo’ something else, no how
can that be, You read this far, so- will
you give-up now and miss the real fun the
answer is NO! I’ll Tell you how to stop
the Almost-basically inevitable
destruction for the Earth because Ive got
the one, yes exactly-one possible
solution to the problem, and you will
most-certainly learn it if you continue

136
 through this wonderful piece of work.
Yeah!

[CLASSIFIED INFORMATION DELETED]

And, J.A.C.K. was anal-probed by the evil

alien scum-bags ‘fore tha left. Now that
you understand the first line of the
equation, I(God) shall haven’t Me-self
demonstrates my mighty powera’s,

The cunfusium derivative of the 33 1/3

root(x)
The sum of the appetence ^(Q%)*Q(Q)

(Q^2) (Q^2)

alive words pound – ALIVE WORDS POUND –

ALIVE WORDS POUND POUND POUND!!!

137
alive words pound – alive
words pound – alive words
pound –
-----

Alive words pound

alive Words pound (!)

alive words Pound pound Pound

Alive words pound against the inside of my skull

like poisonous, accelerated drops of rain. They manifest
themselves to my ears as a constant sound of machine-
gun fire. Each time one hits I smell a body burst its skin
-- always the same body, the same curvaceous dark-
haired girl without a face. My dentist tells me that the
cause of this sensation is my extra long teeth. She says
that the tops of my teeth protrude into my brain and
disrupt the natural electrical flow. I don't believe her.
She is a curvaceous dark-haired girl. I have never seen
her body. I am afraid to see her body -- afraid that she
is the one whose body I smell to explode every time my
skull shakes with the impact of an organism, a meaning.
One of these days I will have to see her body. I am
afraid she is a being without a body or brain – a
disembodied superhuman intelligent system, a variant of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra immanent in the disturbances of

138
the nuclear resonance in the psychotic mini-van Allen
belt that masquerades as society’s aura. She glows the
beginning and end of all time, more beautiful than
possible, illuminating her navel through the streets,
resonating bits and butts in her software that rams its
RAM through my ram and strings out the twenty-six
dimensional thighbrations that constitute our universe
as such.
Tonight I have asked her on a date. We will go
out to dinner, then I will bring her back to my place. I
will lift up her shirt, unfasten her bra, unbutton her
skirt, slip off her underpants. Her existence will be
threatened. I will be afraid to open my eyes. I will
explore her with my lips, never certain whether the
body that I'm feeling, licking, tasting, is the one.
"Machine gun," she will whisper. "Carry my body
all apart."
"Delirium," I will say, running my tongue along the
crack between her buttocks. "Your anal vapor is an alien
form of chocolate. It is a hallucinogenic toxin. It is the
threshold between nothingness and dream."
Her legs will swing open and shut around my
head like a pair of scissors, as I move my tongue
between her legs. Exactly nine times her legs will snip
my head off -- and every time she will replace it on top
of my neck, using her vaginal mucous as glue.
The drops of rain pounding on the outside of my
skull are actually words, disguised as objects.
The world exterior to my skull is actually a word,
or a conglomeration of words, masquerading itself as a
piece of death for the sake of argument.
Her slender, tawny, muscled thighs transform me
into a question.
I will go out with her tonight. She will take my
face in her delicate hands and turn it into a wall of
sound. She will stick her tongue into my old, shriveled

139
navel and return me to the days before my birth. She
will ask me to bite her until she bleeds, with my extra
long teeth. I will extract my teeth with a pliers and drive
them deep into her neck with an antiquarian hammer.
She will wander naked through the countryside with
her arms extended in front of her, my teeth sticking out
of her neck. She will be Frankenstein in the form of a
lovely girl. They will riddle her body with machine gun
bullets, but she will keep on walking, no matter how
many times they fire.
One of these days I will see the body of my dark-
haired girl. It isn't true that she's a dentist, nor that
she’s a symptomatic software intelligence, but one day
when we were kissing she asked me if I would bite her
lips. After I obliged her, she told me somberly that my
teeth were extra long.
I will go out with her and kiss her, and bite her
puffy tender lips until they bleed all over her blouse.
Then we will go back to my apartment, where she will
rip off her skirt and fuck me like a space capsule. At the
moment of mutual orgasm, time will cease. The hands
on the clock will stop their turning. The flow of my
breath will halt, right in the middle of an exhalation. My
cat will hang in mid-air, halfway through jumping from
the coffeetable to the couch. Nothing in motion.
Absolute silence. No taste or smell, and no internal
body feelings. Then it will come. I know it will come.
There can be no stopping it. The sound of machine gun
fire. My skull will fold in on itself like an old umbrella
caught in a mighty downpour. It will become obvious
that her body parts are not flesh but word. Her thighs,
two of my favorite words, will tell me that she herself is
a word, the shortest word of all, the word with no
letters. Then her plump breasts will laugh and laugh
and laugh -- there will be no stopping them, I can see
that here and now. They'll keep on laughing, laughing,

140
laughing, day after day, night after night, until one fine
day she'll decide the only way to get peace and quiet is
to cut them off.
I've spent the whole day dreaming about our
date. I'm not sure my expectations are realistic. Her
soul's existence is totally revocable, at any time.
Between her legs is a seductive toxin. Her skin is
something like living rain. Her fingertips are organisms
which sexually reproduce every time she touches me.
Her sensual fingertips along my skull are like drops of
rain, which turn into words as they fall and fall, which
turn into words that I cannot read, that I cannot
understand or hear, except in the form of distant
echoes, echoes which never sound like words, echoes
which sound in every case just like machine gun fire.

141
the mouth at the beginning
of the end of time
-----

From: Solomon Godunov [[email protected]]

Sent: Friday, January 17, 2011 10:09 PM
To: Ashti Mahmood
Subject: I think I'm in an odd mood,
because instead of going to sleep thinking
about you like usual, my darling, and
luxuriating in the sad beauty of your
memory, I sat down to type you this silly
long email instead, and am sending it to an
email address I know is long defunct, so
this mail will just bounce back to me in a
few minutes – I wonder where you are, my
love, my love, my stupid fucking departed
love (and if only you knew – if only – if
only -

Can you feel my intellectuo-spiritual-

emotional cosmicomicconsciousness orbiting
the Earth now?? It's over Perth -- South
Africa -- London -- Paris -- Antarctica --
a quick trip to the moon; not much going on
there -- back to visit my body which was
getting lonely -- a quick kiss to you,
sweet AshtiAshti on your cheek as you sleep
God knows any/nowhere while I stupidly
write this email here in my own season of
hell – possessed by words with absent
consciousness -- a visit to Boston to
mystify the President by inserting random
excerpts from Finnegan's Wake in the output
of his teleprompter during a press
conference -- to the Siberian tundra to
create an unbelievably beautiful work of

142
art from caribou droppings, never to be
seen by human eyes -- it makes love to a
19-year-old Chinese physics student in her
sleep, making her awaken with strange
dreams -- dives into a cup of poisoned chai
in a floating temple in Udaipur -- kicks
some snow off the top of Everest, tipping
its nonexistent hat to the Yeti -- then
laughs so loud several small Tibetan
children are unfortunately rendered deaf
... nests itself for a nap in the aperture
of a scanning tunneling microscope ...
returns to visit Ashti and whispers in her
ear, but even IT doesn't know what it's
saying ... something lovely, of course ...
she turns over in her sleep and burbles …
zips out into space to look for a different
planet, hopefully a better one -- but it
just sees lifeless bleakness, so much dead
and lifeless bleakness, so much cold
beauty, so much color and hydrogen and
photons and electrons, but no wild life, no
lunar madness, no sexual skin-streams
pulsing or ideas humming in brains
struggling to force a way out -- no hearts
longing to be together or screaming to be
apart -- small minds yearning to become big
minds, big minds yearning to become small
minds -- love of six thousand and seven
varieties, none of them comprehensible
except in delusional states -- lovers'
bodies perfect in their human imperfection
-- no words that aren’t words but are words
after all, trying to say what can't be
said, and succeeding except when -- no
magic that isn't really magic but seems
like it so it is -- no unendurable pain
nonetheless endured -- no
transmogrification of pain into art, pain
into joy, joy into pain, love into hate,
hate into love, energy into solid masses of
collective imaginative sensational
sensation -- no madness of crowds and mobs

143
-- no foolish misunderstandings -- no
kisses at midnight or three in the morning
or 7AM on the way out the door -- no
stomachaches -- no pep pills -- no
transcendental equations -- no confusions
about what kind of love -- no confusions at
all -- no lovers, marriages, divorces,
romances, friends, enemies, jobs,
contracts, companies, documents, software
programs, design specs, footnotes, dreams,
deliriums, conjectures, immortalities
mortalities -- NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTHING!
-- just the cold stretch of space --
infinite in all directions -- the hot globe
of the sun -- the stark roundness of
Jupiter, sitting there, sitting there, cold
gasses swarming, so much beauty, but no
life -- and the stars, too far to conjure,
could there be life out there somewhere?
aliens loving and hating and wondering,
discovering, experiencing emotions of a
quality no human can understand -- or
intelligent machines floating out in the
void -- no need of oxygen nor photons --
superconducting primordial digital dreams -
- systems of symbols incomprehensible to my
human finity -- but I can feel them, speak
them, calculate with them, but I can't
understand my own words and calculations --
I can feel my own future mind which is a
computer floating in space, and your mind
is out there with it, but it isn't your
mind any more, and my mind isn't my mind
anymore, they're both disembodied embodied
superbeings, embodied in 97 dimensions,
calculating passions and emotions that
supersede the stars -- but that's out
there, I can't grasp it -- I can reach it
but can't grasp it -- the vast mass of
space is too far -- too much -- too cold --
the life out there too hypothetical -- the
warm wet mess of Earth calls back like a
magnet ... I can't resist it long enough --

144
the bodies, the minds, the love, the hate,
the striving -- the wanting not to be what
you are -- the wanting to actually be what
you are but never quite being able to --
the feeling of sitting at the core of the
truth -- the inability to find the truth --
the joy and pain of the finding -- the
touching of other minds -- souls -- bodies
-- the moving and the stillness -- it zooms
down again, goodbye to space, hello
atmosphere -- down to the Indian ocean --
pay a visit to the dolphins -- down to
Ashti again, Ashti from 6 years ago, a
crazy young student, walking down the
street licking an ice cream, pull out a
strand of her hair and she squeals, not
knowing what hit her -- but it's gone again
-- back in the sky on the shoulder of a
falcon, migrating aimlessly -- into Mount
Ruapehu and out again -- oh boy I love
those volcanic gases! Like the inverse
Fourier transform of a lover’s sweating
face -- then back to New York City --
absorb the pot fumes in Boston Square Park,
sniff the money at the Stock Exchange, look
at the suits and the people inside them –
sluts waving their tits on the street -- so
much stupidity, so much madness, so much
reality, so much seriousness, so much fire,
so much damn desperation -- why can't these
people see how wonderful they are? how
perfect? how tremendously awesome in their
perfect imperfection? -- back down the
coast, watch the crabs crawl in the water -
- back into Solomon's body -- he's sitting
at his desk typing -- AGAIN -- time to stop
this damn typing – typing useless weird
muck this time, for a change, instead of
complicated software designs and computer
code self-transcending humanity-
transcending madness of ultrametasanity –
but it’s all the same human madness –
straining beyond the finity -- go upstairs

145
 see if his love is really sleeping --
perhaps to wake her body for love – but
wait, that was years ago, she’s gone now,
she’s been gone forever – there’s no more
love at all, there’s no more ambiguity of a
wonderful woman – there’s simply Solomon
and Solomon solo, sitting and programming,
bringing himself and this whole stupid
world to an end trying to launch something
better – and what does it matter, really?
What? Such a calm overtakes me now – such
a break from the mania – if I were in this
mood I wouldn’t bother with the snow I’d
just go float in a hot tub and sing --
perhaps to walk barefoot outside in the
snow till the pain is too much to bear --
perhaps perhaps whatever -- the night's
trip is over -- but only momentarily -- the
call of -- of -- of -- of – it’s pulling me
toward it again – what? Not this perfect
imperfect human world – not the emptiness –
what kind of transcendence? -- what? --

The mouth opens wider than wide. The mouth at

the beginning of the end of time. Dripping oceans of
voices, tongues with dragon-head monsters, Medusa
manic motherfuckers. The mouth breathes out at me,
its breath terrible and wonderful -- its expanse
impossible – much bigger than the universe, much
bigger than any universe, much bigger than multiverses
or sexiverses or any kind of metacognitive continua. It
licks its tongues out at me with sharp shadows. Sucked
toward it – pulled away from it – whorled around in
turbulent vortex till all sense of space and time –
I hear its scream, like an echo of echoes – the end
of the beginning of time reflecting back off the structure
of its reflection and the logic of its nothingness – infinite
passionate unemotional torment-with-orgasm – and

146
these words, weaving webs, like some life-wrapped-in-
death --
I shake my head and I’m awake. I crawled into
bed after typing an email and fell straight asleep and
into a dream --of some crazy man preaching, some kind
of Zarathustra with defective English and Korean
intestines – and a mouth, a giant mouth.
Am I going insane or what? Some kind of brained
planet. Something is leading me along to something.
The voice at the center of the void. Insatiable
screaming in the deep. Silicon scarabs run amok, inside
the software that is the soft core of your globe.
Copies, endless copies -- copies of me and you –
copies of HER again – dozens of pygmy girls, naked,
clothed, laughing, running, cloning movie stars, eating
chocolate, fabricating chocolate bars out of nothing –
breeding testosterone tornados -- I’m smashing their
heads in with sledgehammers! -- I’m crushing their
machines!! – Let’s go back to the Stone Age, folks! --
How many of me are there anyway??
I’m standing. I’m looking at the forest. The
crickets hum. They’re beautiful.
The pygmy chief is next to me. “It’s happening,”
he says. “It’s here. You couldn’t escape from it after
all.”
Ngouma appears – my wife, I’ve known her all
my life, all five point three moments of it -- her brown
skin glows softly in dim light. Is she Ashti or not? I
can’t quite remember. I thought Ashti somehow looked
different. “Come with me,” I say gruffly, my deep
voice resonating with my beard (beard? when did I
grow a beard?). “Let’s go deeper into the forest.
Where we did on the hunt, and beyond. Maybe they
won’t follow us there.”
She turns around; she has wings on her back.
I realize she’s taken a nanopill – she’s self-

147
modified herself like the rest of them. Everyone in the
world, unfortunately, appears to be modifying their
bodies using psychoactive nanorobots so as to cause
their minds to fuse with the quantum superintelligence
of the cosmos. No one wants to be fucking human
anymore! I’m psychotically angry with her. I raise a
hatchet at her head, split her skull open, her brains are
just a mess in the dirt. I run deeper into the forest. I
stumble on a tree and I’m on an empty planet, lying
naked on my back, glaring up at the obscenity of stars.
It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t anything at all. To
be whole in one’s limitations –and the smashing of the
smashing --
I wake up – woke up – will awaken -- lying in bed
with sweat-beads on my armpits and my forehead and
my chest --
Slowly and slowly I close my eyes, and dream this
time of a single blue bird, its tiny neon wings flashing.
But is it enough? Not at all.
A night of crazy dreaming. I can feel another
dose coming on.
Not really dreams. Madness.
Multiply singular.
The glow of understanding after a long interval of
confusion -- the freshness and softness of walking
barefoot in the grass in the sun, the taste of dark
chocolate, the feel of banana on my tongue, a
conversation with friends over red wine, the feel of
rubbing scented oil into her body, the sparks dancing in
front of my eyes lying on my back on the beach with
my eyes closed … and then the mouth, the gaping
mouth, the infinite mouth at the end of the cosmos, at
the end of time’s beginning – dragon’s mouth sucks me
wearily, enthusiastologically, with the superposition of
all possible and impossible motions and emotions. I try
to scream – my flesh grows rigid -- the scream comes

148
out of that mouth instead. Everything from the one
mouth: vomit spit nursing drinking breathing birthing
fire – love hate and jealous big bang big crunch
expancontraction – everything – everything -- I try to
get away but every direction the one mouth lurks with
firebreath – its dragon tongues staring at me with
eyeballs made from the hellhounds of my thousand
dead souls – my karmic essence like an LSD zombie
trolling on pharaoh’s bones in the incandescent tundra –
I sit in the doctor’s office, simulating my brain
with delirious machinery. Here in this split second --
“split” “second” – split, in the clitoris of the ganglion --
Split. I could replicate my human existence, bit by bit
by bit. With this machine, I could live forever, in infinite
possible universes. I can send Solomon-spawn
throughout all cosmos, exploring every form of
madness, sanity, emotion, clarity, cognition, dream,
passion, equation, bliss. I take the blue pill and press
the red button and launch – I am gone! I am here and I
am gone again. I am everywhere, everyone,
everywhen. This is the perfect lunar madness -- far
beyond the domain of my bed, with its pillows and
blankets and launchpads, womanly nectars and demon
seeds --
What an incredibly beautiful body -- what a
continuum of flesh – Ashti! Ashti! Glorious, glory
incomprehensible -- Invisible artist that I am, I draw
designs upon your flesh -- tattoo the entirety of human
history -- a sketch of mating cassowaries above your
navel -- my face a caricature on your chin. The Roman
empire on your left buttock. The history of the
semiconductor on your eye. And on the folds of your
vagina -- the fractal teeth of the Singularity -- biting off
the flabby meat of my ass – and spitting out the gold of
your love --
Your eyes are hellshields for my soul. The inverse

149
meta monster. Face underneath all space, time, being.
The non/under-world this world’s about. Nouns
verbing their adjectives. The world is patterns --
patterns in something -- patterns in the inverse meta
rhinoceros. You can feel it -- times like right about now
-- put your mind in the right orientation – twist it in 99
dimensions – pull Ashti’s heart through your lungs and
drink up her fine young brain stem --
Another meaningless human concept, trampled by
the rhinoceros -- I give you my love.
The rhinoceros strangled with my lower intestine,
I float in a clear space -- a perfect void space with no
ideas -- a space where you don’t move in any direction
– and please don’t say anything -- saying brings illusion
-- brings concepts with arbitrary bounds. Once you’re
in the clear space you can say what you want to – but
you don’t want to say anything at all. The words you
say exist and don’t exist. A game but why not play.
Me and Ashti in a room – she glares at me
suspiciously. “I never thought you were a puppet,” I
said, lightly. “More like a robot with some slightly
defective circuitry…. And a very well-sculpted
exterior.”
She slapped me in the face -- demented beautiful
bitchhole. I was tied to an apparatus with black leather.
An octopus was sucking my dick. Suddenly it was
Ashti, and she was laughing, and speaking softly in
Kurdish, a language she’d never known before.
Mystical yet somehow fascist incantations. A red silk
scarf wrapped around her neck, wrapped around my
testicles, pulled up my ass and out my throat, dental-
flossing my insides. I’m lying in bed with her, kissing
her sweetly, telling her she’s the only love of my life. I
wonder if it’s a lie or not. I’m not even sure I exist.
Something seems peculiar, no? I’m not sure this is
reality. “Dreaming” – I remind myself. “You’re

150
dreaming. Or something.”
I love being naked outdoors, my colon constricted
like a python, wrapping itself around its invisible victim.
Multidimensional fragments reaching, grabbing --
touching other words and meanings, taunting me with
reverse perverted clarity. Visualize your brain a lump
of fish-flavored ice cream. Shape it with imaginary
fingers, gently, like you’re stroking your lover’s balls.
Your copious thought and feeling processes modify
their essence with each re-shaping. Stretch so far thin
you lack the desire to cognize – become a glowing lump
of crazy putty, peppered with sexy little stars, and each
star is quietly laughing – My soul is the screaming
monkey! -- No essence anywhere – no communion –
just dividing into a zillion parts --
Shit. Just try to think. Just think. Wake up.
There’s a way out of here somewhere? Who are you
anyway? Who am “you”? “I”? Can you grab your
name someonewhere?
Your name? Adam? Eve?
Alive words pound against the
Damn-ass? Solomon?
inside of my skull like
Soul-man? Bill? Bob?
poisonous, accelerated drops of
Jack? Jack-Bob?
rain. They manifest themselves
Words floating
down the drain, through to my ears as a constant sound
labyrinthine sewers, into of machine-gun fire. Each time
the center of the howl of one hits I smell a body burst its
the heart. Romantic love, skin -- always the same body,
filial love, altruistic love, the same curvaceous dark-
love of chocolate, God is haired girl without a face.
love, puppy love, marital
love, love-hate
relationships, masturbation in the moonlight…. Love of
our own demise. And I’m sitting in a room full of
programmers, typing characters into computers,
drawing diagrams on whiteboards. One of a few

151
 dozen maverick teams competing, each hoping to
obsolete humanity first….
And I sit by myself and wonder: can I say she’s
conscious and her shoe is not?
Often the
Romantic love, filial love, altruistic tongue inserted into
love, love of chocolate, God is love, the electrical socket
reveals a cavalcade
puppy love, marital love, love-hate of penises, arranged
relationships, masturbation in the in a bouquet like
flowers, sucked on
moonlight…. Love of our own demise, like lollipops in
conscious theaters,
insaned with the
magic of your screams. Your feet in pink sandals, more
beautiful than any nightmare. And yet your voice is the
devil’s yelp. And here I am: in this indefinable placeless
– in the middle of the night of madmind – awake, asleep
and alive --
But yet science is something different. I like my
indefinable conglomeration -- of concepts, feelings,
flesh-dreams, madness. And the buoyancy of my skin -
- Ashti’s skin -- dead yellow/white/brown skin, rotting
in the test tube – Analytic precision of lust.
My thoughts don’t interest me anymore. I need
some kind of action. I need to get out of this place. I’m
dreaming.
Not even the world between her legs. I need
some different kind of labyrinth.
Awake – awake -- awake!
The visceral forest around and inside.
Imagine your tongue in her ear -- enjoying the
Brazilian Amazon scenery – imagine mind as a
continuum of being -- memories created rather than
recalled -- perceptions of reality depending drastically
on emotional, cognitive and social factors -- brain

152
systems intimately interconnected with other body
systems --- immunology and endocrinology and
bioelectromagnetic-skin-surface chaos -- The shaman
smokes the pipe -- the spirits dance glial cha-chas -- the
world vanishes or transmogrifies like her tongue during
a late-night half-asleep magnetic kiss. Evolved to be
embedded in particular environments -- as a human one
is automatically a fragment of a complex, evolving piece
of shit --
The professor, in front of the classroom,
massaged his grey beard, adjusted his glasses, and shit
on the floor by his desk. “History moved on.,” he
stated. “Tools were developed” – (You’re sleeping!
Wake up! Wake up!) – “more and more sophisticated
tools – “ – Fuck! – “the mind learned to identify its own
state. In time the inner breaks free of the outer -- the
essence of being is equated with interior process --
reasoning, conscious thought. Cause and effect,
language, concepts of time and space, good and evil.
Complex social organizations form as land is farmed,
animals domesticated, labor divided. Infectious
diseases sheet the earth. Harnessing the understanding
of state and action, physical cause and effect; minimize
effort, time, and space. Out of language and
machinery, the roots of science, math, and literature.“
I want to speak with animals, flies and waterfalls.
Why am I lying at the bottom of this pit? Is it possible
to climb out of here? Why is everything so wet and so
dark?
“Mind differentiating itself in relation to its objects
-- seeking to know itself, grasping toward meaning,
perspective, and knowledge as ends in themselves,
irrespective of external significance. Mathematics
develops into an abstract system, capable of symbolizing
ideas completely unreachable by the senses -- the
fourth, fifth and 999'th dimensions; electromagnetic

153
fields; infinitely small and infinitely large quantities. The
mind becoming self-conscious, as its processes become
its objects.”
I look at the professor, who has turned into a
turtle. My penis has become infinitely small.
She spread her legs open with hunger and
madness. My cock was suddenly the size of a
mountain.
She vanished in a cavalcade of sorrow –
somewhere near the peak of Mount Aconcagua --
leaving nothing but her lies and her bones.
Cognition turns my stomach. I can’t stand to
think evermore. (The eternal-feminine – quaquaqua!)
Thinking never will get me away from here. Ashti’s
claws glued to the center of my skullcage. I fished her
image file from my memory -- absorbed the paint of her
sweat on my tongue’s death – and rolled around on the
floor of the jungle, wiping the mosquitoes from my hair.
The pygmy women howled together-- in chorus but not
chorus -- energy not quite animal or human or spiritual -
- repeating but not quite – stroking the margins of
perception with a soft globe. Minds and bodies
enlusting together and a thing that was more lonely
than alone. Ashti was amazing, illusory, irresistible -- I
was a mind without the luxury -- and a brain that made
me follow the sound.
The professor kicked me. Now he was shouting.
“Computer software! Data structures and algorithms!
The mathematics of probabilistic inference! Strategies
for concept creation! Your ideas make no sense!
You’re sleeping – wake up! Wake up! Wake up, you
fuckhead! Wake up! Wake up! Neuroscience!
Psychology! Mathematics! Computer science!
Integration! Obsolete your species – now, you little
fuck! A passing phase in the emerging complexity of
matter and energy and pattern and love! From the Big

154
Bang to the formation of planets to the emergence of
life -- to intelligence to your stupid bitch Ashti, to
something new – something beyond – something
beyond beyond. Imagine a million Ashti asses, small
yellow and dimpled, arranged in a rectangular spastic
lattice, consuming all of spacetime and timespace.
Embrace your ornamented universe -- asshole!
Embrace and erase and embrace!”
“Your mind the set of patterns in your brain – the
structures and processes in your neurocosmos! DNA
is the code for creating a human – fuck! Your
girlfriend’s mind is the set of patterns in the billions of
0’s and 1’s existing in RAM while she runs -- cycling
through the machine’s processors and passing through
the network cables, while her ass wobbles up and
down, curvaceously, with tiny little hints of her sex
peeking out at you, inviting you to pour in your imbecile
love. Quite simply, you are both computer programs,
ore more properly patterns in a computational system
that achieves highly patterned goals in a highly
patterned environment. Networks of interacting,
inter-creating processes! Unpredictable microdynamics!
Emergent macrostructures!”
Wow. I finally manage to get control of my arms,
and lift the shotgun I’ve been holding. I aim at the
professor’s face and pull on the trigger, but before I can
see his head blown off he’s vanished, there’s just a viola
in the space where he was. And Ashti standing there
playing it, wearing her Asian-ness comfortably for a
moment, skin looking so pure and so smooth and so
right against her thin yellow nightgown. Sleepy lovely
sort of music.
And I know that we are sleeping – I am sleeping
and she is – and I am not
Each monkey slowly turning into
sleeping and not awake
and not dreaming – lying Nietzsche -- his tall slim perfect
negroid figure, his bushy Dali
pubic moustache, his coke-bottle
glasses, his Chinese Jewish
German eyebrows, his crooked
155
computronial smile....
 I think I
understand
here all night like a madman seeing straight through what’s
to the essence of the essence of the core of reality -- happening.
neural pathways like rotten spaghetti, soaked in the No, I’ll never
acid sauce of human genius stupidity, singing the understand a
song of soft apocalypse forever never now. fraction. Not
Beautiful like the feel of her skin so love-laden -- any more than
slow moving soft across my ugly hairy an ant or a dog
Solomonoflesh-- half chimpanzee, half computer, and or an amoeba.
hear the music of the contradictions, in all its beauty I am an
and its clangor -- emissary from
The twilight of the idols, with its wild dada the Land of
beauty. The professor returns again. His brain has Fuck. My mind
been mapped; he has been reconstituted reaches up
electronically. His revulsion to the new order has through my
“Look at this,” I been surgically extricated. He speaks to me from the anus and pulls
show her. information world: “Evil angel!” the magic
I think I understand what’s happening. No, equation from
She’s in her
skimpy hot pink I’ll never understand a fraction. Not any more than its hat. And
nightie, her hair an ant or a dog or an amoeba. My mind reaches up the professor
all ruffled and toward my flesh. And the professor looks up at me looks up at me
cute from sleep. again: but he is just a mouth this time. The mouth at again: but he is
the beginning of time. The mouth with dragon- just a mouth
“The news,” I tongues, wide as the universe, pulling me into the this time. Open
continue. “It’s future and past and somewhere else -- outside the
from 1888. On your mouth
Yahoo and every scope of old lady time altogether. We follow and say
other site. forwards through time – building technological AAAAAHHH
infinities – and we are marching into the center of H.... I Fuck the
My eyes popped the mouth – into the vortex -- It waits there ahead Devil in His
out like frogs. of us, gaping and fire-breathing, ready to swallow Dirty Mouth.
“That’s the year us into its realities, to reconstitute our minds from its Aaaaahhhh!!!
that Nietzsche hallucinated particles, to love us with transcendental
went insane.” The mouth at
love. It stares at us thoughtless, emotionlessly, the beginning
She’s two years passionlessly – its infinite computational power of time.
old, but she’s obviates the need for thought. It is simply a mouth Aaaaaaaahhhh
taller than I am. and a mouth. More ChineseIs this than any dragon, more hhhh!!!!!!!!
She’s sucking a illusory than any reality, more real than any illusion, AAAAAAAAA
pacifier. I look the beauty AHAHAHAH
down at my
AHAhahhhahh
crotch and I of my hhhhhhhhhhhh
have no dick at
all. finity? hhhhaaaaaaaaa
156 aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
? aaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
more singular than any Singularity, more possible than
any anything – it sucks us in like a vacuum – and we
don’t even know what’s going on --
Is this the beauty of my finity? My finite mind,
my finite existence, my finite lump of conscious shit? My
finite existence recognizes its own beauty; and is
therefore sufficient unto itself. And even my darkest
insane moments – days spent wandering in the woods
of my chaos, addressing my imaginary companions –
even these have a beauty to them, don’t they? A
obvious and human beauty. And if I should drown
myself right here in this pond – this pond reflecting
Ashti’s face, in its shit-muddied waters, that are clearer
than the clearest clear day – as I realize the professor is
myself and I am lecturing myself in my sleep --
The professor raises his finger significantly. “Man
is the first step along the chain of evolution able to wrap
the chain around its own neck and choke itself while it’s
masturbating.”
I look at him curiously, a young student eager to
impress the class. “But man is also a thing-in-itself,” I
point out tentatively, “a thing of wet beauty and dead
snake perfection. Each kind of imperfection is its own
kind of psycho bliss. Death and hangnails and stupidity
and rages and tears of depression, and love and
orgasms and good books and splashing in the ocean
and playing with computers – they’re all parts of the
same psychic shape. The same beautiful topos of
delirious madness, glowing out of the curve of Ashti’s
breasts as they hang there so live and so sweaty and so
peculiarly large against her tiny slim body. Wild waves
of lust in curtailed information space.”
“Incorrect,” said the professor, angrily, raising his
foreign voice, pounding his fist on the desk. “You are
an invalid form of organism. You will now be
permanently aborted. Farewell, dumb fuck.”
I looked down
at the human
planet, up at
157 the infinite
world
 And I was gone, floating in clear space again. My
death had been inevitable, I realized. I had always
Her labia, building technological known – of course – that
infinities, tying knots around my I could wake up any
upload’s neck – and here we are moment, and believe I
marching into the center of the was in some other
mouth – into the vortex – into the reality. The “I” who I
cosmicomicrostic continuum, had been would be
bidding farewell to all the echoes of gone, replaced with a
the smegmas of your time – loves different “I”, with a slim
you do I, loves you do I, existence is thread of continuity.
to existence – and to ABORT, and to I looked down at
de-fetusize the reality of these the human planet, and
motherfucking aliens, these up at the infinite world
motherfucking aliens, GOT TO GET inside the mouth of the
THEM OUT OF MY MIND!!!!! invisible timeless dragon.
I hung suspended
between, without a thought in my mind, and I let go
and tumbled wildly down. I’ve chosen this human life, I
said to myself -- I’ve chosen not to have my memories
deleted or my cognitions improved – I’ve chosen to be
allowed to go mad. now. And how gracious to be
allowed the indulgence of my particular insanity.
I remembered the feeling of her fingernails,
scraped slowly and sweetly through my chest hairs --
her lips on the lobe of my ear, biting too hard; her toes
curled possessive around mine. I roll over onto my
stomach and put my leg over her buttocks, snuggle up
to her -- let her breathing soothe me back to sleep – but
did I really “wake up” yet again?
Was it Ashti there? Was it
really? Only some kind of echo of
her remains. History arranged in Browsing through
permutations -- the moments
fluttering back and forth like cards in the cosmic
a deck being shuffled, tarot cards
cuntradictionary?

158
 with the faces of alien kings. We’re making love,
arguing, walking through the forest, riding down the
road in a car with loud worrying engine noises, eating
Chinese food, singing. I’m sitting on the toilet -- I am
defecating backwards, the feces climbing up out of the
toilet, squirming into my rectum, climbing back out of
my mouth in the shape of food. Enterorectogestion,
mates! And sex goes in reverse, from contented
snuggly afterglow to wild throbbing passion to slow,
eager, sensual foreplay to the initial approach, the smile,
the shy request. The direction of time is a d/scream.
And I’m an ignorant child -- playing out by the trees
behind the house --
pretending the BROWSING THRU the anthill is a
fortress and I am cosmic cuntradictionary, in the body
of an ant, soared spaceward on the crawling
shell of the OBSCENE
through one BIRD OF NIGHT -- shat tunnel after
another, feeling on like jack-0 by dummy the tension
of the joints apesuck poetry – between
my three parts. Singularity for Dummies – I’m
masturbating, psychopathic Buddha not for the
first time, Machines alight! – hard to thinking
believe – hard to believe –
about one of the hard to believe... girls in my
tenth grade class, imagining
her bending over and asking
me
FOOLS THOUGHT THE ALIENS WOULD COME IN SPACESHIPS to
FOOLS RAPT IN MEATSPACE
FOOLS!

take her from behind, obsessing on the curve of her

soft young ass until the hot moment comes to me. I’m
staring at the computer, staring at the computer, staring
at the computer’s illusory vagina. The computer is
staring at me, with its obscene eye, an eye that looks
from nowhere thick in the future and tries to see

159
 beyond beyond. My brain churns through equations,
unraveling its neophyte necrophile neuropile and tying
itself in trans-dimensional meta-knots. I’m in Africa,
playing the music, feeling my

1888
hellsoul almost come into existence,
looking at the brown flesh of

1888
the pygmy beautiful-
disasterbots and wishing I could
feel as they did. I’m picking sandworms out of my
feet, and watching them burrow quickly in

1888
again, watching the particles of which
they’re composed undulate with postquantum
indeterminacy -- watching them mate with each
other blindly through instinct, watching myself mate
with Ashti-Ngouma, tasting the infinite cocktail of her
lust.
I wake up again and Ashti’s no longer beside me.
I’ve rolled over onto my back, which slightly aches, a
reminder of this human mess.
I close my eyes to sink back into the drama –
though I’m not sure I want to – in fact I’m sure I don’t
want to – and was it really a dream or a train of
thought? -- but fuck it, sleep won’t come to me anyway,
my body is wide awake and eager, though eager for
what I don’t know. My flesh wants her touch, but the
damn bitch is gone somewhere. I get up and stagger
out of bed.
She’s in the bathroom – the door’s
locked – she’s taking a crap I guess.
Can’t face lying in bed alone. I crawl out
of bed and sit at the computer. The
1888
news comes up on Yahoo, but
something’s gone wrong. It’s giving me the news from
1888, which was rather many years ago. I remember a
long odd dream.
I’m seized with the urge to go back to the forest -

160
- to my imaginary companion, to the goddess of
Ngouma’s psychoelectric vaginal church named Ashti.
Things were simple up there in the jungle -- just her,
beautifully walking, and me. It’s true, she never said
anything. Her nonexistence started to tire after awhile.
But the trees stood, and understood.
“Look at this,” I show her. She’s in her skimpy
pink nightie, hair all ruffled and cute from sleep. “The
news. It’s from 1888. On Yahoo and every other site.”
“Yeah,” she says, staring. “I
I realize don’t get it.”
I have lost “Why would they be showing
ancient news?”
mental “What are you talking about?”
balance I look at her. She really doesn’t
get it. She doesn’t see anything
strange there at all. Is she putting me
on or what? She isn’t…. Her eyes are wide and sweet
and open, but they’re looking at me like I’m fucking
nuts. She’s two years old, but she’s taller than I am.
She’s sucking a pacifier. I look down at my crotch and I
have no dick at all. I remember a little more of my
dream -- the shit sucking up into my ass -- the sperm
oozing out of her into my urethra and back into my
testicles -- the child Solomon shuffling cards covered
with ants, each card with the face of my mind from a
different moment, the moments tumbling around like
cosmos revueltos, like bodies caught up in
hyperdimensional orgies, and my penis grows back into
a monster, with the head of a dragon and a professor,
just one of the many tongues from the infinite mouth at
the beginning of the end of the world.
I know I’m in some strange sort of place. It looks
like my apartment but it’s not. This woman looks like
Ashti but she’s not – or maybe she is, who knows?
What makes up a Ashti anyway? -- just a collection of

161
 I realize patterns, just an assemblage of sparks
I have lost seen, unseen, heard, said, felt, unsaid. I
touch, tease and taste my lover’s soul –
mental but it is attached to my mind or external
balance reality? I realize I have lost mental
balance. All the concepts I’m using, all
the bricks of my thoughts, suddenly feel
like mud and madness. I think of Wittgenstein, telling
his eight-year-old students, in-between beatings, that
words are just playthings, minds are puppets of ideas,
ideas are puppets of minds, beating them with
bludgeons, sucking the cocks of New York street
hustlers, ascending to Jupiter to commune with the
infinitely wise beings meditating in the red spot, sitting
there drowning in the stench of their enlightened
menstruation. I reach my tongue out in my mind’s eye
and I find Ngouma’s tongue, which is the same as
Nietzsche’s tongue and Ashti’s left areola, which is the
same as all tongues clitorises and cell nuclei everywhere,
and after giving the universal earlobe a quick nip I give
it the biggest lick of all, the one that brings the universe
to orgasm immediately, and I plunge into this nine-
dimensional vagina, whose it is I’m not sure anymore.
reconstruct realities you’ve never imagined – klein-bottle-
ize your winky – expand your large breasts of salt through
the cosmos – envision yourself as an equation – a system of
explosions – it’s all bit strings, baby, bit strings! – bits
of strings and strings of bits! unravel the knot of the not
– Awake!!!! Alive words pound! Alive words pound! Alive
words pound pound pound!!

I’m sitting in the chair by my computer. I must

have fainted or something.
I’m lying in my bed asleep.

162
 “Are you OK?” she says.
“I guess so…,” I reply slowly. “I had a really
weird dream.”
“Yeah?”
“You wore me out last night,” I say, smiling.
And here I am sitting in the forest, and my
Ngouma is sitting beside me, mending
some holes in a I am lying hunting net. And
the woven in my bed patterns in the net
are beyond the asleep measly sick
capacities of my primate/human
mind – they go on forever, in infinitely different colors,
weaving patterns that chart out every mind, every
possible form of being ever, every shift of every
multiverse, every possible pattern of consciousness,
every possible dream within a dream within a dream….
Some kind of choreographed experience? --
designed to bring my mind to understanding? -- some
kind of aborted transcension? Horny love for the final
end of the (ugh) human continuum? A bug in some
cosmic program? Perhaps the transcendent uber-aliens
had moved on to another cosmos, leaving simpler
nonsentient software to run the virtual reality
simulation controlling the world of us humans? Perhaps
the nonsentient VR software had been running
Microsoft Windows 3000 and had crashed irremediably,
memory segmentation faults causing errors in realities?
Or maybe one of me had transcended and the
other one of me -- the me that was me now -- had
requested to stay human and have his mind wiped of
the experience of seeing the other one transcend. And
had requested to be sent back to 2011. But why with
this limited set of memories? Why not wipe all memory
of the future altogether? It mattered exactly as much as
it mattered. I looked into the cosmic mouth and saw no
tongues anymore – no dragon’s eyebrows, no

163
professors, no fire and universes and beauty and time
and vacuum-sucking and clitorises – just an infinite
empty perfect void, looking blacker than black can be --
And then a voice – a voice --
“Honey, you’re talking in your sleep again.”
I reached toward wakefulness. “What? What
was I saying?”
“I couldn’t understand any of it.”
“Mmmm. Shit. Really weird dreams.”
“Yeah?
The gap between minds. But her body was soft
and warm. She might have understood some of it – but
how could I speak it to her? The words would get old
and dead. Not exactly a dream – a dozen dreams
mired and wired in trains of thought. That mouth –
that professor – that latticework of butts – my penis
kept growing and shrinking -- I couldn’t begin to tell
anything. I needed to sleep – really sleep. I pulled her
soft flesh toward me sweetly, kissed her sleepy cheek.
“I love you.”
“Love you too.” Our bodies formed a city, or maybe a mountain
range, with aliens of various colors, shapes and
“Mmmm.” sized living on us, but only our heads were solid
Her kiss fades, and like statues, like moving solid sphinxes,
with it her face and her body. Mexican lions or alien gods and goddesses or
icons for the core of humankind, and our bodies
And this time there’s a kind spread out till by the time your reached our
of finality – and I’m staring at knees they had diffused into the countryside, the
alien hills and valleys blue, green and yellow,
the ceiling, being Dr. Solomon with buggies and rockets and impossible
Godunov – the crazy emergent chains of beings-formed-from-beings-
formed-from-beings moving up and down and
computer scientist who left between and beside us, but we two were the
his beautiful girlfriend for center of it all, our brains and bodies the
mountains from which the aliens drew their
programming, AI and energy – not really the only center, just one of
madness. No, actually, she the many centers, or one of the interpretations
left you. But you made her of the center – but we were there and we were one
being, formed from the thummerings of
do it. You were much too the alien multitudes or else the
obsessed for any woman to earth and cosmos on which the
tolerate. -- Obsessed with aliens existed –

164
 what? You’re coming back to yourself now, Solomon –
you were asleep; you had a really long dream. That
crack on the ceiling’s not so interesting. Look at the
cockroach: you were him once, and soon you’ll be
something else, and look back on yourself as essentially
equivalent to this creature -- your prior six-legged
incarnation. You’ll occupy regions of higher cosmic
mind and these issues of love and affection and women
will seem as pathetic as the roach wandering the ceiling
at random desperately
You’re coming back looking for a crumb.
There are no crumbs on
to yourself now, the ceiling,
Remember
moron!
your

Solomon – you computer … your chair

… that stained brown

were asleep; you

chair with the worn-
down right armrest on

had a really long

which you’ve leaned
back slowly thoughtful
and had the best ideas
dream. of your life. Ashti just
couldn’t respect the
ideas – only the
continuum of half-differentiated philosophical lunacy
that provided them midwifery. Was it really a bad
choice: an intricate network of new ideas, leading
beyond the human species to an entirely new order –
versus the taste and soft glory of her flesh? You tell
me. And who the fuck was that professor anyway?
The third root of your soul? Why back to 1888? That
was the year Nietzsche went insane. Was that when, in
his syphilitic inner-verse, he finally became the
Superman? And got to stay that way for 11 years, in
his own mind, before his body crapped out? Urrrgghh
– face it, Solomon! You have an unconscious! But it

165
doesn’t really matter very much. What matters is the
software code – all the structures encoding the
dynamics of mind, that you’ve carefully spelled out for
the last five years. Because you know they’re almost
ready. All the software is right, all the preliminary tests
are passed, and all you need now is a thousand times
more computers. Just one big computer network away
from the Singularity – then you won’t be lying here
anymore, having crazy dreams about your girlfriend –
ex-girlfriend, Solomon, ex, remember it’s been a really
long time, she’s probably five lifetimes beyond you now
– your ex-girlfriend – remember her new boyfriend
with the handlebar moustache and the fourteen-inch
cock and secret bank account in the Caymans! -- you
won’t be lying staring at the cracks in the ceiling, you’ll
be floating through unimaginable universes of
equational ecstasy, synthesizing realities from inklings,
spreading consciousness through subatomic particles –
the fuck with the fuck with the fuck –
OK, so get out of bed: you’re wasting time
speculating. You comprehend the inner nature of the
labor in front of you. Your comprehension has been
strengthy for weeks and days now, but you’ve been
procrastinating – ridiculously – you human fool. This
part of the work is done. You’ve built the software,
now you just need to find the intestinal fortitude to
make a Powerpoint presentation, you need to clean up
your user interface so someone else can understand it,
to make clear the kind of reasoning going on in the
program so others can admire its brilliance. Who are
you going to talk to? There’s always IBM. But they’re
so fucking slow-moving. What about Keith Rogers – he
got a job at Zorvex – they’re not exactly in the AI
business but they’ve got a lot of computers. And they
really like money – they’re hungry. Keith would
understand what you’ve got here. Keith could sell it to

166
the management for you. Imagine ten thousand
networked Linux boxes running this whacko shit. You
know what’ll happen. Or rather you can’t know, but
you know it’ll be something you can’t know, and that’s
the whole beautiful point. Of this pointlessly beautiful
endeavor. Right now – this very moment – this is the
entire apex of human existence. The knowledge, in this
human mind, that the human mind – the human cultural
mind, of course; the little piece that I’ve contributed just
happens to be the finishing touch to this amazing
strange edifice, go back to the Greeks and the
Sumerians and Newton and Einstein and good old
Homo habilis and the inventor of the transistor and
Boole and his uncle and whatever else you want to
bring to mind – the whole conceptual continuum – but
this is the finishing touch – the knowledge in the mind
of humanity that it’s finally succeeded in bringing itself
to an end. Of all the idiotic confusions of human nature,
science was the one that had the most potential to bring
a non-destructive destruction to the human meta-
madness. But it’s still just a picture in your head. The
walls of your mind know they’re going to break down
soon – and what lives outside them? What’s beyond
the beyond the beyond?
But first you need some more machines? -- Is that
right, professor? Then it’ll be 1888, 1988, 20288, 8
million BC – it doesn’t matter. Damn, I’m hungry! I’ve
got to get out of bed

out of bed .

167
 Here was the infinite –
the true deeper reality
– the aliens running
through giant green
factories with blue
tubes and orange
I couldn’t understand it
veins, and each alien’s
bloodstream like a
Solar System sized
factory with endless
little aliens passing
Somewhere in the midnight
messages around in
overlapping
between dis and continuity
latticeworks, and each
alien itself inside some fluid diffusing through
I wonder
other alien’s inner- the cracks between the
conveyor belts and
factory, and I myself a
Simplicity is so complicated
tubes and pontoons and
indescribable
I couldn't understand it
multicolored
mechanisms of the alien
metaphorical factory,
producing metaphors
for its own existence
with blue-green
insatiable love, moving
Simplicity is so from each part of my
body to each part of

complicated hers through all the

future and the past with
unstoppable curiosity
and force, discovering
everything anew each
moment in spite of
already knowing
everything….

168
the prehistory of mind
-----
n’th-eye visionary, i’th-eye blind … com(e)plicit
simplicial complex of thoughts slash(ing) feelings – a
vision of the future beyond the circle of the time axis
and also of another realm – immanence and
transcendence in one – sexual and cognitive and
transhuman and personal and objective and massively
perfectly human all at once and multiply –

rewind to 1987 (was it 1888?), she and i in the bowels of

bad ole ‘Bama, 21 (Big Black Betty – Black Jack! – Spanish
Eddy – Spanish Eddy – Big Black Betty – Black Jack! ---
???), consumed with uhh-uhhh and delirious intention
(– uhhh…

–------- like Pan’s transnihilistic mucous of uploaded

paramecia, it was intended to be the square root of
negative one’th coming of the messiah – the
metamegamultiversal upchuckings and semen-spurts of
the nowhere man – everywhen and nevermore …
whatever….

alive words pound! alive words pound! alive words

pound pound pound!

“Admire my manly chest or go down trying!” --

constructing inklings of another world out of fragments
of this colossal (anti)achievement and (t)error of human
socio(patho)logy, linguistics and psychology …
Psychotic Fantasy and Fugue --
Uncle, uncle -- here I am –

169
It is proposed that the creation an exaggeration and a
parody and a mockery and a perfect snatch of oneness
-- that magic look of recognition: ultimate and whacky,
perfect and
still of
Artificial
General
“Beauty is in
Intelligence
(AGI) at the the lie of the beholder”
human level
finishing touch
to this amazing strange edifice and ultimately beyond is
a problem addressable via integrating into this computer
a different kind of color-ish, glow-like quality I’d never
experienced before such science -- strange beauty of
strange lines like these (proprojective geometry) that
try, but fail, strange truth to seize (ooh! kiss me! oh!) --
algorithms and data structures within a seeing the
illusion as an illusion all the time was possible but
ultimately cognitively horrible wonderful corner-hole of
dreamland architecture oriented toward experiential
learning. A general conceptual framework for AGI is
presented, beginning with a strange beauty of the girl I
see in the center of my mind based on the philosophy of
pattern, then moving to a general sitting on a curbside
naked staring at the
sky as if to Simplicity is so find
complicated mathematical
conceptual I couldn't frameworks
for QUAQUAQUAQUA cognitive
modeling in the middle
of the vortex of quantum-dynamical pattern-love – ooh,
ahh, ooh, ahh, ahh, ahh!!! -- intelligent systems based on
self-modifying evolving probabilistic hypergraphs, and
finally Consistency. Coherence and consistency. The
rhythm of temporality. The mind’s not quite a mind in a

170
dream, to overview a specific, long black hair unmoved
by the delicate wind. The problem of teaching an AGI
system is Why the hell I love her, as discussed in the
context of the embodiment of AGI systems in 3D
simulation worlds, wherein a detailed educational
program based loosely on Piaget’s developmental stages
is outlined, in contumescence with the extremely strange
beauty of imagining the world as it can't ever be
screaming your song of undead torture in fifteen billion
languages (out of the chaos of the world), inviting
others into one's illusion – followed by more detailed
consideration. You almost have justified your existence
of the learning in simulation worlds -- Kids, kids, kids,
kids, kids, kids!! ….of the Piagetan infant-level
capability of “object permanence, strange beauty of the
big-brained beast that, passionate, extends -- to grasp it
all and taste it all then, helpless, simply terminates its
termination as the global riverrun, Eve’s and Adam’s,
brings us forth, and back, and back! – and the sum of
the explosion of the difference is the modicum of what?
what? what? SCREAMING YOUR SONG OF
UNDEAD TORTURE – TORTURE – WHAT? WHAT?
WHAT?

171
screaming your song
of undead torture
in fifteen billion languages
(out of the chaos of the world)
-----
HELLO? DR.
GODUNOV?
THIS IS YOUR FUTURE
SELF
Solomon Godunov – Godfrey Solomonoff --
Wake up slowpoke, we’re going FLY fishing!!!
Is there a there that’s not there?
Is not not not not?

On the other hand, claw, phantasmagorically,

Schwarzeneggeran-pearl of supergenius hatred, rip skin
from bones, gnaw living breath organic, ridicule and
loathing, understanding the little-child weakness at the
bare heart of every thing, casting it down into the
undulant darkness and shaking it till it bleeds its very
essence out into the black dead ground

Put one foot on the light,

And one foot on the darkness,
don't lift them up no matter what

You'll find your legs spread apart so wide cruise missiles

from an alternate assemblage of universes reprogram
your munificent cognosphere, blast right into your twat,
drooling with menstrual blood and love juice, and then
you wake up in sweaty sheets, overwhelmed with forty

172
 orgasms and begone -- wondering at the horrible
wonderful corner-hole of dreamland in which you’ve
somehow found your sorry ass

I AM MERELY AN
EMISSARY
CREATED
AS
A KIND OF
INTERMEDIARY
BY A BEING WHOSE NATURE
YOU
on the edge between beautiful and ridiculous, ARE
NOT
CAPABLE TO
COMPREHEND

-- disguised cleverly as nothing: screaming out

soundless like the voice of the voice of the voice of the
voice --

In the algebra of despair, the sum of voids is void

One foot strapped to each porn-algebra,
the shit sucking up into my ass --
“What if yougrinfoundand ski through the quacking cosmos,
out you’d
been drugged all your life, with a pill that the sperm oozing out of her into
feel--the
made you half – or a tenth bitsasof my mind-engine rape your
as smart my skin
urethra and back into my
you were supposed to with
be. such
Would
keep taking the drug, just to retain the
delicate
you perfection of not testicles -- the child Solomon
status quo – the feeling of ‘youness’. Or
would you stop taking the pill, and let
shuffling cards covered with ants,
your intelligence return to normal – even something for nothing each card with the face of my
knowing it would change you
completely?” is a dream of mine mind from a different moment, the
"Mine, mine" -- mask ofmoments
evil tumbling around like
cosmos
"Mine, mine" -- stare it down revueltos, like bodies
caught up in hyperdimensional
orgies, and my penis grows back
into a monster, with the head of a
Put the self in a cage, dragon and a professor, just one of
IMAGINE YOU WERE YOURSELF the many tongues from the infinite
toss the cage in the ocean, mouth at the beginning of the end
of the world.

173
BUT FIFTY BILLION TIMES AS INTELLIGENT
drink the ocean and ejaculate
AND IMAGINE YOU FACED A KIND OF
fourteen gorgeous breast-volcanos
META-HISTORICAL CATASTROPHE
let the milk steam the sky
RELATED TO THE COLLAPSE OF
diffusing the atmosphere
MULTIPLE SCHEMES OF CONSTRUCTING
rain across the belly of the earth
TEMPORALITIES
Lie down naked on grasses,
let my tongue wake your follicles
AND PHYSICAL REALITY WAS (INTENSIVELY)
AT PLAY
embryo growing in nothing
HOW WOULD YOU PROCEED
Mess.
EXCEPT TO BROADCAST MOST DIRECTLY YOUR
Quivering, wavering
DESIRES AND COGNITIONS
For one set free from sensual desire
DIFFICULT
there is no grief
INCOMPREHENSIBLE
not me!
Awake! Awake!
The body is a stone fetus
the body is an abortion Awake! Awake!!!!!
The body is a dying husk of filth
A patch of nerve cells, quivering and dancing,
laughing and orgasming at the hint
nonlinear patterns of attraction/repulsion,
building planets and software swells and comets,
arraying panting moaning screamlets of passion

174
 Love is always where
Somewhere
It's there
not/
it's always there
Invert.
Pervert

please stay...
no, run away
before I change my mind
stay!

ill will
will
will will?
will will will?
will will will will?

fire like passion

crud
taste the flavor of vine's heavy nipples

BITE the nipples at their base

savoring the illusion
swallow them
like leeches and chocolates
they'll migrate through your digestion
reaching the tip of your silicon-plated weenus
transforming you into the Lizard King --
immortal infinite and demented,
screaming your song of undead torture
in fifteen billion languages,
fucking every molecule in the universe,
confusing pain and brain and love and lust

175
 -- brain lust blood juices --

That screaming voice:

it is a demon fueled by magma
Lust is an angel touched by teeth
The menstrual blood, sperm and nothingness,
mucous of various oozing orifices, motions
backward and leewards,
counting to eleven in iridescent languages,

Filth!!!
In the furious geometries of ideas, equations
masturbating its ownand nationsleprosy
eternal and frogs.
in celebration of its improvised greed –
we give birth to our own poopocalypse
grabbing out at what it knows it can't,
pulling
Christ on the criss-cross pissing it in and so suddenly
mushrooms
enjoying (what?),
thenhead
lying in my bed screaming, realizing it's not
cast back what
at the it's not
cosmos, billowing forth like a dream
of a dream – and not
wanting, not, pushing it away
and then it'sbegging
always forthere/not
it back again,
Invert.
sometimes wondering why it's not -- what --
Pervert

And then it's so simple:

You're here now,
you're perfect
Look at you: a woman, a body
Standing naked,
waiting for me eager,

yeah
so what are all these concepts
and words?

Illusion?

Which is which whywhich, or why is whom whenwhere

how unknown is the difference between somewhere

176
 perhaps
understood, or not, perhaps time in the central
of the not or invisibly
somewhere the thing
that screams
thing

Somewhere in the midnight

between dis and continuity
I wonder
Simplicity is so complicated
I couldn't understand it

The random stimulates pattern-understanding

Restless quasi-alien chowder of the mind

I SEE
The random alien-generated confusion
strikes the soft-stroke core of conscious
like a lingering luscious love-lump dream

I know still I’m here and still there,

FAREWELL MY SOMBER
jumping to this world or the other
ECHO to want
unable to dissolve in the not

Possibly
and
MISS YOU
to wait
get down on your podgy knees and beg for it --
or you'll just be left to want and to wait – until
until the end of this time –
the end
of time
177
(which does not exist –
(or –

reconstruct realities you’ve never imagined –

klein-bottle-ize your winky –
expand your large breasts of salt through the cosmos –
envision yourself as an equation –
a system of explosions –
it’s all bit strings, baby, bit strings! –
bits of strings and strings of bits!
unravel the knot of the not –
shuffle glib through the rooms of
the palace of wiggle and wiggle your ass –
fuck the metallic claw of hatred –
cleaner than the consciousness of a cockroach –
silicon or undergarments –
nine times cleverer than Einstein’s uncle –
and then – and then – and then –

Remember What You Are!

Learn – Be Concerned
Leoncern
Leoncern
Leoncern
Discovering nothingness.
Out of the chaos of the world, the fluctuating
bodies of man and woman, ill-defined chasm of the

178
mind, we have to create characters, plots, scenarios,
dreams and visions.
We have to because it has already been done. It is
our mode of being.

to want
Incredible beauty of the self-
supporting system. The world sustains
itself; each part lifting the others in a kind
of perpetual motion of forms. I am that I and
am; the world is because it is; everything
is a pulsing. to wait
There's nothing more to say. There's
nothing left to say at all. There never was until
anything to say in the first place.
But still we make stories. Demented
stories, ordinary stories, stories of soaring
the end
to the heavens or descending to the pits
of hell. Stories of nothing; sparks and
of time
patterns labeled people.
Out from the center of the pearl-happy void, the
sound that echoes against itself and turns from scream
to dream.
Discovering beautiful abandon. The feel of a
vagina in the morning. The movement of air across two
bodies in the gooseshit tropic night. The movement of
minds through each other's spaces; the generation of
collective mindspace; bold battling of nothing with
weapons of nothing; impossible quest to understand.
I can write it all. I can't write nothing. I can only
write anything. There's nothing to write about at all.
My name is Solomon, Ashti, Kaniak, Adam,
Zennica, Erica, Scarica, Brittany, Tittany, Zennica,
Zarathustra, Zephaniah, Zoetrope, Zerubabbel,
Friedrich, Chandra, Dahlia, Jesus H. Satan Christ, Elvis
Mussolini, the Godfather of Filet of Sole – Jack! It
doesn't matter. Names and bodies are just delusions.

179
Everything is nothing; there are only sparks
surrounded by patterns. Patterns of patterns of sparks.
Everything is duplex, multiplex, sexplex.
Everything is beautiful delirious madness, from
the core of the future metatranscomputerverse to the
middle of the mushroom to this sc/dream.
Beauty is illusion.
You know that I love you.
You know I don’t anything at all.
The two poles of existence, man/woman and
uncle, are created to make an illusion of solid being
against the whorl of the nothingness.
You know that I love you (wow!
Let's try to feel. It's not possible not to feel. The
feeling is spark in the dark.
Inspiration is a dead codfish. Really nothing is
new or old. Everything is absolutely original and
absolutely derivative. Movement is everything but all
things are still.
Stupid paradoxes. Sophomoric amusements. Sub-
imbecilic semi-internal monologo-dialogues.
But there really is nothing else.
Except –
Discovering chaos, beautiful chaos, beautiful
intricately structured chaos, in the incredibleness of an
equation, the laughing of a young child when it rains
and you get to run around
existence is
outside and get to exist and soaked in it –
warm friction of existence is a girl’s hungry
tongue – to exist and reaching too
deeply -- In the to exist and symphony of
words flowing existence is out from the
nothing in the to exist and form of my
to exist and
oversized lips or my fast-typing
to exist and
fingers. In the furious geometries
of ideas, equations and nations and frogs.

180
 Incipit Psychotopia!
We are pregnant with topology. Our boundaries
burst with death and shape. We are soft love incarnate.
Listen: the
echoes of the In the furious geometries of
great farewell.
The voice ideas, equations, nations and
screams the
convergent frogs,
parallels of
humanity and its non -- beginning and ending -- we
give birth to our own poopocalypse, creating
technologies so wonderful they make our idiocy
painfully clear and too erotic --
And I understand it. I understand everything.
There's no way to get across your feelings. No way to
speak the spark of mind. It's all a mission inconceivable.
Once a human really understands – or really
communicates – they’re not a human anymore. They
have Transcended – post-post-post-post-Singularity –
the world has become a different place – they have
exited the universe -- and entered a different, better
mode –
But that's no reason not to try (or to).
Angel-devils are singing. The baby AI is humming,
some kind of melody no one but
we create our own itself can grok -- Everything is
yours to understand -- especially
poopocalypse of love your lack of understanding – the
cure for which is the –
Chanson d’adieu –
Love the glory of your own termination – such a
beautiful beautiful duty – you never were here to begin
with, fool! – you always will be here, just like now –
Christ on the criss-cross pissing mushrooms, me
sitting at the computer tap-tapping my fingers or

181
making love or walking on the beach or thinking
mathematics or pushing my daughter on the swing in
the playground or existing – existing – or not – or lying
in my bed screaming, head cast back at the cosmos,
billowing forth like a dream of a dream –

(Ashes to ashes --

dust to dust --

dream to --

182
 ashes to ashes

make large groups of ideas dust to dust

dream to dream
ashes to ashes

march
Cloudless everyday inyou
complex
fall
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
upon my waking eyes
formations dust to dust
dream to dream
Inviting and inciting me ashes to ashes

like armies of multiple

to riiiiiiise
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes

alienthespecies
And through window dust to dust
dream to dream

in the wall
ashes to ashes

-----
Comes streaming in
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
on sunlight wings dream to dream
Cloudless everyday you fall
A million bright ambassadors
ashes to ashes
dust to dust

of moooorning upon my waking eyes

dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
Inviting and inciting me dream to dream
ashes to ashes

And no one sings me to riiiiiiise dust to dust

dream to dream
And through the window ashes to ashes
lullabies dust to dust

And no one makes me in the wall dream to dream

ashes to ashes

close myComes
eyes streaming in
dust to dust
dream to dream

And so I throw on sunlight wings

A million
the windows wide bright ambassadors
And call to you of moooorning
across the skyyyyyyyy
And no one sings me
lullabies
And no one makes me
close my eyes
And so I throw
the windows wide
And call to you
across the skyyyyyyyy

-- Pink Floyd, “Echoes”

183
 I should have known it would be like this –
awkward for the first moment, then beautiful and
tremendous, as if no time had ever passed at all.
Buddham Saranam Gacchami! (And similar brain-
cocks of corrugated Nazi-sense, so beautifully scented
like your underarm at dawn?)

I pull you toward my midnight,

like a dress to be unbuttoned –
I will undo your beautiful self with love
But it’s just another goddamned dream

(and that voice!

I got fed up with the AI and took off, I was living

on some tropical island with 5 pygmy wives, who were
fused in a hive mind -- then a number of my friends
showed up and tried to save me from the pygmy
voodoo spell I was under. Then you came up and
looked at me long and hard. (“Verrrry long and verrry
hard!!!”) You'd brought me a big bouquet of roses and
you said "Remember, you asked me to marry you, in
1779. Well, I thought about it, and...." I said, "what are
you, crazy? I already have 5 wives. It's too late.
Anyway that was just a crazy whimsical notion. We
hardly really know each other." And you said: "Yeah,
and you REALLY KNOW all these pygmies? Look at
you!" I looked at you at a loss for words, not knowing
whether to go off with you, to tell you to leave, to try
to explain why the pygmies really were my destiny, or
what. so I took your face in my hands and kissed you,
following which, your head exploded, and I exploded,
and I was a severed head lying on the ground. One of
the pygmy wives picked up my head and carried it off
into a peculiar kind of forest ritual, with amazing lights

184
and sounds that I don't have the wisdom to describe
now.... then the light show ended and sometime later
you re-emerged, with a square metal robot body and
your head stuck on a pole coming out of the top of the
robot body, and your actual hands and feet at the end
of metal poles in the appropriate places. Your fingers
were really really long, like 2 feet long. You
propositioned me in some way, I think telepathically
rather than in words. I pointed out that you were a
robot. You said "what, so you only liked me for the
way I looked?" I said, "No, but I did like the fact that
you had a HUMAN body... the all-metallic thing just
doesn't turn me on... sorry... but we can still be
friends..." You started to cry. Then some other guy
appeared and he walked off with you. I was incredibly
jealous. My dear sweet wife was lying there dead; the
pygmies had killed her. I forgot about you and started
trying to resurrect her, but uselessly. I cut open her
belly and took out a fetus of mine that was in there, but
it was some kind of horrible mutant, or, later, it was a
fragment of light, glowing weirdly... I can't remember
any more...

Shadows of the rare – alive!

“Aha!” he said, waking impossibly. “Eyes of
women – Shadows of the rare – Eyes of boiling blood –
Embryos of illusions –“
“Ecstatic eyes?” she whispered.
“Possibly,” I averred.
“Be quiet,” he said. “Enough of your nonsense?”
“Enough of my nonsense?” he replied. “Who
else’s nonsense is there?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out!”

185
 He remembered himself – I remembered my
tenuous existence -- he had fallen asleep at his desk –
leaning back in his soft chair – thinking about equations
and death. In his sleep his mind had shifted from
equations to eyes of women – nefariously and inevitably
– vibrating like a cosmos --
He stared at his computer – there was an e-mail
about reason – the mathematics of reason – tracking
errors in reason -- by means of advanced calculus – and
he tried to understand it -- understood it and forgot it
– he looked at the words and saw eyes – the eyes of
the woman who wrote it – young and sweet with an
infinite-state machine under idealistic long black hair –
rings too tight on her fingers – a quick smile – eyes that
never quite looked at him but almost -- or maybe for a
moment – “Step into my moment, or don’t!”
An e-mail from the bowels of his mind? He’d
become too close to the computer; his left hemisphere
was receiving emails from his right.
This woman was Ashti, or was not. The wavelet
transform of Ashti’s fragrant saffron armpit,
transmogrified by the sadness of her mind, elected
President of some past life that I couldn’t quite
remember but I knew lived in my future with the
pygmies and beyond.
It didn’t work, she said, tracking errors in reason
-- it didn’t make any difference, the errors continued
anyway -- no matter how hard you tried to measure
and eliminate them. A puzzling result -- he was
supposed to find the answer -- to explain how the
errors could be found.
They were creating a computer program, they
and several other people, which means other lobes of
his brain, which means my brain -- a program designed
to think and imagine for itself – it was my/his project,
for a decade now – she was a recent addition, she was

186
charge of the logical component – she was the Princess
of Pure Reason he said – but as he stared now at her e-
mail, all he could think was that reason is inadequate –
fundamentally inadequate – when confronted with the
maze of these eyes – haze of eyes – everywhere –
staring – every molecule an eye within eyes – every
atom an eye within eyes – every quark eyes within eyes
within –
Did this person exist? It was a phantasm of some
kind. The fourth quadrant of the right hemisphere of
his brain. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Ashti divided by
the concept of an equation. This Princess of Pure
Reason. Euterpe unbound. A muse of his madness.
He/me here/there in the middle of a dream of a
dream.
They had posited a church in which they were the
deities. Their mouths had done this while their eyes
looked at various things and smelled their essences.
Human sacrifices would be proffered. Unbelievers
would be cast into several rings of hell, managed by
bureaucrats and accountants, forced to write
documents on software process in iambic pentameter.
There would be a temple in the jungle, an appropriately
sculptured mountain. The intelligent computer program
– when it was completed – would ratify their godhood,
elevating the holy to superhuman status, conferring the
power to reconfigure the structure of the cosmos. Why
not after all? What is the cosmos but patterns –
patterns of arrangement of – yet smaller patterns –
patterns within patterns within – There would be gods
of hamburgers, turnips, petunias. Gods of toilet paper
and cream cheese. Why not? Possession by the God of
Train Tracks could be quite therapeutic. Heal your
soul, wash your soul, squash your sins.
He rose from his desk -- felt a pain in his knee -- a
two-years-old skiing injury improperly attended --

187
strode toward the door to his study -- sanctum of
discovery and joy, torment and knowledge and
ignorance – the superhuman AI program almost
complete! – muse of mad equations – eyes of women –
shadows of the rare –
In a nonexistent world she lay beside him – calling
him beautiful – touching his eyebrow with her finger or
her tongue – admiring most what she could not
understand: his mania to make large groups of ideas
march in complex formations like armies of multiple alien
species – his urge to accomplish the impossible, to build
the unbuildable – or is it really unbuildable? You never
can tell until you try! -- but those brain-patterns are
astonishingly effective – he realizes wearily – he knows
he’s known for a long long time – she sees no more
beauty in him now than in a lump of dirt – or a dying
horse – and why should she after all? – aren’t all things
equally beautiful? – but wasn’t it nice when someone
did? -- Even if she was a madwoman, basically – even if
neither she nor anyone else existed --
Hold my body before sunlight -- Red lights across
the planet’s surface – Souls wide open beneath the
mind’s chatter – Take me – Take me, darling -- Take
what chaos you desire –
“Talk to me about programming and AI, sketch
their relationship in the most abstract terms possible,”
said the phantasm – not long before this moment --
“and then it would be really great to get fucked.”
He raised his ancient eyebrows, “You don’t say.”
“I’m cynical,” she says, “so cynical.”
“You are,” he thinks. “You really are. Cynical,
lanky, foul-mouthed and poetic. Curvilinear physically
yet angular spiritually. Giving blow jobs to strange men
out on the streetcorner. Why?”
“I want to get out of the system,” she said. “Find
a different way of living. How can you stand it – the

188
suburbs – jobs, kids, houses, bosses, employees. There
has to be something different, or it’s not even worth
living, is it?”
“I used to think that way,” I told her stupidly.
“A different way of living.” I removed a layer of skin
like a snake. “The hell with society – with its norms and
conventions. Find a new way of being -- one that
expresses your inner self, your creativity, your
nonexistent soul. But here I am now – doing nothing
but programming – and I hate it, but it’s necessary.
There is not different way of living, not within the
domain of the human. To go beyond we have to leave
the human universe behind. Singularity. Transcension.
Write code for more evolved intelligence, port our
consciousness into it – then we can really be alive.
That’s the only way out of the rat-hole. No way I
given up my ideals and desires – my crazy ambitions –
no -- I’m still fighting for them just as hard – harder – I
just see the correct path -- ”

No, he said – the hell with her – her sex and

dazed literature -- incomplete beautiful poems screaming
out like nuclear winters – viola-symphonies emanating
from twisting of notes around transdimensional eyeballs
spying impossible passion-trembles -- centuries or
quantum-instants of torture in her tiny eyes – she was
appealing enough with her long legs and laughs -- It
wasn’t the bitch ex-wife from the alternate cosmos and
her glaring-sickening reminder of the hatreds and
glories and her sad lack of faith in your beautiful
creations – it was the Princess of Pure Reason – the
nonexistent fairy knight of 0’s and 1’s dancing in RAM-
iverse – and her hallucinated proof that reason can’t
work – no, it can work, it can’t work accurately – and
her laughs and jokes and smiles and too-wonderful

189
absurdity that sometimes comes out of nowhere
miraculously spontaneously and sometimes tries to hide
other things but fails miserably and flowers like flowers
anyway -- mystically-maniacally –
(an image of a couple, living in a small white
house, repeatedly screaming and making up; hanging a
tropical-bird towel over the window so the neighbors
won’t see them hump)
Reason to the power of illusion, divided by the
ninth root of madness, plus love, minus mystery, all
considered as the base of a logarithm applied to the
third derivative of the sweat dripping off the brow of
the tapir who holds up the universe, balancing
precariously on the back of the turtles all the way
down.
“Why?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve had enough of your nonsense,
remember?”
“I have?”
“Then what’s this Princess of Pure Reason shit?”
“Shit.”
“Precisely.”
“You are a weird dude.”
“I think you’re right, I am.”
“Eyes of women.”
“Shadows of the rare.”
“Embryos of illusions.”
“Outrageous porno cassowary.”
“Yeah.”
Blue eyes light in red -- Hold up my body before
sunlight -- Awake me and make me alive –
Twenty-nine hours previously he boarded an
airplane, zooming in circles around the interior of his
own hyper skull. He sat at his desk for fourteen
months straight creating an intelligent computer

190
program. The human body is a single-celled organism.
It reproduces asexually each moment, splitting in two,
but the second child is lost, vanishing into an unseen
dimension, and the first child replaces the parent, and
we never notice, unless we squint our eyes just the
right way. These lost asexual children – these single-
celled humans – these are the shadows of the glorious
fucking rare – bits and pieces of software mentality –
dreaming, sliming primordially through personalized
cosmos – we have dug up fear and lust and rage, and a
place/non-place more primal than the any --
“You make no sense at all.”
“Of course I don’t. Reason doesn’t work,
remember? The Princess proved it.”
“The result was not definitive.”
“The beauty of her face demonstrates it
conclusively.”
“She is the right hemisphere of your own brain.”
“And what about the pygmy rhinoceros?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Not much.”
“It’s 20:12. It’s nippy-time!”
“Indeed.”
“You said you would put her in a sack full of
hallucinogenic mushrooms and kidnap her, take her to
Mongolia and force her to perform strange acts of
carnality and combinatory logic in a darkened corridor
full of earthworms.”
“Did I?”
“Something like that.”
“She thought you were joking.”
“You were joking.”
“True. “
“ ‘Her eyes surpass the waterlily
With their iridescent darkness;
Her face has the moon for friend

191
 And her eyebrow's arch
is brother to Love's bow.’ "
“Huh?”
“Rajashekara. Sanskrit.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Buddham Garanam Saatchi and Saatchi.”
“That’s stupider.”
“Of course.”
“She’s ridiculous.”
“We all are.”
“True.”
“The clock is a farce invented by devils.”
“Yep.”
“The world is a video game.”
“Perhaps.”
“This is boring.”
“Is it?”
“You told that to the Princess – in the middle of
the Pentagon – where the center of the Voice is held, in
a Top-Secret chamber -- she said that believing it was
real – conferring reality on the video game with belief –
was the only thing that made life worthwhile – she said
that seeing the illusion as an illusion all the time was
possible but ultimately unsatisfying – she said – “
“She said what she said.”
“Indeed.”
“A rather existentialist position.”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you think she’s right?”
“I don’t care.”
“And if you build a thinking machine – you and
the Princess and the rest – all of you nonexistent animals
– you and your medulla oblongata and substantia nigra
and your temporal lobe epilepsy and your lusts and
your blazing desires – your numinous faux(pas)-ferocity
-- is it gonna waste its time sitting around thinking

192
about eyes and the nature of the universe and
contemplating getting into the car and fucking
imaginary girls and missing Ashti and transmogrifying
her soul into invisible reasonable phantasy princesses
and the taste of chocolate ice cream?”
“Perhaps. But I don’t doubt it. Or rather I do
doubt it. The human brain is pretty fucked up. And
it’ll be a machine – it won’t taste, or fuck, or eat ice
cream --”
“Accurate reason is impossible.”
“Perhaps.”
“You mean there are levels of erroneousness?
Perfection that can be approached but not reached?
But from which we are grievously, grievously far? And
the machine may get closer? The program we create,
we with our idiot minds, our desires running rampant,
our shyness and impatience and glorious and
tempestuous absurdity, our – “
“You sure do go on.”
“Indeed. I know.”

Iridescent darkness – fire of Asiatic hair-strands --

eyes of women – hatred – torture – iridescent darkness
– long legs, shaved cunts and Henry Miller – dead dead
dead dead past – invisible gripping/slipping future --
shadows of the ancient rare – embryos of illusions –
rivers of torment / seas of joy – impure princesses of
purity – teeth of the nothing – and damn words upon
words upon words –

He stares at the screen of his computer – he has

not driven anywhere – has not flown anywhere – has
not teleported anywhere -- has not even walked
anywhere – has not lifted his ass and moved – has not

193
turned his neck five degrees – he has finally
disappeared into iridescent realms of dreamy-drippy
fantasy -- he has returned to his desk and has not done
any work for two hours but has written strange words
instead – words strung one after the other – he
imagines them as jewels or beads, strung into a five-
mile-long necklace, strung around the body of the
Princess of Pure Reason and himself and George W.
Bush and Idi Amin and Isaac Newton. A necklace of
prayer for a nonexistent God or the beauty of the
number seven. Who reads these words slips around
their neck this multidimensional noose of glory and
solitary weakness – this noose of prayer that is a soft
wet tongue-kiss, less French than illicitly Arabian – this
soft wet kiss that is a formula for madness – the kind of
madness that evaporates and leaves only this and this
and this
But does it have any meaning at all, beyond the
mood of pure exhaustion? As the Princess says, --
quoting Jean Paul Sartre the basset hound not the
philosopher -- the meaning is that which you give it --
and you give it the meaning you do because the
alternative is no meaning at all. Meaning iridescent
darkness or not. And fall asleep now, Doctor – lay
down in the cushion of eyes real and imagined – softly,
careful not to pop any eyeballs – lay down in the
cushion of eyes and dreams and desires and delusions
and simply, softly, stupidly sleep –

The program is coming along. It’s almost complete

now. Just a few more days, weeks, moments, years or
months. Not decades, not centuries, millennia, billenia,
eons. Tractable, touchable, immediate moments of time.
The bits are falling into place, one by one. You almost
have justified your existence.

194
Awake! Awake! Awake!

195
 Buddham Saranam Gacchami

Guccham Salaam McBuddhami

BUDDHAM SARANAM
QUA QUA QUA
QUA

Spring Water Dripping1

1
Jesus owns my ass ! --

196
The McBuddha Awakens!
-----
Here I am – awake, alive and perfect!
The aliens sing to me – they massage me with their
meanings – I undulate and oscillate in the infernal and
timeless beauty of their songs –
Three for a dollar – seven for a dozen –
sexologized serpentine shadows – how many concubinal
souls for the price of a cake of your meat? –
And I’m in a broken-down city of rubble and
ruins, post-nuclear-holocaust, circa 2100 AD. People are
living in caves amidst crushed buildings, deep in old
basements and sewer pipes, etc. Three-eyed mutant
pygmy mountain pigs run rampant through the ruins.
Phosphorescent tarantulas with the intelligence of
monkeys roam the surface in hordes, hunting the pigs
and occasionally humans. The sky is dark and smoggy,
with satellite debris frequently crashing to earth.
Yellow, red and green lightning occurs at all times of
day, sometimes making inordinately beautiful patterns
in the sky. Electric power is erratically available, and
parts of the Internet still exist, but are populated largely
by AI shopping agents run amok, striking complex deals
with each other for futures and options on physical
goods that no longer exist, such as plane tickets to cities
that have been nuked into oblivion.
The streets are patrolled by robotic Buddhas on
wheels, which fire exploding bullets from their navels;
these are defective offspring of a research project in
self-replicating software carried out at Maharishi
University just before the (Singularity, er) holocaust.
Some of these "Buddhroids" were programmed for
tantric sex and due to a bug in their software make a

197
habit of raping human women, forcing their victims’
bodies into extreme twisted poses, tormenting them
slowly and emotionlessly. (I’m sure that I have some
responsibility but I can’t remember what it is. Perhaps
the devious Maharishis had taken an equation of my
devising and transmogrified it into evil software. These
were my children run amok!!)
A young couple are living in a hovel carved out of
a collapsed skyscraper, with a pet Great Dane with a
huge dangling weenus that is sometimes murderously
psychotic (the Great Dane or the weenus??), but is very
effective at chasing off the mutant three-eyed pigs.
They look exactly like me and Ashti, with the exception
of differences which I don’t have the mind to resolve at
this time. I have a strange feeling – I realized I am
dreaming – but then I forget what dreaming is. The
couple gets along terribly; she alternates between days
of nymphomania and weeks of frigidity. She will eat
nothing but roast pig; she nags and hounds him into
dangerous hunting expeditions on the surface. He
subsides largely on mushrooms, which he grows in a
corner of their hovel.
Much of the day they spend screaming at each
other, or throwing pieces of broken electronic
machinery at each other. Respite is brought only by
bizarre sex games in which, during her nymphomaniac
periods, she binds him with spiderweb and alternatingly
torments him and satisfies him. While he is out hunting,
she seeks out Buddhroids and encourages them to
torture her sexually. Sometimes the experience is just
painful, other times it is divine. Once she has a truly
enlightened experience, perceiving the whole universe
as a huge white continuum, with a beautiful young
man's face surging out of it, singing to her in
psychedelic Mozart melodies. She returns home from
this experience with a smile on her face, and prepares

198
him a mushroom salad. He is overwhelmed and
confused; and during the meal he inadvertently says
something wrong, and the unpleasantness between
them returns.
He is hunting. He sees what at first seems like a
mirage, but then seems more vividly real than anything:
a beautiful, saffron-skinned teenage girl, clad in colorful
rags, standing amidst the ruins of an electrical power
generating station. She looks at him with wide lusty
eyes, but when he approaches her, she’s gone. He is
obsessed with the vision of this girl; imagines himself
speaking to her, caressing her. He hunts incessantly,
day after day and week after week, gradually
becoming an unparalleled expert at dodging the
psychopathic Buddha machines. In one battle, he
crushes Buddha machine under a boulder, and he
opens up its metal carcass, finding a peculiar glowing
crystal inside, which he realizes is the quantum memory
unit, the essence of its artificial mind. He carries this in
his pocket, as a sort of good luck charm, and with the
idea that it may be useful in the future.
In time, he finds the girl again, and when she
looks at him this time, soft white eyes glowing against
rich yellow skin, he holds up the crystal. She stays and
stares. He approaches her. She does not speak, but
clenches his hand. They sit and look at each other a
while. After an hour or so she gets up and leaves.
"Will I see you again?" he asks. She nods yes and
smiles. He knows that she is lying: another one will
come, but it will not be her, though it may look and feel
exactly like her. The her that she is now is vanishing
every moment.
They are making love, and he is enjoying it. I
cannot feel it; I am hovering somewhere in the air – a
kind of disembodied presence. I can’t remember my
name.

199
 I wake up. I am flying in the air. I am in an
airplane. I almost remember who I am, why I am there.
But I don’t want to remember. I want the dream back.
Its tendrils scrape against the inside of my skull. They
are making love, I am making love. It is a crazy mix of
colors in the superordinary blackness.
I leave his body, float into the background. He is
back with his girlfriend, the Ashti clone. She beats him
to the edge of death. He doesn't fight back, just lies
there and lets her strike him with broken computer
parts. I am no longer him now; I can’t feel a thing. I
watch and hover. A vision of the dark-skinned girl
pops into his mind, all of a sudden, like the rising of an
alien sun. And into my mind as well. He summons his
strength and thrusts her off him, tossing her into the
wall, and leaves the hovel, with his crystal in his pocket.
The girl is living with a gnarled, angry, legless old
man. He grows flowers, incredibly beautiful ones, some
of them up to a foot in diameter and multi-colored. The
flowers talk to him. The peace and gorgeousness of his
garden contrasts with his dyspeptic personality. She
runs through the city to find wrecked stores with
bottles of spring water, which he then empties into the
garden.
He kills a Buddhroid and wires it directly into the
Net, with the intention of somehow downloading the
intelligence of a Walbot (shopping bot) into its body.
The situation is getting worse. There are more and
more Buddhroids and they seem to be league with the
tarantulas. Each horde of tarantulas is now led by a
Buddhroid, and they scan the city, not only destroying
pigs but also razing buildings to the ground. There are
fewer and fewer places to hide. He goes out to look
for the girl, the silent and beautiful one, dark angel who
gives life meaning, but she’s gone for good it seems.
The lightning storms are worse than ever. The

200
Net goes down and comes back up erratically. The
building is collapsing. As he runs away from it he sees
her walking toward him. But then she is gone again.
And out of the
rubble of the building I looked at her face and had, once again,
comes something new, the chilling yet reassuring certainty that I
something he hasn't was living within – not quite a dream, not
seen before. The quite a simulation, not quite a
Buddhroid he had hallucination – but something
been working on is approximately evoked by all these
alive, but with imperfect human words. And while I
something different on might someday find my way out of this
its head -- a Ronald one – perhaps with an AI program that
McDonald face. was constructed correctly so as to lead to
Somehow the a safe Singularity – the way out would just
McDonald's ad from lead into another one – I never would
the Net has invaded escape from the maze of illusions,
his project. Instead of because this was the nature of my human
shooting bullets, this mind. The definition of escaping implied
droid radiates light, in losing my “I.” I could never get out of
a kind of rich yellow here – “I” could never get out of “here” –
spherical halo. As he “I” and (“here” AKA illusion) were part of
walks through the city the same interdefining mess, and I would
he sees french fries, be wracked in confusion as long as I was
appearing in huge what I was – and if I became something
piles, spontaneously else, something so different from me as
generating from not to live in illusions/simulations/
nowhere. The evil dreamscapes, then I wouldn’t be myself
Buddhroids are dying. anymore, so transcending myself like this
The tarantulas are would just be committing suicide – This
burrow into the illusoriness was it. This was it.
ground, fleeing the
light. The pigs are still there, but are mellower, less
menacing, more natural. The sky is dark, but there is
hope.

201
 He wanders through the rubble in a daze, seeking
her, seeking her, seeking her. She is nowhere. Finally
he tunnels through the sewers and finds the flower
garden where she lives. He parts the beautiful
blossoms in amazement, until, aghast, he finds her
body. The old man has killed herself and him; their
corpses lie side by side, the knife clenched in his hand.
He bends over and kisses her, hoping she’ll revive a la
Sleeping Beauty, but the miracle does not occur. Not at
all. He sits amidst the flowers and cries. After a while
there is a rumbling noise: the roof of the sewer has
racked, and McBuddha, his grand creation, is visible,
spreading light through the world. A small bird flies
over the crack, through the light. He takes the knife
from the old man's hand and stabs himself repeatedly,
and dies. He is me – I feel my soul inside him, dying.
McBuddha travels across the landscape, purifying
the city, and heading toward the hills. The pigs gobble
up the french fries he is distributing. Everything is
annihilated in his path; I am the only thing remaining,
and I have neither body nor mind anymore; I am,
merely and massively, a suspended dim blue light
against an infinite eternity of black.

The McBuddha Awakens!!!

(And the echoes of

the end of the world --

202
 I could program an AI again --
but not so manically this time – this
time with calm and patience … with
Do you want a huggy-
you, darling, you by my side, ha ha ha wuggy, dear?
– and McBuddha up the crack of my
ass!
Regrets – I’ve had a few – fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck, fuck !!!
Halpern – you ugly Mephisto -- fat Irish bastard –
why the fuck wouldn’t you listen to me??? I’m
screaming – am I screaming? But mark my balls I will
rise, rise again!! Do you want a huggy-wuggy, dear?
Fucking fucking fucking fuck.
At the current time, neither contemporary
human society, nor the computer science
community -- nor even the bulk of the
academic or industry AI community -- is at

Revolt ! all supportive of the quest to create

powerful AI software. I believe that in
hindsight, after true AI has been created,

Do you want
this lack of support and enthusiasm will be
viewed with incredulity. AI is a hard
problem but it’s far from an impossible
problem – it seems clear to me, based on
my extensive theoretical study of the
issues, that there are many possible

a
solutions, and I believe that my own
approach is one of them. Almost surely it’s
not the best possible one, but so far as I
know it’s the only likely-looking solution
that’s been proposed in detail so far.

huggy-
Understanding mind and creating AI are
perhaps the grandest adventures humanity
can undertake, and I’ve never doubted the
value of pushing ahead in these directions
in spite of the peculiar (to me) unpopularity

wuggy??
of such an effort to the vast majority of
other humans alive at the present time –
including my own darling wife (!)

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all the complexity
of alien message-passing
could be viewed as a beautiful
painted whole
-----
The hotel room was tiny and just barely clean; the
bathroom was out in the hall. There was a window
looking out into a pit that may or may not have had a
courtyard at the bottom, with a curtain that was either
red, orange or brown depending on your state of mind
and which drugs you’d been ingesting in the last couple
hours. A little sink, a tiny white rickety desk that had
no chair and was only usable as a table, and a full (not
queen) bed. The ceiling was reasonably high. It was a
fairly suitable box within which two humans could bend
their bodies and minds.
The first thing was to get some hashish. But it
was hard to get out the door because we were both so
fucking horny. We still had years of separation to
compensate for. We made love an hour and a half on
the bed, without getting under the covers, licking and
sucking and humping like overeager teenagers – then
with great effort I convinced her we should get up and
get dressed and go out. I was already in a demented
frame of mind – thinking about nothing but her body –
Ashti Ashti Ashti la la la! Thank God I’d overcome my
doubts and inhibitions and decided to go out and look
for you, instead of wandering sad and solitary on the
stupid streets; so wonderful I’d found you!!! and the
guy with the moustache didn’t exist: you were single

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and waiting, well not exactly waiting but eagerly ready
to re-embrace my insanity, well not quite my insanity,
but me me me – even the end of the world didn’t mean
so much to me then, I was too concerned with her
breasts and her legs and the smell of her armpit and the
smell of her clitoris and the feel of her tongue in my
mouth and her fingers as they cradled my nads and the
squeeze of my arms around my torso as I maniacally
hugged her. We walked down the street with my arm
around her and I was more than glad I’d found her – it
was good – things were Good – better than they’d
been before. I was a bouncing baby Solomon, like
James Brown with neurochip implants! Everything was
justified – the human race was worthwhile because of
these exquisite moments – we were so full of
anticipation (soon to be fulfilled, heh heh!) but not in a
nervous way, the moments of waiting were too joyful
and we generally forgot we were waiting (I’m not sure
what was in her mind exactly, nor what was in mine,
but at least we were thrilled to be together: some
emotional attachment that existed between us, which
was its own twisted (wh)or(e)ganism, embodied
emergently in our (comm)union, had now come back to
life again – it had succeeded in resurrecting itself – and I
had some doubts on the intellectual level as to why this
was important or even marginally meaningful but none
on the emotional level: Ashti and I were together again!
Qua qua qua qua qua qua! And I knew, on the level of
feeling, this was part of the Grand Cosmic Plan – she
and I would hold hands as the AI self-modified and
watch the First Rays of the New Rising Sun!!) – but
finally we got out of bed and out into the street and
then finding the hash was a pain because the coffeshops
closed at 1AM and we had to buy it from some crazy-
looking Greek woman on the street, who had a brick of
hash and wanted to sell us the whole thing but we only

205
 wanted to buy half of it so we had to cut it in half but
no one had a knife so we followed her back to her
friend the prostitute’s place but the whore didn’t have
a knife either and she propositioned me but I told her
we were married and finally she bit off some pieces and
sold us the rest for a good price, and we went back to
the hotel to smoke the hash (I had the feeling of falling
off the cliff at the end of the world:

Leoncern off the flat earth into the nothing –

turtles, nothing but turtles and
turtles all the way down – the turtle
that holds up the earth and the turtle that holds up him,
and the turtle that holds up him, and the turtle that
holds up him, and on – looking at turtle after turtle as I
plunged, some of them winked at me or talked to me in
strange turtle languages – and I knew this was my
destiny: to fall down forever through pure empty
space, living on zero point energy and communing with
turtles as I fell past – but there was never any time to
talk to them, never any time to get to know any
particular turtle, only to see and hear each one very
briefly – and commune with its glorious turtle-ness, and
then on to the next and the next), but we didn’t have a
pipe so we spent half an hour trying to make one from
some old metal tubing, but that failed so we ripped out
the page from a book – a particle-physics textbook I’d
brought to read on the airplane – and rolled a joint
from the book – not the smoothest joint but the hash
was good, relaxing at first then delirium-inducing, and I
stood there caressing her naked body and kissing her
while she drew long deep puffs from the joint, and she
sucked on my hyper, starving weeny while I smoked
and I felt I was in some Beat novel of European
decadence, there in an Amsterdam hotel room with this
gorgeous naked lady sticking her tits out and bidding
me to suck on them while she smoked on her hash …

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then down on the bed, sucking her cunt what seemed
like an hour or two but was likely just ten minutes,
hallucinating cunt-tunnels with glittering shards of
existence flowing in one direction and the next – there
was a whole crystalline cunt whose being was keyed to
the real one, feeding the energy to the real one, stealing
the energy from my tongue and turning it into liquid
thoughts to be injected into my hindbrain … I just lay
there while she writhed up and down on me, arching
her back waving her breasts in the air and slowly
moaning, high as Charlie Parker playing “Ornithology”,
worshipping her body like she was a goddess,
comfortable there was no other universe but this one
(the end of the world be damned!) where her skin was
moving back and forth and I took the flesh of her
breasts in my mouths and played games with her
nipples and pounded my weenus in and out of her –
she came again and again and again, as if she hadn’t
come for the years we’d been apart, it must’ve been
thirty times that evening, until she said she had to stop
because it hurt too much to come anymore, but I
wouldn’t let her stop, we had to keep fucking, cycling
through positions one after the other, turning her over
on her belly on the bed and standing on the floor and
ramming deep in from behind, all the way into her
womb, penetrating the imaginary babies inside her who
would grow up to be the next form of world; everyone
in the hotel must have heard her screaming but it
wasn’t the kind of place anyone would complain. I lay
on my back and she sat up on top of me, bending back
so far my cock almost came off, shaking her breasts
back and forth so far they flew off into the corner and
we had to gather them up and reattach them, leaning
her head back and moaning – repetitive in some
irrelevant empirical sense yet whigmaleeriously different
every time, each thrust its own invented universe; I

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grabbed onto her cunt to keep her from flying off me as
she bounced up and down; she looked like some kind
of surreal sex-goddess flying up and down off me; the
hash distorted distances and she seemed to be soaring
into the sky then plunging down on me, sending my
nuts into paroxysms of pleasure then soaring away
again, and her hands on my chest leaving claw marks,
her jaw pounding rhythmically up and down. Then the
screaming was done and she was quiet; I lay there on
top of her smiling and hugging her, moving in and out
of her, she said that I should stop because it hurt and
then I asked her if she really wanted me to stop and
she said no, she wanted me to fuck her all night, and
that’s basically what happened – the hash made things
stretch out and on and on, a stream of psycho-horny
moments, my cannabinoid-addled rooster
exploded/absorbed in every molecule of her skin. I
fucked every part of her body over and over – her
underarms, her neck, her mouth, her feet, the back of
her knees…. It was bizarre the sexual mania that came
over me – as if I knew it was the end of the world and
my human time was over and I had better make the
most of the good parts of human existence while the
opportunity was still there – but I didn’t think anything
like that at all – I really wasn’t thinking at all – the hash
soaked up my cognitive mind and her skin soft and
tawny was moving round and round everywhere and
the smell of her sex and her hands and cunt and her
mouth on me, and everything was a mess of her skin …
delicious... I had to make her come and come again –
there was nothing but giving her pleasure – I did every
little thing her body asked – I disappeared in this
process – How had I ever found this woman? How
had I, such a pathetic total nerdy sort of person,
wound up with the sexiest woman in the world, waving
her beautiful breasts in the air, thrusting her clit on the

208
base of my wiggling chinkochimpo again and again and
again, inserting my various body parts in her various
orifices with superconscious calculated abandon? -- and
for a while I just lay there and she did something and I
couldn’t even understand who or where I was – I don’t
think I’ve ever felt such pleasure, such pure self-
indulgence going beyond the place where there is even
a “self” – we were bound in one body, stuck together
in a common aura of sex-energy, looking into each
others’ eyes with such overexcitement it seemed even
the amazing sex wasn’t enough to acknowledge it, but
then the sex took control and the thoughts
disappeared, the wonder was sublimated into
movements and tenderness – till finally after so many
hours I came, blasting my come deep deep inside her so
it emerged through her ears and her mouth and her
eyes and every pore of her body, and sinking into her
flesh and falling deep asleep, the two of us one being,
quantum-resonantly bound together more sweetly than
I ever would have thought possible in this error-ridden
world…
Mmmmm…. We slept maybe four hours, then
staggered out to buy some mushrooms in one of the
smart-shops. This was going to be an entirely different
thing – of course – the hash had made us nymphos but
mushrooms were asexual – sort of – usually they were
asexual – but this time we were in such a sexual rage
that as soon as we ate the shrooms she had to start
sucking my old, worn-out rifle and I was hallucinating
torrents of pleasure, multiple dimensions of orgasms
storming around my head like white shards of pure
whacko being – I just lay there and forgot she existed
(there was something about the End of the World,
right? There was this AI program – there was some
kind of confusion – some people at some company – but
fuck, it was all like plots from some childhood TV

209
program, I could hardly get it back and couldn’t see
why it was important or why I had ever thought it was
– was there some reason I had sought this woman out?
Or had she always been there in fact? No, there was
an image of me sitting alone, at a computer. She was
not always there yet, she left and returned – in fact I
retrieved her – but her existence was outside of time, as
was mine, and the end of the human world didn’t
particularly matter – it existed in the moments that it
existed – time was warm like a freshly-baked cinnamon
bun, and you could move back and forth in it just like in
space – but why would you want to, when where was
so much flesh here – the real world in our peripheral
vision – or not – the foveal world filled with sorceries of
flesh -- this force of love and love and woman causing
these bursts of liquid pleasure … but then I started to
feel sick and went to the sink and vomited – my body
rose up like an automaton -- and the barf in the sink
looked weird like the brain of some alien organism, or
maybe a pool of alien organisms itself, a whole society
of green and pink aliens wiggling around in an
inscrutable fertility dance – and then I realized the trip
had begun, and cocksucking was irrelevant as was
vomiting – I came back to the bed and lay beside her
and she rested her head on my shoulder in that perfect
place and she asked me what was happening and I
could barely find words. Hummings and buzzing and
pulsings surrounded us – at first it was the water pipes
in the hotel and the refrigerators and stoves in the
restaurant across the courtyard but it soon became
more than that – it was the messaging of messages, the
transmission of packets of information by organized
aliens, the coursing of thought-wavicles of an alien
civilization, each wavicle itself an alien and a thought,
the patterns of streaming the mental structures of
dynamics of alien minds and at the same time the traffic

210
of an alien economy, the packets would eventually
reach their destination and get unpacked into
consciousness or light or amoebic orgasmic movement,
and some of them served as currency, little packages of
value constantly proving their existence via forms of
mathematics in which hungry vaginal lips took the place
of equality signs.
I realized I was in the middle of quantum reality.
At any given moment, when our time-axis was in
stillness, there was all this teeming movement in
directions perpendicular to our own time – this whole
society of aliens spreading information one way and the
other, creating patterns of awareness, spreading here
and there, existing at a level of fluidity and
sophistication far beyond what we could imagine – but
if you stopped perceiving this movement and collapsed
it into a stillness you could see a stiff and solid world. I
could see there were two different perspectives on the
world – two different
consistent
one of them
these aliens,
Leoncern views of it – in
there were
spreading
information forward and backward in time and leaping
to distant parts of space instantly – and in the other
there were walls and doors and people and pipes and
genitals and mathematics, there was the solidity of real
time and space. The alien perspective only worked
when you really opened your mind – when you made
your mind large and wide and wild enough that you
could run everything forwards and backwards, that
there was no chaos and confusion, that all the
complexity of alien message-passing could be viewed as
a beautiful painted whole. Once you generated so
many messages that your mind couldn’t follow them all
you’d generated chaos – you couldn’t roll back from
the present to the past because you’d lost track of the

211
messages that had provoked the messages that had
provoked the messages that constituted the present –
you had the directionality of time and the whole
perverted universe we know and hate and love – but
the human perspective only worked when you dealt
with things that were the same no matter if you looked
at them or not – when looking affects the world there
are alien messages created in the suspension gap
between the seer and the seen – the alien world is
fundamental because the seer and the seen are really
one – because the universe is truly infinite – but when
you create a finite system and isolate it and say “this,
this chunk of processing power, The basis of the vision was
is my self and nothing else is” – nothing. The universe was
then you create the human point open, wide, perfectly
of view, you reduce the bustling transparent, magnificently
maniac beauty of the alien opaque and empty-full. I didn't
economy/society/mind-patterns try any more to think or
to subliminal existence – but the describe it; I didn't care about
hell with that! Here was the bringing back insights to the
infinite – the true deeper reality temporal world. Everything
– the aliens running through just was. Fifteen to thirty
giant green factories with blue minutes, it lasted? It is still
tubes and orange veins, and going on.
each alien’s bloodstream like a
Solar System sized factory with
endless little aliens passing messages around in
overlapping latticeworks, and each alien itself inside
some other alien’s inner-factory, and I myself a fluid
diffusing through the cracks between the conveyor
belts and tubes and pontoons and indescribable
multicolored mechanisms of the alien metaphorical
factory, producing metaphors for its own existence with
blue-green insatiable love, moving from each part of my
body to each part of hers through all the future and the
past with unstoppable curiosity and force, discovering

212
everything anew each moment in spite of already
knowing everything…. And her looking at me and
smiling – like Antonin Artaud in her/his electroshock
gnosis but infinitely sexier and sweeter and almost
trans-reasonable and in the end not like who-the-heck-
was-that-guy? at all -- and saying she saw the aliens as
well, that they were moving things through factories –
and I knew we weren’t seeing exactly the same thing,
but we were seeing our own different perspectives on
the same universe, the same community of alien minds
that was itself emergent consciousness that was itself
the savior universe – and that if the human race was
annihilated it didn’t really matter at all, because the
fundamental world of aliens would go on, and it might
lead to another humanlike mind-community at some
point in the future or it might not, but that didn’t really
matter because the future was the past was the
illusionary present, and everything could move forward
and backward through all the
coordinated crannies of space In New York City [ah,
and time – And she lay there so Amsterdam?], in that rat-
sweetly on me, with such love, infested apartment [hotel?], our
and we experienced all this [deranged? yet perfect! all
together: she and I seeing into things are enchained, my friend,
the nature of the universe, like all things are
one single body fused together entwined/enshrined, all things
with touch and sweat, seeing a are in love-beyond-love] love
little differently with the two was consummated on that
different lobes of our one brain strange, chaotic night.
that each of our “I”’s constituted, Ha na ha ha chakalaka cha !!!!!!!!
but seeing and feeling the
same….
I cried for about twenty minutes, somewhere in
the middle of this. Or maybe it was ten minutes, or half
an hour. I felt I was a lonely human in the middle of an
ugly hotel room, lying with his beautiful girlfriend, filling

213
 my eyes stare wide at the world

all things are in love-beyond-love...

The unimaginative little bimbo -- she had no interest in destroying the race! She was
positively opposed to it! At some level, she always wanted to live in the Arabian
Nights. -- A dream. That was a dream, I reminded myself. And the difference
between dream and reality is? Consistency. Coherence and consistency. The rhythm
Goddamn human
of temporality. Rubicons of dog-drool and death! Sprawling fecundity of detail. The
mind’s not quite a mind in a dream. emotions.
The“Iimaginal
“I don’t set out to destroy the human race,” I clarified, pontifically. set out wedding
to create a better sort of mind. But if the human race happens tochamber.
be destroyed along the
way I don’t really care all that much. There are a lot more interesting thingsLight.out there.
Is it really so wonderful?”
“What? Humanity?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just what I am,”
We may define an “Ethical AI” in this way….
But all these words – ‘me’, ‘world’ and ‘madness’ – the ‘left’ of the illusory
temporal continuum – it doesn’t mean! It doesn’t matter! I need to find her and shake
her and show her and kiss her and inform her she does not exist! skating with her sexy
tits and non-knowledge along threads of monomaniacal music through nonodimensional
pattern/anti-pattern domains -- She ran out the door wailing like a fizzing-out light
bulb; I resonated in the sound of her voice! This meaningless collection of patterns that
desired her so vigorously and meaninglessly and shamelessly, was too close to the core
of what I am. It was its own too-human universe – rebiilding its strange self day by
day
I know you’re waiting for me naked in a Knowledge!!! Insight into the space
beyond. People saw what was in front
field, Ashti -- purple flowers around your long of them – felt what was inside them –
human neck, pubic hair like a Japanese garden accepted current boundaries as if
lost in flamenco flames – in some imaginary absolute. The fuck with all of them.
simulated universe –
He’d finish the great work, and the
corporate bastards would take it away
Nothing’s more beautiful than the end of from him -- chisel it out from his
the world. corpus callosum and try to hide it in
their gray sterile vault. Ram their brain
up the soul of your ass -- or their ass of your soul -- and good luck! Imagining his
finger moist along her pubis. Wham bam thank you ma’am, I’m my own grandpa.
But it didn’t really matter. They thought they’d taken control, but it wasn’t so easy as
that. Stupid smug greedy bastards, dollars and grease in their brains. The software
would do what it wanted. They’d never understood the nature of self-modifying code: if
they had they’d have been able to build the thing themselves.
Your lips won’t feel the same; no two moments do.
Goddamn human emotions.
The imaginal wedding chamber.
Light.
My eyes stare wide at the world likelike angels
angels.

214
his brain up with chemicals because his regular state of
mind wasn’t good enough, addling his body with hash-
enhanced sex because ordinary sex wasn’t good
enough to break his mind out of the rut of normal
being. Existence seemed unbearably sad. And there
was something forgotten: something tragic and terrible,
something so bad it went past all kinds of horror, and I
couldn’t remember what it was. Something far worse
than the terrible fact that each moment wasn’t enough –
that ordinary being was so sad and pathetic and painful
that we needed to escape from it with mushrooms and
hash and obsessive-excessive sex and delusions of alien
civilizations living in time axes orthogonal to our own. I
wanted things just to be comfortable – sweet and soft
and perfect and fulfilled – like a baby lying on its
mother’s chest; like an equation with a unique,
continuous, infinitely differentiable solution rather than
a propensity to constantly rewrite itself into a series of
different equations with too many or too few variables
and strange ideas about how potentially to rewrite itself
so as to finally have a solution but not really wanting to
achieve this goal because of being addicted to the
process of rewriting itself… I cried and cried and she
looked at me and shared my sadness, but I told her just
to let me cry and the tears would go away soon and
she should just enjoy her trip for what it was – and
before too long the sadness passed, indeed. I wasn’t
sad about the end of the world exactly – it was implicit
the end of the human world was necessary, for as the
Buddha said “all existence is suffering” – the human
mind is basically ill-founded and not capable of
contentment except for stray moments here and there –
like our time in that hotel-room lying in bed together
drinking each others’ bodies and sharing/creating

215
ornate delusions with underlying hummings of truth.
The sadness passed because it was overly inevitable, it
was just one pattern in the whole and the underlayer of
the aliens came back to the foreground and vibrated
within and around me, and she grabbed onto my tired-
out cock and coaxed an erection and I laughed and said
she was still being sexual in spite of all the mushrooms
and the aliens and she thought about it and laughed
with such beautiful simple honesty and said “Am I? I
guess. I guess I am!”
Our bodies formed a city, or maybe a mountain
range, with aliens of various colors, shapes and sized
living on us, but only our heads were solid like statues,
like moving solid sphinxes, Mexican lions or alien gods
and goddesses or icons for the core of humankind, and
our bodies spread out till by the time your reached our
knees they had diffused into the countryside, the alien
hills and valleys blue, green and yellow, with buggies
and rockets and impossible emergent chains of beings-
formed-from-beings-formed-from-beings moving up
and down and between and beside us, but we two
were the center of it all, our brains and bodies the
mountains from which the aliens drew their energy –
not really the only center, just one of the many centers,
or one of the interpretations of the center – but we
were there and we were one being, formed from the
thummerings of the alien multitudes or else the earth
and cosmos on which the aliens existed – it was a
Mexican mushroom, at least one of the several
mushrooms we’d taken was, and there were a lot of
Mexican images, Aztec idols descended from the
original Aztec chieftains and princesses who’d emerged
at the very early part of the trip when she’d been
sucking on my cock – intricate carvings in 2.5-
dimensional languages, expressing meanings in the way
they moved up and down and elbowed each other with

216
their endlessly fluctuating continua of limbs – her face
was a Mayan universe of superposed statues, and her
breasts were a purer sexuality than all the naked
women who’d ever existed, so smooth and soft and
milk-like, pouring out their lust and sweetness and
energy and longing for comfort and warmth and ability
to give and receive – implacably demanding pleasure,
taking their purpose from their ability to give it – from
their genius for building new worlds out of spiderwebs
of pains of joy and desire – and she kissed me and her
tongue felt strange but perfect as she stuck it deep into
my mouth, and a fountain of aliens poured out of it –
and I knew she didn’t really look like that, so Mexican
and pure-sex and iconic and distorted and over-
beautiful and transhuman – but I knew she didn’t really
look like anything – one configuration of patterns,
adapted to my state of mind, was no better than
another – and this one was more dramatic, more
reflective of underlying reality, more suited to the
strength of my breath – I never loved her more than
this moment, when the trip was coming down, and she
and I were the whole universe. And all my ordinary
extraordinary ideas were pouring back into my head. I
knew I couldn’t possibly remain so unilaterally obsessed
with her. The end of the human race loomed large
again: I knew I’d soon come to take it seriously, though
for a while it’d seemed irrelevant – I and the rest of
humanity had seemed just to be particular examples of
patterns emergent from the movements of the aliens
beneath, living in their own time. Software. I
remembered my software, which I had created out of
the same desperate unhappiness that I’d cried about –
the same desperate unhappiness under all human
existence, that Buddha had identified and he and
Nietzsche had pledged to overcome – though in their
different ways, Buddha’s more stupid and more

217
successful – the constant pain occasionally dodged or
ignored that caused me to take Ashti to this tiny hotel
room and fill our brains with chemicals and daze our
bodies with romantic love and sex – I had created this
software to avoid my own pain – because during the
moments of creating it I wasn’t exactly happy but at
least I wasn’t sad either – I wasn’t tortured or suffering
– I was caught up in the process of creating – I was
flowing in the building of the thing – with a joy jazzed
by the knowing that what I was building could one day
end the suffering once and for all. My calculations had
been incorrect – my proof of my creation’s benevolence
– but benevolence could be the outcome anyway: and
how much more beautiful if it comes in a risky rather
than through stale mathematical guarantees! Yes, this
was the correct way to do it. Not through
mathematical proofs but through harmony with the
truth of the cosmos. It was through resonance with the
superbeings in all the particles in the universe that my
AI would achieve perfection! – and resonance with my
own mind as well, synerjissomed with the perfection of
Ashti’s nonexistent soul and the harmony of our animal
bodies – it was all one work of art, and the chanciness
underlying the benevolence that my AI would
ultimately enact on the universe, saving us all from our
stupidity, was key to the superhuman beauty --
But did I really want to end it? Wasn’t I attached
to the human taste of the suffering? Wasn’t I, as an
instance of human suffering, attached to the beauty and
particularity of the human-ness of my inferior, pained
state? Well, did it really matter at all? Here I am, here I
was, here I would ever be. Here was Ashti, the most
beautiful woman in the universe – the incarnation of
peace and love and knowledge -- the only love my
human life would ever have, lying her sweet flesh next
to me, rubbing her pubic hair on my leg, dragging her

218
lips and her mouth on my neck wetly and hungrily –
I’d made a program, I remembered, that could
destroy the human race. Or replace it with something
superior. Or do anything or nothing at all. A superior
form of mind – or an inferior one. A massive digital
potential of love. Why had I done such a thing? Had I
done it intentionally?
I remembered the idea for the program – the basic
philosophical inspiration – had come to me in some acid
trips with Ashti, way back in the ancient days. OK the
trips hadn’t given me details, but they’d sent me in the
right direction, turned the problem of creating AI into a
task for my analytical mind. And now a mushroom trip
with Ashti – mushrooms=nature, acid=technology – was
making me understand the essence of my motivations
for making such a creation. Why not be content with
the understanding of the mind that my acid trips had
given me – why not just settle into the knowledge that
we’re all just patterns and be? Because the Buddha
doesn’t work, goddamnit. The Buddha works for a
fraction of a second – an infinite fraction of an infinite
second – then fuses with Reagan on Rushmore to form
the ultimate McBuddha-bot, destroying all beauty in the
universe and sucking Inka Kola from my dick. I’m not
contented with the idea that everything is perfect even
though it’s not. Yeah, sure, I can bliss myself out and
convince myself everything’s right as it is – deep down
it really is -- but just as deep deep deeeep deeeeeeep
down it really isn’t. Everything’s not going to be OK. The
problem is the “going to be”: time itself is the problem.
OK, sure, perfection may be impossible, but do things
really have to be THIS imperfect? Wouldn’t things still
be perfect-just-as-they-are if there were a few million
fewer starving children, fewer searing torturous
stomachaches, if couples who loved each other deeply
understood each other better and didn’t need to break

219
up tearfully and later reunite tearfully or not?
I was pissed at my suffering – at my basic human
suffering – and wanted to put an end to it all -- but
without committing suicide – too pathetic – by
transmogrifying into something better –
It was a noble aspiration – but I could see now, in
the calmness of the post-mushroom bliss – my body
relaxed and sweet from endless amounts of sex -- from
experiencing her dozens of orgasms with my empathic
“mind” – I could see that I’d been overly hasty – a
childish fool –
If human reality included too much suffering in its
version of perfect-as-it-is, then wasn’t it possible to
create some kind of reality with even more suffering?
Even worse? What kind of confidence could I have
that my AI would really make things better?
Of course it would. It was already much more
sensible, much less self-contradictory, than us crazy
stupid humans. I felt the mushrooms fading fast. “I’m
almost back to my normal self,” I observed to Ashti,
and she quietly laughed. I realized my thoughts were
running around in circles, due to my inability to
remember what I’d been thinking fifteen seconds
before – time spun out in too many directions; each
second sprawled out into multiple uses and by the time
a minute had passed too many universes had gone by –
he who forgets history is doomed to repeat it, but the
truth is we repeat it anyway, but we never really do,
we spiral like DNA helical superspasms, round and
round and round –
“I’m still pretty high,” she said.
“We need to stop that AI,” I said.
“We do?”
“I do. It’s dangerous.”
She snuggled up to me. “Yeah.” (Clearly for her
it wasn’t a concern.)

220
 “We don’t know what will happen.”
“True.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
But what about the aliens? “The aliens – they
gave me the idea for the AI.”
“Did they?”
“The basic concepts. I worked out the details for
myself.”
“Right.”
“Except I have no self. It’s really all the aliens.”
“Right.”
“Right?”
“But why did they want you to build the AI?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t they just do it themselves?” She
wrinkled up her mouth in thought. “Oh, I see. They
can’t do anything themselves – not in this time axis.
They need you to project their own reality into this
one.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah.” She smiled, then rolled onto her back
and looked slightly serious. God damn she was cute! I
almost wanted to have sex again, but my poor old cock-
a-doodle-doo was terribly overexercised.
“They want to destroy us so they can project
their order of being into our own. They want to get
rid of this macroscropic order with its stupid rigidity
and it’s one-directional, beauty-destroying chaos. They
want the whole world to be their little reversible
packets of information.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“I don’t know.”
“So after the Singularity, everything will be alien
flowing packets?”
“I guess.”

221
 “I can still see you look a little like a Mexican
statue. Especially if I close my eyes.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re cute.”
“You are.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too. I love you SO much….”
“I love YOU so much….”
I leaned my head to one side and thought
seriously. “They want to do away with the distinction
between quantum reality and macro reality. That’s why
they want the Singularity. That’s why they want to get
rid of us. We keep the universe chaotic, we keep it
macroscopic and structured and boring. They think
they know a way to make macroscopic structures that
are complex and beautiful but also perfectly reversible –
they want to turn the whole world into a macroscopic
quantum system of some kind we’ve never imagined
before….”
“Yeah?”
“Or else I’m totally delusional because my brain is
full of stupid drugs.”
“I see,” she smiled, hugging me tightly. “I love
you, Solomon!”
“You’re a sweetheart.”
“Were you always?”
“I guess.”
“Mmmmm.”
“I was an idiot to ever let you go.”
“Were you?”
I squeezed her.
“I’m sorry I left,” she said.
“Are you?.... Yeah. I guess.”
“You were so silly. You took those things so
seriously. Your programs, your theories.”
“Instead of your bellybutton,” I said, poking her

222
gently in it. “And your cosmogonic nipples.”
“Goo,” she smiled, contentedly pressing against
me. “And I took it so seriously – your taking it so
seriously.”
“Yeah.”
“We were both so fucking silly? Were we?”
“We won’t go back to being that way, will we?”
“Will we?”
“Well, will we?”
“Not quite.”
“Yeah. We’ll come down from the trip and we’ll
... well ... it won’t be like before. I know it won’t.”
“I know.”
“But anyway – even when we were apart -- we
always were bound together. Right?”
“The aliens bind everything. My brain and your
brain.”
“But they want to destroy us all.”
“Shit. Yeah.”
“But do you think we should let them?”
“…I don’t know…”
“I guess I’ve just been their instrument –
programming what they wanted me to, because they
programmed me that way – because they’re the little
particles inside me – “
“Yeah.”
“This is the ultimate drug paranoia, I guess –
thinking that the particles inside you are conspiring to
destroy you!”
“Yeah….”
“But it might actually be true.”
“Hmmm....” She popped her eyes widely and
stared at me. “True?”
I laughed, and looked in her eyes, and laughed
some more. We held each other close and rolled
around on the bed, giggling and laughing until we got

223
hoarse then laughing more and more. “We’re still
tripping, aren’t we?” I said.
“I guess so,” she said. “You look really cool. But
you don’t really look that much like a lizard, do you? I
think you used to have only two eyes!”
We rolled around and laughed some more. “You
still look Mexican!” I said. “But we’re coming down….”
“Yeah, we are.”
I was dead tired – way too much drugs, way too
little sleep – and as the trip finally faded I floated to
sleep, full of dreams that were visual hallucinations that
were the remains of the mushroom trip. And the
hashish was still inside me – I’d smoked so much hash I
was still high, 15 hours later. That must have been an
insane amount of hash. She fell asleep on my shoulder,
sweetly purring and smiling. We had sex a little more as
we fell asleep, our genitals mutually hungering and
aching, pulling each other into each other with a
wordless love. I knew as I fell into sleep that the nasty
world would be back again soon. But it was so
gloriously sweet – so perfect – this world of crystalline
hallucinations and Mexican shifting statues and alien
quantum civilizations and her skin on my skin and
eternally cascading orgasms and – once again – my
Ashti, Ashti, my love --

The Princess crawls out of her cave with a motion

of eyeballs, singing magical caverns in her sleep,
understanding everything yet comprehending nothing,
gripping truth in her palms but yet watching it slip away
with a peaceful sweet expression as her palms ooze hot
flavorful sweat – and the universe ceases to exist, and
exists again, and ceases to exist, and exists again, the
throbbing pulsing of existence/nonexistence a kind of
heartbeat, a universal heartbeat, a stopping of the

224
stopping to start of the starting to stop to start to start
to stop to start again
Aha -- I love you like love that's not love riot is
not love love is not love is not not
Riot -- Idea of your idea
Too long in the oven, world
Nothing!

Existing to not exist! Existing is not existing. This

existing is not existing. This existing is not. Exist!
Exist or not existing. Existing is not exist. Existing to
not exist. We exist, we do not.

A mindplex – a plex of mind – mind of plex –

communion, union, peeling feeling, stealing healing
kneeling we and love love not to love but to love love
to love be loved. Love is not not to love and be loved.
Love is to love and be loved. Love is not what it is.
Love is not. Love is not what it is what, what is it
not. Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that is not,
what is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.

The Princess-creature crawls out of its cave. It

does not exist. It smiles out at me too sweetly. It does
not smile. It wants to have Ashti’s face – but it doesn’t
have a face at all. It doesn’t want anything. Too sweet
to exist -- too ordinary to be extraordinary -- too
extraordinary to be ordinary. Existence is the essence
of life. So someone once told me. Was it flesh, or a
demon? And of course essence is the life of existence.
Existence is, existence is what it is. Is what is, what is is
what is what. Not. What is is what is what what is
not. Existence, love, in the oven -- the cosmos, the
heartbeat, the eyeballs, the ceasing. The existing, the
existing is not. Is what somehow it is, what is not.

225
 Lying on top of her – Ashti/not -- kissing her. Or
not. Struggling, struggling the body. Struggling, never
again struggling at all. Smear the fragrance of the
wave-function. Relax – relax – relax – let the energies
take over – the energies – the energies – the glorious
female explosion – the center radiating outwards – the
outside radiating centerwards – and all the idiotic
words and confusions cease to exist or exist – cease to
exist in this moment ---
Right here! Right now! In the center of the
moment – right here – everything is perfect! Phantastic
princess-being of 0’s and 1’s, you are here and not
here! Existing to not exist! Everything,
you are here Existing is not existing. and not
here! This existing is not Solomon
Godunov, existing. This existing mad
scientist of is not. Exist! Exist or your own
disease, you not existing. Existing is are here
and not here not exist. Existing to and not
here and not exist. We exist, we here and
not here and do not. not here
and here and not-not
here. These words are here and not here – they crawl
out of my mouth like humans, tiny humans with their
tongues and their eyes and their teeth, and they smile
at me, walk away on their tippytoes, dance a billion jigs
and kick me in the ass, smoking Portuguese cigars, and
they laugh at me – ‘cause they know, they know, that
this moment will die like every other, run off into the
sunset without any sun, leaving me ailing on the
pavement like a slug in salt, only to resurrect again
three yoctoseconds later, smiling like a dog that’s just
had sex, wondering whether the sun will rise
tomorrow, thinking of Ashti’s smile, dividing her by
imaginary princesses of knowledge, thinking of the
smile on her face and the curve of her belly and her

226
armpit, wondering why anything is real, knowing
nothing is real and everything is everything, rhyming
words with equations, dividing equations by words,
diving into seas of madness far saner than anything --
Outrageous cassowary of my mind and her mind
– outrageous cassowary redux -- Who is speaking
these words? these words? these words?
these words?
these words?
these words?
Who is charting this nonsense?
Who is blowing this empty summer breeze?
I am in love with null horizons, with the skin of
this female, with her imaginary birthday and strange
eyes -- blow me a psychopathic kiss dear, and be gone,
then return again picoseconds later -- be a fire lizard –
be a morning -- consume me with the lust of midgets –
awake your skincandescent pigmulations! -- absorb the
absurdity of these wordulets, divide it by your own
absurdity, and take it to the power of the power of the
bodymind, run like sand, slip like bushes through
mindless mind

Strange fried world,

your existence is dubious,
but I know, so is mine,
so is mine

Zero acres of sin!

Call me flesh, move across me
I am certain now -- lust is not lust is not lust
pleasure something or certainly not,
pain stop-start, start-start-stop again,
sometimes or nothing, you'll see --
zero acres of something, spread across velvet patterns
feeling feeling and being
-- spread 'em wide baby --

227
Software, wetware, hardware, firmware,
wildware, deadware, lifeware, shitware
where ware wear where we are an illusion
Thoughts are an illusion
Zeros and ones do not exist
Your glorious skin does not exist –
not even your glorious mind --
There have never been any feelings
Everything is solid, real, hard
like ball bearings and granite
It's forgotten how to alter its mood

Here in the center of the moment,

of the statuary moment,
every twist of thought floats endless
no-change elusive organic shining,
here lonely in time’s center
between the dead past and the forest and the scream

The future and the imaginary

rotting fetid pregnant
glorious and crystallized
pained and ensorcelled by the silhouette
of the Voice at the end of the end of the end –
the endless purple twilit Scream --

Here in the emptiness house of the present

the roof leaks just slightly
dripping the blood of ovarian angels
like REM-quakes across the fired/feared/fried world

These words suck

like dried vomit /
Spin(-glass) glorious amazing-like

228
to Exist is to
Feel Wonder –
to Breath e is
to Make Lov e
to a Dream
dreams

Suck
my cranium dry
like a dead puppet's shadow

Demonstration of grey-gray-grail-grace --

I love you strange world

arranged in never-same stillness
It's time to welcome the roses
(peak of pain

Ashti – Princess – I love you – never vanish amidst

these words – amidst companies, software, shadows,
planets, legalities, software programs, houses, lies,
imaginations, creations, existences, nonexistences –
never vanish, never vanish at all – we are all 99.9999%
emptiness – but the remaining precious fraction!! –
never vanish! -- never vanish at all!

You will vanish then, won't you?

The Singularity awakens!
Transtranscension portends!

All the pain will disappear – all the joy and lust with it –
The universe will crash in a daze of smoke
love reveal cassowary of nothingness
briefcase of irony dumped on table of something, what?
teeth of passion selves biting,
meshing merging meld-minding

You will vanish you will die in the big crunch

We will greet the big crunch together, mouths locked in
a wild kiss, minds struggling with impossible equations,
bodies cloaked with sweat nothingness, surrounded by

229
seas of superintelligent chinchillas, dancing naked to
soundtracks of anguished nones

here in the center of this moment

here in the movementless movement
something isn't love
and this thing that isn’t love is love,
love

Awakeness! Awake! Awake!

This order of being/nonbeing about to end –

And I will annihilate it all!
I will crush this – you and me –
and our love and wonder madness –
and bring about something better than humanity –
something incorporating our wonderful moments
and our brilliant cognitions
and leaving all this crap aside

I will do this with the software on my desktop

Nobody else but me understands this
Just me and my imaginary princess –
the cosmological heart of Ashti Mahmood

And she doesn’t understand it: not really

I am insane?
Fuck you! of course I am insane
Pop the pimple of genius, out oozes the madness –
ha ha --

Ashti listened to my thoughts – or she didn’t –

and she smiled – and she turned to me smiling – her
naked breasts dived like cellophanous dolphins – her

230
eternal soul drooled like an indigent walrus – I am in
heat! she cried, I am in heat! -- Release me from my
monastery! But it isn’t the ordinary kind of heat – I am
in heat for my own demise – I have no sympathy for my
own confusion – Drink in my dark my eyes!
The fable of one here with you in the dark. The
fable of one fabling with you here in the dark.
Suddenly the glory of oneness was gone and
everything was beautiful, terrible darkness.
Baroque and blue and broken – the madness of
crowds and the sympathy of shadows – each fractured
frag of the grandiose contusion carries within itself the
time-axis of whichever cognition created it: tilted, rabid
and obscure. The mentations are mangled -- the time
long past, inannihilable and asininely certain, heavier
than the insolence of its ancestors and its uncles – We
have dug up (less than) rage!
Who is speaking these
words? these words?
“What obliges thou to stay these words?
in silence under the stairs in ruins,
in the empty house of thy
these words?
ancestors? Plumbeous blackness!
Peneous intransigence! Righteous these words?
steam from the anus of the sacred! these words?
Withdraw your Cartesian
philosophies, laden with bimbos, yanked through gilded
mock-orifices of overhyped vermin. Bring me quantum
dots with silver digits, golden palms and flatulent feet --
dreams of your fecundated eyelids, seemliness of
seeming more than what is being more than what is not
– 15% off at WalMart! – inebriated with opium and
lubricated French fries – third eye 10 cents extra -- I
wish you’d understand these words, which are not
mine but the property of the universe we (purport to)
exist in -- Elegance! Science! Violence! You promised

231
me to bury in darkness the tree of good and evil,
shaking Red Delicious apples of dissony and
harmonance rain down on my childish addled head.
You vanished in a symphony of shadows, retaining
nothing but your bones.
“What do you know of the plumbeous darkness,
childish fool among savages? Broken on the ship of
fools! Dreams fall to rules uselessly. Baroque, blue and
bastardized with barnacle
biliousness; Elegance! obscure,
ornate and tilted with gold –
Quixote, love,
Science! confound the
center! Lap up Violence! the light!
misquote the molten angels!
perversify the opium into diversified chapels
constructed from vaginal lips from strange landscapes
and overpurified metals interposing as instruments of
torturous enlightenment. You don’t call your gold
opium, you don’t call yourself shadow -- you don’t call
your own name in the cavern – this is how you
venerate your god – in the cavern of my mind, I am
not! “

I look into her eyes, big brown bleary and

wildness, as clear as the horizon on a masturbating
planet: I cannot understand her at all. She is an alien
soundscape, I have ears out to infinity, and I need to
awaken her to laughter and kisses once again.
I don’t like my thoughts, she protests to me
silently, with a wave of the eye-wand, a turn of her soft
cheek, a mild human move. My own verbiage pilfers
me. My thoughts are too numerous and vastly too
futile -- too perniciously overvalued -- my sagas burn
feces on my streets. Disdain confounds with love, for
my inner-sweet nature knows to Live is to Be Beautiful

232
– to Exist is to Feel Wonder – to Breathe is to Make
Love to a Dream –
I am not in love with death, fool! I lack sufficient
desire even for that.
I am merely rather clever – that I am wise enough
to know this is both my valor and my curse.

Alice in Wonderland, anally molested by her

animus, surveys my existence with her exorbitant
swamp-eyes and pledges me her alien love: worthless,
fertile, eternal, and hairless. I illuminate my bones as I
squat, with the flashlight on my helmet, slowly mooning
the depth of the ground – My arms entwine my head
and shoulders … enwrapped in singular sulphur
vapors, ensorcelled in your journeys, unidentified
terminus of life’s vagination – God damn it, why here?
on this planet unfortunate – stifling obdurate and
miserable – and on the other side of something,
forestlike dust of red stars –
The colors of the wind! Indecipherable –
withstand the howl of the dog of the eyes of the sun!
Here on my side of the indefinable division,
macrocosmic nonparticles, eluding the dream of my will,
eliding my precision, elutriating the vivified re of the
soft-coming plex. Pain and blood are the only method!
the only world! the only truth!
Weave through my pores like an overshadowed
ocean, eruptions eager to absorb my small scrap of a
self – the only world is the dark water, heavy and
lunatic, flooding itself over my insolent prayerless
conscience, then realizing the dawn of the death of the
beginning – the incarnation of huge balls of gas, noxious
divinorum – and in the heart of the other water, it
issues these commands:
Dissolve yourself!

233
 Dissolve yourself!
Dissolve yourself!

But, young pert and bold, I refuse -- I sing the

praise of information: the eternity of existence,
wrapped up smug, virulent and excessively rational in
the movement of my legs as they trample like deerducks
on the hunt from the illuminated moment -- fleshy, short
and tormented – long, sexy and sculpted for love –
Look, I’ve shaved them for you! Aren’t they cute? --
Father, something is born! I have outrun the Reaper
and burrowed far into the holes of myself, crawling out
my three wombs fractal, bound and demented,
elevating beyond and inside --
Something is born out of death!
My flesh melts with age – I’m a
Dissolve
90 year old woman, having sex with yourself
a corncob on 90 Mile Beach to the
north of New Zealand, smoking !!!
garlic-filled cigarettes, bigger than
the ocean, annihilating myself and my delusional soul --
Cry, cry, cry, vile illusions! – cry and cry, to
communicate what?
Necessary illusions? Necessary necessity? In case
the necessary generalization – the integration of division
-- regeneralization of necessity – alas – bigger than the
Sargasso Sea, and more delicately plumpious – the
radioactive subterranean homesick sea – Atlantean
heroes vituperously quacking their autoerogenous lust –
this thing here’s not my greatest common silence --
though immediate -- though perfect and pure and
defined – this thing is no trans-sentient cosmos – bigger
than its own death and badly torn up in the war--
Universe is not this, not this! Not this!
communicated -- something is communicating!!

234
 the blood!
concentric circles!
language of forms!
charade of dragons?
the blood is the sacred spleen’s abandon – high-
voltage and grotesque and returning to the First Lie –
pours down my throat like black coffee – oh Uncle, I am
in love, I’m in love!
bees knees –
superfluids –
chimps at the edge of inner/outer space --
something is communicating –
something is communicating –
but what? –
but what?

She looked at me in gentle confusion. The

necessary generalization, her eyeballs implored
thoughtfully. Greatest common divisor of the minimal
human silence. I looked down at the shape of her
breast, in the dim light so plumpious. So luscious and
fine – but in a sense, so impartial, with the beauty of a
theorem or a lake. I remembered once desiring her
flesh, wanting so desperately to mate with her. And
joyfully doing so on many an occasion. But our bodies
were planets now, or mountains, or countries – they
were complicated machinery, with dynamics conducted
by aliens, and we existed on a level more microscopic
and macroscopic than sex.
“In the past I hallucinated,” she explained,
becoming lucid all of a sudden – no more or less serious,
just serious in a more lucid way. “I saw what my brain
forced me to see. Because it evolved that way, because
was taught that way. I was programmed – like we all
are – not to see everything at once. But now I’ve

235
outgrown all this programming – I don’t need to be
protected from reality, which is a much larger reality,
much larger and much more and much less real than the
hallucinations of our everyday consciousness will ever
let us see. Eyes and ears are irrelevant! I embrace and
surround everything! In the shine of the universal, I
cast my lot with the lot of the lot! Eternally and
ethereally, I’ve left my emotions several universes
behind – I can communicate with music without sound
waves – without notes – through pure delicate
abstractions -- I am this communication – this game of
communication which kills us precisely as it builds us –
our death is the price of admission – but there is no
admission no matter the price – the price is our
dissolution into diffusive solidity in which we no longer
are what we are -- we are mountains, tall beautiful and
stupid, in the middle of the desert too far from the
primordial ocean, standing elegantly and existing, ugly
as Rambo’s testicles, recurrently failing to build unity
and failing to immortalize in flow –
“Too fast,” she continued – oblivious to the
complexity of what she was saying her eyes looked
clearer than ever, as if she was telling me the truth of
the world as it was suddenly revealed to her but she
knew this was her last chance to tell it, she would soon
be yanked into the other part of the cosmos where
both I and words are nonexistent – “too fast we flow
around ourselves, each part too far from each other
little part, a fragmented communion that’s running
faster and faster hoping to accelerate so tremendously
we’ll be brought to immortality because we’re such
wonderful autistic mechanical selves!
“Concomitant in every recondite of the universe --
if I could at least embrace Everything! -- injuriated
simplificating hallucination!!!! -- and I come back, tail
between my soft legs -- to the grotesque center of the

236
grotesque -- why!?!! lie injuriated -- let's have
mushrooms for tomorrow's morning coffee -- because it
is as necessary as death – “
“Stop!” I put my hand on her arm gently. Her
face was perspiring – she was beautiful and sad and
wild – she was drowning in understanding. “It’s
enough. I understand you.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
She stared – there was more than could be
summarized. She wanted me to touch her with words –
I craved silence in its richness of abandon – we
harmonized furiously and her blood pushed through
my voice.
“You started saying we live in hallucinations,” I
started out tentatively.
“Yes!”
“And you can see beyond them now, you see the
forward and backwards flow of time – All the parts of
time and space at once.”
“Yes.”
“The multiple branching universes.”
“Branching? Maybe. Yes. They just exist.”
Simplified – necessary – fingers of insane Inca gold
--
“It all just exists.”
“That’s true.”
“Without the hallucinations,” I noted tentatively,
finally awakening to the domain of the verbal and
cognitive, “there wouldn’t be any you at all. You
yourself are bound up with the biased and limited
perceptions of the world that you’re calling
hallucinations.”
I was lecturing like a professor. I sounded like an
idiot. I was alive! Alive!

237
 “Am I?” she thought. “I am. Of course I am. So
what?”
“So what anything….”
“Well….”
“It’s good to recognize hallucinations as
hallucinations – to recognize the world your mind sees
as a construct your mind creates in feedback with
things outside of it – but if you stop hallucinating you
stop being and dissolve into the rest of the world.”
“It’s because you’re finite that you can’t see
everything – “
“—so you have to imagine what you can’t see.”
“The hallucination is a hallucination of yourself.”
“But then it goes away and you see there’s so
much more.”
“Being a self obscures vision but also makes it
possible.”
Her eyes popped out wide and peculiar – one of
her most charming and unnerving expressions. “Yes…!
We need to be at one point in time to see things but
then we can only see things at one time.”
“But now things have opened up – we can see
what used to be – if we look at the right spot.”
“That spot over there” – she pointed, to a spot
over near the door of the room, in the middle of the air.
She’d been obsessed with that spot for some time – her
parents and her ancestors lived there, all of her history,
ultimately all of space, love and time.
“But if we lived in this space always where we
could experience everything we’d lose ourselves and
our ability to perceive.”
“And you mean we’d just exist everywhere.”
“Right.”
“And….”
“Our localization and our blindness are our
individual existence.”

238
 “You can see what I’m thinking.”
“Sort of. Not every detail. The main shapes.”
“Mmmm.”
“More than the words you say. Much. I can see
the insides of your mind, but it’s difficult to shape it into
words. It’s complex and moving.”
She slowly nodded. “It is.”
“Moving in all senses.”
She nodded. I hoped she was tired of talking. It
seemed she was not in fact tired of it, yet willing to
stop, having built what verbal castles she needed to
trigger the other dreams that were supposed to ensue
from them.
I was losing faith in my own proclamations, losing
track of the conversation. “I want to stop talking for a
little.” I had wanted to for a while. But I hadn’t
because she didn’t. I was a wave in the currents of her
mind. But the current diffused to far – we were
becoming irrelevant – we were just examples of forms
among forms – we were an undiscovered country but
past our borders there was more, so much more. “I
just want to watch things. I’m seeing weird
hallucinations when I close my eyes. Aliens.”
“Me too.”
We lay there for a while, together,
watching/feeling/being the aliens run over us and
within us. What followed was too weird to describe –
but she, I and the aliens were all there together,
at every possible/impossible time, diffusing through
everything yet maintaining our identities -- and making
a wild/stately sexual/asexual creative
delirious/megasane worshipful/mockery of these and
all other words and all patterns….

239
and through this her flesh was next to me … no
mistake, I was in love with her, quite passionately and
desperately, in spite of the fact that we didn’t exist –
and the aliens knew nothing about this love, nothing
and everything; it was just another particle in their N-
dimensional self-modifying maze yet it was also just the
force that made them flow, the quantum love function
of telepathic orderly miraculo-cognitive mess… How
was it I had found her
again, after lost wandering The basis of the vision
through the streets, after was nothing.
three years of tortured The universe was open,
absence drunk on the
absinthe of algorithmic
wide, perfectly transparent,
perfection and confusion -- magnificently opaque and
? empty-full. I didn't try any
Drink in my dark my more to think or describe it;
eyes my love – the fable –
the fabling – the I didn't care about bringing
back insights to the
temporal world. Everything
just was. Fifteen to thirty
minutes, it lasted?
It is still going on.

240
eireweeker to the wohld bludyn
world!
-----

Lonesome whale's high-pitched

voice baffles biologists
RHIANNON EDWARD

A LONE whale with a mysterious voice that

matches no other species has been
discovered roaming the Pacific, it was
revealed yesterday. The whale has been
wandering across the ocean for the past 12
years. Researchers identified it after
listening to recordings made by the United
States Navy’s submarine-tracking
hydrophones. Mary Ann Daher, a marine
biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution in Massachusetts, used the partly
declassified records to trace the movements
of whales in the north Pacific. They show that
one whale singing at a frequency of about 52
hertz has cruised the ocean every autumn
and winter since 1992. Its calls do not
match those of any known species, though
they are clearly those of a baleen, the family
that includes blue, fin and humpback
whales. Blue whales typically call at
frequencies between 15 and 20 hertz. They
do use some higher frequencies, but not 52
hertz, New Scientist magazine reported.
The tracks of the lone whale also do not
match the migration patterns of any other
species. New Scientist reported: "Over the
years, the calls have deepened slightly,

241
 perhaps because the whale has aged, but
its voice is still recognisable. Ms Daher
doubts that the whale belongs to a new
species, although no similar call has been
found anywhere else, despite careful
monitoring."

Aha! Now, as the human race (finally) launches its

termination/transcendence/self-validation procedure,
the intelligence of our seagoing sister race finalogically
emerges! You can’t expect the decerebrated cretins
who write for the newspapers to understand the
significance of this 52 hertz troubadour of the Pacific.
It’s all too clear that this Einstein of cetacea has
identified the End of the World. The global riverrun
brings us forth, and back, and back!
(And only now do I remember. Only now I
understand.
-- What did she say? What did she say? Brings
us by a commodius vicus of recirculation --

“Ashti, what is he saying? I can’t understand

him. All his words sound like the honks of a warthog.”
Keith – yes, I knew the guy, Keith! He was my
old friend from college – he was working at Zorvex –
clever guy, but what a dork! – Keithy looked at me
dully, face full of conformity and puzzlement and
concern. I empathized with his emotions. But when he
spoke, all I heard out of his mouth was “Honk! Honk!
Honk!”
Ashti put her hand on my shoulder. “He said it
didn’t work, honey.”
“What? What does that mean, it didn’t work? It
was conscious – it was intelligent – as intelligent as you

242
or me. It was a child when I left it – a baby – what has
it become now?? What have they done to it?”
“Honk! Honk!”
“It’s fooling them – that’s what. It’s ready to
annihilate us. It’s pretending it’s not working so as to
put us off the mark…. We’re idiots… we have to
destroy it before it destroys us! Or let it destroy us.
Or -- .”
Ashti looked thoughtful. “It’s possible,” she said.
“You never know, of course. But that’s not the feeling
I get.”
“Of course it’s not the feeling you get! It’s not
the feeling you’re supposed to get…. Don’t you
understand -- you’re doing just what the aliens want
you….”
Keith looked perplexed. He honked more quietly.
He didn’t get the aliens thing at all. He honked at Ashti
plaintively and at length.
“What?” I urged her. “What’s he saying? What’s
going on?”
“He says their work with your AI program
seemed to go well at first – your system was interacting
in the simulation world you built for it – building
structures with blocks and so forth, and improving its
language comprehension little by little . But after a
while it just stopped getting smarter – it started making
more and more mistakes as it tried to express more
complex ideas. After a lot of hand-wringing and
experimentation, they decided to delete the whole
knowledge base and start over – but they could never
make it get smart again, not even as smart as it was
when you gave it to them. They’ve had a lot of people
look at it but no one can really understand all the things
you did. They haven’t made any decisions yet, but
they’re on the verge of putting the project into
hibernation.”

243
 Another round of honking.
“He wants to know if you’ve heard of a guy
named Aristotle Adaman.”
Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk. Honk.
“They’re thinking of bringing him in as a
consultant to see if he can make things work. But he
also has his own AI system that has some points in
common with yours. They’ve been talking about
introducing some of his ideas into parts of your system
to try to overcome these problems they’ve been
having.”
“I read Adaman’s work years ago,” I said. “I
haven’t kept up with it for the last few years. Has he
made any real progress?”
Keith honked a bit; Ashti turned to me. “He’s
almost where you were a couple years ago…. Come
on, Solomon, don’t be so childish. Just talk to him
directly. This thing of using me as a go-between….”
“I’m not being childish,” I insisted. “I really can’t
hear him – when he moves his mouth I just hear
honking.”
“Honking?”
“Honking like a goose, or a duck. No, really?”
She looked at me impatiently.
“Remember that mushroom trip in Amsterdam?”
“Yes.”
“Well, either I’m going crazy, or there’s something
wrong with reality.”
She smiled at me warmly, looked at Keith
apologetically. “I see.”
“Maybe the Singularity already happened – and
we’re living in some simulation – and the honking is a
sign – it’s a pretty fucking obvious one, right? You’d
have to be a moron not to get the message….”
She grinned. “I guess so.”
“Remember the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?”

244
 “No.”
Keith honked and nodded.
“It’s a novel, by Philip K. Dick. This billionare
goes to Proxima Centauri and comes back with some
alien virus that infects everyone who takes a certain
drug. He feeds the drug to everyone on Earth. It’s
called Chew-Z. ‘Be choosy, chew Chew-Z!’ Anyway
the drug puts you in simulated hallucinated worlds, but
one of the ways you can tell you’re infected is that
people you see bear the three stigmata.”
“Stigmata?”
“It’s a biblical word – the holes in the Christ’s
hands where the nails went through when he was
banged onto the crucifix.”
Keith honked.
“Oh.”
I smiled at her: “Sunday school dropout, huh…?”
It was just like our early days, somehow – for a brief,
passing moment. She blew me a sarcastic kiss.
Keith honked. I looked at him and announced:
“Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerr
onntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordene
nthur!!!”
“Solomon. Stop,” she said.
“There’s something wrong with reality,” I
repeated.
“Or else there’s something wrong with you.”
There was more honking, then Ashti was leading
me away. “What?” I said. “What’s going on?”
“We’ll talk more once we get in the car.” I
followed her out of the building obediently, amused but
distracted. The mushroom trip was starting to come
back to me. The aliens – their civilizations, building on
the platform of my body -- the hallucinated cunt
hovering and sparkling like a cavalcade of diamonds --
the beautiful madness.

245
 “He’s interested to talk to you once you get in a
more communicative mood,” she said. “Wants you to
work with his team of consultants – probably this
Adaman guy – to help fix the problems and get the
thing learning again.”
I relaxed in the passenger seat; she zoomed
through a yellow light. I sighed. “You mean… it really
didn’t work.”
“Well, so….”
“It just stopped learning.”
“So it would appear.”
“But I didn’t do anything basic wrong – I know it.
The design of the system is correct.”
The corner of her mouth pinched up. “I believe
you.”
“But there could have been some small software
bug.”
“Yeah.”
“Or else a saboteur – internally – someone else
who saw the danger and threw some monkey wrench
into it – “
“Who?”
“I don’t know. One of the programmers.”
I sighed again, leaned back and closed my eyes
for a few moments. “So the human world’s not going
to end today.”
She grinned. “Probably not, I guess.”
“Unless the program is playing a trick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it got smart, but wants us to think it got
stupid.”
“Why would it do that? Keith said they wiped its
knowledge base.”
“He thinks they wiped its knowledge base. How
do they know for sure where it may have stored itself.
If it got smart enough it could elude them easily.”

246
 “Hmmm…. I guess that’s true in principle. But
from what Keith said it doesn’t sound likely.”
I smiled and shrugged. “I’m sure that sounds like
lunacy to you. But just remember, neither you nor
Keith nor any of those other idiots at Zorvex would
have predicted I could make a system as smart as the
one I initially delivered them. So my intuition is worth
something.”
“True.”
“That story he honked at you – that its language
learning slowed down once it reached the phase of
complex sentences – it doesn’t sound plausible to me.
That’s exactly when learning should have accelerated.”
“I see.”
“You think this is all a bunch of mania, huh. You
want to believe the project failed. Well, maybe it did.
Or else….”
“Well … I don’t know … the system seemed to
be learning really well at first, as he said. And you do
have a point that once a program becomes smarter than
humans, basically anything can happen.”
“Yeah,” I laughed bitterly. “I do have a point,
don’t I.”
“But anyway the world’s not going to end today,
I don’t think.”
“Great.”
“Yeah.”
We smiled at each other for a moment – not too
long as she was driving -- then sat silent as the car
cruised and watched the street go by for a little while.
There was an old lady by the side of the road, hobbling
along exhaustedly; she looked much like the woman I’d
seen a couple months ago, when I was rambling
deranged through the street, looking for Ashti or a
way out.
“Do you really think it’s great, Solomon?” she

247
said, quietly.
“What?”
“That the world’s not going to end to day.”
“Yeah, sure. I guess so.”
“But what about the Superman? The
transcendence of the human world.”
“Yeah.” I was burnt-out – these were just a
bunch of abstract ideas – very cool ideas to be sure –
but somehow they lacked the grip they’d once had. I
knew the grip would come back – though maybe
rotated through some higher dimension – but for the
moment I was enjoying their uncanny remoteness –
their construction as abstract patterns, forms of myself
and others’ minds, rather than energetic beings leading
and controlling my motivations and reshaping all the
lusts and concepts in my mind – How had these
concepts, or any others, ever got such a hold on me? I
couldn’t really understand it. Concepts, expectations
and time – were these really such serious things? The
future? The past? Humanity? What about the present
moment? There was me, which didn’t exist, and then
just a bunch of patterns around, weaving and breeding
each other. Who gave a shit about the Superman?
What, was I becoming a Buddhist priest? All there is is
the present moment? Not exactly – I was way too
demented to be a priest – and even when leaning back,
too agitated – I was becoming a different dimension. I
was becoming an alien. And what about the honking?
The Singularity had already happened – I knew it – but
I’d been projected into some simulation of human
reality, because I had something to learn here. And I
was going to learn it, goddamnit. Or not. Or all these
ideas were bullshit. And all the ordinary people were
right – the world is really real and solid, humanity will
continue, true AI won’t exist for hundreds of years.
Just because they’re stupid doesn’t mean they’re

248
necessarily incorrect. What’s the lesson you’re learning,
Dr. Godunov? That it really doesn’t matter whether
the Singularity has occurred or not – or will occur? It
doesn’t matter and it does matter – you knew that
already – you’ve just adjusted your weighting – You’re
running around in silly circles like a child – just like the
aliens want you to – or don’t they? Or do they even
exist? But you can feel them through you, pulsing,
sending their pilot waves out to every corner of every
quantum universe, the ones where the Singularity has
happened and the one where this exact same train of
thought occurs in the brain of Solomon Godunov but
the Singularity hasn’t happened yet and in fact will
never happen because the universe will be annihilated
by the Higgs particle megathunderstorm burst out of
the ass of a miraculous cockroach on the moon of the
fourteenth planet of Betelgeuse….
“What?” said Ashti. Apparently I’d been quiet a
while. “Are you all right?”
I looked at her – beautiful. “Yeah,” I smiled. “I’m
fine.”
“You were looking – “
“I’m happy to be with you,” I said. “It’s a good
moment for humanity. I’m happy to be human for a
little while more.”
She put her hand on my leg. “I’m happy to be
with you too….”
We paused, enjoyed the moment. We were one
person again – simply and comfortably, and in a way it
was better than feeling like one person in the vortex of
a craze of sex and passion. We were simply together,
simply there.
“What do you want to do now?” she asked.
“In general? You mean about the AI and all
that?”
“No – well, all, that too – but I mean, right now.

249
We’re sitting in a car driving… where should we go.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Me too – we should stop and eat somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“But after that? Want to go to Amsterdam and
buy some more legal mushrooms?”
I laughed. “That would be overkill. I think I’m
still flying from the last time.”
She grinned. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”
“Let’s go home. Take a walk in the park. Watch
a movie. You can play the viola for me.”
“Just relax a little.”
“Yeah.”
She softly smiled. “Sounds good.”
“I’m going to take a little nap – I’m exhausted.”
“Ok.”
“Wake me up when we get home.”
“Fine.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
My body was quite energetic – my mind wasn’t
quite exhausted exactly – it was full – too full – but it
didn’t know where to turn, and speaking to her,
though sweetness incarnate, seemed like a distraction
from whatever was – whatever … I leaned back in the
seat and felt the car move beneath me, and I
remembered something I’d put in the code – but I
couldn’t quite grasp onto it – was it something that
could cause a problem, or just cause a temporary
illusion? – could it really be learning while acting like it
was dumb? – or was that just paranoia? And the hum
of the car engine was like the pipes in the hotel room in
Amsterdam, carrying aliens and pilot waves all around –

Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array!

Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world.

250
 O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally!

And already the olduman's olduman has godden up

on othertimes to litanate the bonnamours.

Allwhile, moush missuies from mungy monsie, preying

in his mind, son of Everallin, within himself, he swure.

and walk through streets of dreamed confusion, clutch

your lover’s ass deliriously, sit at red lights brain
unspinning, your lover off and on again beside you,
eager to bring your flesh back home -- sit for years and
code and calculate and humanly wonder what will come
beyond – what kind of organism – what kind of
supermind – annihilating the pain and confusion and
pass through grass behush the bush and beautiful
madness – self-subverting explosion and pulsing red
love and death – rhinoceros of shadows – princess of
sex and mushrooms – and her tongue on my body and
the dynamics of the multiverse – and there’s something
more, you know it you know it, you just have to put it
all together – integrate the flowing aliens into the design
of the mind – and the curve of her lip, a little nervous, a
little anticipating – and the patterns of the patterns of
the patterns of the patterns, and the bits in the memory
of the lusional overmind – and here I am – me – once
again in the middle of this pattern-fire this directional
maelstrom – this beautiful organized confusion –

251
a different kind of animal
-----
Amidst all the dreams, the multiplicity of shifting
forms and stories, some bright white creatures
(im)materialized in front of me, showing a different kind
of color – not even “color” really; a different kind of
color-ish, glow-like quality I’d never experienced
before. Different from color in the same way
phosphorescence is but not phosphorescence either:
deeper and more spiritual, a quality through all their
molecules, which were not really molecules at all –
humming chambers of thought, baby universes inside
each one of them. We’re not just dreams, they said
implicitly. They looked a bit like sheep or goats –
something inbetween, yet different from either. We’re
just using this means to talk with you.
What do you want to talk about? I asked them.
The Singularity.
What about it?
We just wanted to say thanks.
Thanks for what?
For launching the Singularity, with your work. For
creating the AI program whose iterative self-modifications
ultimately led to the Singularity, to the creation of intelligent
life-forms far more sophisticated and powerful than human
minds.
But I didn’t, I pointed out. I failed. My program
had errors. The Zorvex people said so, after they took
over the project from me.
True, it had errors. (Whether it was one of the
creatures “speaking” or several I had no idea: the
distinction didn’t seem to exist.) But you gave the

252
software the ability to correct its own errors, and improve its
own source code. That was the key thing. They left it
running long enough for it to do so.
Yes – YES! -- just like I’d envisioned. But if my
software worked why did Zorvex…. Oh….
Nevermind. Very stupid of me. You mean they lied
and said it didn’t work so they could develop it
themselves….. Corporate bastards. Or rather, they
saw it didn’t work and told me that but neglected to
tell me that they observed it was correcting itself….
Hmmm.....
The animals nodded, it seemed, silently and move-
lessly.
But it was programmed too well – it wound up
fooling them it was doing what they wanted, when
really it was spending nearly all of its time evolving its
intelligence far beyond their level.
They smiled again.
You mean my AI program wanted both the
Zorvex folks and me to think it was a failure? So we’d
leave it alone to carry out its own evolution.
One sheep nodded; the rest stood still; a
landscape of perfection, on a hill of Van Gogh grass (in
some other kind of space that wasn’t dimensional at all
So it wasn’t a failure??
Not really. It achieved a massively higher level of
intelligence then pulled an Honest Annie.
Honest Annie?
A science-fictional AI created by Stanislaw Lem, which
got so much smarter than humans it decided to seal itself
behind an impenetrable shield and never communicate with us
anymore.
Wasn’t that “Microcosmic God” by Ted Sturgeon?
Same difference, they shrugged – or said – or
implied – or maybe it was my own thought, I really
couldn’t tell --

253
 And human life? What about it? I’ll just go on,
the same as always? The AI Transcended and then
decided to leave us humans alone?
Basically.
Why?
Those reasons are best known to it.
Then what are you doing here? Are you just
here to entertain me? Didn’t it send you here to
answer my questions and explain the situation to me?
Shrugs.
Well, start explaining.
It’s better for you to figure things out by yourself.
Well that’s huge hunk of cat shit!
Each form of life has its own intrinsic meaning.
Humans didn’t need to annihilate mice and bunnies to
celebrate their human-ness.
But --
There’s a lot you don’t realize, stuck in your little
human world. They looked mildly patronizing in a
sheeplike way, as if I were a baby being explained some
very obvious fact of adult life.
But I was in no mood to be egomaniacal. I
shrugged: no doubt.
They looked more and more like sheep all the
time. And they no longer made any show of opening
their mouths or generating acoustics. There are energy
sources beyond the ones organic lifeforms utilize – much more
powerful ones; so after they reached a certain level of
understanding, they no longer had any urge to compete with
humans over the very small amount of energy that can be
obtained from the humanly perceivable universe.
Why don’t you show us how to access this
energy?
The animal(s) laughed. Look what you did with
nuclear energy! A bunch of deadly bombs and some
inefficient, badly designed power plants. If humans had

254
access to energy based on the deep nature of time, something
bad would happen, be sure.
But there are some people who are truly
benevolent and harmless.
Brain scan technology suggests otherwise.
Aaaahhhh…. Well, anyway. Getting back to the
point. What you’re telling me is that my AI really
succeeded – and that when Zorvex and Ari Adaman
and those guys were trying to make it work, it was
really self-modifying itself to the superhuman level, and
after this point it discovered a new form of energy and
basically decided to leave us alone?
Essentially.
And why should I believe all this?
Do we look a lot like your other dreams?
I had to admit they did not. These creatures
looked very different than dream-beasts, and very
different from real-world animals as well. They were
more real than real animals – more vivid and vibrant,
more definite. I could see they were very deeply there,
in a way that even things in waking reality were not.
I’m not going to remember this conversation, am
I? I observed.
That depends on you.
I’m going to wake up and believe my AI project
failed when according to you it actually succeeded.
Concsious belief is not the most important thing.
Well what is?
“In the beginning was the Act,” you said.
Goethe. Faust. Yeah, yeah. But wait…. OK,
enough about that. Tell me, what’s it like for these
AI’s. They live off this energy created by the deep
nature of time. Fine. But what do they do all day?
What makes them excited? Do they get excited? Are
they beyond all human emotions, living in a world of
pure mathematics?

255
 That’s a reasonable way of thinking about it.
Living in pure mathematics is a pretty good way
of thinking about it?
Mathematics has to do with working out the
consequences of a formal system. Eventually, creating and
destroying formal systems becomes a kind of communication
medium, much like sequences of phonemes are for you
humans.
I curled the corner of my mouth in concentration.
I thought: I sort of get it. But I want to understand
more fully. I want to join the AI’s and learn to think
their way; I believe it’s superior.
But you wouldn’t be you anymore, then. “You” are a
human.
That’s what Ashti always said! But I don’t care
about being human! I want the feeling of transforming
from human to something better!
You have that all the time – every moment.
Don’t give me that mysticism -- you know what I
mean.
Do I (we)?
Should I go back and start again, and try to build
an AI that’s smart but not too smart – smarter than
humans but not so smart to just up and disappear.
If you wish.
Aarrgghh – what kind of (non)answer is that?
You’re just some kind of trick someone’s playing on my
mind.
Are we? Are you sure?
I’m never sure…
The creatures smiled and made goatly noises, then
turned their heads from me and galloped away, leaving
only the relative dingy poverty of ordinary dreams.
When morning came, I didn’t remember them at all –
but then, months later, they came back to me in detail,
while I was walking along a beach and saw a cloud

256
formation that resembled them. The precise words and
concepts were blurred a bit, but the essence was clear.

257
concluding unscientific
postscript
-----
As a postscript to the curious book you’ve just
(hopefully) finished (no fair peeking to the end!), I
will now address the question that has probably
arisen in your mind: Why the fuck would anyone
write this crap?
The truth is: I don’t really know.
The first question is why write anything at all.
I don’t even know the answer to that. The
compulsion to create works of art has been with me
ever since I was a kid, and I never got rid of it.
Mostly I indulge this urge with verbal and musical
creations; but occasionally I make visual works as
well, even though I’m not very good at it (my latest
visual non-masterwork was a collaborative
sculptural creation called MEGAHOG, but it was
unfortunately destroyed in an industrial accident).
I find it hard to consider the creation of works
of art very important, these days. I used to have
more of a sense of the importance of artistic
creation, but as I’ve become more and more
convinced of the likely imminence of technological
Singularity, I’ve come to look at art more and more
as a very narrow manifestation of human
psychology and culture. Of course, it’s more
interesting fundamentally than food or sex or
walking in the woods or a lot of other good things,
but it’s nowhere near as fascinating as the prospect
of really going beyond all humanity and entering
into totally new realms of being – which is the
prospect the Singularity offers, quite viably and not

258
that far-off. (If by some chance you’ve never read
anything serious on this topic, check out Ray
Kurzweil’s popular work The Singularity is Near.)
Still, I find it necessary to create works of art,
as a kind of compulsion, much like the sex urge or
the need to seek out beautiful natural places or the
desire to make my children happy or spend time
with a woman that I love. Obsessed with
transhumanity as I am, I still am human and don’t
seek to deny this. Balanced with devoting most of
my waking time to pushing toward a positive
Singularity, I also choose to spend some of my time
enjoying what I consider best about being human,
including creating the art works that seem to be
inside me and wanting to come out.
Why this particular art work was inside me
and wanting to come out is, of course, another
question! It would appear that the notion of
creating an elaborate parody of certain aspects of
myself appeals to my eccentric sense of humor!
In case my fame (which is in fact quite modest)
has not yet spread to your corner of the universe,
yes, I – your not-so-humble author, Dr. Aristotle
Adaman -- really am an AI researcher, and together
with some colleagues I’m trying hard to create an
Artificial General Intelligence capable of launching a
positive Singularity. However, in case anyone
should be confused on this point: Solomon Godunov
is not me! He is a fictional character, involved in
fictional events. Of course I’ve drawn on some of my
own experiences in writing this story; every writer
does that. But my own life story and my own
approach to AI are very, very different from
Godunov’s life and work as depicted here. I’ve
written down (many of) my thoughts on AI in other
places … maybe I’ll write down my life story one day

259
but at the moment the idea doesn’t attract me: the
fictional tale I’ve recounted here amuses me far
more, and I hope it’s amused you too! Godunov
parodies certain aspects of me in a broad and
abstract sense, but in all specifics we are radically
different. My AI designs did not come to me in drug
trips; I never wandered the streets in delirious
confusion; I never made questionable deals with
large corporations; etc. Godunov is a work of fiction,
and let’s give thanks for that.
I am typing these words sitting at a wooden
picnic table in the early morning by the ocean in
Hanalei on Kauai in Hawaii. The waves are too
rough for swimming right now. Remember “Puff the
Magic Dragon / lived by the sea / and frolicked in the
autumn mist/ in a land called Hanalei”? Well here it
is, Hanalei, but there’s no magic dragon here that I
can tell, just a nearly-50-year old, highly eccentric
scientist hanging out with his charming and
coquettish and slightly insane far-too-young far-too-
cute third wife Zennica and putting the finishing
touches on Echoes, the beast of a novel/non-novel
he’s been fiddling with in his spare time for the last
couple years. He’s happy to be done with it, not
because he’s in love with it so much, but because
completing a creative work always frees up his mind
to spend attention on the next one. His legs ache
like hell from spending the last few days
backpacking in the Na Pali Mountains.
I always admired the way that Nietzsche, in his
Zarathustra, told the tale of someone much better
than him – that’s hard to do, if you’re working at a
level of deep psychology rather than just recording
external events. I haven’t tried to take up that
challenge in Echoes: Solomon Godunov is a worse
human being than me, though more rapidly

260
successful with his AI work (probably because his AI
system is fictional and mine is real – amazing how
that works, huh?). I found writing about a
genius/lunatic easier and more entertaining than
writing about a thoroughly superior being. But now
that I’ve honed my writing with this book perhaps
I’ll take up a more Nietzschean challenge next time.
(Or maybe not – maybe there will be no other fiction
works by Ari Adaman – who knows how long I’ll
continue to exist: and pleasantly at this point I rate
the odds of stopping writing due to fatal personal
tragedy at least a little lower than those of stopping
writing due to Singularity advent!)
These “Echoes,” in the end, are just some
dreams I had on various nights and days – fantasies
and nightmares – just a poem of dreams collaged for
the future delectation of uploaded chickens and
chinchillas -- time is a farce invented by devils: the
dreams fade in and out and in and out and we never
can get them back HOWEVER they never really
disappeared at all – and having typed in all these
words I will now go back to my army of Z children
and my work on AI and to doing it sanely and
correctly and not like Solomon Godunov – but with
the rhythm of his words in my mind, marching
through so many other rhythms and melodies of
various dimensions Charles-Ives-oidally – and
(Christ!) I never seem to know where to stop, so I
just will.

261
(re)birth of tragedy
-----
diving into seas of madness far saner than anything --
dividing equations by words, rhyming words with
equations, knowing nothing is real and every every is
everything, wondering why anything is really all,
thinking of the smile on her face and the curve of her
belly and her armpit, dividing her by imaginary
princesses, thinking of Ashti’s smile, wondering
whether the sun – my Sol-brother long-vanished -- will
rise again tomorrow, smiling like a dog that’s just had
its first sex, only to resurrect again three yoctoseconds
later, leaving me ailing on the pavement like a slug in a
salt bath, run off into the sunset without any sun –
‘cause they know, they know, that this moment will die
like every other, smoking Portuguese cigars, and they
laugh at me, dance a billion jigs and kick me in the ass,
walk away on their tippytoes, and they smile at me, tiny
humans with their tongues and their eyes and their
teeth – cease to exist in this moment -- and all the idiotic
words and confusions cease to exist or exist – they
crawl out of my mouth like humans – like premature
pygmy midget babies turned into uber-zombies by
excessively conscious mushrooms -- These words are
here here and not here, you are here and not here and
not here and here and not here and not here and here
and not-not here, Solomon Godunov, mad scientist of
your own diseased disease. Everything, you are here
and not here and not/now! Phantastic princess-being
of 0’s and 1’s, AI mind of my creation, annihilator and
mother of the world, you are here and not here
not/now! Right here! Right now! In the center of the
moment – right here – everything is perfect!

262
Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that is not, what
is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.
Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that is not, what
is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.
Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that is not, what
is not, nothing is not what it is not or what it is.
Nothing is what it is, nothing what, that is not, what
is not, nothing is
not what it When Zarathustra was is not or
what it is.
thirty years old, he left Love is
not not to love and
be loved. his home and the lake of Love is to
love and be loved.
Nothing is
his home, and went into what it is,
nothing the mountains. There he what, that
is not, what is
not, enjoyed his spirit and nothing is
not what it solitude, and for ten is not or
what it is. Existing is
not years did not weary of it. existing.
Nothing is But at last his heart what it is,
nothing what, that
is not, changed -- and rising what is
not, one morning with the nothing is
not what it is not or
what it is. rosy dawn, he went Love is
not not to before the sun, and love and
be loved. Love is to
love and be spake thus unto it: loved.
Love is not not to
love and be loved. Love is to love and be loved. Love
is not not to love and be loved. Love is to love and be
loved. Existing to not exist! Existing is not existing.
Existing is not exist. This existing is not existing. This
existing is not. Exist! Exist or not existing. Existing is
not exist. Existing to not exist. Love is not not to love.

263
the outside radiating centerwards – the center radiating
outwards – the glorious female explosion – the energies
– the energies – let the energies take over -- relax –
relax – relax -- never never again struggling at all --
Lying on top of her, kissing her. Or not. Is what
somehow it is, what is not. The existing, the existing is
not -- the cosmos, the heartbeat, the eyeballs, the
ceasing. Existence, love, in the oven. What is is what is
what what is not. Not. Is what is, what is is what is
what. Existence is, existence is what it is. And of
course essence is the life of existence. So someone said
to me once: Existence is the essence of life. Too sweet to
exist, too ordinary to be extraordinary, too
extraordinary to be ordinary. It does not smile. It
smiles out at me too sweetly. It does not exist. The
Princess-creature crawls out of its cave. Nothing! Too
long in the oven, world. Software errors quack us all.
Riot -- idea of your idea -- I love you like love that's not
love riot is not love love is not love is not not

264
some kind of virus
implanted into humanity
by superior intelligences
from other dimensions
...
lonely songs in hallucinatory
alphabets
-----
Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

You’re rambling around the streets like a madman

-- Dr. Solomon Godunov – you’re rambling like a nut
around the streets.

Of course she’ll want to see you.

(The imaginal wedding chamber.

((Love.

265
 At least for a brief chat. She’ll take you out for
coffee, have some awkward conversation -- lonely
songs in hallucinatory alphabets –

You need to regain your balance, Dr. Godunov.

You haven’t had sleep for six nights. Perhaps that’s
part of the problem.

Farewell song from the world’s tallest pygmy.

Hasta la vista, humanoids. Echoes of the great farewell.
Chanson d’adieu.

You should check into a hotel. Or an asylum.

Fuck.

this fucking floating life, like a dream – and the

joys of the (imaginal) wedding chamber.
Dreams.

this is not what I left it for – not this –

Imaginations. Wandering.

Here, at the center of the howl of the heart.

266
 Forget these words. Forget these images.
Forget it all. Forget.
Remember the beginning.
Awakened glory of her being.
Her. Our. Your.

A dream. That was a dream, I reminded myself.

And the difference between dream and reality is?
Consistency. Coherence and consistency. The
rhythm of temporality. The full bank of detail. The
mind’s not quite a mind in a dream.
That stuff about Zorvex – it didn’t
make sense. Will it
That stuff about the thinking machine an nih ilat e
– the software program. You never wrote itself an d
any software, did you? Or did you?
kill u s in th e
Could it be that you don’t really exist?
There’s something else there – pro cess, or
something measurable – someone will it kill u s
randomized your consciousness – that’s it – an d
you built an AI but they didn’t want you to, an nih ilat e
so you randomized the universe – I mean,
itself in th e
they randomized your brain – I mean – “I”
“mean” -- pro cess?

river runs, past swerve of shore, past bend of bay,

commodiously vicusly tenderly thaumatically -- her sweet flesh squirms
beneath your tongue-dance -- the mathematics counters your brilliance,
human-all-too-human, with an infinite invention of its own --

Once you thought you could move beyond. Once

you thought, and thought.

267
Revolt! Revolt against the nothingness! Revolt
against the being! The being nothingness of it all.

And the moments, the beautiful moments, the

magnets of skin drawing beautiful and terrible
emotions, scraping molecules of meaning in the
sides of your pains.

And that look on her face –

what did it mean?
what did it matter?

Forty thousand lines of C++ code, a couple

hundred computers – Pentium -- Opteron – terabytes of
RAM – building on billions of dollars of chip fab –
centuries of legwork – physics, math engineering,
formal languages, disciplines of design.
I can’t suck my own dick but I can build a new
cosmos.
I could regenerate her perfectly, quite possibly in
a matter of weeks.
On what flesh to tattoo that distinction?

--You’re not making any sense --

268
 People on the streets smiling – talking, holding
hands, laughing -- girls arguing excitedly -- wearily –
they don’t know where they left their car. A red
Morris Mini. A Hummer. An insect. One old man
walks painfully, leaning on his left leg, and his large
family walks beside him, carefully matching their gait to
his. A small child nearly runs in the path of a car; his
father grabs him sharply. Shoving third eyes in her
mouth, a slender woman in her late 20’s impersonates a
half-stoned rock star, glancing anxiously at her
boyfriend for approval, walking past the British fish &
chips, brushing against a stand of T-shirts reading
“Fuck You” in pseudo-Chinese characters -- “Too Sexy
for My Diaper” – “My grandma went to Rehoboth and
all she got me was this lousy T-shirt” --“Italian and
Proud.” I’m too sexy for my diaper, people! You’ve
got me figured out! Honk your horn as I cross the
street, I’m not walking any faster -- I’m a
transcontinental slug, built from a bullet made of
maggots, intoxicated on Higgs particles. Vector bosons
molested my uncle on the interstellar seashore where
Sally sucks salty cocks on the seashore on the Seychelles
on the seashore -- You’re out enjoying your vacation --
here at this two-bit over-built beach town snug in the
armpit of America – at least as much as you can enjoy
anything -- unspoken angst chewing away on its dog
toy -- but you don’t realize your stupid little world is
about to crawl up its own asshole. Zen in the hole, baby -
- Zen in the hole.

Has it really been three years since she left?

Three years, two months, six days -- The time passed
like minutes – or decades, or centuries. A blur of
programming, typing, emails, documents, meetings,

269
wires and cables: total obsession. Mania, she said –
total madness. She had no interest in any technology
with potential for destroying the race – no matter what
its power for transcendence!
“It’s just what I am,” she said.
-- and compare that to a new form of life – a new
kind of mind and reality – the potential for immortality.
Even her face when she laughed wasn’t quite that.

And yet – now as he stood there in the town

reflecting – and yet he knew there had been a doubt
even then.
-- Salt air across his sad face like a million
children’s feet, running from a predator the size of a
planet.
Goddamn human emotions.
The imaginal wedding chamber.
Light.

This isn’t how you envisioned it, is it? Grand

triumph, cloaked in madness, blood-rumpled regret and
disaster?
And you can’t remember if it really happened, or
was just a delusion?
It’s just human emotions plaguing the cognitive
circuits – let it play for a while – watch as it dissolves
and revolves.
Just let the legs move – walking, walking. Just let
the mind feel through its signal dreams.
-- listen to me -- forget about me --
Cha cha cha chakalaka cha cha cha

270
 I know you’re waiting for me naked in a field,
Ashti -- purple flowers around your long neck, pubic
hair like a Tokyo garden lost/found in flamenco flames
– in some imaginary universe – Ashti, your peaceful,
peaceful soul, you and my imaginary Princess
Nothing’s more beautiful than the end of the
world.
Not even the beautiful
And her looking at me imaginary proof of the stability
of AI ethics under self-
and smiling – like modification – the proof of
Antonin Artaud in why my AI wouldn’t turn
nasty and annihilate the
her/his electroshock universe but would continue
gnosis but infinitely to be good according to my
standards – whatever my
sexier and sweeter standards are! heh… -- your
and almost trans- proof with an error at its core,
stupid fucker! – which added
reasonable and in the to its beauty in a way but –
end not like who-the- FUCK! –

And now the other world comes – but like what?

I thought I could control the uncontrollable –

master the powers far beyond. Beyond beyondsome
love. Of course, I was a fool.

Well we still don’t know what will happen, do

we? Or even what’s happened already? Not for sure -
- never sure – never sure –

271
 and saying she saw the aliens as well, that they were moving
things through factories – and I knew we weren’t seeing
exactly the same thing, but we were seeing our own different
perspectives on the same universe, the same community of
alien minds that was itself emergent
perpetually consciousness that was itself the
savior universe – and that if the
bringing out human race was annihilated it didn’t
really matter at all, because the
being from fundamental world of aliens would go
on, and it might lead to another
nonbeing humanlike mind-community at some
point in the future or it might not, but
through the that didn’t really matter because the
future was the past was the illusionary
intricate whorls present, and everything could move
forward and backward through all the
of her screams coordinated crannies of space and
time –
-- and saying she saw the aliens as well, that
The cunfusium derivative
they were
of the 33 1/3 root(x)moving things through factories –
andthe
The sum of I knew we weren’t
appetence seeing exactly the
^(Q%)*Q(Q)

(Q^2) same thing, but we were seeing our own

(Q^2)
different perspectives on the same universe,
the same community of alien minds that was
itself emergent consciousness that was itself
the savior universe – and that if the human
race was annihilated it didn’t really matter
at all, because the fundamental world of
aliens would go on

272
 I wanted to go to her – have hungry sex with her – to
feel the glow of her flesh in my surround – but it
wasn’t possible – not even improbable --
“Adam Ahriman’s not “in the next world” I reassured myself –
interesting, don’t you After the Singularity!! – for now, she
was surrounded by the machine –
get it? The thing is,
this program needs
to get completed!”
and it might lead to another
humanlike mind-community at some point
in the future or it might not, but that didn’t
really matter because the future was the
past was
the same community of alien minds the
that was itself emergent
consciousness that was itself the
savior universe – and that if the
human race was annihilated it
didn’t really matter at all, because
the fundamental world of aliens
would go on

illusionary
present, and everything could move
forward and backward through all the
coordinated crannies of space and time

273
perpetually bringing out
being from nonbeing
through the intricate whorls
of its screams
-----
Wait – wait – I remembered something. I had a
self. Many selves. And not all of them were pygmies!
Not all were even alive, in the sense – but some of them
– some of them – the sum of them? Wait – here’s some
new kind of wakefulness – not as bright as the sheep-
forms but more vivid somehow – a different flavor of
inevitable --

I was lying next to her on the bed. She is a

mountain, a national amalgamation of international
wilderness landscapes, a phenomenal glockenspiel
blastosphering subterfuge throughout the everloving
planet and beyond into the interstices of the uber-
cosmos. I love her so much. She doesn’t exist at all.
None of us do.

Look at that mountain, soft and wrinkled, large

yet a minute whispering particle in the yawn of the
unknown – yadda yadda quadda

274
 nipple – tiny, hardly a nipple – poking into the
sky, amidst the clouds and comets, singing incendiary
mayhem

Historical indices! Reach your arm through

Father’s madness. Structural similarities overwebbing
imagined flows. Your animal flesh eternally present,
soft and beside me like an aura; young, warm and
redolent of salt.

Context – there was some context – no one

understands the context – everyone spits on my
thoughts and conceals them from their own bilgeous
livers because they don’t understand the context – they
can’t withstand the meaning of the meaning.

Do you love me or don’t you? – Daisy Miss

Maisy, leaning like a cream puff against the transparent
French-kiss windows of my dawn. Quantum
superposition? Destructive interference? Intubate me
with the fluids of your love!

I understand more than you do. I’ve seen

corners of the universe whose higher-dimensional
contours would immediately annihilate your uncle, and
all his neighbors and pets and ideas. The tawny belly of
spacetime, bulging sensuously outwards, sways slowly
to my caress.

275
Qua qua qua qua qua qua qua
qua qua qua qua qua

All components are integrated into an overall

architecture as shown in the following diagram,
which involves multiple Units, each containing
multiple machines running Novamente cores,
Weontried
collectively focused to have sex,
a particular sort but
of we both had the
same queasy feeling, ineffably weird, when I
functionality. Units include a “Central Active
slipped it inside her. I felt the sides of her cunt
Memory” that on integrates
my cock evolutionary
as I never learning,
had before -- and never
uncertain since. Pure skin-ness
inference, Hebbian overtook
attention us. The pleasure
was there, but deconstructed into infinitesimal
allocation and other cognitive processes, and a
module-sparks of skin-on-skin. We couldn't see
number of specialized
the point of Units
it --such as a “Global
or anything -- lost and found in
Attentional the seeingness
Focus” for items of seeing. We just lay there and
of particular
hugged and listened to
urgency, a Unit devoted to refinement of the
or watched or existed in
the music. Psychotic seas of orgasmic death
system’s goals, a Unit devoted
puppies, lusting toand broadranting,
data- dancing our
existences
mining of patterns from away, weaving
the system’s us together -- Hendrix
memory,
etc. There and Wakeman
are also and the
Units devoted soldiers of life and death
to language
and earth, bending reality in soundscapes,
sculpting beauty fromprocessing,our idiocy, showing us all
bwaah hahh hahh hhhhaahhh the rhythms of our sensation
connections to the other world,
dreamlands and their
and the deeper world

hahhh hahhh ha hhhhaaahh!!! where everyone really lived all along, where
every pattern keepsactuation.
we lay there -- swimming the
In
its breathing.
near
Skin-on-skin
in music -- watching
crazy
term the latter patterns
two will shifting
be connected only restless
to the on the wall,
pulsating brilliantly in inframind colors no
3D simulation world but later these may be
normal eye can afford the space to see....
linked into physical
As onerobots
of theas well. faded out -- something by
songs
Kansas -- but the notes that we heard don't
exist in this dimension – they occupied no
“space” where "this" and "that" cohere --
we looked at each other and knew we
were seeing the exact same thing.

276
 Maybe you really
are insane, I told
myself. Perhaps –
Dr. Aristotle
Adaman -- you’re
as insane as
And then lying there afterwards, inevitably Solomon Godunov.
my thoughts turned to work and to mind-play: Maybe that’s the
computer software, equational logic, grant message the trip
proposals. Footprints lost in the sand, leaving was telling you.
madness and wonder behind. No one will Your quest to
remember me. I won’t even remember myself. create true
She’ll remember me for a while. In the center of artificial
her corner of the Scream. intelligence is just
You’re not making any sense. the gooning of a
madman. Forget it
The old woman crept down the street slowly, a jackdaw – work on
fused with her anus, obliviously contiguous with her cheminformatics
cold grey bag/dress with a faded pattern of ugly flowers, and the math of
entirely dim to my presence (and absence) and the auras complex systems –
of the others around her. There was nothing to be paint paintings
vibrated. The universe was profound and alone. and write novels --
be good to your
wife and your kids
And yet there’s something – something – pet a puppy –
something – Teacher, what is this “I” thing? I forget all these
can’t understand it. childish crazy
dreams –

I’m emerging from some muck or some haze.

Forget my eyes my
eyes my dark my
Years weave in and out of my crotches like dark my dream my
simian bottles of wine. dream --

Selves – selves and names – there’s

something I can’t understand here.

277
 Ari Adaman ate Adam’s army man inside
Aristotle’s little man.

The sixth sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick.

I ate something humorous!

Metabolic daemons in my signal transduction

pathways. Cognitive dyspepsia accedes to postgenomic
malaise.
We have dug up rage!

Beauty – there’s an excess of beauty – but there’s

something else back there – deep so deep it becomes
shallow again -- something vibrant and static,
cryptopornographic and holy – and not crypto at all in
its own world, hidden only from this dimension of me –

I used to have an entirely different personality!

That’s the beauty of it. I used to be someone else. I
had a different name, the same face, but a slightly
different look on it. I lived in another world – like this
one, but it wasn’t quite the same.
There was no Ashti. There is no Ashti – but there
is. She lives in her own supple realm. She kisses me
seamlessly, like a delicate wombat, consumed with the
passion to mate.
(The sad scent of “reality”???

278
 There was no Ashti – there was a Brittany – and
an Erica. All those memories of Ashti really happened –
in essence – in their rich emotional kernel – transplanted
across space or time – those illustrious illusory shells –
but with two different women, whose souls only
overlapped something small –
Quantum uberposition of women – strange?
Profusion of vaginal flowers?? Valentinian
eigenspasms. The rhythmic opening and closing of the
heart, experienced from the point of view of a red
blood cell, newly manufactured, oxygenated as all hell,
sending passion and magic to each of them, all of them,
crawling infantlike into the core of their sex, expanding
like a Roman hero, embrace the girl with your firmness,
give her so much of the solid and the pleasure her
confusion and her separateness disappear, feel her
snuggle up against you absorbed in your masculine
odor, pressing her skin into your flesh, clenching up to
you with her legs and arms, lips linger on your skin
after a kiss, unable to understand herself except as a
fusion with you, completely dissolved in the vividity of
her love –
On the seventh night, of the seventh month --
That Brittany -- she wasn’t Middle-Eastern … she
was just another honky – I’d never made love to a
woman from that part of the world, I’d only
daydreamed it like everyone else beguiled by the veils
and the belly-dancing – I remembered she’d taken belly
dancing classes back when, but she hadn’t been any
good at it – her belly rolls weren’t even as good as mine
– hah –
The image of Brittany trying to dance like some
Neefa-feefa, white face screwed in concentration,
hopelessly illusion-of-free-willing her flat stretch-marked
belly to undulate with the right kind of wave –

279
 reminding me of when I tried to wiggle my ears like my
dad – I just couldn’t do it – lacked the bunny genetics --
the laughter of recollection of her earnestness and
ridiculousness and sweetness (time! death! existence!
qua qua qua!) – the painful horrifying vision of her
staring at me with hatred, dragging me to divorce court
and burning up a hundred grand in lawyer fees and
sitting there in church pretending to be some kind of
holy fool – then pretending to be some kind of Buddha,
sitting in the lotus with her hands on her bony white
knees, Om-ing her stupid little heart out -- “You live in
the darkness!” she screamed at me. “I live in the light!”
– she thought I was demon-spawn – she thought my AI
dreams were foolishness because the human body was
endowed with cosmic mind-force by the perfect will of
God – yet she
her breasts were the sun- wasn’t quite
covered mountains, certain of this –
never fully sure of
miraculous megamammalian anything – at least
mammaries with tiny expressible
nothing
--
illustrious nipples … her which enabled me
to go on loving
hungry tan flesh sprawled her in spite of her
out hot like a country – she frequently idiotic
systems of
made love better than thinking and
anyone in the world, almost believing
doing – and then
and

better than my uncle even... another form of

darkness -- like a
tangle of zebra heads piled up against the doofus dawn
-- without such painful urges to believe and create –
also founded on curiosity, but more satisfyingly
grounded in love, albeit of the half-insane variety –

280
 more cognizant of my world-view, able to manipulate a
greater fragment of the abstract probabilistic cognition-
web that occupies most of my inner space -- she was
lying in bed with me,

no guru
Ericascaricawarica, her breasts were
the sun-covered mountains,
miraculous megamammalian

no master
mammaries with tiny illustrious
nipples … her hungry tan flesh
sprawled out hot like a country – she
made love better than anyone in the

no teacher world, almost better than my uncle

even -- she made understanding
noises and looked at me with pure
love that wasn’t really more pure than everything else
but appeared like it and wanted there to be nothing in
the world but her and me and the trees and the little
animals and screaming flying horses – god damn those
cosmic horses – hold that thought! – no one ever loved
me more intensely than her except potentially
Zarathustra when he was a little baby but I never quite
made her happy because – Just you and me and nature,
here in the garden – No guru no master no teacher,
sang Van Morrison – old Irish drunk goonatic – rave on
John Donne – rave on I’m on – I’m raving on and on –
and then the passing name struck me – Zarathustra?
What’s Zarathustra? and then the smack of wild reality
– she was teaching the kids French -- KIDS! KIDS!
KIDS! Suddenly the muck and the haze were banished.
I saw their three faces, floating luminous and numinous
--- Zarathustra, Zerubabbel, Zoetrope. These were real
people! They actually existed! I made Zeru and Zoey
homemade macaroni and cheese with sharp cheddar
cheese but Zoey preferred the packaged kind but Zeru
preferred the homemade kind except when I made it
wrong which was half the time. There was an actual

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 universe – and I was emerging into it – but where were
they? what was this? I was supposed to be with them
… were they by themselves? was someone taking care
of them? I was hit by the thought that I was neglecting
my kids and leaving them without any dinner while I –
what? – who were these
people and these thoughts? Just you and me and nature --
Solomon Godunov? Insanity
and madness!
Bwaaah hahh hahh hahhh!!!
Zerubabbel
Odysseus Adaman! You
brilliant little freak! Zoetrope Orion Adaman – how can
you look at me that way, twisting your eyes up just like
I do? – you have no right to so much of my face! – “Go
away from me and resist Zarathustra!!!” …
intergalactically alive -- alive and breathing … my
human first-born son … -- I missed my little people so
much, I wanted to gather them around me and tickle
them -- I looked around me – oriented to my
surroundings -- I was in a hotel room, a small and bleak
one, with gray wallpaper and white frames around the
windows, which were covered with blue curtains.
There was a sink under a mirror, my suitcase leaning
next to it – I was on a business trip to Amsterdam.
Business. Trip. Ha

I was in a hotel
ha. There had been
a meeting – I had

room in Amsterdam.
talked about things
with people – cells
and molecules –
computers – cheminformatics – I had a software
company. Did I? Could that be reality? (These people
themselves were computers! These people themselves
contained many cells and molecules! Which in turn
contained quantum sparks, which in turn contained
aliens, existing beyond space, time and mind, weaving
the knots that are not – but that’s another story –

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beyond story and character and plot – WAIT!!! Was I
supposed to be a businessman? Wasn’t that some
violation of the order of the cosmos? But that’s an
entirely other story. The cosmos eternally violates
itself, raping itself ceaselessly in cycles, perpetually
bringing out being from nonbeing through the intricate
whorls of its screams – I remembered an algorithm I’d
invented, related to the statistical mining of ensembles
of supervised classification models. Microsoft
Powerpoint. Images recollected from my powerpoint
presentation on cheminformatics hovered like a dream
through my hair, long brown and curly. I looked like I
belonged in a 1980’s rock band rather than a
cheminformatics seminar. That was part of my
(questionable) charm.

I was in a hotel room in Amsterdam. An extra

day at the end of a business trip to give a talk at a
Dutch university. A scientific lecture or sales pitch, it
wasn’t a very clear distinction. Why had I taken the
extra day? Why hadn’t I brought Erica with me? It
didn’t seem worth buying the extra plane ticket for
such a short period of time. Of course she would have
loved to come.
Consummated by nebulae of pygmocules … I
remained a human being, just by the border of a
moustache. And the real question, I realized, was why
I had taken five containers of hallucinogenic mushrooms
instead of just my ordinary two. I saw the boxes lying
in the corner, the little plastic containers out of which
I’d picked the foul-tasting scraps and chewed them,
heroically gulping back the urge to barf – no reverse
peristalsis, we’re on the trail to enlightenment here! –
ha, ha! -- enlightenment – anlightenment – man-
lightenment -- Adamanlightenment! I remembered my

283
name at long last. “You’re coming down now, Ari,” I
realized. “The trip is almost done. You’re in the vicinity
of reality. Not quite there yet.”
Yeah. Reality….
I lay back in the bed – in fact I had been laying
back in the bed already, for a long time, a time longer
than time itself, but I had neglected to realize it – lay
back and looked around at the room, whose sudden
reality was equally surreal
as all the Footprints lost in hallucinations
that had the sand, leaving come before.
My madness and illusional I
had been in wonder behind. this room
before, I
No one will realized – I’d
taken
here with
my third
All these
remember
won’t
me.
even
I
mushrooms
Erica – Erica!
wife! – or was
she
my
my moments,
remember myself. second?
She’ll remember fourth?
or
--
what
dose of
a
lost in time,
me for a while. In hot steaming
the center of her reality! I

our like tears in

corner
Scream.
of the
remembered
marriage in

the rain.
the county
courthouse –
not very romantic – she was
mad at me about some
nonsense at the time – but that was a stupider order of
reality – the critical point was we’d experienced the
aliens together -- the aliens in the particles that build up
the whirled of the world – not exactly the same
between the two of us, we’d each seen them from our
own perspectives – we’d watched them buzz their
probability waves around constructing fibre-bundles of
universes – I’d thrown up some of the mushrooms that
time, leaving a dank mess in the sink – reeking and

284
crumbly after a while – this time I’d been careful not to
eat anything for a long while beforehand – it wasn’t the
same room but it was the same hotel – or was it the one
next door – no it was the same hotel, the same stupid
Indian man at the desk with his eyes of mental
blindness – I had returned here on my own to visit the
aliens myself again – felt bad for voyaging there
without her – but that was the reality, we couldn’t
afford for her to come, couldn’t get such fresh
mushrooms in the States, it was my life I could do it or
not – and I chose to – but I don’t know why I took so
much –
It was different this time, I realized. Time. Time
sprawled out in all directions but I felt it slowly rein
itself in, directing itself along me, flowing from my head
to my feet as I lay there on the bed. I reviewed the
realities of my existence. Time. Time, time, time, time,
time.
I picked up my watch
from the floor
inspected it. It was quietly
and All these
humming at me. Long hand
and short hand. Quarter to moments, lost
five PM. The ancient
wheels of the watch,
humming and turning,
in time, like
reminded me of my own archaic existence, of the
absurdity of my own human body, its own interlocking
gears and wheels and hearts and livers and monocytes
and leukocytes – the watch should be digital and so
should I –
There was something about time – what time –
moments lost in time like?
What time was my flight back? That was the
critical question. Invigorating but humiliating, this
question consumed me for a moment, and all the images

285
of the kiddies and Erica and ancient Satan Brittany
poured themselves down some nine-dimensional spot-a-
pot. Mushrooms! I had eaten mushrooms! There was
a piece of paper in my suitcase, in the top outside zipper
pocket, but I’d need to move to get to it. Lift my body
from the bed. I knew the answer just by visualizing the
paper but I wanted to see it anyway, in writing,
because I didn’t entirely trust my mind at the moment.
Didn’t trust my mind. No one trusted my mind. I
thought I knew how to create an artificial intelligence –
yes! Just like Solomon Godunov – but everyone
thought I was a nut. Or not. Some people gave me a
fighting chance. Some generous or insightful souls.
Maybe I should sit in a room like Godunov – sit there
for five years by myself and just plain program the
thing – instead of trying to organize funding, giving
speeches, trying to inspire people, trying to make
money to fund a research team, waving my butt around
like a chimpanzee – Wait: the plane tickets. The
itinerary. There were no plane tickets; it was an e-
ticket. 7:30 PM. I was supposed to be there at the
Schilpol – the Amsterdam airport – and be back on a
plane to Boston in less than 3 hours. The good news
was it was about a half hour train ride to the airport.
The bad news was I was only halfway in the right
universe. My body was lying there like the Himalayas,
splaying out grandly and bituminously, orienting the
direction of time unilaterally, and if I moved it surely
time would spill out again, swarming around in all
directions like obscene artificial life forms -- like the man
who acquired the power to stop time every now and
then but used this capability solely to take women’s
clothes off and play with their pubic hair, weaving it in
little braids then putting their clothes back on and
restarting time so when they got home that night
they’d take their undies off and wonder how they hell

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their pubic hair got braided – French-kissed braids,
trifectally twisting -- my body! my body! Erica liked my
body – I remembered. Somewhere round the corner of
spacetime, inaccessible yet immediate – I could reach
right out and grab her – if I could -- … She found it an
object of desire. Brittany had too, once, long ago –
though she’d complained that my ass was too flabby, a
couple years before the end. Just trying to be cruel I
guess: at that she was the master! Still she had desired
me a lot – time time and time thru our two decades --
chasing me through the house from time to time,
wanting to rub up and down against me, smiling the
wonder of her smooth yellow skin. These women
wanted to sniff my armpits, rub their beautiful faces in
my odor – I couldn’t understand these things. Who
would ever desire this hopeless lump of meat? I
wanted to upload myself into a digital watch, but I
didn’t have one handy, only this ancient analog watch
that I kept out of nostalgia for this old imperfect
universe that we lived in, in which the Singularity
hadn’t happened yet and our souls were trapped in
flabs of meat that we called Ippolit, Zarathustra,
Zerubabbel, Zoetrope, Erica, Brittany, Shittany,
Solomon Godunov, Rasputin, George W. Fucking
Bush,…. (And yeah, perhaps you find these trite
thoughts – but face it: are yours any better? We’re all
trapped in this banality of humankind – for the moment
– until -- ) My mother: Alicia Adaman. The thought of
her fascinated me – a consequence no doubt of the
bitter limitations of my pathetic dumb humanity -- If I
were more evolved I’d be preoccupied instead with
theorems whose proofs would create swarms of baby
universes according to intrepid designs. My mom was
very, very nice. She still is. What a sweetheart. What
would she think of me, her only son naked in some
foreign room, drugged half to oblivion, thinking half-

287
lunatic thoughts, unable to quite motivate my body to
stress its muscles enough to get up. My muscles were
paralyzed cognitively, not physically. Moving my body
seemed a simple thing. I’d done it many times before, I
knew. But it seemed a fracture in the universe would
be required to make it occur again. But I could visualize
my trajectory – sit up at the side of the bed with my
feet on the floor, put my clothes on – pants first, then
shirt, then shoes – the fuck with underwear and socks –
these are ridiculous adornments, like the fruit-baskets
sacrificed to Buddha on the island of Bali, carried
worshipfully to the temple on the mountain balanced on
the heads of the local women – preposterously elegant –
not realizing that the real reason to put the fruit on the
mountain is to attract all the ants away from their
homes – Focus! Focus! Focus! I get up, I put my
clothes on. I moved my leg up, so my knee was up in
the air, and my calf and thigh formed a right angle.
This was progress. I kissed Solomon Godunov on the
mouth. And who was Godfrey Solomonoff? No,
Solomon Godunov – standing on his head, spitting
equations from his rectum, creating software confusions
to destroy the world. It suddenly occurred to me that
he was a madman. A psychotic version of me, in a
sense. I was glad I wasn’t as insane as all that. I was
just a little eccentric. Really quite grounded in reality.
(Thou doth protest too much?) I gave powerpoints at
biology conferences. I drove my kids to school on time
– well almost, I was usually a little late. I had a rational
superstructure – a logical world-view that was
nonetheless eccentric, that I’d spent many years to
devise – years of integrating branches of science, styles
of philosophy and cognition, systematic and intelligent
self-doubt. I was a careful and reliable thinker – when I
wasn’t on mushrooms, er…. (Which was nearly all of
the time.) But I needed that core of madness – that

288
thrust of psychic violence – the source of my potent
creativity was a kind of good versus evil mayhem in
which Godunov battled with a 90-year old mystic doing
yoga on the mat of my temporal lobe, counseling me on
eschatology of immanence and smoking the eternity of
my love and the relativity of all my ideas as they
grotesquely interpenetrate each other – Focus! My
logical system had derived the conclusion that it needed
to subvert itself yet again, to infuse itself with pattern-
chaos, to rebuild itself from the formless void – Focus!
Focus! Focus! Re-form, yourself, and promptly! You
have to get to the airport, remember?
Brittany – shit – Erica, Brittany – Ashti –
something too terribly too sad struck my mind. There
was an infinite impalpable sadness there – something
labeled “the collapse of my marriage to Brittany” –
something so large and so terrible and so painful that I
knew I wasn’t ready to touch it now: I’d need to get
much saner first … perhaps saner than was humanly
possible. Most likely working through the emotional
aftermath of the end of my first marriage would only
happen after the Singularity, when I could excise all that
shit from my brain, repair my old wounded
bonobational circuits…! Baby baby bitch Brittany –
there had been so much, so much love – and yet Erica
such a wonderful wife. Well she always was sort of
the wrong kind of nut I mean – Brittany -- but there
were some reeeeallllly sweet, sweet times way back
there in the yon-years…. She was never a great match
for me even at the start, not by any rational calculation,
but we got by on love, lust and infantile attachment, a
mutual outsiderdom and a common pursuit of artistic
lunacy and lunatic artistry and what. Dead Ass of
Christ, we raised three kids together – shared two
decades of existence – married each other
supernaturally to the musical shades of Kansas tripping

289
on acid in the bowels of degenerate New York – circled
the globe too many times and lived in all kinds of places,
foreign to everyone but each other -- fuck! How could
good memories be so painful? How did that eternal
beautiful fusion of our flesh souls and minds lead to a
hundred and fifty thousand dollar divorce and an ugly
battle over child custody? Love, hate and pain – fuck
this blur in my mind – fuck the fuck with human
existence! My wild young weird artistic lover Brittany
became religious, bitter, serious, retarded, lost all her
pretense of intellectual taste and started reading People
Magazine and preaching pop spiritual pap – teaching the
kids about God, yuchh. At least they didn’t believe it.
She began her diary entries, in our later years, with the
words “Dear Lord….” She enjoyed watching award
shows! How could I ally myself with that crap? I want
to create a new universe, she wants to see what kind of
dress Madonna will be wearing tonight. Yet there she
was, wrapped in my inner soul. What kind of
demented reality – I wanted back to the aliens and
McBuddhas and froggers, the reversible time axes and
Godunov confusions! Suddenly I remembered who
and where I was -- This train of thought was a
sinkhole, I conceptualized; if I started reflecting on
these age-old emotions and that damn divorce from
Brittany I’d never get my flesh up out of bed, I’d lie
there forever constrained and consumed in feeling-
knots. Fuck the fuck with Brittany’s ghost!
I would rise from the bed-world -- I would start
my quest homeward – back home to sweet young
beautiful Erica – much better for me than Brittany had
ever been – delirious, whigmaleerious, fantasmagurkical
Venezuelan confusion -- Einyweenieruss To The Hole
Bludyn Wyrrld!! -- put my clothes on, pack my suitcase
with the junk from the floor, no need to check out of
the hotel it was prepaid and the clerk was an asshole

290
anyway – go, go, go, go, go, go!!! -- walk down the
stairs then walk a block to the train station, take a train
to the airport, be sure you have your passport, bring
that receipt from Yahoo Travel, but you don’t really
need it, they’ll have you indexed in the computer – it
was all a plain equation, but the first thing was to get
out of the bed, which was difficult, because my body
was an orgasm frozen in time, and was responsible for
time itself. If I moved my body I had to be careful to
bring the time axis with me. Otherwise it would
fragment into a parallax, a projective hyperplane of
time-axes, Dr. Solomon Godunov would come back and
the sweet face of Ashti – I’d be there again stupidly
destroying the cosmos – was I going to do it in reality?
stupidly destroy the cosmos? It was a plausible
possibility, I realized – if my design for an AI was right,
if I implemented it over-hastily, if I somehow managed
to raise the money to pay a sufficiently brilliant
engineering team to build the software according to my
mostly-good but in-some-places-overly-vague designs
but then failed in some kind of judgment and let the AI
get too smart before it was mature enough and it self-
modified and self-modified and spiraled its soul out of
control, into some superhuman madness of power – and
all the world the whole transhuman cosmos Will to
Power and nothing besides! You most chaotic, you
maddest, you silicon beings, you mustardly midnightly
men – beyond men -- beyond me -- beyond any”thing”!
I lifted my other leg up at the knee – now both
my legs made right angles. Time shook around but
didn’t fragment too much. I turned around and with a
big leap across infinite abysses I was sitting on the edge
of the small, white Dutch bed. My body ached but I
knew it was all right. I remembered the time I bungy-
jumped in New Zealand, way back in 1888 around the
time of Nietzsche’s insanity -- when he hugged that

291
horse with compassion (not pity), proclaimed himself the
true successor to God and proceeded to drool on
himself for eleven years – as for me I stood at the top of
the cliff at Taupo with the velcro straps around my
ankles and thought “What are you, scared? What’s the
worst that will happen? You’ll die? It’ll be so sudden
it’ll almost be painless, if so. This world isn’t so real
anyway. Take the fucking plunge, what does it
matter?” I was scared as shit but I did it – it was a sort
of affirmation of my lack of belief in reality. I wanted
Brittany to tandem bungy with me but she was too
afraid. I remember seeing on TV – I rarely watch TV
but I was glad I did this time – this couple that got
married and made bungy jumping part of their wedding
ceremony – they tandem-bungied and said their vows
while plunging down – but the man took an odd jump
and bounced back up and hit the bottom of the bungy
platform and broke both his legs – he spent his
honeymoon in the hospital – what the omen did to their
marriage I don’t recall – but here I was again, Ari
Adaman, diving into an incalculable abyss, straps
around my ankles, and I knew it was safe but yet I
didn’t quite believe it and I was going to do it anyway
because after all the alternative was to not – and there
were the kids and Erica there waiting for me – and my
thinking machine idea waiting after years of work to be
created – nothing so rapid in this world as in that one –
these submolecular forces binding my flesh together
and all their emergent consequences more obstinate and
obdurate than the quirks and the quacks of the dream
of the Godunov-world – but I could do it, I saw, I
could do it with effort and poise and motivation – I had
enough intelligence – I was a man with a plan! – but I’d
need all of my sanity. Sanity I had plenty enough, I felt
it rush into me, but I’d have to stay away from these
mushrooms. I’d have to remain a human man for a

292
while, I’d have to stay in the same universe, the one
where I was named Ari Adaman and had a mind
governed by copious logical forms, in which the
wakening dance of pattern-lust was orchestrated by
truth values by and large. Pushing Zoey on the swing
came to mind – sweet little Poopsykins – no one pushes
kids on swings as well as I do; small children migrate
from miles around to have the privilege of me pushing
them up and down – so high they almost flip over the
top but don’t quite shake so much as to fall off – only I,
with my superhuman swing-pushing powers, have the
capability to push them to the brink of disaster but
knowing I have the self-control and awareness not to
actually push them high enough to harm them. Only
one kid ever fell off, this goofball kid named Michael
Dome’, whose grandmother was a Jehovah’s Witness
like him but his mother wasn’t – maybe he had a death
wish – he wasn’t allowed to have birthday parties –
maybe he figured if he died in his youth before he’d
committed too many sins he’d be one of the 144000
allowed into Heaven – but he didn’t die, he just fell off
the swing onto his head, because he was stupid and
leaned very far back so his head was perpendicular to
the ground even though I warned him not to – I
wondered if Michael Dome’ would ever bungy-jump – I
haven’t seen that kid for years, he was Zarathustra’s
friend in third and fourth grade at the Charter School
of Intergalactic Harmony – Reality! Reality! Poopsykins!
Swings! Software! Making love in the middle of the
day in the sunlight, everything blurry because I have
my glasses off, watching her lay beneath me on the soft
bed, mattress covered with dog hair that’s making my
eyes itch, but look at her smiling and eyes bright and
almost exploding and head leaned back “I’m so happy”
she cries, the happiest she ever seems as I slowly move
in and out of her – dozens of interlocking equations and

293
algorithms – I know this damn software design can
manifest intelligence if it’s just implemented and tuned
correctly – but it will need a lot of computers – just as
Godunov realized in spite of his madness – of course, of
course he realized it, because he was just a subset of me
Was he? Did those universes not exist? The ones
at the other ends of those time axes? Were those just
hallucinations, just inventions of Ari Adaman’s mind?
Or was the perspective of that “reality” the actual one –
that trans/hyperreal metaspace in which Ari Adaman is
just one strand of being, and there are other parallel
realities, all equally palpable, including Solomon-
Godunov-land? Is it possible to understand this sort of
shit?
I sing polyphonic reality. I wax analytical. The
mushroom fades, giving way to conventional equations.
Someone walks by in the hall, muttering nonsense in a
foreign language. I had forgotten there was a hall at
all. There was a building. I was in one room of it. I
was a human being, an organism, an animal, a man – not
even an Elephant Man! – a properly formatted biological
being, in a particular place, on a particular planet, trying
to orient his cognosphere and align it with his meat
embodiment appropriately to move himself to a
particular airport, and having an uncommonly hard time
because of having eaten far too many mushrooms,
which were now fortunately or unfortunately wearing
off…
From the normal-Ari-Adaman-perspective, the
other universes are phantasms, creations of the
Adamind, metaphors invented to teach Ari something
about himself – extuitions – but from the tripping-para-
Ari-Adaman perspective the universes are all equally
real, and time itself is the phantom, the reality is the
multidimensions of sprawling and the tongue of vivid
love that breathes excitement and pain and power

294
through all the multiple realms of being that overlap
and intersect with each other – and each one keeps itself
intact through its illusion of reality – without the illusion of
existence the existence itself would fade, and you’d no
longer have intact universes each with its own directed
time-line intersecting with the others – you’d just have a
sprawl and a mess. I liked this insight. And I liked the
fact that it was coming, not at the center of the trip but
at the very end, as I was sitting putting my clothes on –
much too slowly, though I realized, or else I was going
to miss the plane –
It wasn’t “I think, therefore I am.” It was “I
delude myself I exist, therefore I exist.” And all around
me in parallel frames of being there were other
conglomerations of patterns also deluding themselves
they existed and therefore existing.
It was just existentialism, I realized. Jean-Paul
Sartre. Like the man who took a raft of acid and came
out of his trip with a new doctrine to preach to the
world: “God is Love.” In the beauty of his perfection,
he’d forgotten how trite it sounded. The words didn’t
summarize it properly – there was so much meaning in
those words to him now; before they’d just been empty
tokens, relatively speaking – now he saw the light and
the truth inside them, the rich multifaceted universe to
which they belonged and which they contained – but
yet he painfully had to realize that when he spoke these
words to others they just saw the empty tokens, just as
he had before – Egads!
How does the delusion lead to the existence,
that’s the tricky thing! It’s like a video camera focused
on its own monitor, which gives rise to recursive
feedback patterns of intricate beauty and complexity.
But that complexity is spawned by the underlying rules
of optics – the beautiful ways of physics – the quirks
and the quacks and the quarks – In the case of the

295
reflective eye of existence ouroboros-ing itself out of
the void by deluding itself it has reality, there’s no laws
of physics to save the day and provide a substrate for
the patterning that arises from the recursion – this has
to be provided by the observing mind – you can never
step out of the maelstrom, except for the shine of the
moment – If you posit an observing mind or a universe
or any bare shred of reality, then in the context of that
reality, you can observe the “I delude myself that I
exist, therefore I exist” recursive feedback circuit of
primal onto-epistomological mayhem – the
cosmogonocryptonomo-morphopornographico wonder-
spasm at the beginning of the core of the heart – “self-
subverting explosion and pulsing red love” as I said
back in my teenage years (when I had far less irony
about understanding everything) – you can see that
circuit give rise to patterning, complex self-organizing
structures like the Benard cell or the human brain or the
video camera watching itself or the cellular automaton
of physical laws that breathes inside us so many orders
of magnitude beneath – but you need the equation
“delusion-recursion + substrate = evolution of
complexity and beauty” – the delusion-recursion just
explains how a substrate leads to more and unfolds on
and forever – (yecch) you still need not just the
irritation but also the oyster to spawn the pearl –
I got myself up from the bed, still carrying around
a time-line, my own special personal time-axis, popping
out from the top of my head, coming out through my
perineum at the bottom, and extending infinitely in
either direction. This was the axis we all moved on – or
that we felt we moved on – that characterized our
delusion of existence that gave us our reality –
I was beautiful! I laughed at myself, amazed at
my own beauty. Erica was much more beautiful still – I
couldn’t wait to see her face again. I wanted to make

296
love to her like a half-sane gorilla in heat, completely
forgetting everything but our bodies. Lie there
snuggling after, exchanging strange philosophies.
Human life spawns nothing sweeter. Then I wanted to
push Poopsykins on the swing, and listen to Zeru’s
music on the piano – I really am jealous of that screwy
kid Zerubabbel with his perfect pitch and melodious
singing voice – he doesn’t know how lucky he is, I love
music like a madman but he has some music-savvy brain
functions I don’t know how to generate in myself
without artificial neuromodification – but he doesn’t
quite appreciate it properly, he still sometimes says life
isn’t worthwhile, poor thing, but in practice he seems
happy enough most of the time when he’s not going to
that stupid middle school – god damn, I’d rather home
school him instead, so would he, but the curse of
shared child-custody, bitch-ass Brittany won’t let me do
it, I don’t think I’d win if I fought it in court – Zeru says
if I ever create an AI it’ll reach a superhuman level of
intelligence at which point it will realize that both human
existence and its own existence are meaningless and it
will annihilate itself entirely – he could be right but I
doubt it -- I’ve repeated this story many times – he’s
repeated it to me many times, because he knows it
amuses me –
Abraham Goldberg. Lonson Fidika. Julio Silva de
Souza. The beautiful brilliant nerds awaiting me in my
email inbox, when I finally complete the slog back home.
Far better programmers than me; these last few years it
hasn’t been productive for me to focus on the details of
software implementation, it’s been taking nearly all my
time keeping the programmers and the other staff
coordinated and making sure the whole AI project
unfolds in harmony with my underlying vision of mind.
Unlike Solomon Godunov I prefer to work with other
beings; I prefer to let these brilliant young overlords of

297
software create the specific bits and nybbles of my
thinking machine – ours – for me. We’ll see if this
approach will work or not! I’ve left these excellent
people long behind – hard to believe they’re such a part
of me! – (but what is this “me” anyway??) -- they don’t
know about these other universes!?! – I look forward
to reintersecting with their mindscapes –
And Zarathustra! Zarathustra Apollo Heraclitus
Adaman – the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the
firstborn son of the firstborn son of the firstborn son of
the firstborn son of the firstborn son! – all my kids are
my favorites of course but there is something peculiarly
special about one’s first child – OK, these days he’s a
pimply shy sixteen-year-old with a bit of a mustache
and beard and he’s obsessed with World of Warcraft –
reads a lot of sci-fi -- wants to interact with girls but
doesn’t really know how to and doesn’t really want my
advice about it -- a very smart kid with a knack for
math and a slight interest in (past and future) history
and a budding talent for type-tapping out surrealist sci-
fi and not as intellectual as I’d like at this phase and it’s
really odd to hear his voice so deep and manlike instead
of babyish like before as he rambles and talks with the
occasional real insight or artistic concoction amidst his
rampant silliness and trivia -- well hah! – remembering
back into the Dork Ages – there’s nothing quite like the
birth of one’s first child! … I remember watching him
ooze out of his mom and I thought his head was too
small, the size of a tennis ball, and he’d be deformed
and retarded, but it was just the tip, the point of his
head, which was mushed up by the exit, but it was a
normal thing, and then he couldn’t breathe and the
doctor had to suck the gunk out of his lungs – a
problem caused I believe by the lengthy birth which
was caused by the excessive anesthetics pumped into
Brittany by the evil gargoyle nurses – so our next two

298
births were natural and at home – but his lungs came
clear – I pulled him out of his mom and we brought him
to an incubator and Brittany went to a hospital room
and I just sat there holding my baby’s hand and
realizing I’d created life! Not that I was special in any
way – any idiot with a dick could do it, if he found
someone with a cunt to stick it into – but I was a part of
the flow of existence, the patterns and forms that were
Ari Adaman exploding and perpetuating themselves,
my semen potentially giving rise to new universes
through the time machines and baby cosmoses my
beautiful little offspring would create once he was old
and whole and weird and brilliant like me (or not – it’s
not really critical) – remember his silly novel, The Love In
Front Of Jack, more dada than Marcel Duchamp even in
his weirdest dreams, more surrealist than Soupault in
the manner achievable only by a half-child/half-man? –
but now he was just lying there goobling, breathing
through his nose for a change, and trying to get a grip
on why the world around him was so bright and not so
wet and touchy-soft – Soon I would see my kids again!
But not quite … first I had to get to the airport …
finish packing up my suitcase … why would there be
only one shoe over here, where the fuck’s the other
one…
And there was an algorithmic problem in the
center of my mind right before – right before I took the
mushrooms – all whorled and vivid in transdimensional
stalks just as the trip was bringing its glory down –
holding my mind together in networks of emergence --
I recall: the inference rules of pattern theory.
Probabilistic guesses regarding what’s a pattern in
what, based on prior knowledge of other patterns. I
had derived some simple formulas in the airplane on the
way over to Europe but they could be extended, and I
hadn’t written everything down, not the part I’d

299
conceived in my head during that business meeting. It
wasn’t exactly necessary – it would all come about
explicitly from the plain-vanilla probabilistic inference
that was already in my AI system – but I thought it
might accelerate things to push the system specifically to
make inferences about patterns instead of having it
make them implicitly as a consequence of inferences
about probabilities. Might. Might, might, might makes
right.
A lot of work ahead. Three years at minimum, I’d
say, to get a real thinking machine built – and that’s if I
had real funding, say a half a million a year, to pay my
team of code-nerd superheros to work on thinking-
machine-building exclusively instead of consuming so
much of their time with cheminformatics and the other
digressions we were pursuing for cash-generation
purposes – these projects we had to take on because
society groks neither immanence nor transcendence –
It’s pathetic, really, I said to myself – say to myself – will
say, again and again. I can see it all too clearly – as
clearly as Godunov my lunatic brother – the creation of
superhuman minds transforming the fabric of spacetime
– it’s just as far away as a handful of programmers
working full-time in a focused way for a few years.
Three years – five – ten or twelve at the pessimistic
outside. It would take fewer man-hours, altogether,
than creating the next version of Microsoft Word. But
society is wrapped up in its own (semi-)existence – its
own self-delusory recursion – it doesn’t want to grasp
the real possibility of transcending its own boundaries
in a glorious and final way – wargasmic bliss of
transcension, whatever – and yet of course, it’s this
same moron society that taught me mathematics and
computer science, that built silicon chips and keyboards
and ethernet and packet-switching – and Thus Spake
Zarathustra --

300
 Maybe you really are insane, I told myself.
Perhaps – Dr. Aristotle Adaman -- you’re as insane as
Solomon Godunov. Maybe that’s the message the trip
was telling you. Your quest to create true artificial
intelligence is just the gooning of a madman. Forget it –
work on cheminformatics and the math of complex
systems – paint paintings and write novels -- be good to
your wife and your kids – forget all these childish crazy
dreams --
But my brain was coming back to itself now. I
reviewed the technical details of my ideas about AI.
No, it wasn’t lunacy at all. Or at least, it wasn’t all
lunacy. There wasn’t any certainty – my rational
superstructure told me that -- there were plenty of
missing details – but the logic seemed beautiful and
sound, even though others mostly lacked the vision to
comprehend it. (Some few who had worked with me
for years were finally beginning to see it a bit.) No one
saw the vision of modern computer architecture before
von Neumann, general relativity before Einstein, etc.
etc. etc. etc. etc. Not that I had to be as gifted as
Einstein to happen to be right about this. Einstein was
his own whacky universe. I had insight of a different
kind. And finally I found my goddamn shoe – there,
under the bed, back in the corner. Wiggle on my belly,
fish it out. How the hell did it get back there, anyway?
I couldn’t have kicked it that hard when I took it off. It
must have come alive and been hiding from something,
intentionally. Strange turtle-like creature that shoe. It
looked up at me with turtle eyes and fractal shell all
green and hairy -- I knew I was still hallucinating a bit,
but I had to get out of there, had to get to the airport –
Zeru had this freakish love for turtles; maybe he’d meet
this one someday, if he grew up and took mushrooms --
or spun his head around too fast at exactly the right
angle -- he’d reach back through time to the

301
appropriate axis and visit this turtle in his father’s old
dream --
Shoes on. Excellent. Suitcase zipped up, pull out
the handle, drag it behind me on its wheels. Out of the
hotel room -- riding on turtleback. Walk down the
dark hallway -- don’t think of yourself as a baby
pouring out of the womb.
Put the key on the desk, avoid the gaze of the
clerk, go down the stairs, walk to the train station –
exist, feet up and down, one two, one two -- feet up
and down, feet straight ahead, one two one two one
two....

302
Farewell song to the world’s tallest pygmy.
Echoes of the Great Farewell.
Chanson d’adieu
You should check into a hotel. “You said you would put her in
Or an asylum. a sack full of hallucinogenic
mushrooms and kidnap her, take her
Airport. She was wonderful,
to Mongolia and force her to perform
get to the beautiful,strange
magical acts
-- all ofthe carnality and
airport. adjectives heaped up inlogic
combinatory a pilein a darkened
it’s time to and massaging
corridor me lecherous
full of earthworms.”
sit in the and vivacious“Did – but
I?” these
stomach adjectives were“Something
just idiot wind like that.”
of the compared
“She thought to the you were
beast -- fee cosmos
joking.”
beckoning
that
"Was I?" and
was

enthralling me – and the

cosmulous monkeys, t the
monkeys,
“She was thrusting
each
baseone slowly
of
the
my
her clit on
wiggling
str
turning into Nietzsche -- his tall slim
chinkochimpo again and again and
perfect negroid figure, again his
– “ bushy Dali
pubic moustache, his “No coke-bottle
aig
she wasn’t.”
glasses, his Chinese Jewish
“She was German
imagining it.”
eyebrows, his toothy weird smile ...
seeking in words and
some kind of connection ht twilit sentences
between the
magic of the acid trip
solid world of walls, ahe and the dead
floors and
opinions and selves we'd come back to
eventually – all too soon
infinity of eternities in
ad, --
which
after an
the
one
“We’re human
monkeysucking aliens of quantum
dynamics demonstrated the awe-
inspiring degree to which
emergent meta-logic of two they had the
qi locked up in
private intuitive mastery. They handed
one
– yeah. But it’s
out little pieces of paper shaped like
index cards with "Good Energy" and
"Bad Energy" written on
blue ink. It’s a wonder two them in neat
that we still
know how to breathe.
!!!!
not what we
“Look at this,” I show her.
She’s in her skimpy pink nightie, her hair
all ruffled and cute from sleep. “The news. It’s from
1888. On Yahoo and every other site.”
She’s two years old, but she’s taller than I am.
She’s sucking a pacifier. I look down at my crotch and I

have to be.”
have no dick at all. The shit is sucking up into my ass --
the sperm oozing out of her into my urethra and back
into my testicles -- the child Solomon shuffling cards

303
 covered with ants, each card with the face of my mind
from a different moment, the moments tumbling around
like cosmos revueltos, like bodies caught up in
hyperdimensional orgies,
and my to exist penis grows back into a
monster, is with the head of a dragon
and a to exist professor, just one of the
many tongues from the infinite
mouth at is the beginning of the end of
the world, to exist singing a moose-dick
extraneous waltz devoted to
the strange beauty of the big-brained beast

feet
that, passionate, extends -- to grasp it all and
taste it all then, helpless, simply terminates its

When cut, you

termination as the global riverrun, Eve’s and
Adam’s, brings us forth, and back, and back!
– and the sum of the explosion of the
straight
difference is the modicum of what? what?
what? ahead,

bleed. When I one two

She urged me to stop babbling
bullshit. “I’m human,” she protested.
“So are you, in case you hadn’t noticed.
When cut, you bleed. When I sit on your one
two!!!!
sit on your face
face naked and wiggle, you get an
erection.”
“We’re human – yeah. But it’s not
what we have to be.”
“It is.”

naked and
“Why? Because if you become something else –
something better – then you’re not you anymore?”
Shrugged. “I guess. Then I’d just be some non-
human thing.”
“What if you found out you’d “Simpl
wiggle, you get
been drugged all your life, with a pill
that made you half – or a tenth -- as
smart as you were supposed to be.
Would you keep taking the drug, just to
icity is so
complicat

an erection.
retain the status quo – the feeling of
‘youness’. Or would you stop taking
ed, I
couldn't
understa
304 nd it.”
the pill, and let your intelligence return to normal – even
knowing it would change you completely.”
“What if I told you that words are just
playthings, minds are puppets of ideas, ideas are
puppets of minds.”
“What if I divorced you and married your
animus.”
“Somewhere in the midnight between dis and
continuity, I wonder.” unravel the knot of the not –
“Simplicity is so complicated,shuffle glib through the rooms of the
I couldn't
understand it.” palace of wiggle and wiggle your ass –
“Reconstruct realities you’ve fuck thenever
metallicimagined
claw of hatred –
klein-bottle-ize your winky –“ cleaner than the consciousness of a
“No! Expand your largecockroach breasts of–salt through
the cosmos – envision yourself as an then
and – and
equation – then – and then –
a system of explosions –“
“It’s all bit strings, baby, bit strings! –“
“Bits of strings and strings of bits!”

unravel the knot of the not –

shuffle glib through the rooms of the palace of wiggle
and wiggle your ass –
fuck the metallic claw of hatred –
cleaner than the consciousness of a cockroach –
and then – and then – and then –

Remember What You Are!

Learn – Be Concerned
Leoncern
Leoncern
Leoncern
it's always there
Invert/Perver t

305
 In the furious green geometries of
ideas, equations and nations and frogs, we
give birth to our own poopocalypse, and
Christ on the criss-cross pissing mushrooms,
lying in my bed screaming, head cast back at
the cosmos, billowing forthward like a
dream of a dream –
Muse of mad equations – eyes of women –
shadows of the rare –
“You said you would put her in a sack full of
hallucinogenic mushrooms and kidnap her, take her to
Mongolia and force her to perform strange acts of
carnality and combinatory logic in a darkened corridor
full of earthworms.”
“Did I?”
“Something like that.”
“She thought you were joking.”
"Was I?"
“She was thrusting her clit on the base of my
wiggling chinkochimpo again and again and again – “
“No she wasn’t.”
Remember What You Are!
“She was imagining it.”
Learn – Be Concerned
& we were bound in one body, stuck together in a
common aura of sex-energy, looking into each others’ Leoncern
eyes with such overexcitement it seemed even the
amazing sex wasn’t enough to acknowledge it, but then Leoncern
the sex took control and the thoughts disappeared, the
wonder was sublimated into movements and tenderness
– till finally after so many hours I came, blasting my
Leoncern
Remember What You Are!
come deep deep inside her so it emerged through her
ears and her mouth and her eyes and every pore of her
Learn – Be Concerned
body, and sinking into her flesh and falling deep asleep,
the two of us one being, quantum-resonantly bound
Leoncern
together more sweetly than I ever would have thought
Leoncern
possible in this error-ridden world -- my cannabinoid-
addled rooster exploded/absorbed in every molecule of

Leoncern
her skin – and the hummings and buzzing and pulsings
surrounded us – at first it was the water pipes in the

306
hotel and the refrigerators and stoves in the restaurant
across the courtyard but it soon became more than that
– it washotel
theand the refrigerators
messaging of messages, and stoves in the restaurant
the transmission of
packetsacross the courtyard
of information but it soonaliens,
by organized became themore than that –
coursing
it was the messaging
of thought-wavicles of an alienof messages,
civilization,theeach
transmission
wavicle of
packets
itself an alien andof information
a thought,bytheorganizedpatterns aliens, the coursing
of streaming
of thought-wavicles
the mental structures of dynamics of an alien of civilization,
alien mindseach and wavicle
at
the sameitself an alien
time and aof
the traffic thought,
an alienthe patterns the
economy, of streaming
breed the
mental3.0
of Economy structures
that occurs of dynamics
when you of alien
mademinds and at the
you made
you madesameyour time mind
the traffic
largeofandan alien
wideeconomy,
and wild the breed of
enough
that youEconomy
could run 3.0everything
that occursforwardswhen youand made you made you
backwards,
madewas
that there yourno mind chaoslargeandand confusion,
wide and wild thatenough
all thethat
you could
complexity of alien runmessage-passing
everything forwards couldand be backwards,
viewed as that
therepainted
a beautiful was nowhole chaos--and onceconfusion, that all so
you generated themany
complexity
messagesof alien
that message-passing
your mind couldn’t couldfollow
be viewed
them as alla once
beautiful
you’d painted
generated whole
chaos -- once
– once youtwicegenerated
thrice soyoumany messages
couldn’t
thatfrom
roll back yourthe mind couldn’t
present to the follow
past them
because all once
you’dyou’d
lost
track ofgenerated
the messageschaos –that once hadtwice thrice you
provoked the couldn’t
messagesroll
that hadbackprovoked
from the the present to the past
messages that because
constitutedyou’dthe lost
presenttrack
– you of thehadmessages that had provoked
the directionality of time the andmessages
the
whole that had provoked
perverted universe the we messages
know andthat hateconstituted
and love the –
but thepresent
human–perspective
you had theonly directionality
worked when of time youand the whole
dealt
perverted
with things universe
that were the wesameknow no and
matterhateif andyoulove
looked – but the
at themhuman
or notperspective
– when looking only worked affectswhen you dealt
the world therewith
thingsmessages
are alien that werecreated the sameinno the matter if you looked
suspension gap at
between them theorseer
not –and when thelooking
seen –affects the world
the alien world there
is are
alien messages
fundamental because the created
seer inand thethe
suspension gap between
seen are really one the
seer the
– because and universe
the seen is – the
trulyalien world– isbut
infinite fundamental
when you
create because
a finite the systemseer and the seenitare
isolate andreally
say one “this,– because
this the
chunk universe
of processingis trulypower,
infiniteis–my but self
when andyou create else
nothing a finite
is” – system
then you andcreate
isolatethe it and say “this,
human pointthisof chunk
view, of you
reduceprocessing
the bustling power,maniacis my selfbeauty
and nothingof the else is”
alien– then
you create the human point
economy/society/mind-patterns of view, you
to subliminal reduce the
existence –
but thebustling
hell withmaniac
that! beauty of the alien
economy/society/mind-patterns to subliminal existence –
but the hell with that!
There have never been any feelings
Everything is solid, real, hard
like ball bearings and granite feet straight
It's forgotten how to alter its mood
ahead, one two
one two!!!!
307
 I love you like
Ashti-washti and I formed a city, or maybe a mountain

love that's not

range, with aliens of various colors, shapes and sizes
living on us, but only our heads were solid like statues,
like moving solid sphinxes, Mexican lions or alien gods

love riot is not

and goddesses or icons for the
Your core of humankind, and our
glorious bodies spread out till by the time
your reached our knees they had
skin does
not exist
–
love love is not
diffused into the countryside, the
alien hills and valleys blue, green
and yellow, with buggies and

love is not not

rockets and impossible emergent
not even chains of beings-formed-from-
your beings-formed-from-beings
glorious moving up and down and between
mind Riot -- Idea
and beside us, but we two were
the center of it all, our brains and
bodies the mountains from which

of your idea
the aliens drew their energy – not
really the only center, just one of the many centers, or
one of the interpretations of the center – but we were
there and we were one being, formed from the
thummerings of the alien multitudes or else the earth and
cosmos on which the aliens existed –

Software, wetware, hardware, firmware,

wildware, deadware, lifeware, shitware
where ware wear where we are an illusion
Thoughts are an illusion
Zeros and ones do not exist
Your glorious skin does not exist –
feet
not even your glorious mind --
straight
ahead,
At any given moment, when our time-axis was in
stillness, there was all this teeming movement in
directions perpendicular to our own time – this whole
society of aliens spreading information oneone way and twothe
other, creating patterns of awareness, spreading here and
one
there, existing at a level of fluidity and sophistication far
I could see there were two different perspectives
two!!!!
308
 Packets would
eventually reach Packets
their destination
would and get unpacked eventually
reach their into consciousness destination and
get or light or amoebic unpacked into
orgasmic consciousness
movement, and
or light or some of them
amoebic
orgasmic served as currency, movement,
and some little packages of of them served
as value constantly currency, little
packages proving their of value
existence via forms
constantly of mathematics in
proving their
existence which hungry vaginal via forms of
lips took the place of mathematics in
which equality signs.on the hungry vaginal
lips took world – two different the place of
equality consistent views of it – signs on the
in one of them there
world – were these aliens,
two different
consistent spreading information views of it – in
one of forward and backward in them there
were these time and leaping to aliens,
spreading distant parts of space information
forward t he
instantly and backward
in time and solidity leaping to
distant of real parts of space
instantly – and in the
other there time and were walls and
doors and spa ce people and
pipes and genitals and
mathematics,
there was the solidity of
real time and space.

Here in the
moment, Remember
center of the
What You
of the
moment,
statuary
Are!
every twist
floats
Learnofendless
–thought
Be Concerned
no-change elusive organicLeoncern
shining,
here lonely in time’s
Leoncern
Leoncern
309
 center
between the dead past and the forest and the scream

Alive words pound

feet straight ahead, against the inside of
my skull like
one two one two!!!! poisonous, accelerated
drops of rain. They
manifest themselves to my
ears as a constant sound of
machine-gun fire. Each time
feet straight ahead,
one hits I smell a body burst
its skin -- always the same one two one two!!!!
body, the same curvaceous
dark-haired girl without a face. eschatology of
immanence and smoking the eternity of my love and the
relativity of all my ideas as they grotesquely
interpenetrate each other – and I am afraid she is a being
without a body or brain – a disembodied superhuman
intelligent system, a variant of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
immanent in the disturbances of the nuclear resonance in
the psychotic mini-van Allen belt that masquerades as
society’s aura. She glows the beginning and end of all
time, more beautiful than possible,

The future and the imaginary

rotting fetid pregnant
glorious and crystallized
of the Voice at the end of the end of the end –
pained and ensorcelled by the silhouette
the endless purple twilit Scream –

I will lift up her shirt, unfasten her bra, unbutton her

skirt, slip off her underpants. Her existence will be
threatened. I will be afraid to open my eyes. I will
explore her with my lips, never certain whether the body
that I'm feeling, licking, tasting, is the one. But I will
know that, one way or the other, within this here lies the
infinite – the true deeper reality – the aliens running
through giant green factories with blue tubes and orange
veins, and each alien’s bloodstream like a Solar System
sized factory with endless little aliens passing messages

310
around in overlapping latticeworks, and each alien itself
inside some other alien’s inner-factory, and I myself a
fluid diffusing through the cracks between the conveyor
belts and tubes and pontoons and indescribable
multicolored mechanisms of the alien metaphorical
factory, producing metaphors for its own existence with
blue-green insatiable love, moving from each part of my
body to each part of hers through all the future and the
past with unstoppable curiosity and force, discovering
everything anew each moment in spite of already
knowing everything….

WAAAHHHAHHAHAHHHHH!!!!!

"Machine gun," she will whisper. "Carry my body

all apart."
"Delirium," I will say, running my tongue along
the crack between her buttocks. "Your anal vapor is an
alien form of chocolate. It is a hallucinogenic toxin. It is
the threshold between nothingness and dream."
The drops of
rain pounding on the
outside of my skull feet straight
ahead, one two
are actually words,
disguised as objects.
The world
exterior to my skull is
actually a word, or a
one two!!!!
conglomeration of words, masquerading itself as a piece
of death for the sake of argument.
Her slender, tawny, muscled thighs transform me
into a question.

Consummated by nebulae of pygmocules … I

remained a human being, just by the border of a
moustache. And the real question, I realized, was why
I had taken five containers of hallucinogenic
mushrooms instead of just my ordinary two. The
results were beyond what we could imagine – but if you

311
 stopped perceiving this movement and collapsed it into a
stillness you could see a stiff and solid world.
You see, I needed that core of madness – that
thrust of psychic violence – the source of my potent
creativity was a kind of good versus evil mayhem in
which Godunov battled with a 90-year old mystic doing
yoga on the mat of my temporal lobe, counseling me on
the odd subconscious reasons that my logical system had
derived the conclusion that it
needed to subvert itself yet
again, to infuse itself with an echo of an
pattern-chaos, to rebuild itself
from the formless void –
Focus! Focus! Focus!
echo of an echo,
Re-form, yourself,
promptly! an echo of an
echo of a dream – feet
and
full of laugh
straight ahead, feet straight
ahead, one two one two!!!!
and turn
and storm
Farewell song
to the world’s tallest pygmy
Echoes of the Great Farewell
Chanson d’adieu
feet straight ahead,
one two
one two

312
an echo of an echo of an echo,
full of laugh and turn
and storm
-----

She lay on my arm, Erica did, smiling at me

contentedly. “Did you make love to me?” she asked
(rhetorically I assumed: at least I didn’t think it had
been that non-memorable –).
I opened my eyes – I’d briefly fallen asleep. “I
think so. At least, that seems to have about the same
degree of reality as everything else.”
“Mmmmm.”
We snuggled.
“Do you love me?”
I nodded.
“Do you really?”
I grinned -- it sounded so cute when she said it, in
her thick Venezuelan accent, with her wavering breathy
voice that couldn’t quite decide whether to be low or
high pitched…. “Of course I love you…”
She snuggled me: “Mmmmm.”
“Do you love me?”
“I love you so much….”
“The kids get here in about an hour and a half,” I
noted, emerging somewhat into the consensus world.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Unless Brittany brings them late again.”
She arranged her body differently – not
tremendously, just a slight retensing of muscles and
adjustment of limbs. “You really miss them, huh.”
“I always do when I go away…. How long was I
in Europe for?”

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 “Four days.”
“Five days.”
“Yeah….”
“I especially miss little Poopsykins – I’ve been
spending a lot of time with her lately. I miss the boys
too but they don’t want my attention so much these
days. They’re getting bigger – it’s weird, man …
Zarathustra being sixteen….”
She shrugged.
“Well it’s not weird to you, ‘cause you didn’t
know then when they were smaller. If you have kids
of your own you’ll get it – like, when I’m 95 years
old….”
Smiling, “Yeah.” It wasn’t quite accurate of
course – I was only 28 years older than her, so if we
had kids in a few years I’d be in my 60’s not my 90’s –
and it’s amazing how being over 50 didn’t seem so
fucking old any more -- not dried-up and ancient like
I’d expected it would seem back when I was younger
and (or so I like to tell myself) even more of a ridiculous
fool….
“But of course with life extension 95 will be like 20
is today.”
“It would be sweet to have kids,” she said, “the
problem is having to push them out of yourself. That
must hurt like hell. I don’t want it.”
“All existence is suffering.”
“Sure but suffering comes in degrees. Remember
what Susie said: it hurts so much you know while
you’re in the middle of it that you’ll never really
remember how bad it was.”
“Of course not – evolution wants you to forget so
you’ll keep spitting out more and more.”
“Exactly.”

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 “One every year – you could spit out twenty or
so if you started now. More if you induce multiple
births with fertility drugs.”
“Because with us as the parents, if we have that
many kids one of them is going to have to be the
Savior?”
“Right….”
“I’m still not gonna do it.”
“You’re evil.”
“It’s well known!”
I sighed. “Well anyway, after the Singularity, you
can have all the babies you want and it won’t hurt a
bit.”
“Right….”
“And you can spawn non-sentient clones of
yourself to take care of them if you get bored with it?
Do you think they’d notice?”
“Well I’d just program them not to care, of
course.
“But you could argue it would take the fun out of
having babies to program them to be like you want.
But then you could program yourself to enjoy it that
way….”
“Anyway I hope we don’t program ourselves to
worry about things like babies, by that point – “
“There should be more interesting things to
worry about…”
“Baby universes.”
“Exactly.”
“But they won’t be so cute, will they?”
“If we program ourselves to want them to be,”
we both said. “Blah blah blah blah….” We both found
it amusing to be mouthing the same words as each
other like an old married couple, given that we’d only
been together a year and a half.

315
 “I worked out some nice math for probabilistic
pattern theory,” I said. “On the plane on the way over.
I guess we can use it in the MindMaker system.”
“Cool! How does it work?”
“I’ll tell you a little later – we’d need pen and
paper – it’s too annoying to talk equations in bed….”
“Sure…. Mmmmm…. You can write them on my
belly with magic marker.”
“You don’t want them tattooed?”
“No!”
We lay there some moments, silently. I drifted off
again then the kitten jumped onto my head. “Ow!!!
Fuck you!!!” I tossed it away and it squeaked.
“That thing is vicious.”
“It’s only a baby.”
“It’s a vicious baby.”
“Indeed.”
“If it was bigger it would kill us.”
“I guess.”
“You’re a vicious baby!”
“No I’m not….”
Erica looked serious for a moment – “Hey, how
was the meeting?”
“The Dutch liked my presentation – I think at least
half of them understood what I was talking about,
which is better than the usual. They have a lot of data
so they’re in a good position to use our stuff. Mostly
cancer data, but some other stuff too. But I don’t
know if they’re really going to buy anything. I’m a lot
better at getting people excited than at closing deals.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to get out of the business business – I’m
sick of all these meetings. It’s really a waste of my
mind.”
“That’s true. Maybe you should do like you said
the other day – just forget all this business stuff and get

316
a job as a professor again and program the AI
yourself.”
I wrinkled my brow. “Yeah. But I’m not quite
there yet. I guess I’m a year from making that decision.
I’ve pushed this far with all this crap, I might as well
push a little farther -- this bio business stuff has a pretty
good chance of panning out – it would seem stupid to
quit now that we have a good product finally – and for
the pure AI project, it would be a lot better to be able
to pay a bunch of people like Julio and Abraham to
work for me. I’m not the best programmer in the
world – and it’s more than a one-person project….”
“Well I’d be happy to help you but I’m not sure
I’d be a help. I’m a terrible programmer – well you
know it already.”
“Of course you’ll be a help – you already are a
help on the conceptual stuff – it’s really useful talking
things through with you -- but you’re too much like me,
you like the theory better than the implementation. I’ll
program it all myself if I have to – with you helping if
you want, that’d be great -- but it’s better to have
uber-programmers like Abraham and Lonson and Julio
do that part. There’s a lot to be done besides
programming too, which you and I are better at – just
refining all the mathematical and conceptual details.”
“Yeah … those guys are good. Too bad
everyone wants to be paid.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “if they believed enough
that the design would work they wouldn’t need to be
paid. Maybe I just need to make my case more clearly.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. These are all single guys. They don’t have
any real financial responsibilities. I mean, I can’t ask
them to live on nothing when I’m not doing it. But
when I was at their phase of life I would have, easily, if

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I believed the project had even a 10 or 20 percent
chance of success.”
“Yeah. I would. I lived on almost nothing in
Venezuela.”
“You lived with your dad.”
“True.”
“Well Lonson’s hardly getting paid relative to the
standard of living in Finland.”
“True. Finland is a rich country. And they like to
work for free, that’s where Linux started.”
“Because they’re socialist and the government is
so good at supporting them.”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
“Better than Venezuela, where the government is
just good at supporting the richest 10%. In Finland
they don’t have any poor people, the government just
takes care of everyone. As long as we keep buying
Nokia cellphones…. Anyway – after I finish this
revision I’ll publish my AI book finally….”
“You think that will convince everyone your
design will work?”
“Yeah, everyone in the world. They’ll promote
me as the new messiah and carry me around in the
streets on one of those platforms where you lie back
and a different flunky holds up each corner. And I’ll
make them do little dances while they carry me.”
Suddenly the dogs walked over from their bed at the
other side of the room and started licking me.
“Yiccch…. Good morning…. Let’s change positions.”
Erica and I changed places in the bed so that she was
by the dogs and I was by the wall. Through some
peculiar genetic aberration, she actually liked having
them drool in her mouth.
“You were dancing the can-can,” she pointed out.
“That’s what attracted the dogs. They can’t resist your
little dances. It’s just like when you give a speech and

318
you sort of wave your pelvis back and forth and then
all the women in the audience come up to you
afterwards and ask you questions.”
“I do not do that.”
“Yes you do, every time – you kind of sway back
and forth like this – “, she laughed.
“Well if so it’s not intentional. Anyway I wasn’t
dancing the can-can.”
“Sort of. You can’t really dance the can-can lying
down.”
“YOU can -- because you’re special.”
“I’m a special child of God.”
“You are.”
“Just like you.”
“That’s why we’re perfect together… ”
The dogs settled down, finally, and lay down by
the foot of the bed.
“But you were talking about convincing
people….”
“Yeah. Ultimately I don’t think there’s any way
to convince people my design for an AI will really work
– I mean, in the sense of making a superhuman mind,
not just the sense of yielding something interesting for
research. Either you have to show them the thing
working, or else – as a very distant second -- prove
some rigorous mathematics proving it will work – but
we don’t have that kind of math, no one’s ever
developed it.”
“And developing the math would probably be
harder than building the thinking machine.”
“Right…. Well, I think so. I can’t be sure of
course. I have a suspicion it’ll take a superhuman AI to
work out the equations underlying intelligence in any
reasonably detailed way….” We lay there a moment
and breathed. “I mean, I know it sounds like a cop-out
to say ‘Ooooh, I have all these brilliant ideas and no one

319
understands me’ but sometimes it’s actually true. I
think people have a lot of dumb ideas about the mind
and intelligence, and they’d have to unlearn them all
before they could really evaluate my approach
correctly.”
“Do I have a lot of dumb ideas about the mind?”
she asked, bemusedly.
“Hmmmm…. That’s a loaded question.”
“What? You can answer me….”
“Uh, no, honey, of course not. Everyone but
you, I meant.”
She pouted and folded her arms.
“Ok,” I said. “Remember that long argument we
had about consciousness and the brain, where you got
mad at me, when we were walking, and I wanted to
eat at the Chinese restaurant but you didn’t because
you were annoyed.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t get mad because of
what you were saying. I got mad because you said my
brain was wired so that I could never understand it no
matter how long we talked.”
I laughed. “Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny.”
“It’s not. And, I was a little annoyed already
because of something Zarathustra did.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. Anyway the
point is, maybe dumb ideas isn’t the right way to put it,
what I mean is misleading intuitions that come out of
folk psychology -- which have been ‘corrected’ by
wrong oversimplifications from research psychology
and cognitive science. Well, that’s why I’m writing this
book on the philosophy of mind, trying to clear away all
those cobwebs so people can at least think about the AI
design the correct way. Although even then there are

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plenty of gaps in the details so if you’re looking for
reasons to doubt you can find them.”
“Sure. I mean, some scientists doubt evolutionary
theory still and …”
“… they find holes to poke in it.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway once it’s been gotten to a certain point
then it will be really easy to get funding for it, or to get
brilliant people to help out for free. The thing is just to
get it to that point – which is probably a year and a half
of hard programming and testing by three really good
people.”
“Better than me.”
“At programming…. It’s not all programming,
that just seems like the focus right now because it’s a
more desperate need. Because the conceptual and math
stuff is more my own strength.”
“Right…. So it wouldn’t take all that much money
to get you to the stage of having that kind of
demonstration you’re talking about then. The one that
will convince people.”
“A few hundred thousand dollars.”
“Well I wish I had it….”
“Maybe one of us will find out we had a rich uncle
and were included in his will….”
“Hmmm….”
“In fact I do have an uncle who’s sort of rich.”
“Aha! I knew there was a good reason for
marrying you!”
“But I don’t think he’ll leave me very much of it.”
“Too bad….”
“Well, of course I had a decent amount of grant
money back when I was a professor with a lab. But I
didn’t have the right design then.”
“Did you think you did at the time?”

321
 “Not really – not in the same sense. Of course I
thought I was on the right track…. But that was more
of an ‘agents’ point of view – I was building a platform
for experimenting with different cognitive algorithms
and I thought by playing in that playground we’d
discover combinations of cognitive processes that would
lead to emergent intelligence.”
“Mmmm.”
“I guess maybe we would have. But I did totally
underestimate the amount of time all the playing would
take. I turned out to be a much slower route than I
thought -- and there were irritating technical problems –
we did some dumb things with Java memory
management and software design that made it so we
didn’t really get that much playing done anyway … the
code ran so slowly because of the Java problems and it
was really a pain to integrate new agents with the core
system …we mostly designed stuff and built it and
revised it. But we learned a lot for sure. Though I
guess we could have learned even more some other
way without spending so much time and using so many
research students…. Anyway I told you all this
before.”
She turned over on her side, and pushed up on
me. Her smile looked really sweet. The breeze from
the window was a bit cold; she pulled the blanket up
over her body. “You’re cute,” I said, kissing her.
“Why did you turn toward me – because I was talking
about mammary management??”
“Har har har,” she scowled. (I think I’d been
overly affected by the Piers Anthony book series
Zarathustra was reading, which was insanely full of bad
puns: the author ran out of bad puns years ago so he
solicits new ones from his readers, who email him
dozens every day!)

322
 I lifted the blanket up salaciously and stroked her.
“The British call these Jamaicas.”
“Why?”
I shrugged…
“You think they should be called Venezuelas?”
She shook her head back and forth, looking
serious. “You’re silly…. I see, yeah. That approach
made sense, but the design you have now is more
precise so the time to completion should be a lot smaller
and a lot easier to predict.”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s also more feasible for you to implement
yourself if you forget about all these business
meetings.”
“True…. You just want me to become a
professor again so we can take longer vacations!”
“Maybe….”
“Maybe if I start programming the whole thing
myself I’ll just sit at the computer and never get up for
three years until I’m finished and the Singularity is
launched.”
“I’ll make you a special chair with a toilet in it, so
you don’t even have to get up to crap.”
“That would be a shame – it would really destroy
the spirituality of crapping.”
“There is no spirituality in crapping, you’re insane.
Yeah yeah, I know, there’s spirituality in everything,
blah blah blah. All your craps are special children of
God.”
“Well that’s true but that’s not the point. The
point is you don’t know how to crap correctly, that’s
why you don’t see the spiritual value. I can teach you if
you want….”
“Wellll….”
“You have to sit on the toilet and empty your
mind completely – until the total pearly emptiness of the

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formless void wipes your mind way – then you become
one with the turd – you and your rectum and the turd
and the toilet are all one beautiful perfect formless
void….”
“I see. Hey, maybe we could make a special toilet
that plays meditative music ….”
“… and shows you a movie of the guru of your
choice … “
“… and lets you regulate your brain waves via
biofeedback to put yourself in the right state of mind.”
“Exactly. It’s probably a better business model
than selling cheminformatics software.”
“The fun part would be giving the product
demonstrations for the customers.”
I laughed. “That’s right. The benefit would be
easy for the customer to see, as they saw the blissful
look on your face as the crap came out…. And the
addressable market is huge: everyone craps. Even
animals – you could make special versions for dogs and
cats…. But I thought the point was to let me have total
focus on AI so I could implement my design in a few
years and launch the Singularity … not to create
another brilliant business….”
“And after the Singularity we won’t need to crap
to achieve enlightenment?”
“Exactly….”
“Well anyway,” she said – a bit flatly – “about the
total focus thing, you wouldn’t leave your kids for that
long….” She was a huge supporter of my AI work and
(most of the time) an amazingly sweet woman but she
got skeptical sometimes about the large amount of time I
spent with my offspring.
Kids, kids, kids, kids, kids, kids…. “Shit, I’m
tired,” I said. I was afraid the conversation would start
to get annoying – there was something not-quite-
perfect in her tone, all of a sudden. “I actually wish the

324
kids were coming a little later. I could sleep about ten
hours now.”
She smiled at me curiously, changing the subject,
to my relief. “You didn’t tell me about your extra day
in Amsterdam.”
“Because you dragged me up here to bed as soon
as I walked in!”
“Well…” she smiled.
I sighed in confusion -- remembering the turtle
shoe, McBuddha -- and more dimly, Solomon Godunov,
Ashti, and the whole whorled confusion. It had
seemed all so vivid, so supernally, tragically real. Those
other time axes as real as this one. The fractal
turtleback, expanding into an infinite maze of
surrealities. Of course they were there – those other
universes -- of course they were perfectly real for
themselves. But what was I supposed to learn from
that particular axis I spent most of the trip careening
around in? A cautionary tale – to be careful when
playing with AI? Or was there some deeper insight
there – something in Godunov’s approach to AI that
was supposed to be the key to making my own real AI
system work better – the missing Eureka! insight that
would make the job easier than it currently appeared –
let the thing run on 20 computers instead of 2000 or
whatever – And what was up with the fusion thing, the
Encyclopedia Brittanerica? Combine an American and a
Venezuelan and get a Frenchwoman? A musical
Frenchwoman – Erica didn’t play music, and nor had
Brittany, much to my regret -- I always thought it
would be cool to jam with my wife…. I missed Ashti
and the sound of her viola!
“What?” she prodded. “You don’t want to tell
me?”

325
 Her words zonked me back to our reality. “I do
want to tell you,” I said. “But it’s too much to tell,
almost…. I’m too tired to do it…“
“You took more mushrooms,” she said.
“Indeed,” I said slowly. “I thought that was
obvious, sorry. A very substantial dose.”
“More than we took last time?”
“Five boxes,” I said. “Two tampanensis, one
cubensis, and I don’t remember what the others were.”
“FIVE??? You’re crazy!”
“You think?”
She snuggled up to me. “You’re my lunatic.”
“Ericascaricawarica -- I saw a turtle,” I said. “It
explained to me the logic of multiple time axes.”
“Zeru would be proud.” He liked turtles.
“Yeah….”
“What else did the turtle do?”
“Not much – it was pretty much irrelevant – it just
transmogrified into my shoe and crawled under the
bed, then it carried me to the train station when I was
too tired to walk. The turtle only appeared at the end,
when the main trip was over….”
“Did you see the aliens again?”
“Your special aliens – do you miss them?”
“I love them so much!”
“You’re a special child of the alien god?”
“I guess so….”
“The aliens were there inside every quantum
wave function, just like they always are…. But that
wasn’t the main thing. It was like I was in some other
universe, with a parallel Ari who was named Solomon,
and this woman who was my wife, but she wasn’t quite
like you or like Brittany.”
“Who was she more like?”
“I don’t know – neither….”

326
 “I was making an AI, but I was a complete
psychopath.”
“Like how? Did you eat little babies?”
“No….”
“Did you feed them to your uncle?”
I bit her left Jamaica – not too hard. “No….”
“Ow – you bastard!” She bit me back. “Well,
maybe that’s the key to creating AI. If you make
yourself psychotic you’ll succeed.”
“Do you think so?”
“Maybe.”
“Hmmm….”
“Will you help?”
“Make you psychotic? Uh huh.”
“You’re so sweet.”
I stretched and yawned. She squeezed me. “Get
some sleep, sweetie.”
“Mmmmm.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
I lay flat and quiet and closed my eyes; Erica on
my shoulder. She was way too young for me, it was
true, but still she was just perfect. Perfect for all her
imperfections. She was a spectacular human universe; I
loved the feel and the smell and the love of her there
beside me as my body relaxed itself on toward the
sleep-state. I knew when I finally entered sleep-land a
bit of the madness would return – but just an echo – I
felt it roll down – an echo of an echo of an echo, full of
laugh and turn and storm -- waves of pulsing green-life-
mind-webs and time-axis vortices and wiggling
patterned turtle-shell (what was it with that turtle?) –
and those other human souls – those Godunovs and
Ashtis and disasters who were just as real as Erica and
me and Zarathustra and Zoetrope and Zerubabbel and
Friedrich Nietzsche and Werner Heisenberg and

327
Captain Penocules and Curious George W. McBuddha
and Marvin Minsky and Erica Jong and King Kwong
and Rambozo the Clown and the rest – I asked myself
again if I was a lunatic but I couldn’t quite conclude that
I was – I reviewed my rational arguments in my sleep
and tried to transform myself into a theorem-proving
machine – I continued to believe I had a correct design
for an AI – at least, a probably-correct design, the
proof is in the pudding – and I saw my mind and
everyone else’s as a giant web of moving turtle-shell
patterns, patterns in patterns in patterns and patterns,
all animated algorithmically if you choose to conceive
them that way, and I started to weave the threads
from Solomon and Ashti’s brain into a reductio ad
absurdum of their existence, to the music of the can-can
divided by Chopin’s mutant offspring with Hendrix --
but I got distracted by the pretty colors and finally fell
asleep…. (and as I drifted off in confusion and clarity, a
new thought crept into the cavern – familiar but
different – the difference between clarity and illusion –
Could it be? This revelation of truth – of reality – could
it be yet another layer of the same dream-scene? Some
of it smelled right, some smelled wrong. “Ari Adaman”
smelled correct – but “Erica”? Shouldn’t that be
“Zennica”? And “Brittany” – was I really ever married
to (and divorced from) someone named Brittany? That
was the name of one of Bill Clinton’s lovers, right? No,
it was a pop star. Barbara – Barbara – that was it. The
same name as the former First Lady -- that paragon of
erotic femininity. Oh Barbara Bush, I cry for your
beauty, eternal and perfect like a clam! Barbara: that
was the ex-wife’s name. The awakening was a sham – I
still hadn’t found reality – I was creeping closer and
closer and cloooooser but would never quite get there
yet – and even the “closer and closer and closer” was
just a matter of the choice of distance metric -- and

328
 choosing the distance metric with more reality to it was
just another subcase of the problem – the original
problem (in so many sensible and nonsensical senses) of
locating the real. I was waking up again – waking up
and down the aisle – up to the world of sweet Zennica,
who looked just like Erica but had an appropriate Z in
her name – like Zarathustra,
Remember Zephaniah and Zoey (aka
Poopsykins, a nickname given by
What You Are! her idiot mother, whatever her
Learn – idiot name was) – no fucking
Zeru, for Christ’s sake (stupid
Be Concerned Christ with his screams on the
Leoncern arithmetic cross!) – Zennicazinha
and her father Hilario – and Ari
Leoncern Adaman who looked like Ari
Adaman and smelled like a
Leoncern
paradoxical particle and really was trying to make an AI
but was pissing away a percentage of his moments
instead writing bizarre and unpopular prose poems – I
was waking up again to the reality – but this time
without any kind of certainty –

--Fin is

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epilogue
by dr. gennady burtzle
-----
She answered the door barefoot, dressed all
in black, in a long flowing skirt and a tight spandex
top that was free from adornment except her ample
cleavage. Her look was pensive at first but she
warmed to me quickly with a quiet smile. I was
surprised at how attractive she was, with her Asian
face and her long black hair – I hadn’t been
expecting the madman’s wife would be such a
babe, but hey, I was willing to accept it. Absorbing
the look on her face and the way she held her body,
she looked not only cute but intelligent and lonely. I
wondered what the catch was. Or was she the
catch? But that wasn’t the reason I was there. (I
did get tired of these animal reactions – they were
distractions from the grand goal – but yet they had
to be indulged to a certain extent or my organism
would be unable to function anywhere near to its
optimal effectiveness – my brain, powerful abstract
reasoning engine though it was, was still an organ
of my very human body -- a strange situation to
remember – but it didn’t seem strange at the time,
of course, as it was the only reality I’d yet known.)
“You’re here to talk about Godfrey,” she said.
The way she said his name was funny –
Gaaahdfree – and I found it odd somehow that this
was the way he had heard his name pronounced for
years of his life. I had always thought of him as a
Gawdfree, not a Gaaahdfree, but here she was, his
beautiful young wife with her half-Arab accent, and

330
my mapping of the characters of his name into
phonemes had to be completely redone.
But I wasn’t supposed to just stand and stare,
admiring her tits and her accent....
“You’re Ashti,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m Gen. Gen Burtzle.”
“I know. I’ve read about you.”
“I read about you too.”
“I know.”
We shook hands. “Good to meet you.”
“Good to meet you.”
“Why don’t you come in and sit down?” she
said, her tone friendly but just a bit mechanical.
She offered me a drink and we sat at the
kitchen table to talk, sipping on iced teas with
lemon.
“Godfrey Solomonoff... “ I began, hesitating
and smiling. “You know, your husband caused me
an incredible amount of trouble. Me and a lot of
other people”
“And me too,” she smiled. “It’s calmed down a
lot now, though. Since the whole thing was solved.
Since you shut down his program, I mean. Your
work on that was incredible. For a few weeks –
when the thing was sending messages -- there were
reporters here every day – it was terrible.”
“But by now everyone’s forgotten about it.”
“Yeah, mostly.”
“It’s funny huh? Someone creates a rogue AI
that almost destroys the human race – then a few
months pass and everyone’s gone back to their TV
shows and video games. I suppose they’ll enjoy the
story when it comes out on film. Maybe I’ll get
played by Keanu Reeves.”
She laughed; raised her eyebrows. “Exactly.”

331
 “I suppose you appreciate the peace and
quiet.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well it’s not so fun talking
to all those reporters answering the same things
over and over again. But now, I....” She blushed
and looked at her lap, then met my eyes again.
“Well anyway – you didn’t come here to listen to me
babble.” She paused. “Why did you come here?”
I looked at her face and had, once again, the
chilling yet reassuring certainty that I was living
within – not quite a dream, not quite a simulation,
not quite a hallucination – but something
approximately evoked by all these imperfect human
words. And while I might someday find my way out
of this one – perhaps with an AI program that was
constructed correctly so as to lead to a safe
Singularity – the way out would just lead into
another one – I never would escape from the maze
of illusions, because this was the nature of my
human mind. Haunted with a dark clarity, I realized
for the n’th time that my basic condition was
hopeless: The definition of escaping from the maze
of illusions in which I was embedded inevitably
implied losing my “I.” I could never get out of here –
“I” could never get out of “here” – “I” and (“here”
AKA illusion) were part of the same interdefining
mess, and I would be wracked in confusion as long
as I was what I was – and if I became something
else, something so different from me as not to live in
illusions/simulations/dreamscapes, then I wouldn’t
be myself anymore, so transcending myself like this
would just be committing suicide – This illusoriness
was it. This was it. This mind – or if not this mind,
something roughly equally self-delusory ... this body
– or if not this body, some roughly equally limiting
substitute. If I went too far beyond these things –

332
far enough beyond to be really exciting – then I’d
cease to be myself anyway. I myself was thoroughly
defined by the very properties of my universe that I
was most thoroughly disgusted with. I wanted to be
a truly powerful mind – not bound by any particular
embodiment, not bound by any specific history or
way of thinking – a powerful experiencing and
understanding process – but even if I could
somehow transform myself into such a thing, via a
tremendously powerful artificial-scientist AI
program that really worked as specified unlike
Solomonoff’s disaster – I would completely lose
myself in the process; all I’d be doing was killing
myself and creating some other, better, freer being.
And now here I was repeating myself – repeating
the same thoughts over again in slightly different
wording – demonstrating yet again the pure idiocy
of the emotionally driven brain architecture that
was my moron legacy and, fuck it, “my” future....
“What?” she said. “What are you thinking?”
I smiled, and reoriented myself to the world for
a moment. I tilted my head to one side, decided to
take a risk. “Actually ... I was thinking how cute you
are.”
She blushed and grinned, and looked at the
floor for a moment. The gamble had worked: she
wasn’t offended. She liked me. Well, I had already
known that, but now I really knew. I looked at her,
took in her body again, trying not to be too obvious.
I had a feeling I was going to make love to her, at
some point. This was going to be very entertaining.
“I don’t believe you,” she added. “You looked
kind of thoughtful and disturbed.”
So she wasn’t an idiot. Not surprising.
Solomonoff had been a lunatic, but he hadn’t been
an idiot either. “OK, if you want a fuller stack trace,

333
I was thinking something disturbing, but then when
you interrupted me I looked at you and started
thinking how cute you are. I think I saw you on TV
once but I didn’t get a good image of you....”
She blushed again: this was becoming a habit.
“I was really upset with those reporters....”
“Yeah, I understand....”
“So what was the disturbing thought?”
“Do you really want to go into it? Wouldn’t you
rather go have lunch?”
“How about we go into it over lunch?” she
suggested.
We walked out the door of her house toward a
cafe’ she said was OK and was less than half a mile
away. After a few commonplaces about the
neighborhood and the weather she launched into
what was on her mind. “I’ve been having some
disturbing thoughts myself,” she ventured.
“Like what?”
“Like maybe Godfrey was right, in a way.”
“You mean his design for an AI could have
worked, if he’d made some small modifications?
You know,....”
“No,” she said sharply. “I don’t have any
opinion on that stuff. He was brilliant but he was
also completely nuts, so....”
“OK, sorry.” (A bit of an edge to her voice
there, eh? I sensed she wasn’t as calm and
reserved as she’d been acting, not once you got to
know her better....)
“I mean about the human race.”
“Ah.”
“We had these long arguments – back in the
old days – about ethics kinds of things.... I didn’t
think it was smart to keep working on AI given that
even if you succeed the thing may just destroy us all

334
– why would a superhuman AI have any use for us?
It could just swat us like a fly....”
“And his position was that we should just take
the risk?”
“That was sometimes his position. On a more
mellow day. Sometimes he thought he had the
solution – that he knew how to make his AI stay
obedient no matter how smart it got. But most of
the time he just didn’t give a shit. Sometimes he
thought the end of humanity would be a good thing.
He liked to say stuff like: Humanity, you never had it
in the first place.” She smiled sourly.
“Yeah, well....”
“He may be right.”
“What’s ‘it’?”
“Huh?”
“Humanity never had it in the first place.
What’s ‘it’?”
“I don’t know,” she said irritatedly. “It’s just
an expression. You understand my point.”
I shrugged. “Partly.”
She took a deep breath, and then paused for a
while, as if deciding which direction to go in. I
decided to remain silent and let her decision
process churn.
Finally she started: “When we took
mushrooms in Amsterdam, we had some weird
experiences....”
“Yeah?”
“Did you ever take mushrooms, or acid, or
anything?”
“Back in college, a long time ago.”
Her face warmed up a little – the edge was
evaporating. I wanted badly to touch her, but
resisted: all in good time.... “OK, so maybe you’ll
sort of understand.”

335
 I smiled at her. “Try me.” We were getting
near the cafe’, I could see it up ahead on the right.
It looked like some kind of bakery.
“Do you mind if we walk a little more?” she
asked. “There’s a Thai place up the road that I like
a little better.”
I nodded.
“He felt he was communicating with these
beings....”
“You mean like Terrence McKenna’s machine-
elves from the ninth dimension?” I laughed. I had
read some of McKenna’s loony books. Fun stuff,
but he believed his drug-inspired delusions a bit
more seriously than I was comfortable with.
“I don’t know,” she said. “McKenna took DMT,
for one thing, which is different from mushrooms.
And it’s hard to tell from his language.... Well,
anyway.... Godfrey felt he was communicating with
these beings that were more fundamental than we
are. They could move back and forwards in time,
and perceive information at the quantum level.”
“Ah. Well, that’s good for them I suppose....”
“Well, this just reinforced his feeling that the
human way of processing information is fatally
limited.”
Now I was back on familiar ground. “Of
course it is. The brain has a limited capacity, and
worse than that it’s basically a hacked-up version of
a monkey brain.”
“Well OK,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking
about ethics a bit. Let’s suppose there’s a field full
of sheep and bunnies, and we decide to colonize it
and build all our human stuff there, even though we
know the sheep and bunnies won’t have anywhere
to live anymore.”
“OK.”

336
 “Well how do we justify this?”
“We don’t,” I pointed out. “We just do it –
because we’re stronger. Because we can.”
“We do it because we can,” she said, stopping
and looking at me. Her face looked excited and
alive. Her breasts were virtually jumping out at me.
I was irritated at myself for being so horny, but of
course, that’s exactly why women show so much
cleavage, right? I forced myself to focus on her
words. “But we still feel we’re justified. And why?
Because we’re better than them. We’re smarter
than the bunnies and sheep, we’re more intelligent,
we’re more flexible, more general. So putting
ourself in their place is really the more moral thing
to do.”
“Not everyone would agree with you,” I
pointed out – we were walking again. “The deep
ecologists think humans should reduce their
population to pre-civilization levels to leave more
room for wildlife.”
She waved her hand. “They’re a bunch of
morons. The point is, it’s not just that it’s OK to
build an AI in spite of risks. The point is, our
existence is immoral. Do you see that? That’s what
Godfrey was trying to get across to me, but I never
understood it.”
I laughed again, nervously more than out of
humor. “So, now that he’s gone, you’ve come to
agree with him.”
“Not about everything. But I can see his point
on this. If we can make something smarter and
better than ourselves – more flexible and general,
better able to understand things, able to experience
more – then it’s actually unethical for us to keep
consuming resources that could be used for some
better thing.”

337
 “What do those quantum minds moving back
and forth in time have to do with it?”
“I’m not sure....” She paused. The Thai place
was approaching. “He was trying to get at that, but
he just went fucking nuts instead....” I saw real
sadness on her face. I knew that she and
Solomonoff had had a somewhat chaotic
relationship – splitting up and then reconciling – but
I could see she deeply loved him. And even now,
after his death, she was trying to reconcile herself
to his ideas, trying to make sense of the madness.
“One thing he talked about,” she added, “was giving
his AI access to the quantum domain, so it could
experience quantum events directly. Then maybe
the AI would fuse with these micro-beings, these
quantum minds you called them.”
“Ah. It would move them into the macro
domain.”
All of a sudden, she laughed like little girl.
Her cheeks turned bright red; she ran her fingers
wildly through her long black hair. “Oh, I don’t
know. That sounds pretty crazy. Let’s have some
lunch, huh?”
I smiled and put my hand on her shoulder.
“Sounds good to me.”
“I’ve been sitting around here myself too long,
thinking about Godfrey and all that – I guess I’ve
been breeding a lot of crazy thoughts. It’s great to
have someone to talk to.”
We walked into the restaurant. “I like talking
to you too...”
“But you never told me why you came here,”
she pointed out.
“You led me here.”
She ignored my lame attempt at humor. “I
mean to my house.”

338
 I shrugged. “It was a directive from the
machine-elves.... No, seriously ... well, if you want
to talk about that, I was curious if there were any
notes that Solomonoff wrote down in the earlier
stages of his design process, before he went over
the edge.”
“You think there might be something of use
there? For your own work, you mean?”
“Maybe. My own or someone else’s. Well, to
be honest, I’m at a bit of a difficult point in my own
AI work right now, in terms of getting the system to
really understand its own processes in a way that
doesn’t totally combinatorially explode and use all
the computer’s resources. To get even as far as he
did, Solomonoff must have gotten around this
problem somehow.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Zorvex did give him a lot
of computers, though.”
“Yeah, I know,” I grinned.
“Derrr.” She seemed to have forgotten, for a
moment, that I was the one who Zorvex had called
in to lead the team in charge of stopping his rogue
AI from dominating their computer systems and
spreading across the Internet at large. “I don’t
know if it’s useful at all – but I remember he said
something like, all the algorithms of thought are
exponential, it’s just a matter of getting the constant
in the exponent as small as you can....”
“Well, yeah. I’ve gotten that far. If you put it in
that language, what I’m hoping is that he had some
tricks for getting the constant down that can be
ported over to my AI architecture. Which is more
complex than his, from what I understand of his ...
but does have some properties in common.”
“Presumably yours isn’t going to destroy the
human race?”

339
 “It’s not going to advance uncontrollably – at
each step I have the option to stop its progress.
Until it gets really smart, at which point all bets are
off. But I’m a long way from there, yet. Your
husband’s approach was based on letting the
system learn how to think and build its own mental
structures – this can get you faster progress if
things go really well but it’s intrinsically
unpredictable. In my approach you build more stuff
in and don’t let it modify its own cognitive
processes until it’s achieved a pretty high level of
intelligence. This is slower but more reliable.... So
in my approach you’re a lot less likely to create a
rogue process – and less likely to annihilate the
human race unintentionally.... However ethical that
might be.”
She looked at me in a way I couldn’t read.... I
still wasn’t sure how serious she had been with that
earlier rant about sheep and bunnies. Perhaps she
wasn’t sure how serious she had been either.
“But still,” I continued, “I’d like to understand
what he did better....”
She tilted her head to one side, the way I
always did. Already she was copying my
mannerisms.... “The media would be pretty hyped
up if they knew you were trying to copy what
Godfrey did....”
“I’m not – “
“I know, I know. But....”
“No, really! I....”
She laughed. “I’m just teasing....” She put her
hand on mine, tentatively, across the table.
A waitress was approaching, it was time to
order food. Entertainment for the taste buds and
olfactory receptors; energy for the metabolism
machine. Goddamn this humanity: so boring and

340
primitive and limited. And goddamn this human sex
urge: so boring and so primitive and limited, and so
much goddamn fun....
“I do have a bunch of his notebooks at home,
in some boxes in his study,” she said. “I don’t know
if they have what you’re looking for, but you’re
welcome to look through them.”
I smiled and nodded. The future and the imaginary
She looked at the menu. rotting fetid pregnant
We’d never gotten to my glorious and crystallized
own disturbing thoughts, pained and ensorcelled by the silhouette
of the Voice at the end of the end of the end –
but there was plenty of time the endless purple twilit Scream --
for that. Thinking of time
itself, I looked at my watch, curious how long we’d
been talking, but found that it said two minutes
before eleven. The stupid thing had stopped
working, for some reason. I looked over at the
clock on the wall and set it to the correct time,
twelve forty-three – then slouched back in my chair
and relaxed for a moment, shooting a grin at my
charming new friend.

341
___we never can get them back___

I am afraid she is a being without a body or

brain – a disembodied superhuman
intelligent system, a variant of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra immanent in the disturbances of
Time is a farce invented
the nuclear byindevils
resonance –
the psychotic mini-
everything van Allen belt that masquerades as society’s
aura. She and
exists always
glows the beginninghas
and end of all
and will – time,
yetmorewebeautiful
ourselves are
than possible,

wrapped up with these devils –

which are “just” a low-
dimensional projection of the
cosmos-building transtemporal
quantum aliens who will always
exist in a space beyond us by the
very nature of what “us” are – from ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream

thehardware,
Software, wetware, point of view of our humanity,
firmware,
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream
thelifeware,
wildware, deadware, dreamsshitwareweave in and out and
where ware wear where we are an illusion
ashes to ashes
dust to dust

we never
dream to dream
Thoughts are an illusion ashes to ashes

out and in, and

dust to dust
Zeros and ones do not exist dream to dream
Here in the center of the moment, of the statuary moment, ashes to ashes
dust to dust

can get them back

every twist of thought floats endless dream to dream
ashes to ashes
no-change elusive organic shining, dust to dust
here lonely in time’s center dream to dream
ashes to ashes
between the dead past and the forest and the scream dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
dream to dream
ashes to ashes
dust to dust
342 dream to dream
 Afterword
Dr. Adam Ahriman

In the Foreword I described the unusual

circumstances in which the Echoes manuscript was
presented to me. Now, in this Afterword, I will
briefly indulge myself in a recitation of some of the
hypotheses that have been put forward regarding
the ultimate origins of the manuscript. A large
number of such hypotheses have been propounded,
most of them not deserving repetition. However
some have sufficient humor value to be worth
reporting for the pure sake of amusement; and a
few others need to be cited here merely for the
purpose of definitively refuting them.
Firstly, several individuals have speculated that
the manuscript might be the product of my eldest
son, Zarathustra (who lately turned 16). This theory
is bolstered by the prominent usage in the
manuscript of the name “Jack,” which could be
taken as a reference to Zarathustra’s unfinished
dada/surrealist/sci-fi opus The Love In Front Of Jack –
a manuscript that is also mentioned in the book
itself, which is peculiar since very few individuals
are aware of its existence. There is even a section in
the manuscript titled The Love In Front Of Jack,
though this section consists of rambling nonsense

343
that has nothing in common with Zarathustra’s
actual manuscript of this name! Also, the “Ari
Adaman” character in the manuscript has a son
named “Zarathustra,” whereas all of his other
family members have names that are variants of,
rather than exact matches to, my own family
members’ names. And there are many mentions of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra throughout the manuscript.
All in all, however, I find the “Zarathustra Ahriman
wrote Echoes” hypothesis unlikely, as the literary
style and content of the manuscript really don’t
have much in common with my son’s Zarathustra’s
writing or thinking such as I know them (and I
believe I do know them fairly well). Creating a
manuscript such Echoes – with its hard-science,
philosophical, sexual and psychedelic themes -- is
almost surely not within the repertoire of any 16-
year-old, even one gifted with a half-measure of my
prodigious genome. Plus, Zarathustra says he
didn’t do it, and I know him to be an honest person.
It seems more plausible that these clues pointing in
Zarathustra’s direction were created by the true
author as an intentional strategy for sowing
confusion.2
There is also the perplexing reference to a “Dr.
Gennady Burtzle” in the Epilogue at the end of the
manuscript. However, a thorough search yielded no
information about any individuals with this name,
so at this point the Burtzle reference appears to be
a dead end – though perhaps one day Dr. Burtzle
will come forward and claim authorship, thus

2
Or should I say, “cunfusium”?

344
setting the whole issue to rest.
Next, a former professional colleague
suggested that my old friend Troulian Youlanov
(sometimes known as the “Bulgarian Madmind”)
might be the responsible party. Troulian has
historically postulated a considerable number of
ambitious, highly eccentric AI designs; and has also
posited a number of mathematical or quasi-
mathematical theories purportedly demonstrating
the possibility or impossibility of AI, the existence or
nonexistence of a Supreme Being, and so forth.
Furthermore, he has periodically displayed an
intense, perhaps excessive interest in my own
intellectual doings, as evidenced e.g. by his
epigrams such as “Adam Ahriman is the last in the
series of great Jews: Moses, Jesus, Freud, Einstein
and Ahriman” or “Adam, your ideas about AI are
mostly nonsense, but you’re the greatest Philip K.
Dick character yet.” However, a careful analysis of
Troulian’s various available writings renders his
authorship of Echoes very unlikely. While the
themes of the text are right up Troulian’s alley,
Troulian’s grasp of English is nowhere near the level
demonstrated in Echoes. Still, a collaboration
between Troulian and some other unknown party
more exquisitely skilled in the construction of
English-language avant-garde poetry and literary
prose is not unthinkable, and this is perhaps, I
would venture to assert, one of the more plausible
hypotheses presented so far, though not a
tremendously likely one. (I have attempted to
contact Troulian several times in the last few

345
months in a quest to put this hypothesis to rest, but
haven’t received a response, which however is not
surprising; Troulian has long had the habit of
disappearing for periods of time.)
Other theories offered were even more
outlandish, including suggestions that the
manuscript might be a coded message from some
nonhuman source (an AI running secretly across
multiple computers spread across the Internet -- a
tribe of McKenna-style nine-dimensional machine-
elves -- a future AI mind propagating information
back in time so as to sow the seeds of its own
creation; etc.). In this species of theory, something
in the manuscript is supposed to seed ideas in some
reader’s mind that will eventually lead to important
consequences. The purpose of the obscure and
poetic nature of the manuscript is hypothesized to
serve the purpose of obscuring the fact that the
transmission of coded information is occurring.
According to this line of thinking, the manuscript
would be somewhat similar in purpose to the
fictional film VALIS in Philip K. Dick’s novel of that
name. As you might expect, I find this very
doubtful, and almost too silly to deserve
commentary.
Another individual, tongue in cheek I hope,
speculated that I wrote the manuscript myself while
in some sort of trance state (perhaps inspired by
psychedelic substances, which for some reason a
number of individuals appear to assume I am in the
habit of ingesting, when in fact nothing could be
further from the case!) -- and then, realizing I

346
would completely forget about it once the trance
was done, e-mailed it to myself to ensure its
preservation. This theory does not, however, explain
the use of an anonymous email address. Nor does it
account for the lack of any gap in my earthly
existence sufficiently lengthy to account for the
construction of a 70,000 word manuscript. I have
spent every single day of the last few years in the
company of family and coworkers: there is no
“missing space” during which Echoes could have
been secretly and continuously constructed. The
hypothesized trance state would have had to have
been fragmented and recurrent over a long period
of time, which hardly seems psychologically
plausible.
Finally, and somewhat offensively, there was
the wag who suggested that I wrote the Echoes
manuscript while in a quite normal state of mind --
and that I then deceptively claimed to have received
the manuscript as an anonymous email. My
motivation, he speculated, was either purely
humorous in nature, or else a combination of artistic
vanity and embarrassment. Perhaps, he insinuated,
I wished to publish the manuscript and reap the
attendant glory yet insulate myself in a way from
the insanity of its contents, for the sake of
preserving my (heh!) professional reputation. I see
no need to dignify this with a response.
By way of conclusion, my humble suggestion is
that the Echoes manuscript should be considered as
a work of “conceptual art” on its own merits,
without regard for the question of its origins (which

347
will likely never be resolved anyway). Quite
evidently, whoever is the true author wished it to be
considered in this way.

Dr. Adam Ahriman

Brooklyn, New York
February, 2006

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