There is something about the Canadian Rockies. What is it?  Is it the way you can see millions of years of geology in the sharp slices of time that thrust up into the sky as though these gargantuan upheavals happened only yesterday?  Is it the feeling of awe and humility that comes when you realize how infinitesimal you are, and yet, in this humility, a sense of the infinite power that you are part of, that has brought all this into being?

 

John Muir wrote: “Oh these vast, measureless mountain days, opening a thousand windows to show us God.”  So this morning, I write to you from Banff to remind you of how healing it can be to put oneself into the middle of thousands of miles of pine forests, glaciers and these amazing signatures from another time when great forces had their way with the earth.  This is the thing about virtual reality. You can be anywhere, and you can be in that place, walk around it in your mind, bring it into consciousness and then see where your thoughts want to play.

 

There is a lot to be learned from geology, the way it puts you in touch with our living planet. The way it helps you to understand your own glaciers, morains, sudden slides and alluvial fans.  Oh, that part of my life is moving so slowly!  Oh, that is where a few small pines are starting a forest, over there in that pile of shale! Oh, I wish I could see around that bend in the river!  We need this one on one encounter with the earth, just as we need to think about how, as artists, we shall continue to evolve through our sediments and synclines, our crumbling bluffs and meandering river beds.

 

It has all gotten harder, and easier, too.  History and her faithful handmaiden, Time, are forcing us to develop new theories about things, because the old theories do not fit any more. That is the frustration, discontinuity and exhilaration you feel now.  That is what is forcing you to reflect on the purpose of your life, of novels and of art in general.  Milan Kundera says that we veil reality by pre-interpreting it,  and this pre-interpretation is like a curtain: “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world.”  He continues:  “Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.”   I agree with Kundera that it is the task of the novelist to rip through this curtain and reveal what it hides.  Indeed, this is the task of the artist, the poet, the mystic, and even, in our time, the voyager through cyber-space who inhabits, as I do here, the etheric realms of virtual reality and the imagination.  How shall we play?  To what new planets shall we travel? And what new worlds shall we invent?

 

En Route

 V: Your postcard from Seattle reminds me of a few weeks I spent there one spring. I stayed in an old house, much like the ones you describe. The gardens of the houses in this area were filled with daffodils, roses, and everywhere there were huge bushes of fragrant lilacs.  It smelled like a florist's shop. At night, and very early in the morning, I would take long walks, often down to the shore of Lake Washington, then along the waterfront to a small shopping area where there was a coffee house that never seemed to close. The neighborhood seemed as though it had been there forever, generations arriving, growing up, leaving, but always a stability and continuity, something that California seems to lack.  I would walk when there were few other people outside. Even in spring it was quite chilly.  In the morning, Mount Baker way off across the lake in the distance was still shining white with snow. I was haunted by the phrase "stranger in a strange land." I felt like an observer in a slightly foreign culture. Who lives in these houses, year after year? Who tends these gardens?  What are their joys and their sorrows?  But there were no answers. I would wrap my wool scarf tight, and walk quickly from one island of pale yellow streetlight to the next.  Hugs, S.

 

 

resurrection   thank you gracious god for this amazing green day and green everywhere bursting from buds suddenly out of winter-bare limbs and twigs and the green ocean and the green grasses sprouting new life back into our fields and hearts   thank you infinite god for our spinning green planet our rainforests with their green parrots and pale green butterflies and green snakes and their mayan green rivers full of mystery leaping down from distant green mountains   thank you playful god for this amazing green life with kindness and compassion and hope and the chance to be born again and again from despair and sorrows; there is always green reminding us of life eternal and resurrection   thank you creative god for the amazing green flash on the horizon sometimes at sunset if one knows where and when to look and the green of your goodness that sustains us and holds us forever in the power of your great love alex noble Copyright C by Alex Noble 2007. All rights reserved in all media. Photography by Alex Noble

Corfu

 

C::  I am sitting on the small beach in front of my hotel, writing to you by moonlight so bright that the sand is sparkling like a sea of diamonds.  It is late. Behind me, the random sounds of the village closing its doors on the day. Friends call out goodnight as they leave a party. Dogs bark and then go back to sleep. Blue shutters close. Far away, bouzouki music in a café and bursts of laughter.  Smells of roast lamb, garlic, and woodsmoke hang in the air. The polished sophistication of French gardens and Italian museums seems so far away.  Here, it is fishermen, donkeys, colored nets drying in the sun, women hanging out their laundry in alleyways, and time is marked as kairos not chronos.  Things take as long as they take. No pressure. No deadlines. No Swiss trains running on time. The little ferryboat to the mainland leaves when the Captain has had his lunch and a nap.  No one complains.  I am so happy, so at peace, my mind is going blank. I am in some spell of happiness.  Because I am here on Corfu, of course I am rereading Durrell.  And I will leave you with this passage:"The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this --that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer, can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold -- the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfill it in its true potential -- the imagination."  I hope you are writing and painting, wherever you are.  It is the ultimate salvation. By the way, I heard from a scholar here that the authentic translation of the word "salvation" is really "rest."  Think of that!  When we do art, we are saving/resting our souls.  S.

 

Alex Noble

 

 

Copyright C 2007 by Alex Noble. All rights reserved in all media.

 

 

Giverney:

 

V: The most wondrous afternoon at Giverney, walking where Monet walked, everything bathed in the clear Old Masters light of early autumn, the poplars beginning to burn with slow fire. His paintings are everywhere. Being here is like stepping into a virtual reality dream, but instead of just looking at Monets on some well-guarded museum wall, here you can experience them in their third and fourth dimensions: luminous color, fragrance of herbs, nasturtiums, lavender. Here, you see inside the paintings, through them, around them, escaping the limitations of the frame altogether. You see with his eyes, and you want to pull out a brush and capture this vista, that bench over there under the willow.  There are masses of lavender, clouds of it, hovered with dun colored bees and small white butterflies, giving the sense of the garden always in motion, never static.  There is a rich smell of apples, but I do not see any apple trees - perhaps a trick of the wind.  And of course I spend hours by the pond, watching the water lilies drifting slowly through reflections of sky.  How did he ever see with such clarity how things really are - indeterminate, approximate, tentative?  In his luminous blues and soft greens, his portraits of the numinous, he anticipates by decades the quantum physics of Einstein and Bohm, particles and waves in constant flux. Watching  sunbeams and shadows dance across the water under the wind, I feel as though I am in a holy place, companioned with angels, angels who speak not with sound, but with light.  Tomorrow, off to Paris, then Lago Maggiore.  These postcards are fun, sort of like travel back into another time, a vacation from e-mail, which is so instant there is hardly ever time to catch up with one's self.  Am off to watch the lights of Paris one last time before I take the train at midnight.  Do send the sketches that you mentioned, or at least copies. S.

At the MIT Media Lab, I would design an interdisciplinary Ph.D program with Ray Kurzweil, NIcholas Negroponte and Jaron Lanier as Advisors. Within the resources of the Aesthetics and Computation Group, I would create additional interactive online "environments" for my utopian multi-media work-in -progress, The Twenty Third Century Novel:  Secrets of Planet Metafor Revealed At Last!  (Alternative Title: Techne Meets Logos at the Singularity Cafe.)

(The Aesthetics and Computation Group works "Toward the design of advanced system architectures and thought processes to enable the creation of (as yet) unimaginable forms and spaces. ")

The purpose of my Ph.D would be to design and launch into cyberspace a transdisciplinary self-organizing, non-linear, dispersed work of art which, through its imaginative and innovative technologies and content, would provide the opportunity for every Citizen of Play-Net Earth to attain optimal health, happiness and success, and for the nations of Play-Net Earth to invent and implement a global form of organization that embodies the highest values of our great spiritual traditions and supports the positive evolution of all life forms.


 

 

V:  Here for a few days to tidy up my presentation for the Virtual Reality conference in Kyoto.  And of course this raises all of the new questions. If I am having a virtual experience, how much is "me," how much is imagined? If I "touch" you in virtual reality, do you really "feel" it, or do you just get tricked into thinking that you feel it, but if you think that you feel it, isn't that just like "real" reality?  When I enter a virtual world, but am not really there, why is it that I can still learn from my experiences in a way that my body feels that it has actually had the experience?  So it is that we move into these inner worlds, which exist in their own eternity, just over the edge of perception, these fractal data bit dream times. Speaking of fractals, did you get the Mandelbrot set images that I sent?  I will be using some of these in my talk. Enjoy the colors, but wait until I can show you the videos. The more I learn, the less I am able to speak about these new realities. Only the image can carry the full power of these new worlds of meaning. So perhaps now art comes full circle. From Altamira to Adobe Photo Shop. Even so it was in the days of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and the early icon makers.  Nothing you could say about sainthood said as much as those pure gold halos.  In a time of growing illiteracy among the masses, our images will be the only weapons left for staving off the cultural Darth Vaders who gather at the gates.  But enough of that!  This great Belle Epoch hotel is almost empty. All tourists are gone back to their cubicles and coffee cups. (Wasn't it TS Eliot's Prufrock who "measured out his life in coffee spoons"?) I swim in the chilly lake in the morning, take long contemplative walks at sunset, when the clouds pulse with hidden fire, and the lake melts into liquid bronze. Here, in this museum of the past, I feel as though I have fallen back in time. They still dry the linen sheets in the sun, and as you go to sleep, you feel as though you are sleeping in a field of sage and wildflowers.  Everything is so Turn of the Century, before world wars, and the onslaught of chaos. Last night, there was chamber music in the Grand Salon, even though there were just a few of us sipping our tea. There are moments when I wonder if I have slipped into a Merchant-Ivory production of a Henry James novel.  And then I start wondering if I have simply entered a figment of my imagination, programmed by some rogue virtual reality chip in my brain. Now, don't laugh, this is the direction we are heading in. It will literally be possible to think a thing and create it.  You mention that you will be leaving for Cairo.  Some special assignment, perhaps? Can you share? I am mad with curiosity.  S.

 

You wake up at 4:30 AM, light the small beeswax candle on your desk, and begin writing. As you write, the images present themselves, like stately emissaries from distant galaxies, bowing, speaking in low voices.  There is so much to listen for: the voices of friends who have Gone Ahead, the lyrical voices of Tomorrow and Yesterday and What Might Have Been.  In your imagination, you watch the rising sun wash night’s shadows from the sky. You hear the call of a Blue Heron. You remember that enchanted afternoon when you walked through Monet’s garden at Giverney. You feel the chill of the Alaska wind as you look out across miles and miles of ice.  All of this happens in your imagination. You hear fragments of songs, broken passages of music: Monteverdi, Ellington, Coltrane, Vivaldi. This, you realize, is the very center of the Universe, the place where Love lives, the silent, musical, dancing stillness, the secret cave at the heart of space-time where everything becomes One, and from which we depart in quantum ships that take us on all our journeys.

 

Here, at the very center of your silence, you discover and experience images of the love that lives its many lives through you. The lines of your many loves etch themselves across the geography of your memories and dreams the way the Colorado, century after century, whispers its swirling water-brushes along the walls of the Grand Canyon, painting in colors of dawn and sunset the history of rock, time and the river. You nod to these images, as you would acknowledge the presence of angels. You become still and receptive. Your listening is a prayer, a state of grace. You realize that what you are writing is a kind of a love story, and every love story is a journey through rivers and time and rock.  And every love story is a journey, with all the silences and mysteries of eternity weaving in and out of its shifts and changes like golden threads in a unicorn tapestry.

 

The Blue Heron casts his shimmering reflection across the waters of your life.  The ice cracks and spring  rivers start to flow. The golden celebrations of Vivaldi echo across an Umbrian landscape. Monet’s water lilies fade in and out of the sky. Great glaciers recede, exposing mountains and valleys that have been hidden in a mantle of ice for millions of years.  You see and hear all of this, and you feel reborn and new each morning, as your little candle flickers against the fading night.  Your silence is like a lover.  Your infinite silence holds you in its arms.