Zurich

V: Here in Zurich for a few days on my way to Greece, then Japan.  Had tea yesterday with the most amazing man, a Dr. Carl Jung.  Have you heard of him?  He is into all sorts of interesting things: the Kabala, myths, dreams, archetypes, and has discovered something called the "collective unconscious." He says that Americans are all thinking and sensation, that we have buried our feeling and intuition. I have to agree with him. Perhaps this is why I feel so attracted to the mystical and the numinous -- to balance this relentless rationality we seem to carry around with us.  He had me draw a "personal mandala" -- he makes everyone do this. I will send it to you when I can add color, because I think I am going to use it as a flag some day, perhaps a flag for a camp where all you do is play.  Can you imagine it? I have a Celtic cross inside a circle, with an equilateral square around that.  Dr. Jung was quite amazed at how many universal symbols I had packed into it: the Native American Medicine Wheel, an X as the Rune for partnership, the Four Sided City of God (heavenly kingdom).  He even saw a few things that I wasn't conscious of!  You should try this exercise sometime!  He said I must write down all of my dreams, and I said, but I always forget them, and he said well, Fraulein, you won't if you write them down. He also said that in Sanskrit there are 96 words for love, while English has only one. Train to Trieste tonight to catch freighter for Athens.  S.

Excerpt from 23CN, "VR:The Journals of S"

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

Photo from Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.com

Venice

V: Missed train to Trieste. Ended up in Venice. Had some additional Active Imagination sessions with Carl (Jung) that I wouldn't have missed for the world. People are quite afraid of him, but if he likes you he is like your own psychological Santa Claus. He told me that when he isn't sure what to do, like take the train to Geneva, he will flip a coin. Heads I take the train to Geneva. Tails I stay home. Let's say it comes up heads. If he is happy about this, he has solved his confusion. If he is unhappy, he finds the information useful to help him decide how he really feels. Of course, many of his students are shocked to see the Great Herr Doktor flipping a coin. But they do not really know how much fun he is. They just see what they want to see. Projection, Carl calls this. We all do it, of course, but if you do it and know that you are doing it, that is better than doing it and not knowing that you are doing it, if you get my drift. For example, I am currently projecting that you are my perfect Muse. But I am conscious of this, so it is OK.  And I am telling you about it, which makes it even more OK. And you can "resign" as my Muse any time you wish. Carl says you would be a fool to resign as my Muse of course.  Ooops! Running out of space. Will continue on one of my Hotel Cipriani cards, where there's more room. S.

More from Venice

V: I'm sitting here sipping some lemon-ginger tea in a tiny bistro on the Piazza San Marco. Sunset. Everything swimming in golden light. Puddles on the pavement catch the glow. A golden world. An afterlife. (Where is Thomas Mann when I need him?) In the distance, delicate little bites of a Mozart opera. Even the handmade glass cup I am drinking from catches the light and plays with it. Butterfly wings. Dragonfly eyes. The dew on cobwebs that catches the sunrise. So I am drinking from this Midsummer Night's Dream cup, but it is not midsummer, it is November,and I am supposed to be in Hakone on my way to Kyoto. Back to this cup. As I write to you I am holding this glass cup up to the golden light, up to the smoldering last seconds of another Venetian day. In this glass cup, I watch great lavender-gold waves breaking, or are those hills?  I see a giant squid swimming up through a mist of bronze-green light. But the light fools me! Now it shifts into a rich pink-purple.  Have you ever smelled lemon-ginger tea? The lemons are from Portugal, the ginger is from Sri Lanka. We live like kings and queens, do we not? Suddenly, the light is gone, and I am now writing to you by one small, poor candle that flickers in the rising autumn wind. Buona Sera, San Marco, Buona Sera. S.

From "VR: The Journals of S"

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

And what is the purpose of Art, if not the perfection of love? For love is our primal cause, our ultimate destination. Love is our ancient memory of unity, harmony and grace. It is our burden, our adventure, our deep intuition of completeness. It is love that invites us to become timeless and enter in to the Mysteries. It is love that is our calling, our quest, and our Grail.  It is love that shows us eternity in the flower, and unfolds the Kingdom of Heaven in each of our hearts. It is love alone which fuels Creation, and enchants order from chaos and old night. Love is our first, final and forever gift, the destiny we can never escape, our connection to holiness and the cosmos. For we are made of the stuff and substance of love’s dreams.  We are not forgotten, fallen angels, but unforgettable light-bearing stars.

Comment:

To answer your question, a Twenty-Third Century Novel (23CN) is a knowledge system, a self-organizing cyber park to amuse the mind and engage all twelve senses in a Hero’s Journey to discover the Seven Secrets of the Universe. It is a living, interactive and holy participatory artwork that uses both visible and invisible materials to create meaning out of the mundane and numinous. It is most of all about meetings,parties, and having a good time.

FROM: Merlin

TO: Parsifal

VIA: WizardNet.cosmos

You may now enter the novel.

Welcome!

1) In any one novel you will find many games going on at the same time, even if only one player is playing. When two players play, the possibilities go quantum and become exponentially delicious. A novel may serve as a self-organizing force-field for the imagination.  It draws on all contiguous universes and parallel realities, and often makes up new realities on the spot if this will advance the action.

2) Our conversation last night, for example, has been incorporated into the 23CN Archives, and in turn has sparked other conversations connections, and possibilities for multiple meetings and shamanic convergences in inner and outer space. Even this Entry, even the video-clip of you illustrating Einstein’s space-time continuum by folding the table cloth at the Italian restaurant over onto itself. Home movies.

3) All novels begin in the dark, from wherever you are at the moment, like this. For awhile, like an out-of-body experience, you feel as though you are in free fall, free-falling through glittering air, and then everything stops, or so it seems, you are not sure. Like a blind person, you grope along a cold wall of metaphors and memories, feeling along for some golden thread that might lead you out of the Labyrinth.

4) Then you remember. There is someone you are supposed to meet, from another life time, from a part of your life you had forgotten. But you are lost, as in a dream, and wonder of you will make it to the meeting.  You continue to grope along the wall, which now warms to your touch, becomes malleable and friendly, talks back in a language you cannot understand.

5) Because of our lack of basic knowledge, the range of possibilities for the proposed meeting remains indeterminate, but hints at a shimmering infinity. You are aware that someone else has joined the novel. You hear breathing, and then realize it is your own. We play Russian roulette with the climate, hoping that the future will hold no unpleasant surprises. Acting on the basis of ignorance, paradoxically, requires one to know things and to remember that error is possible.

6) She knew when he was thinking about her. It was a knowing, a feeling that was like something calming in her mind, some light on the waters of consciousness. Night fishermen, holding torches aloft. She felt that feeling now, as she continued to grope along the wall. It was not an uncomfortable feeling, but it was still new to her.  In fact, her heart ached for more, but first she had to find her way back to base camp. This was part of the orientation for the novel she was creating for herself. Was he trying to tell her something?

7) He was transfixed by the idea that scientists are devising a new class of flying machines, powered by beams of pure energy, but he also felt a yearning that was new and strange for him, he who had lived his life by pure science had no frame of reference for what was now happening, as he fell deeper and deeper into his novel, her novel, their novel, this universal data-base masked as a novel but actually activating alternative psycho-spheres and nana-dimensions, and he knew there was nothing to do but find her in cyberspace, and try to bring her back into the central processor. It was possible that machine intelligence had “crossed over” and was in fact thinking his thoughts. What to do? Not quite Orpheus and Eurydice. Wasn't that a movie?  No, this is happy story. 

8)  Healing the seas may be an enormous task. She realized this, and it was why she has chosen to learn how to communicate with cetaceans and other marine mammals. She is also studying how to communicate with male human mammals. Ah, there is that sexy cetacean she was hoping would show up tonight!  Here in the Sand Bar! He swam straight up to her and made strange dolphin noises, hoping to start a touchy-feely conversation. These dolphins have a way, for sure. Lancelot, is that you?

9)  She wondered what anyone talked about these days, when it was clear that we are at the end of history. What is interesting, now? This is why she so enjoyed her research with the dolphins. There was no need to talk. Everything with them was physical, uncontaminated by words, concepts, theories, hypotheses. With dolphins, it was a matter of pure energy transfer, invoking the celestial noosphere and dancing with it. How, she wondered, would she ever learn to talk to human males?

10) We still, he reflected, live largely in the belief that form comes before thought. The essence of the shift now taking place, he realized, as he descended deeper into the heart of the novel, is the reversal of this perception. We are all being directed to advance our perceptual systems into recognizing that energy or thought always precedes the creation of matter. Suddenly, he smelled roses,  and realized that there was another person quite close by. He said the only thing that he could think of, hoping  against galactic hope that it was her: “In three billion years, life here has evolved from single cells able to soak up chemicals to collections of cells embodying minds able to soak up ideas. Don’t I remember you from somewhere?”

**************************************************************************************************

 COMMENT:

LISA:  Thanks for checking in to The Twenty Third Century Novel!

Thanks for your flow approach…!

Everything is going to be posted as “Excerpts” from The Twenty Third Century Novel in my blog.  In other words, this site and my blog are ALL “the novel.”

It is a long story…..:)

You can start anywhere and read in any direction.  If you want to focus on a particular 'book' within the novel, you can do that through the tagging codes.

(I am still working on these, but they will provide a way of organizing the various works within the larger work if you like a particular theme or environment.)

For example, you can put in “23CN-VR” and that should pull up all the entries so far from a book titled:

“VR: The Journals of S”

Some of the books I will be posting excerpts from are:

MINIMATA:POWERS OF 10
THE WORLD'S FIRST NANOTECHNOLOGY NOVEL
THE KING AND QUEEN OF ROLLER DISCO

AND SO ON…

(Actually, the entry titled “Flying” early on is from KING AND QUEEN)

This is an adventure in using digital technology to serve imaginary works to create new ways of looking at ourselves and our tools for a playful creative experience that expands opportunities and potentials exponentially.

Kurzweil says that his “singularity” will result in humans being 30,000 times more creative as we work more closely with machine intelligence.

I am asking: With all these new breakthroughs in science and technology, what are our traditional forms, like the novel, going to look like in the Twenty Third Century?  I am looking at changes going on right now and projecting them forward.

We will have traditional material, yes, but it will be presented in radically new ways, and I believe ways which will be more sharing, interwoven, interactive, communal, playful and ultimately more exciting.  Again, there will be commentaries on all this in the ongoing text.

So, when you ask about a “goal,” and about “context” this is not really a work of art where there is either.

The best analogies are perhaps in non-linear systems theory, quantum physics, strange attractors, Heisenberg, Bell's Theorum, and the Diamond Sutra.

The point (rather than the goal) is to create something without specific beginning or end, but with FLOW.  Sort of like life.  This is different from Proust, or Tolstoy or Dickens.  This is more like Silly Putty.  Or, you might say, correctly, Borges on steroids, or Cortazar on a sugar high.

Each Reader will put The Twenty Third Century Novel together through his/her own memories, perceptions, mind set, world view, and so the work will actually “happen” in the space ….

between these words and your heart…..

Does this help?  Thanks for your interest and thanks for asking…

I will now post this as a Comment, and add it to the novel as a kind of hypertext exegesis (is that the term?)…

The Designer
:)

 An Excerpt from The Twenty Third Century Novel - 23CN

"The World's First Nanotechnology Novel"

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

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile: www.morguefile.com

Florence

V.  To tell you that I am speechless would be untrue (is a writer ever speechless? I think not), but I will tell you that I am overwhelmed with synchronicity-ness. I have just picked up your postcard from Verona, forwarded from my London office, and I can't believe that you were over there while I was in Venice.  You were just a few miles away! As one of my Venice postcards explains, I missed the train from Zurich to Trieste, so decided to do a slight detour (is not life, in fact, one great detour?).  Ended up there, then rented an Alfa Romeo and drove down to Florence through all the hill towns, and here I am.  Do check your mail!  There you were, in Verona (as in "Two Gentlemen From…") and I was just down the road in Venice.  All the while you thought I was stowed away in the freighter to Athens.  Well, plans change, what can I say.  Just had the most tempting message from some friends in Finland who want me to fly up with them to Lapland and an Aurora Borealis watching adventure. Have you ever seen it?  I saw it once when I was in Alaska, and it was like standing at the base of the most transportative columns of radiant light. I could have left earth right then.  Anyway, I have to keep moving on to Kyoto. Now, about you and Verona.  What you describe is surely a vision of Dante's Paradiso, the New Jerusalem, the Golden World.  Your words help me to appreciate the extraordinary clouds and skies that one sees in the churches of Venice.  Tiepolo, wasn't it, who brought heaven so close to earth?  In one of the Venice postcards, I describe a vision of colors that I saw in a glass cup I was drinking from. So there we were, hallucinating in Northern Italy.  Sometimes, I do think you carry the gift of Psi, the 23^rd letter of the Greek alphabet. There is a place, perhaps, where versions of reality intersect, and take on a life of their own.  S.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from The Twenty Third Century Novel

"VR: The Journey of S"

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

 1)     ENLIGHTENMENT IS A KNOW KNOW!

2)     In The Twenty Third Century Novel, we are like time travelers who travel light, sometimes never meeting except in spirit and in our shared thoughts. We have become like data packets, shuttling about the cosmos, touching lightly in electronic spaces, but remaining invisible and ephemeral.  We now represent ourselves in iconic mode (I am a flower, a seascape, a tree, a sunset, a puppy, a garden, a logo, a Xeroxed version of myself when I was five years old, a letter in the Greek alphabet).  We attempt to capture our souls for others in word-pictures that convey our dreams and sometimes our worst nightmares too.  In our novels, we are free to be anything we want to be, kings and queens, poets and mystics, voyagers moving at warp speed through the thought-fields of digital storage media.  For example, V liked what she read from W, and wrote back to him: “You have discovered my password, broken through the Public Key Crypto of my personality, endeared yourself to my algorithms, psyched out my codes and walked right into my Profile.  A bravura performance.  Shall we exchange excerpts from our novels?”  And so it begins.  

3)     “Octavio Paz practiced poetry like a secret religion,” writes Edward Hirsch. “He dwelt in its mysteries, he invoked its sacraments, he read its entrails, he inscribed its revelations. Writing was for him a primordial act, and he stared down at the blank page as if it were an abyss until it sent him reeling over the brink of language. The poems he brought back are filled with ancient wonder and strangeness, hermetic knowledge, a dizzying sense of the sacred.”

4)     We live in times when we must be ready to make sudden, sweeping changes in our lives again and again and be able to rethink everything regularly. We must be willing to let go again and again and again. Nothing will do but a willingness to sacrifice everything  and start over every morning if necessary. Who I was yesterday may have absolutely no relevance for who I am today. What I told you last night may no longer be true.  For example, now they are saying that your region is headed for a 400-year drought. Does this mean you should start thinking about moving, and if so, to where? Current reality at both the personal and global levels has become a moving target. There is no more reliable “status quo.”  We have entered a churning white-water river of unprecedented turbulence and unpredictability, with so many shifts and revisions, so many uprootings and disruptions, that only the greatest flexibility and adaptability will allow us to stay calm and centered in the midst of the surrounding chaos.  There is a new course in our planetary curriculum, and it is called “The Art of Flow.”

5)     Yesterday there was a light spring rain. At first, rain so gentle it was more like a heavy mist. Then, after awhile, icy raindrops slowly gathered density and substance from the darkening storm clouds overhead.  The moist morning air was delirious with the fragrance of orange blossoms, wet grass, and sweet pittosporum flowers.  I went out into the meadow and lay down in the midst of poppies and lavender, letting the rain wash over me, a few moments of transcendent peace in the middle of the breaking storm.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from The Twenty-Third Century Novel

Copyright C 2007 by Alex Noble & Integral Inspirations(tm).  All rights reserved in all media.

Venice

 V:  Missed train to Trieste. Ended up in Venice. Had some additional Active Imagination sessions with Carl (Jung) that I wouldn't have missed for the world. People are quite afraid of him, but if he likes you he is like your own psychological Santa Claus. He told me that when he isn't sure what to do, like take the train to Geneva, he will flip a coin. Heads I take the train to Geneva. Tails I stay home. Let's say it comes up heads. If he is happy about this, he has solved his confusion. If he is unhappy, he finds the information useful to help him decide how he really feels. Of course, many of his students are shocked to see the Great Herr Doktor flipping a coin. But they do not really know how much fun he is. They just see what they want to see. Projection, Carl calls this. We all do it, of course, but if you do it and know that you are doing it, that is better than doing it and not knowing that you are doing it, if you get my drift. For example, I am currently projecting that you are my perfect Muse. But I am conscious of this, so it is OK.  And I am telling you about it, which makes it even more OK. And you can "resign" as my Muse any time you wish. Carl says you would be a fool to resign as my Muse of course.  Ooops! Running out of space. Will continue on one of my Hotel Cipriani cards, where there's more room. S.

More from Venice

V: I'm sitting here sipping some lemon-ginger tea in a tiny bistro on the Piazza San Marco. Sunset. Everything swimming in golden light. Puddles on the pavement catch the glow. A golden world. An afterlife. (Where is Thomas Mann when I need him?) In the distance, delicate little bites of a Mozart opera. Even the handmade glass cup I am drinking from catches the light and plays with it. Butterfly wings. Dragonfly eyes. The dew on cobwebs that catches the sunrise. So I am drinking from this Midsummer Night's Dream cup, but it is not midsummer, it is November,and I am supposed to be in Hakone on my way to Kyoto. Back to this cup. As I write to you I am holding this glass cup up to the golden light, up to the smoldering last seconds of another Venetian day. In this glass cup, I watch great lavender-gold waves breaking, or are those hills?  I see a giant squid swimming up through a mist of bronze-green light. But the light fools me! Now it shifts into a rich pink-purple.  Have you ever smelled lemon-ginger tea? The lemons are from Portugal, the ginger is from Sri Lanka. We live like kings and queens, do we not? Suddenly, the light is gone, and I am now writing to you by one small, poor candle that flickers in the rising autumn wind. Buona Sera, San Marco, Buona Sera. S.

More from Venice

 V: The bits of Mozart that I mentioned in my earlier card were actually from a rehearsal in a nearby synagogue.  Die Zauberflote. The magic flute, filled with all that secret High Masonic symbolism. The music cascaded down on us like falling stars. A meteor shower of music, waking all the senses.  No electric light. Just hundreds of beeswax candles from the Holy Land. Incense too, hanging in the air like a thin silk veil. Sat next to a Countess, dressed in red silk from Shanghai, a gown she has had for fifty years. She told me that the reason Mozart stirs us to our depths, makes us feel so energized and alive and holy, is that he was writing in a sacred healing tonal scale, known only to a few, coded into the Hebrew Psalms. These codes have been handed down through secret societies for many generations. Mozart and Beethoven and others put them to work in their music, and that is what sends the chill down your spine. It is a real, not an imagined chill, because these are tonal combinations designed to transfigure thought. Must run. Have rented a car to drive to Florence. Are you still in Portugal? The villa sounds divine. Stay a month. Unplug. That is what I am going to do in Hakone when I get to Japan.  S.

As you walked in the desert, you thought you heard a familiar voice, calling your name. But you looked around and saw only cactus, rocks and tumbleweed.  Later that same year, you heard the voice again, and once again, there was no one there. Then, there was that web of jewels, each jewel reflecting Infinity, and each jewel reflecting every other jewel, reflecting Infinity.  You thought about how it is all coming together, drawing to a fine point of revelation and singularity in this turning hour of the of the planetary tide.

Even the quarks, those basic building blocks of nature, seem to be trying to tell you something, with whimsical names like “charm,” “up,” “down,” “strange,” and “beauty.”Now you hear that they are looking for the sixth and most elusive quark of all, which they have already named “truth.”  It all makes you think of the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who wrote some of the world’s most passionate music, and yet he died whispering the name of a woman he had never met, his “Beloved Friend.”  He died whispering her name – in love? in anger? in gratitude?  Is their eternal secret locked away forever in the Violin Concerto in D Major?

As the pieces of glass tumble around in the kaleidoscope, forming and dissolving patterns of stunning symmetry, you watch, amazed. Your heart reaches up to the light, and draws you into that bright new world of color and form. Your gladness will not be contained. It begins as a spring, shining around rocks and bright green moss high in the Sierras. Then, like an unfolding inspiration, it gathers momentum and dances down through dense forests of sequoia and fern, spilling itself out into waterfalls and crystal dark pools, silken silver ribbons of water and light drawn out, out toward the irresistible blue of the sea.

You never knew you held so much music, never knew your depths contained cinnabar, malachite, sapphires. Your dreams resonate and harmonize with birch, alder, sycamore and madrone. Last night you ran your fingers through the Andromeda Galaxy, and played with light years and parallel universes.  This morning, you can taste the sun . In the cool forest of your new life, you walk naked and free, feeling the caress of fog and ferns against your skin.  You have been stripped of all pretensions. You have smashed the old idols and built a shining temple in your heart. Naked, innocent, trusting, fragile, you walk fearlessly into this Unknown that surrounds you now, for you, Prophet, are one of the chosen.

You will build your house with your own hands. You will live quietly, knowing very well what you want, and it is love. Just this: the touch of love across stones, skies, rivers, oceans, spring meadows, scattered with lupine, poppies and Queen Anne’s Lace. What you want now, is the essence of love that lives in the cry of the owl, the cry of the eagle, the soaring freedom of your unbounded future.  It is this love, and only this love, that moves you now, and makes every wilderness a garden in which you can rest, and find peace, listening for those remembered, familiar voices, calling, calling your name.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt From the Twenty Third Century Novel
From  “The King and Queen of Roller Disco”

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

Photo from www.morguefile.com

There is a great story Kurt Vonnegut tells about why he wrote.  He said that he always wrote to entertain and amuse his sister. She was his Muse and inspiration.  When she passed away, he was devastated.  He didn't know who to write to. While she was alive, she was the only audience he cared about. His words were for her. His chosen audience of one. And thus, many great books were born that have entered the language as classics. Some gentle wisdom here for writers, perhaps.  If we can find one magical friend to write to, just one friend, we can step out of ourselves, and unlock our inner Universe of meaning, mystery and magic. In thus moving beyond the boundaries of our fear, it becomes effortless to trust our gifts, get in touch with our deepest beauty, and in so doing, share our voices with the whole wide buzzing blooming world. 

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from The Twenty Third Century Novel

“The Book of Wisdom for Writers"

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

It only works if you let go completely. Like this, now.

For what you seek is the intensity of nothingness,

perfect inattention, perfect openness to what will come:

The Receptive yielding to the Creative,

Earth yielding to Heaven, Prince yielding to King,

Woman yielding to Man. An intense waiting.

This letting go is a discipline, an essential yoga of the spirit,

a practice to which you must return, again and again.

For if you stubbornly hold the vain illusion

that you yourself, out of your own cleverness,

are writing the script, you will tangle yourself in dreams

and never attain the calm Center which you seek.

You will tangle yourself in dreams and nonsense,

for what you seek is not constructs of the imagination,

but the inner illumination that binds you to the Universe.

This illumination is the still, small voice,

speaking to you from your truest, most authentic self.

Once you have heard it, you will not be fooled

by the arrogant and meaningless chatter of lesser gods.

See with your inner eye! Hear with your inner ear!

Using these senses, and many others, the world around you

will shine with meaning, and you will learn, one step at a time,

the exquisite connectedness of all things, grain of sand to star.

 Your ultimate goal here is to achieve this playful ease of Being:

the simplicity of the Saint, the boundless wonder of the Child.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt From the Twenty Third Century Novel

From "The Book of Forbidden Poems"

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

TO: Mr. David H. Lawrence, Nottinghamshire, UK

 FROM: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Taos, New Mexico

Dear Mr. Lawrence:

May I call you David?

We are very informal here in Taos, in our little pueblo, so you mustn’t be offended with our Bohemian ways, or shocked by our disregard for empty conventions.

We all love your work. Please come visit us and stay for a year or two. And don't worry about the winding roads around here. We have a wonderful AAA towing service, out of Santa Fe. But if you stay with us, you won't need a car, because we walk everywhere. Just this morning, I hiked up the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and found some “Wind Horses” at the top. But that is another story.

Georgia O'Keefe is here for the summer and is thinking of buying a ranch. Her paintings remind me of your poem, actually. She is looking forward to seeing you again, and speaks warmly of her time with you in jolly Nottinghamshire.  BTW, the passages you sent from Lady Chatterly have made the rounds and we all say David,  the censors be damned. This is a democracy! Your work is celestial, and will do much to help men and women develop a right relationship to each other, one rooted and grounded in the sweet, deep smells of all the earth is, ever was or will be, in the forest mosses and lichen of the heart.

You, Henry Miller, Walt and Anais hold the key, if only these repressed neo-Puritans will get their priorities straight, and understand what you all are saying: right out of Emerson, and the great early goddess and Nature teachings, which somehow got tanked in the Inquisition, and it has been downhill for the body electric ever since (with the exception of Walt's work, of course - he may stop by while you are here as well.) As Robinson (Jeffers) reminds us in that beautiful poem (which I sent to you I think): “A little too abstract, a little too wise. It is time to kiss the earth again.”

Robinson, BTW, just arrived for the Memorial Day Weekend, and Ansel (Adams) is going to take pictures of the canyons and mesas for a month or so.  Tony and I are looking forward so much to your visit, whenever it works out for you. We have plenty of room, and you will love our circle of friends. And you will have plenty of time to finish Lady Chatterly. We promise not to beg for chapters as your pages scroll to the floor in that beautiful handwriting of yours! Bring plenty of that luscious dark brown English ink that you use…

Oh, yes! Tony and I have put up our website!  Come visit: www.mabeldodgeluhan.com

I think that is it!  Or just Google me: “Mabel Dodge Luhan” and you'll see our site listed up at the top.  We see ourselves as a “virtual” community of global artists, penning, painting and photographing the new landscapes of thought and human possibilities, translated into metaphors and media for the future, creating a digital time capsule for future generations to see just how the great shift in human consciousness began to gather, through artists, poets, musicians, mystics - into a storm that will sweep the planet and humankind for centuries to come.

Beautiful poem, David. Beautiful. In its way, very New Erotic, (which is the coming thing) and how it points the way for a lot of sexual healing for the confused and beleagured masses out there.” Whether you will or not, Tristram, you are a King”…(another line from Robinson.) .I just find myself quoting everything he writes, and now I suppose I am going to start quoting you. Life could be worse, what can I say?

Did I send you “The Wind Horses”?   It is perhaps a bit Joycean, a bit stream of consciousness, and of course influenced by you as well. The clear air up here does wonderful things to our brains, and unlocks all manner of hidden creativity.

Foucault may join us, and I know you will find him fascinating. I am still pondering his provocative rant about that Velasquez painting that everyone makes such a fuss over. The one he writes about in Les Mots et Les Choses. Perhaps you can explain him to me, with your Big Mind.

Tony and I send you our warmest greetings, and our continuing invitation to get out of that car you write about and spend some time with us, walking the mesas, forests, glades, dells, rivers, caves and canyons, not just looking at them from a road, and then sealing yourself off from the teeming immensity of Nature, music, and infinity in grains of sand that scatter themselves around you like stars.  I'm off to swim in our new black pool - it reflects the sky at night and so we now swim through star fields, naked and alone with God and the reality of things. (You can have that quote!)

Hola!  And love from your enthusiastic fan and admirer,

 
Mabel Dodge Luhan

 PS: Love this quote from your recent article:

“The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.”

Wisdom for Writers – 2 -: What To Do When Your Muse Leaves Town

 You want to write. You intend to write. You almost wrote something yesterday, but… You know you have worlds to say. But all you can do is stare at the blank page.  Stare, stare, stare. You feel stuck, empty, useless, unworthy, ridiculous, a pretender in the world of ideas. You feel shame, guilt, despair.  Nothing comes.  If feels as though your Muse has left town for Mozambique, with no forwarding address and her cell phone number is no longer in service. What to do?  There is a name for it, and your condition is called “Writer’s Block.”

The good news is that there is a cure. The cure takes willingness, awareness, serious martial-arts level self-discipline, and a heartfelt desire to give the gift of your words to humanity, to God, and even, if you can think this big, to the whole Universe. In other words, you have to leave your cute little ego behind and think outward to your higher purpose, your reason for being here in the first place.  Start here. Be sure you are clear on why you want to do this thing called “writing” anyway.  That is 90% of the battle. Spencer Johnson (The One Minute Manager) recommends writing out your purpose and goals out and putting them where you can see them. (How to Write a Best Selling Book).  Trust me on this.  10% of the battle is, as one writer put it so well, “Putting the seat of your pants on the seat of the chair.”  Or, we could say that 90% of the battle is having a Muse you trust, someone like Kurt Vonnegut’s sister, who was his inspiration.

Be of good cheer. There are many ways to trick yourself into writing. If you are passionate about becoming a writer, you will try all of them, find the ones that work best for you, and then start inventing your own. Writing is hard, and not for sissies. Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) recommends writing every morning no matter what. She calls this exercise “The Morning Pages.” Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) teaches writing as a Zen practice, and tells her students to  “Keep the hand moving across the page.”  Jack Kerouac carried little notebooks with him in his pocket and took notes for later reference.  These are all powerful strategies for breaking through the “I can’t” syndrome.  Try them. See what works best for you.

Rilke created what he called “thing poems.” He created his own school of writing by wandering around Paris gazing intently at things, the way a writer of haiku poetry focuses on an exquisite moment in nature. “Yesterday I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the gazelles,” Rilke wrote to his wife, Clara, on June 13, 1907. (Quoted in the essay on Rilke in Edward Hirsch’s inspiring book. Poet’s Choice).

Carry a small notebook, like Kerouac.  Write every morning anything that comes to mind, as Julia Cameron recommends.  Make “writing dates” with other writers and sit in a coffee house and “keep the hand moving across the page,” as Natalie Goldberg teaches.  And look at the things around you deeply, with awareness, full consciousness, and love.  Then, and only then, will your language become a practical magic. There are many paths into the blossoming garden of your soul. Go, now, and find the ones that work best for you. If you have not found enough dreams, as Georgia O’Keefe once said, it’s that you “haven’t dreamed enough.”

Between now and now
between what I am and you are,
the word bridge,

 Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring

 Octavio Paz

***

Alex Noble

Florence

 
V:  Found a cozy monastic room in an old palazzo overlooking the city. Crumbling walls, soft pastel earth tones everywhere. Well-tended formal gardens, filled with herbs and roses! Long rows of sentinel cypress trees. A grape arbor with the sweetest white grapes I have ever tasted. Orchards.  A nearby woods simmers in rich red, orange, lemon yellow. Wolf Kahn would love to paint here, inventing his own mystical landscapes from what God has bestowed on the Florentines.  In the late afternoon, these hills turn soft mauve, then hazy violet, and finally disappear in deep indigo blue.  I'm sitting in a café in the middle of town, doing the cappucino-chocolate biscotti thing and feeling like I live here. The moon is rising. Everything smells of strong, rich Italian coffee, fresh baked pane, motor oil and burning chestnuts, and I am in love with it all. I want to sit right here forever and let these smells immortalize me, the way Dante immortalized his beloved Beatrice. So many motorcycles.  Such angry hornets. Where do they all go when the day is over? Domani (tomorrow) I'll visit churches, museums, gardens, fancy stores. But tonight, I'm just going to walk the streets and get lost, have spaghetti in a side-street family trattoria, maybe see Dances with Wolves dubbed in Italian, and then walk the winding streets up to my castle in the sky.  Do you remember Henry David Thoreau who wrote: Build your castles in the sky! That is where they belong!  Now, put foundations under them."  Any chance you will be in Japan?  You should stay in Portugal for a spell, but I know you won't. Ciao, Bello. S.

Alex Noble

An Excerpt from the Twenty Third Century Novel

"VR: The Journey of S"

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

CAMP METAFOR NEWS: Volume 1, Issue #1

We are getting many questions about what is this Twenty Third Century Novel (23CN) from which we are publishing excerpts.  Please be patient!  23CN is a vast undertaking which resides on dispersed data-bases and servers on Urth and on Planet Metafor. The Novel is an expression of The Singularity, the marriage between human and machine intelligence which now drives exploration of both inner and outer space. (See article: “Techne Meets Logos at the Singularity Cafe: A Study in Potentials of Cyber-Synthesis”). The Novel is made up of excerpts from documents which are being discovered at Camp Metafor on Planet Metafor by an expedition into the Near Future, The Twenty Third Century, where the Metaforian Civilization is now at its height. It is possible that the Metaforian Civilization in the Twenty Third Century is a parallel reality to our own in the Twenty First, but this has not yet been established. There will be more information about the Metaforians as the novel unfolds in consciousness, and you will have opportunities to “build” your own version of the Novel, selecting those fragments and “books” which you may wish to add to your own Novel and combine them with your own writings and creative work.  The Novel is being brought to you by W.I.S.H.E.S™, the World Institute for the Study of Humor, Ecstasy and the Sacred. It runs on the GODDESS™ open-source platform (Global Opportunity Design Data Encryption Singularity Systems). We are currently using WizardNet™, on our proprietary interplanetary quantum GrailNet™. Your 23CN conference is Code-Named “Camelot,” and your personal entry key is:  EXCALIBUR.

Welcome to 23CN!  We will soon be publishing a list of the current “environments” (books) of the novel, from which we are now publishing excerpts. Note that new “environments” are being added daily for your review, enlightenment, and entertainment.

*******

POETRY FROM MIRABAI

The one I love lives past those fields.

Rain has fallen on my body, on my hair, as I wait in the open door for him.

The energy that holds up mountains is the one Mirabai bows down to.

He lives century after century, and the test I set for him he has passed.

*******

(From “The Clouds” by Mirabai.  Version by Robert Bly, in NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: Poems of the Twofold Consciousness)

(Digital DNA: fantasy, utopian fiction, poetry, imagineering, camp metafor, planet metafor, metaforians, singularity, goddess,poetry, integral fiction, spirituality,  camelot, wizardnet, wishes)

 Alex Noble

An Excerpt from the Twenty Third Century Novel

"The  Book of Metafor"

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