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23cn
May 2008 
MERLIN TO PARSIFAL VIA WIZARDNET - 1
AlexNoble
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?”
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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
Access: Public
A feeling of earth, sky and water moves through the 23CN, and the dolphins are right to laugh at the possibilities. When did swimming through night waters become more difficult than loving infinitely? It encourages grace, when it finds us, and challenges our notion that we are bound by certain potentialities. There are no limits now. We can move through time made liquid, in several parallel universes simultaneously, and yet have a strange sense of still not knowing exactly where we are. Why does it matter, really? All we know is we lost sight of shore some time ago and the stars are spinning silver tracers in the sky. From the looks of things, we've breached the southern horizon and yet we still keep going. The cold animus that drove us here now seems softer, more alive and more fully realized, approaching god-like prowess.
The stars shift, keeping time to the rocking of our vessel, and the azure waters make a percussive sound against the lapstrake. Her Majesty's Ship 23 CN has a following sea now, and leads the dolphins on a merry chase, glimmering in the night and not stopping for air.
He paused and reached to steady his shoulder against the rigging, the wet hemp filling his nostrils with musty and peaty overtones of spice, seaweed and sun baked days. As the bow rose and dove, cleaving wave after wave, he thought about the world left behind, once the only world he knew. He saw large blue diagrams spattered with acronyms; physics applied to aeronautical metallurgy and wrought upon the page. There was the pretense that the work was important; that somehow in wringing metal into an imitation of nature, to serve some other's militant wishes, he could somehow snug himself into the security of not questioning. He now realized the illusion couldn't have possibly lasted forever, or even much longer. He reflected on the stepwise dismantling of his previous mental constructs once this called, this…something…this je ne se quoi that was greater than he alone or the forces of nature he once struggled to master.
She was plugged into him somehow, in ways he couldn't possibly understand. He sensed there were certain forces that were at work in a non-linear way, most likely at the quantum level, so that deterministic outcomes were getting scrambled between what was cause and what effect; which was the “before” and which the “after”. He knew these quantum energies were spun and divided from the implicate order, now appearing and then quickly merging back into the wholeness with an easy fluidity. Still, he couldn't help but try to imply meaning to the events, and some sequential ordering of the symbolic archetypes that danced almost constantly into his days now. He realized with a sigh it would most likely be years before he would overcome a lifetime of habitual, Newtonian interpreting of the cosmos. Where is she now? He felt the pull of her, as the night air swirled past him. And then sharply, a strange sense of her again, now close, her clarion voice filling the space in his head, not so much hearing as feeling her answering his question with her own: If I lead will you follow?