Light music improvisation...
Scatterings, moments of glimpsed beauty in the brittle-edge-of-post-human book I'm reading right now.
It's called 'Light Music', by Kathleen Ann Goonan. It is so incredibly packed with prose and theory and rampant near-post-human nanotech-infested landscapes magically transformed after a hundred years of all manner of technology released.
The theories are slippery, crossing from one study into another. Quantum physics collide with Theory of Everythings, radio frequencies gliding around the nature of reality, all mixed in with how everything is made up of music, music that is solid, light that can be heard...
I'm nearing the end now, the revelations come thicker and faster. Humanity is on the verge of blasting off into space and aiming along the trajectory of a signal a hundred years old that has changed humanity into so many posthuman variations. Dome cities where the body vanishes, mind stuck in a virtual heaven. Rural farms where objects are literally grown on trees, given the right instructions and ingredients. Talking animals cross the land made into Native American Spirit Guides (a Coyote, for one...whose name is Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast). Everything, everyone converges into some important moment. Some new evolution into...wonder.
Somewhere along the line, there is a message from one Loius, who has been...inexplicably...turned into light.
"I am different now; I have been changed. I suppose I am a bridge. A conduit. I have this...opportunity. I am in two places at once. More. The idea of place, and even words, are quaint and limited, as if I look over a broad view from a high peak where once I walked along the road with limited vision. But there is no notion of singleness nor even of twainness. There is a simultaneousness.
There is light. So much light. I know the light now and it knows me. This is one option, for those who are prepared. But you must be prepared for it to happen. Your body must be ready. Read as is an embryo, who when born is full equipped to sense light and sound, to build a picture of a world with what is sensed.
What struck me the most was a statement farther on. One woman had been infected with a nanotech that changed her mind into a receptor for....stories. She was infused with the literature of the world, and saw stories of time and people seeping into everything. There was discussions earlier on about the nature of the universe and how several dimensions were folded up into the three we could perceive. Then the woman ended up dying, and her mind absorbed into the knowledge storehouse of the ocean city called Crescent City, the one that was about to launch into space.
She said this: Stories are the folded-up dimensions in string theory. Stories are how humans unfold time. Consciousness infiltrates time in a new way. It is a new improvisation of the universe. It has evolved in rhythm with time. And it unfolds time. I seem to be the matrix for this.
I sat back and got shivers from that. Such a brilliant vision, people being turned into light, consciousness folding itself into the universe through music and time and frequencies...and here I am playing in a universe that DOES consist entirely of stories. Were it not for the stories enfolded in it, Puzzlebox would not be.
It is a goal. I want to shape this universe. I want to be inspired by this book, all the strange ideas simmering under the surface. I want to use this...I want to turn someone into light. Maybe at the end of a run of stories. Or as part of one.
A being obsessed with light and memories...just might have the potential to become such. Filled up with music, filled up with stories and memories from others. Filled to bursting.
I'm going to go finish this book, now.
[later]
The ending.
We have come through a long dark birth canal and emerged into clear, sparkling daylight. We are able to know more, do more, and with more wisdom and more joy and more intensity and more depth of thought, able to weave more strings, more information, into each thought, than ever before. We are a part of the music that light makes. We are able to change the music that light makes. Constantly.
It's called 'Light Music', by Kathleen Ann Goonan. It is so incredibly packed with prose and theory and rampant near-post-human nanotech-infested landscapes magically transformed after a hundred years of all manner of technology released.
The theories are slippery, crossing from one study into another. Quantum physics collide with Theory of Everythings, radio frequencies gliding around the nature of reality, all mixed in with how everything is made up of music, music that is solid, light that can be heard...
I'm nearing the end now, the revelations come thicker and faster. Humanity is on the verge of blasting off into space and aiming along the trajectory of a signal a hundred years old that has changed humanity into so many posthuman variations. Dome cities where the body vanishes, mind stuck in a virtual heaven. Rural farms where objects are literally grown on trees, given the right instructions and ingredients. Talking animals cross the land made into Native American Spirit Guides (a Coyote, for one...whose name is Three Impossible Things Before Breakfast). Everything, everyone converges into some important moment. Some new evolution into...wonder.
Somewhere along the line, there is a message from one Loius, who has been...inexplicably...turned into light.
"I am different now; I have been changed. I suppose I am a bridge. A conduit. I have this...opportunity. I am in two places at once. More. The idea of place, and even words, are quaint and limited, as if I look over a broad view from a high peak where once I walked along the road with limited vision. But there is no notion of singleness nor even of twainness. There is a simultaneousness.
There is light. So much light. I know the light now and it knows me. This is one option, for those who are prepared. But you must be prepared for it to happen. Your body must be ready. Read as is an embryo, who when born is full equipped to sense light and sound, to build a picture of a world with what is sensed.
What struck me the most was a statement farther on. One woman had been infected with a nanotech that changed her mind into a receptor for....stories. She was infused with the literature of the world, and saw stories of time and people seeping into everything. There was discussions earlier on about the nature of the universe and how several dimensions were folded up into the three we could perceive. Then the woman ended up dying, and her mind absorbed into the knowledge storehouse of the ocean city called Crescent City, the one that was about to launch into space.
She said this: Stories are the folded-up dimensions in string theory. Stories are how humans unfold time. Consciousness infiltrates time in a new way. It is a new improvisation of the universe. It has evolved in rhythm with time. And it unfolds time. I seem to be the matrix for this.
I sat back and got shivers from that. Such a brilliant vision, people being turned into light, consciousness folding itself into the universe through music and time and frequencies...and here I am playing in a universe that DOES consist entirely of stories. Were it not for the stories enfolded in it, Puzzlebox would not be.
It is a goal. I want to shape this universe. I want to be inspired by this book, all the strange ideas simmering under the surface. I want to use this...I want to turn someone into light. Maybe at the end of a run of stories. Or as part of one.
A being obsessed with light and memories...just might have the potential to become such. Filled up with music, filled up with stories and memories from others. Filled to bursting.
I'm going to go finish this book, now.
[later]
The ending.
We have come through a long dark birth canal and emerged into clear, sparkling daylight. We are able to know more, do more, and with more wisdom and more joy and more intensity and more depth of thought, able to weave more strings, more information, into each thought, than ever before. We are a part of the music that light makes. We are able to change the music that light makes. Constantly.