Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Initially I was very nervous about meeting my classes—for the very first one, in September, 1972, I ended up walking past the open door two or three times before mustering the courage to go in. But I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and the students liked me—after all, I was only about ten years older than them. From the start, I avoided collecting homework, and I tried not to give too many tests. I never liked grading.

  As a break from the calculus courses that were the department’s bread and butter, I was allowed to teach a few higher-level courses. One that I loved was on the history of mathematics, a topic that truly boggled my mind.

  I discovered that the seemingly seamless edifice of mathematical knowledge has in fact grown up as organically and unpredictably as a coral reef. Things as simple as inventing the equals sign were huge, intense deals. Throughout history, mathematicians have been irritable coots, often feuding with each other—just like the mathematicians I knew. Things in math have never been fully rational or congenial.

  I bought a set of the thirteen books of Euclid’s Elements in an inexpensive Dover paperback edition, edited by the wonderful British scholar, Thomas Little Heath, who’d died before I was born. I took to drawing intricate figures of circles and lines, and even found a large wooden compass for drawing these constructions on the blackboard. I also studied Heath’s History of Greek Mathematics, and marveled at Archytas’s construction of the cube root of two, which uses the intersection point of a cylinder, a cone and a torus.

  My investigations gave me the courage to take charge of our departmental course on the foundations of geometry. Most of the suggested textbooks seemed utterly absurd to me—for they contained no pictures! Some benighted authors believe in teaching geometry as if it were a language game, an arbitrary formal system. Fools. As a logician, I well knew the limits of a methodology based only upon axioms and proofs. If you’re doing geometry, you should be looking at shapes, for crying out loud!

  It occurred to me that I might fashion a text from my notes about A Square and the higher dimensions. That way I could talk about the topics that interested me. I was still wondering, for instance, about how best to reconcile the notion of the fourth dimension as an unknown spatial direction with the notion of the fourth dimension as time. And I wanted to find a user-friendly way to elucidate Einstein’s notions about curved space.

  I dug out my binder with pictures of A Square—the one I’d started while listening to Frank Zappa at Rutgers. I copied my drawings onto mimeograph masters, and typed in my explanations, bulking the thing up with material drawn from T. L. Heath and from Euclid’s Elements. I stayed just a little bit ahead of the students, handing out some ten mimeographed pages a week. By the end of the semester, I’d produced something like a book.

  The students loved the class, and I taught it perhaps five times during the years 1973 to 1978, with ever-increasing enrollments. Over and over I’d rework and retype the notes, larding them with fresh information about hyperspheres, the illusion of the passage of time, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the special theory of relativity, and the shape of spacetime. I was a professor lecturing about relativity, just I’d hallucinated during that peyote trip at Swarthmore ten years before.

  Starting in the fall of 1973, I began having the campus book store photo-offset the latest version of my notes, and each year we’d sell copies to the students under the title, Geometry and Reality. I showed my volume to some of the textbook salesmen who haunted my office, and they passed it on to their editors. But the big companies thought my book too quirky and untextbook-like.

  Finally I hit upon the idea of sending Geometry and Reality to the publisher that was keeping in print so many of the esoteric mathematical and philosophical books that I enjoyed: Dover Books. Back in Louisville, Mom had regularly ordered Dover books for me on obscure topics like infinity, cryptography, mazes, hieroglyphs, and wave mechanics. And all of T. L. Heath’s books were Dover books as well.

  With surprising alacrity, Dover agreed in 1976 to publish me, suggesting only that I give my book a title more indicative of the contents. So it became Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension. Wanting to veil how young and shaggy I was, I identified myself to the unseen editors as “Professor Rudolf v. B. Rucker.” They offered me a thousand dollars for perpetual rights to publish my book. I wondered about any lack of ongoing royalties, but Dover said that, since they were largely a reprint house, they weren’t set up for issuing royalties. So what the heck, I took the thousand bucks. It was real money for a real book. Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension appeared as a nice, glossy paperback early in 1977. I imagine they’ve sold quite a few copies over the years, but I don’t regret the deal. It pointed my way to my real career.

  Although I was also getting a couple of my set theory papers into journals, academic publishing was slow and painful, with no sense of there being an actual readership, and with no checks in the mail. And, even though I could write publishable mathematics papers, I still wasn’t managing to prove any really big theorems. My academic math career wasn’t going anywhere. I started thinking more about writing popular science books or maybe even science fiction.

  In the fall of 1977, the year that Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension was published, a woman editor from Dover turned up at our house. She was in Geneseo to deliver one of her children to the college. She was surprised how young I was—the “Rudolf v. B. Rucker” ruse really had convinced my publishers that I was a distinguished old scholar. We had a good laugh, and the editor remarked that mine was one of the few non-public-domain books that they’d published.

  “We have a saying at Dover,” she said. “The only good author is a dead author.”

  In March, 1976, with my Dover advance in hand, I threw a big thirtieth birthday party for myself, with a keg of beer and a country ham. Grandly I bought plane tickets so that my college friends Greg Gibson and Barry Feldman could come. I half expected the world to dissolve when I turned thirty, so I didn’t much care what I did with the money. The house was so full that Feldman slept under one of our rugs.

  I got very drunk at the party—Rudy Jr. says it was the first time he ever noticed me being that way. I was in fact tanking up on beer a couple of times a week in those days, and I usually got drunk at parties. There was a nice bar in the middle of Geneseo that I liked, it was called the Idle Hour, sometimes I’d stop in there for a beer on a Friday afternoon. But at this point alcohol still seemed like as much of a friend as an enemy.

  As for pot, that was still hard to get, although once a friend mailed me some with the return address “Slim’s Dude Ranch, Stone Arabia, NY.” Another occasional source of pot was Dennis Poague. He was the fascinating and screwy younger brother of my professor friend Lee, who lived across the street. By now, Lee and I often got high together on Friday nights.

  Dennis would orbit through Geneseo once or twice a year. Once Dennis showed up with a whole suitcase of green weed that he’d bought at Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The stuff was of such an inferior grade that Dennis ended up boiling it down in water to try and obtain a reasonably potent extract—a procedure that failed to work. While he was doing the boiling, Dennis gave Sylvia and Lee’s wife Susie an impromptu kitchen-lecture on his techniques for unusual sex. The wives dissolved in ribald hilarity..

  Dennis always had wild ideas, and he never stopped talking. Sometimes I’d want to clobber him to shut him up—but sometimes I’d get onto his wavelength and I’d have a great time hanging out with him. One of the things I always enjoyed about getting high was that the lifestyle brought me close to strange people with surreal ways of expressing themselves.

  Dennis was a nice contrast to the somewhat goody-goody professors I usually hung with. And as a younger brother myself, I felt a certain bond with him. At another level, I was also mindful of the mileage that Jack Kerouac had gotten out of his association with his wildman pal Neal Cassady. With his hyperactive, unreflective nihilism, Dennis seemed like a ch
aracter in an underground novel. And so, as his speech patterns and conversational tics sank into my mind, I started thinking that I might eventually model a fictional character on him.

  Around 1975, I began team-teaching some experimental courses on the philosophy of mathematics with Bill Edgar, a charismatic Geneseo philosophy professor. One of our courses was called The Inconceivable. Edgar was an intense and brilliant debater. Often he’d put me on the spot in class, driving to debunk my feeling that our physical world is infinite in some very literal sense of the world. I wrote up and distributed sets of notes for my lectures—entitling them Mystic Fuzz, just to get a rise out of Bill.

  The thing was, Bill claimed to be a hard-boiled materialist, and I claimed to be a spaced-out mystic—but my special twist was that I was trying to buttress my gut feelings with rigorously logical arguments drawn from higher mathematics. Thus I supported the slogan, “All is one,” by saying that anything can be viewed as a mathematical form, and all the mathematical forms live together in the universe of all possible sets. And to argue that mere logical thinking isn’t enough, I described Gödel’s proof that no logical system can deduce all the things that are true.

  So, in a sense, I was really much more hard-boiled than Bill—which is why I enjoyed putting a twist on things by giving my notes a hippy-dippy title like Mystic Fuzz. In your face, materialist-man!

  Just as my notes for my lectures on geometry led to a book, my lecture notes for the philosophy of math courses would lead to a book as well. But this was going to take me a few more years.

  The summers were nice in Geneseo, with the Genesee River snaking through the valley’s flat bottomland. Some of the valley was plowed into fields, but large tracts had been left wild—the largest local landowners were into fox-hunting, and they liked having woodsy areas to ride in. Most of the time these woods were deserted, and I liked to walk around down there, looking things over.

  One time I found three brass links of a heavy chain in a stream, and brought it home. The three-link chain’s mass and luster made it seem like a power object. That night I dreamed that the frogs who lived in that stream were begging me to return their treasure, so I brought it back. It seemed best to be on good terms with the resident spirits of the place.

  On our tenth wedding anniversary, in June, 1977, Sylvia and I went down into those woods with crystal glasses and had a picnic with champagne and roast chicken. The setting sun was fat and slow on the horizon, bathing us in honeyed light. Life was beautiful. We were in love.

  By now our children were approaching the ages of eight, five and three. We were emerging from the difficult early stages—from the filth, the stench and the din. The kids were more fun all the time. Sylvia was still painting a lot, and feeling good about herself. She longed to start a paying career of her own, but for now she was content to let it slide for a few more years.

  We often took the kids to a huge public swimming-pool in Letchworth State Park or, which was more exciting, to a swimming hole at Triphammer Creek. The pastures around Triphammer Creek were private land, but the owners were mellow, and quite a few people would hike in along the creek to the swimming spot—which lay at the base of a waterfall that was the height of a man.

  The swimming hole was deep enough that, if you were reckless, you could jump into it from the rocks at the edge of the falls. Another fun thing to do was to worm into the rocky space behind the waterfall itself, squeezing into that damp ringing cavity where, in fairytales, the nymphs keep a magic harp or a pot of gold.

  We went to Triphammer Creek often enough that eventually I thought to bring along a diving mask. I saw dozens of sizable fish in the water, enjoying the bubbles from the falls. One Lord of the Trout was two feet long. These fish were so adept at dodging us that I’d never known they were there. It occurred to me that maybe some elusive beings live in the air around us as well, elemental sprites visible only as an occasional twitch glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye.

  Bicycling became popular around then, and I got myself a ten-speed. I had a lot of fun riding out on the deserted country roads in the baking summer sun. One time, out into the middle of nowhere, I found my way down to a creek where enormous butterflies flitted about. The air was so still that, just like when I was a boy, I could hear the world turning. I imagined that I was on another planet, an explorer observing, like, the legendary stinging butterflies of the Genesee Rift.

  Ignition

  Deep down I was still dreaming of being a literary author like the Beats. I was reading and rereading Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to winkle out the secrets of his florid yet colloquial style. I was also studying the essays and short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, admiring his skill at creating high literature on the border of science fiction. I found Borges’s essays to be among the most informative and profound things I’d ever read—I’m thinking here of his writings on infinity, the passage of time, and the nature of language.

  My way of finally wading into literary writing was to write poems. With all due respect to serious poets, it’s pretty easy to write something that resembles a poem. All you need is a typewriter and a single sheet of paper! And maybe a few drinks.

  I happened to have a very nice typewriter, a rose-red IBM Selectric that I’d bought because it had an interchangeable type head. When I wrote math papers, I’d switch out the heads so as to type in Greek letters and mathematical symbols.

  Off and on during the years 1975 through 1978 at Geneseo, I’d write poems on my red Selectric at night. Not that I bothered sending the poems out to magazines—submitting my math papers was heartbreak enough. A published poet friend on the English faculty, Dave Kelly, encouraged me to join in the periodic faculty poetry readings, where I’d hand out my works in mimeographed form. I enjoyed performing for a literary crowd. Like the professional poets I’d seen reading before, I’d preface each poem with an anecdote about how I came to write it.

  Eventually I put my poems into a little Xeroxed chapbook called Light Fuse and Get Away—I made fifty copies in 1983 and gave them away. The title was taken from the instructions on the packs of firecrackers that Niles and I used to get. I thought my poems might act as a fuse to light an explosive career as a writer. Years later I saw a copy being offered for a couple of hundred dollars on eBay. The starving artist’s dream!

  In 2007, I ran into Thom Metzger in Rochester, New York. Thom had been a student of mine at Geneseo, and has since become a successful writer. He still remembered a poem that didn’t make it into my chapbook, and he even had what may be the sole surviving copy of a mimeographed handout that I distributed at a Geneseo faculty reading in 1976. Here’s the poem.

  Dick Tracy with Crutches in a Bucket

  Imagine

  A national restaurant chain with

  “crutches” of french-fries and

  “chicken” of Tracy a pot of honey with each meal

  and French ticklers in the men’s room.

  I remember exactly what I had in mind while writing this. When I was a country kid in Louisville, my favorite restaurant was called Pryor’s. They had a big sign showing a tousled rooster playing golf. Their specialty was a dish called “Chicken in the Rough”—a huge mound of French fries, with pieces of fried chicken nestled into it. The meal came with soft dinner rolls and a tub of honey. And, as I’ve mentioned, my favorite newspaper comic strip as a boy was Chester Gould’s surreal Dick Tracy, with its peculiar insistence on grotesque criminals and the details of physical objects, often with lettered labels.

  In my poem, I imagined a large bucket filled with dismembered and deep-fried limbs of Tracy, packed in among soft limp crutches of the kind you’d see in a painting by Salvador Dali. I liked mixing together the images of a pleasant and inexpensive restaurant meal, a pop culture reference to Dick Tracy, a countercultural suggestion of eating the police, and the sexual frisson of “pot of honey” conjoined with “French ticklers.” I like that the poem is worded so flatly, which has the effect
of making the odd imagery that much more of an affront—and in the context of a poem, an affront can be a good thing, in that it means you’re waking up the reader. Making their blood boil, one hopes, as opposed to boring them stiff.

  In other words, for me, this poem still feels like a successful work of art. But I fully realize that the references are so personal that my lines could well leave many people cold or indifferent.

  In writing, there’s a balancing act between making your piece specific enough to come alive, and making it general enough to have a wide appeal. Stylistically I’ve always tended towards the lively and the specific. But I try to counterbalance this by casting my stories’ plots into fairly archetypal forms—such as a love triangle or an initiation into adulthood.

  The real start of my writing career happened in 1976, after Sylvia and I went to see the Rolling Stones play once more. The concert was outdoors at a football stadium in Buffalo, New York. Back then the Stones seemed radical and of-the-moment. We drove to the concert with Brooks, a young friend of ours who was an apprentice printer—old-school metal and ink printing.

  I was once again awed to see Mick and Keith on stage, right there, in person—two leaders I felt willing to follow in that overhyped year of the United States Bicentennial, two public figures in whom I could believe. The day after the concert I sat down at my red Selectric and started writing my first beatnik science fiction novel: Spacetime Donuts.

  I composed the book in the style of my father telling a story after a meal, that is, I made it up as I went along. The early sections of Spacetime Donuts were loosely based on my experiences in graduate school, and the hero’s love interest was modeled on Sylvia.

  My story was guided by a particular science speculation I wanted to present: If you keep shrinking long enough, you’ll eventually end up back where you started—in the same place and the same size.