Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  By the way, in Realware, my old stoner hero Sta-Hi, although crazy as ever, is sober. This annoyed a few of my fans. In my later books I’d lighten up and let some of my characters get high again. Or maybe even—what a concept—not be addicts at all.

  At school I was still teaching software engineering and working on my textbook. More and more, I wanted to break out of my usual routines. When I finished Realware in 1998, I started thinking I might write a historical novel about the sixteenth century Flemish painter Peter Bruegel.

  I’d loved Bruegel’s work ever since that year I’d spent in Germany as a boy, when my grandmother had shown me that book of his paintings. I’d been naively pleased by the Bruegel’s hundred-in-one pictures like Netherlands Proverbs, and fascinated by his apocalyptic paintings like The Fall of the Rebel Angels, with its wriggling mask of chimerical creatures. In later years I became fonder of Bruegel’s mature, naturalistic paintings such as Peasant Dance or Hunters in the Snow. With their deep, detailed pictorial space, these late works are like windows into other worlds.

  Bruegel’s paintings are like novels, so filled are they with character, landscape and incident. I feel a pang when I stop looking at one of them, akin to the sadness I feel when reading the last page of a great book. It occurred to me that if I were to write a novelistic narrative of the man’s life, I could hang out with him for a quite a long time.

  Now that I had tenure, I was able to score for a sabbatical. In the fall of 1998, Sylvia and I took a long trip around Europe, and on our trip, we made a point of swinging through Bruegel-related towns: Antwerp, where he worked as apprentice; Brussels, where he had his studio; Vienna, where the bulk of his paintings hang; and Naples, where two of his sardonic final works can be found.

  We felt at home in Belgium. Some of Sylvia’s ancestors were from the lowlands—her maiden name is in fact a variant of Bosch. My ancestor Peter Rucker, who came ashore at the mouth of the James River in Virginia in 1690, was from a family of harpsichord makers in Antwerp. The best known of these craftsmen was Andreas Ruckers, who, as it happened, was in the same guild as Bruegel. Painters, instrument makers, and cabinet makers were lumped together in those early times.

  Walking down the streets of Antwerp with Sylvia, I was thinking that the genes around us were much the same as the genes in Bruegel’s time—as if Antwerp were an isolated pond of fish. And surely some of the genes were ours as well. The mouths and noses looked familiar.

  Sylvia was going to stop by and visit her father in Geneva, but I’d head straight to Vienna to look at the twelve Bruegel paintings there. When I went to catch my train, I got into this science fictional mind-trip that Bruegel was alive inside me. And I started seeing things as if I were Bruegel, looking with his eyes around the station, like, wondering about those diabolical magic moving stairs over there—was this Hell? A beggar girl was sitting and singing—beautifully—she was only lovely thing in this subterranean ants-nest of lost souls. I followed signs for my track—and I ended up outdoors, amid half-finished construction. The sun was setting, light glared from a glass building, I saw no sign of green, just pipes and stone and pavement, and for a minute I was so into being Bruegel that I felt utterly lost and confused. Yeah, baby!

  In the Vienna museum, their amazing trove of Bruegel paintings is hung in a single high-ceilinged room. Entering this divine space I felt a sense of urgency, as if the paintings and the beings within them were calling out to me.

  I visited the Bruegels on four different days. Coming back to the same paintings over and over, I was struck by the obvious yet transcendental fact that the images were always the same. Everyone in these little worlds is frozen forever in time, living a day like any other day, a day that lasts forever. Another thing that struck me was the fractal nature of the paintings: when I looked twice as hard, I’d see three times as much. This property of having “too many details” is precisely how mathematicians formally characterize fractal shapes such as the famous Mandelbrot set.

  Sylvia met up with me in Vienna. It was late September in 1998. One Sunday afternoon we went to a circus in a tent on one of the squares, a lovely show, bright with color and laughter. When we went outside, there was a chill in the air and low gray clouds with scraps of blue showing through. Most of the leaves on the trees were yellow. All of a sudden it was fall. Summer had been fading gradually, but we’d been too busy with our fun to notice. It occurred to me that I myself, at 52, was entering the autumn of my life. A heavy thought. It turned to fall while we were at the circus.

  When we got back to California in October, 1998, I began trying to write my Bruegel novel. I wanted to make it a straight historical novel, with no science fiction, but I felt a little skittish about tackling a new genre.

  To help get into the right frame of mind, Sylvia and I took an oil painting class at the San Jose art museum early in 1999. My idea was to get a sensual feel for the craft that I’d be describing. As it happened, I really took to painting, and I’ve gotten more and more into it over time. I enjoy how non-digital and sensual it is to paint, and how different it is from my usual keyboard-based activities.

  It would take me until February of 2002 to finish my Bruegel book. I stuck to my plan of making it a historical novel, and I ended up running it through several extensive revisions. When people asked me why this wasn’t going to be an SF novel, I’d say, “I don’t want to drag Bruegel into the mud.” Not that I truly think of SF as inferior. But I felt that the paintings and the turbulent history of Bruegel’s times provided more than enough material to work with.

  Very little is known about the great man’s life, so I was free to invent most of it. I used a kind of inverse transreal method, that is, I studied his paintings and then dreamed up what might have been happening in his life when he painted them. Some of the paintings might depict things that Bruegel saw, while others may symbolize things that were going on in his family. Each chapter of my book is named after one of the paintings, and with a little effort I got the museums’ permissions to print black and white images of the works.

  I came to identify very deeply with Bruegel as a man. He loved both the fantastic and the literal, that is, he depicted otherworldly drolleries and everyday life. His work was often viewed as vulgar or incomprehensible. And he had only a modest success in his lifetime. None of his works ever ended up on the altar of a church.

  I gave my book a dreamy, mysterious title with an explanatory subtitle. As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel. The title phrase is a traditional occult saying meaning something like, “On Earth as it is in Heaven.” I felt that the motto captured Bruegel’s stylistic habit of representing specific human activities in the context of a broad and even cosmic landscape—which is precisely what I like to do.

  I Retire

  I’d dreamed of breaking out of the science fiction ghetto with Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel—after all, it’s a historical novel about a painter, and a similarly themed novel, Girl With Pearl Earring, was a bestseller just then. But none of the mainstream literary publishers seemed interested in my book. Perhaps people had me pegged as a cyberpunk SF writer, and that was that.

  My new editor David Hartwell at Tor Books published the Bruegel novel in 2002. Although mainly known for science fiction and fantasy books, Tor has a mainstream imprint called Forge. The novel did pretty well after all, and over the years, I’ve heard from a number of people, particularly artists, who love the book.

  As part of my deal with Tor, I also sold them a new SF novel called Spaceland which I’d written rather quickly between September, 2000, and April, 2001, as a break from the Bruegel project.

  Spaceland was a contemporary Silicon Valley novel, similar in that respect to The Hacker and the Ants. The story was loosely inspired by Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. I’d happened to notice that the Flatland character A Square mentions, almost as an aside, that his adventures start on December 31, 1999. So I set Spaceland on that day as well, which seemed fitting, as everyone was so fra
ntic about the Millennium just then. In Flatland, A Square is visited by a sphere from the third dimension. In Spaceland, Joe Cube, a middle manager at a San Jose computer company, receives a millennial visit from a denizen of the fourth dimension. This book was very easy for me to write, like falling off a log.

  I even designed a bunch of illustrations for Spaceland, to make it easier for people to understand. Not that everyone did understand it—some people resist making the mental leap that’s needed to understand the fourth dimension. Like infinity, the fourth dimension is a genuinely new and different idea that can’t be dismissed or explained away. And this can be a little scary.

  As things worked out, when my Bruegel novel appeared in 2002, I was back in Belgium, living in Brussels for a semester, as a guest of the Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences, temporarily alone. I had a grant from the Academy to do research on “the philosophy of computer science”—a new topic that hardly anyone’s talked about yet.

  My apartment in Brussels was near the Marolles district, the raffish old neighborhood where Bruegel’s three-story stone house still stands. He lived and worked there for most of his adult life. I liked going by Bruegel’s house, and now that I’d written my novel about him, the house meant that much more to me. Bruegel’s church is in the same neighborhood, it’s where he was married and buried.

  I felt a nostalgia for my imagined years of living in Bruegel’s house with him—I’d seen him shake fruit-tree petals onto his wife Mayken beneath a tree in the yard, I’d seen him painting his masterpieces in the attic, I’d witnessed the births of his sons Jan and Peter, and I’d attended his death. It’s funny how my fictional characters get so mixed in with my own life’s memories.

  On October 3, 2002, shortly before I got my hardback copy of As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel in the mail, I went out to look for a meal. It was just starting to rain, but I had a good coat. I went down into Bruegel’s neighborhood, and it started pouring. My pants were getting wet and some rain was trickling in through my coat’s buttoned collar. I cut through the arcades in some housing projects, running in and out of the buildings’ arches and terraces. And then it was me alone in the night, on the wet cobblestones. I felt Bruegel’s ghost come up and walk along beside me, very casually. He’d already read my book of course, and he liked it. What a trip.

  For my first six weeks in Brussels, I was living alone, as Sylvia couldn’t get away from her teaching job yet. It was strange to be on my own—this was the first time I’d lived alone in my whole life, given that I got married about a week after graduating from college.

  Settling into my apartment, I bought a couple of Frank Zappa CDs and a portable CD player with good speakers. Hungry as I was for the sound of a human voice, it was wonderful to hear warm, friendly, mellifluous Zappa and his soaring, lush, romantic guitar solos. In the mornings, I’d do yoga to his CDs. A high point of each day.

  As well as doing research, I was giving a course of lectures in the philosophy department at the ancient University of Leuven, which is about an hour from Brussels. Leuven is the university where the medieval thinker Erasmus hung out. The philosophers there in 2002 liked me, they were the ones who’d helped me get the grant.

  The one question philosophers always want to ask me is what it was like to meet Kurt Gödel. Really, I pretty much put everything I remember about him into my book Infinity and the Mind, with maybe a bit more here in Nested Scrolls. But people hunger for that extra bit that I never told before.

  “He took off his clothes and stood on his head and wrote GOD = DOG on the blackboard with the chalk held in his toes. I was surprised.”

  I always took the train to get to Leuven. Train travel perfectly instantiates quite a few of my neuroses. It’s archetypal, like the fabric of a dream.

  The old-style dangerous metal wheels and gears of the train itself are a nice match for the giant analog clocks they always have in train stations. The Industrial Age! The train leaves at 9:48. The clock says 9:46. The big clock’s minute hand moves forward in an abrupt tick. 9:47! Horrors, I’ll be late! Running up the stairs, down the long platforms, I begin to sweat, dreading the very real possibility of getting on the wrong train.

  And once I’m on the European train, for the final nightmare touch, I meet the menacing authority figure, the smiling conductor whose smile is only skin deep, the father who doesn’t really like me, and I can’t communicate with him, thanks to the language barrier! I begin trying to explain myself to my father, but a chill wind tears my words away. My lips move but my voice is inaudible, at the very most I emit a gibbering squeak.

  For my research project in Brussels, I was reading Stephen Wolfram’s magnum opus of 2002, A New Kind of Science, and starting work on a nonfiction book of my own, about similar topics. Remember that Wolfram was the guy who’d gotten me into cellular automata. He’d been working on his big book about computation and reality for over a decade and now it was done and he’d sent me a copy.

  The physical weight of Wolfram’s book felt like an imposition—it was wearing out my wrists and it was a literal drag to carry around Brussels. So I found a big carving knife in my apartment’s kitchen—the knife had those tiny nicks in the blade like you see on the knives in Bosch paintings—and I cut the book into slices of a reasonable size. As I was slicing loose the first three chapters, I noticed that the copy was in fact inscribed to me by Wolfram himself, and I felt a little abashed.

  In reality, I would become a strong advocate for A New Kind of Science—I discussed and extended Wolfram’s ideas in my book about computation, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, and I wrote a long and positive review of Wolfram’s book that appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly in November, 2003. I regularly took flak on Wolfram’s behalf whenever I’d lecture on his teachings.

  Very many people indeed opposed A New Kind of Science. To me, having known Wolfram for so long, his ideas seemed obviously true. But others found them to be—as Wolfram might put it—either trivial or wrong. When a set of ideas provokes such a firestorm, it’s a sign of an impending paradigm shift.

  So what was Wolfram saying?

  First of all, he was arguing that we can think of any natural process as a computation, that is, you can see anything as a deterministic procedure that works out the consequences of some initial conditions. Fine. Instead of saying the world is made of atoms or of curved space or of natural laws, let’s see what happens if we say it’s made of computations. This notion gets some people’s goat, but if you’ve hung around computers a lot, it seems semi-reasonable.

  Secondly, Wolfram made the point that, by studying cellular automata, he’d learned that there are basically three kinds of computations. The simple ones peter out or repeat themselves. The pseudorandom ones generate a seething mess. And the interesting computations lie in between. They generate patterns that seem to have some kind of structure to them, but they don’t repeat themselves or turn boring.

  This second idea is simply a taxonomic observation about the kinds of things we find in the world. The in-between computations are akin to what we might earlier have called chaotic processes. I myself came to call them “gnarly computations.” So, if everything is to be a computation, then pretty much all of the interesting patterns in nature and biology are gnarly computations. Fine.

  Thirdly, Wolfram argued that all gnarly computations are in some sense equally powerful, that is, given enough time and space, any given gnarly computation can in fact emulate any of the others. If everything is an equally-powerful computation, then we’re all in some sense the same.

  Note that a computer doesn’t have to be made of wires and silicon chips in a box. A cloud can emulate an oak tree, a flickering flame can model a human mind, a dripping faucet can behave like the stock market. And we’re not talking about vague, metaphorical resemblances here, we’re talking about mathematically precise bit-for-bit representations.

  For someone who’d become as steeped in computer science as I had, this third p
oint also seemed reasonable, but outsiders had trouble making sense of it—and in their confusion, many of them grew angry.

  Fourthly, Wolfram said that gnarly computations are unpredictable in the specific sense that there are no quick short-cut methods for finding out what these kinds of computations will do. The only way, for instance, to really find out what the weather is going to be like tomorrow is to wait twenty-four hours and see. The only way for me to find out what I’m going to put into the final paragraph-sized “scroll” of Nested Scrolls is to finish writing the book.

  Wolfram’s fourth point is very nearly provable on the basis of some well-known theorems from computer science but, again, many scientists don’t like it. They still subscribe to the pipedream of finding some magical tiny theory that will allow them to make quick pencil-and-paper calculations about every aspect of the future. They haven’t taken to heart the essentially chaotic nature of the world. We can’t control; we can’t predict—but even so we can hope to ride the waves.

  I gave what may have been the least successful talk of my career when I tried to explain Wolfram’s ideas to the computer science department at the University of Leuven near the end of November, 2002. I’d organized some snappy computer demos and slick slides, but the faculty met the new ideas with extreme hostility and complete incomprehension. It was like a classic scene from the history of science.