Weird Science

At 3 PM today my private Quantum Tantra research was "outed" by Rudy Rucker on Boing-Boing, the most popular blog in cyberspace. Will this unsought publicity mean that I will have to move even deeper into the woods to avoid the mass of thrill seekers eager to offer me their souls and bodies in order that they might be the first to connect with the Next Big Thing? I don't think so. Tomorrow at Boing-Boing this blinding spotlight of fame will thankfully be directed in some other direction and I will once more be freed to pursue my underground research into the nature of deep reality without oversight, without supervision, and in any crazy direction I damned well please.

Welcome to Buzzsaw

In the early 90s, while I was finishing a book on consciousness, the circus came to town.

Actually it wasn't the circus, but a Hollywood movie company that intended to use Boulder Creek as a set for a movie called "Welcome to Buzzsaw". The movie featured Matthew Broderick (who recently starred in the Broadway revival of "The Producers") and Jeffrey Jones (whom I will always remember as the delightfully clueless Emperor in "Amadeus").

In "WTB" Broderick plays a stockbroker who is a genius among New York hustlers but is completely out of his depth in the rural logging town of Buzzsaw. Jeffrey Jones plays both the popular mayor of Buzzsaw and his Evil Twin who had broken out of jail, murdered his brother, whom he was now impersonating for the 24 hours it would take him to scoop up the mayor's liquid assets and get out of town. Some of the movie's funniest lines occur as Evil Twin Jeffrey Jones tries to pass as the Good Twin mayor at home with the mayor's wife and two kids.

As the technicians were transforming Boulder Creek beyond recognition into Buzzsaw, the casting director went looking for extras. On a whim I auditioned and was chosen for the role of bank president. After the shoot, the president of our local bank told me that he thought I made a more impressive bank president than he did. And I didn't just sit behind a desk. While I was processing a loan, Jeffrey Jones pulls a gun, holds us all hostage, robs my bank, and leaps out of a (closed) window into the street. I couldn't say a word because they'd have had to pay me extra and I'd also have to join the union. One of the hostages--the lady I was interviewing for a loan--was one of the few extras with a speaking part and I stood next to her silently watching as Jeffrey Jones verbally intimidates her.

It was a lot of fun to work on the movie, hang out with the actors and observe all the problems that had to be solved to shoot the simplest scenes. One scene was shot in the rain outside a bar. The rain was produced artificially by sprinklers on big booms. If it had really rained, the director said, they'd have to cancel the shoot because the cameras would get wet. One of the oddest sights in more than a month of oddities for me was the crew cafeteria. We were all fed marvelous food under a big tent with cooks and waitresses imported from Hollywood who wore T-shirts with shoulder pads, a style statement truly impressive to the hillbilly denizens of Buzzsaw.

Some of the best scenes were cut, including an attempt by Jones to kill Broderick with a falling tree. My friend and alpaca rancher Fred Keesaw brought the tree down for this one but Fred's logging artistry never made it to the big screen. After serious editing the title was changed to "Out on a Limb" but the movie never really held together and quickly transited from theater to DVD. O yes, my scenes were kept intact. But you'll have to look quick to catch Buzzsaw bank president Nick Herbert's 16 seconds of big-screen fame.

Cannabis? Yes!

Cannabis? Yes!

"Die Luft der Freiheit weht."
(motto: Stanford University)

Surely the very Bedrock of Liberty is this:
The freedom to cultivate my garden
Anyway I please.
Anything less is tyranny.

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."

See also
"Wearin' o' the Green"
"Obama is IRISH!!"

First Steps

FIRST STEPS

Have you ever stopped to gaze at the ones
who have only just learned to stand?
Heads tilted back, open-mouthed and unblinking
they open close open close little fists
clutching at
iridescent sashes the angels dangle before them
the silver-wrapped rain that falls for them
like kisses.

Or having watched a toddler chase his father
down a gravel path laughing
parrot-screech then water-bubbling-over-rocks
instead of elbows riffling the air you saw
two tiny oars trying to row the ocean.

Nor can we prepare ourselves for the radiance
of their faces as when
running they become birds delirious with flight
the sun blooms behind a summer cloud
saffron crowns the treetops and turns the field
to golden poppies in its shimmer.

For if you would abandon your busyness
in a tantrum of red tulips burning through snow
reckless intoxication of twirling and staggering
you might catch the receding glimmer of a child's
former life--those last dying breaths soaring
again in these first teetering steps.

-----------Kathleen Flowers------------------

A Brand New Science

Reno DeCaro

A BRAND NEW SCIENCE

(For Reno DeCaro)

To see deeper into things
We need a new way of looking.

Against love of the right kind
Even Nature is defenseless.

For eons She remained closed--
Sealed tight as a bank vault.

Then She opened Herself
Like a blossom
 
For one flirtatious glance.

Happy Birthday, Reno!

Song of the Iris: Come on in

SONG OF THE IRIS: COME ON IN

Come and get it, honey
I’m so ready it ain’t funny
If you’re looking to entangle with
the feral feminine
Come on in. Come on in. Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
I’m so ready it ain’t funny
Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
Come on in.
Come on in.

Come and get it, honey
I’m worth more than all your money
I’ve been spreading love and sweetness
since your ancestors had fins
Come on in. Come on in. Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
I’m worth more than all your money
Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
Come on in.
Come on in.

Come and get it, honey
I’m so sticky, sweet and runny
Please come inside and palpitate
my yellow fur and purple skin
Come on in. Come on in. Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
I’m so sticky, sweet and runny
Come on in.
Come and get it, honey
Come on in.
Come on in.

Kathleen Flowers (1964-2009)

Kathleen Flowers was a bilingual teacher and acclaimed Santa Cruz poet. I was attracted to her verse by its warmth, beauty and bite. She died of a rare form of cancer on Easter Sunday. Adios, muchacha.

Before Surgery

I hurry up Laurent, steep hill
behind my house, before night
has fully fallen. Above me
the sky is a royal blue
belly slit by a sickle moon.
From this vista, the street lamps
string together the neighborhoods
of this coastal town.

Beyond winding avenues,
the Monterey Bay sleeps,
a black field lying silent.
In the cold deep, sea creatures
are eaten. Their bones,
picked clean, tumble and drift
across the ocean floor.

I like to think the spirit is freed
once the body dies, but it is this body
that allows such beauty, such exquisite
pain. I unzip my jacket, offer this malignancy
to the dark gulls, to the night.

From "Call it Gladness"
by Kathleen Flowers
Photo from poetry reading
at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Quantum Errata

In a previous post entitled New Law of Nature I described a quantum operation (Quantum Wedding) which could be used to send signals faster-than-light. The new law of nature is this: the laws of quantum mechanics forbid Quantum Wedding--a pair of unknown quanta cannot be reliably tricked into the same state. A similar situation exists for Quantum Cloning. If you could reliably clone an unknown single quantum you could send signals FTL. But the laws of quantum mechanics (as shown by Wooters & Zurek in a well-known 1982 article in Nature) forbid Quantum Cloning.

Since quantum mechanics is reversible, one might reasonably conclude that the operations inverse to Quantum Cloning and Quantum Wedding would also be forbidden. Does nature therefore forbid Quantum Deletion (anti-cloning) and Quantum Divorce (anti-wedding)? I used to think so and said as much in the previous post.

In this I was mistaken.

Unbeknownst to me a group of Indians (Bhagwat, Khandekar, Menon, Puri and Sahni) from the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Mumbai had shown in 2000 that nature does not forbid Quantum Deletion.

The reason? Cloning and Deletion are not precisely opposite operations. This loophole, the Indians then show, permits the deletion (uncloning) of a generic quantum state. Looking at this article from Bhabha I realized that Quantum Divorce is likewise not the precise opposite of Quantum Wedding. A short calculation shows that this same loophole also permits the unwedding of a generic quantum twosome.

Therefore this: Cloning and Wedding are forbidden but Anticloning and Divorce are not. Ain't quantum mechanics wonderful?

Lifting the Veil of a New Sensual Science

LIFTING THE VEIL
OF A NEW SENSUAL SCIENCE

Why waste so much of our money on weapons?
Why are we counting our kills?
Where is our liquid yohimbe?
Where are our new hard-on pills?

Where are our sentient dildos?
Where are our pussies that talk?
Our college of tantric mathematics?
Our computerized orgasm parks?

Where are the sexual executives
Lining up to please MY private parts?
Where are the sensual professionals?
The kingdom and queendom of hearts?

Could physicists be our priests and rabbis?
And mathematicians be our seraphim?
Can we find hot new ways to praise Her Mystery
As we lift the veils from Nature's Quim?

If physics is our new religion
Our mosques the science institutes
Then where's our wild-eyed wanton groupies?
Where's our sacred prostitutes?

What are our physicists doing
With their Geiger counters and Lead?
What has our science discovered
That I can use in my bed?

Where are the new radiations
That can thrill us like X-Rays can't do?
And new forms of material entanglement
That could stick us together like glue?

If we can spend billions on bombers
Why can't we spend millions on drugs
That make us ALL better lovers?
Our arms, were they not made for hugs?

And our cocks for blissful coitus?
And our cunts for mysterious ends?
Our minds for devising new pleasures?
For our spirits unspeakable blends

With goddesses, gods, elementals
With creatures that barely exist
With ravenous extraterrestrials
With virgins that no one has kissed?

We want to wallow like piglets in tantra
Remold our broad swords into plows
Don't promise us cum in the future
I want my full-body naturegasm NOW.

Sex in Space

"What will become of these galaxies? Spiral Galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Most frequently when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides. Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Quite possibly, our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years."

[From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) July 21, 2008]

Two galaxies caught "doin' it"
by a telescope in the Andes
Two galaxies inexorably drawn together
by "dat ol' black magic"
by Newton's "gravitational force"
by Einstein's "curved spacetime"
by Dante Alighieri's
"Love which moves the sun and the other stars".