Traveling to an Artist’s Ur-Reality
Quotations from an Illustrated Book
The Saugatuck Cosmology, first published online, has become a prototype of a book. The tale is a travelogue to a realm that, figuratively, underlies our everyday reality like one of those cosmological turtles.
The story couldn’t fit on Substack, which lacks a way to show the many gorgeous images of that other land. We chose to first reveal it at a venue where the images are luminous and the words roll by like an ancient scroll.
We did offer you a teaser before, with irresistible come-ons like ”pictures of Living Water, Deep Time, the Fine Structure of Matter, and Ideas as Vortices of Light” and “Demons and the Legions of Hell. Tolkien over Lovecraft.” We still recommend reading that blurb, if only for laughs.
Some of you lapped it up, and others might have been bewildered or not ready to have their minds stretched in unknown ways.
So consider this Teaser #2: with quotes that preview what the story has to offer. You’ll learn that yes, it’s a fantasy, but not like any you’ve ever seen. The following are some of the best lines, but if you like them, then you will love how they all fit together.
The Opening Setup
Artist HA was obsessed with seeking a hidden reality by transforming photographic images of the Saugatuck river near his home. … but if you want to know a hidden reality you need to go there.
HA unexpectedly finds himself in a world that looks like his artwork, populated by creatures — demigods really — who have an enduring beef with humans.
… remember when they first showed up, wearing animal skins and poking holes in everything with sharp rocks on sticks? That was at least 10,000 turns [of the solar system] ago.
The locals call themselves the Ckami, and they:
call the beings and processes of the <extended/churnng> smud world, ‘smudlings.’
Human smudlings have no Ckami as their guiding spirit. This unhappy fact guides the dialog as HA and certain Ckami tour their TrueReality, and they try to understand each other while contending about what’s real and what’s bullshit.
At the end, we offer a takeaway. While a big theme is about artistic creation, the story also examines our relationships to nature. So we say at the end:
nature is cruel, nature is kind, nature is indifferent, or nature moves towards greater something or other (complexity, expansion, intelligence?). These are all flawed metaphors being used … by an animal that thinks it is a god. Nature is us and is not us … we had better find an understanding of that paradox that the whole world can work with.
Pieces of the Story
The protagonist HA survives unexpected peril. He and his Ckami handlers visit the three phases of their world, Stone, Water, and Air. All the while, HA experiences a tangible, fantastic world that mirrors the one he imagines in his art.
He [HA] was getting fed up with this argumentative, contrarian Ckami. … “You know, this is like I'm dreaming about a stoned dorm room conversation with a sadistic stranger who just wandered in. Why am I here?”
the living water told more stories of variegation; the possibilities almost unending, in a moving perceptual riot.
He would focus on the merely preposterous idea that he was inside a living river populated with annoying sprites. Be sociable. Work the room.
Smud perceptions are limited. Looking in one direction instead of all of them. Seeing only one set of colors when they are all there, everywhere. All things are connected and vibrating.
We do often disagree, even violently, over the nature of the sublime. …
There is only one purpose for violence, for tearing apart, and that is to re-cycle matter for new life. Your kind has twisted that purpose into mere competition for status, disagreements over ideas or even over facts, and just pure <animosity>. …
You know what species we consider to be the most highly evolved? The leafcutter ants.
Water Phase is awash with swimming schools of quirreps, proto-souls that become smudlings in our world. They:
looked like reef fish swarming around boulders, with sunrays grazing clouds of kicked-up sand. … Then [they] looked like flocks of monochrome birds passing an icy cliff.
Travel in True Reality can be simple.
putting it in your terms, to pop over to Stone you just squeeze your eyes tightly shut and fart.
In Stone Phase:
Patterns had more textures, with sharp contrasts and random shapes, definitely evocative of formative mineral motions that took eons. ... he could see through them all, like being inside a translucent geological foam. …
Here is where we can visit deep time, apprehend long cycles, and experience the impermanence of the permanent. …
But when you go back to another Phase hundreds as many moments can have elapsed.
The Ckami don’t distinguish between science and the supernatural, and they see themselves running the reality show.
the ancients transform into the <background principles>, the <infrastructure> of our Ckami realm. The closest analogy would be your physics and chemistry, your vortexes and ley lines.
your dualisms — smooth and rough, continuous and discontinuous, wave and particle, vibration and stillness — are simply false. It’s all just texture.
Sometimes you sense the wandering pheromones or dropped molecules from other creatures, the signals from plants talking, or even the sharp scent of a newly cracked stone. Your immune system reacts to stray cells when they touch you.
If atoms were individuals, your every breath would contain atoms that had been breathed by every human that ever lived.
You might say that Ckami are the operating supervisors of natural selection.
Air Phase is where newness is made. ... We <excrete> ideas into Air. They mix and recombine like DNA ... This is how new <ways of being> get to your world.
The Ckami also have a hand in our spiritual beliefs.
I suppose mystics and artists are doing pretty much the same things. … Like your William Blake.
Humans get the demons they deserve.
We encourage your kind to assimilate our contacts into your existing frameworks. Otherwise, you get too nosy. Humans start talking about undiscovered truths, secret cabals, and ancient esoterica.
it was 66 lords of Hell, altogether ruling 666 legions of 6,666 demons each. Comes out to about 4 million. That was figured out only a few hundred of your years ago.
HA the artist doesn’t believe that the Ckami hold all the cards.
… it's my reality. I made it. … Any artistic creation is a fiction, a sort of simulation using the brains of artists and art lovers instead of computers and displays. And, over time, art becomes more meta — more about itself than about the observed world.
So Have a Look
I didn’t give away all the good stuff here. The actual presentation involves artistic alchemy. The many images all started as photos of the roiling surface of the Saugatuck River. Bill Gore’s digital Bardo magic transforms them into a stunning variety of prismatic organic abstractions that depict the imagined phases of Stone, Water, and Air.
It’s not to be missed; learn how it all fits together (free: see it here).
