Hello World

Heat and the West Coast

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The West Coast of the US is the crucible of new ideas about virtuality and I wanted to be there. What began as a progressive technology has also become a progressive philosophy. I wanted to feel the heat of that thinking.

Several of my books have featured scenes or items that were invented at the time but later appeared to come into reality. In this case, the above paragraph was simply an exposition of my thinking about California. And yet in April 2004 I found myself signing up for a workshop at Esalen, my first, and of all the topics I might have chosen, I decided on Bronze Casting, simply because it was so far from my usual experience.

And here, without any planning or expectation, I found myself experiencing my first crucible. We built a firepit
and placed inside it a crucible filled with bronze, to be melted and poured into the casts we had made. Unexpectedly, I was working with a crucible, and as we sat around the fire together that night, high up on the cliffs in Big Sur, listening to the crackle of the burning wood and the boom of the Pacific waves below us, I certainly felt the heat.

the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own

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In Walden, Thoreau describes how in his imagination he bought several farms, although in reality he never owned any at all. He explains how he worked so hard to imagine landscapes, buildings and harvests that he was able to fantasise entire sagas of negotiation, purchase and sale. Even without money or legal ownership of a piece of land he still ‘annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow’. In other words, his ability to simply savour a landscape enabled him to reap a valuable harvest – the sheer imagined experience of it. ‘I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk.’ (1) If it existed in his brain, it was real.

Virtual Reality has always been a part of our experience. It is where we are when we think, when we meditate, when we imagine, when we remember. It is a place where we all have been and indeed where we will all end up. After all, what could be more virtual than the unvisited and yet fully imagined place we call Heaven? But let us define our terms. Maybe you’re thinking of people wearing gloves and goggles and navigating their way across an apparently empty room? Well, that’s not the kind of VR I’m talking about.

I’m talking about memory, imagination, hopes and inventions.

I’m talking about the kind of VR the brain produces all on its own.

(1) Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 76.

06 Thoreau's ideas

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My guide during that first trip to the Mojave Desert was the hypertext writer M.D.Coverley whose work Califia is an epic story of California's history, myths and legends told in hypertext, music and images.