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View from the Grease Pit Looking Up at Reality
“The Kabalah of Time.” (Course by JLI, Spring, 2006.) Heaven Exposed by Tzvi Freeman. (Class One Press, 2004.) Tour of the Merrimack: The Myriad by R.M. Meluch. (DAW, 2006, Paperback.) Tour of the Merrimack: Wolf Star by R.M. Meluch. (DAW, January, 2006, Hardcover.) Pretender, Eighth in the Foreigner Universe by C.J. Cherryh. (DAW, March, 2006, Hardcover.) This is a review column on science fiction and fantasy, but I often stray into nonfiction because that is where SF/F writers get their crazy ideas. While attending the second lecture of the eight week course titled “The Kabalah of Time” (www.myJLI.com), I suddenly had this vision of standing in a car mechanic’s grease pit staring up at the undercarriage of the universe. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading Heaven Exposed, a nonfiction (well, not exactly) book by Tzvi Freeman compiled from essays he has posted on chabad.org. He’s currently up to about 86 articles there. Search on Tzvi Freeman at chabad.org for a list of free reading. Heaven Exposed covers some of the same material that the course does, but it’s cast in a language I understand though don’t speak well—geek. Freeman is a computer game engineer by day and a mild-mannered essayist by night, among other things. He explains Kabalah in computer engineering terms such as “kludge.” He also invents trademarked terms such as “isify” and writes the most absolutely hysterically funny dialogue—such as the one between a neurotic Angel and a human psychiatrist. There’s a court case where the Angels argue that humans shouldn’t be given the Torah. He also explains lucidly and precisely what a “Miracle” is and how to identify them, classify them, and even what it takes to produce them. The important thing about this book and the essays is that every single freehand colloquial English/Geek word is an absolutely fundamentally true translation in spirit and intent from the original Kabalah source material. You learn while laughing your ribs sore. Seriously, truth always makes people scream with laughter right at the edge of pain. If you love computer games, as most SF/F readers do, or know computer programming, or even just make your home computer do things, this is your Kabalah book! Now, let’s synthesize the experience of this course, this book, and three ostensibly innocent SF novels. Synthesize all this and you may experience what Carlos Castaneda called Stopping The World. R.M. Meluch is a writer I have much admired for some time, but I haven’t reviewed any of her novels since before 1993. She has a knack of blending fast paced military action with science, technology and human nature in the best tradition of say, Robert A. Heinlein crossed with Andre Norton, and thus is somewhat similar to C.J. Cherryh. The first book, Tour of the Merrimack: The Myriad is actually a sequel in chronological time to book two, Tour of the Merrimack: Wolf Star. In other words, read Wolf Star first. The Myriad picks up right after Wolf Star and takes the story onward to a springboard finish leaving us panting for the sequel. In this Merrimack Universe, we have a vicious marauding parasite that eats anything organic, devouring planet after planet across galactic space. The interstellar instantaneous communication method used by Earth derived cultures, called Resonance, attracts this parasite when used. Thus hoards of them are heading for human occupied star systems at faster than light speed. The Merrimack, the most highly developed technology available in space, is the first interstellar ship to survive being boarded by these creatures. The story takes off from there as the Captain of the Merrimack assumes a very “James T. Kirk” level of responsibility and handles the situation—diplomacy be damned. With every “win” the Captain gets himself and Merrimack’s crew in deeper trouble. Eventually, they begin to suspect that exterminating the creatures will extinguish their communications based on Resonance. In other words, the creatures who communicate by Resonance, create Resonance as a universal property. Or maybe not. We don’t know yet even though Merrimack has discovered a wormhole through to the beginning of time. My only objection to these books is that same objection I constantly raise. The point of view shifts for no reason, and that spoils the emotional continuity and thus the soul level Initiation that is possible when reading a single-pov story. When you can become the person in the story, live their experiences, you can actuate the lesson in your own life. I want to point you at these new R.M. Meluch titles (plus all her old stuff if you can find it) because she presents here a mind-tickling concept of time and space and the relationship between them. As with most good SF, there is no detailed explanation of currently known laws of science being extrapolated. Either you know—or you don’t and have to go study and learn. However, the mechanism behind this story does mess with the substance of time, which is the subject I have my nose into right now. Two notions have me riveted to this material. Time, according to Kabalah, is one of the three “dimensions” (used in the math and physics sense—a parameter) of creation. There are three such dimensions: space, time and soul. That’s right—soul is a dimension of the physical universe created at the moment of creation. You can’t have space and time without soul. But the mind-boggler for me is that “soul” enters material reality through the conduit of “time.” Every particle of matter in creation down to and below the mu meson has soul as a component. The second notion that I’ve garnered so far is that it didn’t “take seven days” to finish creation, but rather what was created was a single thing, a single template that consisted of seven days—six days and a seventh that resulted. Each day of the week corresponds to a Sefirah of the “Lower Face” of the Tree of Life that I’ve discussed in this column at length. So the question I’m noodling with now is, what if the universe had been created on a template of eight units instead of seven? Or some other number. What would change? Eight colors of the rainbow, the speed of light (an old Asimov premise from his novel A Mote In God’s Eye.) That, and the notion of soul entering creation through the conduit of time, has me standing in a grease pit looking up at the undercarriage of reality with oil dripping onto my face and feeling real stupid. And that’s only two class meetings and a (no coincidence) seven chapter book. Meanwhile I’ve just read the eighth novel in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner Universe, Pretender. As a stand alone novel it’s a good, fast read. It doesn’t advance the story arc much and so may seem frustrating until we get the third novel in this trilogy. I do recommend reading them all, in order. Taken in sequence with the preceding seven novels, this is a powerful love story across a human-alien interface. All the Foreigner books so far are strictly single viewpoint novels, from the view of a human so steeped in a nonhuman, numbers-based culture that he occasionally loses his grip on the human point of view. The disciplined viewpoint writing takes us through the Initiations that Bren Cameron experiences and you live with him in a universe built of raw numbers. The series title, Foreigner, always reminds me of the admonition to be gentle with strangers because “you were a stranger in a strange land.” Many of those profound Kabalistic lessons are embodied in these novels. Taken together, the Foreigner Series is about the questions of soul—what makes a human into a human? What binds us all into one? What is the nature of the interface between cultures? What role does physiology play in casting and limiting our cultures? (Tzvi Freeman would call it “resolution.”) What does it take to reach across that interface? Or can you reach? To contact the other side, do you have to cross that interface? What is language? I’ve reviewed all the Foreigner titles here. You can find them on amazon.com. Or bug your local library. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to learn. But learn you must. Cherryh has a different knack for teaching than does Tzvi Freeman, but both will set your mind spinning. While you’re being entertained with a human/alien love story that might be a romance in alien terms, you will learn something about the nature of soul, soul growth, and Initiation. I must also point you to my July 2003 column, “He Who Maps It, Owns It” Part I, where I review How To Build A Time Machine by Paul Davies. The primary notion there is that there is no such thing as simultaneity. Remember Saturn is astrologically associated with time, and the Romans named the Seventh Day after that god. R.M. Meluch chose Rome and Roman civilization as the basis of the first colonizing thrust off Earth. Coincidence?
Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
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