MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 1

Grampa dreamed of fame. Not about achieving anything in particular to earn it; he just liked to fantasize about having it. About being a celebrity. His journals contain long meditations on how he would deal with his public. Would he give autographs? Yes, he would; he would sign autographs day and night. He would lavish love upon his public. Or: No, he wouldn't. He would remain aloof from his public. He would "vant to be alone." He would eschew interviews. He would be demure. He would outwit the paparazzi. He would pass among the masses unseen, a windblown shadow. His public would be frustrated, maddened, but in the end they would come to understand the gift he had given them: a hero unsullied by commercialism. A man who hadn't sold himself.

If Grampa's journals reveal anything, it is the inner life of a man self-absorbed, escapist, deluded, detached from society, abjuring any productive relationship with his fellow citizens – in a word, and from every angle, an "unrealistic" man.

And this is precisely where I differ from Grampa. My experience with fame is authentic; his, fabulistic. He ate baked beans cold out of the can and dreamed of caviar. I've eaten my share of caviar and don't even really like it much. Fame does not impress me, nor do its accoutrements. This is no doubt because of my immersion in the milieu of celebrity. I am a biographer, entertainment journalist, and sometime-ghostwriter. And I am lucky enough to count among my friends the most celebrated entertainer of our time, Flicky Flounder, a fact that has undoubtedly played its part in demystifying that which Grampa looked upon as a fetish.

I can't overstate my affection for him. Most of the worlds know Flicky as the star of such eleven-dimensional mo-tainment spectaculars as The Fish Who Saved Madison County, Mr. Limpet Goes to Wall Street and Moby Dick VI: Gladiators of Atlantis. Gear-heads know Flicky as a state-of-the-art eighth-gen autunculus, a slack-stringer, a pocket phantom. But I know the fish behind the technical strata and PR glitz. The Flicky I know is not the Hollywood idol; nor is he any mere refraction of a set of probability equations projected within a highly energized, tightly focused gravity beam through the prism of micro-dimensional spacetime.

The Flicky Flounder I know is an artist, and a deep soul. He is profoundly wise, and profoundly sad.

You hear this phrase all the time regarding celebrities, but I'll say it anyway, because in this case it is so true: people don't understand Flicky. People have the wrong idea about autunculi in general. But I think, because of his origins in 3D computer-generated animation, they have an especially wrong idea of the Great Flatfish. He is beloved, especially by children, for roles in which he displays a cartoonish talent for distorting his features. Such talent is, no doubt, a vestige of his Pixarian ancestry. Yet he is no cartoon; he is anything but. (I address all these issues, and more, in my upcoming biography of Flicky, Nobody's Fish out of Water, the very real life of the worlds’ greatest entertainer.)

Integral to his depth and strength of character has been his struggle against bigotry. There will always be those prejudiced against admitting the equal authenticity of the Cosmunculus and our Cosmos. And that is sad. For me, there is something especially poignant about it. I am, let me assure you, an unwilling champion for the cause of equality. Were it not for my personal stake in the matter, I wouldn't consider for a moment agitating for a transformation of the popular consciousness. There's nothing I'd rather do than flow along with the course of historical events, causing nary a ripple. But destiny has demanded otherwise. There is an over-arching armature of fate that pulls the strings. I find myself having to apologize for the preachy tone that inevitably possesses my voice. Against my nature, I've become a kind of evangelist.

But why should it be so difficult for so many to acknowledge how intertwined the Cosmos and the Cosmunculus have become? And this outrage I hear – as if such a condition had been thrust upon cosmorganic humanity with the precipitous shock of a truck accident – can there be anything more disingenuous? As if we couldn’t have seen the Sluice coming. Even as the first theoretical universes were in the process of being modeled in the Quantum Ocean, the ocean of qubits, part of which evolved into the Undermind, the seeds of the jungle of realities we now inhabit were already beginning to sprout. Anyone who was shocked by the Sluice must have been living in a cave for the six decades prior.

A good historical analogy is the development of radio broadcasting in the early twentieth century: listeners initially had no doubts whether they were being spoken to by another human being, thinking thoughts within their own heads, or listening to electromagnetic signals translated into sound waves by a receiver; yet, by the early twenty-first century, the human information environment was so saturated with signals – electromagnetic, olfactory, tactile, sonic, and visual – that personal broadcast/receive devices were as integral to human awareness as eyes, ears, noses and skin. Of course there was still a difference between, say, being bodily in a war and experiencing a war via electromagnetic transmission, but the difference was no longer one of "natural" versus "artificial." They were different ways of perceiving a war, each with its own limitations and advantages, but neither more nor less "real" than the other.

The same argument for authenticity applies to those who originate in the Cosmunculus. The colloquial terms, "slack-stringer," "gravity puppet," and the archaic pejorative "pocket phantom," are misleading in their evocations of artifice. Likewise, the term normally employed in “sensitive” discourse and journalism, "autunculus," brings to mind, even in its most respectful connotation, a will exerted from behind the scenes to manipulate an otherwise hollow projection. It casts the Undermind as puppeteer, the Cosmunculus as a stage, and the autunculi as its puppets.

Needless to say, there's a great deal of cosmocentrism at work in the metaphorical universe these lexical relics conjure. Remember, to the autunculi, it's OUR world that is a projection into THEIRS. Conservatives will point out that our world came first; but what makes an old world more real than a younger one? Were the Titans more real than the Olympians? Is the Old Testament more real than the New?

Others will assert that, since humans authored the original quantum computer programs that formed the Quantum Ocean, any reality catalyzed thereafter by the Undermind is in some way contingent upon the more "real" reality of our universe. To me that's no different than asserting that, because we long ago altered the genes for frontal lobe development in chimpanzees, the differential calculus chimpanzees use today is less real than that which was employed a century ago. But we know this to be untrue. Both are the same calculus, using the same equations for the same purposes with identical accuracy.

The milk is contingent upon the prior existence of the cow, yet both are equally real.

Is an ancestor more real than its descendant?

I think not.