images in the mind

I've been thinking a lot lately about the kinds of images we are naturally drawn to, and especially why we are drawn to them in the first place. The images that have always attracted me make sense to me now more than ever. Here is one of them: it's the one on my web page--a photograph by Robert Parke-Harrison. It's been up there a while--for years, really. Periodically I think I should redo my webpage, just for interest's sake, but this is just me. And the image so perfectly speaks for me and where I am right now, in this strange, half-awake, half-dreaming state of recovery.

I've spent much of the past month either asleep or in a sleep-like state. I sleep and I dream; I watch periodic tumor-induced visions inside MRI's, and I read. And when I read, I manufacture new metaphors and images, which themselves get translated into my thinking and dreaming.

Now I'm currently rereading Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand"--one of my favorite books of all time. It's out of print now, but you can still find copies in used bookstores. Zelazny's protagonists are largely the same, psychologically speaking--they are all very male (I believe he has been criticized for this), but they all have a certain moral integrity about them that guides other actions. They are characters you can really get behind--they are characters who inevitably do the right thing.

"Doorways in the Sand" takes place in the present, but it's a present in which contact has been made with an alien race, and new technologies and worldviews have already been introduced to us. The main character, Fred Cassidy, is a perennial student at the university: left a legacy with certain restrictions by an uncle, he can retain his yearly allotted inheritance only for as long as he remains in college. And so he has managed to stay in college for years without graduating, coming in most cases just one course shy of a BA--or even an MA or a Ph.D. Fred is quite enterprising.

And so, of course, he is the perfect host for the gift of the new alien race that has made contact with our planet: the star-stone, a beautiful object of which no one quite knows the significance or import. Through a contorted set of events, we learn that colleagues of Fred's at the university have been studying the stone and that some of them have been appointed to create models of it. In the usual way that these things turn out, one less-than-scrupulous friend has snitched the original star-stone and swapped it for one of his models, and now Bad Things are afloat.

So where is the star-stone? Spoiler alert here! But it's not much of a spoiler, because you figure this out relatively quickly in the plotting. Somehow the star-stone gets absorbed into our hero-protagonist. It's in him. And it works symbiotically, fusing its own peculiar blend of knowledge and imaging with his. And as only Zelazny can actuate, the result is the kind of book that utterly changes the way you see things. It really is one of those books that sincerely affected the way I see things and perhaps even do them--and yet it's a quick, delightful, uplifting read.

I've been plotting out my new courses for Fall 2010--can you believe our proposals are already due? And my new course on mindmapping is on my wish list. I hope I can make it happen. This book will be on our reading list.