And today I finished a big new painting of the couple, and it’s called Night of Telepathy. I posted a draft of it the other day. Note that the picture now includes six little rats. They’re alien beings called jumbies. I’ll be talking about then below. Morton and Loulou met at a picnic in Louisville—the scribbly drawing above was my rough plan for the chapter about them. I got interested in the awkwardly drawn figures in the lower right corner of my drawing. It’s hard to draw that badly and childishly if you’re paying attention. Expression at a deeper level. Despite the labeled names in my original sketch, I now think of these two as being my characters Morton and Loulou. Looking for something new, I put theses two into a painting that I jokingly called “The Louisville Artist.” I’ve posted this image before.

So what’s up with those six little rats in my “Night of Telepathy” painting? Rats play an integral part in The Big Aha. I did a painting involving Loulou and a rat all the way back in February, 2012, when I posted about it. Not that I had any solid ideas at all about my novel then. The paintings really do guide me. And then I ended up writing Chapter One about a quantum wetware rat.

Anyway, the morning after their big Night of Telepathy together, Morton and Loulou are talking about aliens. Morton is narrating.

“I’ve always had a thing for space aliens,” I said, sidestepping a capped youth steering a roadhog limo. The six-legged pig had a depression on his back, with two rows of passenger seats. Funny that the limo had a chauffeur driver. An absurd luxury these days.

Loulou was still thinking about my remark. “If there’s aliens at all, the likeliest place to find them might be in the cosmic mind mode,” she said,

“How do you mean?”

“I always hear rustling and scrabbling when I’m teeping,” said Loulou. “Like there’s things that creep around beneath our reality.” I’m deeply into the notion of there being odd critters living behind straight-reality’s sets. Like rats on a sound stage. The unseen, ghostly Qwetland darters.

It would be too corny to have the secret aliens be bug-eyed-monsters in UFOs. Better if they’re tachyonic, subdimensional, crooked-beetle, spirit-like beings emerging from an alternate view of reality. “Mighty Mites From Quantum Land.”

Note that I’ve already written about these kinds of aliens as “subbies” in my novels Postsingular, and its sequel Hylozoic, and in “Elves of the Subdimensions” with Paul DiFilippo. The subbies relate to the quantum wetware thing of The Big Aha. You plug into the cosmic wave function and it’s wiggy. And you can get stuck in this merged state, you’re hearing the “voices of the gods,” you’re lost, talking to all the objects around you.

Scuttlers behind the baseboards of reality, yeah. I like to do a seen-from-the-corners-of-the-eyes routine about these Qwetland darters, or I might call them jumbies—creatures that live out in the analog mindspace. The heretofore invisible aliens whom, for whatever reason, we’re ordinarily unable to perceive. Those flashes of light you see out of the corner of your eye sometimes—those are alien beings.

Putting it differently, the jumbies can be figure/ground kinds of creatures—they were always here, but we weren’t noticing them. The word jumby, sometime spelled jumbee, is a Caribbean word for ghost. I remember my sister-in-law Noreen telling me about them in Grand Turk in the British West Indies. In the town of Grand Turk, they have zigzag boards on the ridges of houses called “jumby boards.” These are meant to keep those Qwetland darter spirits from alighting on your house like pigeons.
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