We've all wondered what we would do if we could live our lives over again, knowing what we know now. It's easy to imagine, but the actual result might be far different than we may think, or wish.... In 1972, Bob B. Pilhaus is a radical, 24-year-old surfer/hippie/intellectual, a cultural refugee, a lost soul, desperately searching for meaning and peace of mind. Stoned and alone on a train to Biarritz, looking for relief in some soothing, autumn waves on the Bay of Biscay, BP tries to ingratiate himself with a beautiful woman in the dining car--a French-Canadian, ex-fashion model named Esmeralda. There is far more to her than it appears, though, and Beep makes a bargain he lives to regret, never dreaming that time travel could be so easy, or that growing up again could be so tough....
I have always been fascinated by the Really Big Questions, the ones with no clear answers. Who am I? Why am I here? What is this thing we call "the world?"
I have wondered for many years about the true nature of 'time.' I was always taught that it is a fourth dimension, a fundamental element of duration embedded in the fabric of our three spatial dimensions--the "space-time continuum," but is there more to it? The ability to perceive time is certainly not as straightforward as our perception of space. I began to wonder if human consciousness might evolve at some point to include a sense of time as complete and unambiguous as that of space, allowing us to understand and even manipulate it in similar ways. This notion became the basis for the character of Esmeralda, the heroine of my novel.
My purpose in writing this book was inspired by a passage in the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko's A Precocious Autobiography--"Poetry, if it's genuine, is not a racing car rushing senselessly around and around a closed track; it is an ambulance rushing to save someone." I believe in the old saying that "The message is what separates a story from a lie."
Most of all, I wanted to fashion a story that would both entertain and inform, while eliciting some self-examination of the reader's most closely held beliefs. I fear that the conflict between science and spirituality has reached a serious state of impasse in our world, with severely unproductive consequences. We have scientists declaring religiosity as delusional, and Christian fundamentalists denying the factual evidence of evolution. Jewish and Christian believers are aligning against radical Islamic fundamentalists in a spreading, worldwide conflagration. I am struck by the parallels between the Vietnam War and our current conflicts in the Middle East, and wanted to use a narrative set in the social upheaval of the 1960s counterculture to point at the recurrent hypocrisy, materialism, corruption, and malaise of our American social and political reality.
As a lifelong surfer and student of physics, philosophy, and cosmology, I utilized an underlying theme of surfing in Beep!, presenting a unique view into that majestic sport for the uninitiated, without promoting the usual, one-dimensional, "Spicolian" characterization of the surfing life, and included an "element of the strange within a context of the familiar" which was a hallmark of Franz Kafka's work. It is a story of hope and redemption in the end, leading to a climax which attempts to reconcile spirituality and science, mind and matter, in a way that I hope may help us find unity and peace. We desperately need to achieve the kind of understanding that can deliver us from our notions of separateness and annihilation. As John Muir said: "Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe."
Aloha,
Stewball
