My Odd Link to Apple Coder Bill Atkinson (RIP)
BrownTrout published this book by Atkinson in 2004. Seven writers, including me, riffed on Atkinson’s photos of cross sections of rocks.
HOBOKEN, JUNE 11, 2025. Bill Atkinson, a legendary coder for Apple, died last week. Atkinson wrote software for desktop interfaces and other features that “made computers easier to use,” as his Times obit puts it.
Atkinson and I have an odd connection. Here’s the story:
In the early 2000s my buddy Robert Hutchinson, who ran a book imprint for BrownTrout Publishers (which mainly sells calendars), pitched a project to me. This guy named Bill Atkinson, a former Apple engineer, had invented methods for shooting and printing super-high-resolution digital photographs. Atkinson used this tech to photograph cross sections of petrified wood, opals, agates, meteorites and other rocks. Atkinson’s photos of rocks’ innards were fantastical, other-worldly.
Robert came up with the idea of a book that would pair each of Atkinson’s photos with a literary riff by a science-y writer. Robert asked if I would contribute to the book, I said sure. Robert signed up six other writers: Diane Ackerman, Philip Ball, Andrew Revkin, Dorian Sagan, Tyler Volk and David Zindell.
I ended up writing nine essays and a poem. Atkinson wasn’t thrilled with some of my takes on his photos. He thought my allusions to nuclear bombs and scary DMT trips were morbid. He found my response to a slice of petrified wood especially offensive and ordered Robert to cut it. Robert convinced Atkinson to leave all ten of my pieces in.
BrownTrout published Within the Stone in 2004. As payment I got a copy of the book, and Atkinson mailed me a mounted print, which he signed (bottom right), of his photo of a “matrix opal” on which I’d riffed. I had that print framed, it hangs in my living room. Here is the matrix opal followed by my response:
SYNESTHESIA
In Desert Solitaire, nature-loving curmudgeon Edward Abbey demands that we see mesas, cacti, clouds not as signs denoting something else but solely as themselves. This is mystical vision, in which our cognitive filters fall away, and things shine in their naked glory. Supposedly. But our brains persist in thwarting pure perception. Our neural circuits are so tightly packed and interwoven that even the simplest percepts reverberate throughout our lobes, evoking memories, metaphors, analogies—whether or not we want them. Synesthesia is a particularly literal outcome of short-circuiting between sensory pathways: you see the opalescence of your lover’s sigh, hear her scent as a distant flute, feel her gaze feather your belly. Bereft of neural crosstalk, we would also lack language, art, music, mathematics—all our modes for making meaning and sense, and of imagining. We would be trapped in the point-like prison of the here and now. Shouldn’t we celebrate--rather than suppressing—the innate flightiness that propels our minds back and forth through space and time? And isn’t seeing one thing in another—thou art that and so on—a mystic trait too?
Within the Stone wasn’t the only gig that Robert Hutchinson got me to do for BrownTrout. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Robert heard me jabbering to our neighbor Frank Geer, pastor of a local Episcopal church, about that terrible day’s theological implications. Robert ended up publishing a dialogue between Frank and me: Where Was God on September 11?
Below is a photo of me (left) and Frank Geer (right) signing copies of Where Was God as our maniacal editor Robert looks on. The date is June 9, 2002, the place Garrison, New York, where we all lived. Suzie Gilbert, then my wife, took the photo.
My marriage ended in 2009. Robert Hutchinson died in 2021. His death haunts my most recent book, My Quantum Experiment. Frank Geer died in 2023. And now Bill Atkinson is gone. Within the Stone and Where Was God on September 11? are out of print, but you can find copies for sale online. We die, words and photos endure.
Here is the riff of mine that Bill Atkinson found offensive and wanted to cut from Within the Stone, followed by the photo of petrified wood that inspired it:
THE PETRIFIED MOTHER
In 1999, on a drizzly afternoon in Basel, Switzerland, I found myself wandering through an exhibition called Anatomy Art, which consisted of scores of human corpses that a German anatomist, Gunther von Hagens, had preserved in epoxy and posed in whimsical ways. The “Chessplayer” hunched over a board, his body flayed to highlight the information-processing network formed by his eyeballs, brain and spinal column. The skinless “Runner” was captured in full stride, scarlet muscles peeling away from his limbs like streamers. “Reclining Mother” sprawled on her side, bathing-beauty fashion, a window cut into her belly to reveal the eight-month-old fetus curled within. Van Hagens had skinned her skull but left intact her nose, lips, eyes and eyelids, fringed with lush lashes. Terrible, that final touch of femininity. And yet once the reflexive horror subsided, this tableau of birth, life and death was strangely soothing. Gazing past her quick, noisy audience, the petrified mother seemed at peace with her plight. She, after all, had attained what eludes the most disciplined yogis and roshis: perfect stillness, perfect silence.
Further Reading:
Not sure what counts as “Further Reading” for this column. If you want more by me, check out “About Cross-Check,” which lists (and links to) all the columns I’ve published on this website. And here again are links to Within the Stone and Where Was God on September 11?