Authority? Do you mean the pinnacle of order, as in “the market”? Or do you mean “realms within”? Lunch yesterday at a fast-food chain placed me in proximity to cops and military personnel. I imagine this as the universe’s way of suggesting that I go vegan. It also recommends, through the intermediary of a friend, that I read Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia — whilst listening to Swedish progg group Träd, Gräs & Stenar.
Note that the left-wing, anti-commercial “progg” movement, despite remaining mostly unknown in the United States, whips the pants off of what we think of here as “prog rock.” Spice things up with a shadow protestor throwing a Molotov cocktail. A squirrel jumps into frame and disrupts the leaves out of whose shadows leapt the protestor — promptly causing me to land back into language. “Vår Vila,” thou art such stellar stoner high drama! News from nowhere. Follow through with the explication, darlin’. Lamb, described by W.C. Hazlitt as a lover of “the Indian weed,” is in many ways my spiritual countryman. My new goal in life is to act like a capybara. “Poor youth!” cries Coleridge, as if reaching an arm across the centuries to console me, “who scarcely dar’st lift up thine eyes– / The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon / The visions will return!” Such, at least, is my hope. I imagine a primitive neural network undergoing routine maintenance, followed by a reboot. To Coleridge I reply, “Light that sucker up like a Christmas tree!” We live happily ever after in worlds built from memory, proclaims a tombstone. Is that my frightened existentialist self (a part of me I prefer to keep submerged) trying its best to imagine a best case scenario for an afterlife? The no-longer-there is still there: in the mind. The point of consciousness that operates upon, while remaining ontologically distinct from, the body, its avatar. Reality gets weirder — inflates again. Bewilderment gives way to a smile. Let us aspire to write something as great and divine as Lamb’s “Dream-Children: A Reverie.” Lamb’s chess-master, planned-ten-moves-out sentence structures are marvels; one savors their unfolding. That essay is definitely one I wish to include the next time I teach my “Psychedelic Lit” course.
Trance-Scripts 