Friday September 29, 2017

“Stop! You’re embarrassing me!” says the exasperated mall-inhabiting eighties teenager to his mother. “Ma, get away from me!” There were just these ludicrous situations. She was like a little kid, dancing to the radio in her punch buggy blue Volkswagen Beetle. Always with the perm and the giant sunglasses. I miss those early years of childhood; I remember much of it with great fondness. I loved strolling invisibly back then through bits of the visible world. Others probably think of me as one who dwells too much in the past — stiflingly so. Keep tossing, a voice advises, until you get to one you know. There used to be a thing called leisure-time — though it was never entirely free of fears of bombs and missiles. How foolish it now seems to have believed in theological niceties like “progress.” Whereas now, things that matter are being gunned down by police, pulled out from under me. I fixate on grievances, I harbor grudges. Like, permanent 24/7 hex against those who delete my comments — that’s right, my evil eye is trained on YOU, motherfucker. Good for a minute, next bit. You’re done. And like, my dog, who pees on the hardwood floor just to spite me. There was once a time when words had meaning. I lived in their midst. The best medicine, though, is to “relax and let go.” Dance a bit, loosen limbs and neck muscles, allow oneself to be drawn upward toward reconciliation with the dog. When I see her lying in bed, I feel panic: what if she’s given up, what if I’ve lost her? I also learn about “chemical poetics” and studies of trip report literature.

Go to archives, I tell myself. Explore correspondence between early psychedelic pioneers. Watch as faces get photoshopped in, reporting hypnotically from other dimensions instructions for the evolution of consciousness. “Come here: I found it, see?” proclaims an onscreen scholar. Look up Beat poet George Andrews and his letters to Leary in the 1960s. Leary, too, is an important figure to study. There’s a rich, vast psychedelic literary network to add to our histories of late modernism and postmodernism. A whole field has begun to coalesce around the study of this network. By which I mean, check out Psychedemia, a documentary about a “Psychedelics” conference held at University of Pennsylvania in September 2012. Neşe Devenot appears to be one of the field’s leading scholars. Should I start calling myself a psychedemic?