The change in mood or disposition is nearly instantaneous. I pause to investigate being, even as I continue to review sentences under my breath. I exist, take stock of myself and my surroundings, and then, following the way an exhale follows an inhale, I dictate silent sentences in response, the inner “I” reviewing words according to a learned social rubric. Once satisfied, I trance-scribe the results by hand into a marble, college-ruled Mead composition notebook. I establish these as conditions on which I work. Let all take note. Add to that the poetic cocktail of substances I ingest each day. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson, though, I remain quite the minimalist.
Rock stars, meanwhile, were Joan Didion’s ideal subjects, since they lived a disorder to which she could respond with horror, allowing the dissociative, detached bourgeois self to co-exist in a common story with its time. “The story unfolds,” Didion once said, “as you write it.” Personal phobias and superstitions intersect with the affect of one’s historical moment. One can tell and examine the story of one’s time. The emotional life of late capitalism. Illumination of peripheral detail. Corroboration of the aural through the gestural. There is, alas, a faint delay to be heard, perhaps equivalent to that which exists between an object and its shadow. We try to trust fully in life as would a singularly blessed and accepting child. We observe the embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude. When we look into the light, we’re rearranged, our faces melt, mountains become plains, a foot slips on a banana. It helps when we imagine ourselves in a library. Light shines instead out from behind a cloud; the crowd goes wild.
Trance-Scripts 