I often know not how to participate lovingly in time with family. So much of it descends into staring despondently at what others watch on television in garish consumerist disdain or at least ignorant unconcern for my personal preferences. The emotional and psychological investment in biological tribalism that I witness in members of my extended family seems superficial to me given their unwillingness to aid me out of my economic nightmare. How can I continue to pay to visit people who throw money around as the system through which they profit tramples me underfoot? Perhaps we just need to center. “When we are on center,” writes M.C. Richards, “we experience reality in depth rather than in partition” (Centering, p. 53). Richards knows that centering is a difficult process. It’s easier to say one will love one’s enemies than to do it. “How are we to love,” she asks, “when we are stiff and numb and disinterested? How are we to transform ourselves into limber and soft organisms lying open to the world at the quick? […]. Love, like its counterpart Death, is a yielding at the center…figured forth in intelligent cooperation, sensitive congeniality, physical warmth. […]. One gives up all one has for this. […]. One gives up all the treasured sorrow and self-mistrust, all the precious loathing and suspicion, all the secret triumphs of withdrawal. One bends in the wind” (54). The more I read of Richards’s work, the more I want to investigate the Gate Hill Cooperative, an experimental artists’ colony that was located in Stony Point, NY. Richards wrote Centering while living there from 1954 to 1964.
Month: January 2019
Monday December 24, 2018
“Do you hear a robin?” I overhear my niece asking her sister in the next room. Let us resolve to learn something new. Listen to Lee Konitz’s “Sunflower” and drink a Martini.
“The essential irony here,” wrote LeRoi Jones in response to “cool jazz” players of the 1950s like Konitz, is that “when the term cool could be applied generally to a vague body of music, that music seemed to represent almost exactly the opposite of what cool as a term of social philosophy had been given to mean. The term was never meant to connote the tepid new popular music of the white middle-brow middle class. On the contrary, it was exactly this America that one was supposed to ‘be cool’ in the face of” (Blues People, p. 213). Fair enough — but let us not make “existing to cast judgment on others” our middle name. Get out there, swept up in the joy of common, everyday, familial being with others. ‘Tis the season. Imagine in the circle of an eye a triangle of power. With one’s hands, weigh a series of geodes and prisms. Go for walks in a snow-covered neighborhood. Exchange presents. Sit by a fire. Recognize “modernity” as a trope that signals the emergence of the condition to which it refers. Those who use this term come to occupy an alternative temporality — a “temporal structure,” as Fredric Jameson explains, “distantly related to emotions like joy or eager anticipation,” where time fills with promise (A Singular Modernity, p. 34). The term generates an electrical charge, a feeling of intensity and energy. Think of it as a shock doctrine, a shock to the system, an electrification of consciousness.
Sunday December 23, 2018
With college basketball coverage silenced temporarily on my in-laws’ massive television, I settle in and watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. Gonzo the Great stars as the work’s author Charles Dickens. Christmas is a time of gift-exchange, the film reminds us. It ought to be a time of global Jubilee. In Leviticus, Jubilee is a time when slaves and prisoners are freed and debts are forgiven. But darkness is cheap, and the Scrooges of the world like it. Time for their minds to encounter chain-rattling dancing Marleys. Come, all ye Scrooges — there is much to see. I’m often deeply divided in my resolve regarding education and discipline. How does one make time for these meditations while parenting? It’s a matter to which mind is applied, I suppose, a gift of attention. Do it: wash some cookie trays and settle atop a bed in a pile of pillows and read hippie modernist poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards’s Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (1964), a book Richards published more than a decade after her departure from Black Mountain College. Through this book, Richards instructs us in how to materialize “as force in the world the unifying energy of our perceptions” (3). Discipline is something the book struggles “with, toward” (5). This is what allows it to express and convey a “whole person” — or as Richards translates, “mankind as many-membered being” (5). Richards asks us to contemplate a moral question: “How do we perform the CRAFT of life? How do we love our enemies?” (5-6). This craft requires discipline — though not a kind involving toughness, not a “tough love,” in the words of conservatives, so much as a “firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts” (9). I look forward to sharing Richards’s book in my course this spring and discussing her ideas with others.
Saturday December 22, 2018
Anthony Reed contributes to an understanding of hippie modernism in his essay “After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia.” He causes us to ask ourselves: By what means did hippie modernists intervene in reproduction of the hierarchies and contradictions of the dominant society, the oppressor, the Empire as it manifested in their moment? Intervention of some sort is necessary if there is to be positive social change, for it is by way of its hierarchies and contradictions that the Empire produces the shocked consciousness, the defensive ego formation that buries consciousness within labyrinths of ideology, so as to postpone recognition of the War in Heaven, the fundamental class conflict. Through deliberate pursuit of consciousness-raising, however, hippie modernists relaxed habitual thought and behavior mechanisms, and thus gained sight of and came to embody in certain of their lived actions, aspects of the world-to-come. But is this world-to-come merely a mythic future, an alternative to a more “authentic” world-picture, where all are enslaved to a tragic destiny? Or is the future always-already mythic, a metaphor used to enable choice of hopeful ways of being? “Outer space” was Sun Ra’s metaphor for this hopeful future elsewhere, though he fused it with recovery of a glorious Egyptian past, thus allowing release of it from any point of access within the established harmonic framework, no matter one’s time or place. I see the future not just in Sun Ra’s work, but in all who attempted to leave the game. See, for instance, the Dutch Provos and their “white bicycles” program. In the early 1960s, the Provos teamed up with a Dutch designer named Luud Schimmelpennink to create a system of sustainable transportation. They covered several hundred bicycles in all-white paint and distributed them around Amsterdam. The system is similar to today’s Bird scooters, but without any fee. “My White Bicycle” was also a song by UK psychedelic band Tomorrow.
Members of the band claim the song was inspired by the program in the Netherlands. Nazareth released a successful cover of the song in 1975. John Lennon and Yoko Ono can be seen posing with a Provo white bicycle during their Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam in March 1969.
Trance-Scripts 