Thursday July 18, 2019

This is a story wherein culture learns to behave lovingly. Animated anthropomorphic cocktail glasses wearing party favors raise cocktail glasses while dancing at a party. Next thing I know, my eyes are open and I’m speaking unashamedly, meeting the gaze of the Other with an expression of goodwill despite the capital-relation that binds us and brings us together. No matter how we interpret it, we’re always here, called upon to occupy this subject-position on this phenomenological plane. Let us do so each day as best we can, drinking juice guilt-free. I used to worry that guilt was something I carried, like a sentence of unknown extent, causing me to cower in fear of a temporarily-absent-but-due-to-return “Big Other.” For those who have ears to hear, say the Christians, this Big Other has already expressed willingness to forgive—but only upon certain conditions spelled out by fallible earthly translators, emissaries, bearers of sacred word. Who could help but fall astray under such conditions? Let us accept their fallibility—theirs, as well as our own—as the essence of the message. For this acceptance constitutes a freedom, a horizon opened up before us, judgment stayed. To live otherwise would be to live in fear. I acknowledge I’m not much of a narrator. I wander, I digress, losing myself in forests and labyrinths, out of which I rise occasionally to otherworldly heights like a self-styled Captain Marvel. This is as it should be, I suppose, for the stories that save me aren’t the Christian ones. They’re the ones involving X-Factors and New Mutants, where latent powers and hidden potentials suddenly become manifest. The psychedelic experience arises alongside this mythos. The world we live in is the one where the change already happened. For better or worse, human societies have birthed a new era of augmented consciousness, have they not? There’s something apocalyptic about the event itself, a kind of veil-lifting — the arrival of a new phase of history. Suddenly we’re in the worlds of Grant Morrison’s Supergods and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. (Another name for all of this, perhaps, is the Anthropocene.)