Wednesday January 13, 2021

Let us hop in our rabbit hole and explore Internets gone dark. The Wayback Machine is more time machine than rabbit hole. Somewhere in that past that it stores on its hard drives is a clean, green cyberfuture awaiting reactivation upon retrieval. Other sites elicit collaboratively posited Objects From the Future. Both are desire-machines and means of production: tools for building and changing worlds. Friends, I suggest we get to it. When I think “Object From the Future,” though, the one that arrives is The Book of the New Alchemists. Let us see where we are. The poem by “my” that begins the book is an eerie one, is it not? Do psychedelics aid in reorientation? Can plant allies help us map our relationship to the totality? The New Alchemists teach the old Hermetic formula: “What is below is above; what is inside is outside.” For them, this means “the Earth is an organic being, itself in turn reflecting the life of the cosmos” (vii). The book’s foreword is by ecopsychologist Betty Roszak.