Reality expands, splits along a seam, opening a path, a trail for bikes and pedestrians beside a downtown railway, linking formerly disparate parts of the totality. Cells and cell-clusters travel through veins beside arteries. The name of an appearing and disappearing cat scrolls across a screen. One can imagine universes suffused with entities of this sort, on whom one may call through performance of ritual, as in The Teachings of Don Juan. Among incalculable potential pathways through life’s labyrinth, I’ve wound up here, eyes scanning across rows of books. Let us make of our path a joyful journey. Planes streak the sky at twilight as I listen to Brett Naucke’s “The Vanishing.” Ignore the monorail and advance toward the glowing pyramid.
Author: trancescripts
Sunday March 25, 2018
Sarah and I listened to Ought’s “Beautiful Blue Sky” off their album Sun Coming Down while driving to see Godspeed You Black Emperor the other night, the last moments of sunlight shining through the rear window, warming the backs of our necks. Standing at the show afterwards, I wondered: “Who today are my countrymen? Who today stand opposed both to machines and to those who make them?” Recalling these thoughts now, I wonder: is the true power of witchcraft and sorcery their ability to provoke consciousness-alteration in oneself and in others? Those affected vape and dance despite their dehumanizing professions, as nonhuman nature finds its springtime groove. A television in the corner of a Chinese takeout disturbs my peace of mind with an infomercial hawking beauty products: some sort of ‘Cindy Crawford’-sponsored age-defying skin treatment super-serum. The ex-‘global supermodel’ collects a tax, even if just as burdensome interruption of one’s soundscape and field of vision. I’d rather lie around all day in a state of jouissance. Kicking up dust, reading old reports, watching The Godz, a short work by psychedelic filmmaker Jud Yalkut.
Saturday March 24, 2018
I busy myself with psychedelic reassembly of cultural memory. Reshuffle the game-pieces and remember differently. The Rajneesh community, occluded for so long, re-enters political consciousness. Our society, drenched in capitalist realism, has no way to conceive utopian aspirations these days beyond “getting from day job to dream job,” as reads the text on a billboard in my neighborhood. This is the great virtue of the Netflix series Wild Wild Country: it reminds us not just to dream big again, but to demand everything.
Friday March 23, 2018
Imagine reality evolving into the unthinkable of existing sets and disciplines. Call the results of this dream-work The Ones Who Follow: A Modern Mythology. The Jonestown Massacre lies on the outskirts of all ventures of this sort, utopian communities of joy derailed everywhere, cursed, denounced, undone. How might we again induce a change in people? How might we together achieve self-actualization, group-realization? As opposed to just repeating over and over again history’s pattern of conquest, domination through separation of people from their lands. The “altered state” is what we’re after. That phrase, in its various senses, is what we mean by our Utopia. Lovers as hemispheres, fused at the mouth, as in John Donne’s “The Good Morrow.” We’re trying to raise consciousness, awaken the sleepwalkers from their deadly slumber — beginning with ourselves if necessary.
Thursday March 22, 2018
A singsong routine occurs, a beckoning. Guided by voices, I advance, dreaming up games to be played, video-streaming services stocked with programs. Netflix takes the chill out of my basement with its new series Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneesh movement and its leader, the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho. With crowns come guillotines, says a woman onscreen. Seek instead gentle, meditative gardens, oases amid seas of people. Unless those people are white christian practitioners of settler colonialism, who “settle” with bombs and guns and then defend their stolen land with same, heaven forbid others achieve ecstatic union with other deities. The conservative christians are the life-haters, the pleasure-deniers of history. The ultimate invasive species — over the planet they lay their rule.
Wednesday March 21, 2018
Voices lead a roving imagination — let’s call it the camera-eye — on a tour of a menu screen leading to Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy in Turiya.”
Floating in a void, grasping at straws. I am but a mere vessel, like the “Black Panther” figure, multiplying into several semi-autonomous guises over the course of 1965 and 1966: first as the mascot of Stokely Carmichael’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization, then a second time on newsstands as a character in an issue of Fantastic Four (Stan Lee, the character’s creator, a fan of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception), only to return transformed into another political party, this time out in Oakland, the invention of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Hallucination? Spirit animal? Archetype? Fantasy? What is this product of mind that erupts synchronistically into reality, in what seems a coordinated manner — conjured, planted, determined, dreamt?
Tuesday March 20, 2018
Is everything I write about in these trance-scripts curated by algorithms? Let us go right through it: you think after all this time, something asking to whisper in my ear would be heard: the “Soul,” floating in an ocean of sound. What would be its message? Egg’s “Fugue in D Minor.”
The dramatic idea dissipates into confusion. Vectors in 2- and 3-dimensional Euclidean spaces. I want utopianism to triumph over unthinkable disaster. The truth of the matter is that divination falsifies whenever it imagines its hand on the rudder, as with Norbert Wiener’s helmsman. Human control systems. Instrumental reason. Intuition is more like reality reloading with updates, extra levels, bonus rounds. A cartoon ghost escapes from a head, exploring by taking the will of others as its guide. Data rate rises and falls. Terry Riley’s “Cactus Rosary” announces, “Some of my work has been altered!” Peyote rattles, aluminum pepper shakers. “Dead artist!” chant voices in unison. My inclination is to reach for a book.
Monday March 19, 2018
I think my talents are being wasted on tasks to which I’m ill-suited. Trigger mechanisms release pent-up energy. I stress constantly about work and finances. “One misstep and game over,” I tell myself. But then I smoke and walk through my neighborhood and find joy amid simple things: birdsong, observation of budding trees, conversations with friends. “Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle,” Leary once said. “Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.” People in my neighborhood are out relaxing on their porches, their time late in the afternoon and early in the evening theirs to use as they please, not just as it pleases capital. As bad as it’s gotten, I can still glimpse seeds all around me, particularly on weekends, of futures worth fighting for: utopias robust enough to house gatherings and partings, innumerable adjacent paths of solitude and community.
Sunday March 18, 2018
Compose mildly, humbly, yells a voice from ahead on the line. We of the chain gang. Every breath a guess, a near fumble. Conversations, dialogues, words assembled from channel-surfing, dial-turning snippets of televisions and talking radios. It’s as if the larynx, a highly sensitive vibrational surface, were suddenly set aquiver, collaboratively operated by self and other, floating among oceans of sound. Songs for breakfast, songs for lunch. Rapid montage sequences flit past. Like horseshoe crabs, we possess receptors useful for sensing changes in moonlight. I imagine a fictional universe, perhaps I’m programmed to do so, I’m not going to delve into agency, will, all that David Copperfield kind of crap. Rice Krispies crackle loudly as the childhood self leans his ear to a bowl of cereal. The inner voice speeds up, acquires greater proficiency. “My environment,” I tell myself, “has been carefully designed to draw me to this state of mind.”
Saturday March 17, 2018
“Say something warm, say something bright,” sing the words in my head. I concentrate upon lyrics to songs from an algorithmically-generated playlist, seeking sense amid chance. That sense arrives when thought begins to throb to the beat of “Beat” by Bowery Electric.
A reveal occurs: I see sacred geometries. Mind invents ideograms — first languages, perhaps — by abstracting experiences into memory-derived essences. Picture Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Escape from grim reality. Final thought of the day: Black Panther is thrilling in many ways, but the film’s imaginary resolution to real contradictions is one and the same with its backstory and founding premise: namely, the Vibranium-powered alternative modernity represented by Wakanda.
Trance-Scripts 