Author: trancescripts

John Dee, as Imagined by Derek Jarman

Among the more fearsome of the precursors to what follows is John Dee, the great Renaissance spymaster, court magician and inventor of the British Empire. Filmmaker Derek Jarman is just one of several artists to have made much of Dee in recent decades. In fact, Dee appears repeatedly throughout Jarman’s oeuvre. We first meet Dee, for instance, in Jarman’s 1978 film Jubilee, where he operates as a kind of early-modern Doc Brown. At Her Majesty’s behest, the Dee of that film works up a spell that sends Queen Elizabeth I 400 years into the future–i.e., to London in the age of punk. And what begins in Jubilee continues in the films that follow, with Dee cropping up again the very next year by way of Shakespeare’s famous magician character Prospero. The latter wields a wand modeled upon Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica in Jarman’s adaptation of The Tempest (1979). Nor is this the last of Dee’s appearances in Jarman’s catalog. He also turns up as muse, for example, in a film named after Dee and Kelley’s famous scrying experiments, The Angelic Conversation (1987). Nor was Jarman alone in thinking highly of Dee. The latter captured the imaginations of several of Jarman’s contemporaries. To mention just two examples: Dee appears as a character in Michael Moorcock’s Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen; and comics artist Alan Moore wrote a libretto about him. For Jarman’s own reflections on his interest in Dee and in related topics like alchemy, see his memoir Dancing Ledge.

The Three Sisters

“I love the future when I water my garden,” muses the Traveler, hose in hand.

Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches of the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. Planted together in early May, these three veggies grow well in close proximity and form the core of indigenous agriculture.

“I continue to love it. I continue to long for it and lean toward it,” admits the Traveler. “I welcome it without apology, despite what comes to pass.”

“Mmmm,” replies the Narrator, savoring the taste of a tomato. “As do I.”

“I love it and open myself toward it,” continues the Traveler, eyes closed, recalling futures past, “as when I open my heart and mind to the sounds of Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future and Emma-Jean Thackray’s Yellow.”

Narrator places an arm ’round Traveler’s shoulders, leans close and whispers Prufrock-style, “Let us go then, you and I.” He smiles, pats the Traveler’s shoulder, and steps away. “But first, another of these lovely tomatoes.”

Repeating the Encounter

Time machines are devices that permit movement between two or more modes of production. Yet the consequences of this movement vary, dependent as they are upon the nature of the traveler. Wells’s traveler is rash, brutish, given to frenzies, where he bawls “like an angry child” (34). In his behavior toward the people of the future,

he repeats the Encounter

and takes the Other

for a fool.

Afterwards he reprimands himself, councils “Patience,” and tells himself, “Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all” (37).

“Like the flapping of a black wing”

I record a voice memo, pleased as I am with the wordless sounds of cicadas and a niece playing with water in a toy sink in my in-laws’ backyard. Mood alters, though; weight returns the moment I consult Facebook. The latter brings upon its users an atmosphere of bad feeling. “Glunk” goes the sense-board. My father-in-law cooks up delicious pastrami sandwiches (red onions, pickles, provolone stacked on kummelweck rolls, the latter a regional specialty here in Western New York). Mood enhanced, I utter thanks to the chef. Eyes closed, I open them again onto Wells’s The Time Machine. The Time Traveler sees the Dreamachine flicker of day’s interchange with night “like the flapping of a black wing” (18). Days flicker past in much the same way here, as one scrolls through these Trance-Scripts. Take comfort, though, reader: for as the Traveler explains to those caught up in his journey, this unpleasantness of moving “solstice to solstice” merges at last into “a kind of hysterical exhilaration” (Wells 19).

Time Out of Joint

“The Time Traveler” (as since Wells we’ve come to speak of him) lapses again into an introspective state, “his lips moving as one who repeats mystic words” (The Time Machine, p. 5). The sight of Tokyo 2020 here in summer 2021 perplexes him.

Is that you, intrepid Unconscious, telegraphing via Internet-of-things to say, “Time is out of joint”?

Gratitude

for all who move

and all that is still

on this world that spins

for plants that grow up poles

tendrils running

skyward through metal

silhouettes of birds

for the wow of each day

last night’s full moon in Aquarius

genres that allow us to receive our fellow beings.

Gratitude, too,

to the goldenrod

and the Queen Anne’s lace

and the wind in the trees.

Gratitude to all who care for the garden

and report of its flourishing.

Gratitude to the cosmos,

the great human and nonhuman multitude,

manifold persons and beings

gathered here

aboard Spaceship Earth

and Beyond.

Pickings

I’ve been purchasing books, expanding the library with pickings from used bookstores. I step away midday and peruse the shelves at Small World Books in Rochester. 30% off everything in the store, so I come away with quite a stack. Christian Bök’s ‘Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science, Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle, Ishmael Reed’s Chattanooga, William S. Burroughs’s The Western Lands. Robin Wall Kimmerer reads to me “A Mother’s Work” from her book Braiding Sweetgrass as I drive. Ponds and lakes can be made swimmable again in our lifetimes if we attend to them. Let circles of care widen to take in all.

Jamberry

Jamberry is an audio-visual tone-poem that riffs on the American Dream-State and its history. It sings the raft down the river, the one containing Huck and Jim from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — only it follows the raft’s progression (reimagined as a canoe) well beyond Twain’s time. Huck and Jim plunge over a waterfall, enter a time tunnel and drift prophetically past trains into outer space. Moons, rockets: they’re there on the page, Jamberry thus possessing a kind of “space flick plot,” like the one referenced by Black Arts poet David Moore (aka “Amus Mor”) in the opening minutes of Muhal Richard Abrams’s “The Bird Song.” Traveling across time I recall Raistlin Majere, the mage who adventures to the years prior to the Cataclysm in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance novels. Books that delighted me when I read them as a kid. Afrofuturists like Moore see in the space flick plot a means of escape. Chariots and arkestras part the waters and lead the righteous ones to Zion.

The Bird Song

I receive the gift of a solitary afternoon at Durant-Eastman Beach in Rochester, NY on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The stretch of beach across from where I park is closed, so I walk to the right toward an anchored sailboat. Along the way, I discover a seagull lying dead in the sand. I hesitate for a moment upon sight of it, and in this act of hesitation offer it my condolences. Giving it wide berth, I continue on my way. A dune buggy crawls past and retrieves the bird soon thereafter. Setting myself down into a beach chair, I stare out toward the horizon and long and pine for an unknown unknown. Desire’s many-tendrilled, dendritic — stopped only by awkwardness on account of fear. Speaking of fear: pitbulls on leashes get in scuffles mere feet from my feet. Female owners yank at the leashes until, calmed of whatever caused them to behave as they did, the dogs are allowed to lay together again in peace. Waves crashing I give listen to Muhal Richard Abrams’s Levels and Degrees of Light (1968).

There it is, as if in answer to my ministrations: “The Bird Song.” Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart recommend it in their book The Hundreds. The authors collaborate through “hundred-word units or units of hundred multiples” (ix). The form of their book emerged through obedience to this capacious, generative constraint. Words set toward description of affect-events through scanning of object-worlds for vibrant tableaux. I feel adjacency to this form. “Everyone has their own version,” they write, “of the glimpse of a long-forgotten realm of possibility suddenly intruding into the real like a splice of light captured in a photograph” (9).