trancescripts

Saturday February 15, 2020

It’s been several weeks since I last sat before the window for morning meditation in the room above the garage, facing outward, to the street to the trees to the sky. Meditation has instead become a yoga integrated into everyday life. This is election season, wealthy billionaire politicians throwing their money around to fill the air with lame signage as our cars and bodies zip around through outer space. Enough is enough! The time has come for change. Jerry Farber spells it out, tells it plain in his essay “The Student and Society: An Annotated Manifesto.” “Students can change things if they want to,” he writes, “because they have the power to say ‘no.’ When you go to school, you’re doing society a favor. And when you say ‘no,’ you withhold much more than your attendance. You deny continuity to the dying society; you put the future on strike. Students can have the kind of school they want — or even something else entirely if they want — because there isn’t going to be any school at all without them” (17). The problem, however, is that students lack consciousness of themselves as a class. They’re divided. Some of them continue to see school as a privilege. Hence the need for teachers — those outside voices who, like the character in Socrates’s cave allegory, return to the cave to free the others. If only I could assign Theodore Roszak’s book Sources, described in its subtitle as “An anthology of contemporary materials useful for preserving personal sanity while braving the great technological wilderness.” Roszak’s introduction points the reader back to Dwight MacDonald’s earlier book The Root is Man. These are important works within a largely forgotten strain of postwar thought: a kind of radical Marxist Humanism.

Friday February 14, 2020

Work load plus baby care plus seeking a home plus preparation for an interview and a job talk: it’s a lot. What is our dream home? Pool? Garden? Zendō? A base from which to launch on walks and dérives? A place into which one grows as a family. Space for growth. As I said: it’s a lot. All the same, I leave time in the evening for a walk beneath the stars. What will this house of ours look like? Will we know it when we see it? I have a large collection of books and records. The organizational models proposed by hippie moderns were loose and spontaneous — experience a kind of free play amid minimal “scripting.” The “tool freaks,” however, featured in the pages of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, focused instead on “personal computing” and videogaming, programming scaled to the person. The neoliberal order instantiated by these technologies decollectivized the body politic, reducing users to “islands in the net,” connected only by media mail and money. The housing market seems a bit like a game one must play once encircled by the system, ensnared in its webs of debt. Time to watch or at least save for later a six-part BBC series based on Brand’s book How Buildings Learn. Unless time is a thing better spent reading and sleeping — and it is, it is. There is a house out there that is right for us. Let us wait and walk and see.

Thursday February 13, 2020

A friend puts his house up for sale — a beautiful old craftsman, sizeable enough for a small family. We schedule a viewing and prepare ourselves in case we wish to make an offer. A bin full of discarded library architecture books turns up earlier in the day at Goodwill, including books from the 60s and 70s by Lawrence Halprin and Paolo Soleri.

Wednesday February 12, 2020

Huxley is a prophet, and with his final novel Island, he offers us a vision of redemption. Each of us is the island of Pala. Let us work together as allies. Youth for Bernie! There it is: let’s do this! “Uncover honey / where maggots are,” as Charles Olson prompted at the end of his poem “The Kingfishers.” We determine with the genres we teach different kinds of subjects. By assigning utopias rather than dystopias, we arrange for students to confront within themselves stirrings of hope rather than fear.

Monday February 10, 2020

Cartoon images play across the backs of my eyelids like the surface of a scramble suit, an animated sequence of metamorphosing characters and places. Then back to baby care. Sarah passes her to me. After some adjustment of my arms, I comfort her, her beautiful eyes gazing up at me. Thoughts turn to a song new to my ears: Fountainsun’s “Ripening Sheaves.”

Fountainsun is a music project featuring Fumie Ishii and Daniel Higgs. I saw Higgs perform with his band Lungfish sometime in the late nineties. I’ve remained a fan ever since.

Saturday February 8, 2020

Modernist art and literature gain viability — become possible — only when there are social movements afoot vying for control of the production of reality. Such was the argument Marshall Berman made in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is it not? (Book out of reach, I settle for Berman’s essay of that name.) He complains early in his essay of “primitivist romance” among his fellow former SDSers following the latter’s disintegration in 1969. He accuses these former comrades of nihilism and anti-Americanism. Berman’s views are silly; I bore quickly of his rash judgments. His admiration for Marx’s “developmentalism” leaves him cold to the pleas of Indigenous resistance movements and anti-colonialists like Fanon. Berman is no ally to those of us who demand an end to the money-form. His humanism excludes from its circle of care nonhuman relatives and kin.

Friday February 7, 2020

A crouched cat, rustling leaves, the blinking lights of a distant plane: these I encounter on a chill night as I walk about the earth beneath a large moon. The planet’s surface bathed in its light. I stare up at it in wonder (oh mysterious thing, so lovely!) before returning to the house, baby feeding hungrily at Sarah’s breast. The three of us go on a date: ice cream for mom and dad, while baby sleeps beside us in her car seat. F. wears a hat her aunt knit for her. As she and Sarah quiet and settle down for the evening, I enter the basement and listen to a recording of a guided meditation led by Chuck Pereda & Natalie Szendro, featuring music by Pulse Emitter. Time to practice Yoga Nidra.

Thursday February 6, 2020

Literature can be used to educate the whole person. Readings prompt studies of the psyche—studies of authors and characters as well as studies of ourselves. But these studies of selfhood and personhood can lead us—so long as we’re attentive enough, so long as we read carefully enough—from microcosm to macrocosm, from worldview to world. Consciousness of the cosmos and our place in it. They help us build cognitive maps, as Fredric Jameson would say. Intimations of who we are, what we are, when we are, where we are, how we are. Injustices are registered, confronted, acknowledged; we contemplate demands rightly made upon us by the aggrieved across history. Those amid us who are crying, let us comfort them. The maps may have differences, they may emerge for each participant individually, revelation and awakening scaled to each person; yet this awareness is of our commonality, revealed through our interactions as fellow Beings in dialogue over shared texts. As the Western Buddhist Beats who inhabit Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums would say, we recognize operating throughout history a “Brahman”—a common consciousness or common ground of Being manifesting among the particulars of identity and historical circumstance. Taken in aggregate, these manifestations tell a story, however paratactically—a narrative history of which each of us is a part. This recognition of our relationship to history can’t be put into words, exactly, other than by declaring as Charles Olson does in his poem “The Kingfishers,” “This very thing you are” (171).

Wednesday February 5, 2020

Announce “Bath Time!” and we roll into motion, baby calms down, extends her legs, toes eager to catch water sprinkled over her, squeezed from a wet hand-cloth.