Author: trancescripts

Wednesday March 27, 2019

The communes of the 1960s were utopian experiments — attempts to develop better ways of living. Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s short memoir Heavenly Breakfast provides participant observation and reflection from within one of these experiments. The communes were like irradiated psychedelic seeds thrown to the winds, each free radical allowed to evolve its own local variety, its own distinct mutations, each one searching for alternatives that might survive and thrive. Most communes failed: some because of fundamental errors, others due to an unlucky set of contingencies. Yet here and there, some survived. This process needs to continue. Broad, grassroots social experimentation will have to begin again, picking up where Hippie Modernism left off. And those of you who wish to be cutthroat capitalists — you must allow radicals the space, resources, and freedom from violence to do so if the species is to adapt to the new planetary environment.

Tuesday March 26, 2019

When I wake at 2:40am, fresh in my mind are a set of dreams. I visit some sort of gathering or festival on a farm or a fairgrounds in the company of two childhood friends (who from this point onward I’ll refer to as R. and J.). J. asks us to accompany him to a chain restaurant. R. is skeptical, J. apologetic (“you don’t have to come along,” he says, “I’m just hungry”). I try to mediate on J.’s behalf, explaining to R. the restaurant’s location in relation to places we all visited during childhood like the United Skates roller rink. Elsewhere, perhaps in another dream altogether, my mom lays giant white sheets out in the bedroom of my childhood home, only the second floor of the house is airy and open, with huge, tall windows — some entirely different structure from my home in waking reality, but one that to my dream-self seems entirely familiar. Somehow that segues to a shoot for a music video: maybe something my dream-self watches online, starring a contemporary band covering a song from the 60s, pretending to tear down an old door to hang a large antique mirror with an angel head sculpted into the top of the frame. Someone who looks like a minor acquaintance of mine but who my dream-self understands to be Timothy Leary’s son Zach appears in an interview for the video, as does a local artist from the town in which I currently reside. One of them explains to the interviewer, “I guess I’m waiting for some new judgment, hoping that that era didn’t just die out, you know?” When I wake to pee, I immediately associate the doorway with the Siege Perilous, a portal between worlds featured in a series of X-Men comics that I read as a kid. When I wake again at 4:30am, another dream lingers. Walking through a large circular home with friends and family, waiting for some band from the 60s to perform, I carry a wooden folding chair that transforms over the course of the dream into a beanbag. As I tell my aunt and uncle about other large circular homes that my dream-self claims to have visited in California, a large dog comes bounding over and tries to wrestle the beanbag from my hands, jumping up and licking my left ear, causing me to flinch with fear, at which point I wake with a start. A final dream remembered upon waking at 6:20am: Sarah and her parents purchase a nice, large house for us with large, overgrown grounds, and while Sarah tours me through for the first time (the house already having been purchased without my knowledge), Mick Jagger shows up and we sit around on the couches in the living room and burn a bunch of wooden knick-knacks in the fireplace. Afterwards, perhaps unrelated to the rest of the dream, Sarah races a bunch of kids around a hotel pool and playground, with an alcohol-infused friend providing advice and encouragement to help her across the finish line. Songs running through my head upon waking include “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”

Saturday March 23, 2019

I sit listening as a neighbor in an adjoining yard plays an accordion. Hey Mr. Accordion Man, help me remember my dreams. I meditate upon a finely detailed ancient wooden eye staring up into my third eye from my back deck. I appraise it from several scales. Sounds come buzzing, whistling, bowling, crackling: conversations, motors, animals rustling in an underbrush, signal-pulses of birdsong. Seven to ten minutes and then I’m off for an evening of fun with my fellow thirsty nuns and monks.

Friday March 22, 2019

Start the words, talk the talk, let it rip. Listen to the music. Dare to eat a peach. “Years ago, my heart was set to live,” as go the opening words to Big Star’s “The Ballad of El Goodo.” And here I am all these years later, holding on. Tulip magnolias and weeping cherries. It is time to write to St. Christopher. It is time to commit to love.

Thursday March 21, 2019

Time to delve into Cosmos as a first-time viewer, even if the series is some sort of anamnesis, some remembering of the one by the one. Who is this charioteer who captains our journey? We are all space brothers and sisters, soulful star people cruising around in outer space — can you get with that? The voice of Reason beams via television satellite into the Library of Alexandria, and just like that, we begin to communicate across time, in many languages, awakening into freedom. From Alexandria, the General Intellect pulses consciousness out into space. Time to do something, we say to ourselves, with our knowledge of the cosmos. As Sagan’s series shifts into a second episode on evolution of life through natural selection, however, it begins to sound grossly eugenicist. I hear June Tyson singing in reply, “It’s after the end of the world. / Don’t you know that yet?” I keep wondering to myself, “Where is phenomenological reality? When and where is consciousness? Who is the ‘you’ hailed by Sagan’s speech?” By the show’s astrology-debunking third episode, I’m nodding off, in search of better dreams. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Sagan’s philosophy.

Wednesday March 20, 2019

“Space is the Place” plays at a low volume, at the back (as opposed to front and center) of my thoughts, though in fact it’s one of the most bracing performances I’ve ever heard, while I reflect on my mixed feelings toward my discipline’s fondness for jargon.

Don’t get me wrong: I like it when my colleagues gather and talk texts. But I prefer birds whistling from treetops. Along with assists from the other elements of human and nonhuman nature, the evening orchestra performs its polyphonic improvisation — with me there to observe and to listen in surround sound in the hollow of a glade. Through these acts we teach each other. As we pull together, we expand each other’s capacity to sympathize and finally to love. I am describing an effort to bring about a fundamental change in “reality” itself, which is to say, in ideology.

Monday March 18, 2019

I steal away from work midafternoon and watch Space is the Place — the original 64-minute version. I think of it as an act of study — perhaps even what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “fugitive planning.” Ra imagines a colony in outer space free of the white people of planet Earth. “Equation-wise, think of time as officially ended,” he explains early in the film. Once time is ended, he says, we “teleport the planet here through music.” Sun Ra’s jazz is the sign-system equivalent of a riot — and when the Overseer comes ’round to make him pay, Ra holds up a card, casts a spell, relocates the confrontation elsewhere, into the Space Age, technic surrounded by void. Through his music, Ra creates “a multiplicity of other destinies.”

Sunday March 17, 2019

Sarah and I went for a lovely evening run last night, listening with shared expressions of wonder as a triangle of barred owls hooted at one another from the treetops above our heads. Old-school beat, MC says “Do it!” Only it’s that bearded longhair Jerry Rubin declaiming Scenarios of the Revolution. In my ascent toward a center of light, the song of a cardinal. I open my eyes and see beautiful animal friends eating and singing from branches in the sky above me. One sends down signals, so I grab and place out for it an offering: a pair of blackberries. I place them out for all who come here wanting.