With college basketball coverage silenced temporarily on my in-laws’ massive television, I settle in and watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. Gonzo the Great stars as the work’s author Charles Dickens. Christmas is a time of gift-exchange, the film reminds us. It ought to be a time of global Jubilee. In Leviticus, Jubilee is a time when slaves and prisoners are freed and debts are forgiven. But darkness is cheap, and the Scrooges of the world like it. Time for their minds to encounter chain-rattling dancing Marleys. Come, all ye Scrooges — there is much to see. I’m often deeply divided in my resolve regarding education and discipline. How does one make time for these meditations while parenting? It’s a matter to which mind is applied, I suppose, a gift of attention. Do it: wash some cookie trays and settle atop a bed in a pile of pillows and read hippie modernist poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards’s Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (1964), a book Richards published more than a decade after her departure from Black Mountain College. Through this book, Richards instructs us in how to materialize “as force in the world the unifying energy of our perceptions” (3). Discipline is something the book struggles “with, toward” (5). This is what allows it to express and convey a “whole person” — or as Richards translates, “mankind as many-membered being” (5). Richards asks us to contemplate a moral question: “How do we perform the CRAFT of life? How do we love our enemies?” (5-6). This craft requires discipline — though not a kind involving toughness, not a “tough love,” in the words of conservatives, so much as a “firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts” (9). I look forward to sharing Richards’s book in my course this spring and discussing her ideas with others.
Author: trancescripts
Saturday December 22, 2018
Anthony Reed contributes to an understanding of hippie modernism in his essay “After the End of the World: Sun Ra and the Grammar of Utopia.” He causes us to ask ourselves: By what means did hippie modernists intervene in reproduction of the hierarchies and contradictions of the dominant society, the oppressor, the Empire as it manifested in their moment? Intervention of some sort is necessary if there is to be positive social change, for it is by way of its hierarchies and contradictions that the Empire produces the shocked consciousness, the defensive ego formation that buries consciousness within labyrinths of ideology, so as to postpone recognition of the War in Heaven, the fundamental class conflict. Through deliberate pursuit of consciousness-raising, however, hippie modernists relaxed habitual thought and behavior mechanisms, and thus gained sight of and came to embody in certain of their lived actions, aspects of the world-to-come. But is this world-to-come merely a mythic future, an alternative to a more “authentic” world-picture, where all are enslaved to a tragic destiny? Or is the future always-already mythic, a metaphor used to enable choice of hopeful ways of being? “Outer space” was Sun Ra’s metaphor for this hopeful future elsewhere, though he fused it with recovery of a glorious Egyptian past, thus allowing release of it from any point of access within the established harmonic framework, no matter one’s time or place. I see the future not just in Sun Ra’s work, but in all who attempted to leave the game. See, for instance, the Dutch Provos and their “white bicycles” program. In the early 1960s, the Provos teamed up with a Dutch designer named Luud Schimmelpennink to create a system of sustainable transportation. They covered several hundred bicycles in all-white paint and distributed them around Amsterdam. The system is similar to today’s Bird scooters, but without any fee. “My White Bicycle” was also a song by UK psychedelic band Tomorrow.
Members of the band claim the song was inspired by the program in the Netherlands. Nazareth released a successful cover of the song in 1975. John Lennon and Yoko Ono can be seen posing with a Provo white bicycle during their Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam in March 1969.
Friday December 21, 2018
The problems hippie modernists proposed to address through their prophetic interpretation of the future have not gone away at all. The violence of capitalism is still all around us. We’re living amidst crisis. We’re living together amid these challenges. Utopia has already been modeled for us; those who modeled it waved to us from the past and asked us to come join them. What are we waiting for? Let’s do it. Each of us struggle for Utopia. It’s the same story for every individual life. Let us imagine the hippie modernist vision as our collective future. The members of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture have prepared us for what is to come. These are the two levels of historical and religious allegory. They’re shouting, “Join us! Join us!” with great joy in their hearts, like the crowd surrounding the police car at the dawn of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, remembered via Berkeley in the Sixties. The image reminds me of Bosch’s famous work, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch’s triptych is the global-cosmic totality unfolding all at once. Think of it as the map of an ongoing, universally participatory Oculus-style MMORPG. It contains within its ambivalent central panel reality’s mysterious core. As audience members, we get to choose our own adventure. Is the air of perfect liberty an intoxicant or a solution to the riddle? In all of Bosch’s triptychs, one can read the work allegorically by viewing it — exercising perception — either sequentially, left to right, each life played out between Eden and Last Judgment, or in toto, viewed abstractly, like the Whole Earth from space. Atlantis is another era’s name for the West Coast. Time is a mere alteration undergone and endured by consciousness. Sun Ra saw this, broadcasting his music from “after the end of the world.” Let each of us create within ourselves a world-picture of like nature, and interesting things start to happen. Contain all elements within a magical-circular perspective and one has a world-picture, a cognitive map, functional on a level similar to ancient devices of such nature like the Tarot and the I Ching. All are devices allowing us to toggle consciousness from local, timely perception to perception of a kind able to observe constellations of meaning, one’s inner spinnings aligned with the timeless, universal spinning of the cosmos. Let us all find our places amid the stars even as now we race apart.
Thursday December 20, 2018
Hippie modernism reimagined progress as a great social loosening, a relaxation of former tensions and animosities in favor of joyful, wondrous being. An allowance for work to coincide with play. In consequence, when studying hippie modernist literature, one is immediately drawn to make comparison with the present. How do work and play relate in our lives today? What do we think we know about the hippies? What, if anything, do the terms “hippie” and “modernism” already signify in popular consciousness? Hippies are in some quarters remembered wistfully, in other quarters disdained. Suffice to say, stereotypes abound. Yet we can come to know ourselves better — our potentials, our hopes, our fears — through study of this as-yet poorly understood chapter in our recent collective memory. Let’s consult the evidence, and see what we learn from it. What was Chester Anderson’s conception of the situation in “Hippies in Haight-Ashbury,” a memo he distributed throughout the San Francisco neighborhood with his Diggers-affiliated group the Communication Company, or “com/co” for short? He interprets hippies as individuals exercising their right, held up as a basic principle of American society, to think and act in any manner they choose, so long as they don’t interfere with the rights of others. Anderson requests aid from members of the community: free housing as opposed to violent mass arrests. He ends with the prophecy, “This is an extremely serious responsibility. These students are in the process of shaping attitudes toward society, police and our governmental system. They are bound to be deeply impressed by what they SEE here, good or bad. They are watching the world today; they will be running the world tomorrow.” Anderson’s broadside hints at a Close Encounters of the Third Kind scenario: the teenage head as homo superior, led westward by Chariots of the Gods, Ghost Riders in the Sky. Look for resonances, associations, correspondences.
Monday December 17, 2018
Worry not: Look outward upon a radiant new environment loaded with hidden Easter eggs. Go out and listen. There is great peace of mind to be had by exhaling and breathing silently along a calm evening walk. I walk in wonder, staring up at chirping birds on lofty branches, a clear cold sky lit for sunset. “Breathe,” I tell myself, “and concentrate mind in the present.” It’s been a tiring past couple of weeks, this conclusion of autumn and entry into winter. To cheer myself, I throw on the Flamin’ Groovies album Teenage Head — but something’s off, the album fails to suit the mood. I fail to find in it the significance suggested by its title, minus that great line at the end of the song from which the album gets its name: “I’m a child of atom bombs / and rotten air and Vietnams; I am you / you are me.”
The band also released a single the following year, an anti-drug song called “Slow Death” — the same phrase used as the nickname for Substance D, the fictional drug in Philip K. Dick’s doper dystopia A Scanner Darkly. I wonder if Dick was a Flamin’ Groovies fan.
Sunday December 16, 2018
Such rich and various object- and person-oriented ontologies represented in the opening shots of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Class and racism are woven into the sights and sounds of the film’s riveting black-and-white portrait of a domestic worker in 1970s Mexico City. Social reproduction is an immense labor — and I worry that because of late-capitalist melancholia, I’ve failed in the past to adequately perform my share. History always felt distant, elsewhere than the level of personal destiny. And yet here we are, working to transform life into a source of poetry, a space of plenty, each day’s activity dealt with imaginatively. As Denis Donoghue says in his book on Yeats, “The idea of self-transformation is implicit in any Romanticism that takes itself seriously, where imagination is deemed a creative faculty and the self its final concern” (8). What is the alternative? The eternalism of the block universe, wherein “the Empire never ended”? Donoghue’s “penury of the given”? In that case, one might as well just announce oneself the Owl of Minerva, or the anima mundi, evoking via hindsight a universe of narrative “hospitable to miracle, the occult, and magic” (16-17). Of course, in the block universe, a thing matters only inasmuch as it must. Worlds ought instead to be listened for, their revealing sung. I aspire to serve not as an “erotic poet” like Yeats, but as what R.P. Blackmur called a “sacramental poet” — one who “respects the object for itself but even more for the spirit which, however mysteriously, it contains” (24). And to respect the object is not simply to belabor it, but to aid and await its realization.
Saturday December 15, 2018
The Whole Earth Catalog appears like a new thing again when viewed in light of psychedelics. Jim Fadiman peers out at me, as does Chester Anderson. I find myself wanting to hear Bubbha Thomas & The Lightmen’s Energy Control Center, spiritual jazz self-released in 1972, and a new tape of field recordings out on Alien Garage called Two Portraits by Kyle Landstra.
The more I study hippie modernism, the more I sense a path opening, reality acquiring arrows and post-horns as in The Crying of Lot 49. Lines of communication radically reorganize, and with them change the worlds they represent. The whole thing swings into focus as if it always existed that way, even though it’s been remembered and refashioned anew. “Shake the snow globe,” as Robin Carhart-Harris says, and “more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles” (as quoted in Pollan 320).
Friday December 14, 2018
Calling all Lacanians: assist me in grappling with the implications of the work of Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London — the cat Michael Pollan discusses in How to Change Your Mind. On the one hand, I regard Carhart-Harris as a justifier of hierarchy by way of the language-game “neuroscience”; on the other hand, I hear him reinventing the Freudian repression hypothesis, and with it, a way of theorizing the potential liberatory political effects of LSD. By ruse of reason, he thus lends capitalist-science ammo to the cause of Acid Communism. It’s as simple as telling a story and heads begin to change. A combination of new science and secret history. One can transmit alterations of consciousness via language. Spread by words, truth changes. This is the key linking psychedelic consciousness-raising and revolution. As Carhart-Harris puts it in the Pollan book, “a class of drugs with the power to overturn hierarchies in the mind and sponsor unconventional thinking has the potential to reshape users’ attitudes toward authority of all kinds” (as quoted in Pollan 315). We can use psychedelics to grow new organs and redraw cognitive maps. Heads are in this one sense, at least, what the Whole Earth Catalog people always said they were: tool freaks, evolving an anti-authoritarian brain chemistry into the nature of being. Tinker with the default mode networks of enough language-users and the world that we imagine to be received via the senses will appear transformed.
Thursday December 13, 2018
With its large, curtain-less, floor-to-ceiling window facing out onto a public street, my meditation room is a place of display, equal part studio and stage, wherein I perform and exhibit my daily being for others. It is in that sense much like these trance-scripts, which I imagine, by the way, to be a kind of Acid Communist variant upon the Prison Notebooks, the mind partaking in consciousness-raising and revolution while the body sits in a box. I know, of course, the absurdity of that comparison. I, for instance, lack accomplishment in any memorable, “world-historical” sense, unlike Gramsci, who headed the Italian Communist Party. My life unfolds in the long American slumber at the end of history, whereas the final years of Gramsci’s unfolded in one of Mussolini’s prisons. Did he, while “doing time,” as they say, ever abscond from the office of public intellectual? I hope he did. I hope he allowed his thoughts to dwell now and then upon the Self as consciousness and condition. Perhaps not, though. Perhaps he refused himself the luxury of “mere subjectivism,” as some of us might say—perhaps even “on principle,” as a “man of science,” his writing free of all trace of the personal. The moments I most admire in the Western Marxist tradition, however, are precisely the opposite: those “trip reports,” those brief phenomenologies of individual everyday being that we find, say, in Fredric Jameson’s report of his encounter with the Bonaventure Hotel in the famous “Postmodernism” essay, or in the confessional poetry in all but name of certain post-WWII French intellectuals like Sartre and Lefebvre. Devising a theory of Acid Communism will require a reappraisal not just of Gramsci and these others, but also of the so-called “Lacanian” turn, the late-60/early-70s moment of Althusserian Marxism in Europe and the UK, with its self-espoused anti-humanism and all of its other insights and peculiarities—all of this re-envisioned, basically, in light of the ideas and practices of humanistic and transpersonal psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof. Because today’s heads, after all, exist amid vastly different circumstances. Why look for answers in so distant and so marginal a past? By the time Jameson was writing the “Postmodernism” essay for New Left Review in the 1980s, revolutionaries in the US operated largely in isolation, affiliated in many cases with academic institutions, but no longer able to identify with the consciousness of a party. Where does that leave us today, those of us sitting at our windows, wishing to act up as an oppressed class? How does the singular monadic debtor household in post-Occupy USA (by which I mean “me,” the first-person author-function, the Subject of these trance-scripts) live intentionally? How else but by the yoga of writing and zazen—sitting through, enduring, persevering, so as to instigate change both in one’s own life-world and in the life-worlds of others.
Tuesday December 11, 2018
The stories we read and tell one another compose us collectively into an intersubjective multiverse linked by each consciousness holding up to the Other its mirror. Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is a hard novel to end a course on, hard because it contains so many prior horizons of psychedelic-utopian possibility in the uncertainty and despair of its narrative universe. I worry that the book inspires in its readers an excess of aversion to chemical modification of consciousness. The book is too unqualified in its denunciation of drug use; the book’s fictional Substance-D operates allegorically (most vividly via its street name “slow death”) as an emblem, a universal shorthand for every drug — drugs in general. Dick leaves readers without a positive alternative to the “straight” world’s miserly, hypocritical relationship to mental health, where “sanity” equals mind-numbing adherence to pre-established norms, and all are expected to board what Margo Guryan called “The 8:17 Northbound Success Merry-Go-Round.”
I prefer to focus instead on collecting recipes for a cookbook. The cookbook was a great utopian art form of the late 1960s and 1970s, from The Grub Bag and The Tassajara Bread Book to Ant Farm’s INFLATOCOOKBOOK of 1971. To my cookbook I add a recipe for “Vegan Cream of Mushroom and Wild Rice Soup” from the Food 52 website.
Trance-Scripts 