Uncategorized – Page 102

Tuesday February 27, 2018

An illustrated snake crawls across a two-dimensional background and forms a magic circle. A title sequence: a dolphin’s head punctures the surface of an ocean oranged by a setting sun. Guitars and drums kick in. Fireworks light a night sky. “No more clouds, no more rain,” sing Lal & Mike Waterson, as if to invoke a triumphant god on their pagan masterpiece, “Bright Phoebus.”

Let us interpret these deities, at least for the time being, as guiding passions that produce distinctive outcomes and inner states. Let us associate one such state with medicine and healing: to this, we sing our paean. Doors open onto an endless regression of doors.

Sun Ra appears, says “Time is officially ended. We work on the other side of time.” A plant sprout seeks sunlight against a blur of browns and grays. I run my hands through my hair and sense around me to gauge my whereabouts. A desert island — or rather, a detailed simulation of one. Wind chimes, palm trees: a beachside cottage. Purple clouds above a tree line steeped in shadow. Archetypes guard the gates between levels and worlds.

Monday February 26, 2018

I practice silently the names of plants in my neighborhood. Star magnolia, tulip magnolia, hyacinth. Rows upon rows of daffodils. A massive weeping cherry tree atop a hill. The first-person perspective shots in Maryam Goormaghtigh’s Before Summer Ends fuse me in an unprecedented way to a trio of Iranian male protagonists, vacationing on the coast of France. By these ways, we forge new ties, bonds, interests, empathetic capacities, across and despite traditional national-linguistic boundaries. Alas, life runs through our fingers; let us make haste in our imagining a beyond. Screw in the corners of a hammock. Relax, lie back, light up, read a book. Lincoln in the Bardo comes to mind. It and High Maintenance present themselves as clue-bearing reference points within a secret network, a kind of “Head Underground.” The joint effort of assembling art from jointly sent and jointly received sets of signs.

Sunday February 25, 2018

Sarah and I tour Faculty Drive, a street that sounds like a Monopoly property. Faculty Dreams Boulevard, lined with mid-century modernist ranches and fields of daffodils. I recall and make use of a recently acquired distinction between war ecologies and plantation ecologies. What are some of the consequences today of the American South’s history of slave plantation monocultures? I appreciate the hollow rumble of an empty plastic water bottle as wind rolls it across an Einstein intersection. Eave’s “The Night of The Burning River” shocks me into a state of wakefulness.

I indulge my tastes with caramels and chocolates. Narratives open rifts onto radically heterogeneous worlds. Of different kinds, degrees, or dimensions. Reconciling these worlds with the combination of first-person and third-person perspectives needed to access them is the great challenge facing the student of consciousness. Modification of sense organs causes modification of experience, yet the self is something else, persisting eternally in a dimension of dream. This dimension is as foreign to experience as are the worlds of players from the worlds of their games.

Saturday February 24, 2018

Electrified guitar strings reverberate in concert with windblown grass. I cross my arms, jut out my chest and lean back into a park-bench. When the sun appears from behind a patch of clouds, I raise my face to greet it. When others walk past on a sidewalk, I pick up my phone and make myself look normal. Nothing here, folks. Continue with your day. BTW, thanks, all of you anti-humanities STEM folks. This is a really great world you’ve created for us. Compulsory labor in support of nominally profit-driven capture of tuition dollars by layers of administrative bloat. They house us in square-plot rent-extraction prisons. Students, when asked about culture, know only the debased form it takes in lousily-acted young adult TV dystopia snoozefests like The 100. Better, thus, to withdraw and to agitate. Inhale while listening to Lea Bertucci’s “Patterns for Alto.”

As the 23rd hour of the 23rd day approached, shit got witchy. Additional synchronicities involving the number “23” cropped up, as did stories of witches. Let us conjure, let us legislate. Adjust the speed of the present with ADT’s “Unlimited Self-Service.”

Fearsome cat god mask lifts from the face of a female figure skater. To her side, applying commentary, sits the critic: the alien with the pulsing brain.

Friday February 23, 2018

After 15 years of teaching, all I can say with confidence is that education dooms itself to the circular reproduction of an empty formalism the moment it becomes compulsory. To extract myself from complicity with these and other compulsions, I walk alone on a sunny day, and whenever else the spirit moves me, listening to “Catfish Blues” by Alexander.

Crows and squirrels appear into consciousness and greet me on my way. As I crest a hill, I imagine myself happening upon a serene alpine lake. Plants offer me high fives, along with other, as-yet-unnameable signs of congratulation. Aye, crow, I hear ye. Greet me here in my true guise, the god of layaway and roustabout. Itinerant wanderer, upswept in a quest narrative that, through its inward-pointedness and self-invention, defies the tropes of conquest-oriented heroic fantasy. I look down at a pile of papers I’m supposed to grade and wonder, “Why am I here, again?” “Before being a worker,” I exclaim, “I am a person, perplexed by an alien imposition, the compulsion to work. Why should I complete tasks imposed by others, given this society’s open, gun-brandishing contempt for the only freedom that matters, the freedom from want?” To my students who complain only of Isis, of terrorism but not the terrorism of capitalism, I want to reply, “Relax. You are a non-subject, a non-event. A non-player character. History operates despite you.” Other students, thankfully, mine included, are organizing as we speak. OUT OF THE SCHOOLS AND INTO THE STREETS.

Thursday February 22, 2018

I wonder sometimes about the ongoingness of declared feeling that results from the ritual nature of these trance-scripts. According to Thee Psychick Bible, though, ritual is “the concrete expression of experience…the foundation of awareness.” Ritual is the only way to approach the ideal of a complete and coherent cognitive map of experience. But do we need such a map? For what purpose? I consider abandoning communication altogether after skimming Henry Flynt’s execrable essay “The Psychedelic State.” Are proponents of “Ordinary Language” or “Natural Language” philosophy always as arrogant and as petulant as Flynt? Author, you are no proper author. Time relays itself into an ontological structure shaped like a cantilevered staircase. Weed-huffing is a healthy, low energy way of moving between floors. One is lifted. Consciousness spins itself off into spontaneously assembled wisps of trance-script, a consequence of subject-object entanglement.

Wednesday February 21, 2018

Walking has been a theme of late. Sarah and I on a walk delight in a burst of edgeworthia that edges a sidewalk in our neighborhood. Walking brazenly onto our campuses, meanwhile, alt-right groups push, harass, assault Marxist professors. Let us care not that these self-styled “alphas,” the members of white supremacist organizations Kool Kekistani Kids (KKK) and Identity Evropa, think us “betas.” What care we what they call us, as this mind-murdering culture of ours steers us into a setting sun? Let us rally, though, to demonstrate solidarity with those comrades of ours who have been assaulted in their places of work. Darkness now. Binaural beats transport me to enchanted lands, where voices sing to me with flute solos and light percussion. Waves are heard crashing, seagulls crying. A violin and a cello duel one another as per the anxious pace of animated film composer Carl Stalling. Lightning-quick odes to speed. My mind, hanging like a weight behind the back of my head, hears snippets of voices interspersed with the sound of a finger compressing a rectangular plastic button on an old car stereo. Did the flickering lights of old video game cabinets stimulate Dreamachine-like hypnagogic states? Video games and cartoons: because of how, when, and where I was raised, these are the languages of my unconscious.

Tuesday February 20, 2018

I light up and contemplate Gaussian Curve’s The Distance, a version of contemporary ambient that I want to like but can’t. Too clean, too relaxed, too untroubled in its appreciation of the Muzak-oriented end of the Windham Hill catalog. Painfully aware of the modularity of my sonic environment, I discontinue The Distance and replace it with Shirase by Bonie Jash.

Without further warning, I receive ‘Ken Burns’-style slow zoom montage sequences: associative chains within a cavernous virtual environment. Each of us possesses a language-shaped map of the totality. Purple core memory units rotate around axes as virtual cameras race across space. As localized points of awareness, we drift without external points of reference, voices buzzing, chattering, asking, “Is this you?” Do I wish to imagine myself in the likeness of Nick Bottom? Are we all just minds awaiting absorption in tales told by imaginary tellers, metanarrative actants of our own desire? Bottom faced the dilemma faced by psychonauts. He had “a most rare vision…a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1: 202-203). If these dreams are past wit of man to say, what then of these trance-scripts? Can a spirit search a dream that hath no bottom?

Monday February 19, 2018

“And…(wait for it)…we have liftoff.” Sarah and I, toward the end of a beautiful, sunny afternoon walk through a park, arrive upon a patch of ground covered in a thick carpet of green mosses ornamented with tufts of lichen. Elsewhere on our way we cross paths with dogs, runners, old men operating radio-controlled aircraft, mountain bikers conversing in a forest. Our hunger for time outdoors not yet sated, we stroll the neighborhood, kneeling to admire newly flowering purple crocuses. Like Ginsberg to Carl Solomon, to ashes I whisper, “I’m with you.” Live ambient pick-up. Voices popping high in the mix, ignored, give way to shouts and clanks. Rattling chains. I close my eyes and persist nervously in an unpredictable sonic universe. Flotation tanks allow us to question not just what Erving Goffman called the presentation of self in everyday life, but the nature of the self in the absence of sensory input.

Sunday February 18, 2018

Writing while high is a bit like trying to describe a sense beyond words. One would need formal devices — spinning Hypno Disks, entrancing patterns and rhythms. One could soundtrack one’s walk beside a curved, moss-covered wall with Equal, a cassette-sized aggregate of “electro-acoustic clicks, knocks and bumps” by Ecto Mist, released this past summer on Genot Centre.

Ecstatic, transcendental and magickal bliss. Or one can feel real awe tinged with fear by walking outdoors listening to Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka. Defy western culture’s ban on new ontologies. Fashion for oneself a homemade version of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine. For more on this device, see John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Experience.