By traveling through mental circuitry, we open new avenues of action. We come back, and we’re not the same. We possess abstract shape patterns, like afterimages of fireworks. We feel out of it sometimes, asleep to our own reality. I don’t have to think; I just know things now, some of it audio-visual, like materials filed in boxes beneath the floorboards — the Id, the unconscious. But with this new knowledge comes the paranoid sensation that I’m still missing some crucial bit of knowledge possessed by others. Sure, one grants, as Jameson puts it, “the historicity of perception (and of the apparatuses in which it is registered, and registers, all at once)” (Signatures of the Visible, p. 3). But what then becomes of the Imagination? What is imagination’s relation to those historically generated forms known as the sonic, the visual, and the linguistic? Literary scholar R.A. Durr took the terms “psychedelic” and “imaginative” to refer to a “fundamentally identical power of apprehension, or mode of being” (Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience, pp. viii-ix). This imaginative power sends and receives codes. Like in a dream, a long dream. Prove it one can’t. One has to just trust it. The truth is a scenario that becomes by whatever means necessary. Sometimes, however, in order to work I need to perambulate. Get up and move, shake a leg. Jameson thinks absorption in the image results in the negation of thought. Let’s drink to that. Or let’s drink, at least, to the negation of those habitual forms of reason and judgment that dominate life in our time. Let’s drink as well to taking down “The Man.” This was the Yippies’ term for the present system of government. Capitalism has hollowed out reality. It’s been growing and spreading beneath us like a cancer. The characters will make the leap and defeat it, I imagine. But the author? One mustn’t say.
Category: Uncategorized
Monday October 30, 2017
“The mind attracts to one whatever the mind dwells upon,” reads a page I flip to in a college-ruled notebook pulled from the bins at Goodwill. The moon, waxing gibbous, pulled Sarah and I toward a Halloween party the other night. Appropriately heady, for sure, and with major magic. An altar-top arrayed with small bones. Conversations washed over me, though, to little effect. Appalachian Southern witches. Symbols of an arcane sort. It was the party of my coming out as a wizard. At one point, Sarah turned to me and read me my horoscope from her Witches’ Almanac. Apparently I’m on the verge of making a big decision which will “raise a lot of dust.” The horoscope also promised “nice aesthetics” this month. But as much as I enjoyed the care and attention to detail that went into the night’s revelries, Daphne’s death weighed solidly on my mind. It was hard to muster enough will to speak with others. Speaking of speaking: My students love to speak highly of their parents’ “hard work” launching pizza chains and amassing fortunes on Wall Street. Whenever I hear this shit, I think to myself: One could say the same about vampires. They, too, work hard sucking blood from their victims. But that doesn’t make them admirable. A hardworking vampire is still a vampire — and as such, deserves to get a stake shoved through its heart. And that’s how I feel about rich people. But I’m also no Van Helsing, so to ease my temper, I binge-watch the new season of Stranger Things. Eleven wanders alone in an Upside Down labyrinth. Thresholds between dimensions look like body tissue: uterine walls, placentas. The show relishes and savors the textures, tropes, and technologies of the 1980s. But it’s also fully absorbing in its sympathies and its use of outdated media to elicit a sense of the strange or the uncanny. New Age “psychic” or “telepathic” spaces — astral planes, other dimensions — these were very much a part of that era’s narrative universe. It’s a relief to watch a show that can once again broaden my sense of the potentials of genre. The latter, because sticky with the residue of an era’s affective investments, can reawaken phantom media antennae, exposing subjects to ghost sensations and histories half-submerged.
Sunday October 29, 2017
What kind of allegorical reality may we ascribe to the myth of the Demogorgon and the Upside Down? A flimsy one, no doubt. A world based on a memory of a mass-media simulation. The same bodies of the past eerily reprising the moment of their youth, despite the change of age. Historical time portrayed as a collective post-traumatic episode to reawaken a numbed sensorium. Capitalism steals away from us our toys. The cathected objects of some originary moment of fully immersive imaginative play. Those objects held the imaginative universe. Why can’t we restructure economic reality around play? Students transform into patients, their automatic writing assignments revealing to me as I read them clues about their psyches. When I contemplate the many towering structures arrayed against me, however, anger flashes through my skin and I find again my hatred for my “fellows,” my “countrymen.” What can I say? It’s a mixed bag. Most of the “work” in our society is mere busy-work, as arbitrary as the mining operations that anchor the value of Bitcoin. “Everyone’s running around, trying to get up off the ground,” sings Transcendental Meditator Rick Stanley, “for that same thing.” “TM is a technique for direct experience,” states the text on the back of his album Song of Life, “And the result of that experience is a showering of pure delight.”
Where is this taking me? Can I trust fully in my journey? These are questions I ask myself while in the presence of Stanley’s LP and similar such objects rescued from historical neglect. Archaic remains of the “New Religious Consciousness” of the 1970s: so promising at decade’s start, yet somehow stalled by Prohibition by decade’s end. “Go deep into silence, take your mind into silence and transcend.” Out we come with energy and intelligence. Big takeover, here we come. We mustn’t turn self-exploration, though, into a mere chartered trip.
Saturday October 28, 2017
“We’re embarking on an adventure,” I sing in the style of Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott on “The Boys Are Back in Town.” My ears seek out Daphne’s sounds. Her piglet snorts. Her heavy sighs. Her presence every day, every hour. Maybe she’s a cat now, like the one that walked up and allowed me to pet it in the sun on Thursday’s autumn afternoon walk. Or maybe she’s a falcon, perched above me in a tree. My friend, recounting her recent Vancouver experience, says, “Come on, Canada — grow a pair!” I need to get myself up there to visit Urban Shaman, a shop specializing in sacred entheogens. I take note of several other of my friend’s allusions and recommendations. Canada’s “Prince of Pot” Marc Emery (though I have no interest in his libertarianism). A band called Ancient, featuring band members Zod, Ursa, and Non (though not at all something I would ever listen to). Angie Thomas’s YA novel, The Hate U Give. Édouard Levé‘s Autoportrait, from Dalkey Archive. Christian Peet’s The Nines. Sarah and I pay our respects to Daphne by Airdropping photos of her to each other’s cellphones. “Look at her!” one of us gasps. “Such a beauty,” we murmur. How wonderful it is to live with others, growing old together, evolving into witches and wizards, entering secret orders and covens, watching Pere Portabella’s Informe General (1977), with its psychedelic soundtrack by Carles Santos. I seek exhilaration through return to the land, return to a space-time free from the dictates of capitalism. When one dreams, consciousness slips free of old kings and returns to all things. We’ll do what we must, shouts the teenage Oedipus, to seize back what is ours and what rightfully belongs to all. The right to grow whatever one’s head desires. I say that, but then I sit around stewing in a mix of anger, grief, and exhaustion. It grinds my gears when neurotypicals act so sure of their arbitrary mental constructs as to demean mine. A thought has still been thought, an experience experienced, regardless of he who is the sire of the world, He who is Om. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews. Re-roll and try again.
Friday October 27, 2017
I feel strangely related to the “Uncle Matt” character on Fraggle Rock, as if he and I were kin. “I’m traveling on my greatest adventure,” writes the bearded ethnographer toward the beginning of the show’s first episode. “So much to explore.” Part of me wishes to adopt as my handle from today onward the name “Traveling Matt.” After all, the first creature this character discovers along his journey into “outer space” is a four-legged beast named Sprocket. A light bulb goes on in my head: Fraggles are post-scarcity acid-heads! Characters like Gobo are like me. They seek advice not from the I Ching, but from a conglomerate entity known as the “Talking Trash-Heap.” Isn’t this similar to my use of the bins at the local Goodwill? (Trash-Heap, by the way, would be the Halloween costume to end all Halloween costumes.) Consider, though, the many psychedelic dimensions of Fraggle Rock: the Fraggles themselves are all stoners and acid-heads, their hair tie-dyed and frazzled. The Beast is asleep, whispers Gobo as he tiptoes past the upstairs inventor’s canine companion. Dogs, by some synchronistic logic, keep cropping up everywhere I turn. The show, I either realize or decide, is the script of my auto-psychobiography. I watched many of its episodes multiple times as a kid. Each episode begins with the mobile prosthetic consciousness known as the “camera-eye” gliding invisibly through the glass threshold separating exterior reality from its interior. Like Plato’s Cave Allegory, in other words, the show’s narrative unfolds across multiple levels. In Episode 2, a bongo-playing Fraggle sings about migration of consciousness via the magic of the jump-cut along that looped, ‘Möbius-Strip’ continuum that lesser minds divide into discrete domains denoted by the terms “here” and “there.” I know, too, from Brian Jay Jones’s biography that Henson “enjoyed a little grass” from time to time. Henson is also reported to have taken acid once, in the company of his friends Don Sahlin and Jerry Nelson — though he claimed in retrospect that the drug never took effect. Jones notes that the musicians featured in Henson’s short film Youth 68 praised acid’s positive effects when Henson interviewed them. After seeing Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane (the long-haired dude with the toy pistol) suggest, mid-film, that the baby boomers will have to “do an Oedipus on their fathers,” I believe it.
The book also recounts how Henson planned to create a psychedelic nightclub called Cyclia in the late sixties. The idea for it came to him, says Henson’s wife Jane, “during the first wave of psychedelia. Jim went to see Jefferson Airplane and he was very intrigued with it — the light shows and the psychedelic graphics.” The nightclub, which Henson imagined housing in a geodesic dome or an inflatable structure at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge, was to have walls, floor, and ceiling “broken into faceted, crystal-like shapes onto which films would be projected” (Jones). Alas, none of these plans ever came to fruition — but I like to think that there’s a parallel universe — an “outer space,” so to speak — where they did.
Wednesday October 25, 2017
Weed helps turn profound emptiness and sadness into lovers lying in bed reminiscing about old apartments, old friends and neighbors, in honor of one of the common threads running throughout the couple’s life together, their dearly departed four-legged companion. Daphne was our greatest collaboration. The one constant. The supreme embodiment of the life Sarah and I built together. The two of us never had the money to own a home or raise kids. But Daphne made up for those. Her bunny hop. Her reverse sneezes. The way she used to urge us to play with her by pushing tennis balls at us with her snout. She was a weird, wild, autonomous little being who nevertheless loved us unconditionally and, through her evolving behavior and personality, reflected back to us traces of our own. “Death is so fucked up, though,” as Sarah said on our way to a park yesterday. There’s no way of relating to death that feels appropriate. I can certainly understand how one could find comfort in the belief that consciousness persists beyond death — some part of Daphne, for instance, watching over us from above, audience to our existence. When I entertain this thought, Sarah sternly interjects, “But she’s not! She’s just dead.” But why are we Marxists so quick to condemn delusion? Since when has truth ever set us free? I’ll admit: when a copy of Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda turned up on vinyl in the bins at Goodwill yesterday, part of me was convinced that Daphne had gifted it to me to cheer me up.
I don’t see any harm in temporary alleviation of suffering, even if it comes via dream. For the latter open up vistas, abstractions of geometric space, into which minds may wander. The private language of the autopilot black hole. Sarah and I arrived at a realization along our walk. A new sense of the potential life we might live, were it not for debt. A new sense of the stakes of what might be. The challenge now will be to find a way to demand from reality the future we want, and to do so quickly, as clocks are ticking.
Tuesday October 24, 2017
We’re struggling, we’re grieving. Shit’s rough, y’all. This is what some call a “limit-experience,” an experience that, for theorists like Bataille, Blanchot, and Foucault, breaks the subject off from itself, exposing it to that which consciousness refuses or excludes. We can think of it as a testing of the limits of ordered reality. The latter is abolished and, as Peter Berger would say, “something terrifyingly other shines through.” Imagine it as the parting of a previously invisible set of curtains where once there was a wall. Relinquishing the words we have, we rediscover words we’ve lost. Sarah and I ended up having to put down our dog Daphne yesterday. Kidney failure, liver failure. Euthanizing her was the only way to ease her pain. Our final night together was excruciating, every few moments punctuated by a sigh or the peristaltic rumbling of an upset stomach. I would lie with my eyes closed watching a comet cross an inner night sky, when suddenly the dream’s plug would pull loose from me, and I’d be lying awake in the dead of night, listening to her whimpering, her labored breathing. How is she but a pile of ashes now, this companion of mine who loved and was loved?
Monday October 23, 2017
A colleague and I headed out into the woods for a brief weekend retreat, our shelter a cross between a tiny house and a cabin, loaned to us by a friend of a friend. But when I woke early yesterday morning, I learned that my dog — my companion of nearly 15 years — had fallen ill. Receiving a text from my wife about Daphne’s condition, I packed my things and rushed home, the world on the horizon reduced to a pure gray ambiguity as I stared intently at the road ahead. Eberhard Schoener’s Trance-Formation soundtracked my grief.
When the fog cleared, I witnessed a wake of turkey vultures picking at the remains of a young deer, the latter’s removal from the world of the living no doubt a consequence of some passing motorist. The destruction of alternative lifeways and nonhuman modes of being is an ineradicable component of capitalist reality. Look around: this system is cancerous. Unable to tolerate and coexist with radical difference. As I approached home, some algorithmic power operating through Spotify tried to console me by churning out 801’s cover of “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
“It is not dying,” Eno assures us, “it is not dying.” By mid-afternoon, Daphne’s condition had stabilized — but even now, as I write this, she lacks her usual appetite and seems confused and lethargic. It breaks my heart to see her this way, lying on her side, her face white, her tube-shaped dachshund body covered in lipomas and skin tags. She has a meeting with her vet scheduled for later today. My fear, though, is that he’ll say she’s in pain — in which case, we’ll have to put her down. All I can do in the meantime, I suppose, is kiss her neck, rub her belly, calm her, comfort her as best I can. I try to comfort myself by imagining episodes of We Bare Bears as conversations between the dog equivalent of Superego, Ego, and Id taking place within Daphne’s psyche. She and other wildlife dream the animal equivalent of proletarian revolution. Humor is the only way we can save ourselves from Seasonal Affective Disorder’s black pit of despair. So sayeth Broad City. It, too, spits up phrases suited to the tinfoil light of my condition. “Seratonin rising, dopamine flowing.” Ilana turns to Abbi and, making light of her proneness to depression, snarls, “So I get sick sometimes and need medicine — who cares?” The trouble is, I think of Daphne as being somehow a part of me — a link between me and my past — and I don’t want that part of me to die. Death is for me the destruction of all sense and meaning. How will I bear this loss?
Sunday October 22, 2017
Smoke from a neighbor’s fire-pit filled the air. It was a crisp autumn night. I sipped a martini at a local bar, Clover’s references to the Commune reverberating unexpectedly, creating an updated sense of reality. A friend sitting across from me explained the work he does as the head of a local food consortium. When I asked him how I might plug myself in and make myself useful, he directed me to read up on a project called Cooperation Jackson. These are the first steps, I think, toward the creation of the Riot’s successor. Another friend, improving my head in a different way, recommended I watch We Bare Bears. A third friend recalled for me “Transcen-dune-talism,” a spontaneous, off-the-cuff coinage of Clover’s referring to the weedy metaphysics distilled via the famous Frank Herbert novel. Speaking of weedy metaphysics: I spent last night getting stoned in the woods beside a campfire. Owls came and spoke to me. Crickets, mosquitoes. At times, a kind of pressure from all sides. The universe inspires an awe laced with terror. A push back into an attentiveness toward matters of survival. A becoming-responsible again with regard to one’s daily self-reproduction. I sat in a lawn chair thinking, “I haven’t really challenged myself like this since Boy Scouts.” Hiking, collecting wood, assembling a fire on which to cook one’s dinner. All mixed with an ambient apocalypticism. Reality augmented via the nightmare of precarious employment. We’ve arrived at the dawn of the idea of global imperial civil war. How are we to navigate our way in this ever more paranoid environment? Heavy self-scrutiny: perhaps the problem is that I was raised as a second-generation American suburbanite. I lack social skills, street smarts, wilderness literacy. I survive on pizza, french fries, hot dogs, burritos. How do I prepare myself for the Commune? Where does one even begin if one’s hope is to lay the groundwork for collective extraction from the formal economy? I look upward in search of answers, but (for better or worse), what I encounter instead is a night sky filled with stars.
Saturday October 21, 2017
I imagine myself as a plant hallucinating itself as a person. The goal is to become a tree among trees. But how quickly the mind turns toward work. I’m reminded of how easy it is to intervene through introduction of minor edits into my self-programming. But even here, my self-conception remains routed through some sort of menu interface of unknowable origin. People’s non-ordinary states of consciousness often utilize either human or non-human guides. Take the plunge, they say, into transpersonal consciousness. Create a climate and a method for healing from within. What is the point of devotion to the roots and the stem if not for the flower? Meaning is lost when we translate “maya” as “illusion.” See, for instance, the 1910 painting “Maya, the Mirror of Illusions” by Arthur Bowen Davies.
Stanislav Grof regards birth as a massive, personality-shaping psychodrama. I’m reminded of the saying, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” So how is Grof useful? He adds to our toolkit enabling integration of further transmissions from beyond. This is how one loses one’s chains and steps outside the construct. I managed to meet and dine with poet-critic Joshua Clover the other night. He’s someone I’ve admired ever since encountering his ideas about “edge-of-the-construct” narratives more than a decade ago in his book The Matrix. The part that isn’t Marx in me, however, is also heartened that increasing numbers of my students are incorporating mindfulness activities into their repertoire of daily practices. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” But fuck that dude — he gives talks to 1 percenters in Davos. “More ice water, please!” DSA’s role on a branch-by-branch basis should be preparation for commune-style declaration of independence from profit-production. If we go down, we go together. Genuine communist praxis involves pulling consciousness out of circulation and production, and directing it instead toward reproduction of oneself and one’s community.
Trance-Scripts 