So thinketh one of our time travelers. The one who relives the past. Let there also be a traveler who seeks and conceives here in the dailiness of his lived experience a utopian future. As Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini note in their foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “Hope is work; we are disappointed; what’s more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of ‘this hoping’ is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a discharge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort” (x). The obstacle is a challenge we must both survive and surpass, Muñoz argues, “to achieve hope in the face of an often heart breaking reality.”
Category: Uncategorized
Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole
That song keeps resounding in my head: “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole,” the one a friend posted the other day. Is mine a whoring heart, too giving in its longings, too unheeding of its misgivings, too promiscuous in its affections? Now that the song has happened to me, various forces drawing it to me at this point in my narrative, I must attend to it. The song interpellates, hails its listener. One finds oneself drawn into a situation as one identifies temporarily with its “you.” And of course this stings. One doesn’t want to be a bloody mother fucking asshole. And we know ourselves to be more than that, as we identify equally with Martha: we, too, have been wronged. We, too, wanted to be good: “To do everything in truth.” For Martha is also the other Martha, the one in Luke 10:38-42, said to be distracted by all the preparations that she thought had to be made upon arrival at her home of Jesus and his disciples. The Martha in the parable, incensed by the sight of her sister Mary “sitting at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said,” complains “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Lord replies not unlike a bloody mother fucking asshole, gaslighting her, treating her like an hysteric, trying to hail her as one “worried and upset about many things” which, to the Lord, are of no importance, no concern, no consequence. “Mary has chosen what is better,” says the Lord, “and it will not be taken away from her.” Martha is wronged in this parable, and the Wainwright song can be heard as a kind of rejoinder. Wainwright said she wrote the song in reply to her father, fellow singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Hear Martha’s song alongside Loudon’s “Daughter,” a song he released two years after Martha’s, and one achieves momentary apprehension of the Rashomon-like nature of the totality: each of us a face of the one true thing. In a 2005 article in The Guardian, Martha wrote, “For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do […]. Especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can’t tell our side of the story. As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” One could imagine the Biblical Martha responding similarly to Christ’s fondness for speech through parable. Martha’s isolation and uncertainty are conditions she thinks are hers alone, things about which others of us cannot know — those of us in particular who, in our act of fantasizing, occupy temporarily the position of the asshole father character: Loudon, Christ, and yes, we ourselves, to the extent that we have ears that can hear. “You have no idea,” sings Wainwright in a wonderful riff on Dylan: “No idea how it feels to be on your own / In your own home / With the fucking phone / And the mother of gloom / In your bedroom / Standing over your head / With her hand in your head / With her hand in your head.” That “mother of gloom” line haunts me each time I hear it. For I, too, feel in my more wretched moments this figure’s presence. The feeling is one I know to be false and ungenerous in its appraisal of reality (the mother, after all, is as deserving of forgiveness as the rest of us) — yet I feel it nonetheless. Thinking analogically, we might read this mother figure in the Wainwright song as a variant of the Mary character from the parable.
Backstory
The backstory to the story is the story of the House on Shady Blvd. This is the past to which the author must return. He must tend to old wounds to enable future flourishing. Do we need a Time-Turner like the one used by Hermione Granger? Or is the Device that enables travel simply the trance-script itself? Does the author sift through unpublished entries from the past? Or have we gotten ahead of ourselves, trying to lead when what the story demands is that we let ourselves be led?
Friday July 2, 2021
Benedict Seymour’s Dead the Ends takes Chris Marker’s La Jetée as its Ur-text. Seymour’s film is a found-footage concoction, and thus incorporates much of the Marker film into itself. But Dead the Ends is also database art, as Seymour pairs these bits of La Jetée with their many echoes in subsequent time travel narratives (Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, etc.). These works that Seymour reanimates in Dead the Ends all feature romance at their core: lovers seeking each other across time. The narrator of my story, meanwhile, feels growing within himself some similar romantic core. It is there “in the belly of this story,” as Leslie Marmon Silko says of her novel Ceremony. I trance-scribe these texts in the time-stream of the paralogy, but they are words received from another timeline, spoken by a shadow-self whose desires led him West. Or not spoken by the shadow-self, but in dialogue with it. Trance-scribing is not the same as channeling. The shadow-self wants to access the acid diaries of Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. The shadow-self is headstrong — discontented — and then enlivened — reawakened — through an encounter with another. Whereas the paralogical self is a family man: loving father, loving husband. But grown weary from excessive self-silencing, and (given the nature of the karmic cycle) the expectation that he plod on and endure.
Thursday July 1, 2021
All of us are feeling it, the sudden shift in mood and content from one day to the next. Here we are trying to react to this new present. I for one haven’t any words yet for this funk that leaves me driving around weeping to Martha Wainwright midday. I’m supposed to suffer through this, is what I gather from the day’s intel. I’m reliving an incident from my past. Time travel prompts a return of the repressed. I’m here to revisit an old knot of sorrow: a scene of fantasy that ended poorly when pursued in the past. The hope is that in my behaving differently this time, we can heal.
Wednesday June 30, 2021
Without yet knowing in advance the form of this narrative, or even whether it is to be a story or a novel, this thing, this experiment in living theater that we’ve method-acted our way into — let us nonetheless speculate as to what it might mean and how it might happen. At minimum, it means a shift in genre. This Work we’re trance-scribing would become a fiction, a fantasy: something other than the author’s lived reality. This despite being tied indexically to that reality through its temporal adjacency. The world contributes, the world participates in the coming-into-being, the trance-scription, of the text’s episodes. It is to the rhythm of the day that the text is sung. What happens is: I realize I’m already in the alternate timeline. The shift occurred with the paralogy of “Wednesday January 6, 2020.” Publish as is and we can continue to remain in this timeline, thinks our traveler. Edit the date and we enter a timeline that occurred otherwise. Or so I imagine as I sit with the idea, the realization unfolding slowly as I water the plants in our garden. “Otherwise how?” I wonder. “What would happen?” We couldn’t know in advance, could we? We would have to become part of the experiment, like seed in soil, attending to the unfolding of each day amid conditions of precarity and love. Yet this we’ve already done by gifting ourselves the paralogy. Swapping the zero with the one would be like looking a gift horse in the mouth.
So begins the tale. Sarah green-lights the production and confirms my thinking about how to proceed. I go live with the paralogy intact mid-afternoon, and encounter several immediate forms of resistance. A troll, for instance, posts a comment proposing that the work has “hit a new level of faggotry,” while someone I care to know better sings out into the void of social media Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” On a more hopeful note, though, the room (acting collectively here as Greek chorus) replies by sounding the passing of Donald Rumsfeld. Have I succumbed to cruel optimism? Should I have proceeded to the “unknown unknown” of the one? Perhaps the Work moves toward personal and collective flourishing as the one and the many learn to live in fidelity with both love and desire.
Tuesday June 29, 2021
The time travel narrative presents itself as an opportunity waiting to be written. The narrator has been keeping an online blog: transcripts of daily or semi-daily marijuana trip reports. A lag has entered the cybernetic loop of life and text: the author has fallen behind in posting, publishing, beaming forward the message. He hasn’t stopped trance-scribing; he continues to write each day as he always has: longhand, in a series of notebooks. But analog jottings go digital a solstice apart from their occurrence. Thus it comes to happen that the author can edit or revise his account of January 6th. As he thumbs through the notebook and arrives to the day, he discovers a minor error, a curious slip of the pen. He’d dated the entry “Wednesday January 6, 2020“: a fictitious date. 2021 was at that point too fresh to have become a habit as a thing to write, causing the narrator to default unconsciously to the year prior.
Monday June 28, 2021
Friends, let us hold space and remember Cruel Optimism author Lauren Berlant upon word of their passing. “A relation of cruel optimism exists,” Berlant wrote, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). We are all in such relationships, are we not? “Speaking of grieving,” they wrote, it was in grieving French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard that Berlant “first saw optimism as the thing that keeps the event open, for better or ill” (viii). How does one come to recognize that one’s optimisms have become “cruel”? What is it that moves us out of ourselves? “A satisfying something,” they whisper. “An intelligence beyond rational calculation” (2). And we are here, we are caught in this “scene of fantasy,” we are in the throes of it. ‘Tis our present, our contemporary moment. And this moment is what Berlant calls an “impasse”: “a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward” (4). That is the genre of these trance-scripts, is it not? “The impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things” (4).
Sunday June 27, 2021
The day is a difficult yoga session writ large. I hold poses through tasks required of me: grocery shopping, lawn mowing, parenting. When time allows, I sit eyes closed and meditate. There is an alchemy in this working-through, this processing of desire. The day is the site where one practices care for an absent other. Come afternoon and suddenly it’s a pool day, world redeemed by popsicles and coconut bars. I rise up onto the surface of the pool and float there, big happy smile on my face as I imagine the act shared with another. My friend at The Alchemist’s Studio reminds me of a saying attributed to Vincent Van Gogh: “Yellow is capable of charming God.” The charm of that rhymes later in the day with “Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’),” the 21:24 B-side to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
Hassell passed away yesterday at the age of 84. After listening and giving thanks, I receive J.R.R. Tolkien’s St. Andrews lecture, “On Fairy-Stories.” For this is what we wish to write, is it not? A story about Faerie, “the realm or state in which fairies have their being.” As Tolkien emphasizes early on, “Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.” Tolkien also calls Faerie “the Perilous Realm” — the source of peril, I presume, having something to do with the realm’s magic. Faerie’s virtue lies in its capacity to satisfy various desires: “to survey the depths of space and time,” for instance, and “to hold communion with other living things.”
Saturday June 26, 2021
I throw myself into frenetic activity upon waking. Pitched and piqued, I do my to-dos: read a final paper; submit a change of grade for a student who took an incomplete; post a trance-script; water the garden; greet Sarah and Frankie as they wake. Passion wells up inside me as I let your love lift me higher and higher, old world giving way to the new. Books show up in the bins at Goodwill. I rejoice amid receipt of this voice, this chorus which I take to be the voice of my Beloved. In my ears, in my mouth, through all of my senses and modes of attention, through my every breath. Yet all is discrepant: for today Sarah and I celebrate seventeen years of marriage.
Trance-Scripts 