Category: Uncategorized

Saturday March 7, 2020

A neighbor broadcasts at a faint volume a punk song while birds sing in the trees. I sit at an old weather-worn picnic table, out of the center of which grows a cute tuft of fungi. Onto a table of another sort, a virtual turntable, I drop Foodman’s Dokutsu EP and rouse myself to help others. It needn’t be a trial. Yet part of me, stimulated by electronic nervous system, wonders, “Where’s the fun? Where’s the joy?” Roger K. Green’s book lands me into new territory: Leary and Alpert’s Castalia Foundation, named after the society that serves as the fictional setting for Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. It also appears to be a town here in North Carolina — though too far from me to be of much use. The Hesse novel is one I wish to read so as to better understand the psychedelic utopianism of Castalia and Millbrook. It seems to have had upon Leary and Alpert an impact as great as Huxley’s Island. Reading it must be like opening a door and going through it and then always going back out again. Intentional passivity as a form of action.

Friday March 6, 2020

We need to talk about Allegory, don’t we? I go for a walk, through cold and wind, birds above my head. Signs, symbols, myths, images, all arranged in synchrony. An elaborately constructed meaning-system — meaning not just in a structural but in a personal sense. Today, for instance, a student produced a Vietnam-themed reading of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” with the song’s writer Grace Slick finding in Lewis Carroll’s White Knight and Red Queen the superpower protagonists of the Cold War. And here I am this evening, reading Roger K. Green’s A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics. It’s messy stuff — but that’s what happens when one’s mind manifests. Books feed back upon their readers, each person’s expansion of consciousness contributing, in however mediated a fashion, to the education of all.

Thursday March 5, 2020

At a desk covered in objects — stacks of papers and books; horizontal arrays of napkins, paper clips, highlighters markers and pens — I sit and work: teach, meet, read, write, converse with students. Around and behind me, dense stacks of books and records, artifacts that store and transmit stories and histories, recordings of events, theories, philosophies. From these, I build my teachings, dialogical investigations of life through study of literature. The America revealed in this literature is a place filled with stories of injustice and resistance. Conquest, slavery, wage slavery. And like a thread run through it, the revolution, the ongoing one, the perennial one, the fights for freedom, equality, love among all persons and joy to the world. The works we read and discuss implicate us — as victims, as perpetrators, oftentimes as both — in a violent, fascist, capitalist-imperialist, patriarchal settler-colonialist system of domination — a system radically at odds with the future integrity of Earth as biosphere.

Tuesday March 3, 2020

It’s a daunting task: trying to talk to one’s colleagues about consciousness. Is it a quality? Is it a substance? Do we wield it — or is it the nature and seat of our being? And what is its relationship to this sphere of action known as language? Consciousness trance-scribing itself for others. I want to say thought, consciousness, language, narrative: all are simultaneous, intermixed. I walk around, stare at three orange and white daffodils beside a small creek. Water runs across rock as a runner runs past as cars drive past, the world a series of concentric rings through which consciousness vibrates, even as with a body, with fingers typing on technology, words are produced. It all happens temporally and simultaneously. Consciousness is what allows us to perform these tasks. We move among sights, sounds, movements, actions, words, interactions with other beings. But then I also wish to say that consciousness is an awareness, a state into which one awakens gradually and intermittently amid cycles of sleep. We can put ourselves into better states through achievement of consciousness. Lukács uses the term in this sense in his book History and Class Consciousness. And for many Marxists, this achievement is to be sought against a backdrop of “false” consciousness. In a racist society it can transform into what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” And of course it’s what second-wave feminists addressed when they organized themselves in the early 1970s into consciousness-raising groups. How does one say this for friends and colleagues? I practice the yoga of baby-holding while simultaneously listening to birds and crows, contemplating a solution. A way of saying, so as to facilitate shared awareness. What is this thing, this abstraction, this manifestation of mind that persists amid disruptions?

Monday March 2, 2020

We bounce, you and I, you draped Sphinx-like across my chest, beside books like The Streams of Consciousness and Expanding Dimensions of Consciousness. I think about the career of Ray “Raghunath” Cappo: from lead singer of NY straightedge hardcore band Youth of Today to yoga teacher, jiu-jitsu fighter, and Hare Krishna monk. Ray’s lyrics for Youth of Today connected with me for a time as a teen. Some projection, I suppose, of a path I sought. Tough-guy jock masculinity refashioned via Eastern spirituality. Whereas nowadays I prefer to listen to “Hallogallo” by NEU!

Saturday February 29, 2020

What are we to make of Tommy Orange’s There There, with its story of a Powwow interrupted by violence? Why is that the event where the book’s interlinked narratives connect? Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, as is his character Dene Oxendene, a young documentary filmmaker collecting stories from Native people in his hometown. Dene is thus a version of Orange himself, allowing the novelist to comment metafictionally about the politics of representing one’s community, particularly when one is a member of an oppressed people. Can the one allow the many to speak? Can the many speak through the one?

Friday February 28, 2020

Time to choose candidates. Time to get out and vote. Exercise hope. The left has been in defeat for fifty years. Time to take power, so that all of us may wield it in common, in the Tassajara sense: “(we’re really one, not two), / […] / (we’re really two, not one).” It’s just us and the dough — ripening, maturing, baking, blossoming together. As Edward Espe Brown writes, “everything is asking this of you: / make full use, / take loving care / of me.” When we concentrate and give our best effort, he explains, “everything is deliciously full / of warmth and kindness.”

Monday February 24, 2020

Flying Start turns up in the bins, the second album by the Blackbyrds, the group Donald Byrd assembled while the head of Howard University’s Department of Jazz Studies in the 1970s. Curious, I look up info on the department — the first of its kind, established in 1970 “to preserve and perpetuate jazz through instruction, performance, and research.” From there, I’m off reading about a Beatles song released in 1968 called “The Inner Light,” the lyrics of which, written by George Harrison, paraphrase a portion of the Tao Te Ching.

Then onto the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, as described by Stewart Brand in his 1972 piece for Rolling Stone magazine, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”