Uncategorized – Page 53 – Trance-Scripts

Thursday February 20, 2020

The yoga of everyday life. We get by with a little help from our friends. By committing ourselves to hope and good will, we help raise a joyful State. A State of Love and Trust. Let’s start what we have come into the room to do.

Tuesday February 18, 2020

Back to Aldous Huxley’s Island, with its Pacific island utopia, the society of Pala, intact despite the “conspiracy” narrative that weaves through it like Muchalinda, the King of Snakes, whose tree the Buddha is said to have sat under. The lesson, we might say, is that “People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten” (239). For Muchalinda cares for the Buddha, shelters the Tathagatha “from the wind and the rain” (238) for the duration of his sitting. Huxley offers the story as a eupsychian alternative to the West’s Eden narrative. Each of us is an island and a world — like Turtle Island — and our time here can be blissful, saved by the Third Noble Truth if we so allow that there is a cure. The prescription for this easing of suffering is laid out in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Each of us has within our grasp the power to live as do the Palanese — because each of us is the Shipwrecked Westerner washed up on Pala’s shores like Island‘s protagonist Will Farnaby. If Will can be educated and changed by his encounter with Pala, then so can we. So can all of us. Microcosmic resistance can have observable macrocosmic effects. Millennials outnumber boomers. Go, Bernie, go! Let us put our educations to practice and change the world. “War is over, if you want it,” as John and Yoko sang, with backing vocals by the Harlem Community Choir. No more war on Natives, migrants, women, children, workers, planet. No more war on ourselves.

Sunday February 16, 2020

Kerouac built his fictions by spontaneously traveling, interacting, playing, and living amid his circle of friends. I join Sarah to help bathe our daughter for the moment of enjoyment and calm each night known as Bath Time. An embryonic journey followed by reenactment of birth. F. cries a bit afterwards upon exit from the bath, until dry in her terry-cloth robe and her pajamas, relaxing off to sleep. Life is a bit “multi-modal” at the moment, attention spread across a plurality of events and tasks. Do Make Say Think. The daily patterned by its many persons. Sarah has been solid and loving and supportive through all of it, pep talking, building me up buttercup, lifting my spirit when I’m down.

Saturday February 15, 2020

It’s been several weeks since I last sat before the window for morning meditation in the room above the garage, facing outward, to the street to the trees to the sky. Meditation has instead become a yoga integrated into everyday life. This is election season, wealthy billionaire politicians throwing their money around to fill the air with lame signage as our cars and bodies zip around through outer space. Enough is enough! The time has come for change. Jerry Farber spells it out, tells it plain in his essay “The Student and Society: An Annotated Manifesto.” “Students can change things if they want to,” he writes, “because they have the power to say ‘no.’ When you go to school, you’re doing society a favor. And when you say ‘no,’ you withhold much more than your attendance. You deny continuity to the dying society; you put the future on strike. Students can have the kind of school they want — or even something else entirely if they want — because there isn’t going to be any school at all without them” (17). The problem, however, is that students lack consciousness of themselves as a class. They’re divided. Some of them continue to see school as a privilege. Hence the need for teachers — those outside voices who, like the character in Socrates’s cave allegory, return to the cave to free the others. If only I could assign Theodore Roszak’s book Sources, described in its subtitle as “An anthology of contemporary materials useful for preserving personal sanity while braving the great technological wilderness.” Roszak’s introduction points the reader back to Dwight MacDonald’s earlier book The Root is Man. These are important works within a largely forgotten strain of postwar thought: a kind of radical Marxist Humanism.

Friday February 14, 2020

Work load plus baby care plus seeking a home plus preparation for an interview and a job talk: it’s a lot. What is our dream home? Pool? Garden? Zendō? A base from which to launch on walks and dérives? A place into which one grows as a family. Space for growth. As I said: it’s a lot. All the same, I leave time in the evening for a walk beneath the stars. What will this house of ours look like? Will we know it when we see it? I have a large collection of books and records. The organizational models proposed by hippie moderns were loose and spontaneous — experience a kind of free play amid minimal “scripting.” The “tool freaks,” however, featured in the pages of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, focused instead on “personal computing” and videogaming, programming scaled to the person. The neoliberal order instantiated by these technologies decollectivized the body politic, reducing users to “islands in the net,” connected only by media mail and money. The housing market seems a bit like a game one must play once encircled by the system, ensnared in its webs of debt. Time to watch or at least save for later a six-part BBC series based on Brand’s book How Buildings Learn. Unless time is a thing better spent reading and sleeping — and it is, it is. There is a house out there that is right for us. Let us wait and walk and see.

Thursday February 13, 2020

A friend puts his house up for sale — a beautiful old craftsman, sizeable enough for a small family. We schedule a viewing and prepare ourselves in case we wish to make an offer. A bin full of discarded library architecture books turns up earlier in the day at Goodwill, including books from the 60s and 70s by Lawrence Halprin and Paolo Soleri.

Wednesday February 12, 2020

Huxley is a prophet, and with his final novel Island, he offers us a vision of redemption. Each of us is the island of Pala. Let us work together as allies. Youth for Bernie! There it is: let’s do this! “Uncover honey / where maggots are,” as Charles Olson prompted at the end of his poem “The Kingfishers.” We determine with the genres we teach different kinds of subjects. By assigning utopias rather than dystopias, we arrange for students to confront within themselves stirrings of hope rather than fear.

Monday February 10, 2020

Cartoon images play across the backs of my eyelids like the surface of a scramble suit, an animated sequence of metamorphosing characters and places. Then back to baby care. Sarah passes her to me. After some adjustment of my arms, I comfort her, her beautiful eyes gazing up at me. Thoughts turn to a song new to my ears: Fountainsun’s “Ripening Sheaves.”

Fountainsun is a music project featuring Fumie Ishii and Daniel Higgs. I saw Higgs perform with his band Lungfish sometime in the late nineties. I’ve remained a fan ever since.

Saturday February 8, 2020

Modernist art and literature gain viability — become possible — only when there are social movements afoot vying for control of the production of reality. Such was the argument Marshall Berman made in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is it not? (Book out of reach, I settle for Berman’s essay of that name.) He complains early in his essay of “primitivist romance” among his fellow former SDSers following the latter’s disintegration in 1969. He accuses these former comrades of nihilism and anti-Americanism. Berman’s views are silly; I bore quickly of his rash judgments. His admiration for Marx’s “developmentalism” leaves him cold to the pleas of Indigenous resistance movements and anti-colonialists like Fanon. Berman is no ally to those of us who demand an end to the money-form. His humanism excludes from its circle of care nonhuman relatives and kin.