Two women walk past chatting about a celebrity chef as I float on my back at the public pool. Here is the Multitude: friendly, assembled for play, with lifeguards instead of cops. From it we scale upward: from the playground to the festival to the tent city with gardens. Children blowing bubbles, adults reading and tanning, seniors lounging in the shade cast by an umbrella. Through the scene floats a yellow butterfly. Afterwards, trees silhouetted by the setting sun, I sit on my stoop listening to cicadas. Neighbors play Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” as a bat flies overhead.
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Saturday August 31, 2019
Now that students have submitted written responses, my days feel crowded with text, words greeting me everywhere I look. Friends entertained Sarah and I last night by suggesting outlandish names for our daughter. Other friends from Chicago sent a beautiful art book modeled upon the Whole Earth Catalog (a publication about which I’ve written at great length, in many ways dear to my heart, expressive of my utopian and eupsychian ambitions), designed by one of their students. Unbuckled is the mail. I walk the neighborhood during magic hour, photographing spider flowers and clematis.
Friday August 30, 2019
Driving a shady, tree-lined section of road on the way to work the other day, I remember feeling mildly disappointed by the line of cars passing in the opposite lane, wishing there were more VW buses, not just to beautify the drive, but to reinvent reality as a place of eupsychian possibility. Lo and behold: there before me this morning, a gorgeous white and red one, restored, pristine, passing me at the same point where I’d wished it the day prior. A magic bus! And with it, a lesson: stay open to the possibility of its appearance. Reflecting on it afterwards, sunlight just so, I imagine colors and textures from the pages of old comic books, as in Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree or X-Men: Grand Design. Later for that, I tell myself, and meet some friends for drinks.
Thursday August 29, 2019
I listen excitedly, hands tapping thighs, to HausLive 1: Sunwatchers at Cafe Mustache 4/13/2019 after an afternoon at the pool, swimming, reading Kiese Laymon’s Heavy.
Laymon’s prose remedies with its tender heavy murmur. He writes as a son addressing a letter to his mother. It’s a book that hits hard. Subtitled “An American Memoir,” the book allows personal and familial history to tell as well the story of the harm done by the country to black bodies: the weight of antiblackness those bodies are made to bear. His mother’s withering appraisal of Dukes of Hazzard when he was a kid forces me to reflect with disappointment upon my own upbringing. My parents thought it appropriate to dress me in a pair of Dukes of Hazzard pajamas at one point when I was a toddler. It is my duty to confront that past and live differently.
Wednesday August 28, 2019
Returned from a successful day of teaching, I dance around the house, my hand out in front of me swimming like a fish as I listen to Patrick Cowley’s “The Runner” from his album Afternooners.
Students seem cool: joyful, inquisitive minds. I think they dig the way I talk. I think they dig the way I walk. Like I’m shaking bells and a tambourine, our conversations a kind of dance. Cue Young-Holt Unlimited’s “Dig Her Walk,” take it for a spin. Then find a quieter place. Sit back, relax.
Tuesday August 27, 2019
When given the opportunity to go on a short run around the neighborhood mid-afternoon, I take it. I return home energized, revitalized. My university has an impressive roster of guest speakers lined up this year, talks and performances by Nathaniel Mackey, Kiese Laymon, Cornel West, Jesmyn Ward. These last few days have been days of waiting — today especially, as classes begin tomorrow.
Monday August 26, 2019
Students and I grow together as heads by reading and discussing literature about consciousness. Minds throughout the ages trying to know themselves. This is literature about education and enlightenment, minds as they undergo alteration and metamorphosis. Patterns disclose themselves, meaningful coincidences compound over time — formal and thematic resonances that defy existing paradigms. By attempting to interpret these, we arrive at new conceptions, new understandings beyond existing enclosures of possibility.
Sunday August 25, 2019
How might the insights of West Coast humanistic psychologists of the 60s and 70s inform our work today as educators? How do we grow together? How do we help each other self-actualize? By that term, the humanists of the 60s and 70s meant a variety of things: realizing hopes and aspirations, exercising full potential, living joyfully, gratefully, lovingly, practicing therapy, repairing the traumas we carry with us as personal and collective bodies, finding happiness, living well. Those who report having achieved peak-experiences, those who seem to have begun to self-actualize, don’t shrivel up into themselves, claimed theorists like Maslow. Rather, they become better adjusted, less begrudging comrades. They join together with companions, forming co-evolving communities committed to giving and receiving care. Look at the support networks that form among mothers. Friends and acquaintances near and far have come to our aid of late, passing along boxloads of hand-me-downs: maternity wear, baby gear, short-sleeve onesies, long-sleeve onesies, pajamas, burp cloths, the works. We feel like characters from the Equals song, “Michael and the Slipper Tree,” or Olu Dara’s “Okra.”
Let us hold this experience near to us as we return to our classrooms. Carl Rogers suggested one model for applying the principles of humanistic psychology to education in his 1969 essay “Freedom to Learn.” And some of these principles informed experiments with encounter groups and sensitivity training sessions at places like Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I sit on the top step of my front stoop after dark, diffusing momentarily into imaginative union with the sounds of the night, a lush chorus of locusts and crickets. Afterwards I feel recharged, replenished, senses open, receptive. I thumb through Ali Smith’s introduction to Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet astounded. Hardt and Negri’s Assembly takes shape soon thereafter, pages propped open, their words released into consciousness with another sturdy thumbs up.
Saturday August 24, 2019
Stressors accumulate with the semester’s approach. At a party last night, a colleague spoke with a shudder of “putting on the mask” again after having been free of it for the duration of summer break. We’re a bit like caped crusaders in that regard — particularly in our caps and gowns. Professor a persona, classroom a white-box theater. Some, of course, relish this “performance” aspect of the job. Performing is what makes the job fun, they say — and I, too, try to approach it that way. Teaching is a time-based medium; my job is to stage a fifteen-week Happening.
Thursday August 22, 2019
Tap on Relatively Clean Rivers. Flash that archetypal Dayglo river-road landscape on the album cover, hint of the mid-1970s privately pressed Marin County-rooted psychedelic folk-rock contained therein. The record includes odd instrumental hollows, exudes a sweet blend of joy and melancholy: “weight off one’s mind,” as the band sings on “Hello Sunshine.”
To encounter it is to encounter a psychedelic beacon, the acid equivalent of the holy spirit, beaming a signal to fellow heads across time. What is it that we’re trying to tell one another, I hear myself asking, we who have had psychedelic experiences? Where did we find ourselves before, in the midst of, and after? The lyrical persona in “A Thousand Years” speaks as one frustrated by subjecthood and identity, disappointed to find itself left again with a face—but the voice persists in its attempt to communicate. It’s an Orphic persona: one who attempts to realize and comprehend the totality, one who bears news from the other side. The news seems to be that all that is Good is trying to win us to its side. Songs are credited to band member Phil Pearlman, a name that recalls past parables as well as poems from the beginnings of English literature. Pearlman’s two incarnations prior to Relatively Clean Rivers were called The Electronic Hole and The Beat of the Earth. After a conversion of sorts involving a bible on a beach, however, Pearlman changed his name to Seth Philip Gadahn. Quite a story there, for those who wish to look.
Trance-Scripts 