I wake from a series of vivid anxiety dreams and Trump-inspired apocalyptic nightmares. The first reminds me of J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island retold in the style of Angela Carter. A grifter drives her car off an embankment into a stand of trees. Still a bit woozy from her crash, she wanders into an enchanted garden, at the center of which stands the twenty-first-century equivalent of a witch’s cottage. When the grifter learns that the cottage is for sale, she poses as a potential buyer. In a second dream, by far the more frightening of the two, a pair of middle-aged shock jocks wait in a hotel room preparing for a visit from the president. The shock jocks look oddly similar to one another. Picture Sir Richard Branson as a pair of coke-addled stringy-haired Texans. Close-up of a swastika carved into the bun of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. The POV withdraws to reveal my dream-self watching the shock jocks on a monitor, as if they were part of a feed from a surveillance camera. A woman enters the room and with infinite care suggests that I get my plans in order for the time ahead — at which point I wake.
Category: Uncategorized
Wednesday May 29, 2019
Sarah and I pause to rest our feet at a burrito bar midafternoon after touring the National Gallery, where we stood transfixed beside Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” and Salvator Rosa’s “Witches at Their Incantations.” Names come tumbling into consciousness, forming pathways for future research: John Michell, Gerald Gardner, Jeff Nuttall, Count Stenbock, Ithell Colquhoun.
Tuesday May 28, 2019
We arrive to the disappointment of a three-story wall-to-wall stained-carpet nightmare of an apartment, diagonal cut-ups stacked atop a windowless basement. What a fucking shithole. Such is the consensus on this first day as we take stock of our surroundings. The sooner we get out of here, the better.
Monday May 27, 2019
Aggro roadways, Trump paraphernalia, landscapes crusted with ill-gotten wealth: up from these like a seagull I rise and take flight. Goodbye America, and good riddance. The mere fact of you bankrupts the world of justice. No theodicy could ever correct your persistence there on the other side of the Atlantic, burning the earth, melting the poles, laying waste to all prior ways of being. Yet here I am, a product of this spoiled history: an American abroad.
Sunday May 26, 2019
How about groaning laundry rooms and animated films that scare little kids? How about blue mermaids with turquoise chains? By following a few simple rules, we can feel at home amid the alchemical symbolism of Arthur Machen’s “The White People.” A librarian from my childhood confides over my shoulder about the limits of her compassion. She refuses to care, she says, for those who come back sunburned after a day at the beach, likening these latter to hungry ones who refuse to eat. I smile and pretend not to differ, even as I ruminate about what it would mean to approach the Tarot as a book, or the fragments of one.
Saturday May 25, 2019
My phantom appetite reopens old wounds as I drive along the south shore of Long Island, a place of radical injustice, like a theme park dedicated to the triumph of Italian Fascism. The planet groans beneath the weight of Blue Lives Matter monster trucks as La Famiglia orders an assembly of scungilli for an air show. How am I to practice zazen amid these sites of trauma?
Friday May 24, 2019
I plug in Walter Wegmuller’s Tarot and float down a canal.
Sarah and her colleague J. are preparing to teach a course about witches this summer. The course includes a screening of Suspiria, and who did J. run into at the Leonora Carrington exhibition this afternoon? None other than one of the stars of the recent Suspiria remake, Tilda Swinton. Let us muse upon this most witchy of synchronicities as geese fly overhead.
Thursday May 23, 2019
My shoshin or “beginner’s mind” struggles to declare intentions for summer apart from foundational stuff, love and well-being for all. I prefer minimal attachment to programming and planning. Yet I have to decide here: narratives are gardens of forking paths, aren’t they? Which books do we wish to read and which headspaces do we wish to inhabit while abroad? How much of each moment do we let go of so as to live in another? I feel like I’m tiptoeing along sensing a border, a boundary, a threshold. Enclosure is the process mystified and occulted by the Eden narrative, yet some of us by acts of reading find our way to the edges of the construct. What then? Do we give in to fear of punishment, as in the Prisoner’s Dilemma? Or do we press onward into the unknown? A beautiful Brakhage-like stretch of video appears from my past — difficult to watch, but presumably necessary. Something akin to a rite of passage. “With this Memorial in His Honour, / Cordially Committed,” read the words on the screen.
Wednesday May 22, 2019
Outside our office windows — outside, inside, everywhere: a world of vibrant matter, leaves and branches rippling with waves of energy. And in the air, in transit, birds whistling, gestures of benevolence. A tiny person opens a gate and invites us to continue on our way. A short hike along a mountain trail and suddenly we’re feeling it: eased, relaxed, quiet, meditative. Awareness is different from its objects — different from both its thoughts and its senses. Those are transmissions, messages received and refashioned. Awareness can focus into a pair of hands as they wash dishes. It can focus on a sunlit fairy garden footpath. Passages which seem either obscure or obvious are often illuminated when observed with care. It is this observing with care that matters in determining the quality of each moment. Like a Rapunzel, the world lets down its hair, allowing us to ascend. When the world acts this way and speaks its mind, says what it wants, let us heed it.
Tuesday May 21, 2019
Since we’re creating the universe (you and I!) we might as well have some fun, as do the members of the Incredible String Band in their film Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending (1970). (An essential psychedelic artifact, communicating secret knowledges from heads to fellow heads across time. The sections on band member Robin Williamson feel particularly otherwordly.)
Dancing down the sidewalk singing from lampposts, Oyster card in hand, we make our way, beach beckoning from beneath the pavement. In just a few short days I take leave of the States for a month abroad. The story at this point is one of spontaneous grandular progress, self-actualization into a grand unknown. Who will we be on return from this journey? I search old notebooks for clues. A head speaks to me across time, knowing perhaps that a future me would eventually get the message.
Trance-Scripts 