My, my, hey, hey — what a difference a difference makes! My intuiting self longs like a shadow toward Rob Young’s book Electric Eden, at the top of my list of summer reads. Like Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Young’s book tracks and reveals a “secret history” spoken across the ages by musicians and poets, transmitters of an occult folk wisdom tradition. Nature, Earth, the ground of being transubstantiated into song and verse. As Peter Murphy wrote, the book “constructs a new mythography out of old threads, making antiquity glow with an eerie hue.” All I can do for now, however, is anticipate what lies ahead. My mind scans its environment searching for a clue. Somewhere amid these texts and artifacts, I think to myself, lies a key to unlock growth or expansion of the gameworld, and thus an altered state of being. Clouds that open and show riches. Before I read further, however, I need acclimate myself to the indecision of the moment. Existential indirection. Toward who, what, when, and where should I orient myself, and why? Toward love, toward counterculture through the ages, toward reconciliation of self and world — love everywhere. Another task of mine this summer is to read and write about Antonin Artaud as translated by Black Mountain potter and poet M.C. Richards. My hope is that this will lead me to a theory of happenings and participatory theater of the kind practiced by groups like the Merry Pranksters and the Diggers. (Charles Perry, by the way, provides an insightful account of psychedelic experience — one of the better “general theories” in the style of Huxley. For Perry, “LSD and mescaline suppress the mind’s ability to discriminate according to levels of importance…and to form persisting notions about reality based on them” [The Haight-Ashbury, p. 253]. Perry’s take on the Diggers informs my ongoing study of psychedelic utopianism, another of the projects I’m working on this summer. Among the Diggers themselves, the ones to research are Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg.)
Category: Uncategorized
Saturday May 4, 2019
Evening fireworks as the city celebrates the approach of summer. Nineties hip-hop artists intervene like the members of a chorus of those who know. Wise Angelenos. The rebel, they say, is the hero in history. But me, I’m just flexing, wondering, longing to do the right thing. Without reinforcement, however, it feels like I’m grasping at straws. Cheer up, I tell myself. Overcome the fear response. Learn to play the game.
Wednesday May 1, 2019
For those like Hardt and Negri, awaiting a New Prince, I advise trust as a component of subjectivity. The multitude need only share duties and practice trust. Honor life in the fullness of its mystery, its unpredictability. Or as Hardt and Negri say, its Majesty. Can you feel it? The race, the relief, the mix of happiness and exhaustion, a new friend held closely in one’s arms.
Monday April 29, 2019
Having received what seem like signals, what is one to do? We’re approaching a new chapter, an episode called “London,” wherein we live happily a month abroad exploring, learning, growing. In the meantime — spring-time, cardinals, squirrels. Mulberries dropping their bounty from on high. These are lovely days during hours free of work.
Sunday April 28, 2019
Revive the phenomenological category of the “lifeworld.” Review its history and weave it into the act of sitting, being-with-nature, the appearance of a pair of cardinals, lovers chirping, flitting from branch to branch amid a grove of trees. How can we best experience the sense of life as it unfolds into consciousness? Sarah steps around the corner, visits me to talk about pens beside a burst of pink flowers. Think of this, and of the cardinals, too, as signs of grace — sunlight through trees, enlightening signals of love and goodwill. The goal, as always, is to formulate a vision of wellbeing more compelling than the neoliberal “eudaimonic” subject. Perhaps I should read the work of Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla, one of the so-called hiperiones, a group that also included Emilio Uranga. Time to school myself in Latin American philosophy, so as to better understand the interventions of El grupo Hiperión. With the arrival into the lifeworld of the Other (an arrival that has always-already occurred except in myth), the lifeworld divides into “homeworld” and “alienworld.” And this process of division continues indefinitely, with the proliferation of the Other into multiple Others leading to the reconstitution of the arrivant’s lifeworld into an interface with an ever-changing multiverse. Countless leaves, branches, insects, birds — being transforming day by day. The past, persisting for potential reactivation by consciousness, allows the latter to travel among worlds, entering and exiting identities as in a dream.
Friday April 26, 2019
My favorite moments are those that allow me to experiment with novel forms of sociality and self-care. Hello, summertime: for academics, a T.A.Z., a seasonal utopia, release from bondage. Yet I feel so isolated and diminished, caught in an entropic well. Let there be good vibrations. Let us crush once and for all this miserly neoliberalism that rules everything around us. For there are reasons to celebrate, reasons to dance late at night, pasts to recast and futures to speak into being.
Thursday April 25, 2019
Time to go somewhere and sit beside a tree. Tomorrow if possible — perhaps in a calm, relatively secluded part of campus. Imagine oneself, however, in one of the campuses of yore, where students lounged among trees strumming guitars and tapping bongos. “Peace, brothers and sisters. Anyone wanna join me in some fugitive study on spontaneous theater?” That used to be a thing: people gathering, barbecuing, chilling, passing a frisbee back and forth. Back before the privatization of cultural memory. Perhaps I should settle in and read Hardt and Negri’s Assembly. Despite its flaws, their earlier book Empire contributed mightily to my formation and development. The question they attempt to answer is similar to the question posed for us by Hippie Modernism: how do we assemble in ways that endure while rejecting traditional, centralized forms of political organization?
Wednesday April 24, 2019
I relax my thoughts and lean back. A large bumblebee draws circles in the sky: hints of other suns, other worlds. Leaves flutter in the wind.
Thursday April 18, 2019
We are everywhere and we are growing. We withdraw consent and demand concessions. First, we demand control of the social surplus. We produced it. It is ours. Each receiving adequate share of total world production. Give us our daily bread — by which I mean space and time for mutual collective joy. Let us be plentiful, gracious, generous — open and transparent in our ways. No more cowardly Prisoner’s Dilemma. Each of us, here and now, must walk away from Omelas. But what if we’re debtors? There can be no freedom until we receive our Jubilee.
Sunday April 14, 2019
I hear myself hissing in syncopation with taps of a ride cymbal on Jeremy Steig’s “Sure Shot”-inspiring psych-flute classic “Howlin’ for Judy.”
The 2008 compilation of that name gives the mind-body a good workout. But since debt remains like a concrete block atop my speculative horizon, I read while listening to “Nardis” Annie McClanahan’s mapping of my subjection in her book Dead Pledges where she writes, “Put simply, for many students today, the cost of an education is greater than the lifetime income gains it enables, making human capital a rather dire form of speculation indeed” (193). I picture myself as a character, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster — the proletarian subject awakening to consciousness of itself as undervalorized, hyper-exploited wage-slave. In other words, awoken to its place in hell, where student loan debt and its consequences lasts forever. But because awoken, this subject can use music, meditation, reading and writing to steal back moments each day for beauty and freedom to love. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, my people sold me off into debt-slavery — but because it’s the 21st century, they can contact me from time to time via cellphone. Electromagnetic salt for speculative wound. Is it “cruel optimism” that makes me write? Is it wrong to go on fantasizing given these circumstances? I have yet to find anyone able to suggest to me another viable way to be. Of course, to default is also a form of political action. A secret power by which to reckon with the totality. In moments like this, “theory” opens up to me as a special communication creating grounds on which to gather in solidarity, as Chris Nealon says, with “those for whom the regime of capital only spells suffering” (as quoted in McClanahan 196).
