We perform a kind of living theater in the way we hold space together as a class. What we’re demanding of one another is the freedom to be enraptured, the freedom to be enchanted in public.
Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday January 29, 2019
What do Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call that act of “calling to order” performed by instructors each day in classrooms? What if I were to introduce into this act a degree of self-consciousness by discussing the theory with students? Perhaps it’s as simple as noticing things along the way. Refunctioning the space we hold together, structuring conversation differently. Freeing one another to speak. Perhaps it’s a matter of organizing improvised collective speech into story, as would a dungeon master, but with the dungeon reformed into a zendo. This is what Kerouac models for us in The Dharma Bums: space to be crazy and free in life and speech. Perhaps I can’t recreate that space in our classroom. Perhaps I need to advance further in my study of Buddhism. Perhaps a class is just a class, and it needn’t be a democracy. But then the same would be true of our lives. No, my sense is that the conversation is developing, people are finding one another as voices in the classroom. I prepare as they do: by coming to class having read and annotated the material, with questions for discussion.
Monday January 28, 2019
The Ray Smith character in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums uses his Beat Zen Buddhism as a cover, an intellectual veil behind which to hide a misogynistic fear of women and of post-WWII white heteronormative domesticity. What is the source of this fear? He seems torn throughout the novel between desire for solitude and desire for something like family or companionship or community. The novel’s great utopian figure for this desired community is the “floating zendo,” a network of mountaintop monasteries strung across the Americas to sustain the wandering bhikkus of the coming “rucksack revolution.”
Sunday January 27, 2019
The Dharma Bums at its very least furnishes its readers with new prayers, word-patterns one can recite and insert daily into consciousness. Modeled after Kerouac himself, the book’s narrator Ray Smith sings brief improvisations with words like “Raindrops are ecstasy, raindrops are not different from ecstasy” (105). The character invents these songs while sitting and meditating in the woods behind his mother’s home in North Carolina. There is no difference, he knows, between what we do and what happens to us. There is only tathata, or “suchness,” and comparisons are odious. And yet, as I re-read the novel for class, the quality of my life seems vastly improved when, after a day of laboring with cut-backs and ‘Marie Kondo’-style purgation, I run myself a bath.
Friday January 25, 2019
I sense a play of voices rising, entering into the realm of the heard. The voices I’m hearing this year are sounding increasingly heroic. Students leaning in, revolutionary, inspired. The preparation is at a very advanced stage: TSA unions grounding flights, teachers striking successfully in Los Angeles. Andrew Fluegelman sounds the call in his introduction to The New Games Book of 1976 where he announces to us today, “You can change the rules if you don’t like them. So long as you all agree on what’s fair, you can make the game into whatever you want it to be. Or you can invent a new one.” “All you need,” he adds, “are a few of your friends and the desire to celebrate the day with play. In New Games there are no spectators.” There will be no instant replays, brothers and sisters. The revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron promised, will be live. Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand participated in the New Games movement. As a head, Brand was committed to exploring new and more satisfying ways to live. As was fellow New Gamer George Leonard, for whom games signify “nothing less than our way of being in the world.” Brand staged the first New Games Tournament in October 1973, a public event held in a 2200-acre valley just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, “where people could create and share their games, and everyone could play” (10). Community organizer Pat Farrington was instrumental in planning the event. “Games are not so much a way to compare our abilities,” she believed, “as a way to celebrate them.”
Thursday January 24, 2019
Broke ’til the end of the month, I entertain myself by walking, listening to Dennis Wilson’s “Dreamer,” lounging about, watching sunsets. Syd Barrett’s “Octopus” gives me pause. Eyes closed, I meditate in a state of pure sound: elaborate spatializations of the sounds of instruments and voices.
Wednesday January 23, 2019
If my government were a channel, I’d grab the controller and change it. Out with this immiserating, sadistic, Walking Dead bullshit. Enough already. I work full-time as a college professor, I live modestly, and yet because of student debt, here I am on the 23rd of the month, bank account overdrawn, savings nonexistent. This system is unworkable.
Tuesday January 22, 2019
Noting a shift in my sensitivity toward rhythm and percussion, I opt for music made by ecstatic ensembles that shake, ring, and sizzle. Thomas Meloncon warms things up with “Waiting On Your Mind,” before laying it straight with “Ain’t Gonna Wait Too Long.”
All of this turns out to be foreplay, however, for what I’ve been seeking: Elevation, a Pharoah Sanders LP from 1973. The theme is certainly in keeping with Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, a book I’m reading with students. Lighthouses, rivers, rainbows, meadows: over these I travel, dancing along, movement of a mind at play.
Monday January 21, 2019
I wrote a letter to a cousin of mine ten years into serving a seventeen-year sentence in prison. I try not to dwell in sadness over my own condition for his sake, given his condition, nearly impossible for me to imagine, let alone endure. I loathe and despise my society’s appetite for imprisonment and detainment, yet writing this letter is one of the few things I’ve done to try to comfort a prisoner. “Better late than never?” asks the ego in hope of absolution as it lies on a couch reading about “Moloch the incomprehensible prison,” “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery.” Reading “A Supermarket in California,” one of the “other poems” in Howl & Other Poems, I hear Ginsberg evoking Walt Whitman as a Virgil, leading him through the neon-lit inferno of the American Century.
Saturday January 19, 2019
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO graffiti and his no-wave band Gray sneak onto my train of thought, and the train breaks down into boxcars of found phrases. Countercultural, determined not to go home again, determined to make it happen. Darling of the art world. Acting out the society’s wildest dreams. Putting that smoke in the air. Graffiti broadcast from the control room, as in the Times Square Show or the movie Downtown 81. For early critical celebrations of Basquiat’s work, see Rene Ricard’s “The Genius Child” in Artforum, and Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Things done by chance. By the end of the night, I’m listening to Funkadelic and thinking, “Fried ice cream is a reality!” Funkadelic’s intervention is not all that different from Basquiat’s. It’s as if a strikethrough artist painted over Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxter‘s to create the richly allegorical / mythopoetic cover art to P-Funk’s One Nation Under a Groove. The psychedelic cultural revolution lies secreted away there, a transmission for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see.
Trance-Scripts 