Imagine reality evolving into the unthinkable of existing sets and disciplines. Call the results of this dream-work The Ones Who Follow: A Modern Mythology. The Jonestown Massacre lies on the outskirts of all ventures of this sort, utopian communities of joy derailed everywhere, cursed, denounced, undone. How might we again induce a change in people? How might we together achieve self-actualization, group-realization? As opposed to just repeating over and over again history’s pattern of conquest, domination through separation of people from their lands. The “altered state” is what we’re after. That phrase, in its various senses, is what we mean by our Utopia. Lovers as hemispheres, fused at the mouth, as in John Donne’s “The Good Morrow.” We’re trying to raise consciousness, awaken the sleepwalkers from their deadly slumber — beginning with ourselves if necessary.
Thursday March 22, 2018
A singsong routine occurs, a beckoning. Guided by voices, I advance, dreaming up games to be played, video-streaming services stocked with programs. Netflix takes the chill out of my basement with its new series Wild Wild Country, about the Rajneesh movement and its leader, the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho. With crowns come guillotines, says a woman onscreen. Seek instead gentle, meditative gardens, oases amid seas of people. Unless those people are white christian practitioners of settler colonialism, who “settle” with bombs and guns and then defend their stolen land with same, heaven forbid others achieve ecstatic union with other deities. The conservative christians are the life-haters, the pleasure-deniers of history. The ultimate invasive species — over the planet they lay their rule.
Wednesday March 21, 2018
Voices lead a roving imagination — let’s call it the camera-eye — on a tour of a menu screen leading to Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy in Turiya.”
Floating in a void, grasping at straws. I am but a mere vessel, like the “Black Panther” figure, multiplying into several semi-autonomous guises over the course of 1965 and 1966: first as the mascot of Stokely Carmichael’s Lowndes County Freedom Organization, then a second time on newsstands as a character in an issue of Fantastic Four (Stan Lee, the character’s creator, a fan of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception), only to return transformed into another political party, this time out in Oakland, the invention of Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Hallucination? Spirit animal? Archetype? Fantasy? What is this product of mind that erupts synchronistically into reality, in what seems a coordinated manner — conjured, planted, determined, dreamt?
Tuesday March 20, 2018
Is everything I write about in these trance-scripts curated by algorithms? Let us go right through it: you think after all this time, something asking to whisper in my ear would be heard: the “Soul,” floating in an ocean of sound. What would be its message? Egg’s “Fugue in D Minor.”
The dramatic idea dissipates into confusion. Vectors in 2- and 3-dimensional Euclidean spaces. I want utopianism to triumph over unthinkable disaster. The truth of the matter is that divination falsifies whenever it imagines its hand on the rudder, as with Norbert Wiener’s helmsman. Human control systems. Instrumental reason. Intuition is more like reality reloading with updates, extra levels, bonus rounds. A cartoon ghost escapes from a head, exploring by taking the will of others as its guide. Data rate rises and falls. Terry Riley’s “Cactus Rosary” announces, “Some of my work has been altered!” Peyote rattles, aluminum pepper shakers. “Dead artist!” chant voices in unison. My inclination is to reach for a book.
Monday March 19, 2018
I think my talents are being wasted on tasks to which I’m ill-suited. Trigger mechanisms release pent-up energy. I stress constantly about work and finances. “One misstep and game over,” I tell myself. But then I smoke and walk through my neighborhood and find joy amid simple things: birdsong, observation of budding trees, conversations with friends. “Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle,” Leary once said. “Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.” People in my neighborhood are out relaxing on their porches, their time late in the afternoon and early in the evening theirs to use as they please, not just as it pleases capital. As bad as it’s gotten, I can still glimpse seeds all around me, particularly on weekends, of futures worth fighting for: utopias robust enough to house gatherings and partings, innumerable adjacent paths of solitude and community.
Sunday March 18, 2018
Compose mildly, humbly, yells a voice from ahead on the line. We of the chain gang. Every breath a guess, a near fumble. Conversations, dialogues, words assembled from channel-surfing, dial-turning snippets of televisions and talking radios. It’s as if the larynx, a highly sensitive vibrational surface, were suddenly set aquiver, collaboratively operated by self and other, floating among oceans of sound. Songs for breakfast, songs for lunch. Rapid montage sequences flit past. Like horseshoe crabs, we possess receptors useful for sensing changes in moonlight. I imagine a fictional universe, perhaps I’m programmed to do so, I’m not going to delve into agency, will, all that David Copperfield kind of crap. Rice Krispies crackle loudly as the childhood self leans his ear to a bowl of cereal. The inner voice speeds up, acquires greater proficiency. “My environment,” I tell myself, “has been carefully designed to draw me to this state of mind.”
Saturday March 17, 2018
“Say something warm, say something bright,” sing the words in my head. I concentrate upon lyrics to songs from an algorithmically-generated playlist, seeking sense amid chance. That sense arrives when thought begins to throb to the beat of “Beat” by Bowery Electric.
A reveal occurs: I see sacred geometries. Mind invents ideograms — first languages, perhaps — by abstracting experiences into memory-derived essences. Picture Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Escape from grim reality. Final thought of the day: Black Panther is thrilling in many ways, but the film’s imaginary resolution to real contradictions is one and the same with its backstory and founding premise: namely, the Vibranium-powered alternative modernity represented by Wakanda.
Friday March 16, 2018
The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that inner speech, much of it motivational, develops as a silent imitation of external or “social” speech. Although accompanied by and thus correlated with tiny muscular movements of the larynx, and brain activity observable via functional neuroimaging in what cognitive scientists call “the left inferior frontal gyrus,” or “Broca’s area,” inner speech as phenomenological datum remains qualitatively distinct from, not at all reducible to, its correlates. Much the same is true of the self, which we come to know, as Patricia Waugh notes, “not as an endocrine system but an experience straddled across body, mind, environment, language, and time.” After spending more than half a century denouncing inner speech as an invalid object of study, psychology as a discipline is beginning to swing back around again, utilizing “Descriptive Experience Sampling,” for instance, as a method for exploring aspects of inner experience.
Thursday March 15, 2018
We live in the time of the last, tiniest bit of light. So it seems, this moment in history. Exhaustion conspires with hunger. Together, they guide me through an exchange with a robot, navigate me into position for receipt of a hovel-shaped sign on the table of a booth in a McDonalds: “Archways to opportunity.” Is an archway to opportunity an example of a Door in the Wall? Not if opportunity just means arranging “skills” and “artifacts” in an online portfolio and marching at capital’s behest. Again, that always and forever tragic phrase, “so it seems,” dehumanization being the apparent inclination of the universe — unless we scheme, dream green, swap beans, gather heads together. Carve doors out of space-time. Launch what Aldous Huxley called “chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings” (The Doors of Perception, p. 64). Let these vacations arrange constellations, trails of clues, destination unknown.
Wednesday March 14, 2018
I imagine Sarah as Wonder Woman, jetting invisibly through the sky above Metropolis. We tour old neighborhoods with our nieces, sunlight flickering through the branches of an ancient tulip magnolia. Afterwards, I sit beside a staticky baby monitor, hypnotized by its bursts of low-volume noise, sensing in the experience some foretaste of life ahead. A portal opens, out of which emerge the drones, hisses, and pulses of The Von Einem Tapes. On the other end lies Robert Stillman’s Portals.
Dive into one of these, and George Orr and Dr. Haber, the characters in The Lathe of Heaven, appear as components of a single mind. The “improver,” animated by an ever-increasing will to power, enslaves the dreamer, turns the latter into an indentured Jinn.
Trance-Scripts 