The apparatus in the chest of the Electric Ant structures light. It gives birth to some objects while causing others to disappear. Dick calls this apparatus the Ant’s “reality-supply construct.” “Tampering with it would be risky,” he writes, “if not terminal.” Imagine the process whereby an avatar acquires knowledge of its player. The latter would have to send the former clues. The gasp of recognition, sure — but where does one go from there? What does one do with this force in the universe that makes things happen? It provides one with a kind of drowsiness, a deep-dream state, this living within a fable, where things aren’t what they seem. “It’s hard to see the city from the buildings,” as F.J. McMahon sings on “The Road Back Home.” It’s like getting lost in a crowd and having to think one’s way out. Facts and figures float by as we wait for morning sunshine. Amnesia aids the merging of the soul with the brain.
Saturday February 10, 2018
Like Mayakovsky, I “see the one no one sees / crossing the mountains of time.” Consider this imaginary friend of mine — hovering, approaching, possessing me as I meditate. Marx’s spectre, pricking on the plain. It matters not where we land, I tell myself, as my boot bottom settles on an oil slick at the base of a gas pump. The important thing is to reopen the case of language and its relation to consciousness. The important thing is to track thought with thought.
Friday February 9, 2018
My mind feels caught between rival epistemes or paradigms. Minds, by a certain age, possess sedimented layers of knowledge — and everywhere, paths not taken, blind alleys among the forking paths of unfinished text adventures. Errant wanderings of restless hearts. But isn’t the indistinct picture, the blurred concept, often exactly what we need? Consciousness needs avenues down which to scheme and hatch itself. The same is true of communism. Inventing communism means inventing a game and convincing others to play it. “Today,” Sarah says, “is all about feeling like we’re trespassing.” How many years are we talking? The mind exaggerates the details. Cut to the straight-toothed grin of a southern white park official as he scolds us for disobeying park rules and walking on lands not ours.
Thursday February 8, 2018
I fell asleep the other night listening to a “past life regression” CD plucked from a bin at Goodwill. I woke up afterwards feeling a mild sense of confusion, but otherwise remembered nothing from the experience. What if I’ve been brainwashed, I worried. Had Dick Sutphen, the founder of Valley of the Sun recordings, succeeded in hypnotizing me?
Although the experience wasn’t the “ultimate altered state of consciousness” that the CD had promised, it did weird me out a bit—especially when my post-hypnosis buzz morphed into a raging headache. As I allowed for time to pass, however, this, too, vanished without a trace. I find myself instead in a new scenario, one where I trudge alone through the streets of my neighborhood, shaking off stress, exhausted from a full day’s work. I amuse myself by observing houses, assessing them as expressions of class. One wonders: How much of one’s facade is really ‘chosen’ in this society? For me, housing is paid into simply as a kind of happenstance. Trapped at all points in my life a mere renter. Always and forever, under another’s roof. To compensate, I listen to “Tree Vision” by Rambutan and stare into the depths of a mirror-night, reflected on the surface of a puddle.
Wednesday February 7, 2018
Marxism has always been a peculiar guide to consciousness. And by “peculiar,” I mean more than just “dialectical.” Cognitive dissonance experts won’t believe their ears, but consciousness resides ontologically at a level greater than mere smoke and mirrors. Part of me wonders, however, if by “greater than,” I mean “prior to.” This manner of thinking about thinking, like a body trying in the midst of practice to pick up and weigh its parts: is there a quality to it that distinguishes it from mere performative noodling? I feel challenged when faced with duplicating my experience of mind via words. Yet language is all that remains when the Cartesian self severs ties to productive agency with regard to that which lies beyond its senses. I prefer active listening. Selective co-production of meaning. When I walk, for instance, I modulate the directionality of my awareness as if I were operating an ambient musical interface not unlike a soundboard. Sound-objects rise and fall, as it were, in the mix. The best moments, though, I tell myself, are when awareness dips and the mix directs itself.
Tuesday February 6, 2018
The phrase “Libra sapphire glow stick” comes to mind as I walk beside a park remembering pleasures, abstractions, noise shows attended by the hundreds. Selves today would never permit themselves such latitude. High Maintenance uses its pot-dealer protagonist to motivate its posing of the problem of cognitive mapping in terms at once political, economic, aesthetic, and existential. Viewers get to ride in a sidecar as Ben Sinclair bikes across the metropole. Cognitive mappers should add to their reading lists Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. Where might weed fit in a practice of orientation able to connect the abstractions of capital to the sense-data of everyday perception? It allows us to conduct our research furtively, I tell myself, hidden in imagination along a mosquito coast composited from bits of psychoacoustic space.
Monday February 5, 2018
An assortment of tasks, given a spin, directs force toward its center. Bound together thus, like a top or a Tasmanian Devil, these tasks are made harmless, the rooms they occupy cleared for better acts of enjoyment. Luck having turned for once in my favor, a turn for which I shall remain eternally grateful, I now possess the opportunity to teach three sections of a literature course of my choosing. What shall I choose? Given how wary I am of loading myself too heavily with work, I’ll most likely just opt for some variant of my present course. There will be time enough to experiment next spring.
Eyes closed while listening to Grand Ulena’s Gateway to Dignity, I imagine a pair of animated graffiti high tops stepping frenetically across a generic late-80s-videogame-graphic brick wall. Perhaps what I have in mind here is Ghetto Blaster, a computer game I played on my Commodore 64 when I was a kid. Minds orient themselves otherwise than toward disaster.
Sunday February 4, 2018
“Just so long as the universe doesn’t fill me with a bad infinity of sense data,” says he who persists in conceiving action as a thing one chooses. Lights, textures, synthesized rhythms. Modular sets of classifiers readjusting against an inky black background. “By luck one may do as one will,” asserts a high-pitched, as yet unnamed being. I convince myself to grow into a bigger, stronger, better version of myself. Head above headrest, carried forth by wind. Richard Horowitz soundtracks a stretch of my quest with his track “Eros Never Stops Dreaming.”
Frequencies flutter through a field. I’m also taken with the work of Horowitz’s fellow composer and sometime collaborator, Jon Hassell. Let us seek lives fit for Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, Hassell’s collaboration with Brian Eno.
An unobserved observer observes duplicate faces seeing eye to eye across a mirror. Cat-people march with banners. Selves enter and exit cells by way of windows. Vast stretches of universe await entry into consciousness. A head pokes through an opening, and wakes to another world.
Saturday February 3, 2018
Richard Brautigan’s “machines of loving grace” possess eyes and stare down at me. I make this thought manageable by assuming a single consciousness operating both parties — observer and observed — through use of selective memory. Temporary acts of forgetting. Aimless, undifferentiated units of time. One has the game in one’s entire body, remember — not just in one’s mind. Weakly interacting massive particles. Massively multiplayer. Let something else take over.
Friday February 2, 2018
Soggy bamboo hut versus cardboard cutout. Suboptimal work-life synthesis. Walk it off. Beware of laws that march ever onward, urged by unthinking decree. Like remaining always in pursuit of points and dollars. The future as highly suspect temporal form. Think instead of the means of production internally, “pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting.” Is it, as Franco “Bifo” Berardi would say, as simple as clearing the head of any further illusions of the future? Berardi’s book After the Future offers suggestive commentary along these lines — particularly the section of the book titled “Zaum and Technomaya.” The best parts of my day, though, are when I put aside such things and walk. Parks, neighborhoods: I enjoy them all. Upon receiving word from on high of my fate, I bow in darkness and give thanks to the ones I love. Parts of narrative click into place. Parts of my childhood begin to make sense. A paper waits to be written on science fiction and the psychedelic revolution. Ahead of me lies the mystery of an unexplored, newly-unlocked segment of the gameboard.
Trance-Scripts 