“How to them I appear, so to me,” I tell myself when told I’m adorably stoned. Another warns, finger wagging, “Don’t stop! the clock is ticking.” The sound of a head scratch appears high in the mix. I receive instructions: “Cause the mind to change channels.” Unfold into action. Even if just taped comedy and commentary. The universe in the form of my loved one extends to me a clue: a page in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta where two characters talk around Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. I become transfixed, I become transfigured. None of this is mere coincidence. Do I feel angry and concerned about the continued stockpiling of arms among my enemy countrymen? Indeed, very. The center disperses ever faster into two contending camps. The nation-state as real-dimension Pong, with computer-controlled opponents. It is no mere coincidence, I repeat under my breath on my way to a talk by Masha Gessen. Daphne’s death continues to weigh on me, especially on gloomy, rainy days midweek. On such days, I sometimes let paranoid musings get the best of me. I take pleasure in the sensation of web detection. A friend of mine introduces Gessen, who speaks on “Democracy in the Age of Trump and Putin.” World leaders who each wish to become “king of reality.” I establish that she and I are both acutely aware of the things that scare us. But all she does is revisit for the audience (in a packed auditorium, by the way) points from her piece “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” What we must do, she says, is “other” for others the reality in which we live. Point to the autocrat; reveal him as such. But reveal to whom? Gessen can speak only to a public that reads the New York Review of Books. A group nearly devoid of influence in our new reality. The reality of concentrated power, limited only by the pressure, she says, applied by civil society upon the judiciary. “It’s really hard,” she says, “to think hard in Trump’s America.” All of us are suffering from a kind of “future shock.” As she states this, my eyes are pulled to the right and peer with suspicion at a figure, an intense-looking young white man, who arrives late clutching a mysterious bundle in his hands and who sits up front beside the podium. Spider sense tingling. Have I stumbled inadvertently into an Event, I wonder? Thankfully the suspicion proves baseless. But such is the emotional / affective texture of our time.
Tuesday November 7, 2017
Return to me the vision of the post-scarcity Noble Savage. I prefer it to the belief that only a properly constituted society and reformed system of education could make humans good. Able to live in egalitarian plenty. Instead, history is about to culminate in a monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction. Collective nouns go silent one by one. The one, because self-conscious, thinks it needs to put itself above others. Hence our current mess. Voices get in our heads. Ghosts. It’s like tinnitus. I no longer want anything to do with the certification industry. That’s all education is anymore. Certification of would-be modern-day plantation owners and Indian-killers. Schools leverage testing, punishment, and the trauma of near-constant boredom in order to transform imaginative beings into cop-worshiping, mortgage-paying members of middle-management. Proponents, armed with nukes, wish to extend this twenty-first century plantation-via-franchise system to all corners of the globe, using “protection of national interests” as justification for perpetual military deployments abroad. Those who perform their duties, those who consent to assessment, are no less complicit than those who lead. I no longer even have the hope of fellow wage slaves waking up and becoming allies of mine, comrades. We’re all too chickenshit. My resentment of myself and others manifests as a total all-encompassing white-hot rage. When others show up to work, I have to work, and vice versa — thus making us mutual enemies. What’s the point? I work all day just to come home and stand in line at fast-food burrito joints. Slop for defeated workers.
Monday November 6, 2017
Can words get ahead of themselves? “Yes, they can, if one is ‘charged,'” mutters a fiction who another fiction says has no authority here. What about this universalizing thought about the universalization of consciousness? Can one migrate through portals? Is that what we’re reduced to? Is that what we lived through — a mere reality show? You show up in a place, you perform your part. They’ve turned us into mere functional selves — so it’s in our interests to resist. On a short run yesterday, I encountered white arrows painted onto street tops, symbols of unknown purpose left by aliens. Squirrels met me along my way. All, pausing to study me, found me nonthreatening enough to resume foraging for nuts amid piles of leaves. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith provided welcome accompaniment with tracks from her new album The Kid.
Daphne’s orange body appears as an icon, trailing my every move. In “dogged” pursuit — get it? How will I maneuver myself through the remainder of my days? I feel tapped out, emptied of ideas. Capitalism nullifies. It numbs my senses and desires. I have to seek out alternative sources of intensity, like Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei, or Aase Berg’s Hackers. I become obsessed for a time with Astra Taylor’s ideas about unschooling. I ponder ways to promote student-directed learning in my classes, despite the grade-oriented confines of today’s corporate academy. The problem, of course, is that by the time students reach me, they’ve already spoiled. It would be like offering fresh fruit to a bunch of rotting vegetables: what would be the point?
Sunday November 5, 2017
The change in mood or disposition is nearly instantaneous. I pause to investigate being, even as I continue to review sentences under my breath. I exist, take stock of myself and my surroundings, and then, following the way an exhale follows an inhale, I dictate silent sentences in response, the inner “I” reviewing words according to a learned social rubric. Once satisfied, I trance-scribe the results by hand into a marble, college-ruled Mead composition notebook. I establish these as conditions on which I work. Let all take note. Add to that the poetic cocktail of substances I ingest each day. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson, though, I remain quite the minimalist.
Rock stars, meanwhile, were Joan Didion’s ideal subjects, since they lived a disorder to which she could respond with horror, allowing the dissociative, detached bourgeois self to co-exist in a common story with its time. “The story unfolds,” Didion once said, “as you write it.” Personal phobias and superstitions intersect with the affect of one’s historical moment. One can tell and examine the story of one’s time. The emotional life of late capitalism. Illumination of peripheral detail. Corroboration of the aural through the gestural. There is, alas, a faint delay to be heard, perhaps equivalent to that which exists between an object and its shadow. We try to trust fully in life as would a singularly blessed and accepting child. We observe the embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude. When we look into the light, we’re rearranged, our faces melt, mountains become plains, a foot slips on a banana. It helps when we imagine ourselves in a library. Light shines instead out from behind a cloud; the crowd goes wild.
Saturday November 4, 2017
The impenetrable landscape: action verbs! action verbs! “It is distinctly possible,” warns Joan Didion, “to stay too long at the fair.” Thought is the sequential computation of meaning. The only order I can conjure is the order of the random — trust is how I comport myself. Intuitive being. The media tell us bad people exist, thus pitting the people who do exist against one another. Take all parties of others and re-imagine them as condensed, coiled prose poised to strike. So different from the world-picture as it appeared even just one year ago. Back then, angels used to sing to me when I smoked. By “angels,” I mean (as Blake did) “facets of psyche.” Yesterday didn’t really begin for me until I arrived home near day’s end. The rest of it a teeth-grinding blur, but for a student introducing me to Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Pink Trance Notebooks. How I managed to escape knowledge of this book prior to yesterday, I have no idea. Reading a brief summary, I realize it sounds like it grew out of a process similar to the one informing these trance-scripts. And I have an opportunity, if I want, to join Wayne for dinner sometime next week. What is this power that works through me, joining together and fating into collision right things? After yesterday’s dinner (more ramen!), a Dungeon Master friend invited us over for some tabletop play. D&D night: it is you, a voice says, but you are not it. High luck grants a bonus in particular situations. When you burn your luck, though, kick-ass karma. Are we able to understand the puzzle? Random number Jesus.
Friday November 3, 2017
My break with Christianity as a teenager made me easy prey for the priests of the Culture Religion. According to this religion, the voice of authority is thought to speak through texts — even those most debased. Hence my capture by the gravity of the Cult-Studs, a tribe of Mind Flayers. Think of it as the tribe of the eternal creative appropriation of reality by reality. The creation as once it was dreamt. We must gather ourselves up, make the climb, become premonitory. Equal parts power and curse tinged with doubt. Wolf and bear icons extend outward from a common center, thus allowing my baked potato to order a baked potato at Wendy’s. Sarah and I scroll through photos of Daphne and then night-walk to a house in our neighborhood known about town for its elaborate Halloween decorations. Birds chirp as accompaniment to cricket-pulse in the moments just before total darkness. These days are numbered, we tell ourselves. Notice them. Be present. Superhuman capability and heroism allow characters to march into a foggy forest. Meanwhile I’m not even in the game, I’m on the bench. That’s not a point of view, that’s a fact, says a voice I’d just as soon discard. No need for reality principles here. Allow consciousness to go wherever it wants to go. It wants land and leisure; ’tis a lie, those who say otherwise.
Thursday November 2, 2017
Utopias are dreamt by those without a home. I must dig deeper. The bad ones have taken us from home. Find that anger. Thus begins the story of the dead-end kid. NO THRU TRAFFIC. Most of reality exists elsewhere, available only via special attention. Beings caught halfway between realms. Would you believe it if I said we’ve been robbed of our personhood? Robbed blind. We see nothing but darkness as we climb from bed each day. But indulge me as I imagine it differently: A beautiful sunrise soundtracked by Locrian on my commute to work.
And when I return home, I slurp food truck ramen in the cool autumn air at a picnic table at a local brewery, the sky a welcome canvas above my head. A time to laugh, a time to weep. Hat tip to King Solomon, Pete Seeger, and Roger McGuinn, I mutter in the awed, half-befuddled voice of hero Ted “Theodore” Logan. He of the band Wyld Stallyns. But my thoughts always drift back to Daphne, to whom I dedicate Alan Vega’s “Lonely.”
Death, man — what a fucking bummer. I close my eyes and picture a contraption on a wall — a hand soap dispenser. I rub my hands together in imitation of a cleansing. We’re coming now upon the verge of the superhuman. The West persists as a place I seek in my skull. Skunk smoke revives my starry eyes. “Where else except in the direction of the setting sun,” asks Fiedler, “can one look for the Great Good Place beyond death, the region where what survives of the human spirit bides forever or awaits resurrection?” (The Return of the Vanishing American, p. 30). The yesterday where we cut down the apple tree. “The world was so big,” sang Miracle Legion,” and I was so small.”
Emo of that sort really appealed to me when I was a young man. Multiples appear and degrade, and then it’s as if multiple TV screens turn off at once. I need to learn to speak BASIC.
Wednesday November 1, 2017
Embroidered pulse signals. 24/7 thermals and flannels. A friend who I run into from time to time at Goodwill, and whose wife is one of Sarah’s colleagues, gave me two blocks of imported Scottish cheese out in the parking lot the other day. (And no, that’s not street slang for a new kind of drug. I’m talking about cheese here, people!) There are sometimes whole days when events like the above make up the full extent of my non-work-related interactions with others. Sarah’s bummed about having received so few trick-or-treaters yesterday. I sat in the side yard absorbing brown, orange, and yellow leaves atop the patchy remains of a lawn. Birds, bells, crickets, neighbors. The bark of a neighbor’s dog. Squirrels courted one another in the branches above my head, the female shaking her tail and leading the male on a chase. My brother’s girlfriend texted Sarah and I from Brooklyn; a truck had fatally attacked bikers in New York, she said, but she and my brother were safe. Subway riders sat uneasily beside one another in costume. I imagine it was hard, trying to play-act a nightmare while in the midst of one. I enjoyed sitting on the front stoop, though, listening to the zombie shuffle of children’s footsteps as night fell. And we did end up meeting a few more of our neighbors. “This is what — essentially a diary?” I ask myself. To which I reply, “Quit bullying me. Back off.” Am I allowing others to watch me as I lower myself into a de-conditioned vortex? I have incurred a debt which I can never repay. But why dwell on the absolute horizon, the structure that bounds in on all sides one’s field of action? Why not focus instead on papers one will never get around to writing? “America” has always been a settler-colonialist fort, white settlers descending like a plague, a wedge driven between the land and its native people. How might we avenge this — the crime of our very existence? One has to countenance this in the “new frontier” mythos that pervades the hippie counterculture’s embrace of psychedelics in the 1960s and 1970s. Then again, Leslie Fiedler responded to the psychedelic revolution in a rather different political register, regarding it instead as “the red man’s revenge” and as a “reunion of white and ‘other.'” His argument is one with which I’ll need to engage as I develop my theory.
Tuesday October 31, 2017
By traveling through mental circuitry, we open new avenues of action. We come back, and we’re not the same. We possess abstract shape patterns, like afterimages of fireworks. We feel out of it sometimes, asleep to our own reality. I don’t have to think; I just know things now, some of it audio-visual, like materials filed in boxes beneath the floorboards — the Id, the unconscious. But with this new knowledge comes the paranoid sensation that I’m still missing some crucial bit of knowledge possessed by others. Sure, one grants, as Jameson puts it, “the historicity of perception (and of the apparatuses in which it is registered, and registers, all at once)” (Signatures of the Visible, p. 3). But what then becomes of the Imagination? What is imagination’s relation to those historically generated forms known as the sonic, the visual, and the linguistic? Literary scholar R.A. Durr took the terms “psychedelic” and “imaginative” to refer to a “fundamentally identical power of apprehension, or mode of being” (Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience, pp. viii-ix). This imaginative power sends and receives codes. Like in a dream, a long dream. Prove it one can’t. One has to just trust it. The truth is a scenario that becomes by whatever means necessary. Sometimes, however, in order to work I need to perambulate. Get up and move, shake a leg. Jameson thinks absorption in the image results in the negation of thought. Let’s drink to that. Or let’s drink, at least, to the negation of those habitual forms of reason and judgment that dominate life in our time. Let’s drink as well to taking down “The Man.” This was the Yippies’ term for the present system of government. Capitalism has hollowed out reality. It’s been growing and spreading beneath us like a cancer. The characters will make the leap and defeat it, I imagine. But the author? One mustn’t say.
Monday October 30, 2017
“The mind attracts to one whatever the mind dwells upon,” reads a page I flip to in a college-ruled notebook pulled from the bins at Goodwill. The moon, waxing gibbous, pulled Sarah and I toward a Halloween party the other night. Appropriately heady, for sure, and with major magic. An altar-top arrayed with small bones. Conversations washed over me, though, to little effect. Appalachian Southern witches. Symbols of an arcane sort. It was the party of my coming out as a wizard. At one point, Sarah turned to me and read me my horoscope from her Witches’ Almanac. Apparently I’m on the verge of making a big decision which will “raise a lot of dust.” The horoscope also promised “nice aesthetics” this month. But as much as I enjoyed the care and attention to detail that went into the night’s revelries, Daphne’s death weighed solidly on my mind. It was hard to muster enough will to speak with others. Speaking of speaking: My students love to speak highly of their parents’ “hard work” launching pizza chains and amassing fortunes on Wall Street. Whenever I hear this shit, I think to myself: One could say the same about vampires. They, too, work hard sucking blood from their victims. But that doesn’t make them admirable. A hardworking vampire is still a vampire — and as such, deserves to get a stake shoved through its heart. And that’s how I feel about rich people. But I’m also no Van Helsing, so to ease my temper, I binge-watch the new season of Stranger Things. Eleven wanders alone in an Upside Down labyrinth. Thresholds between dimensions look like body tissue: uterine walls, placentas. The show relishes and savors the textures, tropes, and technologies of the 1980s. But it’s also fully absorbing in its sympathies and its use of outdated media to elicit a sense of the strange or the uncanny. New Age “psychic” or “telepathic” spaces — astral planes, other dimensions — these were very much a part of that era’s narrative universe. It’s a relief to watch a show that can once again broaden my sense of the potentials of genre. The latter, because sticky with the residue of an era’s affective investments, can reawaken phantom media antennae, exposing subjects to ghost sensations and histories half-submerged.
Trance-Scripts 