Mushrooms tolerate me — exert a strange power over me, even — as I bend the knee to pet them. A couple around the corner have a painting hung upside-down in their living room of an Edenic or maybe immediately post-Edenic Adam and Eve, the two figures clutching one another, bodies pale and unclothed. And the co-signer, the Ectoplasmic Lending Center: what about its contribution? These are the kinds of conversations I have with myself, given the magical thinking of my upbringing. “On the charted route,” my friend says, “you usually miss all the cool funguses.” It happened thus: I walked right into them. They announced themselves. My escort surrendered and was marched off, hands and feet in chains. The game-world at this point underwent a reprogramming. Imagine consciousness withdrawing from immersion in events on a screen. Dis-identification, while yet a perspective persists, there to do the leaping between realms. Freddie de Boer calls it “the perspective that does not understand itself to be a perspective.” To what extent is my writing “place-based”? Is “place-based” the same as “starting from and concerned with the everyday”? Or is the best writing that which transports, that which is most at variance with place, if by this latter we mean the “as-is”? No lion need resurrect itself. Call it what it was: expenses paid round-trip. I am becoming a gummy multi-vitamin kind of guy. A piece of bread floats through the frame: I ingest it. One can orbit blissfully through space if one tries. But I barely have time to reconnect my models each morning come breakfast. A podcast I listen to introduces me to Dr. Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist who researches what she calls “game transfer phenomena.” These phenomena — digital ear worms, closed-eye visuals — involve many of the same processes that we associate with altered states of consciousness: trance, immersion, absorption, hypnagogia, dissociation, dreamwork. De-realization of reality. How might this complicate our understanding of the relationship between games and reality, and between perception, cognition, and behavior? What happens when language use evolves dialectically with experience, but in ways that evade the user’s desire to communicate — leaving only a kind of meandering amidst fragments? The dream has always been to become authors of our own sensations — lucid to a point of real agency. How else would I ever muster any narrative consciousness, or the ability to perform authorship with a swagger? Sometimes you simply have to trust yourself to wing it. You throw the dice, in agreement that if you lose, you’ll try again. The mind invents an imaginary soundtrack, some echoey, reverby, anxiety-stoking industrial act that never was — so why can’t it invent other such short fictions? I mustn’t let frustration with writing become my content. Remember the haze that overtook vision during the afternoon of the eclipse.
Monday August 21, 2017
Everything in darkness brought to light. Imagine trying to know the world exclusively through shadows. That’d be like reducing the objects of the object-world to nomenclatures and calculations of quantity. My friend’s cat raises his eyebrows as Sarah administers to him his eye drops. I ride out my day to the plunderphonic future funk of “CD Player IV” by death’s dynamic shroud.
My view of the song sours, though, mid-listen. It is hard to put thought out to be observed and critiqued by others. We call that “surfacing.” The hiccuping auto-tuned vocals and stately gait of “Tell Me Your Secret” is more to my liking. The Krull tower sends out information-rich bolts of energy. We call these “signals.” There are characters in this town, remember? I am approaching a narrative crisis involving the naming of names. We’re each broadcasting to one another instructions that become like fate. But actors in supporting roles are beginning to show signs of exhaustion. They bite off their lines mid-sentence; they grow visibly impatient. The typecast communicate their readiness to abandon script. A voice states, “Listen with care to the words as they come to you.” The news media deliberately manipulates and casts aspersions, activating doubt patterns to re-contain the militancy of the political unconscious. I waste an embarrassing portion of my life shuffling awkwardly in line through social transactions with service workers in burrito bars, my performance of self choked with a nameless, incommunicable sense of guilt. Part of me imagines a sense of justice in these workers plotting an underground revolutionary conspiracy without me, due to my failure to establish meaningful authentic conversation with others. I wish I possessed divinely conferred charisma or grace or favor, that way I could lead others through the amorphous, self-transcending midsection of “(BALLAD OF) THE HIP DEATH GODDESS,” the rest of the track discarded as a derivative, Airplane-aping pop-psychedelic simulacrum.
Mediocre works are more exemplary than what is best, I offer — a claim I then withdraw for lack of merit. See, for instance, the sentiment organizing Tommy Allen’s “Sea of Same.”
The album art for the album of that name shows the artist as one who floats Indian-style atop action figures poised mid-play. If I were a jukebox, though, the record that would keep playing within me would be “The Worst Band in the World” by 10cc; though I’d attempt to wake myself now and then with eruptive outbursts, as if I set as my alarm Patrick Miller of Minimal Man shouting either “Pull Back the Bolt” or “Show Time!” That’s how I make myself teach.
Sunday August 20, 2017
I release hold of my ego, or maybe I just re-leash it. Emails sound like military bugle calls. The gift of meditation and prayer. The black hole, the abyss that throws up memories. Churches are major structures of social discipline. They create prisons of doubt and fear. But ISAs are everywhere. Clues left behind in the minds of individuals. Drugs can help us release the devils from our brains. Massive criminal conspiracies. Have I mentioned that I became friends recently with a Marxist Baptist pastor? I am excited by the arrival of this figure on the world-stage. Churches remain giants; and as my friend said, “Theology never goes away.” Can churches be reformed so as to help usher in the Kingdom of God? It’s still cops and robbers — but maybe the robbers can act again as Robin Hoods. Perhaps religion is the staging ground for the launch of a new counterpower. We must re-approach the adults who believe the secrets, and for whom the spell has been cast. So many damaged people out there in our midst. Haunted by demons. Survivors of skirmishes in modernity’s and postmodernity’s culture wars. One needs to maintain a distinction, though, between art made for a trip (as a kind of tool or supplement), and art made to re-present in place of a trip. Play “Sensory” by Kill Alters, though, to illustrate reality’s defiance of the above distinction. And follow this with “Ego Swim” as the next phase in our sequence.
What a time to be alive, I proclaim, arms raised to the sky. And the illusion, I should say, looked many-eyed and sang back to me, clothed both in “The Holder” and Do Pas O’s “History of Comedy,” where the universe melts like taffy.
Fierce grotesques profiled as by Diane Arbus. One must command a choir of alternate personalities, each waiting to overtake the others’ transportive ecstasies. Eyes that reveal eyes within. All of us are angels with amnesia, living as humans in the void or simulation we call “embodied presence.” Some of us are pouring fondue on ourselves online. Which makes a lot of sense! Altering, leveling, getting THERE to THAT, begins with our behavior toward one another. It means placing productivity on hold midafternoon. Flip-flops descending a staircase. The world reverberates in affirmation when we allow ourselves entry again to the garden. Calm, deliberate enjoyment as one treats oneself to existence. Uncommunicative, reserved, and quiet, but filled with joy.
Saturday August 19, 2017
Weed affects my perception of my relationship to luck. I find a greater bounty in the bins at Goodwill when I hunt while stoned. And my relationships with others become improvised and more casual. In a word, life becomes serendipitous. The surprise and delight of good fortune can raise my spirit for days to come. Like Horace Walpole, those interested in the phenomenon should read the fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip.” While noting serendipitous occasions, I make no claim that these occasions necessitate belief in a competent cause — though in the midst of the experience itself, I suppose, one assumes this. Sarah toured me the other day through what is now one of my favorite works of residential architecture, Ray Kappe’s home in Los Angeles’s Rustic Canyon. The home as harmonious relation between human and non-human nature. The Strimling House, as it’s sometimes called, with a tree growing through its atrium. House porn is utopian through and through. For cloudform-like extravagance, seek “Live at Goers” by R. Lee Dockery & Smokey Emery.
Astral Spirits is killing it. I’m fascinated, too, by the remarkable self-investigation undertaken in “Note to Self” by Jill Pangallo. Disturbingly aware of selfhood’s manufacture. My most impressive psychedelic aesthetic encounter of late, however, came to me in the form of Eisprung’s “Ivan’s Need.”
Sexuality as synesthetic inner-space fantasia: ASMR-intense, but giggly and filled with joy. And of course, lathered in Freudian condiments. How else shall I conduct my days? Swimming, reading, returning to work under extreme financial duress. I enjoy retiring to the crisp air of my basement on hot summer nights here in the South. The basement is also a place to bunker down — a bit head-in-the-sand-ish, maybe, but necessary for one who thinks of himself still as “from up north.” I relate to life as do the figures in the foreground of Daniele Luppi & Parquet Courts’s “Soul and Cigarette.” The singer indulges hints of Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman. ‘Tis the video, though, not the song, that does it for me. When Sarah and I started the Netflix Original documentary miniseries The Keepers the other night, I immediately noted parallels between the show’s initial foci (the 1969 Baltimore murders of Sister Catherine Cesnik and Joyce Malecki), and the murder of Barbara Ann Butler, an event that occurred in Dayton, OH the year prior. William Clark wrote about this latter case in his 1971 book, The Girl on the Volkswagen Floor. Tentatively optimistic, but impatient for connections, the true crime genre holds great potential for cognitive mapping of the social totality. But the crime at the map’s heart must be the crime of capitalism. Whereas the crime at the base of The Keepers is the priesthood.
Friday August 18, 2017
The return of Westworld may prompt the return also of my obsession with the religion or belief system known as Gnosticism. How odd, to re-watch the title sequence of a TV series repeatedly, as if one were practicing its memorization. Repetition isn’t a world we can easily escape. Art is the simulation’s equivalent of the shot-reverse-shot. A cry when confronted with the psychedelic sublime. What do I fancy myself with these scribblings? Is this the kind of writing that results if one were to follow the advice of voice-oriented “expressionists” like Peter Elbow? Doesn’t this confuse making with the one doing it, linguistic reality laid out like the map of a game-world? Life is but one possible play among many. When television bores me, I bear down upon the taste of a sour gummy lips. Volcanic explosions among the taste buds toward the center of my tongue. Which tasks shall we suppose will be required of us next? Let us tire of reading about the deeds of our betters. How are artists able to achieve what they do despite no coherent theorization of themselves? Why ever do we find pleasure in self-consciousness? Best to become absorbed in New Argentine cinema, thus staving off the thought of thought’s decline. Alejo Moguillansky‘s Castro uses kinetically edited transition sequences to tell its story as protagonists run through the streets. The urban environment becomes the labyrinth through which desire flows. Better to live one’s life than to waste it on a living earned. I’m not sure those of us on the Left know anymore how we’ll win, but this fight is on, it’s happening — so we’ll do what we can. No need to reproduce a scene for today’s events. I sometimes become glassy-eyed and uncommunicative. Too much going on upstairs to bother with the speech acts of others. Words topple and collapse around me. Part of me feels unjustly treated and run ragged by my community; but the only way I know to right this (and thus “write” this) is to use weed to make myself more generous, more sociable. Proceed with the reinvention of the process of communist socialization. Reality delivers to those who dispose themselves accordingly. One’s face becomes like that of a rabbit while asleep.
Thursday August 17, 2017
I act like others know something I don’t know. And vice versa. I become uncaring and detached. Hiro Kone’s “Less Than Two Seconds” returns to me a sense of direction.
August is always the cruelest month. When I arrived Tuesday morning to the first of several all-day faculty and staff meetings — events where my coworkers and I are forced “captive audience”-style to listen to the euphemistically-titled “president” (rather than “boss” or “CEO”) of the institution where we work wax on about vacuities like “excellence” and “grit,” I quickly found a seat and prepared to cast elaborate hexes on those I hate. Above me stood the usual theater-sized screen (adorned, naturally, with American flags on each side of the stage); but rather than begin with slides featuring self-aggrandizing quotes from corporate leaders, as has been the tradition in years past, this year’s presentation began with a video of a five-member all-male black song and dance troupe covering Bell Biv Devoe and Boyz 2 Men hits from the 1990s against an unchanging solid white background. Message received loud and clear, I thought to myself: this is apparently all my institution can muster as far as “valuing diversity.” In all other respects, the presentation was exactly what I’ve come to expect: a near-endless rehearsal of credentials as the institution welcomed new hires; a near-endless rehearsal of financials to assure us that “all is well.” “Growth mindset,” we were told, “is in our institutional DNA.” The president waddled across the stage stating, “Life muddies you up, grit, faithful courage, value in global marketplace, blah blah blah.” To survive such events, I deliberately zone out and find joy whenever possible. Later on, some bullshitter from a company called “Generational Insights” provided a bullshit cart-pulls-horse account of labor-management relations, suggesting that “individualistic Millennials” are the ones demanding precarious workplaces, rather than precarious workplaces producing the individualistic mindsets of Millennials. I love it when corporate schmucks in ill-fitting suits complain that others in our society lack empathy. And yet, to either side of me, lemming-like coworkers of mine from business and sports medicine laughed at each of this dude’s potted one-liners. What can I say: you can’t judge a fish by looking at a pond, but cluelessness abounds these days in the groves of the corporate pseudo-academy. The Left may have embarked on a long march through the institutions following the impasses of the 1960s — but those institutions in many cases are drifting rightward again day by day.
Wednesday August 16, 2017
Warts and all, my friends. ‘Tis my motto, as I soak in the wood-paneling-meets-burnt-orange-Naugahyde interior of an Arby’s. The working class eats beside me on its lunch break. Customers can ring a bell of gratitude hung by the exit whenever the spirit moves them. But no number of bells, I think, could ever address the humiliations and degradations inherent to a service-based economy. Several hits, like my middle-school asthmatic self with his inhaler, and I sink and recede inward. Gone With the Wind can be heard, but only as a distant old-time ambience, whispered from another compartment of reality. The ancients spoke of a method of remembering called the mind palace or memory palace. To underscore, tune yourselves to SPELLLING’s “Tremble Dancer,” or better yet ZEEK SHECK’s “7777-01-07 Son” off the ROGUE PULSE / GRAVITY COLLAPSE benefit comp from Ratskin Records.
This is the world of the heads: a vast network burrowing outward from a rasterized, “Dig Dug“-shaped cosmos. “We all make believe / What is can be.” Is it capitalist to think that desire can restructure reality and give one what one needs? One of these days, I’ll unlock the capabilities contained in Frances A. Yates’s The Art of Memory. Inspiration, I take it, for the album of that name by John Zorn and Fred Frith. The imagination never fails to provide, so long as one allows it. One wakes, one becomes, one finds oneself. If one wants to visit a memory palace, one can do so by listening to Kosmiche duo Art of the Memory Palace’s collaboration with Scottish author James Robertson, “Your Soul Is Not a Bird.”
Devoting oneself to becoming conscious of this makes for a joyful passage of time. But being a brave comrade also means learning to give account and modeling for others a way to be present. It means taking control of the narrative. Is my consciousness behind or ahead those of my comrades in thinking we need as one of our priorities “encounter group”-style retraining at the interpersonal level of how we relate to one another? Tearing down a statue is as easy as gathering enough people willing to do it! Just make sure someone holds up a camera and takes a nice shot. One hand in pocket, other one flicking a cigarette. “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange”: so it goes with one’s rebirth as a revolutionary subject. But what if, instead, we become men in boxes in the ruins of a new Pompeii?
Tuesday August 15, 2017
I wish it were as easy as intoning, “All is okay. One is one’s best self. There is no dark cloud hanging over one’s head.” But my emotions resonate more with Drugdealer’s “Sea of Nothing.”
Those are companies I should investigate, I tell myself as I spy a pair of corporate logos in a “bad things happen there” industrial park beside a highway. This is what I call my conspiracy thriller “social detective” persona. Seeing a Subway worker in a green t-shirt, a green apron, and yellow shorts, I’m put in mind of a Keebler elf. When Sarah and I drive through the lushly vegetated rural towns of the southern coastal states, we notice churches with names like “Overflow,” and white pickup trucks in our rear-view mirror whose occupants remind us of the white nationalist militia fucks who marched in Virginia. Dérives through these regions lull one into a sleepy boredom.
You can approximate this state by listening to Harmonia & Eno ’76’s “Welcome” while picturing the following appearing like ruins among a sea of green: modular home manufacturers, tool and machine works, a field of zinnias at the center of an exit curve. But my head is always snapping out of this hypnosis due to the region’s abiding hints of danger. Standing in the grass of a park Sunday night, I listened to comrades share their concerns at a local vigil organized in unity with antifascist forces in Charlottesville. But the Democratic Party organizers of the event formed us into no more than an inert mass, clapping when expected to clap, faced back to itself with speakers urging it halfheartedly to launch a love-fest. Years of declining people power have left the local Left lacking even a reliable public address system. But it was energizing, ultimately, to hear comrades who had been there in the streets of Charlottesville share their perspective on what had happened, and to hear as well the newly established local DSA chapter representative, a dear friend of mine, properly naming capitalism as the system we must fight. Despite the odds, the collective lighting of candles successfully cast its spell.
Monday August 14, 2017
Synth chimes lay atop the opening to the documentary 8-Bit Generation to great effect, reminding audiences of the psychedelic aura that well-nigh shimmered around Commodore 64s and early experimental electronic music, the original consumers of which came to each with an appropriate sense of reverence, viewing said devices as tools of consciousness. Heads of the time used to play with pocket calculators. By the way, though, terrible documentary in all other respects; don’t waste your time. A reminder that tech-geeks are to heads as cops are to freaks, even though all such groups arrive at their minds through dialectical struggle against insufficient facts. Those who worship the religion of business break with heads in that they use force to replicate obedience to their fancy in others, whereas heads are content to chill. One seeks to profit from nature, while the other co-evolves with it and reveres it. Logics, controllers, processors. Think of the multiple subjects active in a spontaneous prose autobiography: writer plus actor plus thinker plus knower. Because of this multitude, there results a significant delay as I interpret Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, understanding the latter to be a psychogeographical narrative structured around a two-person dérive. Talk remains the preferred method in our society for the extemporization of consciousness. To write it down is another thing entirely. The actor plays himself, but in a scripted narrative written while seated. Winterbottom’s film, meanwhile, only occasionally arrives at scenes that are improvised. What kind of memory is needed to realize “I’m living the dream, it’s all a dream”? I need to study performance and acting, especially method acting, where one learns to inhabit one’s role. Do people with greater memories inhabit richer universes?
A switch is flipped, and suddenly one is singing “The Winner Takes It All,” the words belted forth with a slightly choked-down lump of indignation in one’s throat, one’s hand reaching up to clasp it. We all improvise ourselves through learned routines. Butterscotch has become my jam, says the impressionist who performs only for the one he loves. Romantics are performative selves, with enormous self-confidence and an abundance of energy. They grab the tree of knowledge from the base and shake out all the apples. They do this especially when young and rich. Don’t fool yourself into ignoring, says another, the existence of other currencies: personality, quick wit, prestige. Everyone and everything is available to be observed, but there is disrespect, a voice tells us, in the act of observing. Massive cloud formations drift lazily past a blue that lies beyond. I did manage to squeeze in a brief pool trip the other day. A cardboard box in my garage contains the words “A SMOOTH AND FRUITY WINE” printed diagonally in repeating lines across its side. Can’t you tell I’ve been reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems? White supremacists launched a terror attack with a grey Dodge Charger, while in another state I swam. Social networks accessed through my cellphone, however, brought news of the events close to me. Some asshole with a radio blasted crappy Top 40 dance-pop on the poolside pavement next to me. But where is the benefit in me bearing mass-mediated witness to the alt-right and its murderous acts of violence? Surely my consciousness is altered into immediate sympathetic identification with the victims through that encounter — but toward what end? Shall we permit their ghosts to haunt us? I’m reminded of Foucault’s remark in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “Do not think,” he writes, “that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable” (xiii). What dark telos inspires the ways we allow ourselves to be used by our technologies? Moments later, I saw myself in a bird circling overhead while I floated on my back in the pool. I sometimes worry that I haven’t evolved sufficient compassion for others, as when I walk to the concession stand and order a pair of hot dogs. Is it wrong of me in such moments to attend to appetites? Recognize these as defense mechanisms, I instruct myself, installed during childhood gender programming. And the programmers are the ones who possess vastly superior arms. The political parties are just good cop and bad cop; neither is on our side. Any call for “order” under these terms is tyrannous and indefensible, for the bullies own the earth.
Sunday August 13, 2017
Others vacation when and where they want. This, too, is a form of inequality. Worse still, my city is livable, but unmemorable and unattractive. Is my miserabilism the effect of my impoverished personhood or its cause? I am being asked to fail and fail again. And it’s okay: I’ll keep going. I know I somehow will. Please do not be frightened. It’s just that I’ve become deeply unhappy with myself. My writing is a testament to the failure of my ability today to enjoy. The thing is, it really felt like I was pulling out of the spiral there for a moment. What happened? I try not to tell myself that I suffer from depression, as I’m wary of the theoretical presumptions embedded in that label. (My thinking has been partly shaped on this score by Susan Sontag’s Under the Sign of Saturn. But see as well Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness.) But, look, let’s be honest: my moods are seasonal and affected by work. I go through patches of good and bad over varying durations. One consequence is that I drive people away just by being myself. My work, if it is truly to be mine, will have to attest to this. And so, without further ado, let’s return to the work itself. The construction of a Marxist theory of psychedelia will have to build upon the insights of critical geographers like David Harvey and Edward W. Soja (and before them, Henri Lefebvre). Psychedelics intervene in and directly modify socially produced space, by changing what we might call cognitive space or mental space. “The presentation of concrete spatiality,” as Soja notes, “is always wrapped in the complex and diverse re-presentations of human perception and cognition, without any necessity of direct and determined correspondence between the two. These representations, as semiotic imagery and cognitive mappings, as ideas and ideologies, play a powerful role in shaping the spatiality of social life” (Postmodern Geographies, p. 121). As we continue to think about the relationships between psychedelics and space, we’ll also have to consult Alastair Gordon’s book Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Following Fisher, I see capitalist realism not just as an ideology and an aesthetic that situates subjects within a narrowed or foreshortened horizon of political possibility, where there can be no future utopian alternative to the present; it’s also a shaping and debasing of the way subjects experience space and time. Psychedelics thus possess a certain radical potential under such circumstances, as they provoke immediate (albeit temporary) modification of inner experience beyond the forms imposed by capitalism. When under the influence, one is no longer the Self as defined and designed by the current order. One can drift and linger, now that one has restored to oneself that which capitalism had drowned in what Marx called “the icy water of egotistical calculation.” Anxieties, begone! Pot allows us to see again reality constituted through veils and unveilings, everything both inwardly-lit and haloed. All of which is to re-invoke through transcendence upward from the profane a sense for the sacred, although I’m not sure I wish to do that, as emotional, perceptual, and symbolic spaces are all still immanent to the dialectic of nature. Picture, through perceptual refocusing, the circle-shape and the yin and yang struggle contained therein. No need to delve into those questions just yet. Think, after all, of how much of our lives is invested in staring at illusions of depth onscreen! Games of perception are the very magic by which the system operates. Business is, along with whatever else, a religion imposed on conquered subjects.
Trance-Scripts 