Sarah has had to hold the baby for much of the past few days as I work on the floors of the new house, preparing it for our move — and we’re isolated from our families due to the lockdown. Both of us find each other reunited each evening, busy boxing and bubble-wrapping items, though also finding moments of rest, relaxation, comfort, moments of peace and quiet, amid days filled otherwise. The physicality of each day appeals to me even as it pains me. The move is happening, though, and all is well.
Friday May 1, 2020
After a day of work — hauling, lifting, bending, cutting, holding, Zooming, careering — I catch my breath and then do it again. Days involve multiple scenes, multiple acts. I’m reminded at times of The Theatre and Its Double, a book before which I hesitate, filled with trepidation. Artaud troubles me. I let Susan Sontag usher me toward him years ago with her essay “Approaching Artaud.” I’m turned off, though, by the angst of it all. The hero I seek is a joyous wanderer — the one who forgoes despair.
Thursday April 30, 2020
Video-friends team up for a live performance via Zoom and Twitch. Double-click and one is there, listening and watching with others. I depart for a time, enter the phone zone for a talk with my mother. If it’s not one zone, it’s another. This morning, though, I stood in my yard, my eyes meeting the eyes of a deer.
Wednesday April 29, 2020
The new house is magnificent, majestic. I pulled up most of the carpets, I’ve removed much of the padding, I’m in the midst of removing staples and tack boards. A crew will help us sand and refinish the beautiful hardwood floors. Each day we transport boxes and objects as we begin our move. It’s work — we also plan to paint several rooms, plant a garden — but it’s coming along, the whole assembling before our eyes. And we’re working together. Baby gives loud, satisfied sigh.
Sunday April 26, 2020
Gardens brighten the day, as do messages written in chalk on streets. Bees give me pause. “Hello friend,” I say to one I admire. So, too, with mushrooms, dandelions, wild strawberries. Off the streets, behind the doors of homes, live others. The facade of each home serves as an emblem of the one or many private, undisclosed storylines within. All of them parallel worlds. Other people’s games. And sometimes we meet, we intersect. We enter each other’s discourse. Communication happens intermittently, both frequently and rarely. We produce a kind of mail art, signaling to each other as if across mountaintops with mirrors, and discuss redesign of the neoliberal world order, made happy by each other’s laughter.
Friday April 24, 2020
Over my shoulder atop a wall of bookcases, three figures: a “creature” designed by an artist-friend, one of his “Plush Denizens”; a stuffed E.T. doll with light-up finger; and a can of Kraft Calumet, like the ones stacked in the background of a famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, discussed and analyzed at length in the movie Room 237. Each figure is also an object; each possesses “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” the history determining this presence trailing behind it like the tail of a comet. I think of each also as a kind of fun-loving elf on a shelf. In the study of my next home, I want more plants.
Wednesday April 22, 2020
The workplace is part of one’s support-system, one’s body. Workers, by economic coercion forced into this arrangement, convene, organize. Prepare for insurrection. For Antonio Gramsci, this meant organizing into factory councils — at least in Turin, in the years immediately following the Bolshevik revolution. What about today? Are there alternatives to waiting? Or is the revolutionary she who is patient? How do we organize? Is there an app for that? Where does one assemble? Groups like Decolonize This Place advocate a rent strike. If it happens, I hope it succeeds. Others organize by seeking land and gardening.
There’s Magic in My Eyes
A self-deputized overseer whines helplessly about my unsanctioned use of his ship’s crow’s nest. Heads when high turn mutinous, he mutters, preferring I keep below deck with the others in the brig. Knowing that my ascent offends his cop-mind fills my heart with glee.
Monday April 20, 2020
“You there,” says a cursor, a pointing finger: “Feed your head.” DC hardcore bands of the 1980s laughed off the hippies, refused to remember what the dormouse said. Contra Jefferson Airplane, they clamped down defensively, shouting “Flex your head” through speakers and sound systems across time. That stance appealed to me. I was hailed by it. It formed me into a position as a particular kind of subject. Emanating from the capital, coeval with an era of federally-waged drug war, straightedgers like Ian MacKaye denounced drugs as “crutches.” The stance conveyed an ableism that was simultaneously hyper-defensive, its anger a reaction to fear. As punks, MacKaye and his friends and bandmates faced routine bullying and marginalization. Early episodes of teenage drug use led to denunciations of party culture, as on Government Issue’s “Rock’n Roll Bullshit,” and dramatic public acts of abstention from drug-assisted Dionysian revelry, as on Minor Threat tracks like “Out of Step” and “Straight Edge.” Always flexing, never feeding. It took years for me to recover and loosen up — but loosen up I did.
Friday April 17, 2020
The Hippie counterculture can be imagined as a kind of heroic collective subject. History needn’t be told only in the tragic and dystopian modes preferred by the Western hegemon. Picture instead “Evolvers” on the West Coast wearing sunglasses, edgelords opening portals onto virtual frontiers. The internet needn’t be cast only in the role of Dark Side of the Moon. Earth needn’t be distant. Earth and its profusion of life. The Revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron observed, “will be no rerun.” One hero’s fate needn’t be the fate of the character in each of the myth’s retellings. Time to bypass the past, pursue a different path.
Trance-Scripts 