Thursday September 26, 2019

Les McCann & Eddie Harris wow a live audience with their cover of Gene McDaniels’s “Compared to What” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in June 1969.

The moment finds itself reproduced, resonating through countless lifeworlds. The single alone sold over a million copies, and appears on several soundtracks. Gene McDaniels was kind of an odd dude, though, referring to McCann as his “degenerate friend” on YouTube and Twitter before passing away in 2011. His work sometimes creeps me out, actually, much of it operating with a mysterious, vaguely esoteric air: puppet master, glint in eye, etc. McDaniels retired soon after the song’s success, spending his final years living as a self-described “hermit” somewhere in Maine. His politically charged albums of the early seventies, however, remain towering achievements. During this brief but potent stint, McDaniels reinvented himself as “the left rev. mc d,” a persona so radical it drew the ire of the Nixon administration, causing Ahmet Ertegun to drop McDaniels from Atlantic Records after the release of his album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse in 1971. What about me: where am I at, how do I refocus? The command comes, “Go outdoors,” and it is good. Worlds of images, illustrated figures: around one a mix of life, plentiful, joyous, multitudinous.

Wednesday September 25, 2019

Students and I have been tracking vast allegorical systems as they’ve developed in parallel with historical transformations across centuries. The texts we read contain banners on behalf of consciousness raised by philosophers, poets, bards, prophets, visionaries. Descriptions of the macrocosm shift with great suddenness and power into descriptions of the microcosm and vice versa once we learn to read allegorically. Through it all, a sense of the Mind’s evolving sense of itself. When I return from work, I honor Robert Hunter, who died the other day, by contemplating a song of his that a student mentioned after class. The student wondered if there might be a bit of Blake’s “voice of the devil” in Hunter’s “Friend of the Devil.”

Another student inquired after the Holy Spirit, prompting me to investigate pneumatology. Mightn’t we interpret altered states of consciousness as charismata? Gifts, powers, inspired forms of being, with or without psychoactive sacrament?

Tuesday September 24, 2019

Sometimes I respond to concentric circles representing the orbits of other entities and beings. What did William Blake mean by phrases like “the starry floor” and “the watry shore”? Look, too, at the Silver Surfer figure at the base of the “Introduction” engraving from Blake’s Songs of Experience, lounging on a chaise in outer space.

Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience,_copy_AA,_1826_(The_Fitzwilliam_Museum)_-_SE_-Intro

Blake speaks in the same poem of “the starry pole” that the “lapsed Soul” might control, “And fallen fallen light renew!” In the voice of the Bard who knows the power of words in the act of creation, Blake beckons the Earth to awaken again after years of slumber. And to the “lapsed Soul” of fallen humanity, he says, “Turn away no more.” Or so I thought at first. However, maybe he’s still speaking there to the Earth. Perhaps Earth is the “lapsed Soul,” the slumberous mass of which the humans reading the poem are but a part. This makes sense, given that the next poem in the series is titled “Earth’s Answer.” Awakened into language, Earth denounces the “Father of the ancient men” who would shame her and place her in bonds. In Blake’s estimate, the Father imagines himself as Reason, but behaves like a jealous tyrant, chaining us with “mind-forg’d manacles” to a prison-world, a false totality, a construct. Have critics read this work in relation to cousin genres: image-text parings like Tarot cards and graphic novels?

Monday September 23, 2019

For the first time in many years, I’ve made drum practice a regular part of my day, learning along the way a new bearing, a new coordination, a new integration of body and mind. I sense there’s a whole magical metaphysics to be learned, an articulation of parts into a world party, spontaneously assembling, dancing to a plurality of beats. Align the rhythms of the microcosm with the rhythms of the planet, limb coordination an allegory for coming together to address climate change. In all cases, it’s a matter of reprogramming, creating new branches, new head-spaces, new patterns of play. Each of us becoming solar-powered, enlightened, worshipful of sun and moon. Afterwards, I go back and re-read my entry from September 20th of last year, with its description of a consciousness expanded beyond Reason’s bounds. Then, as now, I had Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell on my mind, a text I teach each fall.

Sunday September 22, 2019

How might we of the Undercommons avail ourselves in light of Climate Strike? Do we have concepts we could offer, lessons we could share? What is this Magnificence all around us? How do we help it grow? Who do we want to become? Hardt and Negri have told us, in a “script that is by now familiar” (xiii), that for most powerful social movements today, “leadership” is a dirty word. One of us rightly asks, “Is the youthful movement against fossil fuels leaderless? What about Greta Thunberg?” She’s a sort of leader, certainly — but perhaps the leadership she provides is tactical rather than strategic, a distinction favored by Hardt and Negri. By this they mean leadership of an entrepreneurial sort, “limited to short-term action and tied to specific occasions” (Assembly, p. 19). Hardt and Negri craft openings for which we’re grateful. I appreciate their call, too, at the end of Assembly, for a Hephaestus, a three-faced Dionysus, and a Hermes of the common. Why those three, however, as the constituents of their pantheon of the common? And how do we get from there to putting the machines back in the hands of living labor? How do we mute the command of capital? What would it mean, for instance, to make “digital algorithms” common, a form of non-property open to use by the multitude? Perhaps it’s as simple as forging “an instrument endowed with magical powers,” like the shield Hephaestus forged for Achilles. This instrument would “depict in concentric circles the composition of the entire community,” thus giving expression to “a new civilization, new modes of life, a new figure of humanity, and new relations of care among living species and the earth, up to the cosmos” (Assembly, p. 274).

Saturday September 21, 2019

With daily practice I develop greater strength and control in my left hand. Exercised with concentration, the hand’s ability to drum shows noticeable improvement. In between these exercises I think about indigenous drum ceremonies like Powwows, and instruments like rattles. How might we account for the Christian West’s antipathy to drums and percussive noise throughout most of its history? Horns, bells, and strings have their charms, but they evoke entities different in kind from those conjured with sticks and skins. With Dustin Laurenzi’s Snaketime providing productive accompaniment, I descend back into Gerald Heard’s essay on his close friend Aldous Huxley, a piece called “The Poignant Prophet,” published in 1965, two years after Huxley’s death. Right away, I’m troubled by Heard’s Darwinian emphasis on Huxley’s heredity (the “ancestral pressures” placed upon the latter due to “the intellectual nobility of his forefathers,” etc). Yet there are also moments when Heard offers glimpses of Huxley as the latter struggled to grow beyond his early reputation as a satirist. The two kept up a tradition of “afternoon walks-and-talks.” We learn of their joint investigations of groups like Moral Rearmament and teachers like Ouspensky. The most interesting part of the account, of course, deals with the transformation in Huxley effected through the latter’s encounters with psychedelics like mescaline. “Was there any effect that was permanent, that manifestly altered his everyday character in relation to others,” asks Heard, “giving his actions a new strength of conviction and initiative of encouragement? Could he thereafter persistently see the common day in the full light of this masterly comprehension, and so go forward as a guide? I think there was evidence” (66).

Friday September 20, 2019

I return home from work exhausted, the energy left from teaching and climate striking enough only to kick back and stare at squirrels. Though by doing so, I’m replenished. I relax, I lay back, contemplating tree-crowns teeming with life. Smoking helps me bring consciousness into accord with Nature, its correspondent other. As Shayla Love notes, psychedelics “recreate the core feeling of relatedness…the sense that nature is a part of us, our bodies, our lives, and that we are a part of it.” Ego dissolves, boundaries between self and other break down. When we emerge on the other side of that threshold, we possess new powers, new ways of seeing, a new sympathetic cosmology.

Thursday September 19, 2019

Honey bees forage around a fence overgrown with ivy, the latter’s blooms providing the bees with sustenance this time of year, the early weeks of autumn. I sit beside them, imagining myself a visitor to their utopia, newly arrived via miniature Montgolfier balloon. A package arrives by mail containing Brian Blomerth’s beautiful new graphic novel Bicycle Day. The bees doing their thing, I enter the book’s retelling of the story of “mystic chemist” Albert Hoffman’s April 19, 1943 discovery of LSD. Intense stuff, particularly upon entering the trip proper, the famous bicycle ride home from Sandoz. In some sense, these scenes reinvent the classic superhero tale: the sudden, terrifying discovery of superpower. Hoffman didn’t know what was happening: the event was without precedent, a burst of pure novelty. He feared he’d lost his mind until his blissful day after, a time of rainbow-colored well-being and renewal. “Everything Glistening in the Soft Fresh Light,” he wrote afterwards of the experience. “The World was as if…Newly Created.”

Wednesday September 18, 2019

Discussing Pearl with students, I find myself wondering why the poem — a “visio” or “dream-vision” from the late-fourteenth century — begins and ends in a “garden of herbs.” An hour later, a book turns up in a bin at Goodwill: Paul Beyerl’s The Master Book of Herbalism. The book includes a long midsection titled “The Herbalist as a Magical Practitioner.” What do we moderns know, I wonder, about the medieval psychopharmacopeia? Beyerl helped to found an Earth-focused Wiccan organization called the Rowan Tree Church, legally incorporated in 1979. Members study and practice a tradition known as Lothloriën (named, I assume, after one of the Elven homelands in Tolkein’s Middle-Earth). In another book of his called A Wiccan Bardo, Revisited, Beyerl notes that the Lothloriën tradition works with archetypes and symbols that are compatible with Buddhist and Native American traditions as well as Neo-Paganism. Reading Beyerl is a bit like reading M.C. Richards: one senses in the wisdom of his prose the presence of a teacher in service of the Good.

Tuesday September 17, 2019

I’ve been trying to teach myself to drum on and off since childhood, occasionally acquiring some rudimentary skill during times of frequent practice, only to lose it afterwards, muscle memory jettisoned after long dry spells, years of disuse. I imagine interior landscapes: frazzled, frayed, cobwebbed ruins, like backgrounds from frames of Scooby-Doo.