Monday July 22, 2019

What does it mean to become mindful of a practice? Take my use of language in combination with my use of cannabis. What enters my awareness, what happens to my consciousness (and is there even still an “I” to whom these properties belong), once I’ve allied myself with a plant? Does becoming mindful mean observing language use, moving recursively through the parts of sentences, sounding them out, testing their properties, aligning them into sequences that please an inner judge? Does it mean editing in accordance with a previously taken-for-granted Reason, or Substance, or Preestablished Essence? Is this latter equivalent to what the ancients used to call Logos? And where does the “I” sit in all of this? Does choice of words have an impact on Being? Is the metabolism that emerges from this impact a healthy one? Let us relinquish the question-form and see. A kind of “angel” arrives here speaking to me from the pages of a book. It claims to be a messenger—though what it wishes to share with me, it says, is not information so much as a “language of transformation” — words “capable of renewing those to whom they are addressed” (Latour, as quoted in High Weirdness, p. 156). Earlier in the day, a friend posted a favorite passage of his from Frank Herbert’s Dune — a “Litany Against Fear” that seems apropos given the tightrope I walk. “I must not fear,” says the novel’s hero Paul Atreides. “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” This passage seems to favor action — but some fears are warranted, I tell myself. Afterwards I catch myself humming “Knock Three Times,” a hit song released in 1970 by Tony Orlando and Dawn. The unprompted strangeness of this song, the way it rose to mind without any clear catalyst, causes me to reflect for a moment on its lyrics. Noting a correspondence, I decide against a second hit.

Sunday July 21, 2019

Sarah shows me how to put the lime in the coconut. Life is what we make of it, she reminds me, and from then on, the good times roll. I sit up, I pay attention, I build and traverse new pathways. Observe the way light falls across furniture. A new person is soon to enter the story. Let us fill our homes with loving-kindness — and don’t worry so much, I tell myself, for as Maggie Nelson observes at the start of The Argonauts, “nothing you say can fuck up the space for God.” I don’t think everything can be thought, and most of what I consider important can’t be put into words. The latter have effect, to be sure, but they’re spoken by Being, not by some small willing part of it. I’m not even sure of the authority of Nelson’s pronouncement. But I prefer to read generously, trusting what she calls “the inexpressible…contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed.”

Saturday July 20, 2019

Distant thunder accompanies a bird calling from the trees beside my home during a light afternoon shower. I struggle to part with belongings, items I’ve gleaned over the decades. I scavenge, I collect. Clearly there’s some part of me resistant to change. There’s some deep-seated fear in me that I won’t be able to find my way home. I’ll go off on a weird walk, a long strange trip. The heroic answer, I suppose, is to reframe the derivé as a “mythic journey” where, unsatisfied with the old stories, we unfold our own. The question I find myself asking, however, is “Who is the hero? How do we make the journey transpersonal, collective, communal?” In order to gain a degree of autonomy from established ways, I need to begin a process of sorting through what I’ve been given. This process of rejecting and discarding, though, terrifies me in its implications. All things seem freighted with meaning: occult disco LPs, implicate orders, standing reserves of belief and unbelief. How am I to act given my uncertainty and distrust? What is it at bottom that I fear will happen? I fear I’m being tested by invisible forces aiming to trick or deceive me — forces that threaten an apocalyptic finale. This fear sometimes grips me in ways that cause me to rethink my relationship to psychedelics — including my use of cannabis. I hem and haw indecisively about the cumulative effects of these substances, uncertain of whether they help or hinder being. A friend chimes in here over social media: “To beat the heat,” he says, “one must become it.”

Friday July 19, 2019

Ellen Sander’s book Trips begins with a lovely dedication to “the incorrigible spirit of the Sixties; a seed planted, a weed grown, the promise, forever beckoning, of a garden.” That garden is the same one that beckons to us as the before and after of these trance-scripts. Sander was an early rock critic who covered the scene for Hit Parader, Vogue, and Saturday Review, among other outlets. Her book documents a change in awareness, the consequences of which continue to be felt today. She wrote in an age of bombs, flying saucers, superpowers, rock and roll groups — the same age of “high weirdness” analyzed by Erik Davis in his recent book of that title. These were the years when we first made contact — people of the world united in dance. Where has it led us, though? Localized changes, small but significant, keep me hopeful, each of us doing what we can. One of my nephews honors me, for instance, by adopting my habit of wearing colored Tyvek bracelets, the kind acquired as tokens of admission during visits to amusement parks, concerts, carnivals, and pools. It’s a quirk of mine, I guess — part freak flag, part makeshift memento mori — something I’ve been doing ever since I was a teenager. A modest bit of deviant self-fashioning.

Thursday July 18, 2019

This is a story wherein culture learns to behave lovingly. Animated anthropomorphic cocktail glasses wearing party favors raise cocktail glasses while dancing at a party. Next thing I know, my eyes are open and I’m speaking unashamedly, meeting the gaze of the Other with an expression of goodwill despite the capital-relation that binds us and brings us together. No matter how we interpret it, we’re always here, called upon to occupy this subject-position on this phenomenological plane. Let us do so each day as best we can, drinking juice guilt-free. I used to worry that guilt was something I carried, like a sentence of unknown extent, causing me to cower in fear of a temporarily-absent-but-due-to-return “Big Other.” For those who have ears to hear, say the Christians, this Big Other has already expressed willingness to forgive—but only upon certain conditions spelled out by fallible earthly translators, emissaries, bearers of sacred word. Who could help but fall astray under such conditions? Let us accept their fallibility—theirs, as well as our own—as the essence of the message. For this acceptance constitutes a freedom, a horizon opened up before us, judgment stayed. To live otherwise would be to live in fear. I acknowledge I’m not much of a narrator. I wander, I digress, losing myself in forests and labyrinths, out of which I rise occasionally to otherworldly heights like a self-styled Captain Marvel. This is as it should be, I suppose, for the stories that save me aren’t the Christian ones. They’re the ones involving X-Factors and New Mutants, where latent powers and hidden potentials suddenly become manifest. The psychedelic experience arises alongside this mythos. The world we live in is the one where the change already happened. For better or worse, human societies have birthed a new era of augmented consciousness, have they not? There’s something apocalyptic about the event itself, a kind of veil-lifting — the arrival of a new phase of history. Suddenly we’re in the worlds of Grant Morrison’s Supergods and Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. (Another name for all of this, perhaps, is the Anthropocene.)

Wednesday July 17, 2019

I find myself wondering about the relationship between psychedelics and the Situationist practice known as the dérive. A number of writers have hinted at one: maybe Sadie Plant? Alexander Trocchi? I also understand, however, upon arriving to campus, that my office could stand some redecorating. Time to occupy space with good vibes, positive energy. Time to fill the walls with doorways and windows. Ken Knabb, editor of the Situationist International Anthology, talks openly of turning on and taking psychedelics in his “Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State.” What I no longer like about Situationism, though, is the way it mired Surrealism’s “energies of intoxication” with ideological conspiracism and paranoia. They were a lot like the Discordians in that respect, suffering from what Timothy Melley calls “agency panic.” Situationism wasn’t loving enough or trusting enough of others in its manner of expression. The same is true of a Situationist-influenced anarchist group from the Bay Area, the Council for the Eruption of the Marvelous. What about Raoul Vaneigem’s famous book, The Revolution of Everyday Life? Does that, too, proceed from a paranoid, “gnostic” state of distrust? The other place to look would be British Situationist Christopher Gray’s book The Acid Diaries. Reality flickers and teases. Recognition coincides with forgetting. Best to hold true to a both-and worldview, exercising what the Romantic poet John Keats called “negative capability.” This is what allows us to be here amid life’s “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This is our condition: let us explore it without undue vexation. Let us be flexible and open, granting the cosmos agency enough to be fun, weird, wild, delicious, and strange. Navigate by way of flashes of noetic insight, and an abiding faith in love as an unfolding process — a single mountain with many paths.

Tuesday July 16, 2019

Home again, stretching, settling in after seven weeks of travel. Initially I find myself needing to focus on nesting, repair, self-care, readjustment. Vacuuming feels like manual operation of a Photoshop airbrush. I get better results and greater satisfaction when I kneel down and clean the floor with a wet rag. If that’s what the life-world needs, then so be it. I give gladly. Throughout the day, I catch myself renegotiating use of will, contemplating my relationship to various entities and objects. Slugs, spiders, chairs, old bits of clothing, bottled water: all of these things require care and attention, as does Erik Davis’s High Weirdness, a copy of which I pluck from the pile of mail that arrived for me while I was gone. Also in the pile is a copy of Fredric Jameson’s new book Allegory and Ideology. Time to start reading, I tell myself. Both books feel weighty, but High Weirdness is the one that warrants immediate attention, I decide after some hemming and hawing, the Stranger Things soundtrack modulating through my head. The Davis book is the one I’ve been waiting for these last few months. It feels timely. It speaks to present hopes and concerns. As Jeffrey J. Kripal notes in his blurb on the back cover, “May this book, like a glowing UFO, land on your lap, and every other lap, and weird our world beyond all measure.” I approach it with a degree of trepidation — but also with great excitement. Across from me on the wall of my dining room hangs a reproduction of the famous Ambrosius Holbein engraving from Thomas More’s Utopia, looking suddenly like an emblem representing macrocosm and microcosm: Genesis, Paradise Lost, and Frankenstein woven into a single grand narrative, the figures down at the bottom reminding me of the debaters from the garden of branching paths. “The devil in the details,” as one commentator puts it. The figure I’ve imagined in the role of Adam wears the name “Hythlodaeus” in the engraving, referring to the character in More’s text whose name means both “God has healed” and “Speaker of nonsense.”

Sunday July 14, 2019

An ant explores the surface of a sunlit outdoor table. I sit across from it observing and writing on my in-laws’ back patio. A neighbor waters a garden next door as I read Erik Davis’s review of the “Hippie Modernism” exhibition for Frieze magazine, written two years ago, when the show was up at BAMPFA. This is the show that inspired the course I taught this past spring. There’s an elegance to the review’s list of the show’s achievements. My eyes dwell for a time on an image included in the review, a digital reproduction of a 1965 painting by Isaac Abrams called Hello Dali.

Hello Dali

I see echoes of the painting as I look over at flowers in my in-laws’ garden. I let this work motivate me to complete my project. I watch videos, like the radical Italian design group Superstudio’s “Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on the Earth,” a film of theirs from 1972.

Balm applied, the goad to work kicks in. I note down books I need to order, like Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro’s Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art. After a breakfast of homemade waffles and orange juice, I burrow away and watch Davis’s recent talk, “A Brief History of Queer Psychedelia,” where I learn about Gerald Heard’s involvement with the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the United States.

Isocrates was the pseudonym that Heard used for the articles he published in the society’s magazine, the Mattachine Review. He also wrote articles for ONE, another early gay publication, under the pseudonym D.B. Vest. Davis also unveils a weird book of Heard’s written in the late 1960s called AE: The Open Persuader published under the pseudonym Auctor Ignotus (or maybe W Dorr Legg). Tartarus Press published a collection called Dromenon: The Best Weird Stories of Gerald Heard in the early 2000s. That, too, is a book worth tracking down. By midafternoon, elements have clustered together to cause me to wonder at the overlapping histories of psychedelics and ritual magic. The famous LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III noted that his early experiences with acid coincided, for instance, with his reading of The Kybalion. Most of the first-generation Western psychedelic crowd took up at points with Eastern tantric currents. Some folks also explored Western pagan and esoteric traditions. This outburst of spiritual yearning and experimentation remains for me in its utter mysteriousness a source of fascination. In my state of unknowing about it, the topic seems rich with narrative potential, like there’s a story there waiting to be told. Like the fate of Pedro Salvadores in the Borges story of that name, it strikes me as a symbol of something I am about to understand, but never quite do.

Saturday July 13, 2019

Toying with the famous hermetic aphorism, “As above, so below,” I begin to tell a story in my head of a protagonist who comes to regard his consensus reality as the ontological equivalent of a matrix or gameworld. Most of the occupants of the gameworld are split subjects. They know themselves only in light of what we might call their “this-worldly” guise, each person’s identity fully sutured to that of its gameworld avatar. This process of identification causes the person to forget its additional role as player. This is where our story begins: for our protagonist has arrived at a thunderous realization. Together, he realizes, these two components — this-worldly avatar and otherworldly player — form the Janus faces, the days and nights, of a single consciousness. This realization arrives at a particular moment; certain technological capacities have to be reached — or so I imagine. But when have civilizations ever lacked their chessboards and labyrinths? All of the ancient myths featuring these objects remain active and relevant in the time of our protagonist.