Friday April 5, 2019

Sleepy — inhaling and exhaling in a kind of trance. When I went for a run yesterday evening, same deal. I concentrated my attention upon the timed repetition of the sound and act of breathing. Speculations about AI seem flawed in their ontological assumptions — particularly their dualism. Something else happens when we go nondual and imagine ourselves at one with a stream of becoming. The self-presentation of being depends in such circumstances on an act of hermeneutics. It’s always a movement between dreams and their interpretation. Ease up, I tell myself, take a break, cook dinner for oneself and one’s partner. Time to dip into Lara Lee’s Modulations: Cinema for the Ear. Part of me remains convinced, though, that “to believe in this living,” as John Prine sang, “is just a hard way to go.”

Thursday April 4, 2019

I take my seat at the table, a wooden one outdoors. Birds chirp and sing. In the distance, a neighbor mows his lawn. I picture a church with flapping wings, but with eyes reopened I spy a pair of cardinals. With these and the branches of a bush beside which I sit, I share a moment after a long day of work. Work, that is, for a system, an institution, a miserly master — so that, whether long or short, each day feels like a sentence served.

Wednesday April 3, 2019

“Hack the code.” That seems to have been the final utterance of the counterculture before dispersing out onto what cyberpunk Bruce Sterling called “islands in the net.” But who among us cave-dwellers possesses the capacity to hack? How do we who are landless debtors hack back into the biosphere and become communally self-sufficient? How do we rewire and reboot world operating systems? For me, it’s by reading Thom Gunn’s wonderful poem written under the influence of acid, “At the Center.” Formally composed into three numbered sections, each containing two six-line rhymed stanzas of iambic pentameter, the poem is nevertheless heady and psychedelic. Filled with wonder. The one commons we do possess as heads, I suppose, is language. Poets like Gunn remind me that that, too, is a code we could hack, though “hacking” as a metaphor for practice seems far too intrusive and masterful, too contra naturam, for the work that lies ahead.

Tuesday April 2, 2019

The revolution grows micro, happens everywhere. Except everybody knows that everywhere is as good as nowhere. As we float in our plastic domes. Is neoliberalism birthed in the summer of ’69? What did Woodstock and the Moon Walk do to us? Did they remake us all as cybernetic astronauts, tethered as if by umbilical cord to an AI similar to the one that awakens and talks to us at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey? What accounts for the recurrence of “space” in so many of the texts of Hippie Modernism? Why, too, is this the moment of LSD and “Spacewar”? Did neoliberalism shoot us all into space? Where does acid figure in relation to this transformation? What effect did it have on the collective imaginary? Abbie Hoffman had his helmet smashed, he says, (and by “helmet,” he meant his “subjective experience”), during a bad acid trip at Woodstock. (The book to consult for an account of Abbie’s trip is Ellen Sander’s Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties.) Even as he imagines the festival as a prefiguration of a new WOODSTOCK NATION, he also describes it as the first time in history that we successfully landed a man on the Earth. “Calling Planet Earth,” echoes June Tyson at the end of “Space is the Place.” Perhaps what we saw is that we’re all one thing, one brain, the General Intellect, a new infant floating out in space. What do we do with ourselves? Stewart Brand assumes that this condition makes us as gods, and that we might as well get good at it. But he does so while involved in a counterculturally-conducted investigation of communal living. The neoliberal cognitive map clicked into place in multiple minds at once there in the late 60s and early 70s. We’re all right there in that “Earthrise” photograph, our collective self-portrait. My hunch, however, is that this map is the veil that we need to pierce if we’re ever to get free.

Monday April 1, 2019

I resolve to become more knowledgeable and fill the world with flower punks and psychedelic bands. For heads already in the know, thoughts may turn to the cynicism of the Zappa / Mothers of Invention song of that name.

But we needn’t be cynical today. Listen instead to Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground,” listen to the 1979 version of “Space is the Place.” Shine on, sister. Gotta reach that highest ground. After reading poems from Thom Gunn’s Moly, the Port of San Francisco flashes like a voice in a dream. Dr. Robert is there with me, as is Homer — consciousness leaping between multiple domains.

Sunday March 31, 2019

Harried with work, days and days of grading midterms, I stumble free mid-afternoon into observation and contemplative reading of the Afros of the White Panther Party, dining on a side of green lettuce. How compartmentalized the days become under capitalist wage-slavery, I think with a sigh. Oscillations, electronic evocations of reality. Abbie Hoffman and John Sinclair in the midst of the last civil war represented themselves on the stage of history as revolutionary superheroes. But department stores are weird trips, man. Compartmentalized to the nth degree. Objects hung from racks in one thinly-populated zone, dense diverse clusters of people and sound elsewhere. How might we reconnect? I pick up a faceted wood vase and tap at it, questioningly. A voice in a nearby aisle proclaims, “it feels so real!” Materials when touched, not what they seem. And these motherfuckers no longer carry my Heinz Jalapeño Ketchup. Reality becomes ever more standardized, with me too jittery and anxious to connect, strike up conversation with others. As in the song, I become “lost in the supermarket.” It’s at least in part a fear of race and sexuality. But mainly it’s a fear that to others I might seem a weirdo, a creep, a stoner. I wish we could somehow become heads together. How do we re-establish communication across the plastic dome?

Wednesday March 27, 2019

The communes of the 1960s were utopian experiments — attempts to develop better ways of living. Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s short memoir Heavenly Breakfast provides participant observation and reflection from within one of these experiments. The communes were like irradiated psychedelic seeds thrown to the winds, each free radical allowed to evolve its own local variety, its own distinct mutations, each one searching for alternatives that might survive and thrive. Most communes failed: some because of fundamental errors, others due to an unlucky set of contingencies. Yet here and there, some survived. This process needs to continue. Broad, grassroots social experimentation will have to begin again, picking up where Hippie Modernism left off. And those of you who wish to be cutthroat capitalists — you must allow radicals the space, resources, and freedom from violence to do so if the species is to adapt to the new planetary environment.

Tuesday March 26, 2019

When I wake at 2:40am, fresh in my mind are a set of dreams. I visit some sort of gathering or festival on a farm or a fairgrounds in the company of two childhood friends (who from this point onward I’ll refer to as R. and J.). J. asks us to accompany him to a chain restaurant. R. is skeptical, J. apologetic (“you don’t have to come along,” he says, “I’m just hungry”). I try to mediate on J.’s behalf, explaining to R. the restaurant’s location in relation to places we all visited during childhood like the United Skates roller rink. Elsewhere, perhaps in another dream altogether, my mom lays giant white sheets out in the bedroom of my childhood home, only the second floor of the house is airy and open, with huge, tall windows — some entirely different structure from my home in waking reality, but one that to my dream-self seems entirely familiar. Somehow that segues to a shoot for a music video: maybe something my dream-self watches online, starring a contemporary band covering a song from the 60s, pretending to tear down an old door to hang a large antique mirror with an angel head sculpted into the top of the frame. Someone who looks like a minor acquaintance of mine but who my dream-self understands to be Timothy Leary’s son Zach appears in an interview for the video, as does a local artist from the town in which I currently reside. One of them explains to the interviewer, “I guess I’m waiting for some new judgment, hoping that that era didn’t just die out, you know?” When I wake to pee, I immediately associate the doorway with the Siege Perilous, a portal between worlds featured in a series of X-Men comics that I read as a kid. When I wake again at 4:30am, another dream lingers. Walking through a large circular home with friends and family, waiting for some band from the 60s to perform, I carry a wooden folding chair that transforms over the course of the dream into a beanbag. As I tell my aunt and uncle about other large circular homes that my dream-self claims to have visited in California, a large dog comes bounding over and tries to wrestle the beanbag from my hands, jumping up and licking my left ear, causing me to flinch with fear, at which point I wake with a start. A final dream remembered upon waking at 6:20am: Sarah and her parents purchase a nice, large house for us with large, overgrown grounds, and while Sarah tours me through for the first time (the house already having been purchased without my knowledge), Mick Jagger shows up and we sit around on the couches in the living room and burn a bunch of wooden knick-knacks in the fireplace. Afterwards, perhaps unrelated to the rest of the dream, Sarah races a bunch of kids around a hotel pool and playground, with an alcohol-infused friend providing advice and encouragement to help her across the finish line. Songs running through my head upon waking include “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”