Saturday March 23, 2019

I sit listening as a neighbor in an adjoining yard plays an accordion. Hey Mr. Accordion Man, help me remember my dreams. I meditate upon a finely detailed ancient wooden eye staring up into my third eye from my back deck. I appraise it from several scales. Sounds come buzzing, whistling, bowling, crackling: conversations, motors, animals rustling in an underbrush, signal-pulses of birdsong. Seven to ten minutes and then I’m off for an evening of fun with my fellow thirsty nuns and monks.

Friday March 22, 2019

Start the words, talk the talk, let it rip. Listen to the music. Dare to eat a peach. “Years ago, my heart was set to live,” as go the opening words to Big Star’s “The Ballad of El Goodo.” And here I am all these years later, holding on. Tulip magnolias and weeping cherries. It is time to write to St. Christopher. It is time to commit to love.

Thursday March 21, 2019

Time to delve into Cosmos as a first-time viewer, even if the series is some sort of anamnesis, some remembering of the one by the one. Who is this charioteer who captains our journey? We are all space brothers and sisters, soulful star people cruising around in outer space — can you get with that? The voice of Reason beams via television satellite into the Library of Alexandria, and just like that, we begin to communicate across time, in many languages, awakening into freedom. From Alexandria, the General Intellect pulses consciousness out into space. Time to do something, we say to ourselves, with our knowledge of the cosmos. As Sagan’s series shifts into a second episode on evolution of life through natural selection, however, it begins to sound grossly eugenicist. I hear June Tyson singing in reply, “It’s after the end of the world. / Don’t you know that yet?” I keep wondering to myself, “Where is phenomenological reality? When and where is consciousness? Who is the ‘you’ hailed by Sagan’s speech?” By the show’s astrology-debunking third episode, I’m nodding off, in search of better dreams. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Sagan’s philosophy.

Wednesday March 20, 2019

“Space is the Place” plays at a low volume, at the back (as opposed to front and center) of my thoughts, though in fact it’s one of the most bracing performances I’ve ever heard, while I reflect on my mixed feelings toward my discipline’s fondness for jargon.

Don’t get me wrong: I like it when my colleagues gather and talk texts. But I prefer birds whistling from treetops. Along with assists from the other elements of human and nonhuman nature, the evening orchestra performs its polyphonic improvisation — with me there to observe and to listen in surround sound in the hollow of a glade. Through these acts we teach each other. As we pull together, we expand each other’s capacity to sympathize and finally to love. I am describing an effort to bring about a fundamental change in “reality” itself, which is to say, in ideology.

Monday March 18, 2019

I steal away from work midafternoon and watch Space is the Place — the original 64-minute version. I think of it as an act of study — perhaps even what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “fugitive planning.” Ra imagines a colony in outer space free of the white people of planet Earth. “Equation-wise, think of time as officially ended,” he explains early in the film. Once time is ended, he says, we “teleport the planet here through music.” Sun Ra’s jazz is the sign-system equivalent of a riot — and when the Overseer comes ’round to make him pay, Ra holds up a card, casts a spell, relocates the confrontation elsewhere, into the Space Age, technic surrounded by void. Through his music, Ra creates “a multiplicity of other destinies.”

Sunday March 17, 2019

Sarah and I went for a lovely evening run last night, listening with shared expressions of wonder as a triangle of barred owls hooted at one another from the treetops above our heads. Old-school beat, MC says “Do it!” Only it’s that bearded longhair Jerry Rubin declaiming Scenarios of the Revolution. In my ascent toward a center of light, the song of a cardinal. I open my eyes and see beautiful animal friends eating and singing from branches in the sky above me. One sends down signals, so I grab and place out for it an offering: a pair of blackberries. I place them out for all who come here wanting.

Saturday March 16, 2019

As William Bowers once said, “I went and saw me some Spider-Man” — only this time, in the current redux, the current version of the myth, the film is called Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I’d heard good things, but I couldn’t recall if I’d seen the trailer. Suffice to say, though, that a hum of excitement could be heard as I approached the theater. Signs appeared on the side of the road announcing “FEEL THE LOVE” and “TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE DOWN.” Which isn’t to say that in my heightened state, I’d lost touch with the ground of being. There were moments of wild paranoia, for instance, during the lead-up: creepy, nationalistic, body-police fitness commercials, followed by slight release into the sanitized exoticism of an ad for “Trident Tropical Vibes,” some light, safe corporate capture-attempt; goofy GEICO; plush digital high-energy stuffed-bear comedians joking on the carpet stage of a playroom. Caged Dumbo released into the world of an elderly filmmaker’s “acclaimed imagination” — no magic, but “IN REAL 3D AND IMAX.” And for those not yet satisfied with the menu, try another product from the Disney Kingdom: the myth of the Lion King in a new reanimated register. Thankfully the Columbia Pictures logo intervenes to save us, graffiti’d into a gun-toting cowgirl, along with a variety of other versions from other dimensions.

The film begins and quickly sets its terms: cops and prep schools versus the “droppin’ science” teacher-uncle, the surrogate dad who distills wisdom extracted from the streets and tunnels of the metropolis. All against the backdrop of the cop-father to whom young black men are expected to publicly humiliate themselves and say “I love you.” The radioactive spider-god Anansi erupts into this, effecting a permanent radical reorientation toward reality. In the Spider-Verse, the psychedelic narrative begins not with a drug but with the bite of a spider. “Why is this happening?” wonders this new speciation of the myth. Next we find ourselves in a miniature allegory about Brooklyn’s rejection of Amazon, the corporate behemoth figured here as Green Goblin. The Spider-Verse is rich with allegorical potential, able to accommodate in its mapping practice beasts and alchemy amid DARPA and NSA. By these means, audiences arrive into a multi-color, multi-dimensional anti-Trump national allegory. The question the nation is trying to answer, apparently, is “How do we destroy the collider?” Stan Lee appears as the good wizard, the benevolent Gandolf of the comics universe, promising each of us that the mask always fits eventually. With references to a fictional corporation called Alchemax, the film conjures up for those who have ears to hear figures like Malcolm X and others of the Black Radical tradition, through whose hands the key to revolution once passed. Who else, though, can show us the ropes of a new horizon, eagles flying? How do we retrace Peter and Miles’s steps across dimensions to defeat Kingpin, the film’s version of Trump?

Friday March 15, 2019

I sometimes sort among aporia: irresolvable questions, internal debates, cosmological Rubik’s Cubes, beanstalks into clouds of abstraction. I feel pulled along sometimes, burdened by daily conditions and daily demands on my labor. Sometimes I think of it as “capitalism” — these conditions, my condition. How do we cheer ourselves? How do we transform the cognitive map into something enjoyable, something we can dance to, some sweaty tie-died daydream? By what games might we reinvent labor as play?

Thursday March 14, 2019

A woman with gray hair and glasses rounds the corner of the neighborhood park and waves her fingers at a man and son blowing bubbles near the playground. Pickups and CR-Vs drive past. A helicopter descends toward a hospital. Grass stems quiver, birds chirp. Is my view of the world large enough to encompass the deeds I will do as well as their significance? How can one know in advance, unless communications could be sent and received between two or more minds in anticipation of events themselves? It’s as simple as a building blinking on in recognition of the approach of evening. Spring is here, daffodils aplenty. To my future self, I submit a note, a reminder in anticipation of summer: London is currently home to an exciting, droney, psychedelic jazz scene anchored around figures and groups like Szun Waves, Luke Abbott, James Holden, PVT, Triosk, Sons of Kemet, Theon Cross, and Shabaka Hutchings.