Monday March 11, 2019

Self and will are learned, not imposed, when one goes with the flow. Don’t worry about how to word it. Just go. Plunge out into the neighborhood and note the signs, identify the constellations, let the world approach in new ways. Worry not of communications, even when short and cryptic. “Daphne with daffodils.” Our soul stretching upward in many guises, like the limbs of an ancient oak. What is this inner spirit that expresses itself as a cradle for ever more diverse gradations of being? A river of cars, a barking poodle. Sometimes something like will or desire manifests, as when I note to myself: “2370, at the corner of Lyndhurst and Coventry, is a beauty.” Or afterwards, at a counter over an order of French fries: “Is there significance attached to the number 8 appearing thrice? Or a dog that self-identifies as a deer?” Perhaps this is my way of announcing my goal as an initiate. “Eight is Infinity — Paradise regained.” Voices speak of bounty and prosperity, movement toward realization of purpose. Let this be the promise of March: the joy in my heart.

Sunday March 10, 2019

Behold, there in the basket of keys and letters beside the door like an object in a memory palace: mirror-shade sunglasses, like the ones invested with allegorical meaning by the cyberpunks. Pardon the group tag, the literary label. Anthologies have that effect on people. And as Bruce Sterling once said, label-mongering can be “a valid source of insight — as well as great fun.” For instance, it is to Samuel Delany that he credits the Mirrorshades crew’s “visionary shimmer” (x). During the Sixties and Seventies, a new movement gained recognition within SF, the New Wave. Delany was one of the stars of this movement. Let us dip back into his 1967 novel The Einstein Intersection. Think of Delany as an important component of a single distributed consciousness attempting to communicate to itself across the ages. Who are these “others,” these posthumans who come to populate the remains of our myths and dreams in the future that Delany imagines for us in his novel? As Neil Gaiman notes in the book’s Foreword, “They inhabit our legends awkwardly: they do not fit them” (The Einstein Intersection viii). Why, then, do they need them? What do myths and legends do, either for us or for them? How does dream and fancy come to play an active part in our being? Prior to the loss of a loved one, the book’s protagonist Lo Lobey herded goats with his friends. Like the rural communards, the back-to-the-landers of the 1960s, Lobey and his friends were out there “on the Beryl Face: looking for pasture” (3).

Friday March 8, 2019

A glitch in the program allows me to inch the horizon line beyond its former position. Into the space opened by unanticipated spending money come new games, new concepts. I sit back and listen to “Truckin’,” chips not yet cashed. I pick up and flip through a well-worn volume, thinking to myself, “How does the song go?” Something about drawing the veil aside and unbinding — or is the command, rather, to leave it on? All I know is, “the feed-back proves, / the feed-back is / the law.” But to know is one thing; to feel the strain between two allegiances another. Who wants to bear the weight of a “law” upon one’s back? Who wants eternity in a country for old men?

Thursday March 7, 2019

I want my Age of Aquarius! “Grab passion,” sings the radio. “Make it happen.” Next thing I know, I’m listening to “Ride My See-Saw” by The Moody Blues and digging it, entering through doorways new states of mind.

Thinking truly is the best way to travel. Floating like a kite and then grounded again, eyes open, the world brighter, sharper, and superimposed atop it a corridor of integral concepts. That album of theirs, In Search of the Lost Chord, allows for quite an experience. I follow it with Moby Grape’s Grape Jam — a relaxing listen, though a bit sloppy and indulgent. But that’s what’s so wonderful about it: “This music happened,” as the group says on the back cover of the LP, “when we could escape for awhile the intimidations of the virtuosity and perfections demanded by posterity. Relaxed, free, unselfconscious — Just laying down some music when the mood struck.” Bellbottomed legs leap and spin among a tribe of hippie whirling dervishes in Milos Forman’s Hair, which I watch afterwards while I practice breathing.

Wednesday March 6, 2019

I wish I could convince others to enjoy birds whistling, the tap of a woodpecker, dogs barking. But students prefer Ozzy Osborne’s angsty theatrics, several of them requesting we listen to “War Pigs / Luke’s Wall.” I can hold off, soak in some rays of sunlight, wait until the time is right. Sit beside trees and practice breathing. Expand consciousness into new modes of sensitivity and sensibility. One way I do so is by listening closely to “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Berkeley-born John Fogerty sings from the standpoint of a critical working-class subject suffering persecution at the hands of hawkish militaristic elites. He calls the latter out, naming them for what they are: hypocrites / phony “patriots” who wave the flag but send others off to fight in their stead. (The rich were able to exercise influence to receive deferment from the draft, while working-class males had no choice but to fight or flee the country. One thinks here, for example, of former US president George W. Bush and other warmongers who themselves never served.) Drums and guitar notes shimmering with reverb, the song kicks into action. It starts marching at you, picket sign aloft, hips swaggering. On the album cover for the band’s fourth studio album Willy and the Poor Boys (1969), they’re seen performing like an old-time jug band on a sidewalk before an audience of African-American children. When Fogerty says, “I ain’t no senator’s son, son,” he’s damning benefactors of nepotism, he’s damning multi-generational elites, he’s damning the entire American anti-democratic system of inherited privilege.

Tuesday March 5, 2019

I am he, apparently, who prepares the table and watches in the watchtower. As I carry around my copy of Vagabonding in America, a synchrony of separately-arrived-at roads all lead to Isaiah 21. Chariots, horsemen, a student asking to lead a discussion about the Dylan song “All Along the Watchtower”: does this mean Babylon is fallen, is fallen?

Monday March 4, 2019

I recline on a couch and observe spontaneously generated eidetic imagery. The Eidetic Image, as Heinrich Klüver notes, “has been identified in psychological literature as a vision, as a source for new thought and feeling, as a material picture in the mind which can be scanned by the person as he would scan a real current event in his environment, and as a potent, highly significant stimulus which arises from within the mind and throws it into a series of self-revealing imagery effects.”

Sunday March 3, 2019

Neighborhood kids play basketball on a small concrete court behind the house across the street from me. Their father plays with them, chuckling, laughing goofily at times, shouting “Airball, airball!” Tiring of basketball, the kids ask the father to pull them, turning him into a docile horse tugging their Hot Wheels chariot. A bird perched on a telephone wire sings to me: a beautiful chesty robin. Such is what I see and hear when I sit for a few moments on my front stoop on a recent misty afternoon. A worker a few hundred feet away hammers new shingles to a neighbor’s roof. While no part of this world is “owned” by me — I, too, like all of us here aboard Spaceship Earth, no more than a mere renter — ’tis a garden all the same.

Saturday March 2, 2019

The light tapping of a pick across the muted strings of the guitar on Dylan’s “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” reminds us as listeners that a clock is ticking. Dylan’s lyrics are in part about remaining cool despite the pain of mortality, the pain of accepting one’s wounds in order to live. What about those initial verses, though: they reference the possibility of nuclear apocalypse, don’t they? Doesn’t the Cold War form the song’s political horizon, “eclipsing both sun and moon”? I worry, though, that the song is also somehow an indictment of me, the teacher who teaches that “knowledge waits” — one who “must obey authority,” one who does not respect it “in any degree,” one who despises his job and his destiny and “speak[s] jealously of them that are free.” The same figure Nietzsche condemned, in other words, for being moved by a politics of ressentiment. But is Dylan singing as the voice of a student who can’t please me, or am I the one who can’t please them? “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” comes up a few tracks earlier on Bringing It All Back Home, and it’s a riotous, rowdy picaresque — the story of a poor sailor who dodges his way through the nightmarish slapstick of my country ’tis of thee.