What have we accomplished since Ulysses, the great novel of everyday life? I wish I could train students to appreciate that book’s achievements. But in what context? Look around: we live in the hours before a storm. There are few among us who have time enough still to read books like Ulysses. I wish to live without cash, outside the capitalist system. Please help me. Please advise. How does one begin to live as one wishes? How does one create a world where owls nest in abandoned libraries, and capitalism is a thing of the past? Desolate land’s ends, abandoned shorelines: these have always been my favorite places. The broken asphalt expanses beneath gull-infested grey skies. I enjoy being assigned the character whose every day unlocks a new spell as he trespasses amid the ghosts-to-be of tomorrow’s mossy wastes and ruins. Extra credit for those who devise mantras and practice neuro-linguistic programming in the moments before bed each night. “Linger, let live: longer, louder.” We were born into this mess; we might as well get good at it. Amen. Blinds draw lines across light, so I go outside, only to have those bastards, the mosquitoes, attack my ankles. Because of “live and let live,” I’m supposed to just permit that? A voice of ours quivers upward with nervous, breathless laughter. Purple lips, a tree-bark face. Breathing often helps to relax me, along with stretches and massage. What role does illusion play in everyday consciousness? Is an altered state a complete distortion of real conditions, as in the case of an hallucination? Or is it more like a slight bending for purposes of enlightenment? “Kiddies, the dream has begun,” I exclaim while waving jazz hands or spirit fingers. The bad faith of fascism expresses itself in the form of store-bought, mass-manufactured tiki torches. No “talented oppressor,” no subtle beast, that. Tunde Wey cuts to the truth of the matter, however — a truth, I’m sorry to say, for which I, too, am culpable — when he writes, “People of color are continuously dispossessed of culture and self in service of whiteness.” And here I am, teaching a course on “consciousness.”
Tag: altered states
Tuesday August 22, 2017
Mushrooms tolerate me — exert a strange power over me, even — as I bend the knee to pet them. A couple around the corner have a painting hung upside-down in their living room of an Edenic or maybe immediately post-Edenic Adam and Eve, the two figures clutching one another, bodies pale and unclothed. And the co-signer, the Ectoplasmic Lending Center: what about its contribution? These are the kinds of conversations I have with myself, given the magical thinking of my upbringing. “On the charted route,” my friend says, “you usually miss all the cool funguses.” It happened thus: I walked right into them. They announced themselves. My escort surrendered and was marched off, hands and feet in chains. The game-world at this point underwent a reprogramming. Imagine consciousness withdrawing from immersion in events on a screen. Dis-identification, while yet a perspective persists, there to do the leaping between realms. Freddie de Boer calls it “the perspective that does not understand itself to be a perspective.” To what extent is my writing “place-based”? Is “place-based” the same as “starting from and concerned with the everyday”? Or is the best writing that which transports, that which is most at variance with place, if by this latter we mean the “as-is”? No lion need resurrect itself. Call it what it was: expenses paid round-trip. I am becoming a gummy multi-vitamin kind of guy. A piece of bread floats through the frame: I ingest it. One can orbit blissfully through space if one tries. But I barely have time to reconnect my models each morning come breakfast. A podcast I listen to introduces me to Dr. Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist who researches what she calls “game transfer phenomena.” These phenomena — digital ear worms, closed-eye visuals — involve many of the same processes that we associate with altered states of consciousness: trance, immersion, absorption, hypnagogia, dissociation, dreamwork. De-realization of reality. How might this complicate our understanding of the relationship between games and reality, and between perception, cognition, and behavior? What happens when language use evolves dialectically with experience, but in ways that evade the user’s desire to communicate — leaving only a kind of meandering amidst fragments? The dream has always been to become authors of our own sensations — lucid to a point of real agency. How else would I ever muster any narrative consciousness, or the ability to perform authorship with a swagger? Sometimes you simply have to trust yourself to wing it. You throw the dice, in agreement that if you lose, you’ll try again. The mind invents an imaginary soundtrack, some echoey, reverby, anxiety-stoking industrial act that never was — so why can’t it invent other such short fictions? I mustn’t let frustration with writing become my content. Remember the haze that overtook vision during the afternoon of the eclipse.
Trance-Scripts 