Be generous: unfurl word-scripts into trusting patterns. Travel the life-world as a sunlight sunbright Sunshine Superman. Practice breathwork on the streets. No need to feel lost there on the sidewalks. Wander for a bit with a gray wooden wand pilfered from a mound of twigs. Ahead of me: Small Batch. Behind me: the looming edifice of the First Baptist Church. On the ground beside me, near a tree where I stand: a plate of uneaten beans. And beside the beans, a board game: The Game of Life. Turning left, I relax into a park bench to absorb the implications of an allegory: an emblematic architecture. In the left panel of the landscape-as-triptych: a glass office tower capped with the number 5. And in the air above it: a rocket ship. In the middle panel, a smaller rocket ship, there too in the sky, though this time above the church. And on the right, in the third of our panels, local high-rise housing project, the Crystal Towers. ‘Tis past the latter that we go en route to Dada’s House. Let us find our path and walk it.
Tag: dérive
Sunday August 6, 2017
As writers, we can populate our voices by sampling the whole of media memory. The sounds come to us as the equivalent of radio signals from within. A voice says, “I gave you Logos a long time ago.” The unlocking of secret heights of language-use prompts shifting of the puzzle parts of reality. Not just a mountain blast or a rhetoric, but a reset of the object-world and of all living subjects’ knowledge and memory of it. Matter complies masochistically to Mind’s urgings. The differences are negligible but real. Like an escaped prisoner, my mind wanders free of discipline, and by that I mean not inner, transcendent discipline, but discipline as imposed by man upon man. By fleeing capture in the language games of others, we pick up the frequencies of an authentic, single-and-continuous, cosmos-creating act of speech. When I allow that speech to hypnotize me, I become capable of writing it down, and what it says becomes what I realize I want to say. The self that speaks itself thus also speaks another. This other self remembers falling asleep the other night while writing, and awakening the next day in the shade of his day, his back deck dappled piebald with spots of sunlight. He burns the social surplus of his days reposed in languorous, language-stupefied gratitude, having learned to worship through pleasure his one true master, the present. It’s like his Boolean microprocessor obeys a different logic, more generous in its handling of circumstance. Mariah’s work continues to astonish in these instances. (The incantatory “Shonen” and “Shinzo No Tobira” are current favorites of his.)
He observes rows of captured sunlight along the boards of a wooden fence, and feels at ease, the rest of the world of irrelevance somewhere behind him. On his run, he dodges a crushed Arizona Iced Tea can. A pointless thing, he shrugs, a trifle of a collapsed civilization. Flowers hung beside sidewalks become for him beings to sniff and touch lightly along his daily, leisurely, mind-adjusting dérives, the latter being a revolutionary strategy he acquired years ago during his apprenticeship among the Situationists. If he knows a word, it holds purpose, and he will use it. There is no active revolutionary strategy for the creation of communism, he thinks, until more residents in the US decide they want this. If this sometimes becomes Trance-Scripts’ Marxist Guide to Wellness, so be it. Still, the kind of joy he extracts from each day is not the kind of joy he’d had in mind. Today is the day on which he and friends had planned to head to the shore for a brief vacation — a trip the group had to postpone due to weather. “The influence of weather on dérives,” wrote Debord, “although real, is a determining factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible.” Perhaps he and his friends will find time in their lives to reschedule.
Trance-Scripts 