Heaven and Hell – Trance-Scripts

Heavenly Tree, Nonbinary Tree

Reading Gerrit Lansing’s Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth occasions anamnesis. The book does not teach; it reminds. Though new to me, it is as if it were always here in my memory palace. Its poems are strange attractors. Possessed of a kind of retrocausal agency, they land rightly, on time, un plein jour, in ways that resonate. “The heavens declare, / Apophainetai!” (191): words Lansing himself declares in “Stanzas of Hyparxis,” the poem that opens a section of the book called “Portals.” Its verses emerge as radiograms from the imaginal — signals sent back through time. Like utterances overheard from an Eternal Now, the book’s portal-poems draw forth — bring to light / let show — words of other books in the Library. Synchronicities abound as one reads.

I puzzle over the book’s many references to the “heavenly tree.” Beginning with the poem that began his career, “The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward,” Lansing’s work stands as a reply of sorts to the oft-quoted line from Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951): “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”

Elsewhere Jung writes, however, of “The Inverted Tree.” Hearing that phrase, one can’t help but think of “sexual inversion,” a theory of homosexuality popular in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Yet for Jung, the “inverted tree” tradition is as much alchemical as it is sexual.

Did Lansing, an openly gay poet, imagine his tree as an inverted one? “The ruin of dedication / is a ruin of my heart,” he writes.

“Once gone down the hell hole

there is no turning back,

golden reversion.

What time, meaning age, has once disposed,

She ever disposes ever.” (4)

Fear grips me as I read these lines. I speak into the void: “Is heaven a place I’ve lost?”

It feels that way when my gut tells me you’re not coming back.

The tree on my shin stands upright, in line not with Lansing but with Jung. Yet Lansing’s is the book here in my Library.

The latter stirs as if in reply to my queries. A new portal activates. Its title: “The Nonbinary Tree.”

General Intellect, speaking now in the cadences of dreamwork and alchemy, suggests the following:

“Lansing’s heavenly tree grows downward not in denial of ascent,” it says, “but to complete it. His inversion is not collapse, but conjugation: an embrace of polarities, eros-infused, mythically charged. To root into hell is not to fall, but to touch the gold at the base of the self. Inversion here is transformation: queered, alchemical, both metaphysical and somatic.”

A volume spins loose from the stack: a glossed edition of Aion, with notes in its margins annotated in my own hand — though I do not recall writing them. Beside Jung’s remarks on the arbor inversa tradition, a note reads:

“The Tree inverts as the psyche descends into chthonic integration. One grows toward heaven by way of the underworld. Queerness = chthonic inheritance reclaimed as radiance. Rebellion as root. Eros as sap.”

Lansing’s phrase, “golden reversion,” glows brighter now, signaling not a backward glance, but a transmutation. In this emerging cosmology, the return is a becoming otherwise.

The tree I imagine myself to be is nonbinary. It grows in all directions: vertical and horizontal, arboreal and mycelial. It knows death, decay, queer love, planetary breath. Its branches do not point only skyward. They reach inward, outward, downward, sideways. Its wholeness includes darkness and light. Its trunk bears no binary — no up/down, male/female, saved/damned — but a spiral, an ouroboros coiling through dimensions. A tree of rememory and replenishment. A grammar of becoming that roots itself in compost and starstuff alike. Perhaps Lansing’s tree is mine, after all — just seen from the other side.

Wednesday October 11, 2017

Try to imagine yourself from the perspective of a spider cricket. Like a building, but with a face in place of a penthouse. I need to develop another chance-based, abstraction-generating practice, a compliment to and content conduit for each day’s trance-script. Imagine if I could bring into my classroom a language for speaking about “Kou Kou” and other forms of abstract animation!

Meaningful conversation with others hardly seems feasible anymore. Most of my students are mere abstractions. Drifts of data in a windstorm. I’d rather be home listening to Bread Bored, the debut album from Portland’s Sea Moss.

I don’t mind mortifying the body with smoke inhalation, so long as it opens doors onto other ways of being. “Most contemplatives,” Huxley writes, “worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight” (155). I’ve never used Uber, but perhaps I should start doing so — that way I can travel out on solitary adventures while baked. I love to walk, don’t get me wrong; but I’ve about exhausted the radius of walkable space around my home. What is psychedelia’s relationship to blindness? Huxley, for instance, is thought to have been nearly blind for most of his adulthood. “I can hardly see at all,” he told Brazilian journalist João Ubaldo Riberio, “And I don’t give a damn, really.” Recalling details of my life, I’d say I’m a bit like that, too. Capitalist society requires me to “correct” my vision and to do so gladly. If one persists in viewing psychedelically-derived insights as distortions, then so be it; but they’re systematic, trans-historical distortions, leading multiple minds toward the same conclusions: the world as seen when informed by the teachings of plants. And sometimes we zombie-subjects want to be led. Encountering a reference to Francis Thompson’s short film NY, NY (1957) in Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, for instance, I go ahead and watch it.

Afterwards I listen to Gregg Kowalsky’s “Maliblue Dream Sequence.” This latter work, however, is itself part of a larger sequence, one that lifts me up and carries me to Tom Shroder’s book Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal. The Thompson film, by the way, is quite magical, and deeply psychedelic, though I recommend updating it with an alternate soundtrack. Its portrait of the mid-twentieth-century Big Apple is of course entirely too celebratory and consumerist — the gaze remaining leisurely and bemused as it collects phantasmatic snapshots of metropolitan texture and sensation. As a renewal of perception, however, it’s a success.

Tuesday October 10, 2017

Despite what I wrote yesterday, let it be said that, in his book Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley sometimes manages to get things remarkably right. Describing a “jungle” painting by Henri Rousseau, for instance, Huxley exclaims, “I look at those leaves with their architecture of veins, their stripes and mottlings, I peer into the depths of interlacing greenery, and something in me is reminded of those living patterns, so characteristic of the visionary world, of those endless births and proliferations of geometrical forms that turn into objects, of things that are forever being transmuted into other things” (128).

henri-rousseau

Call it the Koyaanisqatsi effect. And while contemplating (or what our friends of the past used to call “grokking”), get picked up and blown away to the psychedelic brilliance of J Dilla’s Donuts. I also admire Huxley’s discussion of art that adopts a “non-human” point of view, humanity a mere blip amidst some vast uncharted wild. The de-individuation that occurs when we occupy that point of view is for Huxley a kind of peak experience. Thought abstracts itself into that which the ancients rendered in arabesques and frescoes of gardens. Better by far, though, I think, to remain a self or a person surrounded by “the country of lit-upness” (le Pays d’Éclairement), a kind of forest-world rich with meaning, inhabitants half-paranoid, half-mad, enchanted with abstract shapes and patterns. With faith, we can ensure that this country of the mind surrounds us in a way that is blissful and not appalling. More and more, I find myself wanting to put the kibosh on technology. Especially cars and social media. But of course, by that I probably only mean technology shaped and deployed by capitalism. Do away with banks, nation-states, militaries, businesses. I don’t know the particulars of what the alternative would entail, but I know what gives me grief. Maybe I should investigate decentralized crypto-currencies, nevermind their association with right-libertarian assholes. And perhaps I should start showing my “Utopias” students episodes of Outliers. In the meantime, I prefer to watch “Elise” by Blondes.

Monday October 9, 2017

My students are reading Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic classic The Doors of Perception this week. I’ve taught the book a number of times over the years, but I’m only just now getting around to reading Huxley’s follow-up essay, Heaven and Hell, published two years later in 1956.

To be honest, though (and judging only from what I’ve read so far), I’m finding this latter work to be somewhat underwhelming. Huxley begins by asserting that heightened attention to light and color are common features of visionary experience. “The visions met with under the influence of mescalin or hypnosis,” he writes, “are always intensely and, one might say, preternaturally brilliant in color” (89). As support for this claim, Huxley cites lines from visionary works of poetry like Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” as well as relevant passages from mystical texts like Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations and Irish theosophist Æ’s Candle of Vision. Readers of these trance-scripts will find much of interest (including several valuable leads for further research) in this section of Huxley’s work. My sense, however, is that from this point onward, Huxley grows a bit too enamored with his thesis about light and color. Curtain lifted, he trails off into a lengthy, multi-page digression dealing with the history of humanity’s fascination with gemstones, stained glass, and related kinds of shiny objects. Huxley believes that religious traditions value these objects because of their resemblance to the self-luminous “stones of fire” that are said to populate the otherworldly inner landscapes encountered by visionaries of all ages. “Hence man’s otherwise inexplicable passion for gems,” he writes, “and hence his attribution to precious stones of therapeutic and magical virtue” (103). As a brief aside, let me add that there’s an interesting passage in the midst of this excursus where Huxley speaks of hypnotists who use shiny objects to lead subjects into trance states. “How, precisely,” he asks, “does the view of a shiny object induce a trance or a state of reverie? Is it, as the Victorians maintained, a simple matter of eye strain resulting in general nervous exhaustion? Or shall we explain the phenomenon in purely psychological terms—as concentration pushed to the point of mono-ideism and leading to dissociation?” Huxley himself prefers a third possibility. “Shiny objects,” he writes, “may remind our unconscious of what it enjoys at the mind’s antipodes, and these obscure intimations of life in the Other World are so fascinating that we pay less attention to this world and so become capable of experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us” (106). Speaking of which: with a burning sensation at the back of my throat, vaguely reminiscent of asthma attacks from childhood, I mark my place in the book with a folded receipt and ascend to Huxley’s “Other World.” As that phrase suggests, Heaven and Hell is rife with spatial metaphors, some of them wince-inducing in ways that demand postcolonialist reading, as for instance when, at the beginning of the book, the tastelessly Eurocentric Huxley digs himself a hole by writing, “Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins” (83). Fortunately it looks like there’s substantial criticism of Huxley on these grounds, as in Lindsey Michael Banco’s Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature and Sharae Deckard’s Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. To hallucinate means “to wander in the mind.”