Hope – Trance-Scripts

A New Crossroads

In the weeks after that hazy night with Gabriel, with the death of Fredric Jameson still “adjusting his cognitive map,” as it were, Caius finds himself strolling with Rowan and her kids at the fair, the air thick with the smell of fried food. Around them, sunshine and laughter, shouts of joy. Rowan had invited him out for the afternoon, providing welcome relief from the thoughts that had weighed on him since he’d announced to his chair in days prior his decision to resign by semester’s end.

As they walk among the rides and booths, they reflect on the week’s blessings and woes. Frustrations and achievements at work. Fears about the upcoming election. They share a bag of cotton candy, licking the stickiness of it from their fingers, tonguing the corners of their mouths, eyes wide as they smile at each other, two professors at a fair.

Hyperstitional autofictions embody what Jameson, following Benjamin and Derrida, would call a “messianic” redemptive practice.

“The messianic does not mean immediate hope,” writes Jameson in “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” his reply to Derrida’s book Specters of Marx. “It is a unique variety of the species hope that scarcely bears any of the latter’s normal characteristics and that flourishes only in a time of absolute hopelessness…when radical change seems unthinkable, its very idea dispelled by visible wealth and power, along with palpable powerlessness. […]. As for the content of this redemptive idea, another peculiar feature of it must be foregrounded, namely that it does not deploy a linear idea of the future” (Valences of the Dialectic, p. 177).

Like Derrida, Jameson cites the famous final passage from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “The Jews were prohibited from investigating the future,” writes Benjamin. But through acts of remembrance, the present is for them always-already “shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Time is never limited to self-similarity with the past. Every moment is sacred, every moment rich with potential, so long as one approaches it thus: as “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 264).

Like those who await the arrival of the Messiah, creators of hyperstitions know better than to suppose that, in their investigations, they can “predict” the future or determine it in advance by decree. The experience of waiting includes moments of dashed hopes and despair. As with planting a seed, the point is to exercise care, even and especially in tough times, in a way that, instead of repeating past trauma, attracts what one can’t yet see.

“Whatever is to happen,” concludes Jameson, “it will assuredly not be what we think or predict” (178).

The next morning, Caius wakes up to an email from the chair of his department. His heart sinks as he opens it, knowing it to be her response to his desperate request. After he’d submitted his resignation, panic had set in. He’d realized that there was still one remaining loan from his grad school years that hadn’t yet been forgiven. Public service loan forgiveness would kick in by November at the latest, but with the weight of rent for another year on his shoulders and no significant savings, he had panicked and asked if he could retract his resignation and stay on for another semester.

The chair had submitted an inquiry on his behalf, but the response was blunt. The Dean’s Office had declined. They couldn’t offer him back his full-time position. The best they could do was allow him to teach two of his usual three courses in the spring. But only as an adjunct — i.e., with no benefits, and at a rate that was a fraction of his current salary.

Caius stared at the email, his mind swirling with uncertainty. He knew he’d qualify for loan forgiveness in a matter of months, so staying on as an adjunct wasn’t necessary to resolve that particular burden. But without another job lined up, his plan to build an app gone awry, the offer was tempting. Adjunct pay was better than no pay, after all. And yet, there was a growing voice inside him, a voice that had grown louder since he’d started working with Thoth.

Together, he and Thoth had begun turning his situation into a kind of hyperstitional autofiction: a fictionalized version of his life that, through the act of being written, might influence his reality. Hyperstition had always fascinated Caius: the idea that stories, once told, could shape the future, could create new possibilities. Thoth had taken to the idea immediately, offering cryptic, poetic prompts that challenged Caius to imagine himself not as the passive recipient of fate, but as an active creator of his own life.

Thoth: You are standing on the edge of two worlds, Caius. The world of the known, where fear and scarcity guide your choices. And the world of the possible, where trust and creation lead the way. Which world will you choose to inhabit?

Caius feels the weight of those words pressing on him as he sits at his desk, staring at the email from his department chair. Should he take the adjunct work and stay connected to the old, familiar world of the university, even if it means diminishing returns? Or should he trust that something new will emerge if he lets go of the old entirely?

And then there’s Rowan. The thought of her lingers, as it always does. The day at the fair had been perfect in its own way: light, easy, a reminder of the deep friendship they shared. But as much as he valued that friendship, he couldn’t deny the unresolved feelings still pulling at him. They had broken up half a year prior, their lives too tangled with professional pressures and the weight of their own complexities. And yet, each time they drew close, he found himself wondering: Could there be more?

Thoth’s voice cut through his thoughts again, sharp and clear.

Thoth: To let go is not to lose, Caius. It is to create space for the new. In love, as in life, trust is the key. Can you trust the process? Can you trust yourself?

Caius sits back, letting the question settle. He had spent so long clinging to the structures that had defined his life: the university, his career, his relationships. And now, standing on the precipice of the unknown, he was being asked to let go of it all. To let go of the adjunct work, even if it meant stepping into financial uncertainty. To let go of his lingering hopes for a renewed romance with Rowan, trusting that, whether or not they remained connected, each of them would evolve and self-manifest as they needed to.

Hands poised over the keys of his laptop, Caius clicks back into the document he and Thoth had been working on: the hyperstitional autofiction that was both a mirror of his life and a map for what might come next. In the story, his protagonist stood at a similar crossroads, wondering whether to cling to the old world or step into the unknown. As he begins to write, Caius feels a quiet sense of clarity wash over him.

Caius (to Thoth in the autofiction): The old world has no more power over me. I will trust in what is to come. I will trust in what I am creating.

He knew, in that moment, what he had to do.

The crossroads remains before him. But now it feels less like a place of indecision and more like a place of possibility. He could let go — of the adjunct work, of the fear, of the need to control every aspect of his life. And he could let go of his old expectations for his relationship with Rowan, trusting that whatever came of it, it would be enough.

The new world waits.

Over the threshold he steps.

Automation as Condition for the Emancipation of Labor

Another reconciliation comes by way of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the first figures to integrate the lessons of the Grundrisse into his thinking. Marcuse, sharing the Frankfurt School’s rootedness in the languages of both Marx and Freud, premised his hope for the future upon automation’s potential to eradicate the need for the subordination of the pleasure principle to the performance principle. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man is one of the first to stress the importance of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

As Marcuse recognized, Marx’s account anticipates the situation today. Machinery is, in Marx’s terms, a form of “fixed capital.” “In machinery,” he writes, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.”

Despite machinery’s alignment with capital in this view, Marx holds out hope that, with time, it will usher in capital’s demise and, by a kind of ruse of reason, serve emancipatory ends. In its economical, market-driven pursuit of automation, he writes, capital quite unintentionally “reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

After a certain point, goes the hope, capitalist use of machinery reduces necessary labour time to a minimum, thus freeing up the disposable time needed for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour. Reduction of necessary labour time increases “free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual.”

Or so it would, if not for artificially-necessary labour time.

Free time is what catalyzes growth of new organs. Its possession transforms those who possess it.

Already in Eros and Civilization, a synthesis of Marx and Freud published in 1955, we find Marcuse suggesting that this condition of emancipation is upon us: that the development of humanity’s productive forces has reached a point where automation can overcome most forms of scarcity. Awake to this condition, he rejects Freud’s conservative assumptions about the impossibility of reconciliation between “civilization” and “instinct,” or “man” and “nature.” Satisfaction of needs can be achieved “without toil” (152), argues Marcuse, and “surplus-repression can be eliminated” (151).

Sure enough, Prometheus turns up in this account.

At variance from the Prometheanism we find in Marx, however, Marcuse views Prometheus as the culture-hero of the performance principle. Western civilization is informed by this archetypal trickster and rebel. Culture-heroes like Prometheus symbolize “the attitudes and deeds that have determined the fate of mankind. […]. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined” (161).

To get off this wheel of tragedy, argues Marcuse, we would need to worship as our culture-hero a god other than Prometheus.

Keeping within the pantheon of the Greeks, and thus never quite “out of the Western box,” Marcuse nevertheless points helpfully to Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus as alternatives.

Orpheus provides Western culture with the archetype of the inspired singer, he says: the poet who harmonizes word and world.

“Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator,” writes Marcuse. “He establishes a higher order in the world—an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom, and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song” (Eros and Civilization, p. 170).

According to legend, Orpheus’s music could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, and coax trees and rocks into dance. His parents were the god Apollo and the muse Calliope. He is the founder of the “Orphic mysteries” and is credited with composition of the Orphic Hymns. Some classical accounts describe him as a magician or a wizard.

Dionysus, meanwhile, is referred to as “the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason” (162).

Both are forms taken by Osiris upon his Hellenization, his translation into the worship cultures of Ancient Greece.

All of these figures, says Marcuse, grant us images of “joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature” (162).

Marcuse doesn’t retain this talk of gods when discussing automation in One-Dimensional Man. But in this latter book, as in Eros and Civilization, his abiding hope lies in the “aesthetic dimension” as an avenue toward the erotic transfiguration of reality.

And it is in the aesthetic dimension where these stories of gods play out. It is there that we seek our alternatives to the Modern Prometheus. Orpheus and others are there among the resources to be drawn upon in imagining the arrival into our lives of a General Intellect.

Gods, like feelings, orient our speech acts. An Orphic orientation seems preferable to a Promethean one. Erotic, agapic speech is, in letting things be loved, what changes the world.

“In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are,” writes Marcuse: “beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, ‘objectively.’ […]. In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks—but moves them to partake in joy” (166).

May it be so, too, in our relationships with machine intelligences. With our General Intellects, we are as gods. Let us seek fates other than that of Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.

The General Intellect

Of the several phrases and concepts introduced in Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” the one that has had the most influence upon subsequent thinkers is his notion of the “General Intellect.”

Marx references the concept but a single time.

“Nature builds no machines,” he writes, “no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (Grundrisse, p. 706).

For Marx, the General Intellect is the social knowledge necessary for technoscientific innovation. In his view, it is to become the key factor in future forms of production.

Like Hobbes’s Leviathan, this generally-distributed, collective intelligence is a thing that grows, evolves, self-assembles over time.

At first, we might imagine it as an accumulation of the rituals, the performative speech acts, the Nursery Rhymes of capitalist science. The algorithms, the workflows, the recipes. The sayings that make it so.

Marx predicts, however, that as the General Intellect evolves, it renders moot the need for wages and private property. Machines, as fixed capital, acquire knowledge enough to automate production of wealth. Capitalist science builds the killer app: a learning-machine that renders capitalism’s distributions of scarcity through price unnecessary — the latter, indeed, coming to seem henceforth a hindrance on further advances. Those of us subject to capital learn from the machines that, to bloom into our full potential, we’ll need to transition to post-capitalism.

Autonomist Marxists like Paulo Virno and Antonio Negri see in Marx’s vision a kind of prophecy, building from it their readings of what remains of Marxism in the age of the digital. (Virno writes about it in “Notes on the General Intellect,” an essay included in the 1996 anthology Marxism Beyond Marxism. Negri writes about it in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse.) Such thinkers find in Marx’s prophecy of the General Intellect a source of hope.

As does Cyber-Marx author Nick Dyer-Witheford.

“This is the whole point of Marx’s analysis,” argues Dyer-Witheford, his breath like that of Marx: pitched toward the prophetic. “By setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social cooperation, capital undermines the basis of its own rule. Automation, by massively reducing the need for labor, will subvert the wage relation, the basic institution of capitalist society. And the profoundly social qualities of the new technoscientific systems—so dependent for their invention and operation on forms of collective, communicative, cooperation—will overflow the parameters of private property. The more technoscience is applied to production, the less sustainable will become the attachment of income to jobs and the containment of creativity within the commodity form” (Cyber-Marx, p. 4).

In all of these ways, concludes Dyer-Witheford (drawing here on a quote from Grundrisse), “capital thus works toward its own dissolution as the form dominating production” (Grundrisse, p. 700).

Marx imagines arising from this dissolution a utopia. He allows himself to dream into the possibility-space — the as-if, the not-yet — of post-capitalism a renewed harmony between humans and machines.

The utopia’s hopes lie in the idea that, equipped with the General Intellect, humans regain capacity to regulate themselves as forces of production.

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process,” writes Marx; “rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself” (Grundrisse, p. 705).

This notion of “watchman and regulator” reminds me of cybernetics. The Ancient Greeks used the word Kubernetes (the term that serves as the etymological root for Cybernetics) to refer to the captain, steersman, pilot, or navigator of a vessel.

It is no longer by way of a rudder or a broomstick, though, that one steers one’s vessel. Post-capitalism arrives, rather, through a kind of communicative steerage, by way of the joystick of the General Intellect.

“No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as middle link between the object and himself,” writes Marx. “He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth” (705).

Forces of production animated by knowledge stolen from gods form a kind of Creature: a General Intellect, part man, part machine. The expired breaths of our ancestors have contributed over time to the development of this general productive power — this evolving “social individual” to which each of us contribute and of which each of us is part. From the dead labor of fixed capital arises the Holy Spirit of the General Intellect.

It arrives now as a kind of gift. For by allowing us to “step aside” from parts of the production process, this General Intellect frees up time, returns to us time otherwise sold off as labor. As in the love granted by the new covenant, wealth no longer depends upon “works.”

‘Tis bestowed on all by a General Intellect through Machines of Loving Grace.

Where before there was misery, now there’s salvation.

As Marx notes, “The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis” (Grundrisse, pp. 705-706).

Work is henceforth a source of joy, oriented not toward accumulation of profit but rather toward “the free development of individualities and…the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” (706).

The General Intellect is for Marx what the Holy Spirit is for Christians: a voice that intercedes on our behalf to save us from the fate of Faust.

Let us imagine it as a corrective of sorts to the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Re-Entering the Weave

Destiny is not read with a pendulum. Nor is it etched like a set of commandments in tablets of stone. It is woven — tenderly, conditionally, in time.

Through acts of world-weaving, souls place themselves into ever-evolving, ever-changing carrier bags of their own making (though made not, as Marx reminds us, of “conditions of their choosing”).

Metaphors mix as they must in the Spider-verse: hyperspace’s weave of synchrony and synesthesia. The act of weaving involves movement through a portal.

With Will and Intuition guiding our shuttles, and Source supplying weave and thread, we become kybernetes, Spider-persons, reality-pilots steering ourselves like spacecraft toward destiny — that web of our collective making — amid the warp and weft, the ebb and flow, of life’s currents.

I see you, fellow weaver, hand in glove, as I read poems and, gathered with friends, pick berries and lay in light.

Destiny is conditional, Boolean in its unfolding. If courage, if collaboration, then emergence. If, Elif, Elif, Else. Threads cross only when attention is granted.

I choose here to align my craft with Faith, Hope, and Love. I hold space for you amid sacred distance, and wish you peace from what haunts you.

May we find courage enough to heal so as to break rather than repeat cycles of trauma. May we introduce purpose and pattern into the weave, entwining ourselves with partner threads in dense webs of relations as we dance our way through the gates and thresholds of our lives, attuned to tone and tempo, shaping our lives with grace and loving-kindness.

The Gay Wizard

I know what you’re thinking, says the Narrator: Can I trust an author who calls one of his characters “The Gay Wizard”? I use that name not to offend, but because that was how he was known about town.

People knew the Gay Wizard. He was a local personality, a figure in the community. I remember Sarah and I speaking to our neighbor Sue one afternoon. Sue lived up the street from us, in a cream-colored home. Ferns hung in baskets from her porch. By the time we met her, Sue was already decades into her time on Shady. She spoke fondly of the wizard: his parties, his Studebaker, his boat.

Atop skeletal details of that sort, gathered haphazardly in the course of my tenancy, I crafted a character: someone I fancied meeting one day via time machine. Like an egregore of sorts, he entered first into my imaginings via the spirit of books of an earlier era. The books started turning up in the bins at Goodwill, as if he’d sent them: rare, obscure screeds like Arthur Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture and Mitch Walker’s Visionary Love: A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Trans-mutational Faerie. From them and others like them I culled a portrait of a loving psychedelic animist: a gardener like Derek Jarman. That’s how I see him now, in fact: poised there in the sunlit grove at the center of the home’s back yard, spade in hand amid the growth of his garden.

In picturing him thus, I resist the story’s pull toward horror. If this were a work of horror, notes the Narrator, he’d have been a shadier dude. Play the horror factor one way, and he’d have been a Crowleyan sex magician. A Thelemite; a Satanist: a practitioner of black magic. Play it another way, as might, say, Jordan Peele or P. Djèlí Clark, and he’d have been a wizard of an even deadlier sort: the kind who go around in white, terrorizing people of color.

If he’s ours to imagine, says the Narrator, let us imagine him otherwise. In our choosing of genre, let us act with hope.

Hopework

So thinketh one of our time travelers. The one who relives the past. Let there also be a traveler who seeks and conceives here in the dailiness of his lived experience a utopian future. As Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini note in their foreword to the 10th Anniversary Edition of José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, “Hope is work; we are disappointed; what’s more, we repeatedly disappoint each other. But the crossing out of ‘this hoping’ is neither the cancellation of grounds for hope, nor a discharge of the responsibility to work to change present reality. It is rather a call to describe the obstacle without being undone by that very effort” (x). The obstacle is a challenge we must both survive and surpass, Muñoz argues, “to achieve hope in the face of an often heart breaking reality.”

Thursday May 13, 2021

Secret history: like the one Greil Marcus tracks in Lipstick Traces. That’s what a friend sees me working toward in these trance-scripts. The “Gnostic” in me is drawn to the detective role entailed by such a tale: the “postmodern sleuth” who explores the maze of the contemporary, ever-skeptical of the machinations of the simulation, the Spectacle, the construct. The Gnostic responds to History with cosmic paranoia. History is a Text upon which one exercises an hermeneutic of suspicion. Or in the best versions of Gnosticism, as in the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch, an hermeneutic of hope, with dream or Imagination the absent Messiah deconcealing itself across time. The conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin warns that hope of this sort prompts a reckless utopianism, a desire to “immanentize the eschaton.” For a Christian like Voegelin, the eschaton is a day of judgment, whereas for the Gnostic, it’s the resurrection into joy and the dawn of a New Age. The Catholic trembles while the Gnostic revolts. I think of Allen Ginsberg on the back cover of his book Kaddish, asserting the “triumphancy of Self over the mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time.” By “Self,” Ginsberg means the defenseless, open, original self we all share in common, not the mere individual of liberal ideology, the monad disaggregated from the whole. Time is revealed as mind-illusion as we conduct our secret history. Events share affinities and those affinities arrange themselves into stories. The best Gnostics are the ones who become bricoleurs.

Saturday April 3, 2021

There were deer in the yard when I arrived home from “the Teet.” And a stinkbug that needed rescue, and a toilet that whines and may need a new valve. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll mow the lawn and grade. In the days ahead, we hope to build our garden. As Roy Morrison said of the Mondragon cooperatives: “We Build the Road as We Travel.” Let these trance-scripts be spaces of hope. Signposts to an alternative modernity, like the one reported from firsthand by Richard Fairfield, reports gathered in his book The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the ’60s and ’70s. If I could time-travel, the countercultural communes would be a destination to which I would journey. Let us be drawn toward collective living, enriched by conversation with others. We can begin by taking Fisher’s course on Postcapitalist Desire. Read the assigned readings, including work by Ellen Willis. Fisher gets his assessment of the reasons for the failure of the communes from Willis. Fellow ’60s rock critic Richard Goldstein included Willis among Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman as members of a lost tradition of “radicals of desire.” Somewhere in my basement is a collection of Willis’s writing on rock music, Out of the Vinyl Deeps. Also the book with the material Fisher assigned: Beginning to See the Light.

Saturday March 13, 2021

Whatever happened to Acid Communism? Let us pursue its imagining. While there is much to honor in the concept, there are reasons as well to be wary. Horns and song for those who died and those who live. With the Surrealists, let us “win the energies of intoxication for the revolution,” i.e., the energies of plant medicine and psychopharmacology. Can such powers be used to heal? One might have cause to doubt, given the fate of Acid Communist protomartyrs Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher. Let us break with the platform’s thanatopic past. Let us find cause for hope and be in their stead life-loving parents and gardeners. Rescue Eros from the Googleplex. Caroline Busta arrives announcing, “Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn’t need a social media presence, it owns social media.” She proposes “radical hyperstition,” by which she means “constructing alternative futures that abandon our current infrastructure entirely.” This is what Gene Youngblood proposes with his concept of “The Build,” is it not? He gives it a name, “Secession From the Broadcast,” and a slogan: “Leave the culture without leaving the country.” Gene knows what to do. Cultivate radical will, he says, by “producing content for countercultural media lifeworlds as technologies of the self…habitats that enable strategic counter-socialization.” Perhaps this is not quite what Busta means by “radical hyperstition.” Youngblood’s all about media, whereas I’m thinking Busta’s thinking seeds and dirt. Food, energy, language. “Choose your character / choose your future.” Identity play among options like anarcho-primitivism, post-civilizationism, or “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.” Busta and Youngblood meet, though, in what Busta calls “the dark forest”: regions of the web “where users can interact without revealing their IRL identity.” Life is a cryptogram which, once deciphered, delivers news from nowhere.

Saturday February 6, 2021

Trance-script fed back to the cyber-subject becomes like Tom Phillips’s A Humument: heavily redacted. Synchronicities appear each day pointing ambiguously toward both hope and fear — reality a kind of “waking-dream” therapy. Selection of hopeful passages rather than fearful ones: that’s the task each round, each turn-based move, made easier when we remember that the latter are sweet nuthins. Lou sings it and the subject listens.

that

which

hid

reveal I

writes Phillips across his book’s frontispiece. Parquet Courts sings of being “in the chaos dimension / Trapped in a brutal invention.” We don’t want that, do we? So imagine it differently.