On our final day of class, in concluding discussion of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (a novel, as the title suggests, involving scanning and surveillance), I introduce Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and Michel Foucault’s theory of “panopticism,” applying the latter to the architecture of the digital classroom, the Zoom environment in which we’ve worked this past year due to pandemic. After ascent from Plato’s Cave in search of higher states of consciousness (Plato’s text being the one with which the course began), we lay bare the medium of our being-together as a class. I speak as one there in a cell with others. Here we are, I say: “Gallery View.” I call awareness to the Zen saying, “Before enlightenment, carry water, chop wood. After enlightenment, carry water, chop wood.” Through Dick’s title, I then trace us back to 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul stresses the importance of “charity” or love. Without it, he writes, one is but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” In its final moment, then, the course ends thus: with a synthesis of Zen and a kind of gnostic-psychedelic reimagining of agape. One must accept the prison, or at least return to it willingly, despite knowing that one will likely be misunderstood and crucified — but only so as to impart through the medium of one’s being the words “Love one another”: a message of congeniality and goodwill.
Tag: Love
Thursday October 15, 2020
One can approach the other lovingly, or one becomes paranoid. But what of the Trump signs? Let us vote them out. Light a fire, fill the air with smoke. Dance and sing. Replace fear with collective joy. Let us be seen and heard. Let Trump’s spell be broken.
Thursday February 20, 2020
The yoga of everyday life. We get by with a little help from our friends. By committing ourselves to hope and good will, we help raise a joyful State. A State of Love and Trust. Let’s start what we have come into the room to do.
Wednesday January 8, 2020
I sit in my living room admiring this beautiful, brand new human who, according to a scale, has already grown a whole pound larger since last her pediatrician weighed her. By afternoon the sun has moved us outdoors. I honor mothers and mammalian and marsupial kin by carrying her in a front-facing pouch as I stroll through the neighborhood, talking with Sarah about a Nick Estes book that we’re reading together: a history of Indigenous resistance called Our History Is The Future. As readers we find ourselves wondering: How do we join the resistance to settler-colonialism so as to lessen the latter’s hold on lands, peoples, and nations? Perhaps I can begin by rethinking Hippie Modernist art, literature, and culture in light of Indigenous resistance movements of the 60s and 70s like Red Power and AIM. Rewatch counterculture westerns, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man, and Midnight Cowboy. Watch, too, as F. lies on a couch listening to songs from Jeremy Steig’s Howlin’ for Judy, Karen Dalton’s “Reason to Believe,” Amen Dunes’s “Lonely Richard,” and Jessica Pratt’s “Moon Dude.”
Wednesday November 20, 2019
I’m overflowing with love, surrounded by tall beautiful trees. Together let us learn and grow. Spread joy, pleasure, happiness, accepting past wrongs. Whatever doubts one had of oneself, past disappointments: consider these confessed and forgiven. Rewatch the “Earth Angel” scene from Back to the Future. It remains for me a favorite moment from childhood: Marty revived, harmony restored with a kiss.
Tuesday August 13, 2019
If we’re to assemble into a magical, majestic Multitude, we need to cultivate trust — in ourselves, in other beings, in our capacity to care for one another. No more Gnostic suspicion beyond what is needed to spur care, by which I mean the creation of a system of cooperative, universal care for all beings; but also personal care for sentences, life, loved ones. Trust that despite past shortcomings, we can do better here and now.
Wednesday August 7, 2019
I sit beside Sarah at a town pool, the two of us drying in the air after a swim. A small green insect lands on my leg. We consider each other for a few moments, each one absorbing the other’s fear, processing it internally, transmuting it, releasing it back as love. I’m reminded of Maslow’s claim that each of us contains two sets of forces. “One set,” he writes, “clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what [one] already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels [us] forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all [one’s] capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that [one] can accept [one’s] deepest, real, unconscious Self” (Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 46). Pool days are delightful. Look at us, sun-soaked, unfolding outward, discovering new capacities, refining old ones, becoming. The metamorphosis has begun.
Friday December 28, 2018
The hippie counterculture was a kind of renaissance, a remembering of primal unity, a casting aside of rancor and division in the name of Love — yet how quickly this spirit foundered when met with violence.
Wednesday November 21, 2018
Around 2:30 in the afternoon, I place a tab beneath my tongue, breathe deeply, and prepare for my adventure. Initial stirrings include a flutter in my stomach, warmth behind my ears. Intimations of an as-yet-unnameable source of wonder. I putter around a bit before finding my way outdoors. Autumn leaves flutter in the air as neighborhood dogs yip and woof. Squirrels gather in the trees. “My dear friend,” I whisper invitingly as one hustles toward me. It coos lovingly back and forth with a partner. Moment by moment, the beauty of this world is staggering. With each breath I take, I feel a tremendous ball of laughter welling up inside me. ‘Tis a divine joy, this flickering of sunlight on my eyelids. Slight giddiness, one’s entire nervous system aglow with energy. Amen Dunes soundtracks a restful, languorous moment with their “Ethio Song.”
Above me, flickering, fanning sensations, mushrooms welling up beneath me, offering themselves oh-so-tenderly and ceremoniously as a bed on which to rest. Sarah and I dance and touch tips, tendrils entwined. Much of the experience, in its directness and immediacy, is too glorious to squander, too lavish for words. Humming, giggling, the body does its thing, tests its sensory manifold, expands, grows outward, despite hardship and adversity — this thing is bigger, quivering, bursting, love everywhere triumphant. Let us know ourselves as this life impulse, this spirit of generativity and generosity. Time for all things — for all things there is a season. Sun and moon shed light on all, each yeasty striving, each humble beginning, budding gods and goddesses. Each and every one a universal plentiful complete cosmic plenipotentiary, spreading the good word of being. Climbing up or down from that perch, wherever one may be, allow oneself time to pause, look, take comfort. Recognize in each moment the crown and dignity of being. As we situate, as we gather and take stock, let us body forth this love toward one and all.
Tuesday October 9, 2018
I sit in a chair in my office attending to words and phrases as they well up inside me. There are moments each day when exposure to social media translates into spells of sadness, hopelessness, and despair. A friend and I text about the election of Brazil’s far-right “Trump of the Tropics,” Jair Bolsonaro. Historical agency is consolidating into the hands of the “Tough Guys,” the well-armed, militarily-unstoppable few. How do we turn this around? By what behavior might we resurrect in this world a world dedicated to love and play? We just do it: we listen, we dance, we read signs. We communicate to others our vision of a joyous cosmology. We project this cosmology outward. We enliven. We embolden. We embrace the anomalies of the particular and our subjective feelings as observers. Following philosopher Paul F. Schmidt, we imagine “feelings” to include “thinking, acting, observing, believing, willing, remembering and hoping, in all their modes and moods.” We channel our hopes into radical concreteness, the “true-for-me,” Sartre’s “being-for-itself.” Let us confess to our thinking. When we allow the voice of the loving individual to be heard, we heal. Schmidt’s book Rebelling, Loving and Liberation is astoundingly good, by the way, as is the view of time expressed in T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton.” Both are instructive of how to preserve concrete being in an administered society, if by “concrete being” we mean living in a present that contains many presents, many single concrete inclusive complete wholes, each one lived in the here and now of its own happening.
Trance-Scripts 