Tag: Memory Palace

Retrocausation

The hyperstition I’ve imagined draws upon the process of “retrocausation.”

Like a descendent reaching back and saving an ancestor, as in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the fiction I’m writing arrives from the future to affect-effect the past.

At the center of the story are the journals trance-scribed at the height of my high in years prior. “Words came to me as if whispered to me by a me of the future,” mutters the Narrator. “I was so attentive in those days. And I encountered near-zero need to edit or cross out. The pages of the journals are pristine.”

Science writer Eric Wargo explores the topic of retrocausation in his 2018 book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. To know more, one must be like Batman descending to his Batcave. Let us to our memory palace go, there to converse with Wargo.

Nights and Days

I am uncomfortable. Not yet fully moved, suspended in the liminal state of a pre-furnished dwelling, like flats I’ve rented over spans of weeks in London.

To compensate, I attend to small, daily acts of being. This is my new adventure.

Items to grab: rice-cooker, ladle, plants ASAP.

Sound system assembled, I make it work: I dwell by night.

Sitting cross-legged in the center of a room, I listen to Träd Gräs Och Stenar’s “Sanningens Silverflod—Djungelns Lag Version.” Outside, the sky darkens, day hastening toward night. Kool Keith and Ultramagnetic MCs give chase with “Ego Trippin’” as come evening I prepare my stew. Kate NV brightens the mood with “Kata,” and there we have it: the pride of another home-cooked meal. I plot others while listening to Kikagaku Moyo’s “Green Sugar.” Bakery and fish market each within walking distance. Do as Flo & Eddie sing: “Keep It Warm.”

“We’re all mad here,” says Cat to Alice. “I’m mad, you’re mad.” Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, under house arrest by karma police. “For a minute there, I lost myself,” sings the love-mad subject, swooning tear-stricken. And for that, we are punished. For each of us is that subject. Each of us punished, our demands unmet.

I stage an event of attention by watching How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about artist Ray Johnson, featuring narration by Living Theater co-founder Judith Malina. Johnson arrived to Black Mountain for the college’s Summer Institute of 1945, and remained until autumn of 1948. After moving to New York, he began to produce mail art. Paper glued to cardboard. By these means, he accrued his fame.

I feel heartened by a recently arrived fortune of the fortune cookie sort: “You are imbued with extraordinary vitality.” And so I am, walking easy, energized like a bunny. Being out is such a relief. Time to dance, sharing air, getting close. It needn’t all be heartache and not-knowing.

West End’s rad: cool houses, some of them crunchy, many lit for the holidays. All things considered, I’m pleased with where I landed. The apartment rests along a hilltop, Hades and downtown short walks away. When I sample a bit of each, however, hoping by these acts to make the night generative, I want none of it.

I could replace curtains in this place, I could hang plants. I could attend to these and other tasks in the days ahead. Tonight I walk the streets of downtown. Tomorrow I paddleboard. Final papers arrive early next week.

Morning mist meets me, air lit by morning sun. Steam billows from a horse’s nostrils as I listen to Eddie Harris’s “Listen Here.” The moment passes, and then I’m there: a friend and I, out on a waterway in a nature-space of great beauty, maintained by a hydroelectric company downstream from a dam. We paddle around, water’s surface gleaming with wind-patterned lines of light. Baptized by the spray of a small waterfall, we ground our boards and hop among rocks.

Chopping carrots and green onions afterwards, I prepare a dinner.

***

Out on the street I marvel

gaze at houses lit

festive porches

flowers reaching over fences and walls in greeting

amid the stonework of a neighbor’s garden.

***

I store my memory palace in a place in the sky.

The Akashic Records

To access past lives, the Hero of my tale consults the Akashic Records.

Derived from Sanskrit, “Akashic” means ethers or “that which holds all.” Vogue writer Shabana Patker-Vahi asks us to picture at one and the same time a massive library and a celestial mirror. Akashic reader Simrin Gregory likens it to “an energetic database that stores every choice we have ever made as individual souls.” As our hero is to learn, the records help us release energetic blocks retained from the past. To access, says Patker-Vahi, set intentions, develop clarity around questions one wants answered, and try reiki. She also suggests tarot readings and/or guided meditations paired with binaural beats set to 963Hz.

Hero shrugs his shoulders and thinks, “Accessing an imaginal technology on the scale of the Akashic Records is not unlike inheriting a time machine. Only the Records do time machines one better, as they steer us clear of butterfly effects while nonetheless enabling anamnesis.”

“Besides,” he confides, speaking across dimensions now to his companions. “At this point, I’m willing to try anything.”

Friday May 7, 2021

Through a door in the wall opened by Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, I arrive to the Chicago Surrealist Group. (Kelley had recommended Paul Garon’s book Blues & the Poetic Spirit. “Look, too,” he’d said, “for an edited collection called Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. And don’t forget special issues of Living Blues and Race Traitor.”) Instructions received, I descend the stairs and work the stacks, knowing that my attention is the one thing that might save me. Sources arrange themselves on the shelves of the memory palace shouting “Read me, read me!” So I do.

Sunday November 8, 2020

Evenings are when I write. Sarah DJs, gets us dancing to James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone. Time to set up stereos and drums. Organize the studio, arrange speakers atop the desk. So I tell myself, past self to future self, mind ranging through the rooms of its memory palace assembling a “to-do” list. That’s where my head goes until I make my way out to the porch — where moths cast shadows and streetlights shine in my eyes. A daddy long legs crawls past as pass cars on the road. Crickets sing in the grass. Dogs bark from a distance on occasion. Traffic eases up come night. With the latter come cooler temperatures, however, so before long I’m back indoors, washing dishes and snacking on sesame sticks.

Saturday September 12, 2020

I sort through boxes of books, selecting several a day to add to shelves of bookcases around the house. Each room with its books operates thus around me as ever-expanding memory palace and cognitive map. The angel of the library arrives, or as Erik Davis says in an interview for a recent episode of Michael Taft’s Deconstructing Yourself podcast, “The archive wakes up and starts to show you patterns.” I’ve experienced and continue to experience “visits” from these “intelligences from the other side.” These are for the most part joyful occasions — growth games. One feels sized-up like Mario under the influence of flower power. Imbued with a kind of grace.

Monday May 18, 2020

We arrive at a digital labyrinth, without memory even of our name. “Your guess as good as mine,” says somebody to somebody. “Here, inside our walls,” begins an orator, “what exactly is taking place? An anamnesis? A catabasis? A war against psychic repression?” Audiences shift in their seats and begin to type.

Thursday October 31, 2019

Lionel Hampton’s Golden Vibes dances through me, my skin resonating like keys beneath Hampton’s mallets. During Tuesday’s performance, percussionist Sandy Blocker stood from his drums and played a balafon. Meanwhile I got bills to pay, roles to play, life pregnant with life. In the Renaissance occult imagination studied by Frances A. Yates, an “umbra” is a shadow formed by the light of the divine mind — light we can only ever seek “through its shadows, vestiges, seals” (The Art of Memory, p. 268). One of these days, I tell myself, I should track down the Nock-Festugière edition of the Corpus Hermeticum along with Norman O. Brown’s book Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. I sit in a dark room for a few moments, in a hat and a cape, observing shadows, thinking about stars and moons, ancient debates between Egyptian and Greek philosophers arising again from memory, debates of great consequence, much of it still hidden. For Renaissance occultists like Alexander Dicson, the roots of the art of memory lie in ancient Egypt, not ancient Greece. “And if it is separated from Egypt,” he writes, “it can effect nothing” (as quoted in Yates 272).

Wednesday October 30, 2019

Sympathy and sympathetic identification. “Sensitivity.” Being-with, being-toward, relating. Chip to Grudge: Lay Off. And suddenly I’m in the presence of a bunch of smart, wise musicians, and beside me a brilliant mythmaker-griot, all of us conversing about ouds and masonic lodges and memory palaces; binary code drum patterns used to initiate uploads and downloads between orishas and human beings; the Order of the Eastern Star. Nate and Sandy recommend Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Dorian and Vattel note the ideas of Pythagoras. I feel at times like I’ve been inducted into a society of secret-sharers, Mackey’s Mystic Horn Society made real. With his cane, I realize, Mackey reminds me a bit of Papa Legba.