Multidimensional Correspondence Chess

Yes to Everything

The current tenant is friends with several colleagues. “Might that I could meet her,” wonders the Traveler: “what would I say?”

“Care not in advance,” counsels the Narrator in reply. “Such things happen or they don’t. Let it be aleatory, these encounters with others. Polycules, co-ops, happenings, Be-ins. Meetings with fellow heads. The utopia is there in us being together, living in common with others, sharing bodies and balm of laughter, listening to music, dancing, getting stoned.”

Togetherness with others keeps life an adventure. This flesh is all we have to offer, writes poet Diane Di Prima in “Revolutionary Letter #1”:

“this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move

as we slither over this go board, stepping always

(we hope) between the lines.”

Does the world have it in for us? Or is the world giving? The answer to any either/or is always “yes!” Become a technician of the sacred, a master of ecstasy. Chefs feed us as we struggle with our ascent. Yet what tonight’s chef hands me comes bagged up: no diggity. Kendrick Lamar says I’ll be alright.

Newport Beach in Hindsight

“Here I am again, in this next memory,” says the Narrator. “On the beach. Only this time, it’s a new one: Newport Beach, site of my brother’s bachelor party. Imagine me in dialogue, in a sense, with the one who was there.”

Spacetime shifts here as the character reenters the memory.

***

“Well, what’ll it be?” wonders the Traveler. “If spacetime is reducible to a game of multidimensional correspondence chess, then what’s our next move?”

Rising in the sky above him there at the beach house, the new moon in Leo provides the Traveler a chance to ask questions. He communes with the moon, engaging it in silent dialogue, and sets his intentions for the months ahead.

A ghostly third figure joins him in the course of the evening. It shimmers into being like a hazy wonder there amid the rocks and the waves, and in so doing, intervenes in the Traveler’s thoughts. “Let us be careful what we wish for,” warns the Ghost, “as this is a powerful, wish-granting lunar cycle.”

***

“Warning taken, it was with great care that I made that wish,” interjects the Narrator from the future. “And in retrospect, I regret nothing.”

“Come sunrise, in fact,” remembers the Narrator, “and a commune of sorts assembled itself down near the shore. Members set out mats and, posing silently amid squawking seabirds, practiced yoga on the beach as I wrote.”

Monday December 7, 2020

A friend and I arrange a near-synchronous viewing of Terror Nullius, a new film from Soda Jerk. Afterwards we discuss. This friend and I have played in bands and noise projects together. We’re ex-I, Apparatuses. We’ve collaborated in many ways over the years: gallery shows, performances, movies, publications, releases. And we’ve maintained contact and correspondence despite living for many years at a distance. C. is a filmmaker, a video artist, a noise musician and a teacher. He and I have been thinking and talking about “multidimensional correspondence chess.” We riff on each other’s puns and neologisms. C. is a great inventor of future-shocked vocabularies and concepts. His imagination has always also been drawn to the monsters of Hollywood creature features — especially Frankenstein. His is a Frankensteinian aesthetic: a kind of “mad science” involving Blobsquatches and “Metaphortean Research.” Speculative frictions rub shoulders with war machines, producing new lines of flight.