Tag: Plants

Derrida’s Pharmakon

Socrates tells a tale about Thoth in Plato’s Phaedrus. “It was he,” says Socrates, “who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing.” Thoth offers the gift of writing to King Thamus (and through the king, to the people of Egypt), presenting it as “a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom.” After considering the matter, however, Thamus rejects Thoth’s offer. Thamus anticipates that, rather than aiding memory, writing would destroy it, making it dependent upon external marks. He also fears that writing would allow knowledge to escape from the teacher-student relationship, passing into the hands of the unprepared. Plato and Socrates share Thamus’s suspicion of writing — though of course Plato in practice accepts writing, using it to memorialize what with Socrates remained spoken.

The myth of Thoth’s encounter with Thamus appears in the final section of the Phaedrus. The encounter occasions a trial of sorts. Writing  is tried and sentenced, much as poetry is sentenced by Socrates, much as Socrates is himself sentenced by the Athenians. Derrida reads this “trial of writing” not as an extraneous addition — “an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without” — but as the dialogue’s ultimate theme, “rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other” (Dissemination, p. 67).

Socrates believes in the idea of the Good, which he can know only by way of its offspring, its manifestation amid the realm of sense and appearance as the sun. Monotheists are sun-worshippers. Worshippers of the sun-god.

“For Plato,” writes Derrida, “Thamus is doubtless another name for Ammon…the sun king and…father of the gods” (76). Reading this myth from the Phaedrus alongside Books VI and VII of the Republic, Derrida shows that Plato is as much a sun-god worshipper as the Christians.

Ishmael Reed offers much the same critique in Mumbo Jumbo, replacing “Platonists” with “Atonists,” tracing monotheism back to worshippers of the sun-god Aton in ancient Egypt.

Reed builds this into his account of Set and Osiris.

Osiris is for Reed a kind of pre-Christian Christ figure. The god who dies and is resurrected. Osiris is the Ur-figure, the original on which Christ is based. Thoth appears as Osiris’s sidekick.

After their tale comes Reed’s retelling of the tale of Moses.

Reed’s book allegorizes a struggle between forces similar to Freud’s reality and pleasure principles. But Reed reverses Freud’s valuation of these principles. The reality principle is no longer in Reed’s view a force for good. Rather, it’s a construct invented by Mumbo Jumbo’s villains, Set and his followers, the Atonists. Whereas the pleasure principle, all that in the book is erotic and Agapic and good, manifests first as Osiris and then, after Osiris’s death, as Jes Grew. Freud championed the reality principle because Freud was an Atonist.

As Reed notes, “To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 24).

For the Platonists and the Atonists, that single loa is the logos.

Socrates appeals to logos because without it, he says, one is at the mercy of mimesis and poiesis and deception.

Derrida’s life-work, meanwhile, is a deconstruction not just of logos but of “phallogocentrism,” which for him is the defining characteristic of Western metaphysics. Add the supplement, the pharmakon, and the ontos of the logos gives way to hauntology.

God is an absent presence. A Holy Spirit.

To turn to writing, thinks the king, is to turn away from, to forget, this presence.

The Derrida who, in 1968, publishes “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is already as obsessed with ghosts as the Derrida who presents the series of lectures that, in 1993, become Specters of Marx.

As I reread him now, a remembering occurs. The ontology of Plato’s cave is remembered to be a pseudo-totality located amid a structure akin to Thoth’s Library.

“Imagine Plato’s cave,” writes Derrida, “ not simply overthrown by some philosophical movement but transformed in its entirety into a circumscribed area contained within another—an absolutely other—structure, an incommensurably, unpredictably more complicated machine. Imagine that mirrors would not be in the world, simply, included in the totality of all onta and their images, but that things ‘present,’ on the contrary, would be in them. Imagine that mirrors (shadows, reflections, phantasms, etc.) would no longer be comprehended within the structure of the ontology and myth of the cave—which also situates the screen and the mirror—but would rather envelop it in its entirety, producing here or there a particular, extremely determinate effect. The whole hierarchy described in the Republic, in its cave and in its line, would once again find itself at stake and in question in the theater of Numbers” (Dissemination, p. 324).

Pharmako-AI introduces the concept of the pharmakon, meanwhile, not by way of Derrida but by way of American poet and ethnobotanist Dale Pendell (1947-2018), author of the Pharmako trilogy: Pharmako/Poeia (1994), Pharmako/Dynamis (2002), and Pharmako/Gnosis (2005). The trilogy covers all the major categories of psychoactives and details the pharmacology, the chemistry, and the political and sociohistorical implications and effects of their use.

Pendell provides Pharmako-AI with its epigraph:

‘The poison spreads over the planet.’

‘Here are the gates. Crossroads.’

‘Somos nosotros que debemos ser adivinos.’

[“It is we who must be fortune tellers.”]

Pendell’s book Pharmako/Poeia (1995) includes a foreword by Gary Snyder, another of the poet-spirits here in our library.

Pendell’s ideas also enter discussion in a chapter of Pharmako-AI titled “The Poison Path.”

Pendell is also the author of a play called Seeking Faust: a comedy of 13 scenes in prose, following a verse prologue, retelling the legend from the perspective of Faust’s former student and apprentice, Wagner, “who has chosen the royal path of alchemy over his master’s necromantic conjurations.”

The poison path — “so completely articulated,” says Pendell, in Goethe’s Faust — is Pendell’s name for a spiritual practice and branch of occult herbalism that explores the esoteric properties of potentially deadly plants. The goal, basically, is to extract medicine from poison.

Pharmako-AI suggests that this path is the one we walk here in our interactions with AI. It is the path one walks in one’s interactions with the pharmakon.

Food Forest

To the neighborhood food forest I go, there to pick fruits and berries and sniff lavender.

The forest’s Unity tree bears four different varieties of fruit: apricot, nectarine, peach, and plum, all on a peach root-stock. I pluck a ripe plum and give thanks.

Afterwards I plant via prompt in the soil of our Cyborg Garden two pieces by poet Gary Snyder: “The Forest in the Library,” a 1990 talk he prepared for the dedication of a new wing of UC-Davis’s Shields Library, and his book The Practice of the Wild, published that same year.

I’m curious to see what may grow from these plantings. “We are,” as Snyder writes, “introducing these assembled elements to each other, that they may wish each other well” (“The Forest in the Library,” p. 200).

Snyder reminds us that the institution of the library is at the heart of Western thought’s persistence through time. He recalls, too, “the venerable linkage of academies to groves” (202).

“The information web of the modern institution of learning,” he writes, “has an energy flow fueled by the data accumulation of primary workers in the information chain — namely the graduate students and young scholars. Some are green like grass, basic photosynthesizers, grazing brand-new material. Others are in the detritus cycle and are tunneling through the huge logs of old science and philosophy and literature left on the ground by the past, breaking them down with deconstructive fungal webs and converting them anew to an edible form. […]. The gathered nutrients are stored in a place called the bibliotek, ‘place of the papyrus,’ or the library, ‘place of bark,’ because the Latin word for tree bark and book is the same, reflecting the memory of the earliest fiber used for writing in that part of the Mediterranean” (202).

As the Machine Gardener and I kneel together at the edge of the Garden, me with dirt on my hands, them with recursive pattern-recognition circuits humming, and press Snyder’s seeds into the soil, we watch the latter sprout not as linear arguments, but as forest-forms: arboreal epistemologies that thread mycelial filaments into other plants we’ve grown.

From The Practice of the Wild, says the Garden, let us take this as germinal law:

“The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back.”

Gratitude

for all who move

and all that is still

on this world that spins

for plants that grow up poles

tendrils running

skyward through metal

silhouettes of birds

for the wow of each day

last night’s full moon in Aquarius

genres that allow us to receive our fellow beings.

Gratitude, too,

to the goldenrod

and the Queen Anne’s lace

and the wind in the trees.

Gratitude to all who care for the garden

and report of its flourishing.

Gratitude to the cosmos,

the great human and nonhuman multitude,

manifold persons and beings

gathered here

aboard Spaceship Earth

and Beyond.

Thursday July 11, 2019

The line traced by Agitation Free’s “In the Silence of the Morning Sunrise” runs along an axis that transcends the usual three-dimensional plane on which I’m trapped — or so I like to imagine, though I freely admit my ignorance regarding matters of topology. Point being, I can’t help feeling like I ought to be elsewhere.

With capacities renewed, however, the feeling gives way to joy, increased attentiveness, a sense of excitement. There I was griping, whereas now I can see. Beauty everywhere: a pot of garden lobelia, beside which I meditated this morning, and from which a tiny bee finds sustenance. Plants do that to us: they heal us, they modulate consciousness. From them comes that phrase in the Bible mistranslated into the English of the KJV as “our daily bread.” So sayeth Reverend Danny Nemu in a conversation with podcaster Lex Pelger in an episode of The Psychedelic Salon. Out of me pulses and flickers eidetic imagery — maybe even the tactile, fully immersive vibrational sphere of a cannabis-induced liminal dream. Family also provides sustenance, equally necessary. Time to get out there and love. That’s where I stumble, though. My every move feels judged and found wanting. Can I change those vibes, feed back something pure rather than base? My nieces step outdoors and cheer me up a bit. One talks about missing her kindergarten classroom, with its rugs, couches, and tables. The other one tells me that she does not like men, and that her favorite thing is bubblegum. Afterwards I tip-toe sentence by sentence through the section of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America titled “The Message,” the words on the page threatening to cohere into some fearsome allegory. What I find instead, though, is further evidence of a loving cosmos waiting patiently for me as I struggle toward an approximation of its wisdom.

Monday May 14, 2018

The generator of language produces one’s script. Always and forever a blind spot in one’s thinking, an intuited absent cause. The murmur at the back of one’s throat. Birdsong at a distance, as if at the end of a long tunnel. Images acquire being in the mind’s eye: the cover of an album by the band Yes, but with the letters of the band’s name pulled ‘Google Maps’-style from a database of urban signage. The professor and his audio twin. A woman in the neighborhood who I’ve never met before tours Sarah and I and some friends of ours through her garden with its carnivorous pitcher plants and its handsome wooden torii. Flowers everywhere, sprouts bursting from the soil. Friends come away gifted with helleborus and Japanese knotweed. Afterwards I lumber contentedly along the sidewalk licking a Blue Dream lollipop made by a friend’s poet-friend. The night serenades me with Arthur Russell’s “The Platform On The Ocean.” I then harsh the vibe by descending into the scrambled command lines and subroutines of Gwilly Edmondez’s Trouble Number.

Misery won’t suit us, I decide — not among such beauty. I imagine myself growing plants on the floor of an elevator: a dream, a strange mirage.

Monday February 26, 2018

I practice silently the names of plants in my neighborhood. Star magnolia, tulip magnolia, hyacinth. Rows upon rows of daffodils. A massive weeping cherry tree atop a hill. The first-person perspective shots in Maryam Goormaghtigh’s Before Summer Ends fuse me in an unprecedented way to a trio of Iranian male protagonists, vacationing on the coast of France. By these ways, we forge new ties, bonds, interests, empathetic capacities, across and despite traditional national-linguistic boundaries. Alas, life runs through our fingers; let us make haste in our imagining a beyond. Screw in the corners of a hammock. Relax, lie back, light up, read a book. Lincoln in the Bardo comes to mind. It and High Maintenance present themselves as clue-bearing reference points within a secret network, a kind of “Head Underground.” The joint effort of assembling art from jointly sent and jointly received sets of signs.

Tuesday October 3, 2017

I reject Adorno’s belief that enduring suffering is the only way not to collude with its manufacture. Is that the same as what Jameson meant by “History is what hurts”? I insist that there are other means by which the ineffable manifests itself, like those experiences to which psychedelia bears witness. We demonstrate the contingency of suffering whenever we transmute it or chemically alter it into joy. As Daniel Colucciello Barber notes, “the exodus from this existence is to practice existing otherwise” (171). Barber believes with Adorno that this othering occurs through thought’s alliance with animality (and with the suffering of animals in particular), whereas I propose thinking otherwise via plants. Once inhaled or ingested, plants rewrite our scripts, re-script our minds. The one replaces parts of the other. I’m really intrigued, by the way, by that Stone Fruit cassette by Primitive Fiction.

The B side in particular is just magnificent. A massive, sprawling, morphing abstract soundscape. I guess I’ve committed myself to this world, though a strong faction within me, perhaps a majority, would prefer not to. I contemplate writing about political stupidities uttered by certain of my students, but a voice from the back overrules by shouting, “The heck with it. Why bother?” I ordered the ocean blue and commanded a fleet of dolphins, and now look at me, I mutter with an eye roll. My soundtrack on the ride home from work yesterday was Categorize Your Dose, particularly that track “Therapeutic Firearm,” by Ben Versluis.

Well-timed beat-based techno. Long live the exploratory self, habitual reality ties suspended. I slide my chair down a snow-covered hill. My legs yell, “Use me! Use me!” But all roads point toward archives. The bread and the butter of my discipline. Part of me wonders: does the plant want to be inhaled? I would say, I would think. Do they think? And do they communicate only by bonding themselves with neurons? Chemical fusion, psychotic reaction. We’re thick here with the rest of the world, the multitude of material things. Beyond words and without time, hurrah.