Tag: trance-scripts

Precipitations

More must be said, too, of Devin’s book, Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice. ‘Tis a book of criticism prepared by Devin based on a dissertation he wrote under the supervision of Robert von Hallberg and Saree Makdisi at the University of Chicago. I am grateful Devin wrote it — for with its overview of prior acts of trance-scription by the likes of poets Robert Duncan, James Merrill, and H.D. comes the potential to retell the backstory of what I’ve done. It sits with me here as I write.

Replace “Old Sounds” With “Gold Soundz”

“Going back to old sounds won’t help,” thinks the Time Traveler. “Do so and the Narrator stands revealed as a bloody mother fucking asshole.”

The Narrator, not quite omniscient and thus taken aback by the thought, asks of his sub-creation, “You think so?” “What, then?” he wonders. “Do we edit the entries to make me likable? What would we write instead?”

Thus it happens, thinks the Traveler. “The Ghost would have to enter into the narrative,” he says. We know for certain that some such being spoke to us via auditory hallucination, don’t we? And we know as well that it was already there, doing its work upon us in the house, prior to our introduction to marijuana. The latter didn’t invent the Ghost — but it amplified it. It gave it back its voice. Let us open ourselves to the Ghost, then, and recognize it as a potential for apartness within us that is always-already part of us. Once we accept all that is loop-like, all that is like Ouroboros in our nature, we reveal ourselves as we are, infinite: a single, transtemporal, interdimensional being, enunciating itself across time.

Confronting the Obstacle

One version of the narrative begins with the Narrator rereading old trance-scripts, feeling unhappy with his former self’s negative self-image. He arrives to a realization of how much of an obstacle he was to his flourishing. The Narrator wonders: should I “burn the diaries,” as Canadian poet Moyra Davey recommends? Should I edit, revise, re-sequence events? Is that how one creates an Alter-Destiny?

Weird Occurrences

Suffice to say, we had some weird occurrences there at the home we rented on Shady. None of it seemed malevolent in intent — just a bit weird. I developed a writing practice during my time there involving self-induced trance states, similar to the surrealist practice of “automatic writing.” I experienced auditory hallucinations, where it felt like I was hearing voices. Some of this was admittedly disconcerting at first. I realized almost immediately, however, that I could write some of it down. I could take notes like a kind of sleuth. And so, a Text began to germinate — one I transcribed gratefully, in a state of silent absorption as I listened.

Hence these trance-scripts.

As for the house, Frank sold it when we moved out — and from what I’ve heard, he tempered the decor when preparing to put the place on the market. Thankfully, however, I have some photos of how it looked when I was there.

I have the photos…and I have the Text.

Apparent Retrograde Motion: A Way Forward

José Esteban Muñoz finds a way forward through cruising: the gay subcultural practice of seeking sexual encounters in public places or online.

“I know little of my sexuality,” thinks the time traveler. “Catholicism got in there and fucked my shit up years ago – hence these sexless days and nights.”

Is that a thought to be made public or kept private? Fear not, dear readers. Have I any decency? Yes I do.

“Aspects of Love’s Body have been occulted, occluded, hidden from consciousness,” thinks the time traveler. “So, too, have years prior. Trance-scripts of years past have gone unpublished. They appear to me now as I sit here reading them like repressed memories manifesting as pages of old journals – and thus times to which I can journey. Hence the trance-scripts ahead.”

Friday July 2, 2021

Benedict Seymour’s Dead the Ends takes Chris Marker’s La Jetée as its Ur-text. Seymour’s film is a found-footage concoction, and thus incorporates much of the Marker film into itself. But Dead the Ends is also database art, as Seymour pairs these bits of La Jetée with their many echoes in subsequent time travel narratives (Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, etc.). These works that Seymour reanimates in Dead the Ends all feature romance at their core: lovers seeking each other across time. The narrator of my story, meanwhile, feels growing within himself some similar romantic core. It is there “in the belly of this story,” as Leslie Marmon Silko says of her novel Ceremony. I trance-scribe these texts in the time-stream of the paralogy, but they are words received from another timeline, spoken by a shadow-self whose desires led him West. Or not spoken by the shadow-self, but in dialogue with it. Trance-scribing is not the same as channeling. The shadow-self wants to access the acid diaries of Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. The shadow-self is headstrong — discontented — and then enlivened — reawakened — through an encounter with another. Whereas the paralogical self is a family man: loving father, loving husband. But grown weary from excessive self-silencing, and (given the nature of the karmic cycle) the expectation that he plod on and endure.

Wednesday June 30, 2021

Without yet knowing in advance the form of this narrative, or even whether it is to be a story or a novel, this thing, this experiment in living theater that we’ve method-acted our way into — let us nonetheless speculate as to what it might mean and how it might happen. At minimum, it means a shift in genre. This Work we’re trance-scribing would become a fiction, a fantasy: something other than the author’s lived reality. This despite being tied indexically to that reality through its temporal adjacency. The world contributes, the world participates in the coming-into-being, the trance-scription, of the text’s episodes. It is to the rhythm of the day that the text is sung. What happens is: I realize I’m already in the alternate timeline. The shift occurred with the paralogy of “Wednesday January 6, 2020.” Publish as is and we can continue to remain in this timeline, thinks our traveler. Edit the date and we enter a timeline that occurred otherwise. Or so I imagine as I sit with the idea, the realization unfolding slowly as I water the plants in our garden. “Otherwise how?” I wonder. “What would happen?” We couldn’t know in advance, could we? We would have to become part of the experiment, like seed in soil, attending to the unfolding of each day amid conditions of precarity and love. Yet this we’ve already done by gifting ourselves the paralogy. Swapping the zero with the one would be like looking a gift horse in the mouth.

So begins the tale. Sarah green-lights the production and confirms my thinking about how to proceed. I go live with the paralogy intact mid-afternoon, and encounter several immediate forms of resistance. A troll, for instance, posts a comment proposing that the work has “hit a new level of faggotry,” while someone I care to know better sings out into the void of social media Martha Wainwright’s “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” On a more hopeful note, though, the room (acting collectively here as Greek chorus) replies by sounding the passing of Donald Rumsfeld. Have I succumbed to cruel optimism? Should I have proceeded to the “unknown unknown” of the one? Perhaps the Work moves toward personal and collective flourishing as the one and the many learn to live in fidelity with both love and desire.

Tuesday June 29, 2021

The time travel narrative presents itself as an opportunity waiting to be written. The narrator has been keeping an online blog: transcripts of daily or semi-daily marijuana trip reports. A lag has entered the cybernetic loop of life and text: the author has fallen behind in posting, publishing, beaming forward the message. He hasn’t stopped trance-scribing; he continues to write each day as he always has: longhand, in a series of notebooks. But analog jottings go digital a solstice apart from their occurrence. Thus it comes to happen that the author can edit or revise his account of January 6th. As he thumbs through the notebook and arrives to the day, he discovers a minor error, a curious slip of the pen. He’d dated the entry “Wednesday January 6, 2020“: a fictitious date. 2021 was at that point too fresh to have become a habit as a thing to write, causing the narrator to default unconsciously to the year prior.

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

he

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.