Our journey north having reached its conclusion, on the books as a two-week endurance test, a struggle, self-realization limited, Sarah and I head home to our southern clime, stopping off for the night in a filthy roadhouse inn. The world everywhere lonely and desolate. Trucks pull in their wake as they speed past a fearsome howling void, air torn apart from itself as podcasts blather on, chewing at one’s ears about some dismal bit of capitalist reality. Cops flash constantly in and out of view along the highway in this wretched country. As common a sight as birds along telephone wires. Cultivated heads, beware. I wish to assemble in place of this reality a world where strangers can live amiably with one another, going so far even as to tolerate hitchhiking without fear of harm. And there is in fact some leeway. One can always transform the world as one finds it through guerrilla ontology. Devise new games involving roles for oneself and for others, and voilà: one can see patterns where before there were walls.
Tag: travel
Sunday October 22, 2017
Smoke from a neighbor’s fire-pit filled the air. It was a crisp autumn night. I sipped a martini at a local bar, Clover’s references to the Commune reverberating unexpectedly, creating an updated sense of reality. A friend sitting across from me explained the work he does as the head of a local food consortium. When I asked him how I might plug myself in and make myself useful, he directed me to read up on a project called Cooperation Jackson. These are the first steps, I think, toward the creation of the Riot’s successor. Another friend, improving my head in a different way, recommended I watch We Bare Bears. A third friend recalled for me “Transcen-dune-talism,” a spontaneous, off-the-cuff coinage of Clover’s referring to the weedy metaphysics distilled via the famous Frank Herbert novel. Speaking of weedy metaphysics: I spent last night getting stoned in the woods beside a campfire. Owls came and spoke to me. Crickets, mosquitoes. At times, a kind of pressure from all sides. The universe inspires an awe laced with terror. A push back into an attentiveness toward matters of survival. A becoming-responsible again with regard to one’s daily self-reproduction. I sat in a lawn chair thinking, “I haven’t really challenged myself like this since Boy Scouts.” Hiking, collecting wood, assembling a fire on which to cook one’s dinner. All mixed with an ambient apocalypticism. Reality augmented via the nightmare of precarious employment. We’ve arrived at the dawn of the idea of global imperial civil war. How are we to navigate our way in this ever more paranoid environment? Heavy self-scrutiny: perhaps the problem is that I was raised as a second-generation American suburbanite. I lack social skills, street smarts, wilderness literacy. I survive on pizza, french fries, hot dogs, burritos. How do I prepare myself for the Commune? Where does one even begin if one’s hope is to lay the groundwork for collective extraction from the formal economy? I look upward in search of answers, but (for better or worse), what I encounter instead is a night sky filled with stars.
Monday September 4, 2017
Heads need to spend more time exploring being “out of tune” together. We can begin by playing for one another Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury.
When one is in one’s right mind, one can hardly move a mouse. One no longer vibrates in a register discernible to laptop mouse-pads or cellphone touchscreens. From the cellphone’s perspective, it is as if one has ceased to exist. In celebration of my birthday yesterday, friends and I drove to a forested grove to chat about Dario Argento films and wild mushrooms. We hiked some trails and plunged into a pool of icy water at the base of a rock formation smoothed into the shape of a waterslide. A group of women in line ahead of me slid down the face of the rock in their burkinis, their voices filled with joy. On the whole, a great day, warm and sunny — though on the drive home, as we entertained ourselves by reading aloud for one another in its entirety a young adult novel called Just Too Cool, I began to worry that I’d caught a cold (a condition confirmed in the hours since; hence the relative brevity of today’s trance-script). In general, I’m feeling a shortness of labor-power and labor-time. Events move so quickly these days. The waves: everything bounces, time dissipates or contracts. I feel like an observer along a path watching a stagecoach held at gunpoint. Seagulls, water slapping a retaining wall. I lean against a chilled metal railing, and stare across a bay. Are there ways we can recharge the batteries that run the brains within our domes? Heavy headphones, binaural beats, meditation tapes. Laura Archera Huxley reassures me, palms pointed earthward, “You are dirt poor. You are seeking knowledge of how a person should be. You are not the target.” The startling discovery of adulthood, and the guiding principle of my pedagogy (though one I often struggle with in practice): “Making others feel better generally makes us feel better.” Well, it’s at least a nice idea, says a wrinkled, toothless granny. When one’s body is unwell, what can one expect of one’s mind?
Saturday August 5, 2017
I listened as a wonderful time-lag unfurled between the sound of my voice and the act of my speaking. As I sat up from my reveries beside a fire-pit the other night during magic hour, the air rich with a choir of cicadas, something in the experience awakened in me a memory of the drunken interplay of voice and sampled sound in the virtual acoustic space of Blonde Redhead’s “In an Expression of the Inexpressible,” a track I hadn’t blasted in at least a decade.
Like the spinning double-sided mask in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of the Poet, one always contains at least two.
“You have but one solution,” says the statue, as one’s hand whispers in one’s ear. “You must enter the looking glass — and once there, you must walk.” When the shadow of what looks like a telephone gets a pin in its ear, I wince and shudder. Through the process of identification, I become other. Through a keyhole, an angel captures me with a spinning Hypno Disk. The poet’s eye is pulled as if by gravity, whereas off to the side springs the Cartesian Ego. Cocteau advises, “Mirrors would do well to reflect more before sending back images.” Like in videogames, creation often requires repeating levels. Have I broken too many statues? I work by associative logic and montage. A small voice beside the pounding of my heart says, “I can’t think, I can’t think!” against the unsynced clapping of a crowd. René Gilson’s assessment captures the essentials: “That which reveals itself is a vision of the invisible.” One must “dream the film subjectively,” by identifying it with one’s own experiences. One may think of it as the equivalent of sensing invisible tapestries with one’s dead antennae. But sometimes one’s own experience is just one’s own experience, as when my head goes nuts to Mariah’s “Hana Ga Saitara.”
Shoulders dance and my neck unbolts into the neck of an ostrich as I hurtle down the air-conditioned carnival of the open road. Sarah packed us a delicious lunchtime feast the other day of salami, provolone, and bread. Our love, like A.R. Kane’s, is from outer space. Clinic’s “The Second Line” enters the transmission, another trance-script classic.
The Left should serenade itself with tales of its stolen pleasures, tools of consciousness used to tack the sails of subjectivity away from the Towers of Capital-Time toward the gardens of Utopia. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins really lets us have it on his version of “Monkberry Moon Delight.”
Catch up, cats and kittens, don’t get left behind. We on the Left should follow suit.
Trance-Scripts 