My break with Christianity as a teenager made me easy prey for the priests of the Culture Religion. According to this religion, the voice of authority is thought to speak through texts — even those most debased. Hence my capture by the gravity of the Cult-Studs, a tribe of Mind Flayers. Think of it as the tribe of the eternal creative appropriation of reality by reality. The creation as once it was dreamt. We must gather ourselves up, make the climb, become premonitory. Equal parts power and curse tinged with doubt. Wolf and bear icons extend outward from a common center, thus allowing my baked potato to order a baked potato at Wendy’s. Sarah and I scroll through photos of Daphne and then night-walk to a house in our neighborhood known about town for its elaborate Halloween decorations. Birds chirp as accompaniment to cricket-pulse in the moments just before total darkness. These days are numbered, we tell ourselves. Notice them. Be present. Superhuman capability and heroism allow characters to march into a foggy forest. Meanwhile I’m not even in the game, I’m on the bench. That’s not a point of view, that’s a fact, says a voice I’d just as soon discard. No need for reality principles here. Allow consciousness to go wherever it wants to go. It wants land and leisure; ’tis a lie, those who say otherwise.
Tag: Walking
Monday October 16, 2017
The star of a popular TV show paints dollar signs on her fingernails to demonstrate her love for former US president Barack Obama. She and her fellow Democrats don’t seem to have learned much since last year’s election. Insulated by their money and their privilege, they remain clueless as to why they’ve lost control of all branches of government.
My mind, however, is elsewhere. I continue to dwell upon psychedelic imagery from one of the performances I caught this weekend. Washed Out teamed up with Brainfeeder-affiliated visual artist Timeboy to create music videos for each track on the band’s latest album, Mister Mellow. The videos utilize several forms of animation: everything from stop-motion and claymation to hand-drawn cartoons. The band projects and modifies all of this dynamic imagery in real-time during live performances using Kinect 2.0 devices: motion-sensing “depth” cameras, basically, designed by Microsoft for use with Xbox One. Sarah joined me for a beautiful late-afternoon stroll through a garden yesterday, where we were graced by magnificent monarch butterflies, a pink wildflower anemone named “Queen Charlotte,” a fence post covered in flowering snail vine. We imagined ourselves entering and exiting zones filled at once with the romantic drama of the strolling couple, and at a different scale, observable only when the couple peers down on occasion, a world teeming with ecosystem narratives: complex interactions between predators and their potential prey. Perceived at this level, suffering and decay seem almost painterly in their abstraction. I realize that I spend too much of my life torn between warring impulses. Should I spend my life immersed in texts or in nature? I commit myself fully to neither speech nor phenomena. Broad City more than makes up for past crimes, by the way, with its latest episode, an animated shroom-and-cannabis-fueled extravaganza by artist Mike Perry.
The alarms, the intensities, objects melting and reforming: together, it amounts to a grand de-reification of reality. So much more pleasurable than the gritty nicotine-crack-alcohol police-and-criminal-class hustle-drama dished out by David Simon’s The Deuce.
Monday September 18, 2017
All of a sudden, this Britishness! Art thou a Britisher? “Alas, no,” I reply, if only for my merriment, “There’s naught but an ounce of British in me!” Partnered to contingency, I embark outward into the greater reality, the one of Jesus Christ and the Reverend Freud. Leonard Cohen steps in and immediately ups the ante for us, asking, “Is This What You Wanted?” The heat and sweat of the outdoors?
I admit: it’s not easy, this wandering. I reserve the right to fast-forward on at least one occasion, so as to dwell instead amidst the sly funk and street-corner brokenness of Savoy Motel’s “Sorry People.”
Observe the old ones stranded outdoors along the paved banks of the hospital here in town. Death is this terror, this grand interruption, spreading its wings somewhere behind us in the midst of Being. Witness, too, the “Wah-Wah” cry of wary kindness that erupts from those who take life’s jabs in stride. Meaning arrives for me in the marvelous weirdness and propulsive forward thrust of Francis the Great, who instructs me via restless hybridity of form to “Look Up In the Sky.”
But the alphabet never ceases to rephrase itself: “meaning” is just a freeze-frame, a momentary crest amidst later sequences filled with seagulls and crashing dominos, Being in its further jungle-like stirring-and-coming-forth. ‘Tis but a ceaseless profusion of ants and moss, detritus tossed carelessly. The Wipers strike a note of caution here, reminding all eager seekers among the so-called “Youth of America” that hidden within us lies a secret reserve, a hunger for transcendence.
Because afterwards, it’s the return of the crows. Into this indecisiveness, this place where we find ourselves, comes our reckoning, the call of love. Having retired to our bed for the evening, my love and I read aloud from an illuminated manuscript passed back and forth between us Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” While a cruelly-written passage involving a female dwarf leaves us appropriately aghast, the tale is otherwise so finely wrought and so perceptive in its rendering of self and world that I fall effortlessly into imagining courses by which to introduce the piece to students. Think of the many great works of literature one could assign, for instance, in a course on flaneurie and the art of walking. Baudelaire, Poe, Debord, de Certeau. Pleased with the thought, I resolve to make it so.
Trance-Scripts 