As a kind of essayist — one who writes to think, to find out, to endeavor — I often look for meaning, associations, correspondences, in that upon which I gaze. A friend lends a note of caution: some of what we find, he reflects, might be projected, phantasmatic rather than cloud-hidden. Of course, fantasies are not purely illusory. Psychoanalysts encourage us to think of them, rather, as scenes that stage unconscious desires. Lacan reads fantasy as a defensive formation assembled by a subject to veil the enigmatic desire of the Other. Fantasy hastens an answer to what can never be known, like one’s face or the back of one’s head, that which can never enter directly into the field of one’s perception. Fantasy pretends to solve what Lacan calls the mystery of “Che vuoi”: “What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I for others?”
Tag: writing
Monday March 5, 2018
A parallelogram of forces swerves around a refrigerator drawer. I kneel and pat a patch of moss. Fields glow with thousands of yellow daffodils. ‘Tis the season ’round these parts. Is the universe trying to cultivate or diminish consciousness? Out of the blooming buzzing late capitalist totality comes Darren Angle’s reply: “The long hall of consciousness / makes room for shit like hot dogs.” Let us not abstract ourselves of particulars. Reinteriorize the different moments of exterior causation. Reintegrate chance with historical necessity so as to allow for synthetic progression. Otherwise, we’re just looking through bloodshot eyes.
Sunday February 18, 2018
Writing while high is a bit like trying to describe a sense beyond words. One would need formal devices — spinning Hypno Disks, entrancing patterns and rhythms. One could soundtrack one’s walk beside a curved, moss-covered wall with Equal, a cassette-sized aggregate of “electro-acoustic clicks, knocks and bumps” by Ecto Mist, released this past summer on Genot Centre.
Ecstatic, transcendental and magickal bliss. Or one can feel real awe tinged with fear by walking outdoors listening to Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka. Defy western culture’s ban on new ontologies. Fashion for oneself a homemade version of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dreamachine. For more on this device, see John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Experience.
Sunday December 10, 2017
Prayer will take us there. We might as well call it that, this act of turning inward, even if there aren’t any mantras involved or words addressed to a higher power. Much of my learning occurs these days through concentration on letting the mind go where it may. I hang back a bit and wait to see what stirs. Hands meet with fingers and thumbs arranged to form a triangle. I hold up to my eyes an inverted, upward-pointed Merkel-Raute or Triangle of Power, tolerating it the right to expand slowly across my field of vision, the gesture crossing outward beyond my peripherals. No more aristocracy of moneyed corporations, I declare to potential comrades. But few heed the call. They look at me askance, shake their heads reprovingly, and return to their sullen pursuit of property, most of them declaring themselves for business, without ever having been taught how else one can be. The Real is that which one feels deeply in one’s mind. Let’s do it, sings the chorus. Now is the time for love. The world has never felt itself so much a totality as it does today — so let us raise glasses instead to the visions in our minds. Let us imagine for one another how else the world may be. We have become more or less completely, more or less obviously, more or less miserably, the dependents of capital — so let us change that. Wildlife, like wildfires, rise up and appropriate thy appropriators! Humanity’s running down the clock, one way of being having come to dominate all the rest. And there’s no longer any imagined purpose to any of it. One is tempted to wish for some chance intervention, some upwelling of otherness. Cast over the soul a luminous spell, craft for it a key that opens doors onto possible worlds. Passion destines its victim, writes de Rougemont, “to contest with every breath everything that officially regulates social life” (73). Weed grants me such a passion; it fills me with words and metaphors, interlacing symbols through which to enunciate a mind in its refusal to adhere to the as-is.
Sunday November 5, 2017
The change in mood or disposition is nearly instantaneous. I pause to investigate being, even as I continue to review sentences under my breath. I exist, take stock of myself and my surroundings, and then, following the way an exhale follows an inhale, I dictate silent sentences in response, the inner “I” reviewing words according to a learned social rubric. Once satisfied, I trance-scribe the results by hand into a marble, college-ruled Mead composition notebook. I establish these as conditions on which I work. Let all take note. Add to that the poetic cocktail of substances I ingest each day. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson, though, I remain quite the minimalist.
Rock stars, meanwhile, were Joan Didion’s ideal subjects, since they lived a disorder to which she could respond with horror, allowing the dissociative, detached bourgeois self to co-exist in a common story with its time. “The story unfolds,” Didion once said, “as you write it.” Personal phobias and superstitions intersect with the affect of one’s historical moment. One can tell and examine the story of one’s time. The emotional life of late capitalism. Illumination of peripheral detail. Corroboration of the aural through the gestural. There is, alas, a faint delay to be heard, perhaps equivalent to that which exists between an object and its shadow. We try to trust fully in life as would a singularly blessed and accepting child. We observe the embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude. When we look into the light, we’re rearranged, our faces melt, mountains become plains, a foot slips on a banana. It helps when we imagine ourselves in a library. Light shines instead out from behind a cloud; the crowd goes wild.
Saturday November 4, 2017
The impenetrable landscape: action verbs! action verbs! “It is distinctly possible,” warns Joan Didion, “to stay too long at the fair.” Thought is the sequential computation of meaning. The only order I can conjure is the order of the random — trust is how I comport myself. Intuitive being. The media tell us bad people exist, thus pitting the people who do exist against one another. Take all parties of others and re-imagine them as condensed, coiled prose poised to strike. So different from the world-picture as it appeared even just one year ago. Back then, angels used to sing to me when I smoked. By “angels,” I mean (as Blake did) “facets of psyche.” Yesterday didn’t really begin for me until I arrived home near day’s end. The rest of it a teeth-grinding blur, but for a student introducing me to Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Pink Trance Notebooks. How I managed to escape knowledge of this book prior to yesterday, I have no idea. Reading a brief summary, I realize it sounds like it grew out of a process similar to the one informing these trance-scripts. And I have an opportunity, if I want, to join Wayne for dinner sometime next week. What is this power that works through me, joining together and fating into collision right things? After yesterday’s dinner (more ramen!), a Dungeon Master friend invited us over for some tabletop play. D&D night: it is you, a voice says, but you are not it. High luck grants a bonus in particular situations. When you burn your luck, though, kick-ass karma. Are we able to understand the puzzle? Random number Jesus.
Wednesday September 27, 2017
Broadenings are sometimes later discovered to have been narrowings. Linguistic parts dropped off in transit. On certain nights, I hear it better than on others. Liquid goes down a wrong pipe, so I drink some water to clear my throat. At length, I feel awakened. The automatic self accepts its demotion to a mere infernal device running its engine out back in the garage. Words will not go wanting after that one, though it’s so hard to shake the sense that there are right and wrong ways to write. I pause and scrutinize too often. I lock myself in a spartan linguistic universe. I wish I could see — and not just see but enter — the landscapes depicted in the Kay Sage painting, “I Saw Three Cities.”
Daily life is too often that from which I want to wake. Become the Godhead; cross beyond the Proscenium Arch. I’m kind of liking this website Melt: “an archive of esoteric and contemporary culture.” But then I realize it contains dead links; the content I request is unavailable. In his final, four-part video “Parallel I-IV,” Harun Farocki narrates the invention of the first houses and trees within virtual reality.
The virtual, I think to myself, has always existed alongside the actual as a component of Being. Social constructs always borrow from both — and yet, the entire mode of representation also evolves in leaps across changing material platforms. “Water in motion made from dashes and dots.” In general, though, when it comes to digital imaging, I suppose I prefer symbolic forms rather than filmic realism. Those of us hunting for the apex predator of contemporary psychedelia need look no further than Nmesh’s Pharma, a 42-track double-cassette monolith released earlier this year on Orange Milk Records.
Imagine a sped-up maximalist vaporwave version of DJ Spooky’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer. Midway through, a voice intrudes, echoing forth through the void, the planetless space, to ask, “Does the world exist if I’m not watching it?” It appears out of emptiness, and to emptiness it returns. Is the world generated by the gaze that falls upon it? These are all names for the virtual creations of an alien-human Other. Who are we in relation to this Other-projection? A storybook made of videogame parts. Is that how the pre-Hellenics viewed the world? Games haven’t just become more realistic — they’ve also become more abstract, overlaid with graphs and maps and floating perspectives. Farocki’s Parallel videos reveal piece by piece an entire metaphysics of virtual worlds. “Google that shit, homes,” I tell myself, whispering inwardly for the self below.
Friday September 15, 2017
Fuck this shit. Let it all collapse. I’ve lost whatever remained of my ability to care. And allow me to say that, by the way, in full knowledge that I’ll likely feel differently before the end of this trance-script. Speaking of which: check out Thom Donovan’s essay in Tripwire 13 on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue and on note-taking as a mode of composition. “Note-taking,” Thom writes, “as opposed to prose that results in novels, involves lived duration. ‘Discharge’ rather than ‘disclosure’ […]. Without preparation, nor the time to be edited (rewritten for the dominant culture’s genres), they comprise a continual improvisation, taking form amidst life’s general emergency” (279). A small grey-brown mantis stands alert, perched on the arm of a chair on my deck. For those looking for additional recommendations: I recommend giving yourself time to turn on, preferably during a sunny afternoon, to Pauline Anna Strom’s “Energies,” a track off her upcoming release Trans-Millenia Music from RVNG Intl.
Georgia’s video for that, by the way, takes me to precisely where I want to be. I also recommend Georgia executive Justin Tripp’s interactive generative art app Silk. Greg Fox’s “By Virtue of Emptiness” goes well with that, too. Art of this sort, I think to myself, amounts to a raw language into which heads can unfold their heads. The unified self is that which imagines itself making all of this, as in the video for Lusine’s “Just a Cloud.” My jungle-canyon rope-bridges, meanwhile, all feel limp and broken. This is a brain when fried. We’re all living in separate but adjacent mass-mediated frames, as in the title sequence to John Carpenter’s They Live.
Think the concept of differential immanence from the perspective of one who channel-surfs among parallel worlds. Remember: we who criticize the brutality of this world have been sent to perform necessary work here on behalf of the post-capitalist future. Think of us, in fact, as heroic time travelers whose tasks bear cosmic-eschatological implications, as with John Connor’s father, the protagonist in The Terminator. Each of us, trapped as we are in our private-personal, capitalist-realist prison-caves, must become once more our own Messiahs, interceding, both individually and collectively, on our own behalves — but only so as to be joined again with those we love.
Tuesday September 12, 2017
How I wish I could live more in keeping with a reverence for nature as something more than just a giant money-laundering scheme. Getting high helps. However, the reverence it provokes, while focused on one thing at a time, is otherwise indiscriminate. The nature/culture binary means little in this state; but things are more complicated when it comes to economy and ecology. When I smoke, I defeat my usual fearful posture toward life. We must languor in the telling, I tell myself. Allow others to congregate ’round it. Another voice interrupts here, stating, “Man cannot tame what God wishes to remain wild.” I do worry, by the way, that reverence for nature might be the one necessary element of a properly utopian political theology that Gnosticism fatally lacks. “We are poems in the making,” proclaims M.C. Richards: “Logos at work.” “A craftsman,” she adds (“craftsman” being her name for the utopian subject), “has the opportunity of acting out daily the wisdom of his organism, in its intuitive and other aspects. […]. He knows what can happen of itself once certain rhythms are set in motion. He knows that hand and head, heart and will, serve in a process and a wisdom greater than his own” (61-62). Despite the above passage’s unfortunate tendency to default to masculine pronouns, I feel like every subsequent sentence in Richards’ book Centering contains the precise knowledge of how one ought to live one’s life. She even captures my understanding of what I’m doing, or what I ought to be doing, with these trance-scripts: “The artist participates in a subtle dialogue with nature. Who is saying what to whom? If we allow our views of craft decorum to loosen, we may see more simply what is there. We do not need to fight for our right to be off center. We find that once we are on center, we may be off center as wholeheartedly as we like, for at that level there is no difference. At that level, we are free to create whatever form occurs” (62). Classic modalities crack away like cheap facades that others years ago plastered over or by other means affixed to the forms and surfaces of Practico-Inert-ville, aka the capitalist built environment, i.e. our prison. Try digging your way out of that one. Radical psychedelic healing techniques must be used to de-reify these structures, not just pickaxes and shovels and dynamite.
Wednesday August 30, 2017
There are self-haters among us who don’t yet believe themselves saved. All one need do is close one’s eyes and listen to Ant’lrd’s “Daydream Trace.”
A week into the semester, and I’ve already read responses where students describe growing up in a mansion (albeit one that may have been haunted by ghosts of Confederate soldiers) and vacationing at a “cozy little chateau” nuzzled into the side of a mountain in the Swiss Alps. Charming, no? I wish there was a store in town devoted exclusively to the sale of cassettes and weird books. Instead, a Waste Management truck pulls out in front of me. Should I care about China’s accomplishments re: poverty alleviation when confronted with its inverse, the drowning of Houston? And what is this whole other neighborhood in my city, up by the quarry? “The kid’s mixed up ’bout his geography,” says the neighborhood tough guy, his one hand clenched into a fist punching as if to suggest menace into the palm of his other. My favorite trees are birch trees. But the quarry is beautiful. Kudzu-draped. Cavernous and deep. “QUARRY PARK RULES,” as is printed on one of the park’s signs. Why can’t I retire, effective immediately, and hang out there each day hence? Eyes toward the sky, I revisit consciousness. Crickets mark time as I wait for the uptick, the deluge, the crosshairs. News stories tip my head inward. Worms, defense — one needn’t worry. Nations sign to one another by launching missiles. Others among us begin their days dressing and praying before poorly-wrought shrines to money. Is the inner peace they achieve there authentic? Do others rehearse their thoughts while feeling around as in a labyrinth? What sense is there in using the free-write as a site of utopian prefiguration? That’s what I’m attempting here — or “I,” and whoever else wants to join us. I wish to unschool myself so as to improvise new forms of syntax. Go outside, sit on a rail, and trade time-passing speculations like Vladimir and Estragon. These are two of my “operator voices,” a concept I happen upon by happening upon a cassette of that name by Brett Naucke. Operator voices are characters of mine who wait around for their phones to pop off, their daily practice an ecstatic journey routed through chance operations and signs derived therefrom.
Trance-Scripts 