Tag: writing

Wednesday August 23, 2017

I often wish my prose was more purposive. But I also admire the weathered wooden fence that borders the drive-thru lane at Cookout. Should I ignore life as it happens? I’ll do whatever it takes, I suppose, as I plunge feet-first into the death-swamp of another schoolyear. Capital’s algorithms compel me to perform my “professor” routine. I hear you asking, “Do you lurch about and stumble sometimes?” I do, dear reader, I do. Yet the program that runs me won’t listen to my cries and complaints. Its intention, quite simply, is to cripple me through use. The Hound grumbles, “Quit whingeing.” “Don’t point your finger at me!” I yell in reply. Songs will be sung of my deeds. Navigation of space-time earns me visions and teachings. I just have to trust my instincts or my intuition. A creature appears and kneels graciously to introduce our next fantasy. A voice in a sparkling evening gown shrugs contemptuously and mutters, “Ugh, another backdoor colonialism.” Opening strange doors onto unsuspected vistas of consciousness. The utopia lies there, in the transition between modes. You can activate a sample of the experience by listening in a relaxed state to “Contain,” the first track off of fade, the new Lillerne Tapes release from Toronto artist anthéne.

I tilt my head backward and watch cartoon vines crawl up cartoon ancient pillars and columns. Why are so many in our society unable to tolerate personal accounts of joyful experiences, moments of reflection, solo journeys elsewhere? Nature is far better than all of us combined. I wish I could get students to listen of their own volition to ambient music while developing some sort of weekly meditative practice. I’m also way into driving through randomly chosen industrial parks with “The Doctrines of Swedenborg” by Hieroglyphic Being blasting on my car stereo.

Not anymore, though. I haven’t been able to play anything on my stereo since yesterday evening, when some fuckwad stole my phone. It’s better not to dwell, though, on this inauspicious start to the new semester. Events mean only what we let them mean. Even the most heroic mosaics eventually lose their tiles. What then of one’s persistence, if one is neither an artifact nor a thought? If neither here nor there, then where? The classrooms wherein I teach will before long resemble the ruins in Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens (2016). Imagine some older me returning to survey the wreckage: the discarded object-world, sacred and splendid now because stripped of use. Fix yourself emotionally with this freeze-frame from the deep time of civilizational decline and succession. Meditate, stretch, and move on.

Sunday August 6, 2017

As writers, we can populate our voices by sampling the whole of media memory. The sounds come to us as the equivalent of radio signals from within. A voice says, “I gave you Logos a long time ago.” The unlocking of secret heights of language-use prompts shifting of the puzzle parts of reality. Not just a mountain blast or a rhetoric, but a reset of the object-world and of all living subjects’ knowledge and memory of it. Matter complies masochistically to Mind’s urgings. The differences are negligible but real. Like an escaped prisoner, my mind wanders free of discipline, and by that I mean not inner, transcendent discipline, but discipline as imposed by man upon man. By fleeing capture in the language games of others, we pick up the frequencies of an authentic, single-and-continuous, cosmos-creating act of speech. When I allow that speech to hypnotize me, I become capable of writing it down, and what it says becomes what I realize I want to say. The self that speaks itself thus also speaks another. This other self remembers falling asleep the other night while writing, and awakening the next day in the shade of his day, his back deck dappled piebald with spots of sunlight. He burns the social surplus of his days reposed in languorous, language-stupefied gratitude, having learned to worship through pleasure his one true master, the present. It’s like his Boolean microprocessor obeys a different logic, more generous in its handling of circumstance. Mariah’s work continues to astonish in these instances. (The incantatory “Shonen” and “Shinzo No Tobira” are current favorites of his.)

He observes rows of captured sunlight along the boards of a wooden fence, and feels at ease, the rest of the world of irrelevance somewhere behind him. On his run, he dodges a crushed Arizona Iced Tea can. A pointless thing, he shrugs, a trifle of a collapsed civilization. Flowers hung beside sidewalks become for him beings to sniff and touch lightly along his daily, leisurely, mind-adjusting dérives, the latter being a revolutionary strategy he acquired years ago during his apprenticeship among the Situationists. If he knows a word, it holds purpose, and he will use it. There is no active revolutionary strategy for the creation of communism, he thinks, until more residents in the US decide they want this. If this sometimes becomes Trance-Scripts’ Marxist Guide to Wellness, so be it. Still, the kind of joy he extracts from each day is not the kind of joy he’d had in mind. Today is the day on which he and friends had planned to head to the shore for a brief vacation — a trip the group had to postpone due to weather. “The influence of weather on dérives,” wrote Debord, “although real, is a determining factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible.” Perhaps he and his friends will find time in their lives to reschedule.