Toroidal Reality

The torus, or toroid, is a significant figure for describing psychic reality because its outside is inside, and vice versa. In this sense, considering the "two-ness" of inner and outer, we have a process of perpetual reciprocity: the inner gives into the outer, which, in return, turns inward, infinitely. The toroid is a symbol for a perfectly mediated economy of relations: outer/inner, coming/going, here/there, center/periphery, presence/absence, etc. Imagining the toroid in motion brings out further significance. In motion, it enters time, and its time is manifold: past/present/future have become a single process whose horizon is in perpetual renewal, perpetual simultaneity, perpetual attainment of origin. In this, toroidal motion reaches a state of concresence: it has become toroid in its relating of the two, into and through time, in order to sustain a continuous emergence.

Here is a link to a site containing animated toroids, some of which are interactive. I suggest playing with the ineractive animations long enough to explore its potential as a visual metaphor.

Ghost Distortion

The derelict radio station. from Druskq on Vimeo.

Glamour and Extinction

The Recordings of Ariel Pink

Record, vb. c.1225, "to get by heart," from O.Fr. recorder "repeat, recite, report," from L. recordari "remember, call to mind," from re- "restore" + cor (gen. cordis) "heart" (as the metaphoric seat of memory, cf. learn by heart); see heart.

Ariel Pink's music sounds the way I remember hearing music when I was a kid tagging along with mom at the mall, passing through a gauntlet of perfume counters and catching the musk of commerce in my chest, all the while with music of the era blaring in some awful, seemingly omnipresent soundsystem. I actually hated music then, and I was hurt by it more often then not because of its dense glamour and the synthetic quality of sound in 1986; it made me ashamed of myself and somewhat perverse or secretive about something I didn't understand yet. In Ariel Pink's music, I get perspective on that feeling, and it’s transformed, and I hear the way I used to hear; I can reconcile and re-incarnate that hearing, and, at times, it has allowed me to approach a really powerful kind of love.

As a friend of mine told me, if you listen to Ariel's music enough you start to hear that all of it emerges from a feeling of imminent extinction. Not that it's "about" dying so much as the impulse that moves behind the music is aware of transience, decay, distortion, and the way passions translate over time into irrelevance at worst and eccentricity at best. The glamorous atmosphere our pop music swaths us in is revealed to be insipid and absurd years down the line, and this dialogue between trend and emptiness, excitement and repulsion, and glamour and extinction is very much at the core of Ariel's art - and it is art.

At the same time, much of his work is an homage to the legitimate playfulness and buoyancy of older, dated pop music. There is no ugly parody or satire in his music, except the frequent emergence of self-effacement and gentle mockery; yet it's equally untrue to say his music is strictly an homage and celebration of American pop - to say so would relegate him to nostalgia and sentimentality, which he most certainly flirts with but never succumbs to. What he shows me is that the attempt to hold onto the original nature of one's enthusiasms and to make them permanent, as all of us attempt to do when we love something, begins to erode one's identity, distort one's desires, and render ghostly and haunted the persona that weathers each change. In this, his music escapes into its own decline, thwarting its own learning curve so as to get outside the tangents and procedures that secure posterity. Yet rather than allowing chance into the compositional drama of the music, a la John Cage, chance interferes with Ariel's music on an ontological level; the process of recording, which for him is simultaneous with the composition of the music, is altered by chance and expediency to the extent that the very means by which the music is preserved and made available - the very hearing of the hearer - becomes a material with which to work.

Salvia as Pharmakon

Here's a link to the salvia chapter of Dale Pendell's unparalleled book on psychoactive plants and herbs, PharmakoPoeia. The chapter is an absolute favorite from the trilogy Pendell wrote, the other two installments being PharmakoDynamis and PharmakoGnosis. Here is a review I wrote at Goodreads on PhamakoPoeia:

This is an amalgam of hard pharmacokinetic fact and subjective, experiential notation and narrative. Imagine a professor in a psychiatry class who could summon all the most cutting edge research yet could also refer to his own private experience of psychosis - that sort of cross referencing between objective and subjective fact is what makes this such a worthy book. Pendell envisions this book as a sort of prose/poetic epic, and in some ways it works that way (to boot, he has Allen Ginsberg praising the book as such). However, I wouldn't go too far toward classifying it as epic literature; while there is a very artful control of the various narrative voices that emerge and collide, differentiated by typface or lineation, and while much of the book appears as free verse, I think it is best be taken for what it is on the most basic level: a thoroughly unique and indispensible book for anyone (and I mean ANYONE) even SLIGHTLY interested in plant derived drugs. It is paranoid, erudite, hilarious, beatific, anarchic, poetic, practical, and visually fascinating. Further, spending enough time with the books, you learn to intuit a variety of etymologies, and the book begins to function - not unlike Pound's CANTOS - as a trans-temporal pastiche of languages, cultures, and eras: Latin, Greek, Mayan, Sanskrit, and contemporary American, to name a few.

Omega Principle

I'd like to refer to an older post about wolf packs to advance an idea I've had kicking around for a while now. I refer to it as the Omega Principle, and I think it describes an aspect of human social experience we're all familiar with in one form or another. Whereas wolf packs have a clearly defined Alpha beneath whom other pack members define themselves, with secondary positions giving way, in some instances, to the Omega, human social units -- be they family or friends -- are less distinctly ordered. A father may be said to be the "head" of the family, and this might find corroboration in his wage earning and physical size, but on an emotional plane, he may be quite neglected, mocked, perhaps outright disliked. In this sense, he is like an omega wolf; and in a similar sense, we all are threatened at one time or another by the thought that perhaps we are an "omega" among our peers, coworkers, or family members: that is, we sometimes give into the radical suspicion that we aren't as important as we think we are, and that perhaps we may be annoying or even offending others who are too "polite" to bring it to our attention. This "politeness" is something absent among wolves, and it certainly contributes to the ambiguity in human social organisms as to who belongs, who thrives, and who is the one we could do without.

Christ spoke of being at once the Alpha and the Omega, and while he spoke of this in terms of being the origin and the culmination, the beginning and the end, there is a way in which his and others' messages of compassion (e.g. the Buddha) speak to our concern with the Omega Principle. Only by honoring the possibility that we are the lowest of the low can we learn to forgive ourselves and others and move toward doing away with the hierarchical organization of our relations altogether. The Omega Principle speaks to community and compassion, and it is based upon the Buddhist conception of Emptiness and its implicit claim that I am You, I have been You, I have given birth to You, and I have been mothered by You; I have killed You, and I have saved You; I will return to the absence from which We both originated just as You will. Accordingly, to harm another based on a fantasy of superiority and competition is to harm one self.

To honor the position of the Omega is to exalt the lowly and to remember the precarious privilege we have been granted in being anything at all, regardless of our "estate." In a sense, the Omega is the solder of all social communities, much like the Jungian Shadow, and even the scapegoat, have served to purge communities by making a ritual identification of the Omega among us. Yet the Omega is always already us, it is who we are, it is our potential disgrace, and the grace of our humility. It is resilience and humor and the ability to laugh -- a laughter that transcends punishment.

Joseph Cornell

The artwork of Joseph Cornell deserves a full-scale essay here, but I haven't got one yet. For now, I'll say only that I first encountered his work in the New Orleans Museum of Art in 2003. Visiting the museum with my parents, I was somewhat bored and very hungover; not knowing who Cornell was, I sort of stumbled into a little, low-lit room displaying his work. I quickly shifted from disinterest and nausea to a feeling of purity, nostalgia, and euphoria. The room was filled with Cornell's boxes and collages, as well as drawings done by his brother from when he was a child. His work taps into a realm of pure fantasy, imagination, and intimacy that have been vital to me over the years.

As a smalltime tribute to Cornell, here is a link to a wonderful selection of Cornell inspired desktop wallpapers, here is a site devoted to Cornell, and here is one that provides a multimedia examination of his work. Enjoy.

Nervous Child: Slight Return

As a return to posting here, at my half-beloved step-child of a blog, I thought I'd offer the following bit I wrote recently. As part of a much larger essay, this passage is an attempt to rigorously analyze an experience I underwent at age 23 (five years ago) which was, to the best of my understanding, a straight-up nervous breakdown. It led to my being on an SNRI, which I have discussed previously.

.......................................

My nervous system and the subtle order of all my mental categories and impressions had been so thoroughly upset and overwhelmed, that I truly underwent what can only be termed a psychological death. This is, in effect, what we mean by “nervous breakdown” – a term that has been deprived of all meaning through overuse. Immediately upon recognition that one has been profoundly, terminally altered, the psyche is suspended in a sort of posthumous immunity from all uncertainty – no matter how horrifying the object or meaning it beholds, it is with sheer conviction and clarity of perception that it does so. However, these perceptions are bereft of context, bereft of the personality that hitherto had sanctioned these perceptions’ meaning. In this new infantile receptivity to sense impressions, and in the adult hunger to establish new categories and to parse distinctions in value and quality, the imagination enables exaggerated, grotesque narratives to emerge with the appearance of eternal truth. This is what is meant by revelation, epiphany, apocalypse: the unveiling of one’s absolute nature, and the attendant falsifications and distortions of such an absolutism. This is not to denigrate or explain away the phenomenon of such unveilings – rather, to emphasize the danger in literalizing their content.

Placeholder

To anyone looking at this and wondering if the blog is still active, it is. I'm cooking up a few ideas for future posts, but lately I've been out of the habit. If you actually read this thing, may the gods bless you, and be sure to check back in the very near future.

For now, I'll post an old poem of mine that was featured in FAULTLINE Journal of Art and Literature. For more info. on the poem's subject, see previous posts here and here, or check out the "Rx" box above at the right.

John Lilly

Having been handed his penis by
what appeared to be an extraterrestrial,

he turned to his wife for help. She calmed him, saying
they were at home, in the living room.

Place being a variable coordinate, he moved through
mapped and zeroed states of consciousness,

seeing, alternately, God

as simulation, as science, as drugs,
as consciousness-without-an-object. Afloat

in his makeshift isolation tank, injecting LSD or not,

he still knew "there was still more bad material to go through,
still more nonsense programmes in [him] to be brought to light."

Talking with dolphins, he saw his experiments were driving them to
suicide in their tanks. They would not eat. No true scientist, he felt,

performs an experiment he wouldn’t be the subject of. Thus,

his Ketamine at twenty minute intervals for weeks
to seek out, in post-synaptic space, “extra-terrestrial reality.” At once

comfort and tool, it seduced him, taught him,

and turned him into a dull child fondling the breasts of his
best friend's wife in front of friends. Perhaps laughable,

meta-programmed and open to a paradox of signals, he still knew:
no one wants a sinister reality. As experiment,

however flawed, each mind needs love verified, repeatable.

Online I Ching

Recently, I was recommended to a new, comprehensive I Ching site and from what I've seen, it's unique in its pursuit of a direct, almost blunt English idiom that somehow maintains the multi-layered, traditional meanings of the ancient Chinese. It synthesizes information from a broad range of perspectives, and considering the breadth of its view, the concision is remarkable. Among the online resources for the I Ching that I've encountered, this one is probably the most helpful. Further, it links to the classic Wilhelm-Baynes edition of the book that was introduced and endorsed by Carl Jung - certainly the most known edition in the West (wherever that is...).

Also, I thought I'd take this opportunity to present my (somewhat facetious but nonetheless useful) Late American I Ching method.

Materials:

• 3 Quarters
• 1 Sharpie
• 1 Pencil
• 1 Pad of Post-Its
  

Method:

• First, use the sharpie to write 3 on the heads of each quarter and 2 on the tails.
  
• Then think of the question you'd like to pose to the book. Write it down on the Post-It and edit it to your satisfaction; just be sure that the question is flexible and nuanced enough to do justice to your query without being overly vague. Questions that can be answered with a simple Yes or No are no good.
  
• Throw all three quarters and tally up the numbers, building the hexagram as described in the book you're using (or here). Be sure to write the hexagram on a different Post-It than you wrote the question on, and then stick them together, back-to-back, just for show.
• Building the hexagram from bottom up, here's how to draw the thing: 8 & 9 are unbroken lines; 6 & 7 are broken. Also, the even numbers make the line "unstable," or "changeable," and you'll need to take special consideration in the reading of those lines within the hexagram [The book will tell you how, but essentially, you change the line to its opposite and find the new, complementary hexagram. This second hexagram is to be read in conjunction with the original and understood as the state into which your original hexagram will be immediately changing - it establishes a tandem. ]
  
• Look up the hexagram[s] in the book. It should speak to your question - you may be surprised how aptly it speaks to you; the oracle has been calculated, somehow, to have "80% accuracy."
  
• When all is said and done, you can keep your back-to-back Post-It (w/question and hexagram) tucked inside the book (if you have one) with a date on it for reference. Lay it aside somewhere with your coins, pencil, and unused Post-Its on top.
  
• Remember that these materials are there, ready, easy to use, and sort of fun: use them.
  

The advantage of this willfully unsophisticated method is that you can avoid buying "exotic, authentic" Chinese coins and other unnecessary stuff and just take pride in the ready-at-hand, stripped-down quality of these or similar materials. The entire philosophy of the I Ching asks you to look at what is right there in front of you and to adapt easily, so I offer this ready to go method for anyone who feels intimidated by the "esoteric" stigma of the I Ching. The whole thing is easy to do and quick to pick up, but it is a seemingly inexhaustible source of study and contemplation.

Dreamachine Online

[Note: this post is far and away the most popular on my blog. I should acknowledge that I do not wholly endorse the use of the online dreamachine, and I've not used it enough to speak to any possible after effects. Moreover, regardless of the effects of the flickering itself, I doubt that leaning against one's computer screen for prolonged periods is exactly "healthy."]

To skip to the sum, go here

I've been a Burroughs fan since before I could understand what he was writing about. Around age 15, I got a hold of The Soft Machine and, sadly, couldn't convince myself I understood it at all - a massive blow to my burgeoning ego. However, I was also really unsettled by the under-/other-worldly nature of his images, and it had an insidious quality that stayed with me while I returned to my more reliable Steinbeck. Around 16, I read Ted Morgan's biography of Burroughs called Literary Outlaw; I was sold. Still, it took years for me to be honest with myself about what I understood of his writings, and around 22 I was capable of addressing him more objectively. Then I found that I really loved him, and that his work meant more to me than I thought. As Burroughs was fond of reiterating (for thirty years of interviews, ad infinitum), "We know more than we know we know" (or some such permutation of the phrase).

Anyhow, I'd always heard of Burroughs' collaborator Brion Gysin and his infamous Dreamachine. There were photos of the two of them in a dark room, entranced, sitting before the columnar machine as it rotated and cast odd angles of light on their lowered eyelids. Supposedly, the two would ingest majoun (a hashish candy) and sit at the machine for hours, going into deep trance and culling images that wound up in Burroughs great cut-up trilogy of the late sixties. The scientific explanation for this phenomenon of mechanically induced oneiric states was alpha waves: the machine flickers light on the backs of the eyelids at the frequency of the alpha wave, phasing the brain into an alpha state. This is the same principle behind the seizures that occur when an unwitting individual closes his or her eyes while riding in a car beneath tree-limbs filtering sunlight: the flicker effect, at the right speed, can set off a seizure - as can the dreamachine. However, from my readings on and experiences in floatation tanks, I've come to understand that theta waves are the ones associated with twilight dream sleep, wherein one is hovering between dreaming and the awareness of being a person who is awake who happens to be falling into a dream. As far as I know, the dreamachine has not been studied scientifically, and the alpha wave theory rests solely on the fact that that is the rate at which the light flickers, and by extension the frequency at which it phases the brain into altered awareness. However, alpha waves could be induced without a machine at all, just by closing one's eyes; further, "alpha waves" was an apparently chic reference to altered states of mind back before we figured out more about how the brain works. Something else is going on, and I suspect, at the very least, the emergence of theta frequencies. This would be heightened by the paradoxical information being sent to the eyes: the lids are down, but the retina is acutely aware of stimuli in the form of varied flickers of light. This would create a feedback loop, possibly, in which the brain is responding actively to stimuli while filtering that stimuli in a non-routine manner. This would confuse the strictness of the right/left brain task manager and there would be a default emergence of right hemisphere dominance. [Sounds plausible, right?]

Here is an online simulation of a dreamachine. I have tried it out while listening to music at 10Hz of white light: after 5-10 minutes, a distinct change occurred in which my eyes relaxed and greater patterns started to emerge, and there was a stereoscopic effect in which my peripheral vision seemed to begin compensating and elongated the field of view. I felt waves and bursts of mild euphoria, but circumstance dictated ending the session after only 20 minutes. Afterwards, I felt giddy; there was a mild headache, but it didn't last. There are no known studies on deleterious effects of chronic use, or infrequent use for that matter (that is, none, other than seizures in susceptible individuals).

For those interested, I'd consider experimenting with various frequencies based on this chart. Further, "Inside Out: The Mysticism of Dreamachines" might psych you up for a serious experiment, and this site provides a nice anthology of writings, images, and plans related to the Dreamachine.

As w/all things, proceed with caution: you're tinkering with bio-wires.

Iboga Songs

Iboga and ibogaine have been getting a lot of press lately due to the supposedly astounding success rates it's shown in treating addiction. It's illegal in the US, but according to some, you can go down to Mexico and take it in a modern, therapeutic environment for a weekend and come home cured. Iboga has been used for a long time in Africa as part of coming of age rituals; recently, while dicking around on the interwebs, I came across this piece of music from just such a ritual. Unlike a shaman's incantations or other ritual and/or aboriginal music, this is a duet between two stringed, lute-like instruments that is entirely hypnotic and more readily familiar than expected. The recording is a fascinating document in and of itself: after a few moments of listening to this recognizably alien music, the sound of a truck passing by washes across the scape in doppler effect and re-contextualizes the experience.

Here are some other absolutely amazing files from field recordings by Uwe Maas and Suster Strubelt involving hand-claps, chants, and singing: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

A favorite: 8

Tepid Jicks

Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
La Zona Rosa / Austin, TX
4/20/08

This show was puzzling and unsatisfying for a whole complex of reasons. Let me start with the more objective, tangible factors:

1. It was on a Sunday.

2. It was on 4/20 during a highly hyped reggae-fest and various other stoner related fare that drew a lot of folks.

3. Cat Power was scheduled to perform across town at the same time, but she had to cancel at the last minute due to an injury. Still, allegiances were declared between them, which certainly stole away some fans.

4. Malkmus and the band seemed burned out a bit from their tour.

5. The show was at La Zona Rosa, which is a new, very marketed, and very odd space.

Considering these factors, the show was not exactly prime for a high-energy, totally committed performance: the crowd and the community had been otherwise distracted, and Malkmus knows he's pretty much preaching to the converted at this point in his career anyway. That said, he's definitely at a cross-roads stylistically. It seems like he wants to just have fun and enjoy playing guitar, even if that means indulging in things that would supposedly violate the ethos the indie community [?] reveres him for. The performance suffered from this ambivalence, as though he couldn't commit to either satisfying the crowd or himself. For the former, he would've capitulated to the retarded, half-drunk cries for early Jicks material and even Pavement numbers. For the latter, it seemed like he would've most gotten off by acquiescing to his instrumental skills and playing legitimately intricate and sprawling "space jams." Instead, he compulsively effaced most signs of straight-ahead musicianship with absurd, clowning trills and posture. This has always been his shtick, and a welcome one, but it really seemed to get in the way of his apparent intent and desire: to play the music he likes to hear rather than the music he's most liked for. It was difficult to tell if the noise was intentionally being incorporated into the long interludes of "Real Emotional Trash" and "Hopscotch Willy" or if it was more of a cocoon the band wrapped around itself to keep from being accused of "jamming out." Malkmus is such a gifted songwriter and performer that I would be more satisfied if he would satisfy himself and simply commit. Instead, on this particular night, he came across as annoyingly coy and self-protecting while his music (that is, the new "Real Emotional Trash" material) wanted to be inclusive and celebratory. Whereas this ambivalence and tension worked in Pavement, it seems to have become too self-conscious for its own good.

Moth Undulations

Salvia Divinorum Redux

In a previous post, I mentioned that I would someday get around to writing up my encounter with a moth entity on salvia divinorum. Well, this is me getting around to it.

After my previous ups and downs in trying to access a decent, ecstatic space with smoked 5x, I decided to give unfortified leaves a try. I had just purchased a decent water pipe and had an evening free to recline in solitude and see where I could get to. I crumbled up some of the dry, brittle leaves and loaded them into the bowl and after a couple hits I felt a soft edginess overcome me as I lay back on my bed with the lights off, late evening, with music playing on headphones. As it turns out, the music was a massive distraction. My only prior experience smoking the leaves was aided by an Os Mutantes album that worked in amazing synchrony, and I was trying to recreate that somehow with a different album. This time, it was as though the visual and cognitive phenomena brought about by the salvia had its own rhythm and phrasing that was jarred by the headphone music. I turned it off about 5 minutes into the reverie and was able to go a bit deeper into mild trance before the effects wore off (5-10 minutes later).

The leaves allowed a surprising amount of agency and playfulness in contrast to the full-on reorientation and passivity that can occur when using extracts. I could move around inside the singular dream-space salvia afforded me, but the capacity for reflection and short returns to baseline was allowed as well. I had meditative impressions of the literal room I was in, my bedroom, and its having been projected identically behind my closed eyelids; yet there was a more expansive projection than usual, whereby I was recreating sounds and spaces outside my window and visualizing downstairs rooms as well. The total impression of my spatial orientation was large and organic, but also very accurate and true to consensus; there were no distortions, only amplifications.

Nonetheless, I also went further inward toward a much more illusory place where there was a vague building barely perceived within shadows, and I was trying to get in without knowing where it was I was going. This was not a hallucination or a transportation, mind you; more like a vivid dream that I was not consciously controlling. There were two people "guarding" the entrance to the building: a brother and sister, both dark-haired, both my age (late twenties). They were looking off to the periphery and seemed only to acknowledge me in an impersonal way. The brother said to the sister, "Let him in. He can see her." They seemed like ticket-takers in their indifference toward me, and it was as though they'd gone through this routine often and were beginning to feel like the whole spectacle was just that: a mere spectacle; an exploitation.

Fittingly, at this point, I was finding it too difficult to stay in the trance, and I realized I had basically reached baseline. I was fascinated but felt somewhat cheapened by my status as "one of the many" trying to "get in and see." But see her? There was a part of me that understood this instantly as a reference to the deeply feminine, maternal presence I'd experienced before on salvia; also, more than a mere "drug phenomenon," it was related to what Jung calls the anima: the female contact within oneself that provides access to the unconscious and to wholeness - a feminine soul image. While I hadn't been reading much Jung at the time, this had been an easily identifiable concept/entity to me since college when I'd first begun recording poems and dreams in earnest and psychoanalyzing myself, becoming interested in myth, etc. (all in a clumsy, juvenile, and often highly embarrassing way, mind you - I'm no adept, and I digressed from that understanding for years before sort of coming back around to it lately). Anyhow, I decided to try again, then and there.

After two hits, I was in a room much like the quintessentially described "dream room" that everyone knows subjectively: "It was sort of like my room, but different, like a composite of several rooms I've been in, but just itself too, you know..." Well, it was like that. I was facing a blank white wall and there was window in it, a low roof, and small dimensions all around (intimate, not claustrophobic); to my left was a doorway. I stood watching the window and had a sense of a sisterly, demure female to my left, hovering in the doorway. I instantly recognized her, without looking at her, as Linda Snopes, a character in a Faulkner novel I'd been reading: The Mansion. In the book, she is a source of profound courage and pathos; I had a very rational understanding of her character in the salvia space, and I also knew that I was projecting her into this imagined room and that it wasn't "real" - yet I almost felt like weeping. The poignancy of her image, vague though it was, affected me greatly, and I felt I'd come into much closer contact with the novel as a result. I felt that strange, desolate sadness and recognition that can sometimes only be accessed through dreams: she was leaving the room, and no one could make her stay, and though she would be lost, it was allright - but nonetheless it was fucking sad, as all loss is.

As I sat in the imagined room, thinking about Linda Snopes, the window began to pulsate toward me, almost like it was trying to reach toward and envelop me. At this point, the experience took on a decidedly non-rational aspect and seemed much deeper "in" than the Linda Snopes aspect. This pulsating window, with its typical cross frame shifted itself clockwise to form an X, and waves of energy were being batted toward me as though with wings. This became a moth entity of vast proportions that hummed intensely in its body and fluttered slowly and massively as though extending its vigor and benevolence toward and around me. It also seemed to be trying to teach me that this was "how it was done..." - as though I were being asked to recognize this feeling of warmth and vibrancy and learn to see this way. Rather than looking AT things, I should be looking toward things and enfolding them and embracing them. It was erotic but almost non-gendered: it impressed me as a female entity, but that was almost irrelevant to my maleness or any sexuality. Nonetheless, what was being shown to me was important for erotic experience and intuition. I felt as though my fundamental intellectual and intuitive paradigms were being reoriented and shown a way to go that wouldn't result in the same conclusions as the past. There was sense of being guided, but largely the import of all this was left up to me. Eventually, the pulsating slowed, and I came back to baseline. I reflected on the continuity of the two experiences: being outside the room where "she" was, and then being inside with "her"; the first experience seeming impersonal, the second very personal; first two dark haired male and female entities, then a dark haired female who leaves and a meta-feminine moth; the notion of twinship in the first being literal (brother and sister), the twinship of symmetry in the moth's wings being symbolic.

As a conclusion/epilogue, I want impress upon you that these experiences were not entirely out of the ordinary. There was nothing explicitly transcendental or mystical about them. The same information, perhaps of a much higher order, can be accessed without drugs and nightly in dreams (as long as one remembers and records them!). Nonetheless, the cognitive phenomena of salvia divinorum ingestion has a surprising set of coherent attributes. It does seem to be reliable for a certain type of imaginal work (if one wants to call it that) whereby one engages the unconscious through a sort of chemically guided process of projection and unfolding. It's reach extends into childhood memory, other temporal orders, iconic feminine entities, and dream consciousness. Of course, it can also cause a really retarded, undesirable trip if approached wrongly. Be careful, even with non-fortified/non-extract leaves.

Poetics, Dialogism, and the Divided Subject

Part I

Both Jung and Buddhism recognize a divided subject: a conscious being suffering a split between the autobiographical ego and the anima/Buddha self. As such, all subjectivity is in dialogue prior to the dialogue it involves other persons with in the world of objects, places, and time. Further, imagination, dream, and fantasy serve as projected "worlds" in which the inner dialogue is imaged as though external. Such a divided subject posits a far more complicated and fascinating ground from which the lyric impulse can emerge than the more familiar dichotomies of self/world, animate/inanimate, temporal/eternal, transient/permanent, etc. Nonetheless, this doesn't merely replace these dichotomies with one of its own; rather, it suggests the capacity for projection as being more fundamental than, but nonetheless extending toward, these familiar binary distinctions. However, the subject/object dichotomy is interrogated and exposed in a far less kindly manner. Especially in the context of a poem, no object-as-word can be seen as distinct from the subject-as-speaker: each reveals the other in varying degrees of reciprocity. Such reciprocity, then, would seem to be a virtue; however, far from being prescriptive in any way, I'd like to suggest that such a poetics is ultimately pragmatic, versatile, and not so much a reconsideration of the composition process as the receptivity of reading. Still, the extent to which writing and revision are a form of participatory reading is very much at stake here.

The lyric speaker is a projection that is more or less a reflection of the state of the author's interest in and receptivity to a subjective dialogue. However, this does NOT work in retrograde, whereby we'd be able to diagnose the author's inner state based upon the speakers he chooses - such thinking is what I'd call the Diagnostic Fallacy. What this DOES allow is a circuit between readers (of whom the author is one) in that they all share the same projection. Considerations of diction, tone, and prosody will be the fundamental criteria for establishing a consensus reading, as it already is, and there will always be room for private enjoyment on a more associative subjective level. What an allowance for the divided subject gives us is a way out of the clumsy translations of poems into mere statements ABOUT the world (or ABOUT aesthetics), or as mere RESPONSES to the world, when they are actually trans-subjective contexts FOR the world: a poem is a limit placed upon how much world we're going to attend to, and what we come in contact with across and through its lines is always just the world again, with somebody in it, in dialogue with subjectivities; and those subjectivities will always leave out of a desire to return again in a different context.

What remains is the poem, the speaker who is of that context as well as its originator, and what was made known.

Wolf Projection

Wolf packs are an easy analogy for human power dynamics - the Alpha male, pack mentality, survival of the fittest - but the particulars of wold packs are more subtle and illuminating. Within the context of the pack, a collective psychological projection is directed toward the lowliest member, the Omega; however, this projection is more interesting and complex than mere scapegoating. I'll excerpt from this bit at the Wolf Ranch Foundation:

"The most unique trait of wolves is their intelligence and social behavior [...] Wolf packs typically consist of an Alpha pair, the only pair that mates, a Beta, or supporter, subordinates, or other members of the pack, and the Omega, typically a female, who bears the brunt of the pack's stress [...] According to general knowledge about wolves, the male and female wolves dictate and control the hierarchy of their own, that is, the males maintain a separate pack order from the females, though all will enforce the position of the Omega. The Alpha wolves are not always the strongest. It is thought by many, including the author, that the Alpha pair is a leadership role, one that is characterized by organization and rallying, rather than forceful domination and strength. This is due to the very nature of the pack. It is not vital that the pack be as strong as can be, but as organized as possible, so that the hunt can be as successful as possible, putting food in the stomachs of all members. The Beta wolf usually does the 'enforcing' of the pack structure, showing support for the Alpha, and 'reminding' the other members of who is in charge. Typically, the Alpha will be first to eat, and given 'the best cut', but not always; pack dynamics are not fully understood. The Omega wolf plays a vital role. It bears the stress of the pack, kind of a scapegoat. Though it does take the abuse of the pack, it is an essential role, as the pack must find a way to relieve stress if the hunt is not successful, or if a pack member is angered or stressed for any other reason. As unbelievable as it sounds, the Omega finds comfort in it's position. The Omega is not always the weakest member of the pack. It is not unheard of for the Omega to rise to Alpha, even without stepping up through the pack[.]"

Retarded Chaos

After that Jim Carrey movie, the number 23 has become a cultural touchstone for conspiracy theory cliche. There's wide speculation about the numerological import this number has in correlation with disasters; however, lest we forget who brought this oddity to our attention, I draw your attention to William Burroughs. I often remembered the image I've posted here (from a Burroughs scrapbook), and ever since high school I'd associated the number with Burroughs' rather occult musings. Then I came across this comment from Robert Anton Wilson that seemed to emphasize it all quite well:

"I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23."

For me, that little anecdote elicits the darkest laughter there is this side of evil. Further, I enjoy being reminded that Burroughs's sensibility was a rare and vivid reflection of such unheard-of and retarding ironies. As he put it, his entire life was a mortal struggle with the sort of entity that might be causing these disastrous numerological jokes; he named that entity "the ugly spirit."

Two Paintings

Two of my very favorite paintings - each of which occasioned a poem at some point.

J.M. Whistler's At the Piano



Edvard Munch's Madonna, 1894-5

For Perusal and Espousal

This here's a selection of links to sites that have been a source of intrigue for me lately. Some things I've read, some I've only glanced upon.

This is a link to a fairly intense site about literal Aliens.

Here's Christian de Quincey's site - he wrote a book called Radical Knowing (which I wrote about earlier).

This is a doctoral thesis called Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview.

This is Marie Laure-Ryan's page containing several documents about Possible Worlds theory, the theory of Fiction, and Narratology.

Here's one called Carl Jung and the Alchemical Renewal.

A site about John Lilly with several of his writings, including...

the long out of print Programming & Metaprogramming in The Human Biocomputer

DMT, Trauma, and Alien Conversion: Part II

Synchronicity, Omnilogue, and Alien Intuition

Having indulged my possibly uptight humanism in the previous post, I think it's important to concede that the contacts Strassman reports were largely devoid of fear (except for the "sexually violent crocodiles" one man encountered), and the Aliens seemed just as fascinated in the human subject as she them. In fact, while reading his tales of Beings on both sides striving to communicate and understand one another, I was greatly moved by the empathy shared between Them-as-Aliens and Us-as-Aliens: both want to know what the other one is like and how one came to arrive Here...or There. There is great pathos in the notion that a parallel universe holds inhabitants desperately curious to connect with those beyond their realm to the extent that they would welcome a human visitor with such curiosity, astuteness, and warmth.

I cannot deny this side of the picture. However, to what degree am I projecting and anthropomorphizing the Alien's capacity for emotions such as empathy? I guess I may need to converse with an Alien to answer such concerns.

Ultimately, I find myself willing to be entirely Other-directed in my thinking when I consider the possibility of such entities - I have no idea what I then become to myself, or what my perhaps-neglected local, Human Others become to me. Am I merely a subject in a linguistic experiment translated across universes? What can be said for my Death? What can be said for Earth? That is, admitting the Literal Alien Realm, how much of an Ingrate and Idiot do I become by sticking to Earth Concerns on Earth Terms? Human Concerns on Human Terms? How much of an Idiot will I be in fumbling Alien Discourse, or being merely subject to such discourse?

I cannot forsake my own agency, and in these matters, I feel I'm being led to do so. I begin to feel overdetermined to an absurd degree. I want knowledge of functional, free, and ontologically appropriate participation in the cosmos. If I have to tune out Alien Discourse, am I able to do so? I desire, at the very least, that option.

Yet to the degree that dialogue is at a premium in all things, what more Radical Dialogism can one indulge than to find an Ontological Other, or a Quantum Other, with which to initiate dialogue and the reciprocity of informational gift exchange?

Theoretically, this moves us beyond dialogue - there is not merely one other parallel universe but, I suppose, an infinite number. I've considered the term Omnilogue before but never knew exactly where to affix it. Perhaps it's what I've begun to talk about now: Quantum Discourse, Trans-Ontological Reciprocity, Total Reflexive Novelty.

To return myself to surer footing, I'll propose that synchronicity is the occurrence of Omniloquy on human, earthly terms. It may be our best [i.e. safest?] bet for cultivating this radical intuition.

I need a drink...

DMT, Trauma, and Alien Conversion

Having finished Strassman's book [see previous post], I have to say it is highly fucking disturbing. I've never experienced alien contact to the degree his subjects report [I will soon have to write about the moth entity and its guardians that I met on salvia], and I don't see any way out once you've made that foray in. That is, how is one to honor and integrate the experience without following the line Strasman feels compelled to take, almost unwillingly, in speculating on the possibility that DMT provides a port of translation into parallel universes or alerts one to ubiquitous infiltration by dark matter? At that point, having made contact, lest I try to ignore the un-ignorable, I would most likely be compelled to abandon my entire conception of both humanity and being itself in the service of comprehending the wholly Other: the unremittingly Alien. From a certain perspective, conversation with alien ontology is appealing and therapeutic - CON-versation: a turning WITH the alien in a rhythm of informational exchange and growth. What Strassman presents seems like a potential Alien Conversion: a turning against one's origin or ground state in favor of the newly inculcated ontology of the Other. This is not good. Granted, few if any of Strassman's volunteers report such a conundrum; however, I feel like this is a compromise of their psychospiritual integrity: perhaps they simply had no choice but denial or suppression or mistranslation of the ontological import of their experience.

Trans-humanists may find this all smooth sailing in Theory, but I'm greatly skeptical about the nature of DMT trauma as reported in Strassman's book, and without a doubt, I feel that he is as well. It's not that an individual will necessarily be damaged or led into delusion or alienation from themselves as a result of DMT, but the ontological, spiritual, and psychic implications of Alien Contact change the nature of human discourse so profoundly that I'm not sure it's possible for us to keep up with the rate of such an alteration - at least not when that alteration happens in 10 minutes.

That said...DMT is an endogenous chemical: if this is what it's capable of, what the fuck's it doing there?

Also, I take a keen interest in what's going on at xenolingusitics, and all of this is her terrain - "alien linguistics."

However, "linguistics" implies dialogue, communication, and conversation - NOT conversion to an alien ontology that will efface one's nature through trauma. As Strassman notes, set and setting are as much an issue as anything else, and a well-informed and healthy investigator may find no such thing as outright alien subversion from "across the veil." I speak speculatively, again, not having experienced literal alien contact - yet it is the LITERAL nature of the reports in Strassman's books that I find so disturbing. While Alien as Other, and as a metaphor for the Other, is vital to human discourse and to the growth of the human Self beyond the confines of ego, Literal Alien Encounters are a whole other ballgame.

But is it literal? I wonder how it is that Strassman failed to consider the laboratory setting of so many of these contacts in his volunteers: while he dismissed the psychological model as an interpretation of the encounters, it stands to reason (weak though reason may be in these matters) that rather than submerged psychic contents emerging in alien form, what one is getting is a grotesque and inordinately heightened distortion of the labratory setting in which rectal thermometers, IV's, and blood pressure cuffs were all applied while two onlookers sat and sought to use the volunteer as a vessel for their own "alien" understanding. Strassman never considers this, amazingly, yet he would most likely be quick to point out that his volunteers would stand for no such interpretation: the experience was "more real than real" and not reducible to any such analysis.

At any rate, the book should be read by anyone interested in...well, anything. The extent of its fascination has forced me to mount this small defense in order to preserve my own little shifting paradigm in light of its implications (again, Strassman freaked himself out as well with what he found). Perhaps I just get a little bit carried away at the absolute implications of Alien Contact, parallel universes, and dark matter infiltration...

but as William Burroughs might quip, "Wouldn't you?"

Strassman's Triad

"In the triad: drug, set and setting, the one that is least important, or most dispensable, is drug."

Here's an interview with the man about his experiment, and here's a link to sample chapters at his website.

DH Lawrence's Cosmic Eye

I've been reading The Rainbow, and I recently stumbled online into a seemingly obscure bit of Lawrence's non-fiction. This excerpt from chapter 2 of his Fantasia of the Unconscious struck me as the sort of voice worth hearing a whole lot more of. I don't think he's received enough credit for the lethal wit he has on display here:

"We are all very pleased with Mr. Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel.

So that now the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it, like an impaled fly vainly buzzing: now that the multiple universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got any hub, we can hope also to escape.

We won't be pinned down, either. We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: I am I. And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not all alone. There are other stars buzzing in the center of their own isolation. And there is no straight path between them. There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears. I am I, but also you are you, and we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity. We need it much more than the universe does. The stars know how to prowl round one another without much damage done. But you and I, dear reader, in the first conviction that you are me and that I am you, owing to the oneness of mankind, why, we are always falling foul of one another, and chewing each other's fur.

You are not me, dear reader, so make no pretentions to it. Don't get alarmed if I say things. It isn't your sacred mouth which is opening and shutting. As for the profanation of your sacred ears, just apply a little theory of relativity, and realize that what I say is not what you hear, but something uttered in the midst of my isolation, and arriving strangely changed and travel-worn down the long curve of your own individual circumambient atmosphere. I may say Bob, but heaven alone knows what the goose hears. And you may be sure that a red rag is, to a bull, something far more mysterious and complicated than a socialist's necktie.

So I hope now I have put you in your place, dear reader. Sit you like Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my individual atmosphere; some strange deflection as your music crosses the space between us. Certainly I never hear the concert of World Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony. Still, the world-regenerators may really be quite excellent performers on their own jews'-harps. Blame the edginess of my teeth.

Now I am going to launch words into space so mind your cosmic eye."

They Are Man Man

Well, last night, I came near fainting at a Man Man performance at the nearby Scoot Inn. They sounded like a stomping, aggro-blues version of late Mothers of Invention with warpaint, all five members shouting in unison, and every object handy used as percussion. More energy than any band I've seen (except, maybe, Monotonix), and considering how extensive their current tour is, I wonder how they'll maintain. Everything about them was rugged, primal, and ecstatic. It made me think, "Man Man is like Captain Beefheart doing an impromptu opera based on Lord of the Flies."

[Trivia: How many other times in this blog have I characterized a band's sound by imagining Beefheart as the lead singer? The first five right answers will bring me to tears of self-importance.]

"Ultimate Reality" Redux: Both/And

After I posted the last bit about the "Ultimate Reality" performance, a friend who saw the show with me commented that I should rethink my praise of the supposedly transparent, non-ironic, non-satirical aspect of the piece. It's true that I projected my own feelings for the show onto the other audience members, and I must admit that it wasn't as seamlessly "with it" as my post suggested. There was oddity and discord everywhere.

To wit: How is it that Schwarzenegger's image elicits anything other than a scoff or a knowing sense of being "in on the joke"? I mean, the act does little more than re-contextualize his inanity. How can the project be expected to do anything other than lure people in on the most superficial level and pander to them through their apathetic willingness to respond to his images unreflectively? How is the film not a cheesy exploitation of the very idea of absurdity?

I mean, does Ultimate Reality exploit absurdity itself?

To elicit that question alone may be worth the effort of their art. Nonetheless, on the most prosaic level, I offer this image in order to explore the complexities:

The moment from T2 in which Arnold destroys himself by being lowered into a molten pit is used as a climactic image in the musical drama: his gloved hand giving a thumbs up extends above the molten surface as a gesture of affirmation. As I witnessed this, a guy in front of me in the crowd photographed the screen with his cell-phone: his own hand giving a thumbs-up at the thumbs-up on the screen was foregrounded. While the most climactic part of the performance was happening, I was aware of this douche looking at a photo-image of his own hand saluting the screen before him.

So...what the fuck? The way I see all of this is in terms of Projection, both literally and in Jungian terms. Arnold is an image upon which we've projected decades worth of expectations and personal experience. For instance, Conan always reminds me of being six years old; however, I also lived in California when Arnold was voted governor. I've seen his image go through revolutions, both popular and retarded, and yet each step of his career has been sanctioned and applauded by a collective. As a Hollywood bred actor, he is a vessel for his audience's projections, and those projections cut as deeply into each individual psyche as they do onto Arnold's preposterous physique.

Nonetheless, the open question seems to be this: is Ultimate Reality an affirmation or a provocation? And how is that not an either/or? To the extent that it's an affirmation, my previous post attests. To discuss the ways in which it may be a provocative question posed to an audience that is uncomfortable and/or unreflective when it comes to its fundamental ethical and aesthetic values...well, who knows? If it is such, then that's it's statement: "Who knows?" More than that, is the film offering a critique of pop-culture? Is the film asking us to laugh with Arnold or at him? By laughing AT him, how are we not laughing at ourselves? Where do we draw the line between the Arnold we've projected and the Arnold that...well, where the fuck else does he exist if not in the projections we've allowed him to inhabit?

Personally, I find the context of the music to be ecstatic, propulsive, and essentially epic in the degree to which it seeks to grab hold of and transport its audience. The series of dense meta-climaxes that bring the last five minutes of the piece to its conclusion are done in a way that surpasses any possible irony or disinterested contemplation. As such, I'm let off the hook altogether and it is my laughter that's decontextualized, not Arnold: my laughter becomes incapable of scorn or scoff; in the alchemy of spectacle, my laughter is made innocent, no matter what I think. Hilarity becomes meta-affirmation.

Well...to back off for a second and reconfigure, I assume I may also be giving too much credit to the musician, Deacon; let's not forget Roche's statement about the film itself: "[It is a] mandala projected from the third eye of suburban back yards, cracked drive ways, and dusty VCR's. The wizards of Baltimore and Wham City deal powerful magic, we'll need it soon, the dawn of this post-postmodern age is upon us." That doesn't sound to me like a nihilist or a cynic. However, it also doesn't sound like someone who'd be interested in telling me what he thinks about Arnold's face. However, avoiding the either/or, maybe it is a provocative affirmation, or an affirmative provocation. Let's let it be both...AND!

And go fucking see it if you can, folks!

"Ultimate Reality" at SXSW

Dan Deacon is an electronic musician and his friend Jimmy Joe Roche is "a video artist" (to steal character Knox Harrington's title in The Big Lebowski). They got together and did a project called Ultimate Reality which I had the pleasure of witnessing last night [Emo's, Austin,TX, as part of South by Southwest]: electronic music, two live drummers, and a large video screen with a psychedelic montage edited and sequenced to the music. That may sound like standard artsy/druggy fare, but Deacon's music is not normal music and the montage samples images solely from Arnold Schwarzenegger films.

Imagine:

You are stoned [or not], a beat begins replete with retarded analog synth textures, and wildly oversaturated colors show up on a screen; all of the images you see are split down the middle in mirror image of themselves, creating a vertical, totemic moth effect that occasionally converges in the center into strange alien facial permutations - and, predictably, all of the images are from Conan the Barbarian.

Just as you realize you're not in a normal space, inside or out, Conan begins to contemplate his clenched fist while standing atop a hill in a post-sword-exercise moment of clarity: he's sensing the unearthly power that is alive inside of him, the beat pulses more strongly...and the audience laughs in a state of zero sarcasm and total, unprecedented recognition. The beat accelerates and an action sequence involving motorcycles from Arnold's True Lies catapults the audience in unison into a pogo.

Such climaxes and plateaus went on for twenty minutes before a scrolling text appears in white against a red screen while Roche reads an absurd text conflating several Schwarzenegger films into a sci-fi mythology so perfectly retarded that it seems like something you dreamed when you were ten years old after seeing the Terminator and Kindergarten Cop in too quick a succession. Ultimately, that's what we're shown next: Arnold giving birth from a "man-womb!", Arnold dancing slo-mo in a circle with children, Arnold jumping the freeway in T2 regalia atop a motorcycle. The music accompanying this sequence takes on a less frantic and more reflective, meditative quality, which is all the more ridiculous while seeing Arnold's look of divine astonishment at having given birth (from the film Junior). Somehow, the laughter and cheers from the crowd seemed to be doing anything but scoffing at the stupidity of the movies: it was as though this damaged presentation was externalizing and performing the pseudo-mythical residue of having grown up amid the pop-culture iconography and idolatry of which Arnold was God and avatar.

At some point, I was convinced that the word "steroids" was being chanted in a buried, distorted voice deep in the mix. Watching Arnold's overinflated body, it seemed to be a moment of satire, but it may have been imagined. Nonetheless, Arnold is acting out extremes of physical and psychological endurance in his films, and Ultimate Reality threads these roles together into a myth of our most arche-/stereo-typical popular figure being transformed backwards in time to a proto-human and forward into the future as a trans-human, android, and back again.

By harnessing the most obvious and larger-than-life imagery of late 20th century entertainment, this show performs an act of generosity. Ultimately, I can't imagine anyone who was born between 1970 and 2000 not "getting" this project: Arnold is ours, and he's an absurd piece of property; Ultimate Reality re-appropriates the populist-absurd and performs a musical tribute that includes and arouses the unreflective part of the mind that only wants to be entertained. It wakes this psychic region up and makes it dance around and admit that it's a part of the mind that is literate, protean, ecstatic, true, and fucking useful.

Fake Zen and Bad Faith

On the Hangover

I spent 2+ years of my life hungover 4-6 days a week, post-college. After a while, the drinking seemed almost incidental and certainly less and less cathartic. The hangover, however, often got deeper and more consuming. Some mornings when I'd awaken hungover, I would just open another beer; even though I would "assume" that my intentions were to take the edge off, I would usually get fucked up enough to awaken to a multiplied hangover the next day. Because I like shitty beer, due to the sheer volume of substance it commits me to, the hangover is of a particular variety that not everyone I drink with understands. While most opt for quality liquor, wine, or good beer, I like 12-24 light domestic cans. The beer hangover rarely involves vomiting, but the sense that someone has pissed in my veins is enough to create a full-bore immersion in my viscera, and all my good neurotransmitters are gummed up in the synapses that have been swamped through forced over-elasticity and recoil.

As William Burroughs wrote, all pleasure is the result of conditioning, and just as you can condition a person to get sexually aroused from a photo of a coffee mug, you can can learn to get high off of sickness. I find that just short of that sort of nightmarishly mechanistic view, the perversity of enjoying a hangover is a real phenomenon. When I'm fucked up and stuck in bed, information hits me on a subliminal level, and my body seems to be doing all my thinking for me. This discourse of viscera and aches and false memories taken from drunken nightmares of wholly believable and mundane events from the night before all just collude to stun me into non-thought. At that point, I'm free enough not to notice that I'm sick, but it takes just that much sickness to get there. When I was a child, and I'd been puking from the flu all morning, my Mom would call me in sick at school, and as I lay in bed, there was a short interval wherein I'd hover between nausea and neutrality. Although that neutrality still felt shitty compared to "normal," it was a blessing in the moment, and that moment was free from Routine Time. That same interval occurs during hangover: I find freedom in privation; I recline inside a special temporality; I'm separate and satisfied with the apparent novelty of having just barely enough.

A hangover is a way of life that could be called pre-alcoholic. In contrast, "real" alcoholism happens when there's just no time to be hungover because you're always drunk. Being hungover is a lesson in exchange, a way of learning the strict ethical economy of the mind-body relationship: You Can't Steal Anything. You have to pay. That insight is obvious and feels just when I'm hungover. While I might have been unjust to myself the night before, its hangover involves me in some kind of organismic justice that works itself out while I wait and chase rest.

Yet relied on too heavily, or perhaps at all, this behavior is the living definition of Bad Faith.

Oh Oh Eye Oh Oh

The Japanese band Boredoms - whose music is already well known by those who have ears to hear, and who have such English-as-a-second-language notes in their album inserts as "Man is Sun Bird with Pyramid Action" - had a member named Yoshimi, and she formed the band OOIOO. Before going apeshit with tribal drumming and meditative rather than terrorist psychedelia, Boredoms were often like Captain Beefheart fronting the Butthole Surfers, only weirder. In complimentary contrast, OOIOO is childlike, feminine, organic and ecstatic in a manner unlike anything I've heard. The album Gold and Green is just fucking amazing. I suggest that everyone get a copy of it and play it repeatedly for a few days in order to heal-up and breathe right.

Effexor XR Exorcism

Taking a glance at the industry site for Effexor XR, a bland looking woman stares off into space with a caption beside her head reading, "Reality: You Have Options." I opted for Effexor Reality after about nine months of unemployment, insomnia, alcoholism, and living at home after college graduation. I graduated cum laude at a good private college, but I have no idea how I did it given the state of my depression, hypnophobia, chronic anxiety, and lower back pain. I also won my graduating year's top award for poetry and had the promise of grad school in creative writing to keep me afloat; still, the fact is that if I was going to get on an SSRI/SNRI at some point, it should've been in college.

What brought about the necessity was a fullscale nervous breakdown that left me vomiting, shaking, and seeing my world from what John Lilly would call the Hell State: all the energy my organism was capable of summoned for the wrongest manifestation. Obsessive, revolting ideation and image recall drove me to a state beyond distraction into outright horror lasting for at least two months. Sleep was impossible without benzodiazapenes, and immediately upon waking I was in the Wrong World and being prodded into accepting that it was mine and always had been. After about three weeks of side effect automatism, the Effexor XR 150mg I was given began to do something. I would go up to half a day without being caught in the writhing kaleidescope of sick imagery and obsession. This got better and better, and eventually I was starting to feel just plain Good, and the imagery wouldn't resurface for days.

The images themselves are beyond description without a thoroughgoing immersion in my psyche and personal history, so I'll spare you. Interestingly, though, at its worst - which was the worst I'd ever known - suicide never occurred to me. It seemed futile, because the world I was in was nightmarish enough to warrant the firm belief that suicide would only hasten a post-mortem awakening into something potentially far worse. I feared that, in some cosmic mindfuck, I should actually be glad and grateful to be able to still be here, in my negative state, rather than where I was certainly headed.

Since then, it's been five years, and Effexor changed my life dramatically for the better. Without question, it brought back the extroverted person I was prior to adolescent depression. Graduate school brought about for me a social and creative renaissance, as well as a fair amount of accolades and financial reward. During that time, I twice experienced life without Effexor: once by accident, and once through intentional reduction. The only thing that saved the accidental deprivation from being worse than my original madness was that it allowed the catharsis of perpetual weeping. Serotonin withdrawal, as the doctor deemed it, brought about from three days of abrupt and complete discontinuation of an SNRI to which I'd become habituated: how this doesn't translate into Effexor withdrawal is beyond me, but that's another issue ("Effexor, of course, is non-addictive"). I could not get through to my doctor and had no refills left; the emergency room would've cost me too much. It was not just Zero- but Negative-Serotonin. From what I've read, such withdrawal has introduced a new symptom that doctor's were unable to corroborate except through cross-referencing other patient testimony: "brain shivers." This has been described as "a form of neuro-epileptiform activity." It's like a series of seismic, visceral ripples that pulse at random and make you feel like your body is painfully echoing out of your mind-body map in one direction or another. Vertigo without the nausea, but it starts and stops abruptly. And then some.

When I intentionally reduced the amount in order to rid myself of paying $150 a month, uninsured, for these pills, I had no luck and a doctor who knew jackshit in a series of doctor's who knew less than fuck. I hate those pricks for being misinformed and making me feel like a hypochondriac for letting them know what was happening. I was down from 150 to appx. 7mg a day: i would take the pill apart and sort, grain by grain, until I reduced by the most miniscule amount. No matter what, after 36 hours...the withdrawals, just as strong as usual.

Thus, fuck Middle American Family Practitioner horse shit: I am seeing an acupuncturist/herbalist and enlisting the power of floatation tanks to slowly wean myself off. As changes occur, I'll report them.

Without question, this medicine saved me, but its work has been done, and it's time to find a better, more holistic approach to balancing myself out.

Godspeed, Me.

Salvia Divinorum, I Ching, Humility

I submitted this at Erowid a while ago, but they are back-logged and I figured I'd just throw it into the fray from here. These tales are all from roughly five months ago, and a few further trials have occurred since then which I'll get around to writing up soon.
..........................................

These notes are an attempt to articulate the status of a moderately experienced salvia smoker who intends to slowly go further toward higher potency extracts. I feel that what I have to share is a template for humility with regard to the substance, which has been known to hijack every single mindset that has attached itself to it too eagerly. Here's the sketch:

- I've used a broad range of psychoactives, although only alcohol and cannabis ever became habits. I've found acid to be unsuitable to my temperament, but mushrooms have proven highly therapeutic and insightful. Nitrous oxide, while I consider it a neurological hazard, and which I no longer use, is perhaps my favorite psychoactive. In fact, I find a great deal of similarity between salvia and N2O, both being dissociative to a degree.

- I'd read many, many experience reports online regarding salvia, and for a long time I'd considered it something I was going to avoid. It took a change of town and mindset in order to open me up to its possibilities.

- My initial dose was a small bowl of 5x, but my nervous system was bolstered by cannabis, amphetamine, Xanax, and alcohol at the time. What I experienced can best be described as a flash of cubist consciousness: my subjectivity was decentralized and the room I was in presented itself as a flat, kaliedescopic non-sequence of texture, color, and shape. Upon returning to baseline, I was shocked in a recreational, rollercoaster way: "Holy Shit! Holy SHIT! That was un-REAL!" It was shatteringly unique and strange, ambivalent in emotional tenor, but ultimately something that seemed like a novelty: I didn't think there was much to learn that would translate into any sort of workable understanding.

- My second and third doses were very similar, 5x, nearly a week or two after the first, themselves separated by a one day interval. These experiences were very similar to one another and outright ecstatic. They were cathartic reunions with a childhood mode of time, that mode itself powered with intense alinearity: unattached to any one event from childhood but seeming to encompass all of it. I was able to move easily from closed-eye reverie to an open-eyed acknowledgment of the room I was in, and I felt as if I could willingly ignore the altered temporality behind my eyelids if I chose to. I didn't choose to. Incommunicable particularities from my early youth (such as wood paneling in my parents' bedroom and an intense emotion attached to it that seemed to filter into every other particularity and fuse them together seamlessly) arose with such comparative clarity and ease that I felt like there was something profoundly benevolent at work within me, which I'd never had such perfect access to, and assured me that everything had already returned already and I could return again, etc. Such linguistic loops and riddles seemed to do as much justice to the feeling as anything else. There was a strongly feminine, perhaps maternal presence behind the orchestration of all this, although it felt like a female potential within myself as much as a third-person entity. Later, I began to feel quite a strong erotic attachment to this feeling, and the sense of psychic exposure incited by the experience seemed to be quite naked and sensual. I can imagine that low level dose would make an excellent aphrodisiac. [note: both of these experiences were also bolstered by cannabis, alcohol, and xanax; this later became important for me to remember.]

- In the time following this second round of salvia, I became quite committed to cultivating my relationship to the plant and, reading Dale Pendell's writing on salvia, consciously thought of it as an "ally." I read up on the plant and purchased my own supply of leaves and 5x. I decided to mine my week for an appropriate setting for my next dose, and in the meantime I stayed sober, worked, and fostered a meditative calm throughout the day. When the evening came, I'd had three drinks with a friend, and I decided to smoke the 5x. After lighting it poorly, I was ushered into a realm that was highly reminiscent of nitrous and below my expected standard for salvia. After that disappointment, I tried again and felt a mere sustain to the initial smoke. My friend offered me his 10x and it did the trick, in a way. I was transported, but the inanity and sheer pointlessness of the world it unveiled were, ironically, profound. This was my first encounter with the sarcasm and self-protectiveness, if you will, of this plant. While I believe it useful and sane to personify or mythologize the plant as an entity, this is merely a technique, a metaphor, for keeping myself humble and reciprocal in my relation to this little dried up piece of leaf. In this instance, it was as though I'd told the plant to "Do that trick again! Let me into the show!" This was heightened by having two interested friends watching me in a brightly lit room. The mental effects were gross parodies of the childhood particularities of my previous sessions, and they were far more elusive and less than worthwhile of being pursued; yet, I had no choice but to follow this recursive train of imagistic non-entity until it wore off. I was able to speak throughout the experience, and almost instantly, I was cursing the experience, and myself, lamenting the sheer idiocy and waste of my attempt. This put me in a foul mood for the res of the night, and to further the metaphor of plant-presence, I felt I'd been spurned. It was, pathetically, like the bruised ego of an adolescent heartbreak. I later gained perspective on the delicate balance between humility and cosmic largess that this plant initiates one into.

- While spending these few weeks essaying salvia and trying to establish an alliance, so to speak, I was also working with the I Ching, which I'd long referred to but only recently come to understand more deeply. I'm not a "mystical" person, but my interest in all conscious phenomena is tempered by a lean pragmatic streak and a faith in the power of clear speech and basic humanism. I believe in metaphor and technique, not necessarily goddesses and magic per se. These things are all interesting and valid in so far forth (to quote a hero, William James). In so far forth as the I Ching hexagram I threw read "Modesty" (in the Wilhelm version), I felt it right to gently reacquaint myself with a small dose of 5x just so as to test the waters again: I couldn't deny that I desired to do it, but I also had to admit that I was wrong about it last time; fearing it or resisting it was not the way to go. Alone with lights off, I took a single hit from a small bowl and felt very much what I'd felt on the third session above before irritably overdoing it with the 10x. It felt very serene, orderly, and feminine, but distinctly modest, almost prudish. There was a delicate sense of reacquaintance and gratitude, but only that much, only enough to show me slight benevolence, and then gently back to normal. That experience buoyed me for a few days.

- Ultimately, I have to qualify this small anthology of experiences by saying that I've been able to draw on the small residual effects of the leaf during sober hours and that it did quite a bit to direct me toward more beneficial and intuitive stances toward the world. The writing I'd been doing was very much aided by my connection with salvia, but not in any way bearing its particular stamp. As such, I want to express the elusive potential of salvia divinorum, its delicate "persona," its capacity for sarcastic refusal, and the benevolence of what it has to share. For anyone who isn't sharing oneself in a decent and respectful way, depending on what you want from it, it will show you exactly what you don't need at all and already have in full.

- From here, I intend to continue exploring the rewards of a reciprocal attitude toward the plant. While my first experiences were infused with a cocktail of chemicals, I'd like to believe that a more straight forward openness toward the plant is a proper route.

Xenolinguistics

Click on the image and muse some. Then go here:

http://mazerunner.wordpress.com/2008/02/22/xenolinguistics-i-aspects-of-alien-art/

"Hallucinations as alien art."

The lady who writes this blog is pretty much full-on and has devised her own language known as Glide. Check this out when you have time:

http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/

True Persona

Despite my longstanding, inbred Nirvana-dorkdom, it was an interesting and surprising experience for me when I watched the film Kurt Cobain: About a Son. I've read a ridiculous amount of shit about this guy and have learned all his contradictions and self-mythologizing tendencies, along with his lazy self-pity and hate, and his intelligent hilarity. Hearing him speak in this film, I never once flinched even when I knew I was being put-on: I valued him in the manner that the fictionalized version of himself asked me to value him. Ultimately, that is the requirement for friendship and intimacy; it is the way we respond to our friends: we trust their fictions as they trust ours, and we revise within one another.

The triumphant feeling I come away from it with has nothing to do with the specifics of Cobain, per se. It simply corroborated and dramatized a feeling I've had a long time: that I am what emerges from the dialogue I'm carrying on with myself, and that that dialogue is informed necessarily by others. Each one of us is in a dialogue prior to realizing we're individual people, and this could be due to the dependent nature of the fetus (one of Cobain's obsessions)...the bottom line is, what kind of dialogue are you in? Conflicted, angry dialogues often get the biggest attention, and that's called "passion" for lack of a better word. We seem to like fire and antics when we're paying attention to others, esp. when that view is at a remove. However, what if it isn't a weak bias in our natures that draws us to tortured and glamorous individuals, but an awareness that it is the dialogue, highlited through its conflictedness, that is at stake within the subject undergoing our observation: the dialogue appeals to the audience's desire for participation and representation. It isn't that we don;t like happy people, but perhaps "happy" or "normal" people have [healthily?] quieted their dialogue to such an extent that they are basically inaudible to time and history, or "the fiction of endurance" . We want to see a person as they work themselves out across time in a dialogue's emerging continuity: we want them to live with us, for us, as us -- just as we ask our friends and Fathers and Mothers and lovers to live with us, for us, and as us. Transference. Apparently, happy people don't often give us this. The "happy couple" is a bore, and marriage at its worst excludes the out-going nature of one's inborn talkativeness. Also, Buddhists don't give us this. Or, maybe they get it and I don't; maybe it's a lot simpler than the flawed picture of human interest that I aim to paint right here.

[Speaking of flaws...How am I not just talking about an ethos of voyeurism?]

Yet, what sort of happiness could foreground an interest in dialogue rather than the monologic humming of heightened self-awareness, or the united couple-hood of sex, or the micro-community of family? A lot of times, we just plain identify more with fucked up people, not because they're fucked-up, but because they show us what it means to be acclimated to dialogue within ourselves. Rather than annihilating history (i.e. the ongoing tradition within which we catalogue and question ALL dialogues), we should realign our own withheld autobiographies by becoming more intimate with our own evasiveness and enigma: go inside so as to commune better with others; everyone's already there. The unconscious. Everything fucks around there and wants to play, but it's always dead serious about it.

Maybe we want two things at once, all the time, whereas we should know that everything, at the very least, is already more than one.

An Invitation to Commentary

I don't know who sees this aside from one confirmed looker, whom I've actually stood beside while he brought up the page, but if any of the jokers who received my email invitation to check this out are looking at this - yes, YOU - feel free to comment on any posts.

In fact, if you don't want to revisit the past, here's a new topic to talk about:

I'm reading Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and am roughly 2/5 of the way through; I like it quite a lot. If you've read the book, let me know what you thought, or you could write about any other Hardy you've read. I'm planning to veer in a somewhat natural pattern from Hardy to D.H. Lawrence, specifically The Rainbow, so you might as well write me about him too if you want to.

My expectations are small, but my patience is hung like a sperm whale.

A Spatial Ethos of Fiction Making

While it is a truism that our experiences are shaped by an intuitive understanding of narrative and that we are storytellers by nature, it's less clear the extent to which we are makers of Fiction by a similarly innate drive. Insofar as the fictionalizing tendency is equated with fantasy, falsehood, or mere invention, it might seem pessimistic or reductive to say that we necessarily live by fiction. However this mistakes the energy that is invested in its materials when one consciously crafts a fiction in the act of writing or speaking. In the process of writing fiction, one inhabits and organizes and, in effect, participates in an economy of insight and incident: one works IN or BY the fiction, not FROM or AT. It is first and foremost a means of orientation toward experience and is predicated upon responsibility, relationship, and habitability. If these virtues are then transferred to the meaning of a phrase such as "We live in and by fictions," then the phrase takes on a different quality. This differentiates the impulse toward fiction from the sort of ontological redundancy that Plato accused poesis of (for him, fiction and poetry were essentially one and the same in their remove from truth; poesis is "making be," more or less, as opposed to "revealing what is"): rather than a mere repetition of the unintelligible surface of experience, it is the means by which we impart meaning onto the emergent topography of our experience itself. Topography, taken metaphorically - or, fictionally - is a way of deeming the Face of our experience, and the degree to which we are willing to reveal this face with candor, compassion, and meaning is the degree to which we begin taking responsibility on a transpersonal plane. Fiction is the dialogue I involve the World by; the dialogue I involve a person with, however, while it may participate in fiction, is not itself fictional and is its own point of orientation prior to my need to orient myself toward it through fiction. Fiction is the experience of having-experienced. While this doesn't necessarily raise an issue of authenticity, it is nonetheless true that primacy is always given to the present while acknowledging that few if any of us live solely in the immediate. We Mediate by fiction, and our dialogue is with the world we lived in, through, and by: Fiction is the attention of having endured. It is an invitation to belief.

E.C.C.O. / The Uses of Belief

MISHLOVE: You also mentioned the term ECCO. What is ECCO?

LILLY: E-C-C-O. In Italian it means, "This is it." But it means to me the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is one of God's field offices. ECCO runs our lives, though we won't admit it. If you're an ECCO agent, you can be very, very careful to use your best intelligence in ECCO's service, and you realize there are no discoveries, there are only revelations. That was a come-down for me as a scientist.

MISHLOVE: Well, I've found in my own work in the media and parapsychology, that I'm very much guided by coincidences.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And I guess it's looking to coincidences as signs along the way that defines this relationship with what you've defined as ECCO.

LILLY: Right, the Earth Coincidence Control. It's coincidence control that they do, and they say, "We control the long-term coincidences; you control the short-term ones. And when you find out how we do the long-term ones, you no longer have to remain on earth; you don't have to return there."

MISHLOVE: It seems to me as if your concept of ECCO is a way of modeling a mechanism behind what Jung has defined as synchronocity.

LILLY: That's right. Jung defined synchronicity only in a good fashion in his introduction to the I Ching, and he uses the term coincidences.

MISHLOVE: Meaningful coincidences.

LILLY: But of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that's all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, "Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation."

MISHLOVE: And here we are misrepresenting to each other in order that we can learn from these lies.

LILLY: Right. Now if you use language injunctively, as a set of directions, then it's not as bad as it is otherwise.

MISHLOVE: So in other words, for example, when you talk about ECCO, when you talk about perhaps going into an inner reality using sensory isolation, which is one of the other technologies in which you pioneered --

LILLY: In 1954, I invented it.

MISHLOVE: Or using a number of different molecules which can be used for this purpose, or mystical disciplines -- when one enters into these realities, each set of instructions carries with it usually a belief system.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And basically what you're saying is that all of these belief systems are wrong, but one needs to entertain or to hold the belief system in order to follow through the instructions.

LILLY: That's right. Our brains are so small we have to do this.

MISHLOVE: So the belief system itself becomes a tool that we work with, and then eventually we have to let go of.

LILLY: Right.

http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/lilly.htm

Pissing On Robert Frost

...or should that be Pissing Off Robert Frost?

While he was dead, this old man got his house pissed on and puked in by a pack of crazed teens on a bender.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/us/28land.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Neural Voyeur

I just dredged up this old report I wrote about a weird freshman year college experience:

In 1999, I smoked some weed that I believe was laced with something, perhaps PCP [It has been suggested to me in a comment to this post that the substance may have been DMT]. It brought about the most profoundly intense psychedelic experience of my life before or since. At the time, I'd only ever smoked weed, but after eight years of further experimentation and more intentional psychedelic experiences, I still say nothing compares to this. No reports I've read of people smoking weed laced with PCP or anything else seem to corroborate, and I'm still curious as to what it was and how it could be recreated -- I do NOT think PCP would do the trick.

One consideration, before I commence: due to my absolutely unprepared mental set (I just thought I was hitting a bowl of weed, as did my companions), I wonder if there was a level of openness and vulnerability that was distinctly absent from later, prepared efforts at psychedelic experiment. All I know for sure is that this was extraordinarily intense, very short-lived (for a while, I though it may have been DMT, but I doubt it), and utterly unlike anything I've encountered before or since.

I got high at a friend's dorm room with a group of people, but about 5 minutes after a few hits off a pipe I felt a sense of insane weakness and fear. I stood up and left without saying anything. I barely made it to my room, and along the hall leading to it everything seemed to be throbbing, like someone was fucking with the sharpness of my vision, as though tweaking a knob on a TV. I dropped on my bed and the weakness overwhelmed m, and I lay there sensing my external world start to fade out. I felt like I was submerged in water, or like the air was water, and when I touched my stomach my tactile responses were greatly distorted: it was like I was pressing on a four-inch layer of foam; like I had receded deeply into my own body and the surface was being shut off. Soon, a serious pain developed deep in my abdomen; however, I was so physically sedated that no thought of doing anything about it, such as contacting security, ever occurred: I was my own sensory cosmos and little else had bearing on my reality, although I still retained a small hold on my visual field. All of my focus went to the pain and I closed my eyes, being vaguely aware of a grey mist behind my eyelids.

Everything was dull, floating, and detached, except for the pain in my abdomen. As my focus went to it, I felt it start to rise up into my stomach. It was like a ball of energy lodged in my lower body, slowly working its way up. Next it was in my chest, then my throat. As I realized it was going to reach my head, I became convinced I was dying: when the ball of energy hits my eyes, I'll expire. There was such an intense level of conviction and fear surrounding this that I was forced to reconcile myself to it and accept the occurrence of my own death. An immense calm came over me: I was giving myself over to dying. I felt the painful energy go through my sinuses, and when it hit the space between my eyes, there was an explosion of geometric patterns behind my eyes. I was utterly blind at this point, completely disconnected from the outside world. The geometric patterns were vivid and bright, distinctly pulsating rectangles of varying colors that seemed to present a tunnel at certain points, at other points a flat vibrating surface. Eventually, as the energy of the vibration increased, a sort of slide-show began: not photographic; more a mesh of shifting geometrics of varying depth. A sense of familiarity and nostalgia overcame me, and it was as though I was being asked to recognize the shapes: they were intimate, familiar, uniquely my own. In all seriousness, I recognized them as abstract colored patterns on shirts I wore as a child, as though I was being shown the clothes I wore as child through the eyes of my childhood self. The absurdly mundane nature of that realization occurred to me afterwards, but in the moment it was like some treasure of my childhood had been laid before me, totally accessible and recovered. Eventually, the patterns ceased intensifying and merely oscillated, entirely geometric with a void center from which the phosphene colors seemed to generate and resolve. As it died away, there was a twilight effect as I began to look out into the real world again, even though all the lines, corners, shades, and colors of my room would click into alignment and become representations of other things, like a mutating art object. When I felt sane again, and could stand up and gather myself, I noticed it had been less than 90 minutes since I'd left my room.

What amazes me about it is the way in which the painful ball of energy seemed to move through the chakras, exploding in the sixth: the third eye, locus of the pineal gland. Also, the intensity of the recovered visual memories amazed me. It was as though at the moment of death, which I was very sure of, I was comforted by a random detail seen by my childhood eyes. The next day, a friend of mine I smoked with asked me, "Have you ever been so high you left your body?" I laughed, feeling somewhat uncomfortable about telling him of my experience (I didn't know what to make of it, and feared being accused of exaggeration; they were all hardened weedsmokers). He said after that bowl we smoked he ended up having to lie down and went into a hypnotic, levitating state of complete confusion. So, that leads me to believe it was laced: I was not alone with my aberrant mindfuck.

Anyhow, the upshot of it all is that I want to go back there, and I'm convinced, disconcertedly, that I may relive it when I expire altogether. Perhaps it would be an apt goodbye to the phenomenal world to see something like old wallpaper, or the shirts, or a stretch of linoleum from an old babysitter's . Those would be satisfying if they really re-occurred witht he intensity of the original experince of them. I only hope, and trust, that there's more than that in the realm of eternity and the nowNowNOW of space-time's confluential omniloquy...

Riffing, there.

Year of the Rat

My acupuncturist has been telling me a bit about Chinese astrology, and two days ago was the Chinese New Year initiating the year of the Rat. It's the first year in a 12 year cycle, so according to the Chinese, it's a truly "new" year and auspicious for change and transformation. It's also a time of good luck, and this shows just how different the rat is viewed in the East. Faulkner wrote a fairly accurate statement concerning the Western attitude: "Were it not a cannibal, the rat would have already inherited the earth." In fact, his Snopes clan is seen as a rat-like infestation in Yoknapatawpha county: breeding endlessly, meaninglessly, and rapidly; being survivalist opportunists, cunning, ruthless, and cold; maintaining a tenacious and seemingly permanent presence. Still, there's a great anecdote about Faulkner somewhat drunkenly discoursing on his admiration of rats while at a Manhattan cocktail party, where he was seen as somewhat of an alien from the South: he went on and on before a coolly disgusted genteel gathering about how the rat is a paradigm for what it takes to exist, period; he marveled at their ability to thrive within disease, refuse, and the extermination techniques of humans. Aptly, alongside the pestilent Snopeses, he provides a character who is a fairly exact embodiment of the benevolent Eastern view of rats: V.K. Ratliff - clearly, the name says a lot. Originally, the name was Surrat - "sir" as in respectable, and "sur" as in "higher than." The elevation of the rat is suggested, if you want to parse minutiae, in the sonic suggestion of rat "lift" - Ratliff. Anyhow, the character is an irrepressible and magnanimous figure, but no less cunning and tenacious. He is the conscience of the novel itself and in some ways its true narrator. Faulkner's ambivalence and fascination regarding the rat was an unwittingly sound introduction for me to 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_rat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats

"When it comes to conducting tests related to intelligence, learning, and drug abuse, rats are a popular choice due to their high intelligence, ingenuity, aggressiveness, and adaptability. Their psychology, in many ways, seems to be similar to humans." [my italics]

...and be sure not to miss the section on laughter among rats.

Popular Ontology

I came across a very promising book called Radical Knowing by Christian de Quincey. It's from this millennium and the second part of a trilogy that began with Radical Nature. I'm not going to try and sum any of it up, but it's about the most satisfying and naturally stated book of philosophy I've encountered. He's primarily interested in the mind/body problem and the ontology of consciousness, and in my opinion he's more exciting and relevant than Damasio, who also has a trilogy on the same issues (although Damasio is not a philosopher). De Quincey talks about hallucinogens, the life of dolphins, and shamanism on one hand, and formal logic, neuroscience, Heidegger, and quantum theory on the other...and at no point does he flake (so far).

Also, it's becoming clear that the truly worthwhile philosophers are Bergson, Heidegger, Whitehead, Spinoza, Levinas and William James. They seem to be the ones who had it right ahead of time.

Still, there's a hell of a lot more shit going on than philosophy.

Floatation Experience No.5

This afternoon was my fifth experience in a floatation tank - the last three being scattered across two weeks - and a distinct breakthrough. After twenty minutes of floating, during which time I finally felt my neck fully relax, pop, and release tension allowing my scalp to sort of re-fit itself to my head...well, I began to have very clear images of an elfin stream and bridge with green hillocks and tufted grass, all very much like an image from a storybook I had as a child. I remember a story of a goat crossing just such a bridge and some wicked gnome that hid beneath. It was devoid of characters or action, and it began to give way to a very sharply defined image of the bridge near my Grandparent's house where I would go as a child to watch the stream. Something about this "real" image being superimposed upon the magical one began to fascinate me and I thought of further super-impositions and revealings: it became a game with imagined visual landscapes rooted in childhood experience that I could toy with at will and see quite clearly (albeit in my mind's eye - not as though hallucinated).

This brings me to another tank phenomenon, although this one was absent today. I become keenly aware of how readily I project my consciousness into a room when my eyes are closed. This may seem a statement of the obvious, but that's the point: I was aware of one of the most obvious things my imaginations does. At all times, I'm aware of being in a room, and often I project the room I'm actually in behind my eyelids as a means of spatial orientation. Clearly, there are adaptive advantages to this, but in the tank it begins to be a bit annoying and paradoxical because after a period of projecting the "room" that is the tank (i.e. a pitch black environment ) behind my eyelids I begin grasping for other rooms: I project lit-up rooms from childhood, last year, today, etc. There is an enormous amount of physical space we internalize and it gets in the way of "pure" imagination - but what is "pure"? As with Proust, I've always transfered the energy of my imagination into rooms and onto their objects. Quite simply, my imagination "takes place" in a room and sometimes conceives of itself AS a room. [At this point, I want to remember to look deeper into Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.]

Today, there were no rooms - however, the superimposition of surfaces was applied to the stream/bridge image: a landscape at once external and deeply internalized across decades from childhood. This image faded and for the second time I had out of body awareness - I won't call it a bona fide OB "experience," but I was certainly able to sense myself from above and visualize a going-out from my own body as a spectral silver streak: very ghost-like, but vibrant and lit up from inside. This became a very erotic thing because I was literally projecting a being hovering above me and reaching down into me and touching me, and while I could see my "floating self" from above, as though within this entity's eyes, it was effortless to make this entity female and other. There was a sort of feedback loop between my projection of this entity and my perception of myself from its eyes as same or other, and it became very tactile, convincing and arousing. I resisted giving in entirely to sexual fantasy and I let the silver light into my body so it could roam around.

[Note: these were not outright hallucinations, and at every point along the way I was actively suspending disbelief. Nonetheless, it is the utter EASE with which such suspension occurs and the intensely purposeful and effortless nature of the image and energy projection that make this a completely unique and transcendent practice - floating, that is.]

I'd never felt complete freedom before when visualizing and activating chakra energy. The silver streaks of light that wove around me would accelerate into shapes and then slow into a single stream and at times move perpendicular to my body in a helix, as though chasing itself vertically; then they'd zero in on certain energy centers and just vibrate for a while. This was at once willed by me and somewhat animate: it was very much like a lucid dream, only with a great deal more of lucidity. Full-on 3-d worlds haven't been available to me in the tank as in a dream, but the clarity and convincing nature of imagery is on par with it. Anyhow, I played aound with this light for a long time, and there were oscillating "wings" pulling my shoulders back and discs of light circling my pelvis and sometimes the light wanted in my nose or my anus. It was quite a bit like a cleansing procedure, and the way in which I associated this silver light with a healing or enlivening force was a source of wellness during the experience and after. It was at once one of the most profoundly liberating conscious experiences I've had and just a shit-load of fun. When I emerged, I felt an extreme giddiness and sense of well-being. I can assure you that, with practice, the tank can be a major exploratory and healing tool.

Pollock and Adolescence

On the most superficial level, his paintings evoked a sense of recognition when I was younger. As with most of the abstract expressionists, but later exemplified perfectly for me by Rauschenberg, the textures and forms appear in a sort of arrested emergence much like the wear of rust or a wall covered with months of posters or a billboard that's faded, etc. Eventually, I spent a lot of time reflecting on how these things were related in my imagination, and those little "collages" in my old bedroom were just found and chosen images that represented to me, at the time, the sort of patterns and alinear, associational gestures I was trying to see everywhere.

Some of my most shockingly intense aesthetic experiences occurred when I worked in a warehouse and saw flatbed trucks hauling around decades-old dumpsters tarnished and spraypainted and rusted and beaten up. The surfaces of those dumpsters suggested to me a distinct signature of meaning, but it was located in the least intentional and perhaps unobservable of processes: it took years of accidents and unconscious handling for those things to appear as they did. Pollock always spoke to me in this sense because he was quite literally trying to allow this sort of "acausal" aspect of nature free reign even as he basically brooded and danced around inside of it. His mythmaking is equally intriguing to me, tho he seemed to be seriously damned by the stamp his works exhibited, never being able to do anything once he'd broken the game so wide open: spontaneity was expected, which is a perfect paradox.

I see many of his paintings to be intended accidents, at play with chance, and at the service of visual metaphors of process. Synaptic firing, neural matting, nebulae, nova, etc...these are often called to my mind when I see one of his paintings. He goes as far internally as he does externally, and reveals a sort of quantum myth of nature: you get a universe the deeper in you go, and you get a universe the further out you go, and they resemble one another.

Radical Empiricism

"Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. 'Change' in this case means continuous as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy. The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value, neither less nor more; and to take it at its face value means first of all to take it just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize their suggestions and to make our actual experience again seem rationally possible. There is no other nature, no other whatness than this absence of break and this sense of continuity in that most intimate of all conjunctive relations, the passing of one experience into another when they belong to the same self. And this whatness is real empirical 'content,' just as the whatness of separation and discontinuity is real content in the contrasted case. Practically to experience one's personal continuum in this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all that they can ever mean."

-- William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism

Aesthetics of American Reclusion

These images come from my old bedroom at home circa '02 after I'd graduated from college. Still, these look a lot like how things were when I was in high school. The topmost image is from 1998 and covered the wall at the foot of my debauched bed of college freshman year. I stared into it dumbfounded and entranced while my mind gorged itself on itself under the influence of an awful batch of LSD.

Also, Jesus is peculiar. No one knows exactly how to parse their irony when his image hangs around. For that reason, I kept his images around.

Bad Welcome

An actual mess with language and images all about False Shit, American Gnosis, Imaginal Being, Suburban Appalachia and some other label-able categories.

This is in the process of figuring out how serious and/or silly it will be.