MMXXI

Even before COVID-19 smeared plague across the globe, 2020 was already going to be an especially ugly, desperate year here in America, thanks to the election. As it stands, we—Americans, that is—have collectively limped past the December 31 finish line (an illusory goal if ever there was one), having only barely gotten our shit together enough to vote Donald Trump out after his administration spent the past eleven months doing nothing about a disease that much of the world managed to handle with at least a modicum of common sense and rationality. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died needlessly, huge swathes of the population are unemployed and/or about to lose their homes, and around the world nation-states (including the US) are starting to rehearse for the next phase of the ongoing and ever-worsening climate crisis, which usually means foregoing the sort of species-wide solidarity we actually need in favor of shoring up artificial borders, dehumanizing outsiders (or insiders who don't meet the criteria of a "real" citizen, a category that grows narrower by the day), and generally doubling down on the us-versus-them mentality that got us here in the first place. 

So yeah, 2020 was been a bullshit year. It was by no means the worst in human history, but that's cold comfort for everyone who suffered, or is still suffering, at its numb, infected hands, and it feels like History (capital H) decided to give us a tightly-scripted preview of what awaits us over the course of the next, I dunno, 50 or 100 years. It ain't pretty, and I am not at all sure that humanity will rise to meet the challenges we've created for ourselves (and every other species on the planet, but it's been pretty well established that we do not give a single fuck about them or anything that stands in the way of making profits and fulfilling the sad-ass failures of imagination that pass for "dreams"). That said, barring a heavy-duty nuclear exchange that renders the whole thing moot—an outcome as possible as it's ever been—I don't think we're straight-up doomed. Shit will get bad in unimaginable ways, but the species will scrape by. Hell, we may even outgrow some of our worst traits. I have no idea. Or, more accurately: I don't know.

Not knowing is one of those skills I'm always honing. Not knowing isn't ignorance, though of course ignorance involves not knowing; not knowing is a refusal—albeit not too militant a refusal, since that leads to its own set of conundrums—to mistake one's one thoughts and feelings for reality. In this case, reality as it'll play out in the future. Forecasting the future is a sucker's game, and like most such games it's sometimes just lucrative enough to make us think it's a worthwhile pursuit. While I like throwing around ideas of what may be coming our way as much as the next dude, I like to think I have a sufficient grasp of how complex the world is, and how unpredictable people and nature can be, to avoid conflating the notions I toss out on IRC or over beers with what's actually going on. But again, I don't know, so I generally avoid prognostication. You're better off consulting the 易經 I Ching/Yi Jing than talking to me.

This blog is entering its 18th year. I still don't really know what I'm doing with it, but I plan on keeping it around. Maybe I'll do more writing and less translating this year. I wouldn't mind sorting out some of my ideas about, say, Buddhism or martial arts, or trying to write more critical album reviews. I may write more in Portuguese. 2021 is still a newborn, though, sticky with afterbirth, so I may let things unfold at their own pace before worrying too much about what exactly is said when The Corpse Speaks.

In the meantime, I'll direct your attention to Erik Davis' new venture, the wide-ranging and always compelling Burning Shore newsletter; the Korinji Rinzai Zen community, home of some deep Zen practice; Herman Melville's marginalia; the Ploughshares Fund, working to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons; and the mind-shattering vajra doom hammer that is the music of Neptunian Maximalism.

Happy MMXXI, y'all.

 
微臣
史大偉/D.A.S.

Expanding Mind

A couple months ago I started listening to Erik Davis' Expanding Mind podcast. I've been a big fan of Erik Davis since reading Techgnosis in college; I sent him a copy of Axis Mundi Sum when it was published (I got a copy of his chapbook on Burning Man in return), and I've known about Expanding Mind for a while, so I'm not sure why I didn't check it out sooner. These days I don't worry too much about coming to something late, though, as it seems like I find things (or they find me) when the time is right—and conditions are certainly ripe for the fascinating, friendly, intense conversations Davis has with his guests.

Some time ago I noticed that I didn't seem as curious about the world as I'd used to be. A lot of things I'd been into, or wondered about, had fallen by the wayside. This is a typical developmental process, as we outgrow or discard some interests in favor of others, and with age we (usually) start to figure out that the world is too vast and complicated a place to keep tabs on as much as we might so desire, which forces us to reduce the scope of our attention. And yet I find this process, which I suspect is more conditioned than it is natural, rather stifling, since for most people it never stops. As wild and unpredictable as the world can be, humans are really good at ignoring it in favor of locking themselves into increasingly restrictive patterns, and through those patterns, we come to view the world and our existence therein as smaller, safer, more mundane, less pregnant with meaning, than they actually are, or can be. Which is perfectly understandable to a point—who doesn't want or need a reliable degree of safety, certainty, and comprehensibility?—but at some point the pattern tightens to the point of inflexibility, and you're stuck, often without even knowing it.

Erik Davis' conversations with folks on Expanding Mind are a wonderful way to break those patterns, as is his writing. His/their discussions of religion, psychedelics, science, high weirdness, the occult, music, pop culture, and all the ways in which such things intersect and intertwine are consistently thought-provoking, as well as thoroughly enjoyable. (As one of the guests on Expanding Mind recently noted, enjoyment is a crucial component of consciousness practices. If awakening, or clarity, or whatever, is nothing more than a chore, then why not stay mired in samsara?)

What I find especially valuable is that neither Davis nor his guests are credulous true believers: they may be practicing sorcerers, meditation teachers unaffiliated with any particular tradition, esoteric musicians, scholars of Gnosticism, or scientists pursuing the outer reaches of psychedelic research and therapy, but there's never that sense of "holy shit, these people are up their own ass" you might get on AM radio or Facebook. There's a healthy skepticism (not in that tired-ass Dawkins/Harris/etc. sense, mind you), intellectual honesty, and connection to modern critical frameworks that makes you eager to hear everything they have to say, even if it's completely fuckin' out there. And out there, caro leitor, is where it's at.

I mean, I find magic(k) fascinating, and I've been meditating for a decade now, but it's way easier for me to think about things like ghosts, egregores, 氣/qi, and hoodoo as psycho-social phenomena and practices with potentially tangible (and very real aesthetic) effects than to say "oh yeah, that shit is 100% real", just as I can look at more mainstream theologies and appreciate them without imbuing them with what, to me, is the mark of death known as certainty. Erik Davis is more or less on the same page, albeit far more informed, well-spoken, and cooler than yours truly, so if any of this sounds interesting, check out Expanding Mind and his writing, a couple decades' worth of which can be found at techgnosis.com. 

All right, dudes, that's it for now. I was going to get into some other stuff, like meditation, but I'll save that for another time. I gotta get dinner started, so I'll just sum up by saying that Erik Davis rules, and that I wish I'd run into him when he was at Rice, because having a beer with him at Valhalla would've been all kinds of rad.


"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -HST




Your pal,
DAS