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.

Happy birthday, Tom.

Happy 83rd birthday to Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have meant a great deal to me for over twenty years. There are a handful of writers whose stuff makes me want to stop reading right then and there and go write, and Pynchon may be foremost among them (Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and William S. Burroughs also come to mind). Fortunately—mainly for any would-be readers, not so much for me with my now long-dormant delusions of literary grandeur—I figured out early on that I lack the talent, the eye, the humor, and the depth of thought required to successfully emulate, or at least take useful cues, from Pynchon, so it's been a long while since I tried my hand at writing that sort of detailed, intensely aware shit. Still, the idea is always there, and I'm not likely to give up on it entirely, seeing as how I have a permanent reminder of Pynchon's influence in the form of a W.A.S.T.E. tattoo.

I can't remember if I first read about Thomas Pynchon in Steamshovel Press, which published a good review of Mason & Dixon in 1998 or '99, or in this interview with William Gibson, which I read in 1998 or so and the actual existence of which I was unsure of until recently (hence my being stoked at finding that link, and seeing that the "reading Gravity's Rainbow in jail" memory I've had all these years wasn't just some neat misremembering or implanted memory). Whatever the case, it feels like fate, or at least in line with the idea that you find something when you're meant to. What I do know is that I started Gravity's Rainbow in the spring of '99 and was utterly overwhelmed, so returning it (in that blown-out orangey hardcover edition from, I think, the '70s) to the SHSU library for the summer break wasn't so bad. Over the next year and change, before I graduated, I finished it and read V., The Crying of Lot 49 (which I still re-read on a regular basis; it's a great way to spend a day otherwise blown off), Slow Learner, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon. Then came the latter-day books—Against the Day, Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge, plus the cinematic version of Inherent Vice, which I saw as soon as I could, and while properly high. I got all the books the day they came out, much like I've done with Gibson's novels since All Tomorrow's Parties.

My take on almost everything has been shaped by Pynchon's work. His ongoing themes of entropy and paranoia have influenced my thinking, but don't define it; as Sortilege mentions in Inherent Vice (the book, not the film), shikantaza, the Zen practice of just sitting, plays the part of a corrective to all the bummer vibes of life in this sad-ass crumbling empire we call America. The relationship between the titular characters of Mason & Dixon remains my favorite depiction of friendship, and continues to buttress my belief that choosing to care about certain people because we want to, because we have a mutually-chosen bond, is more meaningful than caring about someone because they're simply related by blood. I don't fully share Zoyd Wheeler's status as a burnout holdover from days of revolution and hope, but I think I have an idea of what it feels like. My take on what little time I've spent in California (including San Narciso's probable inspiration/doppelgänger) has been influenced by the adventures of Oedipa Maas, Doc Sportello, and the rest. Etc. etc.

Anyway, Thomas Pynchon rules, and I wanted to say a little something as to why I think so. I hope he's enjoying his birthday with beer, tacos, and a joint of Acapulco Gold. I won't even do that thing where I hope for another novel, because writers don't owe us anything, and even if they did, he paid that debt decades ago.

DAS
5.8.20

“Fate does not speak. She carries a Mauser and from time to time indicates our proper path.” — Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

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

The Terrible Something

If in search of what's wrong with the world today- a phrase I despise, because the slightest brush with history shows us that the past is hardly laudable, but I'll stick with it for now-  one need not turn to the grotesque buffoon in the White House and his coterie of reactionaries, bootlickers, and bipedal leeches. An examination of one's immediate surroundings and internal state will suffice to demonstrate that the world around us is currently in the grip of something terrible, and that we ourselves are microcosmic hosts of whatever that terrible something is. Best not to look too closely, lest the contours and details resolve themselves and the terrible becomes overwhelming. Yet a failure to investigate is exactly what has led us here.

The terrible something devours minds, hearts, time, and space. It lends the grinning ghouls of the ruling class masks of respectability, and tells us they are true faces, trustworthy and wholesome. It bears down upon our souls, or whatever passes for them, and allows them to collapse under the weight of their very existence. It robs us of our days, which it feeds to the ravening demiurges of the economy and "progress," and fills our nights with a dreadful silence that is unconducive to slumber. It stalks the globe, snatching corners of heaven and earth from their rightful inhabitants and uprooting the human being from its surroundings. The terrible something does not live in the world, but dwells upon it, like an extradimensional horror might a threshold.


So: what is this terrible something? Is it capitalism, currently grinding its teeth, and us between them, as it attempts to force its way through yet another crisis? Is it the rot eating away the veil of democracy with which the West covers itself? Is it a spiritual malaise, some species-wide ennui and self-loathing immune to the pathetic variety of cures we have dreamed up? Or is it an absence of some kind, a void in our social relations, our collective lack of imagination coming back to haunt us from whatever astral graveyard we banished it to? Perhaps it's something else entirely, detectable only by what it doesn't do or where it isn't.

Me, I'd venture to say that the terrible something is all of the above and then some. It has probably always been with us. Maybe it simply is us, and we've contorted ourselves into such a mockery of being human that the terrible something has manifested itself fully.  I don't know what all this means, or how it can be combated, assuming it can be combated at all. I doubt it can be, at least not in the sense of pushing back against a defined foe, but we can study ourselves, stand in solidarity with our fellow humans, and dream, as the terrible something wends its way through our lives and settles into the cracks of the cosmos. It ain't much, but it's all we've got.