One of the things we are committed to at Alembic, and that I have been devoted to intellectually and spiritually for decades, is pluralism. My cosmovision is cosmopolitan, attentive to zones where practices and traditions mutate and influence one another, where metaphysical views commingle and clash. I don’t even believe that all paths lead up the same mountain. I think they lead up different mountains, and that the whole range — the whole network, the whole resonating net of jewels — is marvelous and valuable.

Such pluralism is now rather old school, even quaint, arguably a problem. But it’s what I gleaned from a lifetime of reading and writing and tripping. Sure, I am an old dog — I cut my teeth in the post-structuralist 1980s, more interested in difference than identity. As a freelance writer, I swam in the wider remix culture of the 1990s, with its rhizomes and dub infections. I gave a lot of talks at the esoteric New York Open Center, whose eclectic and intelligent vision was echoed in those years at San Francisco’s great Gnosis magazine, which published substantial early essays from me, and proved that traditionalism and pluralism could both shape spirit. Later, I learned more from the history of the Esalen Institute, where I continue to teach on occasion. There is a lot to critique about Esalen, which has priced itself out of relevance, but its commitment to pluralism and humanist experiment is wonderfully summed up in a motto that inspires Alembic: “No one captures the flag.”

Usually I don’t use Burning Shore to promote Alembic events I am not directly participating in, but this coming weekend of talks and workshops is so pluralicious I can’t help crowing about it. Truth be told, I am also hoping to move the needle for some great teachers who deserve lots of attention. Most of these events are also available to stream.

• David Odorisio:

An Introduction to Christian Mysticism for the Spiritually Curious

Part 1: Friday March 6 at 7pm; Part 2: Saturday March 7, 10am – 3pm
(streaming links: Part 1; Part 2)

David used to be my boss at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a Jungian-inspired school where I taught for a spell. He wrote a great book about Thomas Merton in California, and also edited a volume on comic books and mysticism. He is a wonderful teacher of Christian currents: spiritually experienced, open-hearted, non-dogmatic, and charming. David will explore the biblical and neo-Platonic roots of Christian mysticism, with a focus on the resurgence and explosion of mystical writings in and around Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Mystical theologians attempted to map “the mind’s journey into God,” articulating heightened stages of consciousness that ultimately went beyond mind, either through ecstatic union with the divine or through the void of apophatic unknowing. Odorisio will also explore significant figures who have stirred more interest today, including Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Throughout this workshop we will tie these ancient mystics and texts to the resurgence of interest in mysticism today, particularly through the lens of psychedelia and “altered states of consciousness.” Join us as we journey together through the “High” Middle Ages. This workshop will also include gentle, guided meditation practices to begin and end each session.

• Scott Traffas:

Word from The Western Gate: Tea and Poetry

Saturday, March 7, 10am – 1pm; link

My friend and comrade Scott Traffas — one of those rare ones who combines critical theory with spiritual exploration — has a long-standing practice of serving excellent teas in the spirit of community contemplation. He will be featuring a wide array of Chinese teas, including oolong, red, and pu-erh; a separate pot of herbal tea will always be available for those who prefer to avoid caffeine. Scott has spent decades exploring the various exoteric and esoteric traditions of the East and West. His abiding interest in the intersection of Yoga, Tantra, and Ayurveda deeply informs his approach to gongfu tea curation. Beyond the teas that are selected and their method of brewing, Scott is particularly interested in the qualities of becoming that constellate among friends, both old and new, around a tea table. What will be discussed this morning...? Whitman’s Leaves, the Experiment at La Chorrera, the sublime ethos of Judas Iscariot, the vagaries of hyperreality, the Dark-Haired Girl, the Alembic itself!?..given time (and tea)...even eternity will reveal itself...

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• Rebecca Ryuen Long Okura Sensei:

The Empty Room: Discovering Zen Essence

Sunday, March 8, 10:30am – 4pm; (in-person link; online link)

I have been practicing with the Lost Coin Zen sangha since before the pandemic. Ryuen Sensei, who has been studying Zen in the White Plum lineage for over twenty years, is now serving as Vice Abbot for Lost Coin, and is returning to the Alembic with a workshop devoted to the essence of Zen teachings. By homing in on the physical posture of meditation and the essential foundations of deep practice, the roots of reality begin to reveal themselves. In Zen, this is called "Zazen"— an invitation to sit enlightenment directly. We will spend the day exploring various Zen methods of meditation, delving deeply into the “empty room,” and experiencing how sitting practice can inform, open, and refresh your everyday mind. Sensei’s teaching style is lively, funny, clear and direct. A bibliophile, fencer, and longtime student of Chinese literature and language, Sensei is also the founder of Old Truths Library & Reading Room in Salt Lake City.

• Jeremy Crawford:

In the Beginning Was the Story

Sunday, March 8, 7–8:30pm; (in-person link; online link)

Jeremy Crawford knows a thing or two about storytelling and the human imagination. Before becoming the game director at Critical Role’s Darrington Press, he was the lead designer of the Player’s Handbook (2014 and 2024) for Dungeons & Dragons, and he oversaw the development of rules for D&D over the past decade, as well as leading and co-leading the design of many D&D books, including the Monster Manual (2025). Prior to becoming a game designer, Jeremy earned a master’s degree in theology at Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and studied at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Jeremy will explore the way that storytelling shapes our view of ourselves, the cosmos, and the divine. Starting with a meditation on the prologue of John’s gospel, Crawford will explore the entangled life of narrative and the religious imagination. Whether we seek mystical union with the divine, a deeper understanding of spiritual tools like the tarot, or a greater sense of empowerment in a roleplaying game, are we ready to wield the wand of the magician-storyteller? Following his talk, I will join Jeremy for further conversation.

Miscellany

You may enjoy the following:

Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking — A bleak and funny Harper’s essay by the sometimes amazing Sam Kriss focuses on Roy Lee, CEO of the odious AI cheat-tech startup Cluely. More broadly, Kriss peeps into the teflon void lurking behind so many young tech founders, especially in my beloved Sad Francisco, where Kriss finds the ubiquitous AI adverts — at once dull and incomprehensible — to reflect the same message as the drooling fent-heads on the sidewalk: the invitation to stop thinking.

The City of AI Djinns — I keep up with Jules Evans’ Ecstatic Integration as much as any Substack newsletter, partly because he covers so many zones of interest — psychedelics, New Age gurus, AI — and partly because he strikes an attractive stance of critical sympathy. He brings that spirit to bear here on a tale of a middle-aged British psychiatrist who goes mystically bonkers with AI, and winds up cranking out all manner of metaphysical slop but somehow, maybe, healing himself. What makes this one work is the focus on an individual within a broad reckoning with madness, spirit, and writing in the AI age.

Love Breaks This World: Power and Politics in Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold (Ring Cycle) with Phil Ford — The Lepht Hand podcast is created by Sereptie (Craig) from the Acid Horizon podcast. In this episode, Craig joins with the wonderful Emma Stamm to talk to my Weird Studies pal Phil Ford about the music of Richard Wagner. Wagner is an odd topic for Lephties given the virulent anti-Semitism and the later Nazi love, which is of course addressed. I am a Wagner head, despite all the thin ice, and love Phil’s thoughts on the composer, especially in his amazing Wagner extras over at the Weird Studies Patreon. One of my fantasies is to do a podcast where Phil and I go see a Ring cycle and I talk to Phil about it, My Dinner With Andre style. Until then…

Ocean Giants: the Secret Lives of Sperm Whales — My just-completed Weirdosphere course on Moby-Dick, co-taught with JF Martel, is sadly over, but it has left some flotsam in its wake. One is the inexplicable desire to pick up Melville’s book and read it again, which I will do later this spring. (Right now I am halfway through the entertaining Omoo.) Sperm whales have also taken over my imagination, thanks in part to my old pal (and Whale reader) Ben Kamm, who sent me this video from the Easy Documentary Nature channel. Like too many nature documentaries, it over-sentimentalizes and personifies non-human creatures, and some of the music will induce incapacitating wooze. But the footage of these deeply social creatures is extraordinary, including a lesbian dorsal ridges grind that I can’t deny was, like, hot. The most poetic thought to me was brought about by the discovery that young sperm whales don’t make those deep sea dives for squid because their bodies can’t handle the pressure — which means that, one day, they are ready, and must for the first time plunge thousands of feet into the inky dark.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers. If you would like to show support, the best thing is to subscribe and to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Stamina is important in times like these, and nourishment, and a sense of coming from the core. One of my “hacks”, which is inefficient and vaguely pretentious so probably best avoided by those looking for hacks, is to read heavy works of great literature. This is not exactly an unheard of notion. Stuff I read on the Internet suggests that ploughing through grim fatties by (mostly) dead white guys is enough of a thing already to be officially deemed insincere and performative, a bro flex along the lines of NBA prediction contracts or Orthodox conversion. But fuck you Stuff I Read on the Internet! Stretching my humanities-trained brain and corralling my flagging attention with Harold Bloom deep cuts offers ballast in the midst of the digital deluge. The classics, even the pulpy ones, also provide an opportunity to pull back from the immediacy of panic media enough to recognize the long arc of causes and conditions that feed so much of our current turbulence. After all, the literature of the old ones really has the capacity to resonate across time, especially when the text in question is, like the time in question, apocalyptic.

It’s the power of those resonances that help explain why JF Martel and I are having such a blast teaching Moby-Dick over at the Weirdosphere, and why so many fellow readers there seem to be having a good time as well. Melville’s dense, long, and multi-perspectival Great Book is notoriously grim and metaphysical, but it’s also full of gallows humor, proto-ecological naturalism, cosmic horror, and catalytic prose. In addition, the story seems profoundly relevant at this moment: a tragedy of American extractivism, and of myth-sized payback from beasts exploited in a savage run-through of the petroleum economy that was, in 1851, just around the corner. The novel’s political poles are also familiar, split between a scruffy democratic pluralism and a spiteful and lawless overlord who has left his responsibilities – not to mention conventional economic reckoning ­– behind. Ahab and Trump are both vengeful, rude, and egotistical old men, great at manipulating toadies and crowds from out of their violent inner voids. Though Melville’s captain is too monomaniacal and ascetic to pave the way directly for Trump, the two titans certainly rhyme.

All this I expected before embarking on my third pass through the novel. What surprised me this time is how deeply Moby-Dick’s visionary passages and ironic paradoxes addressed the vexed journey of expanded consciousness, and whether or not we consider such transformations in “spiritual” terms. Writing to Hawthorne, Melville loosely compared his book to a gospel, while later describing it as a wicked book, with a demonic motto to boot: Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli! Elsewhere he notes that things look infernal or angelic depending on your mood, and the perspective moods breed. This multi-perspectival mood both resonates with and resists the vast panoramic expanse of mind suggested by the Transcendentalism of Melville’s day, that new American pantheism that figures like Emerson and Thoreau were articulating in largely optimistic and liberating terms. For even as Melville tastes the power and beauty of the pantheistic vision at various times throughout Moby-Dick, he also critiques and even mocks Transcendentalist exuberance. Instead, he weaves his peak experiences into an almost tantric tapestry of tragic naturalism, offering a tangled counter-vision that does not deny unity consciousness, but re-embeds it into a messy, material, deeply weird world.

The vexed journey of expanded consciousness animates one of my favorite early chapters of the Whale, “The Mast Head.” Ishmael, the unfixed narrator of the novel, who both is and is not Melville, is an ironic seeker of sorts. A lover of arcane lore and exotic scenes, and a broke-ass moody drifter to boot, Ishmael might be the first hipster in American literature. In this chapter, he admits how many young men like him, romantic and melancholy, are drawn to the whale fishery, and how they invariably fail at one of the core tasks they are invariably tasked with, which is to climb up to the mast-heads to look for whales. As is usual with Ishmael/Melville, the chapter begins with a trawl through the archives, wherein we discover early precedent for “standers on mast-heads” among the Egyptians with their pyramids, seen as more solid and worthy than the unsuccessful builders of Babel’s tower. The author also invokes St. Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Christian hermit who spent his days atop a pillar — see Buñuel’s funny and surreal film, Simon of the Desert — as well as more recent political and military heroes who to this day stare off into the smoggy faraway from atop their urban monuments.

The challenge for Ishmael and his fellow hepcats is the inflationary powers of that wide expanse before them. “There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.” Notice how Ishmael’s body itself begins to expand and change scale, as drug-takers and meditators sometimes report, its mutation allowing it to viscerally match its increasingly more-than-human perspective. “There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves.” But this chillax panorama is precarious as well. There are no comfy crow’s nests up there on Pacific whalers, nothing more than two thin parallel spars called cross-trees. “Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns.” It’s a trick, and a dangerous one.

Upcoming Event:

Learning from the Living World, with Kathleen Harrison, Meghan Walla-Murphy, and Erik Davis

On Wednesday, February 25, at 7pm, I will be hosting Kathleen Harrison and Meghan Wally-Murphy at the Berkeley Alembic for a discussion about deep learning from our spirited world. Whether in the form of animals, or plants, or ancestors, beings from outside our supposedly disenchanted world are leaning in with tales to tell, challenges to mount, and wisdom to offer. Kat Harrison is an independent scholar and teacher of ethnobotany, and the co-founder of Botanical Dimensions. Meghan Walla-Murphy has dedicated her life to wildlife tracking, and understanding how Traditional Ecological Knowledge can serve as a bridge between mainstream environmentalism and the rich world of animism. More information here.

The view from the mast-head is enough to spin anybody’s head, but the expanse proves particularly seductive to a “sunken-eyed young Platonist” like Ishmael, who has the “problem of the universe” whirling in his skull. The mention of Plato here is, like all allusions in this hyperlinked Wikipedic text, hardly accidental, since the type of peak experience catalyzed by the mast-head vision lobs the principles of philosophical idealism into the soul’s felt sense, which Melville communicates with almost psychoactive prose:

[L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space;…forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

Though Melville was only modestly familiar with Emerson when he wrote Moby-Dick, having perused a few of his essays and seen the Transcendentalist lecture in Boston, Ishmael’s mast-head grok here accords with the idea of the “Over-soul” that Emerson, influenced by Neoplatonism as well as Vedanta, elaborates in an essay written a decade before the Whale. In that text, Emerson invokes “that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.”

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Here Emerson’s Over-soul vision ties together nature’s high magnitudes of earth and sky with the fused potential fellowship among people in a common heart. After a century and a half of Eastern religion and philosophy in the West, not to mention the convulsive if often cliched tropes of psychedelia’s “mystical” experience, we have grown familiar with this Over-soul stuff, which remains the summum bonum to many in the “spiritual but not religious” box on the form. But in the middle of 19^th century America, when the seeds of SBNR were just getting planted in America’s appropriated soil, such a naturalist and impersonal vision spoke to startling new horizons for thought and experience. Startling — and also terribly fragile, even delusional, as Melville makes clear in the remarkable final paragraph of his chapter, when the rug beneath our ecstatic Platonist gets tugged:

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!

With the seasoned voice of one who, as a young man, himself spent time aloft gazing for whales, Melville reminds look-outs of the concrete dangers of succumbing to the dopey haze of reverie. But he is also making a deeper point about ecstatic experience, or at least the sort of pantheistic “unity consciousness” that formed one of the ideals of Transcendentalism, not to mention today’s more mystic-minded psychedelic scientists. Recall Emerson’s famously trippy flash in “Nature” (1836):

Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

With the dark ironic turn at the end “The Mast-head,” Melville seems to pluck the “transparent eyeball” out of Emerson’s skull and hurl it deep into Walden pond. What’s going on here? A simplistic view common to Melville critics sees him as a mocking anti-Transcendentalist, devoted to skeptically skewering the Over-soul faith, which here, again, seems more a reverie than a revelation: it is a trance, a dream, a vast field of awareness that is also a lapse. As every beach blanket dozer knows, the ocean can induce lethargic, sun-crisped, liminal fuzz — something that Walt Whitman reminds us only a few years after Moby-Dick’s publication when, in Leaves of Grass, he languidly invites the sea to “rock me in billowy drouse.”

But for Melville the Over-soul trance is not just a delusional dream, and that’s what makes his take poignant and important given our current consciousness culture, a time of jhana tech, hardcore dharma, and democratized 5-MEO meltdowns of space-time. Writing to Nathaniel Hawthorne the summer he was finishing Moby-Dick, Melville again seems to mock the sort of pantheistic ideals which he finds, this time, in Goethe, who suggests that we should Live in the all and merge with the flowers and woods and planets. “What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!’” The body that feels pain, that slips on the cross-trees, keeps the score; the rest is spiritual bypass. But later in the same letter, Melville admits to an experience that so many of us have shared, especially when bemushroomed in field or forest:

This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

We’ll return to that last qualification, but note first that the All feeling is not just a feeling but has “some truth” in it. Many (but not all) of the extraordinary experiences of expanded consciousness in Moby-Dick mix truth into these pantheistic mergings, especially, it seems, when they involved his fellow man — and I do mean man. Later that same year, Melville wrote Hawthorne again, discussing the gush he felt for Hawthorne upon reading a letter from his friend.

I felt pantheistic then — your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. . . . Ineffable socialities are in me…It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling….I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling . . . The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question — they are One.

Even given all the vagaries of recollected and articulated peak experiences, this is a rich and complex set of feelings: erotic merger, ineffable unity, and a remarkable mode of anarchic equanimity, a stoic coolness enlivened with wild fellow-feeling. Indeed the very complexity of this mix speaks to an underlying authenticity.

So why pull the rug out from under such a peak experience? Why this distrust of the All feeling? What’s wrong with pantheism?

One factor is the fact of transience itself, the impermanence that speaks to both the irony of passing enthusiasms and the realism of the morning after. It’s like the meditation master Jack Kornfield’s great book title: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. In a later chapter in Moby-Dick, Ishmael has another pantheistic experience while squeezing lumps out of the fresh spermaceti with his fellow sea-grunts, one that resonates with his Hawthorne glimpse of “ineffable socialities.” But the spell does not last, and in its wake he makes a call for the more muted satisfactions of the everyday that, to my ears, speaks to the pragmatism in Melville’s view:

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country. . .

Rather than offering an escape from the conundrum of mortal consciousness, Melville holds that pantheistic unity experiences cash out on the plane of the quotidian, of the ordinary messes and marvels within which we make our way. In this he accords with mature meditative (and psychedelic) wisdom: the long value does not lie in the peak, with its mythopoetic intensities and egoic inflations, but rather in the subsequent art of integration, of coming down with elegance and tact — rather than slipping and falling into the drink. The trap in the pantheistic vision does not lie in the experience itself, which is marvelous and not without truth, but in the temptation to reify it into an abiding idol. As he writes above, “what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.” But we shouldn’t aim for that kind of universal application in our kind of universe.

Moby-Dick is a map of our kind of universe, and like that plural cosmos it is fractured, multi-perspectival, beautiful and horrifying, mythic and material. And all these domains and their inevitable divergences are haunted and deeply entangled with all manner of others: with insects and whales and quadrants and archives. That’s the other reason we cannot be fools for the All, which Melville regularly figures throughout his text as a kind of endless and ongoing weave. We are reminded that the word tantra too means loom or weave, what the old Zen coots called “the ancient brocade.” This is the nondual vision not as a vaporous Vedantic oneness, what Tim Leary mocked as a “custard mush”, but as an endless tantric tangle of ongoing phenomena. “Whither flows the fabric?,” Melville elsewhere asks. “What palace may it deck? Wherefore all these ceaseless toilings?” I don’t know the answers, but I do know the cosmic loom leaves nothing out, even the gap of God whose foot is on the treadle.

The problem with the All feeling then is not the All but the feeling that the All is a simple unity, and that its seething and sometimes lacerating complexity has been smoothed away like the calm surface of shark-infested waters. As my friend Aaron Weiss once told me, “Radical pluralism is closer to nonduality than unity.” The tantric brocade weaves with all the threads, even the most grim and violent and wayward. The problem with unity vision is that it releases the burden of entanglement and disruption that attends the pluraverse we actually inhabit, a burden that, in a theological key, we might call the problem of “evil” — always the last and hardest test of any nondualism worth its salt.

This is a huge conundrum of course, huger even than Moby-Dick, which is one of this theme’s great literary workouts. As was his wont, Melville does not give systematic answers or crystalized conceits but hints and images, and I will leave you with only one clue. Other than in the “The Mast-Head” chapter, the word “Pantheistic” appears only one other time in the book. There it is used to describe the lingering vitality in the body of a dead shark whose jaws are still capable of snapping your hand off. “It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures,” Melville tells us. Heed it well, ye Extractivists!

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers. If you would like to show support, the best thing is to subscribe and to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Moby Dick is a lot of things. A lot of words, for one thing — a seething, sometimes overwhelming torrent of languages: scientific, mystical, goofy, poetic, morbid, mad. These multiple tongues enrich this book immeasurably, but can make the project of reading the thing feel rather intimidating. While we think its best just to go for it, we also invite folks to read in ways that work for them. Listen to some of it on an audiobook (we prefer Frank Muller), skim the “boring chapters” (which don’t really exist), and, at a minimum, closely read the specific chapters JF and I are going to concentrate on each week. Our aim is not so much to provide our own weirding takes on the Whale — which we will do, of course — but to support folks in settling into a fine and tasty meal with this justified classic, and its gnarly, playful, and unquestionably psychoactive prose.

A word about reading “classics.” There have always been classics, certainly centuries before bearded white males schemed to install themselves as arbiters of everything. The I Ching means the “Classic of Changes” — an oracular book for the eons, even if those eons keep not settling down. But what about actually reading the things? Is it worth your precious time to read The Whale, or Homer, or War and Peace?

My Mom has long pegged War and Peace her favorite novel, so three years ago I picked up a copy and said, fuck it let’s go. It was no more challenging than watching twenty seasons of excellent prestige TV. In fact it was an utter delight, just challenging enough to require me to minimize distractions, focus my weakening powers of attention, and get truly absorbed. Since then, I have always had one fat classic bubbling on the burner — Dostoevsky, Mann, Woolf, Musil, Kazantzakis. Say what you want about the concept of a literary classic, and the purported virtue, or not, of taking the time to read them. As a practice I have found it to be grounding, nourishing, illuminating, and, somewhat to my surprise, very entertaining — often far more entertaining than reading accessible contemporary fiction, genre or ortherwise. There is good new stuff out there, calm down everyone, but there is nothing like the chewy, resonating, and demanding claims of The Good Shit. And there is no richer, more glorious, and more fecund, fungi-festooned pile than Moby Dick.

The book is not just loaded with words or tongues. Its also loaded with genres, or more accurately, different modes of literature. And one of the modes I particularly enjoyed this time around is, appropriately, the Weird. In ways long noted on forlorn and unspeakable subreddits, there is a decidedly Lovecraftian dimension to Melville’s Whale, which the Master of Providence did read and enjoy months before writing his game-changing “Call of Cthulhu.” We begin the novel with a sick soul, who may or may not be named after an Old Testament outcast, wandering through a macabre and fetid New England whale-town, following grim portents that lead him on towards a cursed ship doomed to confront a monster who sleeps or at least feeds, and presumably dreams, at the bottom of the sea. And that’s just the first couple of chapters.

What lies ahead are many moments of outright cosmic horror that puncture the novel. Take, for example, the famous scene when Pip loses his reason after being left alone bobbing in the water.

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

Or this description of a giant squid:

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again,…

Or later, when Ishmael is reflecting on the whale fossils that, like other relics of the ancient past, were eroding the confident claim of Biblical history still widely accepted in Melville’s day.

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebræ, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible.

Lovecraft, of course, is all about those “dim, shuddering glimpses” into eternities. But Melville, unlike other 19th-century proto-Weird American masters like Poe or Hawthorne or old Charles Brockden Brown, draws many of his Gothic gnostic mysteries out of the close observation and careful appreciation for the natural and material world — the planet as cosmic conundrum.

Melville is a fascinating if skeptical weaver of the religious imagination, and Moby Dick is (in part) a book of pantheism, and polytheism, and prophecy, and dharma. But it is also a profoundly naturalistic book. This is why none of the chapters in the not-always-a-novel are boring — not the one about krill, not the one about the history of whaling, and certainly not the notorious one where Melville classifies whale species the way bookdealers classify physical volumes. Melville’s deep research in these chapters shows his appreciation for the naturalist eye, for combining observation, reason, skepticism, and imagination into the sorts of accounts that drive a Charles Darwin to upend the human story in the crisp light of the more-than-human world. Melville’s acute, almost journalistic appreciation for material processes also informs his devastating portrayal of the realities of the American whaling industy, which gives this book a depressing relevance in an era of extinction and catastrophic climate feedback. Remember: before there was petroleum, there was sperm oil, the central lubricant of early industrialism.

Melville also fully and deliriously recognizes the limits of naturalism — the false promises of “objective” language, the ultimate futility of scientific categories, and the inevitable mysteries that fringe our maps, whatever their accuracy. Ahab is not wrong to destroy his sextant. Here, in the margins, something anomalous still appears — ancient godforms, signs and portents, glimmers of a grim Beyond. Before us an enormous cetacean Enigma sky-hops and sounds above, beyond, and beneath the human horizon. Melville is an amphibian, one who can follow the logic of the land and the trackless drift of sea-being. That’s how he winds up writing some of the first passages of cosmic horror in American literature. More than that, he unrolls a foundational text, at once a scripture and an anatomy, of the other-than-rational view of the other-than-human world. This is what I, in High Weirdness, called weird naturalism: the respect for natural fact and the practice of attentive perception of the material cosmos, even as this gaze peers deeper, into the glittering and haunted void, the Abyss that stares back with a creaturely eye. Hello.

Other Upcoming Events

• Weird Academia

From Tuesday January 27 through Friday January 30, I will be at Indiana University in Bloomington to join the previously mentioned JF Martel, his Weird Studies partner Phil Ford, and a host of other thinky oddballs (including friends Jeff Kripal, Michael Garfield and Shannon Taggart) for Weird Academia, a gathering that will explore how serious engagement with the strange and the paranormal might find a real place within the contemporary humanities. Here are the three public events going down:

Tuesday, January 27, 4:30 - 6:30 pm
Gallery opening for Shannon Taggart’s Séance. McCalla School Gallery

An exhibition of Shannon’s amazing Spiritualist photography project Séance, with live music by the ever groovy Michael Garfield.

Wednesday, January 28, 7:00 pm
Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), with a live episode of Weird Studies to follow. IU Cinema

Come hear JF and Phil riff in person after a showing of this excellent and deranged film. The event is free but ticketed. You can reserve your seat HERE.

Thursday, January 29, 7:00 pm
Weird Academia: A conversation with Phil Ford, J. F. Martel, Erik Davis, Jeffrey Kripal, Jacob Foster, Shannon Taggart, and Cat Hobaiter. Buskirk Chumley Theater

God knows what we all will conjure. This event is free but ticketed. You can reserve your seat HERE.

• Archiving Terence McKenna, a Chalice conversation with Klea McKenna

Over a quarter century after Terence McKenna’s death, his visions, voice, and “funny ideas” continue to loom large in a world now exploding with the apocalyptic novelties he foresaw. In 2024, Terence’s daughter, artist and photographer Klea McKenna, began gathering, digitizing, and interpreting her father’s work, intellectual legacy, and life story. I first met Klea when she was a teenager, and have followed her subsequent career with great appreciation. For this February’s Chalice — the Berkeley Alembic’s monthly psychedelic salon — Klea will provide a glimpse of the new Terence McKenna Archive, sharing elements of her process and digging out some gems from the collection’s thousands of letters, lecture notes, journal pages, photos, and butterfly specimens. Hopefully Klea will talk a bit about her own extraordinary photography work, especially her early work The Butterfly Hunter, a response to her father’s time in Indonesia. Join us at the Alembic on Wednesday, February 4th, at 7pm. Links for in-person and online.

Recent Appearances

• The Unseen Internet

All the wireheads were out in force for a recent Alembic event celebrating the Internet scholar Shira Chess’s new book, The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. Along with looking at today’s WitchTok, reality-shifts, and glitch culture, Chess tracks the weirdness back to the 1990s, when many of the people shaping early Internet culture were also hacking reality, practicing Technopaganism, and engaging in other forms of alternative spiritualities that intersected with emerging technologies. And some of those people were present at the event, including myself, Paco Nathan (Machine Learning, AI expert and editor of the great FringeWare Review), Mark Pesce (Co-inventor of VRML and futurist), and R.U. Sirius (Mondo 2000). Together we wrangled with consensus reality. You judge who survived.

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My favorite Jesus is the freaky Jesus, the long-haired outlaw cosmic prophet who rode the cultural imaginary in the early 1970s. There was a broaderer cultural turn to Jesus at the time — think Jesus Christ Superstar and the Doobie Brothers. But he also rose high in the hearts of the Jesus People, aka the Jesus Freaks, who found their “one way” to the Savior from within the druggy occult youth scene of the late 60s. Later in this post you will find a lecture I recently gave on the “psychedelic Jesus of the counterculture” at Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions, where I had the honor to be a scholar in residence this fall. But before we get to that, I thought I would reflect on some of the personal lore that lies behind my long-standing fascination with this figure and the scruffy street Christians who followed him: my own brief teenage sojourn, during the spring of 1983, as a born-again Christian, SoCal-style.

Where to begin? A number of years ago I was gathered around a table with friends, including two other Californian males roughly my age (I am now pushing 60). A question came up: When was the weirdest time of your life? All three of us immediately answered: “when I was 14 years old”. Why the coincidence? My personal bet is that the permissive subcultural milieu of California in its post-hippie heyday provided just the right fuel to supercharge the liminal headspace of mid-puberty. Reflecting on my own experience, 14 seemed to mark a time when the mind, anxiously and greedily opening up to adult desires and concerns, was still high on the pixie dust residues of the preteen myth-mind. It made for a time of sullen magic.

Drugs didn’t help (but they didn’t hurt either). I started eating acid on Halloween in 1980, when I was 13, tripping out to “Careful with that Axe, Eugene” in the colorfully festooned loft that Bry-Fry had built in his family’s garage. By sophomore year, me and my gang of half-throwback freaks were cooking along with shrooms, windowpane, and the excellent cannabis products our position on the globe — coastal San Diego County, aka “North County” — afforded us in the early 1980s. My friends and I absorbed counterculture lore, mostly through books and records and VHS tapes of Performance and 200 Motels. But we also had direct encounters with wandering hippie monks and Zen guys and a former est leader who taught “Epistemics” at our high school, Torrey Pines High, which was also Tony Hawk’s alma mater. We caught rides to UCSD to see Ram Dass and to the Siddha Yoga Center down in Kensington, where we would toke up in the car before chanting “Hare Krishna” for hours.

At 14 I was reading stuff like Castaneda, Lovecraft, Hunter S. Thompson, Dune, and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. I started meditating as well, boosting the gain with resin hits, and discovering humanity’s infinite capacity to entrance itself. A particularly excruciating trance accelerant was my phantasmagoric and unrequited crush on Barbara Zinke, a girl I took for a budding white witch. Into this heady, horny mix came various occult attractions — I Ching, Tarot, astral travel, and Crowleyan magick, at least fantasized via John Symonds’ scandalous biography. One summer a few of us, including the crush, got our hands on a mimeographed spiral-bound Book of Shadows, and were soon drawing down the moon.

I had a number of anomalous experiences in those years, including creepy lucid dreams, an old hag on my bed, a doppelganger in my mirror, a cosmic lovebomb from Ram Dass, and a galactic download from a mystical satellite signal that popped into my head the same year, I would later learn, that Philip K. Dick died. These visionary intrusions were of a piece with the pockets of the mystical marvelverse my friends and I stumbled into as we wandered tripping through Del Mar, a coastal suburbia that, blessedly, was dotted with arroyos, funky culverts, beach access, 7-11s, and amusing surfer keggers.

In the fall of 1982, having turned 15 and in junior year, things twisted towards the dark, at least in my head. I took a course in Comparative Literature from the wonderful Dee Frank, who let me choose most of the books I read. I started out staring at the void with Sartre before moving on to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (in the classic 1958 Leclerq translation), which helped demonize my abiding horniness. Then I consumed two books I still really love, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Mann’s Doctor Faustus, both of which happen to feature Satan. I grew more grim and isolated, certainly from my family, and sometimes had lucid nightmares and dark hypnagogic encounters. Though I didn’t get into any real-world trouble, I was sinking into something more twisted than depression. I wrote fetid Dungeons & Dragons poetry, listened to tons of Van der Graaf Generator, and became obsessed with the idea of “sophisticated evil.” (Don’t ask.) I crowned the semester with a Christmastime reading of Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, which got me obsessed with Judas, a rebel figure I had first fallen for years earlier during repeated listenings of my Mom’s scratchy copy of Jesus Christ Superstar. My mind was even clearer now, I thought, and I became convinced that Judas’ betrayal was the key to Christ’s cosmic passion.

My family was not Christian. Jesus was on my mind because of another consequential class I took that fall: typing. It was consequential not because I learned something that’s still actually useful, which is true, but because of the two dudes I sat behind as we ratta-tat-tapped our way through the drills. One guy was a chunky blond surfer and the other a semi-feral metalhead with a mullet. They weren’t particularly smart, but they were friendly and talkative. They also happened to be newly born-again Christians, and hot to spread the news. I grilled them about their faith, a well-established habit of mine since junior high, and they eventually invited me to a Bible study that took place Friday nights in a house in the Del Mar highlands near the interstate.

I don’t recall the order of events now, but somehow between the invitation, my peculiar headspace, and my reading and writing, something shifted. I didn’t have a come-to-Jesus moment, but something more like a melty mutation over a number of weeks. I started to attend the Bible study gatherings, which took place in the living room of a small tract home with beige wall-to-wall carpeting, which was usually packed with a dozen or so teenage souls. Our exegete was a young man with shaggy hair and an impressive command of scripture, which he strung together in the loosely Pentecostal and fundamentalist style favored by many otherwise informal SoCal evangelicals of the era. Michael offered compelling readings whose content I recall much less than his passionate, commanding, but laid-back style. If you have ever listened to David Koresh preach in one of his less apocalyptic moods, and you’d have a decent sense of Michael’s charismatic blend of scriptural citation and dude-sprache.

My favorite relic of those months is a version of the King James Bible I picked up at a Christian bookstore at a strip mall near the coast. The store, which I visited a number of times and was more important to me than any particular church, was one of the many nondenominational Christian shops that popped up in the 1980s, paralleling the New Age stores of the era with their spiritual lifestyle blend of books, cassette tapes, bumper stickers, statues, jewelry, and inspirational wall art.

The Bible in question, which I still own, was a more old-school affair: a faux-leather-bound copy of the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible. On its thin scritta pages, the 17th-century King James prose was copiously, almost talmudically broken down with over 35,000 notes and commentaries crammed into side columns and myriad appendixes. Its author was one Finis J. Dake, a Pentecostal evangelist from Missouri who, after violating the Mann Act in 1937, became the first Pentecostal to publish a scriptural reference work on anywhere near this scale. Imagine a listaholic fusion of Jack Chick and Charles Kinbote, the deranged literary critic who animates Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and you would not be far off. Here, for example, are some facts about angels tucked into Dake’s notes on Psalms:

They need no rest (Rev. 4:8); can eat food (Gen. 18:8; 19:3; Ps. 78:25); appear visible and invisible (Num. 22:22-35; Jn. 20:12; Heb. 13:2); operate in the material realms (Gen. 18-19; 22:11; 2 Sam. 24; 2 Ki. 19:35; Acts 1; 12); travel at inconceivable speed (Ez. 1; Rev. 8:13; 9:1); ascend and descend (Gen. 28:12; Jn. 1:51); speak languages (1 Cor. 13:1); and can do anything man can do, including sin.

Dake’s interpretations today are largely considered “personal,” aka wacky, with fanciful Aramaic etymologies and Clarence Larkin-style dispensationalist illustrations. At the time I thought I had fallen in love with the Word, but I think what I really fell for was obsessive hermeneutics — the kind of conspiratorial intertextual “readings” that would later make a Pynchon and Illuminatus! fan out of me. The doctrine of Biblical inerrancy I imbibed did strain credulity, but its literalism also made for some wonderfully phantasmic bedfellows — angels that eat food and travel at inconceivable speeds, just like UFOs.

A number of years later, I took an English seminar at Yale called The Bible as Literature, which was taught by Leslie Brisman, a wonderful teacher and a student of both Harold Bloom and an orthodox yeshiva. It was a profoundly influential and engaging experience. One day in class we were discussing the King of Tyre, who appears in Ezekiel 28, and I said, “That’s Satan.” Brisman gave me a quizzical, intimate look, as if we had discovered we might share the same great-aunt. “How did you know that?” Thank you, Finis Dake.

As a high school born-again, I did not exactly conform to the mold. I didn’t like the groupthink vibe at the nondenominational church the Bible study kids attended, nor did I get baptized, which I was tempted to do, my parents having kept me heathen as a babe. Though I stopped taking drugs, I didn’t cut my hair and still hung out with my stoner pals, to whom I learned not to witness too heavily. In some ways I approached my new faith as a head. I had some trippy visions, which I took very seriously, though I feared one of them may have been the satanic simulacra that Paul warns about in 2 Corinthians. I slipped into tongues a few times, and had something devilish shaken out of me one Friday evening after lapsing into what I would now identify as a spontaneous kriya. In other words, I remained a seeker, up for peak experiences, kinda solo, and fascinated with resonating signs and wonders.

I did worry about demons, too, having spent so much imaginal time with them the previous fall. But as the months rolled by and my brain remained sharp, I grew tired of the widespread Christian fetish in those years for demonizing popular culture. Though I bought records by Phil Keaggy and a few other Christian acts, I kept listening to secular rock and prog because it was just way better. I remember chatting about Peter Gabriel with one of my brethren, and he promptly condemned the artist’s “Shock the Monkey” video for its demonic African paganism. I understood the concern, but he still sounded like an idiot.

Cracks like this continued to grow, and the inevitable contradictions inherent in the literalist approach — like trying to square the two creation stories crammed into Genesis — left me more bemused than believing. I was trying to stay in the groove, to not “backslide,” but the writing was on the wall. That June I turned 16, which meant a driver’s license and, finally, a girlfriend. By the end of the summer, I was eating blotter and dancing to the Dead.

Over the decades, as my own path splintered and mended itself into a California crazy quilt I can’t even map anymore, I never quite lost that JC-shaped hole in my heart. These days I continue to read scripture, apocryphal and otherwise, and find sustenance and imaginal challenge in esoteric, literary, and radical sides of the faith, from the atheist Christianity of Žižek to the poetry of George Herbert and Thomas Vaughan to the Orthodox doctrines of theosis. I also study Christian history when I can, fascinated if regularly repelled by cranky old cenobites and creepy new nationalists. And I continue to research the Jesus People, those scruffy street Christians who first emerged among druggy hippies in California before exploding into national prominence.

Part of my attraction to the Jesus People is personal, as if immersing myself in these moldy subcultural vibes allows me to catch a lingering whiff of the sweet enigma of my own born-again experience, which also took place after a teenage plunge into LSD and the occult. It’s not the theology that draws me, but the earnest charm, and then only at one remove. As their “underground” newspapers show, Jesus People discourse is mostly strident, predictable, and naive. But when they picked up electric guitars, things could get beautiful and heavy. There is an impressive amount of amateur Christian rock and folk from the Jesus People days, mostly appearing on private-press LPs, most of which are as medicore as they are rare. But there is gold in them thar hills. Years ago I started collecting the stuff, both reissues and originals. At first I favored gnarly psych monsters by groups like Fraction, Agape, Azitis, and the Exkursions. But I developed a taste for some of the schmaltz as well, crunchy folk-rock praise songs and bittersweet ballads whose artless sincerity can, in this outsider’s heart anyway, serve up the most singular of feels.

Jesus People are also fun to think about. As a student of wayward postwar religiosity, I am fascinated by the anomalous role that these hirsute converts play in counterculture history and memory. Should they be seen as just another variation of the novel spiritualities that bloomed following the psychedelic youthquake of the late 60s? Or, as the Jesus People themselves liked to think, did they represent a total backlash against stuff like gurus, Zen, paganism, and the human potential movement? Things are just as unclear on the Christian side. Were the Jesus People just another American revival movement, or did their hippie origins introduce something new and radical? Historians of American Christianity still debate the significance of the movement, some seeing it as a flash in the pan, and others arguing that we don’t get blue jeans and acoustic guitars at suburban mega-churches without it. You certainly don’t get Bob Dylan’s great gospel period without it. And I am pretty sure you don’t get born-again surfer Bible study groups in Del Mar without it.

As mentioned above, this October I found myself at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions as a visiting scholar. The CSWR, which runs a lot of excellent public programs and has a terrific mailing list, has been exploring psychedelic humanities of late. I decided to focus my research time there on a very particular question: how do we understand the role that psychedelics played in the Jesus People movement and particularly in people’s conversions, which sometimes involved LSD? How was that influence narrated, and repressed, and paradoxically acknowledged? I took full advantage of Harvard’s libraries, turning up a number of rare books and scholarly studies, including David Di Sabatino’s scarce and excellent annotated bibliography The Jesus People Movement, which also includes an extensive guide to the music of the era. The following lecture is the result of that research.

Upcoming Events

• The Phurst Church of Phun

For this month’s Chalice, which will take place at the Berkeley Alembic on Wednesday, Jan 7, at 7pm, we will be welcoming Johnny Dwork, a multimedia artist, Oregon psilocybin guide, and renowned producer of psychedelic music and art festivals. In 1984, the legendary Merry Prankster Wavy Gravy ordained Johnny as The Rabbi of the Phurst Church of Phun, an underground society of comics and clowns that first emerged from the protest movements of the 1960s. Through a wide variety of theatrical and comedic modalities, Johnny has since helped thousands of people embrace good-hearted humor as a vehicle for health, healing, and more playful approaches to psychedelic experience. Johnny and the full Chalice crew will discuss sacred foolery, mystical mirth, and the role of clowning in activism, as seen recently in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. In the second half of the evening, initiations into the Phurst Church of Phun will be on offer. Click here to attend in person; alternative for online only (which will only feature the first-half discussion).

• The Occult Internet

Things are getting weird online. Beyond fake news, AI slop, and social media madness, our digital ecosystem seems to be eroding reality itself: tech bros believe we live in a simulation, people debate false memories known as “Mandela effects,” young people are “reality shifting” between different dimensions. To help break it down, join me at the Alembic to hear Internet scholar Shira Chess discuss her new book, The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. Shira tracks a lot of the weirdness to the 1990s, when many of the people shaping early Internet culture were also hacking reality, practicing Technopaganism, and engaging in other forms of alternative spiritualities that intersected with emerging technologies. For the book, Chess interviewed a hodgepodge of characters who were influential at the dawn of the commercial internet, including me. Her conclusion: it’s kinda our fault. Joining Chess for the evening will be a panel of OG techheads including myself, Paco Nathan (Machine Learning, AI expert and editor of the great FringeWare Review), Mark Pesce (Co-inventor of VRML, futurist, and host of the podcast The Next One Billion Seconds), and R.U. Sirius (Editor of Mondo 2000, Reality Hackers, and High Frontiers). In-person link; online-only link.

• The White Whale

Since embarking on Moby-Dick for the third time, I have found wakes of the white whale everywhere: mentions in the manosphere, by the integral wizard Layman Pascal, even on Ross Douthat. If you have yet to make the voyage, or want a return to the maelstrom, please consider joining me and Weird Studies co-founder J.F. Martel for our six-week class devoted to Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. Prophetic, mystical, and unhinged, the novel is a book of riddles and mysteries, a secular scripture that wrestles with myth, modernity, the dangerous project of America, and the gnostic (and weird) dimensions of reality. J.F. and I love this book, and as we bring it into conversation with religion, philosophy, esotericism, and natural history, we have no doubt that the Whale will speak to us all. Class meets twice a week — a lecture slot where J.F. and I riff and roll, and an office hours session for discussion. For more info, follow this link, which gives Burning Shore readers a 10% discount.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers. If you would like to show support, the best thing is to subscribe and to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Empathy, again, is a slippery term. It’s also, depending on how you slice it, a new-fangled one. While concepts that resemble empathy have been around for centuries — in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam “Invisible Hand” Smith characterizes “sympathy” as a powerful form of fellow-feeling compounded of affect, imagination, and thought — the word itself did not enter English until 1908, when, according to the science historian Susan Lanzoni, it was used to translate a concept from German experimental psychology. Empathy did not take on its social connotations until after World War II, when psychiatrists began to study its interpersonal dynamics and social reformers began to deploy it in hopes of building a better world. Today, it’s often unclear whether people are talking about an ethical value, or a kind of emotional clairvoyance, or a conceptual skill that can be trained — or hacked. The social psychologist C. Daniel Batson, who has been studying empathy forever, claims that the word can now refer to at least eight different distinct concepts, including knowing another’s thoughts and feelings, or imagining same, or actually feeling what another is feeling.

I suspect these slippery definitions reflect the ultimately boundary-less relations between self and other. In any case, many folks over the years have attempted to get a handle on things by contrasting empathy with its near relatives, like compassion or kindness or sympathy. Indeed, one of the best ways to understand what’s freaking out the right-wing Christians is to recall an analogy that often pops up on their blogs and podcasts, and which is intended to contrast (bad) empathy and (good) sympathy. Say you are strolling along and, hearing a cry for help, discover a person drowning in quicksand or a raging river. The sympathetic person senses the terror of the victim’s plight, but keeps her feet on solid ground as she throws the struggling person a rope. The empathic person just jumps in. As Stuckey puts it, “empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person.” Instead of such dangerous comminglings, the Christian should stick to solid ground of Biblical truth, which allows them to resist the sloppy soup of sentiment and get behind real solutions — solutions that currently seem to involve cruelty, terror, xenophobia, economic idiocy, and the nasty-ass trampling of American norms and legal procedures.

What’s interesting about this analogy, which is kinda creepy but not without merit, is that it redoubles its critique with the figurative language it uses. It is not simply that empathy is stupid, and cannot see that the best way to help the victim is to stand your own ground and not let him, a la Dylan, “get you down in the hole that he’s in.” It is also that empathy is already a kind of metaphoric drowning, a self-subverting process of losing touch and perspective, of being “in another’s feelings,” and thereby submerged in the chaotic flows of emotion. The ground here is something like judgement, whose analytic distance allows us, while sensing some of the victim’s pain, to maintain critical distance from the reasons and choices that sucked them into the soup in the first place. Reactionary psychology, remember, is all about affirming and even fetishizing boundaries, whether those define traditional gender roles, or the limits of individual responsibility, or the border walls that keep Them out, from our country and from our individual souls.

In contrast, empathy has always suggested a kind of porousness or even fusion, a potentially overwhelming loss of distinction between self and other, a merging more compulsive than compassion or even love. Brought up to a global scale, this capacity to transcend differences and experience something like “oneness” does suggest, for some, a significant role for empathy in a future world defined by resource wars, refugees, and climate crisis. In his 2009 book The Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin called for a leap toward “global empathic consciousness” — the kind of demand that, for paranoid Bible thumpers, sounds like pure Antichrist cant.

Conservative Christians are hardly alone in their concerns however. Lanzoni reminds us that the German playwright Bertolt Brecht specifically designed his alienation effect to interrupt the spectator’s dangerous (and potentially fascist) emotional identification with the actor or character onstage. More recently, the psychology professor Paul Bloom offered an influential critique of empathy using the kind of rationalist ethics that later become associated with effective altruism. Reflecting on the global obsession with the victims of dramatic accidents — like the three-year-old Kathy Fiscus, who fell into a well in San Marino, California in 1949 and riveted the world — Bloom explained that empathy is “parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate.” The later term is particularly important. The magnetic force of a single little girl in a well can easily win the war of attention over, say, whole cities full of cholera victims. Empathy dives in, but it also doesn’t think straight.

Poor Kathy Fiscus did not get out of the well alive, but nor can we extricate her plight from its technological context: the mid-century emergence of television news networks and the corresponding uptick in the “mediated immediacy” of affect on a global scale. In this sense, it’s no accident that empathy gained its contemporary interpersonal meaning only following World War II, amidst a communications environment defined by TV, satellites, transistor radios, and improved electronic audio. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan’s whole theory of the global village can be seen as a way to account for the new affective and emotionally resonant dimension of media. As he wrote in Understanding Media, “The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy, and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology.”

The information technologies that have appeared over the last century and a half are not just content engines; they are also distribution networks for infectious, partly subliminal, and sometimes deeply manipulated feelings. Different media can be characterized by the variable feelings they inspire, with radio in particular becoming a source of concern in the pre-digital era. In his discussion of radio, McLuhan quoted Hitler from a 1936 broadcast: “I go my way with the assurance of a somnambulist.” Or consider the more recent example of right-wing talk radio, an analog foretaste of today’s social media swill. Regardless of the words that spilled from the gullets of Michael Savage or Rush Limbaugh, or even the evident coordination of that apparently spontaneous talk with broader Republican talking points, these shows mattered most by engendering and feeding sentiments — potent political fuel like outrage, resentment, anger, and fear. One might be consciously listening to discourse, but the sonic enunciations that carried the words, intimately slipped into your car via the additional carrier wave of radio, pushed and pulled one’s whole affective body.

Today the immediacy of some analog media has been wedded to the monstrous mega-machine of digital manipulation, with its combined powers of tracking, profiling, memetic engineering, and algorithmic control. With the emergence of surveillance capitalism, social media, and refined affective technologies, we have reached a point where feelings are not just targeted by political messaging, but subconsciously manipulated alongside flows of information. Affect in our environment is not just politicized but explicitly polarized. In his excellent MindWar newsletter, Jim Stewartson just wrote about a new Science study that confirms what many had already suspected. Researchers made hidden tweaks to social media feeds in order to increase inflammatory and antidemocratic partisan content, subtle shifts in the info flow that not only increased political polarization among those poor souls still chained to the feeds, but did so without their conscious recognition. “Most participants reported that they did not notice a change to their environment — but the change in their affective polarization was measurable to the outside world. This means the subject’s psychology was being altered involuntarily.”

That’s what makes the 2025 right-wing assault on empathy so significant (and, my gut would like to add, seemingly coordinated). To use Stewartson’s language, empathy has been identified as an “attack surface” for progressive information flows. Rather than combat the sob story signals themselves, either with counter-arguments or offsetting emotions, the anti-empathy campaign targets the receiving template of emotions themselves. A highly sensitive, immediate, and reactive mode of feeling is being reframed as essentially toxic, or deceptive, or even “artificial” — like fake news sent from the storehouse of sentiment.

Remember that Stuckey’s book is directed, not against the libs, but towards conservatives, and especially the women who make up the vast bulk of her fandom. A lot of these people do not enjoy the gloating cruelties of the right-wing manosphere, and are just trying to be good in a confusing fucked-up world. For that reason, it’s important to get Christians to gird their emotional loins, to renew their faith in a patriarchal order that sometimes must, following the logic of corporal punishment so beloved of conservative Christians, bring down the harsh but “loving” lash. But you can see where this goes. As one Christian commentator explained, Joe Rigney’s “sin of empathy” rhetoric has been taken up by others who argue that Christians should “harden our hearts” or even “properly hate.”

Let’s be honest: all mainstream political media exploits affect. Hollywood and corporate liberal news often treat empathy like a cash cow, especially when the sufferings of the downtrodden are involved. Recall the family separation policy that served as the first Trump administration’s punchy trailer for our current immigration crackdown blockbuster. Here was a whole border full of kids getting thrown into wells. Once outlets like MSNBC got their teeth into that ragged plush toy, they ripped and tugged and did not let go. I remember a few Bay Area encounters with casual acquaintances in those months, when, out of nowhere, the conversation would abruptly shift to the horrors at a border crossing five hundred or a thousand miles away. It felt like an unspoken request or comradely offer to chow down on mutual feelings of outrage, shame, and pity. I have a largely “progressive” and multicultural set of sympathies myself, and, in an old-school conservative way, remain loyal to them, despite a variety of qualms. But I found that move memorably weird, like the conversation had been invaded by flying ActBlue spam.

We need someone to write a Theory of Cyborg Sentiments. But until then, we still have Philip K. Dick. I am just finishing up a course at the Berkeley Alembic on Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which will be repackaged as an online course over at the Weirdosphere next year). Most folks know the book as the source text for Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, where the Voight-Kampff test is used to measure the empathic responses in individuals suspected of being replicants (androids, in the novel). As in the book, the test measures unconscious physiological responses (or the lack thereof), and the questions revolve largely around cruelty to animals.

The elaborate Voight-Kampff gear partly reflects Dick’s abiding fascination with the tests that overpopulate psychology, a few of which do measure something like empathy. The Affective Picture System, still in use, deploys emotionally disturbing images to measure emotional responses, also on an unconscious, physiological level like pupil dilation and speed of reaction. In the 1950s, Susan Lanzoni reports, an “empathy index” was developed to determine whether or not a patient was schizophrenic. But unlike Blade Runner, it was the shrinks who answered the questions; if they were not able to imagine feeling or behaving in the strange ways that the patient reported, this suggested that the patient was indeed schizo — in other words, beyond the circle of empathy.

This sounds a bit like Philip K. Dick, who also associated schizoid types with coldness and an inability to share a world, or koinos kosmos, with others. In Androids, Dick suggests that empathy is the essence of the “truly human,” a thesis he pursued, in a sometimes contradictory way, through a number of novels, short stories, and essays. In Clans of the Alphane Moon, the telepathic Ganymedean slime mold Lord Running Clam is described as having caritas. As the character Joan explains, caritas is the crucial term in Paul’s famous encomium to love in 1 Corinthians 13, whose modern form she suggests is empathy. “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have caritas, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Androids, and AI chatbots, and today’s toxic Christian influencers, are nothing but clanging cymbals, just metallic noise and fury, signifying nothing.

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In Androids, Dick offers a quasi-biological account of empathy, arguing that it only exists within the human community. “Intelligence,” on the other hand, “to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order, including the arachnida.” Given today’s explosion of machine intelligence, these are words to the wise, but what makes them actually interesting are all the ways that Dick’s characters and narratives, in Androids and elsewhere, not to mention Blade Runner itself, challenge and complicate the simplistic contrast between cold technology and the human heart. Blade Runner, of course, is beautifully crafted to direct our empathy towards the replicants, especially Rutger Hauer’s remarkable portrayal of Roy Batty, even as the Director’s Cut lead us to suspect that the bounty hunter Rick Deckard is himself a replicant. Though Dick’s novel is more consistent in its distrust of android psychology, its emotional tugs and especially erotic bonds erode ethical and ontological boundaries almost as thoroughly as the film.

But Blade Runner does not include the most bizarre “affective technology” in Do Androids Dream: the empathy box, a device that allows users to emotionally and psychologically fuse with a televised Christ-like old man named Wilbur Mercer. First appearing in the short story “The Little Black Box,” which was published in Astounding in 1964, the empathy box is a kind of gaming controller attached to a TV. Grabbing the handles allows acolytes to merge with Mercer’s Sisyphean climb up a bare hillside, where he is pelted by rocks, before dying and sinking into the tomb world, only to rise again. But the box also allows users to commune with all the other humans tuning in, merging with their murmurs, sharing their joys and pains. If the Voight-Kampff test is a riff on psychology, the empathy box is a riff on the affective contagion that modern media makes possible, and the inevitable collision of those global village vibes with religion, the quest for community, and the sometimes brutal work of drawing boundaries.

It is also a riff about telepathy. It is hardly accidental that Lord Running Clam is a telepath, though it’s also important that he is no saint. (Neither was Paul, exactly.) In “The Little Black Box,” one character proclaims that telepathy and empathy are actually two versions of the same thing. Suddenly Allie Beth Stuckey’s claim that empathy means “to be in the feelings of another person” takes on a rounder, more magical resonance. Dick, then, is arguing that one of the defining features of human beings is a paranormal or even posthuman capacity to overcome the boundaries that separate us, to participate, at least for a time, in a corporate body of shared suffering. Here I cannot help recalling Deanna Troi, ship’s counselor on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Played by Marina Sirtis with a strange mix of New Age sensitivity and sexy gravitas, Troi is the hybrid child of a human and a Betazoid, a telepathic race whose powers are muted by her human DNA, making her, instead, an “empath.”

There is much more to say about the telepathic televised religion of Mercerism than I have room for here. But it will surprise few to hear that Dick’s portrayal is deeply ambivalent. We see the value that empathic communion has for characters in the novel, and that their practice of shared suffering is not masochistic but deeply devotional and humanistic.

At the end of the novel, Mercer is exposed by a rival TV talk show host as a hoax, an alcoholic actor filmed beneath a painted sky. But in a sense, this revelation only increases the religious pathos of the situation, a pathos that inspires communion rather than the mockery, condemnation, and terrible spite that saturate our media today. And please remember that Dick was four years into his conversion when he wrote Androids, and that he never stopped considering himself a Christian. Indeed, Dick is as much of a “Christian writer” as J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, and his portrayal of empathy/caritas lies at the suffering heart of his faith. Even if his worlds always fall apart, are riven by human conflict and ontological rupture, there is also something extra and uncontrollable, something that, as William James put it, “always escapes.” I have already spoiled enough of this fine novel, but at the end of Androids, the essential excess of reality takes the form of a quasi-divine intervention — a temporary but pivotal escape from the cynical circuit of toxic media that, for now, remains our sorry lot.

Upcoming Events

• The Chalice, the monthly psychedelic salon I co-host at the Berkeley Alembic, continues to attract a devoted crowd. This Wednesday, December 3, at 7pm, I will grab the mic to discuss Freaky Jesus. I spent October at the Harvard Divinity School and I want to share some fresh research diggings I made into the psychedelic side of the Jesus People, the so-called “Jesus Freaks” who emerged from the counterculture in the late 1960s and went on to transform American Christianity. Though most Jesus People rejected the drug culture that birthed them, psychedelics not only sparked many a conversion trip, but continued to shape the vibe of the movement. We’ll listen to some obscure Christian acid rock, and check out the visionary art of Rick Griffin, a titan of Haight Street rock posters whose 1970 conversion to Christianity produced a slate of images that scramble faith, popular illustration, and underground culture. At a moment when even conservative Christians are turning to ibogaine and shrooms to heal their wounds, it’s time to meet the OG psychedelic Jesus. Link.

• Though hardly a household name, the California-based filmmaker and painter Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was one of the greatest spiritual artists of the postwar era. If you were lucky, you caught the recent Belson symposium at San Francisco’s Gray Area, an astounding gathering that combined lectures, screenings, performances, and reminiscences. But if you missed it, you can always zoom into The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson, an online gathering hosted this Saturday, December 6, at noon PST, by Psychedelic Sangha. I will be gathering with friends and comrades, including Psychedelic Sangha’s Doc Kelley, curator and Belson scholar Raymond Foye, and legendary alchemical poet Charles Stein. We’ll stream two mesmerizing Belson shorts — Mandala (1953) and Samadhi (1967) — do some contemplating, and together explore Belson’s unique and transformative ability to braid together inner and outer space. Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey; in terms of cosmic cinema, this is The Shit.

• I suspect many of you are fans of the Weird Studies podcast and its two hosts, J.F. Martel and Phil Ford. The podcast has also bloomed into a teaching platform, the Weirdosphere, and I am pleased as brine to announce that, this January, J.F. and I will begin co-teaching a six-week class devoted to Herman Melville’s 1853 novel Moby-Dick. Prophetic, mystical, and unhinged, the novel is a book of riddles and mysteries, a secular scripture that wrestles with myth, modernity, the dangerous project of America, and the gnostic (and weird) dimensions of reality. J.F. and I love this book, and as we bring it into conversation with religion, philosophy, esotericism, and natural history, we have no doubt that the Whale will speak to us all. Class meets twice a week — a lecture slot where J.F. and I riff and roll, and an office hours session for discussion. For more info, follow this link, which gives Burning Shore readers a 10% discount.

'Tis the Season

Yule is a time of giving, which includes spreading some philanthropy around. This season, I urge you to consider throwing some of that love towards Sacred Succulents, a small family-run organization in Northern California headed up by the brilliant and passionate plant-man Ben Kamm. I have known Ben for decades, and shared with him a love of cacti and California, of the Andes (he is a world-class expert on Andean flora), and of psychoactive fantasy literature, especially the work of John Crowley. Ben, in fact, was instrumental in bringing the recent 40th anniversary edition of Little, Big to fruition.

Sacred Succulents is, without doubt, the premier nursery for Trichocereus cactus offerings in North America. But the outfit is also dedicated to the preservation of ethnobotanical knowledge and rare and endangered plants. Ben is a fiercely DIY guy, and I am amazed at his independent efforts to sustain his mail-order nursery, public-access seed bank, and research gardens, which have provided scores of rare plants and seeds to big-name places like the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and the Huntington Botanical Gardens. But Ben’s nursery and gardens now need some serious renovation work. In the immortal words of the Lorax, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better — it’s not.”

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As we near War between the States levels of polarization in this God-haunted land, it is important to remember that demonization does not simply refer to the extreme othering of one’s political, ethnic, or cultural opponents. It also means the literal identification of evil supernatural forces at foot, either indirectly, by way of lies and deceit, or through overt domination and puppet mastery. Consider the apt word “Manichean,” which commentators on both the left and right increasingly use to describe today’s splintering discursive battles. The term comes from the third century prophet Mani, who wowed the world of late Antiquity with the old Zoroastrian vision of the cosmos as a perpetual battleground between irreconcilable forces of light and darkness. And while Christianity eventually beat out this one-time rival with a technically less dualist theology, the Manichean rumble in the jungle is always lurking just below the surface of the Christian imagination.

Some contemporary Christians call it “spiritual warfare.” Such battles sometimes take place on an individual level, like the office or the local elementary school, but they are also waged on the wider stage of cultural institutions, public discourse, and politics. Demonizing on that scale can lend an apocalyptic urgency to collective action, a feverish dreamlike ferocity. It also makes dehumanizing your enemies easy — their rights and privileges, even their “common decency” as human beings, can be ignored because they, or rather we, are simply sock-puppets of the real Enemy, who can and must be hated without a shred of countervailing empathy. We can be pitied, but still hated. Indeed, I suspect that the dynamics of spiritual warfare provide much of the secret sauce for Trump and MAGA’s surrealpolitik program of outrageous exaggeration, conspiratorial lies, and feverish contempt. Start tussling with demons, and everything gets turned up to 11.

Shit gets infectious too. As the mediation of consensus reality shatters into a funhouse mirror horror show, worldviews formally pitched too far from a basically rational pragmatism suddenly gain traction and explanatory power. Paranoia earns supernatural warrant, and balloons as the Armageddon horizon approaches. Despite the terrible irony of Peter Thiel’s own personal emulation of Antichrist behavior, his End Times warnings of late have been savvily timed. The Great Unraveling is upon us, and Christianity is back in black. This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Jesus, marching with the downtrodden hand in hand, but the dude with a sword, ripped AI muscles, and a Crusader cross. Church attendance is rising after decades of decline, even though a lot of MAGA Christians don’t bother much anymore. Gen Z dudes are going Orthobro, prophecy is booming, and all manner of spiritual warriors are girding their loins and loading their AR-15s. Everyone senses the collapse of the secular liberal order, and the loss of all certainties but apocalyptic ones.

Take Tucker Carlson, a secular blowhard who made a religious turn a year ago when he started talking about scripture and the demon who attacked him in bed. Recently this former Deadhead dropped a doozy: “The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast,” a podcast conversation with a callow Hollywood insider named Conrad Flynn. Flynn covers a lot of familiar Techgnosis territory — Marshall McLuhan, Jack Parsons, John Lilly, William Burroughs, AI occultism, transhumanism, Antichrist — so I had planned to take it all in and deconstruct the thing so that you didn’t have to. Reading the tea leaves and all.

But I’m sorry, I just couldn’t bring myself to add one more pair of ears to a shitstream currently clocking in at 2.6 million views on Youtube alone. Even just scanning the transcript made me feel woozy and sad. Flynn is one of those fools who knows just enough to get himself into trouble as he sloppily red-threads his way toward some revelation about occult elites conjuring a demonic AI Golem. Despite some good thoughts on AI, and his sometimes arcane knowledge (Grant’s Nightside of Eden, etc.), his vision adds up to little more than the sort of “Mark of the Beast” malarkey that illustrates the podcast — a trope that goes back to the early 1970s, when Flynn’s psychedelic Mom first went Christian. Start tracking demons, and your critical IQ heads south.

Don’t get me wrong. I kind of enjoy this stuff, and not just because Flynn’s mode of slapdash but ominous hermeneutics is itself a familiar part of occult thinking, like a crazy uncle who can still tell good stories. Strong conspiracies often function as twisted allegories of real conditions, and this very much applies to the sorcerous discourse of occult technologies. I was particularly taken with Flynn’s resurrection of John Lilly’s ketamine visions of a malevolent Solid State Intelligence taking over the universe — a 70s High Weirdness baddie now making a come-back through AI prompts and the myriad of k-holes that tunnel their way through Silicon Valley.

There’s another reason to track this sort of stuff, and even encourage it: the half-assed hope that techlord demonizing widens the fissure in MAGA between populist Christian paranoids and the Promethean transhumanists represented by Musk and other proto-cyborg superbrights. Tucker is one of the rightwing pundits leading this charge, along with Steve Bannon and Candace Owens, who recently announced that she believes that Musk, Thiel, and Sam Altman are “hybrids” rather than humans. “It’s something in the eyes,” she said, and I totally agree. “I’m like, I don’t know if I stabbed you if you bleed, you know? I’m not going to stab them, but I don’t know if they bleed all the way. I think a battery would fall out. You know what I mean? And I just get that sense. I’ve always known it was demonic.”

But maybe its just all those drugs that Musk and his battery-operated cronies are consuming. That said, the psychedelics that Flynn and Tucker inevitably discuss are not demonized as such. While the weirdness of ketamine and DMT are invoked, psychedelics are not framed as a demonic transhumanist plot to destroy Christian civilization, or to channel the legions of hell, or to confuse and conceive the minds of the young or the spiritually hungry. Instead, psychedelics are treated as truth-tellers, offering proof that there no shit is a spiritual world as real as this one, and that this other realm is inhabited by supernatural agents, including demons but also, just maybe, the angels of the Lord, if not Him Hisself.

Indeed one curious feature of today’s rightwing Christian demon discourse is the relative absence of anathemas proclaimed against psychedelics. Perhaps there is something here for us. As both commentators and activists have noted, the embrace of psychedelic healing has become one of the very few bipartisan issues in our schizoid land. This fragile consensus has been constructed most visibly by MAPS’ Rick Doblin, who for years has cultivated military interest in MDMA therapy both at home and abroad. But the consensus also represents the organic demand from conservatives and particularly veterans — many of whom are serious Christians, natch — to get in on those potent healing powers, including far heavier ones than molly.

Given the horrible rates of suicide and PTSD among soldiers, groups like Heroic Hearts, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, and the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition are demanding widespread access to psychedelic therapy. Earlier this year, the Texas governor Greg Abbott, no friend of plant medicine hippies, shepherded a bill supporting research into ibogaine, a bitter root used by decidedly pagan West African wizards that has become the clear market favorite for messed up vets turning to the underground or overseas providers. The official military deployment of psychedelic healing is hardly without controversy. Those of us who grew up associating Ecstasy with PLUR quaver at the prospect of active-duty soldiers getting their heads straight with MDMA before returning to the killing fields, a therapeutic protocol that is currently being studied in a DOD-funded clinical trial. Nonetheless, this military psychedelic turn has created a significant wobble in American Christianity’s demonization force field.

Let’s pause and consider how extraordinary this is. For the last year or so, I have been studying the history of the Jesus Freaks, those hippies who found the Lord in droves in the early 1970s, many through psychedelic experiences both harrowing and divine. In those fractured days, when political polarization was also running high, both conservative Christians and the longhaired converts viewed LSD and other psychedelics as instruments of satanic deception on a par with Tarot cards, yogic samadhis, and witchcraft orgies. There are also deep historical reasons for demonizing psychedelics this way. Indeed, the rhetoric of Nixon’s Drug War that was emerging at the time, as well as Harry Anslinger’s earlier reefer madness attack on cannabis, can be laid at the feet of the Spanish Catholic suppression of psychedelic use among the colonized Indians of Central and South America. Substances like cohoba snuffs, peyote, teonanacatl (Psilocybe mushrooms), and ololiuhqui (morning glory seeds) were all, literally, demonized.

That said, there is nothing necessarily demonic or anti-Christian about psychedelics then or now. Before the hippies injected massive doses of pop occultism into postwar psychedelia, a number of significant figures gave a Christian spin on the new alchemy. Captain Al Hubbard was a staunch Catholic who became the Johnny Appleseed of LSD in the 1950s, turning on at least one monsignor and attributing his acid evangelism to an encounter with an angel. During the 1960s, the Boston area not only saw Walter Pahnke’s famous Good Friday Experiment at Marsh Chapel, with Howard Thurman delivering an Easter sermon through a loudspeaker to the trippers below, but also the modest but significant career of Lisa Bieberman, a brilliant and unsung psychonaut who worked to square LSD and Western religion, especially Quakerism. (Please read Bieberman’s crucial 1968 text Phanerothyme: A Western Approach to the Religious Use of Psychochemicals). Around the same time, the psychiatrist Bill Richards started collaborating with Stan Grof on psychedelic therapy at Spring Grove; decades later, Richards worked with Roland Griffiths to shape the game-changing research program at Johns Hopkins. As his book Sacred Knowledge makes clear, Richards has long brought a gentle but overt Christian sensibility to psychedelic healing, most notoriously through a widely-used trip playlist heavy on requiem masses and Bach. An Episcopal reverend with the excellent name of Hunt Priest, who went through the Johns Hopkins shroomin’ clergy study, was so inspired that he founded a pastoral psychedelic project called Ligare — and stuck with the org even when it got him into hot water with his diocese.

These days, a pro-psychedelic stance is emerging on the edge of mainstream American Christianity. Take, as an example, The Christian’s Guide to Psychedelics, a guidebook recently self-published by Wendi Rees, who records a podcast called Truth Talk whose tagline — Faith, Family, Freedom — probably clues us into her voting behavior. Occupying the Venn diagram between wellness and Christianity, deeply concerned with the traumas of childhood sexual abuse, Rees spends some of her book describing her own healing journey through the “Heart Protocol” (MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine) as well as later work with ibogaine, which, because of its popularity among vets and Texas legislators, may be on its way toward becoming the most Christian-coded of psychedelic substances. But Rees spends most of her book directly addressing Christians who are wary of being “deceived” by psychedelics. In his foreword to the book, Adam Marr, who promotes psychedelic healing for veterans, describes Rees’ project as a “powerful call to the Christian world to move beyond fear and stigma and into a higher discernment.”

Using lots of scripture, Rees makes the argument that plant medicines are part of God’s creation, and that there are both godly and ungodly ways of using them, just as there are with wine, sex, and music. Perhaps the most interesting Bible passage she cites is from the First Epistle to Timothy, a probably pseudo-Pauline letter addressed to church leaders at Ephesus:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. [4:1-5]

The passage starts out with some good ole Christian demonizing, with warnings about the latter days and devilish deceptions that should sound pretty familiar by now. It’s easy to imagine contemporary believers heeding this passage and putting psychedelics and proponents like Rees and Marr on the side of the Deceiver. But the text goes on to describe ascetic Christian teachers who condemn marriage and certain foods, presumably along the lines of those hard-ass hermits who began fleeing the cities for desert caves the following century. The author of First Timothy condemns these sour naysayers in turn for criticizing God’s creation, and for not recognizing that the practice of thanksgiving and prayer can help make such carnal enjoyments holy. Psychedelics are part of God’s plan for us, Rees insists — even the synthetic ones — and consuming them prayerfully, with a godly “set and setting,” makes all the difference.

Whether or not psychedelics become normalized among conservative Christian communities is not so much my interest. More power to them. What seems important is that believers like Rees and Marr are willing to turn and face the strange, to resist demonizing substances that can occasion weird ecstasies and sometimes ominous enchantments, but that can also afford authentic sacred encounters and much needed balm. And the reason they are willing to make that leap, to push back against Christianity’s deeply ingrained pattern of supernatural paranoia, is because they know that they and others are suffering. Trauma, PTSD, despair, and sexual abuse do not recognize political boundaries, and I would like to think that our shared vulnerability to such wounds demands a certain fellow feeling around healing, even for those across the aisle. Given the increasingly eschatological tenor of our times, and the willingness of so many right-wingers to literally demonize their fellow Americans, this smidgen of shared practice may not amount to much. But it’s not nuthin.

News and Events

So Do Androids Really Dream of Electric Sheep?

Last year, I had a blast diving into Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for a lecture series at the Berkeley Alembic (and later on the Weirdosphere). PKD hasn’t become any less resonant since then. So it’s on to another novel, which we will unpack at the Alembic over five Monday nights starting on November 3. For this round, we will read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), perhaps best known as the novel that formed the basis for the cult Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982). But that’s the least of the many reasons to read or reread this excellent novel.

The first lecture will lay out some of the major themes of the novel, which will be treated less as literature or science fiction than as a prophetic lens on today’s polycrisis, aspects of which resonate uncannily with Dick’s philosophical and visionary concerns. Subsequent weeks will combine close readings of the book with focused discussion sessions (only on-site participants will have access to the Q&A). Weekly readings will consist of roughly 50-page chunks, plus some optional secondary texts. We will explore: the vexed human relationship to both animals and humanoid machines; the pharmacological control of personality and emotion; the mechanization of empathy; the ontology of entropy; and the transformations of the Christ figure in an age of immersive social media.

Tickets are available for the full series ($150) or, for dabblers, single classes ($35). Here are the links for in-person and online. (Alembic just switched away from Eventbrite to Momence — let me know if you have any trouble!) Whether online or not, purchasers will receive access to the recordings of the lectures covered by their tickets. The recordings will be available for a few weeks.

The Amazing Disappearing Podcast Archive

I posted the last fresh episode of the Expanding Mind podcast all the way back in 2019 — a “summer pause” that proved perpetual. Folks still find their way to the archive, whether to follow me along on my weekly explorations or to dig up some of my more recherché guests. Last week one of these listeners informed me that he could no longer access the show. I’ve gotten emails like this before, and usually I can direct folks to the right file. This time, no dice. The links on techgnosis.com and Apple Podcasts were all dead. Luckily, Spotify was on the ball, and shows from March 2017 onward are still available there. But a couple hundred shows from earlier years, which had previous been accessible on Techgnosis, seemed to have disappeared. I hopped over to Podbean, which hosted the archive, and found no trace that the show had ever existed. I thought it was a Podbean problem, but their helpful support staff quickly identified the culprit: the Progressive Radio Network, who had unceremoniously pulled the plug.

Who, you might ask, is the Progressive Radio Network and why did they have the power to erase Expanding Mind? I started the podcast in 2009, when I was heading off to Houston to begin my PhD program at Rice. I knew I wasn’t going to have time to crank out my usual flow of reviews and essays, but the prospect of withdrawing from the culture critic game was, frankly, disturbing. Because I am a good talker, with experience interviewing both scholars and freaks, I figured the best way to keep stirring the soup was to record an esoteric “talk show.” I would co-host the show with my friend Maja D’Aoust, whose practical Angeleno witchery would, I hope, balance out my headier talk.

I wanted to do a radio show that would attract live call-ins, but in the end a more controlled Internet stream made the most sense. Still, I conceived Expanding Mind as a live show rather than a downloadable product, which is why I hooked up with PRN, an online “radio” network founded by Gary Null, the vitamin-slinging, proto-MAHA talk radio veteran who long held court at WBAI. I was not a fan of Null, though I ate his vitamin C formula for a spell. But I liked the NYC alt-radio vibe of the place, all the goofballs and rabble-rousers on the roster, and especially the fact that I recorded the show live on the stream, which made for some crazy snafus and stresses, but also animated the process like real radio. In a way, PRN was a “skeuomorph”—a hold-over from a previous media, in this case a terrestrial FM, that decorates a new medium for a time. But live was fun, and it was also easy as cake. Maja and I just got on our crackly phones, talked with a guest for a crisp hour, hustled toward the close, and called it a day. PRN handled the rest.

Though I got on well with the program director Jesse Funk, who left a few years ago and would probably not have dicked me over, PRN was always a bit of a janky outfit. Still, this month’s abrupt and thoughtless act of deletion, especially given such teensy files, was a surprise. — Guys, why didn’t you buzz me? My email address hasn’t even changed! — Those of you who know enough about Null to be repulsed by his AIDS denialism and vaccine skepticism might say I had it coming. Fair enough. PRN was definitely low-rent. When I got someone from the network on the phone earlier this week, he just hung up on me.

I must admit I was neither as angry nor gutted as you might expect. This is the modern Internet after all, a merciless and precarious environment where caprice and greed actively mangle public memory. It’s not the worse thing to be reminded that the cloud is just someone else’s computer. Moreover, I am also one of those humans who are not unmindful of the inky void of oblivion that is already swallowing up all our loves and works, which means I can go “philosophical” on data loss pretty quick.

Besides, I am no dummy. I made a couple backups of the archive many years ago, though I did so too late in the game to rescue some earlier shows. (The Alan Moore chat, I am afraid to say, appears to be gone for good.) Despite the rough sound, Expanding Mind remains a valuable exemplar of the Weirdosphere to come. For me, curating guests was a kind of mixed media, a collage of thought, vision, and weirdness whose juxtapositions, I like to think, were more charmed and capacious than most. Folks still use it, so I will make sure it abides. After I go through the hard discs, praying for no further degradation and maybe digging up some lost episodes, me and my team (Peggy and Roberto) will get the shows up on Youtube, back on Techgnosis.com, and maybe over to the Internet Archive. I am bummed about all the broken links out there, but hey, the material will still be available for the nerds and robots who care. That inky void’s just gonna have to wait a bit longer on this one.

Pearlsong

I first stumbled across the text I first knew as “Hymn of the Pearl” in a fat 1984 compendium of ancient texts edited by Willis Barnstone called The Other Bible. I bought this eye-opening volume, published by HarperCollins with New Age readers in mind, around 1985, after learning about Gnosticism through Harold Bloom and Philip K. Dick. I feasted on the hermetica it contained, the Nag Hammadi myths, the apocryphal gospels. But it was two rather anomalous texts that have most stayed with me — “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” and the “Hymn,” a short text, embedded in (some versions of) the larger Acts of Thomas, whose tale of spiritual forgetfulness and awakening is told with the narrative economy of a fairy tale. A prince from the East is sent to Egypt with the task of retrieving a pearl from a serpent. A stranger in a strange land, he then forgets his identity and mission until a missive from his parents rouses him from his slumber with its voice. He remembers himself and his mission, and then snatches the pearl with a spell. The same letter then guides his way home, where he is received with joy and honor, and dons a bejeweled robe that quivers all over with, as Barnstone had it, “the movements of gnosis.”

Because of the rather animated role that the letter plays in the story, I included the Hymn in Techgnosis, and returned to it decades later for High Weirdness. In close-reading the Exegesis, I discovered some fascinating ways that Dick leaned on the Hymn to grapple with his own visionary experiences and textual wake-up calls. This fun little bit of detective work gave me the opportunity to devote further pages to the ancient text and its enigmatic charms. I was pretty proud of this part of my project, since it allowed me to surf the big breaks of religious studies scholarship — ancient religious texts — with my scrappy weirdo short board.

Little did I expect that this material would go on to make a small but deeply satisfying dent on the first scholarly volume devoted solely to the Hymn, retitled the Pearlsong by its translator and keen exegete, Adam Bremer-McCollum. The Pearlsong (2025) is a wonderful book, and I don’t say that just because Adam and Charles Stang, who wrote the foreword, happen to say nice things about me and Philip K. Dick. Truth be told, mere mortals like me can only appreciate portions of a volume that, in addition to its English translations and commentaries, is rich with glossaries, transcriptions, concordances, and specialist discussions. But if you are like me, the proximity to impenetrable religious scholarship has a sacred power all its own, an arcane enchantment only enhanced here by the lovely paper and crisp typography, whose multiple scripts and textual marks were managed through LaTeX, a typesetting tool designed to handle mathematical equations. Sure there is an appendix devoted to Syriac metrical forms, but another appendix gathers a raft of cool pearl-oriented texts from Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic sources. And how could you not love Bremer-McCollum’s close, loving, and witty commentary, whose penetrating analysis of this short text finds time for references to “Pinball Wizard”, Robert Hunter, eden ahbez, Toto’s “Africa,” even Whitesnake?

Unlike many scholarly texts, especially translations of ancient material, The Pearlsong also appears in a reasonably priced paperback volume, and is free to download. It’s the first book in a new series published by the Center for the Study of World Religions, which the CSWR folks call “4T”: Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation. I know this because I have spent the last month as a scholar-in-residence at the CSWR, which is part of the Harvard Divinity School. A largely independent center first founded with Theosophical money, the CSWR take religious, esoteric, and psychedelic experience seriously, and supports scholarship that does not leach the life from materials devoted to transcendence and transformation. Their other publications include conference volumes on Gurdjieff, Henry Corbin and “Psychedelic Transformations.”

I’ve had a blast here, and also managed to get some good work done, including a public conversation with CSWR director Charles Stang and a public lecture on “The Psychedelic Jesus of the Counterculture” that will be posted soon. Happily my stay also coincided with the release party for The Pearlsong, which also meant hanging out with Adam. Dude is a marvel. A spry and long-haired elfin character, very much the groovy Southerner, Adam is also a philologist in the mighty 19^th-century mode, a master of many languages dead and alive, the kind of guy who learns Pali and Chinese for kicks. Adam is co-editing the whole 4T series, whose tasty forthcoming volumes include texts by Porphyry and Evagrius, as well as Adam’s own translations of a bushel of Arabic texts on cannabis from the 13^th through 15^th century, when Islam first encountered the plant and started feasting on its powers, though not without stirring up the inevitable backlash. To keep up with the CSWR’s myriad projects, including the great Pop Apocalypse podcast, I encourage you to subscribe to their excellent mailing list, pleasantly plump with news, texts, lectures, and links from the ivy-choked borderlands between scholarship and mystery.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Other Cinema is run by my old pal Craig Baldwin, a frazzled filmmaker, archivist, theorist, and collector who somehow keeps ATA running in the face of it all. Craig has made a bunch of excellent and provocative films, often relying on assemblage techniques that draw from his vast archive of industrial shorts, B-movies, amateur Super 8s, advertisements, and uncategorizable anomalies. Baldwin’s films include meditations on Negativland-style appropriation (Sonic Outlaws), paranormal media theory (Spectres of the Spectrum), a partly live-action narrative riffing on Scientology and Jack Parsons lore (Mock Up on Mu), and an extraordinary phantasmic political critique of American adventurism (Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, which you should watch immediately). Craig interviewed me for one of these films, and also invited me to do a number of “performance lectures” at ATA back in the day. It’s an analog place, and we painstakingly cued up dozens of VHS tapes for each lecture, which wove together film clips and my feverish rants about topics like bardo worlds, psychedelic trips, and Lovecraftian mind parasites. These remain some of the best presentations I have ever given, but were never recorded, both by sloth and by design.

The program the poet and I caught that night was named for a classically Baldwin theme: “Archive Fever.” It featured a pre-show auction of select pieces from his large collection of T-shirts, also immortalized in a new book called 222. The shorts he then screened reminded me, once again, of the vast, poignant, and elliptical richness that lies irredeemably beyond the filmic universe available for download or streaming. We witnessed a 1953 tribute to LA sanitation workers, whose rescue of “Treasures in a Garbage Can” gave the evening its theme. There was an IBM paean to future tech, a California tsunami public service apocalypse, and a mid-70s Oscar Mayer industrial film whose greasy weiner Taylorism changed me for all time. Religious weirdness, as usual, was never far from the 16 mm scene: we saw a racist Mormon travelogue, an early 70s Christian cult exposure (featuring ex-Panther Eldridge Cleaver), and, most incredibly, an amateur 1956 Kodachrome tourist recording of a Trinidadian carnival saturated with devils and costumed deliria.

The evening reminded me of the intense and critical pleasures of marginalia, the treasures of the garbage can, and the jewels we sometimes grasp from the raging stream of oblivion. One thing I did not anticipate about growing older is that the world that one has known — in this case the world of the analog underground — disappears at about the same rate that the actual people you have known and loved disappear, whether they drift away, go nuts, give up, or die. Craig himself has been wrestling hard with the Big C for some time, and I was amazed that he had the energy to mount another season of Other Cinema. Actually I suspect he doesn’t have the energy, but he did it anyway, which is very Craig. If you are in the neighborhood, you should swing by and sniff the old school, avant-underground magic, because it’s going to flicker out eventually, and probably sooner than later.

Upcoming Event

• Jordan Belson: COSMOGENESIS: A Symposium of Transcendental Films, Lectures, Performances, and Visual Arts

As arts go, film stands out as a relatively massive enterprise requiring scores if not hundreds if not thousands of creatives, actors, techs, and support staff. Experimental film is often produced on a vastly smaller scale, but for some DIY filmmakers, working in documentary, abstraction, or animation, the numbers sometimes boil down to one single diligent visionary, whose obsessive labor makes this most “technological” of arts handmade, intimate, and, occasionally, the vehicle of a singular but utterly transcendental vision.

Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was one of those singular visionaries, a remarkable Bay Area-based artist and filmmaker whose meditative, trance-like 16mm shorts, most of which Belson created on a light table of his own design, are numinous, poetic, and aesthetically ravishing. Having already turned on before the Beats showed up — he was an old friend of Harry Smith when Smith still lived in the Bay — Belson walked his path of art mysticism for many decades, studying meditation, yoga, and comparative religion, and consuming the occasional visionary compound. His lifelong devotion to the Mystery shows in the best of ways. Films like “Samadhi”, “Cosmos”, and “Chakra” hand your third eye to you on a mandalic platter, plumbing the esoteric implications of abstraction so fundamental to modern art. But they also capture aspects of the internal phenomenology of meditation and trance like few other visual artifacts I know. Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey; in terms of cosmic cinema, this is The Shit.

Partly because of his own exacting demands for screening conditions, Belson’s films are rarely seen in all their analog glory. This coming weekend, San Francisco’s Gray Area will be showing quality prints of many of his films, including rarities, newly-struck 16 mm films, and digital preservations. That’s already awesome, but only part of the package. Over the weekend, Gray Area will also host a deeply thoughtful symposium devoted to unpacking some of the fascinating histories and implications of Belson’s work. Presenters will include myself (hosting some Friday night screenings), curator extraordinaire and all around mensch Raymond Foye, Bruce Conner restorationist Ross Lipman, and Belson expert L u m i a. I am particularly looking forward to a presentation and musical performance from Haight Street Moog pioneer (and Aoxomoxoa contributor) Doug McKechnie, one of the last folks living who attended the multimedia Vortex concerts that Belson staged with Henry Jacobs at the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park back in the golden day. Like Belson’s films themselves, COSMOGENESIS looks to be a rare blend of esoteric aesthetics, cosmic reflections, and finely-honed craft. Tickets and more info.

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Documenting Californians

• O Mother Gaia: The World of Gary Snyder

Though physically a bit of a squirt, the poet Gary Snyder remains a towering figure of earth verse, bioregional activism, and backcountry Zen. After meeting the young poets Lew Welch and Philip Whalen at Reed College in the late 1940s, and then gallivanting through the Bay Area’s poetry circles in the 50s, Snyder came to articulate a rural, West Coast take that paralleled the Beats’ otherwise heavily urban sensibility. His friend Jack Kerouac immortalized a version of the Snyder vibe in the 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, whose central hero Japhy Ryder is based on Snyder and his mountain hermit calls for a “rucksack revolution.”

Along with his deeply informed study of Buddhism and Zen, Snyder’s wilderness predilections, embodied in his spare and vividly concrete poems, helped establish the organic and Eastern turn of the hippies who followed the Beats, as well as inspiring the works and lives of younger figures like Dale Pendell and Peter Coyote. Snyder himself mostly skipped the hippie thing. Though he appeared at the Human Be-In and participated in a the famous houseboat summit with Tim Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts in 1967, Snyder spent most of the 1960s at monasteries in Japan. In 1970, he moved to the San Juan Ridge in the Sierra Nevada foothills, building a home without power tools and catalyzing an informal intentional community and a stab at bioregionalism and “non-mindless anarchism.”

O Mother Gaia was shot by Colin Still, a British filmmaker who started interviewing Gary and some of his cronies back in 1995. The BBC ran a shorter version of the film, and when the material reverted to Still, he finished it as a feature, just in time for Snyder’s 95th birthday. Accordingly, the film smears time in an odd but not unpleasant way, as ghosts like Ginsberg and Snyder’s wife Carole Koda, who died in 2006, appear alongside living sources like Michael McClure, Jane Hirshfield, and Peter Coyote, all of whom add immeasurably to the film — in part by watering down Snyder’s air of patriarchal command. I have a lot of respect for Snyder, and though this film helped me appreciate his verse more than before, I still prefer his essays to most of his poetry. But I also found him a bit insufferable at times, so rugged, so competent, and so keenly self-assured. (One wag I vaguely remember called him the Marlboro Man of American poetry.) You know the guy’s knives are freshly sharpened, the tomatoes flourishing in the garden, the notebooks — as he shows off here — fantastically in order.

While the film suffers from some silly stock footage illustrations of the verse, the poetry is generally handled very well. One nice move is to shoot different interviewees reading the same poem, which allows their various stresses and inflections to naturally compound the richness of the verse. This multiperspectival quality is an important theme to both Snyder’s vision and the ecological vision he incarnates. Still draws our attention, for example, to “Straits of Malacca,” from 1957, which presents three different takes on the same phenomenon, like Stevens’ blackbird rendered in the variant minimalism of Han Shan, Basho, and William Carlos Williams.

At its best, Snyder’s poetry gives us the tangible transformative moment stripped of symbolic significance or romantic frosting but sustaining its immanent flicker. More thing than thought. (For an extended meditation on this process, and its implications for memory and our relations to the non-human world, please study my favorite long Snyder poem, a shimmering meditation on Indra’s net called “Bubbs Creek Haircut.”) The film sheds direct light on this dry Zen kindling when Snyder turns to the subject of haiku, which he defines as “a precise imagistic short poem.” This is turn sets up a brilliant elaboration from Hirshfield, who describes the poetic process of “plac[ing] a flash of perception against perception in such a way that there’s almost an electric spark that jumps.” There you are, in the middle of experience, “paying close attention to specific particular objects of this world at a particular moment in time,” when “eternity flashes through.” Like a lightning strike over the crags, Snyder can still flash.

• Master of the Temple: the Tragedy of Jack Parsons

I don’t watch too many YouTube docs. Either you find yourself presented with the same old potted plants, or the dank claustrophobia of the rabbit hole closes in. But when Peter Grey, the occultist, author, and publisher, let readers of his “The Adder in the Churchyard Wall” newsletter know that he was featured in a recent film about Jack Parsons, I took the plunge. Grey has written extensively and insightfully about Golden State occultism, in his book The Two Antichrists and on the Substack, and I trust his slightly jaundiced witchy eye.

The life of Jack Parsons — rocket scientist, occult bohemian, and follower of Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema — is one of the mighty California Tales, a lore trip through the state’s singular technocultural landscape, and a narrative so redolent with southern California weirdness that, if it were presented as the fiction it resembles, it would seem too outlandish and overdetermined for the proper suspension of disbelief. I have written twice about Parsons, in an academic chapter that analyzes how the man navigated the liminal zone between technology and magic, and in a more speculative essay for the occult publisher Three Hands Press, a piece that looked at his relationships, both imaginal and polyamorously real, to women and the figure of the witch.

What interests me now, after we have seen the TV show and the comic book and the academic treatise, is how Parsons’ story has drifted, thickened, and emptied itself out. I first read a version of the story in 1993, in an article in the great pagan zine Green Egg. Written by Adam Walks Between Worlds, a tricksy redhead I met a few times, the article traces the Thelemic currents of Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a key text to the Church of All Worlds, which published Green Egg. But a brief account of the story had seen print the year before, in City of Quartz, the Marxist historian Mike Davis’ game-changing account of the sordid past and future of Los Angeles. Then, at the end of the decade, Feral House released Sex and Rockets by the pseudonymous “John Carter,” an undercooked book stuffed with rich but sometimes hasty data.

By now, after further bios and treatments, Parsons has a toe-hold in pop memory and even the obscure details of the tale are rather well mapped. Thankfully, Master of the Temple doesn’t try and stake out any new edgelord terrain. Instead, with the help of three fine interviewees, it gives a comprehensive account of Parsons’ life and work against a well-drawn backdrop of sciences both occult and explosive. Atrocity Guide, who has also made compelling videos about Zen Master Rama, Immortalists, and Breatharians, is a wizard of the archival image; I have been fascinated with Parsons for decades, and I saw lots of footage and photos that were new to me. Though this documentary proceeds with a certain humorlessness and lack of wit, the story still shines, rich with detail and the apposite image. One fact I had not known before was that, for a time, three of the four departments at the early Jet Propulsion Laboratory were led by Thelemites.

Despite the salacious draw of Parsons’ esoteric hedonism, Atrocity Guide thankfully spends more time than most would have on the scientific side of Parsons’ story — the rocket experiments in the Arroyo Seco, his development of solid fuel for the JATO program sponsored by CalTech, and the founding of JPL. In the second hour, the science fades away as we move deeper into Parsons’ magick, especially his ceremonial relationship with “scribe” L. Ron Hubbard, whom he had met at an LA science fiction club. In treating the fascinating question of how much Thelema influenced Hubbard’s later Church of Scientology, Atrocity Guide doesn’t exactly argue the case — instead, we simply watch footage of Hubbard lecturing in a way that clearly indicates that his “bridge to total freedom” was built over the very same Abyss that Parsons tried to cross towards the end of his life.

Jack had lost a lot by then, including his money, his security clearance, and probably his relationship with Marjorie Cameron (whose shrift is short in this doc). On the eve of a voyage to Mexico, Parsons died in an explosion in his own lab. Without pushing either the conspiracies or the occult coincidences too far, Atrocity Guide does rightly quotes the scriptural prophecies — “thou shalt become living flame” — that Parsons had early channeled, with L. Ron’s help, from the goddess Babalon.

No folks, you can’t make this shit up. Only California can.

• Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill

I love Judee Sill’s music and have loved it since I first picked up the vinyl reissues of her two albums back in the early 2000s. I bought Judee Sill first, and I picked it out of the bin based on the cover vibe alone — a fuzzy early 70s photo of a lanky chanteuse with a heavy-duty cross necklace, and maybe a sticker mentioning Jim O’ Rourke or something. I was sold, and the even more magnificent Heart Food came soon after. For years, I knew nothing about her challenging life nor the tragic arc of her very Californian career, so sustaining and strange were these songs, which seemed to spring from some mysterious source, somehow melding cowpoke folk and baroque fugues and soulful gospel and mystic Christian revelations. Genius, for once, is the right word.

Lost Angel is a solid documentary rather than a remarkable one, and includes some annoying contemporary tics — too many animated sequences, and an over-reliance on commentary from famous fans (though luckily these include Weyes Blood, who is as collected and articulate in her thoughts as in her music). But for Sill fans, Lost Angel is required viewing. The doc unfolds her gnarly, turbulent, and ultimately tragic life — hooking, reform school, career failure, junk, early death — with plenty of archival material, but without the kind of easy sentimentality that Sill, given her own scrappy, intense, salty-dog attitude, would have rejected. The LA music scene gets a good sketch, and there are rich interviews with friends and lovers, especially with the wry J. D. Souther, the sometimes Eagles songwriter who broke Judee’s heart after taking up with Linda Ronstadt, inspiring Sill’s near-hit “Jesus was a Cross Maker.” Probably the biggest treat are many glimpses of Sill’s wonderful drawings and journal doodles, though I would have preferred a bit more archival rigor in the presentation.

My biggest beef with Lost Angel is its inability or perhaps refusal to directly address Sill’s singular religious vision, which is absolutely central to her body of work. I say religious rather than spiritual, because, while Sill drew from the proto-New Age grab-bag of astral planes and archetypes and planetary gods, the core of her sensibility is visionary Christianity transposed to a post-hippie key. Sure she was on Joni’s label, but Judee’s songs are less singer-songwriter confessions than numinous poems transmitted from her particular Angeleno cross of desire, suffering, and exile — an affective Catherine wheel that’s been rolling since the days of medieval female mystics like Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

It’s often unclear whether the male figures in her songs are West Coast cowboy lovers or Jesus Christ himself, the original bridegroom offering up roses that bleed. This fusion of God and eros was the staple of soul music, of course, but Sill articulates the crux in a deeply singular key that nonetheless touches the timeless. In songs like “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown,” she combines religious images — serpent, spark, lamb, crown, demon, battleground — in such a fresh way that the tune seems like a new revelation of some ancient drama. Other songs are so intimate in their holy yearning that they seep into you and shape your very capacity to really hear them in the first place. That’s what live spiritual texts do for you, whether poems, films, ballads, or sunsets: they make you recognize their forms and feelings as shapes of your own being, tripping over itself as through a tangled veil.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Upcoming Events

• Practice Circle. This Saturday, August 16, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop about the practicing life with my squeeze Jennifer Dumpert. Everybody talks about “practice” but what do we mean by it? What are the features and traps of being a practitioner? Rather than focus on particular practices, the Circle offers room for us to discuss the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice in general — issues like commitment, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust, rejection. Suggested donation, $20-40, no one turned away. Registration here.

• 3rd Ear Presents: Fletcher Tucker performing Kin. This amazing show will take place Saturday, August 16, 6:30 pm, also at the Berkeley Alembic. Join the Big Sur musician, Gnome Life Records label head, and wilderness junkie Fletcher Tucker for a rare live performance celebrating the release of his new album. Composed while trekking through the remote Big Sur back country, Kin is a sonic offering to the living world: an incantation of kinship, mystic communion, and mythopoetic storytelling. Tucker’s immersive set will bring to life the record’s elemental palette of “ancestral instruments” — pump organ, Swedish bagpipes, flutes, and bowed zithers — alongside chanted verse and percussive portals to the liminal.

The opener for the evening will be LFZ, the exploratory sound project of Los Angeles–based artist Sean Smith. Together, these two visionary artists will unfold a night of vibrational ceremony and sonic enchantment. At the end of the evening, I will moderate a discussion with Tucker about his animist approach to culture-making. Deets here; $20-$50, but no one turned away for lack of funds.

Californica

• LD Deutsch, Time, Myth and Matter. There is a vast modern literature that attempts to build bridges between science and spirituality — quantum mysticism, paranormal theory, and far too many retellings of Kekulé’s ouroboros dream. California is responsible for a lot of this stuff, much of which is profoundly unsatisfying, if not actively crappy. In her wonderful essays, which were first published as chapbooks by LA hepcat label Sacred Bones and now gathered into a beautifully designed book, the Los Angeles writer LD Deutsch takes another tack. Carefully, with deep research and bright, illuminating prose, Deutsch traces the points where the narratives of science and myth diverge, echo, and assemble themselves into genuinely new patterns of understanding. She can discuss physics with clarity, respect, and rigor, but like the first wave of quantum theorists, she allows herself to move deeply into philosophy, myth, and the mystery of consciousness. She is not, in a strict sense, a physicalist. And yet, when she does wrestle with uncanny things, like gods and oracles and synchronicity, she does not sink into the typical archetypal Jungiana. Every line of her book is devoted to the clarity and discrimination and serious joy required to trace the cracks and zig-zags and fluttering ripples in our weird conundrum. In fact, I believe she is incapable of writing a New Age sentence. Instead she does the hard work of getting to the heart of the matter of the mystery.

• Arthur Scans. Arthur magazine was the last print publication I wrote for regularly, the last general publication I identified with, and probably the last one that I really cared about. A creature of Los Angeles, Arthur was principally associated with music, especially psychedelic rock, freak folk, and all manner of spiritual riffs. But it also worked hard to sustain and nurture a sense of organic subculture that was being squeezed out of existence. I wrote a column for a while called “The Analog Life” and also penned a monster cover feature on Joanna Newsom and Ys.

As someone who came of age writing for classic alternative newspapers like the Village Voice and the LA Weekly, I have always appreciated (and, later, mourned) the way that print publications can weave themselves into the material life of a city or a culture or a scene. Arthur ranged too widely to fit into a narrow demographic, but it did have a consistent local vibe, an Angeleno sense of mystery and bluster that was at once crunchy and spiky and leafy and down-to-earth. Its consistency was due in no small part to the visionary leadership of its indefatigable editor and co-founder Jay Babcock, who currently pens one of my favorite and most consistently read Substacks, the informal but deeply nourishing Landline.

Arthur ran through most of the 2000s, and then returned in a different but still satisfying format from 2012 to about 2014. I was sad to see it go. So I was incredibly pleased to learn that the complete run of the magazine has been scanned, OCR'ed, indexed, and made searchable by the hardcore archivists at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM). The Arthur page is part of their recently launched “Archive of Popular Music Magazines" (RAPMM) collection, which the RILM describes as "the ever-expanding full-text compilation of zines that facilitates unprecedented federated searches.”

Huh? As you might guess, RILM is an institutional joint, a subscriber-based operation geared (and priced) towards universities, research institutions, libraries and so forth. While that’s great for Arthur’s legacy, as well as future researchers, it’s not necessarily helpful for you or me. Luckily, drawing from both scans and the original digital files, Jay has also recently posted pdfs of every single issue on the Arthur website. Whoopee!

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• Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California, 1980-1992

This extraordinarily pleasing compilation of obscure and charming private press recordings from the Golden State is so deep in the Burning Shore pocket that it rips out the other side like a meteorite plunging through the exosphere. These cosmic and spiritually-minded tracks were made during the golden age of Golden State New Age. But they only really bounce along the boundaries of that genre, and from different angles to boot: Martin & Scott’s “African Sweet Fantasy” starts out with ET chimes and Native flutes but veers towards diaphanous dissonance, while Clay Play’s “Ancestress” sounds like the ambient B-side of an industrial track that mutates into an indigenous Scots-Irish chant fantasy. There are avant-garde sine waves, zithers by the sea, and a lovely song with words entitled “Song Without Words.” Welcome the low-fi divine.

Many of these tracks are so obscure they still carry the penumbra of transience with them, like the last glow of sunset that somehow got bottled against oblivion. They were gathered by Zully Adler, the overlord of the cassette label Goaty Tapes, known for informal experiments, four-track wanderings, and bedroom pop, recordings marked with a rare quality of intimacy and enchanted scruff. Reflecting a similar spirit, the tunes on Lost Coast were produced far from the circuits of commerce and broadcasting — DIY gifts of and for the spirit. They were sourced from private collections, estate sales, flea markets, and thrift store trawls. Some tracks here were composed for yoga classes or ceramics studios, and one was sourced from the collection of a former mescaline dealer near Eureka.

Adler met the guy because he used to know Martin Wong, a wonderful and sometimes visionary California-to-New York Chinese-American freaky queer artist whom Adler wrote about for his dissertation at Oxford. Wong is a fascinating character, and Adler has the chops to relate his work to the various subcultures the man moved through, including Haight Street freakdom (Wong was in the Angels of Light). I thoroughly enjoyed the Cali parts of Adler’s dissertation, and am happy to report that he is currently turning the manuscript into a book.

Adler can rock the artcrit speech, but he knows the vibe of the underground from the inside, and is a damn fine curator to boot. You can catch a whiff of his care in this interview about Lost Coast. One of the major concerns for creative curators is context — what brings a collection of items together, what sort of story or “category” does it imply, how does it crystalize a larger network of associations, forms, realities? Regarding Lost Coast, Adler notes that:

Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds. […] Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to roll still further, imagining territories unencountered and wavelengths as yet unheard.

Notice that Adler does not say “New Age.” The problem with the latter category is that, like so many well established designations, it shuts down as much as it clarifies. By preferring the broader and less defined “visionary,” Adler lets us hear these sorta New Age pieces in a new and different light. He has assembled a uniquely shining crystal that in turn tunes and refracts the larger psycho-history of California’s sacred experimentalism, its peaks and valleys lost and found and lost again, but then dug out of a pile at a yard sale in McKinleyville.

Appearances

• ICPR Interview. I met Péter Sárosi and his fellow Hungarian “drog riporters” at the Open Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research in the summer of 2024. Blotter had just been published, I was prepping intensely for my keynote address, and my mind was filled with reservations about the cultural, psychological, and spiritual costs of the mainstreaming of psychedelics. The field of psychedelics has changed a lot in the year since, but I still feel swell about this interview and the intelligence of the Drog Reporter team (except for some creative misspellings of my name, including the “Eric” that dogged the first printing of Blotter).

• Dharma and the Dead. While the Grateful Dead need no more smoke blown in their direction, from hash pipes or from hagiographers, it must be said that the 60th anniversary Dead and Company’s shows at Golden Gate Park only further knitted the Dead’s legacy into the texture of San Francisco, the Burning Shore, and our now terrifying America. Legacy is maybe not the greatest reason to go to a show, but thankfully the Nameless Mystery was still prowling about amidst the poster tubes and corn dogs, providing galactic boogie and heartfelt devotions alongside a number of questionable musical moves and the steady flow of dollars into the pockets of promoters inside and nitrous dealers outside (“Cold ones! Get your ice colds!”).

Didn’t matter to me: I was happy dancing my prayers. Wandering through the polo field before the show on Friday night, I knew immediately that the Cosmic Dancers would gather behind the windmill thingee, where the sound was good but you couldn’t see the stage. And indeed they were there, the whirling, spinning, bone-dancing initiates, my new and ancient friends. At one point I felt a disturbance in the force, and made a Good Samaritan beeline towards the scene: some yellow-vested security folks surrounding a middle-aged woman in full freak-out — half nude, lunging around in awe and terror, eyes alight with strange shadows. I caught her gaze and, despite my pragmatic orientation toward harm reduction, realized that she was deeply in trance, swallowed up in a nightside of spiritual ecstasy she had reached at the extreme end of a visionary protocol — drugs, dancing, worship, who knows — that she probably did not expect would take her quite this far. Luckily she was surrounded by friends, and the yellow-vested kids were mellow. I don’t know where they led her away to, and I dearly hope that Another Planet Entertainment provides some sort of decent psychedelic support at this point (though I doubt it). But at least she was surrounded by kindness and care.

This encounter reminded me, once again, of the sacred stakes of Deaddom, devotional, risky, and sublime. Before the shows, Jamie Wheal and I gave a presentation at the Portal in Mill Valley about the initiatory powers and feral wisdom of the band, and particularly their matchless songbook. In different but complementary ways, Jamie and I were really trying to grapple with the paradoxical religiosity of the Dead’s profane illuminations. We weren’t just high on nostalgia. We were interested in how the Dead phenomenon — the jamming, the lyrics, the ethos of Americana, the cosmic synchro-syncopation — all helped provide qualities of collective play, cultural resonance, and integration that our current psychedelic renaissance, with its AI guides and corporate takeovers, could certainly use. During Q&A, Rose Barlow, the daughter of Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, pushed back on some of our rosier views with straight talk about the inner scene’s narcissism and foolishness. But she did insist that the core ethos was well captured in that line from “Uncle John’s Band”: “Wo-oh, what I want to know is are you kind?"

Not sure if our discussion will ever be posted, but Jamie and I were both pleased with this clip of Bob Weir talking to Dan Rather about the “American Zen” of Hank Williams. He also makes the core interpretive point that religion and non-religion are both legitimate approaches to this American Zen current, a current that really is bound up with an American ethos that, I am afraid, is effectively dead and gone, but therefore, at least possibly, still Dead.

I dove into the band’s American Zen more directly for a San Francisco Zen Center workshop I did last weekend with the Zen teacher Kokyo Henkel. Kokyo is a delight — sharp as Manjushri’s sword, twinkly-eyed, and ever so slightly goofy. In the late 80s, Cosmic Charlie — as he was then known — racked up a couple hundred shows on tour before making his way to Tassajara monastery. Earlier this year, Kokyo participated in the Psychedelic Sangha’s Psychedelic Buddhism 2025 conference, but we didn’t talk about drugs directly. We had a great time going through our favorite tunes, and riffing on words and meanings, emptiness and form. SFZC kindly made our three-hour conversation available at this link. If you like the idea of studying Zen with a Deadhead, you can explore Kokyo’s website or visit his Bright Window hermitage. You might see clear through to another day.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to resonate with readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward my posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, and you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

• Jamie Wheal and I Shake our Bones. Tomorrow night, on July 31, the night before Dead & Co.’s three-day Golden Gate Park run, I meet up with the intrepid writer and ecstasy engineer Jamie Wheal for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. Our chat, Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head, will go down at the Portal in Mill Valley, which I have been meaning to visit for some time. All proceeds will be donated to the Rex Foundation. Tickets here.

• Dead Zen. On August 9th, on the 30th anniversary of Jerry’s demise, I will be joining the Zen teacher Kokyo Henkel for another Dead chat: the online San Francisco Zen Center workshop Dharma and the Dead: A Lyrical Discussion of the Grateful Dead. This particular nightfall of diamonds will stream in the afternoon, 3pm - 6pm PST.

• The Way of the (Dancing?) Bear. In my recent Burning Shore post, The Wild Awake, I wrote about the animist backpack adventure I had with Wildtender, an outfit out of Big Sur. This September, from the 10th through 14th, I will be serving as a support guide for a new Yosemite trek they are offering called “The Way of the Bear: Pan-cultural Bear Mythopoetics, Tracking & Ecology.” In addition to Wildtender honcho Fletcher Tucker, we will be joined by the amazing Meghan Walla-Murphy, who is a world-class animal tracker and ecological educator. I interviewed Fletcher and Meghan separately for Expanding Mind years ago, and I am chuffed that I get to support their work now by offering contemplative and sensory awareness practices to complement our engagement with the Sierra.

At the Berkeley Alembic:

• August Chalice. For the August Chalice, our monthly psychedelic salon at the Alembic, we will be hosting the wonderful Michelle Lhooq — for my money the best younger drug reporter we have these days. She writes for DoubleBlind, the Guardian, and other rags, and also pens the Rave New World newsletter. The event takes place at 7pm on Wednesday, August 6. Full deets.

• Practice Circle. On Saturday, August 16, at the Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop about spiritual practice with my squeeze Jennifer Dumpert. The Circle offers room for us to individually and collaboratively discuss the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust, rejection. Suggested donation, $20-40, no one turned away. Registration here.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to show support, the best thing you could do is to forward posts to friends or colleagues you think will dig them. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, though for now everything here is free. And you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

So here is a Tiki raft of Californica for you, starting with some obits.

• Brian Wilson (1942-2025) and Sly Stone (1943-2025): Two giants have passed, almost together, two great wounded California behemoth musical prodigy fools who finally crashed to an earth that had already knocked them around many a time. We are a Sly-loving household, but I don’t have much to say other than to point you to Margaret Wertheim’s charming tale of almost furnishing a come-back Sly with a hyperbolic crocheted hat. That weird math makes sense to me in light of my favorite Sly tune, 1973’s “In Time,” whose rhythm cannot be charted by man, and whose hyperbolic beat scheme, I like to think, gave him a momentary place to hide from the historical and personal forces thrusting him toward the wasteland.

Brian Wilson’s own voyage through drugs and mental illness seemed to close with some love and mercy, which the poor dude very much deserved. But I’d still count his life a California tragedy, or a tragi-comedy really, which means there’s money and girls and excellent session players, but also, like, brutal exploitation and evil shrinks and way too many pills lost in the arroyo folds of the waterbed. Indeed, part of being a Brian fan is feeling protective towards the guy, not unlike the way that PKD freaks nurse a soft spot for the author’s terrible mental struggles and sometimes pathetic life decisions. This inverts the usual heroic mode of worshiping a pop “genius”, suggesting something more like the Christo-Gnostic notion of the Salvator salvatus — the (aesthetic) savior who himself needs to be saved after being wounded by the world they have come to illumine.

I remember getting turned on the real Beach Boys in the early 1990s. I was hanging around Dinosaur Jr. for a Spin profile, and bassist Lou Barlow took it upon himself to enlighten me as to the weird wonders of the catalog, especially taken in toto. And lo and behold, around that time Columbia released pretty much the whole run in two-fer CDs, which I played over and over and over for months. A meaty LA Weekly piece came out of this obsession, and I continue to ponder and enjoy the Beach Boys mysterium. “Til I Die,” whose lyrics Brian actually wrote for once, is a sacred text in my book, an existential Zen pagan ballad of poignant flow. And I still well up, as if on cue, when Brian reaches the “children’s song” close of “Surf’s Up” — the salvational prize held up at the end of that song’s cryptic apocalypse, when dominos fall, laughs come hard, and the stumble down to the beach finds us aboard a tidal wave (or an earthquake, or a burning shore).

“Surf’s Up” plays a central role in my favorite media reverb of Wilson’s death: three episodes (so far) of Michael S. Judge’s singular podcast Death is Just Around the Corner. “Columnated Ruins Domino,” sides A, B, and C, are devoted to Wilson, SMiLE, and, because this is Judge we are talking about, Gravity’s Rainbow, La Strada, Tarot, Van Dyke Parks, David Lynch, T.S. Eliot, and the archetypes of fools and bicycle riders. If you are not familiar with Death is Just Around the Corner, you really owe yourself a plunge. A voracious, biting, and singular take on high culture, low politics, and the moral reckonings of the age, the podcast is smart, and dark, as fuck. Judge, who also writes super-gnarly experimental novels, weaves together dense and feverish tapestries of ideas, histories, dreams, texts, myths, and machines, and with nary a stitch of elbow-patch academia. He is a deep reader of Pynchon and the Rainbow, and therefore particularly close to my heart. I recommend starting with his Crying of Lot 49 series, or anything he says about JFK.

I’ve met a couple dudes kinda like Judge in my life — brilliant and sardonic freelance intellectuals whose grim worldviews, based on knowing far too much about the down-and-dirty twentieth century, hang like sepulchral Spanish moss from their sensitive poet souls. Unsurprisingly, he is also a music fan, deeply knowledgeable about both popular song and the star-making machinery behind it. Be warned: we don’t even get to Brian Wilson until an hour into the first episode. But readers of Gravity’s Rainbow, a text written in the same Manhattan Beach hood where PT Anderson placed Inherent Vice’s “Gordita Beach”, will not be surprised.

• Bill Atkinson (1951-2025). Bill Atkinson, who grew up in Los Gatos, was one of the designer visionary freaks that worked on Apple computers early on. He was responsible for a number of Apple’s most creative features — the early GUI on Alice, the pioneering drawing and painting programs, the lasso and menu bar, and especially Hypercard and its revolutionary language of the hyperlink. Last year I also learned that Bill played an important role in streamlining the “user interface” experience of vaporized 5-MeO-DMT, and, using a pseudonym, broadcasting the LightWand tech. I talked about this extraordinary (and by no means rare) convergence of Bay Area tech and psychedelic culture at Breaking Convention in the spring. Then Bill died of pancreatic cancer in June, and wanted the full story spread, which some friends have done over at the Pattern Project. One marvelous story they don’t mention concerns Atkinson’s hyperlink Eureka. While high on LSD, Bill claimed, he looked outside and his eyes hopped between the bright moon and a bright street lamp. One thing literally (or psychedelically) led to another…

• Jonathan Ott (1949-2025). Jonathan Ott, one of the mightiest literary psychonauts of all time, was not particularly associated with California, although his latest publishing project — a deluxe reissue of many of his out-of-print books and unpublished manuscripts, now temporarily put on hold — calls Sonoma County home (I helped back the project). I only hung out with Jonathan a few times, and exchanged some emails with him (he was notorious for cranking out prolix and multi-colored bombers). These were lovely and memorable experiences, as were my encounters with his extraordinary and singular and sometimes decidedly over-the-top texts: Pharmacophilia, Ayahuasca Analogues, The Age of Entheogens, and especially The Chocolate Addict (my favorite), now renamed The Cacáhuatl-Eater. So many. Jonathan was a polymath, brilliant and productive and unapologetically single-minded. He was one of those rare birds who can just stand up, open their mouths, and have brilliant, stimulating, and cited discourse pour out. But he was also exceptionally kind and fun, as well as freeing, as if a lifetime of scholarship, DIY living and thinking, and regular drug use (including baddies like heroin and cocaine) actually delivered the secret to happiness. He will be missed.

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• Wayne Thiebaud and the California Sublime. The Ruth Asawa exhibit at the SFMOMA is still the show to beat this San Francisco season. But when I had an afternoon in the city free the other week I turned my trusty two-wheeled steed toward the avenues to make my way to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor museum and its Wayne Thiebaud show, “Art Comes from Art,” which lasts until August 17. It’s one of those shows driven by a curative concept — Thiebaud as a “thief” (his words) of art history, whose pieces derive from sometimes rather brazen riffs on specific historical paintings. Rather than trumpeting the usual “rupture” that Pop or Pop-adjacent artists like Thiebaud are supposed to have made with high modernism, the show exudes his love of tradition, an appreciation that not only infused his formal compositions but animated the luscious applications of oils that Thiebaud famously used to bring his milkshakes, pies, lipstick tubes, and bathing suits to exuberant life. These are, or were, Pop images, but Thiebaud was coming at them from a very different angle than the cool irony of Warhol or Lichtenstein — something closer to love and mercy.

Thiebaud grew up in Long Beach and lived most of his life in Sacramento, teaching for decades at UC Davis. The wry American Graffiti images he is most famous for, and the unapologetic pleasure they radiate, owe more than a little to his commercial experience at Walt Disney Studios, his work as a military cartoonist, and involvement with advertising, illustration, and design. His New York encounter with Willem de Kooning in the late 1950s was also important, and some manner of abstraction is always pushing his representations towards the picture plane. But equally important are the masters of old he came to study and love when he started really teaching art. Thiebaud was clearly a wonderful teacher, and his sprightly comments on art enliven the wall texts at the Legion of Honor. Indeed, by the end of the show it becomes perfectly apparent how much one of his gumball machines owes to the bravura brushwork of Velázquez and El Greco.

But none of this brought me across town. I was there for the vertigo. Already in the 1960s, and increasingly towards the end of his career, Thiebaud also painted landscapes, which was super uncoolio for a postmodern sorta Pop artist to do. Landscapes were fuddy-duddy, sentimental, vaguely imperialist. But Thiebaud’s images of San Francisco, the Sacramento Delta, and mountains (mostly the Sierra) break with both the realism and the comforts of traditional landscape painting. Inspired in part by his friend Richard Diebenkorn, another ace California painter who probed the liminal zone between abstraction and landscape representation, Thiebaud’s canvases are direct explorations of color, line, and shape that warp established rules of perspective. More audaciously, many of them — especially the San Francisco and Sierra images — exaggerate the vertical dimension to the point of absurdity.

Some folks might see this as more wacky pop surrealism — or, being San Francisco skaters, might grab their decks and prepare to hill bomb. Not me. These diagonals plunging out of the frame scare the shit out of me. You know the way that some David Lynch shots hit too close to home, as if he scraped them from the walls of your own personal hypnogogic cave? These Thiebaud streets and cliffsides get me that way, stirring up a primal environmental anxiety, not unrelated in some ways to Brian Wilson’s tidal waves. The colors and composition are still rather cheery, of course, and Thiebaud has referred to these canvases as “pictorial tall tales,” which stresses the fantasy of them. But he also acknowledges the kinesthetic vertigo they trigger, a “precipitousness . . . you . . . feel in the pit of your stomach.”

Yes these angles are absurd, but their absurdity is not really about pictorial exaggeration. It’s about the cold hard reality of our civilized human condition, clinging to fragile and contingent architectures as we ride the bucking bronco of the biosphere. In an article about Thiebaud’s landscapes, Margaretta M. Lovell suggests this core tension is particularly visible in San Francisco, where a handful of large grids characterize the bulk of the city’s streets, despite the lurching and squirrelly topography they stridently try to overwrite. As I discuss in Blotter, the grid is arguably the central design archetype of the top-down control logic of modernity. “And yet the grid is sometimes irrational,” writes Lovell, “as when it trumps topographic logic.” (And, I want to add, when it is used to streamline the distribution of LSD.) Lovell argues that, while Thiebaud’s images highlight the shapes of San Francisco’s landmass, the painter also points “to what we cannot see, to what he encourages us to feel, namely to the power of gravity to chasten us and remind us of the array of superhuman natural forces that underlie our buildings and our assumptions.”

The one painting I was not prepared for at the Legion of Honor show was “Road Through”, which totally knocked my socks off. Thiebaud based the image partly on his admiration for the Grapevine, the fantastically engineered six-mile plunge that Interstate 5 takes from Fort Tejon down to the town of Grapevine and, for so many travelers, the start of the San Joaquin Valley haul. In the piece, whose powerful brush strokes and sense of vertigo are totally lost in digital reproduction, a near vertical stretch of highway bisects a steep crevice between hulking landmasses whose extraordinary range of color suggests a leaking Cézanne landscape.

I got the shivers when I saw this thing in part because of something I wrote in one of the best rock reviews I ever cranked out: the lead review in Spin of the Stockton band Pavement’s 1992 debut, appropriately entitled Slanted and Enchanted. The review was one of those rare jewels that emerges almost effortlessly, over a couple of hours, and includes the line that some songs on the record are “beautiful the way freeways through the mountains can be beautiful.” And here is that beautiful freeway and those beautiful mountains, only now that beauty is also nerve-racking, plunging down the slanted and enchanted earth towards the abyssal California sublime.

Thiebaud himself invoked the aesthetic category in a comment about Barnett Newman, who partly inspired the painting: “If you’re dealing with the sublime, you’re making a caricature of some thing.” This is a reformulation of the classic hi-brow/low-brow tension that Thiebaud’s own confectionary work plays with, and that remains a core Cali polarity. California can be sublime, in both the cosmic and sybaritic senses, but it endlessly caricatures itself as well, and the difference between the categories melts like sandcastles or burger cheese. If OpenAI’s machines can now engineer “culture,” its a culture that depends on caricature.

Upcoming Events

• Jamie Wheal and I Shake our Bones. On July 31, the night before Dead & Co.’s three-day Golden Gate Park run, I meet up with the intrepid writer and ecstasy engineer Jamie Wheal for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. In contrast to today’s psychedelic scene, with its Instashamans and obsession with individual trauma, the Dead offer a much-needed example of collective psychedelic integration and ecstatic mythopoetic play. In addition to parsing the esoteric wisdom animating the Grateful Dead songbook, we will also address the revival circuit of Dead tour, that burnt-over snake-oil spirit-dance mystery cult of cowboy tunes and cosmic jam. Our chat, Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head, will go down at the Portal in Mill Valley, which I have been meaning to visit for some time. (Look for details at the Portal website.)

• August Chalice. For the August Chalice, which will take place at the Berkeley Alembic at 7pm on Wednesday, August 6, I am stoked to announce that we will be hosting Michelle Lhooq — for my money the best younger drug writer we have these days. She writes for DoubleBlind, the Guardian, and other rags, and also pens the Rave New World newsletter. Full deets.

In one of her recent posts, Lhooq offered an account of a Sasha and Ann Shulgin celebration at last month’s Psychedelic Science conference. Along the way, she put forward some of the key ideas behind the Chalice. One is that certain substances, especially LSD and MDMA, are “indigenous” to the modern West, a point made in her article by Zach Leary. That’s why it’s extra important that we keep the wisdom of our elder freaks and hippies warm and bubbling as their bodies bone-dance into oblivion. “This church of elder psychonauts represent a dying breed whose renegade spirits and altruistic attitudes…are getting eclipsed by the logic of psychedelics under today’s late-capitalist and increasingly militarized landscape. [Zach] Leary is right: in order to prevent psychedelics from becoming de-radicalized, investor-driven mental health ‘products,’ the spirits and stories of the old guard must be kept alive.”

• Dead Zen. On August 9th, on the 30th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s demise, I will be joining the Zen teacher Kokyo Henkel for another Dead chat: the online San Francisco Zen Center workshop Dharma and the Dead: A Lyrical Discussion of the Grateful Dead. After discovering our deep mutual affinity for the Dead’s music and songcraft, Kokyo and I decided to explore the band’s “Dharma songs,” and particularly the striking lyrics of Robert Hunter. “Together we’ll listen to selected tracks and hear Zen commentaries on lyrics that open the heart to a realm beyond our habitual fixed views of the world.” This particular nightfall of diamonds will actually stream in the afternoon, 3pm - 6pm PST.

• Practice Circle. On Saturday, August 16, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop about practice with my squeeze Jennifer Dumpert. The basic assumption here is that we humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves what we are through what we do. The Practice Circle offers room for us to individually and collaboratively discuss the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust, rejection. We will also talk about ways to craft practices on one’s own. Suggested donation, $20-50, no one turned away. Registration here.

• The Way of the Bear. In my previous Burning Shore post, “The Wild Awake”, I wrote about the animist backpack adventure I had with Wildtender, an outfit out of Big Sur. I’ve been hanging around these folks for a while now, trying to impress them, and this September I will be serving as a support guide for a new Yosemite trek they are offering focused called “The Way of the Bear: Pan-cultural Bear Mythopoetics, Tracking & Ecology.” Some words from Wildtender’s poet guide Fletcher Tucker: “Across the Northern Hemisphere, from the cave art of Ice Age Europe to the healing ceremonies of Siberian shamans and the stories of North America’s first peoples, Bear has stood as a keeper of thresholds — guardian of sleep and waking, of death and renewal, of body and spirit. As we move through bear habitat, we will listen for these deep archetypal echoes, shadowing the Bear not only through physical track and sign, but through story, memory, and our own bodies.” One nice feature of the trip is that we will only move camp twice, so we will have some time hiking without our full packs. An even more fun feature is that, in addition to Fletcher, we will be joined by the amazing Meghan Walla-Murphy, who is a world-class animal tracker and ecological educator. I interviewed Fletcher and Meghan separately for Expanding Mind years ago, and I am chuffed that I get to support their work now by offering contemplative and sensory awareness practices to complement our engagement with the Sierra.

Appearances

• Team Human. I have known and respected Doug Rushkoff forever, or at least since the 1990s, and I was pleased as Kesey punch when he invited me onto his blockbuster Team Human podcast to gab. It’s a well-run operation, which suggests to me that Doug is getting the support he needs to keep doing the amazing work he does asking questions, calling bullshit, sharing vulnerability, and being willing to change his mind in public. Doug and I share a particularly deep and nuanced sense of generational identity, and one of my favorite things about our conversation is how we riffed on certain shared features of Gen X sensibility, especially the double-edged sword of Don’t Know mind.

• Blotter: The Medium is the Art that Melts in your Mind. OK, normally I wouldn’t serve up any more interviews about Blotter, now grown rather tepid in the memories of the book buying public. (Maybe I should have gone to Denver to shill the puppy after all.) But rarely have I had as much fun as I did with this conversation with Mark McCloud and the indefatigable RU Sirius, whose recent record release party-cum-90s cyberpunk reunion at San Francisco’s Gray Area was truly mindblowing — goofy, sweet, and poignant in equal measure.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to find resonant readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, though for now everything here is free. And you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

We get this troublesome word from nineteenth-century scholars, who were trying to understand the far-out cultures encountered at the restless and rapacious edge of empire. For all their riot of differences, nearly all of these tribal and indigenous people seemed to share the belief that the world is suffused with non-human spirits and agents. Hence, animism. Of course, for these early anthropologists and scholars of world religion, such a belief was considered stupid and primitive in comparison to the ethical dogmas of monotheism and the rational methods of science. When later Western bohemians, seekers, and mystics abandoned European values for novel and more spirited worldviews, including exotic religions, they rarely embraced full-on animism. For most developed worldlings, it remained a bridge too far up the river of re-enchantment.

Times have changed. Consider the following developments, springing up like kudzu, thrusting through the cracks of consensus materialism:

• The growing acceptance, among scientist and philosopher types, of panpsychism: the position that consciousness is as fundamental to the universe as matter or energy. Consciousness is just everywhere, like dust.

• The popularity of psychedelics, which for many trippers boots up an enchanted world in which non-human entities, many associated with plants, animals, and “nature,” regularly waltz onto stage. Sometimes they will chat you up, or maybe try and make a deal.

• Our growing understanding of the deep intelligence of animals and especially of plants, who we now know demonstrate decision-making, inter-species communication, variable acts of reciprocity, and memory.

• A post-humanist appreciation for the embeddedness, interconnection, and complex hybridity that surrounds and shapes human subjectivity. Doesn’t the “we” who we think we are include the creatures in our gut biome at least as much as it includes our social media feeds?

• The rise of AI and the explosion of simulacral humans, autonomous drones and robots, and extraordinarily persuasive conversations with digital agents. This tsunami of algorithmic Others is forcing us all to grapple with once sci-fi ideas about technological minds and beings.

• The growing appreciation for indigenous cosmologies, not just as “cultures” worth preserving, but as philosophical and pragmatic systems of knowledge — systems that lead, in contrast to raggedy-assed secular materialism unraveling around us, to a more generative and arguably more accurate framing of humanity’s relationship to the non-human world.

These developments do not represent “the same” paradigm shift; in some cases they are not only out of sync but actively inimical to one another. Panpsychist philosophers strive mightily to distinguish their views from ayahuasca guzzlers. Defenders of ecological spirituality often reject the new AI agents as nothing more than distracting corporate lies sucking up precious energy. And yet there is the sense that new technologies and the archaic revival are facets of the same jeweled becoming. Terence McKenna thought so, and so did Philip K. Dick, who noted decades ago that

Our environment — and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components — all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves.

Whatever is behind our current neo-animism, I don’t think we will ever get to its marrow through philosophical argument or Substack posts. Like most important things, animism is less about belief than it is about perception, and particularly about a mode of perception. This mode is relational, imaginal, and liminal. For most folks it’s an alien and unfamiliar way of changing, reminiscent at best of childhood story books or stoner animation. Things are changing with new technological Others, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. I am interested in how the ancient more-than-human crew of plants, rocks, rivers, bugs, and critters come to take the stage.

The thing is, animist seeing can be trained. The perception of an ensouled world can emerge from an ongoing process of intention, story-telling, and trial-and-error practice, just like prayer or, I dunno, a good tennis serve. What seems awkward at first, resistant to our given habits, and contrary to our stated beliefs about the world, can nonetheless bloom over time into an embodied experience of a new, and very old, world.

Tending the Wild

Wildtender is an outdoor education and adventure operation based in Big Sur. The couple who run the outfit, Fletcher Tucker and Noël Vietor, have been living in and exploring the redwood coastline and its steep and craggy mountain outback for decades. I first met Fletcher through a small record label he runs called Gnome Life, which has released lovingly packaged weird folk records by Daniel Higgs, Sean Smith, Robbie Basho, and others. Fletcher makes music as well, feral dirges and tangy earth mantras that reflect a more haunted and desperate sense of wilderness love than the old hippie kumbayas. His upcoming record is called Kin, an album of “acoustic drones, animistic chanting, and place-based rituals” that he composed while trekking through the backcountry. I look forward to sinking into its pump organ, Swedish bagpipes, flutes, and bowed zithers.

A few months ago I joined Wildtender for a week-long backpack “pilgrimage” through the Ventana wilderness that encompasses Big Sur. The path began on the coast and wound up deep in the Santa Lucia range, at Tassajara, the oldest Zen monastery in the Western hemisphere. Now that Tassajara’s summer guest season has been shuttered, it’s pretty tough to get to the place unless you are willing to sign up as a monk, which is tough in a whole other way.

Since I had hiked this same trail with Wildtender a few years previously, I already knew how nifty it was to arrive at this beautiful and earthy monastery after long sweaty days on the trail, with little on the agenda but morning zazen, good food, some work practice, and the hot tubs that abut a gurgling stream. The fact that I wasn’t seeing any new terrain this time didn’t bother me. Not only did the familiarity allow me to get to know this particular stretch of land better, but the repetition of the path just magnified Wildtender’s reframing of hike into pilgrimage.

In other ways, of course, the program was just a guided wilderness trip for mostly city folk, a dozen more-or-less strangers who forked over a decent fee and one day found themselves at a parking lot in a state park, fussing with their gear and getting used to the weight of their packs as the guides — Fletcher and his friend Rachel Goldberger, another dyed-in-the-wool Big Sur local — offered important details about sanitation and poison oak and scorpions. We were certainly not alone in the wilderness. For the first leg of the trip, we would follow a steep, well-maintained trail toward Sykes Hot Springs, a once-legendary backcountry hippie mecca and now a beacon for all manner of weekenders, young bucks, and yahoos lugging coolers on their backs.

The Wildtender difference was apparent from the start. For one thing, we had a Zen monk with us, a Japanese-American fellow named Hiro Ikushima who lived at the San Francisco Zen Center and had spent years at Tassajara. We paused at the trailhead, and Fletcher and Hiro invited us to approach hiking as an awareness practice, encouraging us to rest the mind in present attention, that open grok we bring to all experience, whether we recognize it or not. To support this practice, we were asked to adopt one of Wildtender’s signature protocols: not just hiking in silence, but stretching the physical space between us on the trail so that each person effectively walks alone, with guides taking up the front and rear, and a handoff routine at junctures so no one gets lost. So we bowed to the Pine Ridge trail and set off, one by one.

The day was hot and the trail was no joke. As Fletcher later told us, the Santa Lucia mountains form the steepest coastal slopes in North America. The path climbed between cool redwood shadows and exposed hillsides cloaked with chaparral plants whose oils, toasted by the sun, simultaneously brought me into the pungent present and thrust me childwise, back to the untended North County arroyos I’d crash through on my way home from grade school. Then I’d downshift these reveries into a future to-do list, or grumbling about the chatty jock girls hustling past me, or alarm at all the glossy poison oak mischievously poking out amidst the blackberry.

Fletcher compared hiking mind to surfing. In the water, you force your muscles through the roiling resistant surf until you catch a wave of body, beauty, and natural surge, and you ride that wave until it crashes, sometimes awkwardly, and you have to wrangle for a sometimes considerable time before getting to the next flow or flash. With the heat blazing, my toes tingling, and my lower back reminding me of its existence, I found it hard to rest in presence, even with this old meditator’s mind fu. I started to reframe the yummy stuff along the trail as reminders to shift to awake awareness, so that flashes of leafy, buzzing beauty, or the physical relief provided by the occasional stretch of shade, would trigger a mindful return to the concrete delight of now.

After we gathered for lunch, Fletcher talked about some of the plants we were nestling amidst, including a charmingly named hairy perennial called woundwort. He showed us the best way to crush plants to release their odors. Smell, he explained, is a great way to meet plants at their level, since they are such deep chemical beings. I’d add that the paucity of our language around odors is here a blessing in disguise, inviting us to remain upstream with evocative sensation rather than crystalizing around words and categories. Discussing the identity of other plants around us, Fletcher encouraged us to register their qualities before we pinned them down with a name.

Fletcher is very careful with language, always bringing it back to the relational and reciprocal. When someone pointed out another botanical curiosity and asked “What is this?” Fletcher took a pause and reframed the question: “Who is this?” It’s a simple move, bordering on corny, its delivery not unrelated to Fletcher’s many years of teaching K-12. But the path to animist perception lies partly through the return of a sense of pregnant wonder most of us knew best in childhood, so some childhood-adjacent pedagogy doesn’t hurt. Besides, the more you are surrounded by these beings, it just makes pragmatic sense to call them into relational speech at least some of the time, Buber’s old “I-Thou.” In a few days we were all doing it, code-switch-backing into the wilds of a different kind of talk.

Like a sesshin with backpacks, the pilgrimage was enough like a retreat that some familiar obstacles rose up for me: comparing mind, grumpy fatigue, sharp self-judgment. But these rarely stuck around for too long, as there were so many other forces ready to bowl them over. Powerful if diaphanous surges of breezy bliss, speckled light scatter, and magical aromas announced the ambient influx of the ten thousand things. A sense of lightness would begin to balloon inside, drawing dark thoughts and heavy feet up and into an ecstasy of moving with the mountain air, exhilarated by the unfolding shifts of landscape populated by a Mos Eisley cantina of other-than-human beings.

I will never forget the sight of hundreds of feral European honeybees pouring out from the gnarled yoni of an oak by the path, seemingly oblivious to our amazed presence. Rather than deplore the bees for being non-native, Fletcher praised them as escaped slaves. I also spent time with some hilarious harlequin lupine; a rare Santa Lucia fir; a scuttling horny toad; and some muscular ruddy stands of manzanita. All real live beings, but also forms of wisdom, at least for ears that can hear. As Rachel explained, manzanita allows parts of itself to die off, but it doesn’t drop those sections like other small trees, instead incorporating the relics into their bodies. Fletcher later added that manzanita berries, packed with yeast and sugars, also make a good hooch.

I don’t want to give away all the animist tricks of the Wildtender trade. But I have to tell you about one more charming little relational intoxicant: the wild tea they brew every night, and that we first enjoyed that evening at Terrace Creek. Rachel made a tea from a handful of plants we had met that day on the trail: yerba santa, coyote mint, mugwort, redwood tips, golden fleece. It was like drinking the day’s encounters before they totally slipped away into forgetfulness, bringing back the heat and fragrance of the hike just when the cool night was settling down. On subsequent evenings, Rachel spiced the tea with more pungent plants, like creeping sage, California sagebrush, and wooly blue curl, whose loopy Dr. Seussian panache sassed up many a section of deeper trail. It’s hard to convey how ambrosial this simple infusion was. As Fletcher put it, “The tea is made of beings.”

I suspect some of you might be feeling a bit queasy right now. Sitting at my desk, with road noise in the air, typing these words into my crazy Internet recursion machine, I can sense the cringe potential here. In the wrong hands, animist invocations like these can come off as sanctimonious or sentimental or forced, like some deep-ecology virtue signal on the fritz. At the same time, the awkwardness and even mistrust we feel around intelligent, place-based animism is also a sign of just how far modern humans have drifted from a way of experiencing the world that, in broad brush strokes anyway, characterized nearly all of human history. To bring this mode of perception back, you gotta break some eggs.

Fletcher was straight edge until he was 22, so he is OK breaking eggs. Though a person of great good humor, whose approach to the mysteries finds him squarely in the Venn diagram between the sacred and the silly, he has long felt deeply alienated by the world we humans have built. Growing up lonely and bored in Pacific Grove, he couldn’t grok the world of malls and automobiles, and his best friends were crawdads and snakes. In later years, experimental noise music, Gestalt work, and deep time in the outback allowed him to keep to the margins while refining his ability to commune with humans and critters alike. But his love of the wild remains in some essential way at least as much punk rock as hippie. He compares modernity to an oil slick, “bright and shiny and psychedelically-hued, a surface in which we just see the reflections of our own humanness.” You need to penetrate this slick shimmer of species narcissism to get to the depths. And to penetrate the shimmer you need both passion and practices.

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The original inhabitants of California, of course, had practices galore. But therein lies a problem. Aspiring American animists from settler-colonialist stock — Fletcher’s genetics are mostly Swedish — are in a bind. If they are at all sensitive, politically or otherwise, they know they have no business simply aping indigenous lifeways — especially in California, which as a state was particularly genocidal towards the many many indigenous peoples who were living here. On the other hand, there is more than a little awkwardness in replacing local cosmovisions with a cobbled-together European heathenism, or some nebulous ayahuasca-inflected neo-shamanic romance. (Describing himself as something like a “pagan Buddhist,” Fletcher never strays into New Age medicine talk.) With animism, locals rule. The more deeply you engage the actual land you live on and in, with its singular collage of creatures, weather, landmarks, and endemic species, the more you hunger for songs and stories that resonate with that particular place.

Over some long patient years, Wildtender has built up good relationships with the local Esselen tribe, after whom the famous retreat center, where Fletcher and Noël have also worked and taught, is named. They have participated in some educational exchanges, asked permission to take folks to certain sites (which is sometimes denied), and shared in the tribe’s local struggles and triumphs. (The Esselen, who are not a federally recognized tribe, have gotten some good-sized chunks of Monterey County returned to them in recent years.) In contrast to those boilerplate land acknowledgements everyone is already sick of, Fletcher also acknowledges the land’s agency, as well as its rightful association with a particular historical people.

In addition, Fletcher offers a soulful response to the problem of how contemporary neo-animists can find ancestral connections to a place their own ancestors seized from others with guns, germs, and lies. After we had made camp for our final night in the wild, Fletcher led us over and introduced us to one of his favorite beings: Elderberry, a lovely shrubby tree then displaying lacy yellow flowers. But elderberry, or at least its genus, is also a major player in northern Europe, where it shows up big time in medicine, cooking, magick, and even music (the hollow stalks make good flutes). And elder is just one of a number of serious power plants that circle the Northern hemisphere, just the way bears and the Big Dipper do — and, more to the point, the way the human myths surrounding Bear and the constellation do. And then there’s mugwort, another native plant we communed with in the Ventana, but which also appears in the 10^th century Old English “Nine Herbs Charm,” a marvelous poem of enchanted botany that includes California locals like chamomile and nettle. For Fletcher, such far-flung “herbs” now serve as animist connectors, weaving the West coast and Europe together, here and there, into an ancestral quilt much broader that we usually imagine these days – and one, moreover, that is literally rooted in the soil.

Wildtender also participates in a more local West Coast tradition, one that is particularly close to my heart: a multi-generational handoff of outback dharma and feral bohemia that goes back well more than a century, at least in these parts. Over a century ago, the romantic poet George Sterling held ritual fetes in the cypress groves of Carmel, near where the novelist Mary Austin lived in a treehouse called “Wi-Ki-Up.” Both of them laid the literary trail for the mighty Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry unites myth and matter like few California writers, and whose Tor House in Carmel — very much worth a visit — embodies an alchemical fusion of global gods and local stone. Then there’s the writer, linguist, and eccentric Jaime de Angulo, who studied California Indian lore and languages and wandered the Big Sur ridges in women’s clothes. Looking farther and later in time, there is the Beat Zen of Gary Snyder, who wrote the Smokey the Bear Sutra and circumambulated Marin County’s Mt. Tam as if it were Mount Kailash. Or the Terran Tao and visionary tribalism found in some Ursula K. Le Guin (especially Always Coming Home, Fletcher’s favorite book). Or the mountain poems and entheogenerous prose of SoCal native Dale Pendell. Even the old problematic Calvinist John Muir is part of the pack.

But while we were in the mountains, and the mountains may have been in us, a lot of other stuff came along with us as well. Not only were we outfitted with fancy, brilliantly engineered, and often expensive gear — including gear that kept the guides in touch with the outside world — but we talked a lot about it as well. As with so many outdoor activities, gear talk is part of the play, but navigating consumer possibilities, in their complexity, technical detail, and diverse abundance, has become a debased sort of adventure all its own. There are products and materials galore, each with its own fiendish mix of pros and cons and unexpected affordances, many of them produced by niche outfits pursuing specialized solutions to the demands of efficiency, economy, weight, and reduction of moving parts. Capitalism too is tendering the wild.

But to imagine, as some cynically do, that the Technium has already absorbed the earth, and that the language of wilderness encounter is mere romantic ideology, is to ignore the reality of the beings you meet along the trail, not to mention those who make sure you never find them. Tuning into animist frequencies also tunes you into the mixed reality that we actually inhabit, surrounded on all sides by populations of nonhuman agents who definitely have their own stories to tell and moves to make.

Shortly before we stumbled into the dirt road that led to Tassajara, Fletcher brought us to a remarkable cluster of wind-shaped sandstone caves that, he explained, were used ancestrally by the Esselen as sites of birth and dying. The tribe was OK with us being there now, we just couldn’t take any photos. We dispersed silently into the curvaceous crevices, these cupboards for human passage, now offering us warm stone, cool shade, a gritty bed for a nap or, in my case, a hypnagogic spin. I popped up re-energized and poked around the mass, finding scat, rodent tracks, and some remarkable dudleya, with fleshy red stalks towering over labial mandalas.

I stared off towards Tassajara and Zenned out. Then I noticed faces starting to pop out of a nearby rock escarpment: old ones, Easter Island heads, hawk-nosed braves. These were not the faces of “rock people”. That would be too easy. But such mild phantasms, which used to emerge unbidden into our minds when we were kids, do indicate something, perhaps that you are shifting into a mode where other-than-human-persons can be met as such. The phantasms themselves are like candy strewn along the path, morsels of easy imagination gobbled on the way to something greater, perhaps, or at least subtler and more elliptical. And these faces were as nothing to the rare pair of condors we saw circling over the caves shortly after we left the area. A remarkable vision for the close of pilgrimage. As a pagan Buddhist might say, all is adornment.

Fletcher and Noël first walked this way to Tassajara well over a decade ago, following more or less the whole track we had just taken. The trails were not maintained, trees and shrubs criss-crossed the path, and they had to clamber as much as hike. They stumbled into Tassajara monastery parched and sunburned, covered in pollen and flowers and guardian oak, which is what Fletcher calls poison oak. All is adornment.

Fletcher says a goal of Wildtender is the “collaborative reparation of enchanted relationship.” In other words, it wasn’t just about taking folks walking through the wild, but about creating a space where other beings might want to show up the way they once did, for all of us, long ago. “I felt a longing from the land, from the kinfolk,” Fletcher says. When Wildtender started, it was really about these other-than human people. “But over the years I realized that it’s actually about the human people.”

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to turn readers on to my stuff. So if you want to show support, the best thing you could do is to forward posts to friends or colleagues you think will dig them. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, though for now everything here is free. And you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

Appearances

• Monte Verità Drop. This year has involved a lot of amazing travel, but the psychogeographic prize goes to Monte Verità, a storied hilltop in Ascona, a lovely lakeside town in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. At the turn of the last century, Monte Verità served as ground zero for Hippie, hosting a necessarily loose colony of vegetarians, anarchists, feminists, and spiritualists. Dudes wore sandals, let their hair grow long, and spent the winter in caves; women made art, celebrated their erotic agency, and performed nude dance rituals beneath the moon. Drawn by the good vibes still lingering decades later, many of the giants of comparative religion (Mircea Eliade, Henri Corbin, Richard Wilhelm, Gershom Scholem, etc.) gathered just down the hill at Eranos. And the vibes continue: this September, Ralph White — whose New York Open Center hosted my first public talk, on PKD and gnosticism, back in the ‘80s — will be convening one of his Esoteric Quest conferences in Ascona.

In April, Monte Verità also hosted its annual Eventi letterari, which generously invited me to a place I had longed to visit for years. One afternoon during the festival, two local Swiss filmmakers, Kevin Merz and Felix Bachmann, shot a particularly satisfying and intimate interview with me in the small tea garden near the Bauhaus hotel that hosted the event. Felix and Kevin are accomplished artist freaks who have recently taken the AI plunge. This June, the Generative Center they run will show the video as part of an opening entitled “Learning to Fly”, a celebration and remembrance of The Incident, a Swiss symposium held thirty years ago that drew paranormal all-stars like Jacques Vallée, Terence McKenna, Jeremy Narby, Kathleen Rogers, and HR Giger. Here is the interview we shot.

Upcoming Events

• Chalice: Black Psychedelic Revolution. For June’s Chalice, the monthly psychedelic salon at the Alembic I co-host with Maria Mangini and Dr. Christian Greer, we will be welcoming Nicholas Powers, a poet, professor, and journalist who teaches in New York City. An insightful and generous thinker and speaker, not to mention a mensch, Nick has written about war, the Occupy movement, vampires, and his love of Burning Man. Tonight he will discuss stories and notions found in and around his dynamite new book Black Psychedelic Revolution, published by Berkeley’s own North Atlantic Press. In the book, which provocatively mixes fact and fiction, Powers unpacks his own psychedelic story as a way to uncover the legacy and persistence of trauma in the Black community, as well as some concrete ways that entheogens can unravel such devastating distortions. Streaming and in-person, 7pm PST, June 4, tickets.

• Dead Zen. On August 9th, on the 30th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s demise, I will be joining the Zen teacher Kokyo Henkel for the online San Francisco Zen Center workshop Dharma and the Dead: A Lyrical Discussion of the Grateful Dead. After discovering our deep mutual affinity for the Dead’s music and songcraft, Kokyo and I decided to explore the band’s “Dharma songs,” and particularly the striking lyrics of Robert Hunter. “Together we’ll listen to selected tracks and hear Zen commentaries on lyrics that open the heart to a realm beyond our habitual fixed views of the world.” This particular nightfall of diamonds will actually stream in the afternoon, from 3pm - 6pm PST.

Reading

• Revenge of the Machine Elves. Heads everywhere are looking forward to the September release of Strange Attractor, my mate Graham St. John’s forthcoming biography of Terence McKenna (with a foreword from yours truly). Graham recently posted a fresh Terence essay that takes takes a thread from the bio and runs with it. Entitled “Zone Ghost in the Machine: Terence McKenna’s Cyberdelic Reanimation,” this fascinating piece examines Terence’s digital afterlife as a mega-sampled voice, an anamolous digital persona, and a font of material ripe for translation into interactive LLMs. “Resurrected a quarter-of-a-century since his passing, and echoing his own ponderings on AI and its fraught implications….AI-augmented TM speaks directly to the technological moment that made this reanimation possible.”

• Karamozov Bros. These are dizzying times, turbulent and exisentially woozy. Ballast is required. One method that has worked for me lately is a commitment to reading serious works of literature, philosophy, and religion, especially “classics” that, whether in theme or heft or both, can be described as “heavy.” Taking these puppies on is an act of defiance against the urgent froth of our moment, even as the heaviness rhymes tonally with the times. Given all the gaps in my reading, the practice also serves to symbolically fill in the foundations of the great edifice of humanities learning that has sheltered me for decades, but that, for reasons both internal and external to university practice, is collapsing before our eyes. I also find that some classics are paradoxically good for escapism. Because they require a good deal of attention and care to follow, they collect and focus my mind, and thereby divert and distract it more commandingly than superficially fun or accessible timely texts that, these days anyway, often kick me to the curb long before I am done, wondering where I can get a decent plate of soul food.

The latest pile of brisket was The Brothers Karamazov. Its dumb to offer a capsule review of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece beyond noting that, as reported, its great and you should read it. It wasn’t always easy, not so much because of the density of the prose — the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation I read seemed excellent — or the gnarliness of the themes the author explores — guilt, responsibility, God, modernity. No, it wasn’t easy because Dostoyevsky is pitiless (if charitable) in his portrayal of human beings, which means you have to spend many, many pages hanging out with creeps, egoists, and fools. Of course, there is also the wonderful, world-class character of Alyosha Karamazov, whose complex attraction to Orthodox Christianity, embodied in his amazing mentor Father Zosima, was one of the features that drew me to this book in the first place. As you may not have noticed, Orthodoxy is having a major come-back these days, both for the appeal of its premodern mystic ambience and its utility for hardcore reactionary Theo Bros. I wanted to huff some fumes from a safe literary thurible.

Still I was not prepared for the echoes of current affairs that came hammering back toward me when I reread “The Grand Inquisitor,” the famous short story wedged into a chapter that I had previously enjoyed on its own. In the tale, a leader of the Inquisition meets a quietly returned Jesus, whom he basically tells to beat it. In his monologue, the Inquisitor justifies why, in order to actually save and serve humanity as they really are — and not as the more enobling Jesus saw them — the Church has turned to Satan’s ways, and therefore don’t need Him anymore.

Dostoevsky was a conservative, and he uses the tale to point towards the theological void he saw through the cracks of his era’s rising tide of materialism, socialism, atheism, and rationalism — devil tools whose proper manipulation, the Inquistor suggests, is necessary for the Church to establish dominion over lost humanity. But as I read it, the critique also seems to land at the feet of today’s grim crop of Christian nationalists, whose desire to use state power in absolutist and authoritarian ways directly echoes the Inquisitor’s ideas — especially his autocratic rejection of the “terrible, absolute freedom” to choose offered by JC, here the silent witness to the cynicism of power, of Caeser taking it all.

Listening

• Is This Thing On? Very broadly stated, there are two basic species of panpsychism, the idea that some manner of consciousness underlies or is distributed throughout reality. The more traditional “mystic” school leans idealist and monist, and often supports its philosophical arguments with spiritual literature and the evidence, such as it is, of extraordinary personal experiences. The other approach relies on scientific reasoning and resonates with an essentially materialist approach to the universe. The idea here is that, when you boil the physics down to the fundamentals, you get matter, and energy, and something like consciousness. In this view, consciousness is no more special than space dust. But its space dust that helps solve David Chalmers’ famous “hard problem:” the reason that meat slime like neurons seems to “give rise” to the awareness you are experiencing right now is that some basic form of consciousness permeates everything from the get-go.

Folks invested in consciousness culture owe it to themselves to be familiar with both approaches, which of course interact and disagree in all manner of complex and interesting ways. In that sense, though not in others, I would recommend Annaka Harris’s new podcast audio documentary thing Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps us Understand the Universe. Harris is a popular writer on physics and the science of consciousness, but like her husband Sam, she is also an advanced meditator with a more than superficial interest in psychedelics. (She also shares with hubby a sometimes brusque, grating, and overly dismissive dialogue style.) Over eleven hours or so, she pursues the possibility that “consciousness is fundamental” with an impressive cast of mostly science-minded interlocutors, including Lee Smolin, Brian Greene, David Eagleman, Carlo Rovelli, and Susan Blackmore, as well as the meditation master Joseph Goldstein. Harris leans panpsychist (a term she does not like), but is not a committed believer, and the evolution of her own views over the series adds nuance at well as some hazy murk to her conversations, which are themselves parsed and narratively organized, not always effectively, by Harris’ ongoing dialogue with her cohost Jay Shapiro.

As the snarky asides about “woo” suggests, there is a fascinating tension here: because scientific panphysicism abuts mystical idealism, Harris has to do extra work to keep that stuff at bay, especially since a lot of her guests are old-school physicalists and she wants them to take her seriously. On the other hand, she does keep open the possibility that some of the subtle and profound stuff that happens in meditation (or on drugs) may directly shed light on the structure of reality. Harris deserves credit for sticking with the audacious possibility for such an “experiential science”, as well as her overall ambition in approaching this tricksy topic with such a wide, pluralistic approach. But somebody like Bernard Kastrup, the computer engineer who has brazenly rebooted metaphysical idealism, should really be here, if only for the fireworks. The fact that Harris wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole speaks to the ultimately parochial limits of her project.

• Mitch Hedberg: Strategic Grill Locations (1999). I’ve been doing a deep dive into Gen X sensibility for an upcoming essay, and a return to Mitch Hedberg’s excellent standup seemed imporant. Hedberg, who was born a year after me and died, unlike me, of a drug overdose in 2005, has an absurdist and non-linear style whose hilarity seems like the preternatural flowering of the cut-ups that funny stoner guy offered up in high school. Hedberg expresses a very generational sense of irony, slack, and meta — on this self-produced (and self-described) “CD,” he jokes about editing in audience laughter to beef up the unfunny jokes, and then listing audience members’ names on the back of the release so they can feel the shame. At the same time, Hedberg’s comedy actually hews to an old-school ethos that is more Rodney Dangerfield than Richard Pryor: the one-liner, the punning gotchya, the exploitation of goofs that were already lying there in our common tongue, ripe for the taking. “I used to do drugs,” he slurs. “I still do, but I used to too.”

• Slavic Folk Songs. Like many an 80s head, I was transformed the moment I dropped the needle on Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. An obscure 1975 recording from the Bulgarian State Radio & Television Female Vocal Choir, the album was re-released by the avant-Goth label 4AD after Peter Murphy from Bauhaus slipped a duped cassette to label head Ivo Watts-Russell. I have been an absolute sucker for Slavic vox ever since. So when I stumbled across some pricy import vinyl called Slavic Folks Songs from the bins at Amoeba, I just rolled the dice. (The fact that the record was on XKatedral, a label cofounded by Kali Malone, didn’t hurt.) Here the voices are just two, Latvian friends and choir mates Ansis Bētiņš and Artūrs Čukurs, and the mix of folk and sacred tunes they present — with a special emphasis on Ukranian tunes — are haunting, vibrant, strange, and intoxicating. The spare arrangements center the architectural magic of the intervals that define this music’s stirring harmonies, while the stark and intimate recording totally rejects the slick ambient gloss that mars so many contemporary “folk” recordings.

Watching

• Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948). Like the better known Nightmare Alley (1947), this flick is lodged somewhere between film noir and occult thriller. While opening with a marvelously dank aborted suicide sequence, the movie qua movie is only OK. What makes it shine — besides great shots of LA’s old Bunker Hill — is Edward G. Robinson’s earnest and melancholic performance as John Triton, a huckster stage mentalist who discovers that he possesses genuine precog powers — powers that, while saving lives and making other people money, bring Triton himself nothing but grief. Film noir is a cynical genre, whose sardonic skepticism is represented here by a crusty LA detective who mocks Triton’s claims. But the story, drawn from a Cornell Woolrich book, makes it clear that Triton’s’s gift — and therefore his doomed pathos — is genuine. And that preternatural tension makes all the difference.

• Baba Ram Dass, Live on the Aspen Strip. A reader sent me this excellent hour-long videotape of Ram Dass delivering a talk in a Colorado church in 1976. At this point, Ram Dass was years deep into his Hindu rockstar thing, and a rascal energy animates his twinkling eyes. Stroking his beard, he mostly entertains the crowd with road stories — gigging with Allen Ginsberg, suffering through Zen retreats, and encountering Jaya, the foul-mouthed Brooklyn mystic whom he would soon abjure in a justly well-known article about getting suckered by bad spiritual teachers. But for all the wisdom he drops — or, in the case of Jaya, misses — the genre here is basically stand-up comedy. Between his piss-taking, his impeccable timing, and his very contemporary sense of comic neuroticism, Ram Dass makes us recognize the central role that humor, and especially Jewish humor, played in the American seeker scene (he uses the word “scene” a lot).

Played, and IMO should still play. In fact, if you find yourself fixated on some new psychedelic guru or sense-making Stoic or jhana coach, you should ask yourself: is this person funny? Do they ever genuinely crack wise? Do they channel the cosmic giggle? If they’re not funny, or if, even worse, they do that fake funny teacher thing where they prime their students to laugh in that forced in-groupy way at jokes that aren’t actually funny, then you might just wanna hit the path again.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to find resonant readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, though for now everything here is free. And you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

In the first talk, I offered a big thinky framework to help illuminate the longer historical swells that drive the massive breakers of novelty and threat now crashing on our stranded brains. Call me old-school, but I find it hard to orient myself without a strong sense of historical context, particularly about the postwar geopolitical order installed after 1945, and its exceptionally influential imbrication of capitalism, culture, psychology, weirdness, and cybernetic technologies. Something truly strange entered the world in the 1940s, some fell pattern constellated by the CIA, LSD, ENIAC, the Macy conferences, the flying saucer, and even — at least if you believe Phil Dick — the gnostic gospels of Nag Hammadi. That’s one way to explain the many World War II flashbacks that intrude in our moment — the Nazi salutes of Musk and Bannon; Vance’s platforming of Germany’s extreme right-wing; the Holocaust discourse kicked up by Israel’s brutal pulverization of Gaza. As the global geopolitical order is dismantled, vengeful ghosts are loosed from the cage of the postwar pact.

This is a vertiginous state of affairs. Collectively and individually, our souls — or psyches, if you will — are skating on thin ice. Because of this, my second talk turned from analysis towards something more immediate, home-spun, and rooted in no-longer-normal everyday experience. I don’t know about you, but I regularly find my mind and heart assaulted by looming waves of dread, anger, grief, and shock, often infused with an almost psychedelic sense of incipient SciFi insanity. A recent example was the AI Trump Pope image, an easy-cheesy bit of AI brain rot that became, through the mere fact of being retweeted by the President of the United States, an obscene horror. In a post on his increasingly necessary Liminal News, Daniel Pinchbeck identified in this image a pure exercise of power, one that draws us into complicity through the kind of numbing nihilistic profanity — a woozy sacrilege rendered even more repellent through its banal stupidity. And yet this fucking thing is in my mind, and millions like mine, our fragile immunological bubbles punctured like Swiss cheese. The Mekons told us this in “Sorcerer,” a postpunk ditty about necromantic capitalism: “The abyss is close to home.”

These emotional maelstroms of nausea and vertigo are also by design, which means that facing the authentic reality of our feelings rather than burying ourselves in distraction — including the near distractions of doomscrolling and social media outrage — is only half the battle. We have little choice it seems but to also develop practices that, however we act on and in the world, also work inwardly and cannily with our attitudes, modes of awareness, and roiling emotions. This is not self-help, let alone self-realization. It is survival, or at least sanity.

This is the long haul, folks. The hard rain is here, and the storm will last for the foreseeable future (which admittedly is not that foreseeable). I am worried about the world, but I am also worried about us. Can we keep it together, for ourselves and for those around us? Can we hold open the creative capacity to respond to the extraordinary demands of the time without losing our minds, let alone our souls? So I humbly offer up a few of the tactics and maxims I brought up in my talk, already reworked, rewritten, and still incomplete. These aren’t solutions or commandments, but goads, probes, and slap-dash hopes. I hope some of them land.

ATTENTION IS A MARTIAL ART

It’s been over two decades since a pop business book first drew our attention to “the attention economy.” These days we are paying even more attention to attention (including claims that we are over-prioritizing the sort of steady, continuous awareness that many of us crave). But how are we doing?

Lots of us find our ability to concentrate under threat. Our stream of consciousness feels splintered, hurried, overwhelmed, fatigued, vexed, and easily interrupted. Just to make it through an ordinary day, we are forced to navigate an informational matrix in which our moment-to-moment awareness is captured, organized, and monetized by fiendishly designed distraction machines, algorithmically-crafted memes, Kafka software, and massive propaganda swarms. In response, some have turned to various attentional practices — media fasts, technological hacks, mindfulness stop-gaps. Generally these are little more than “in-app solutions,” kinda like expecting sustainability from capitalism. But they are still preferable to more costly responses like burn-out, despair, and addiction.

Peering into a very near future, where our screens are invaded by AI agents who know us better than we know ourselves, I think we need to embrace a more focused, integrated, and ornery attentional stance. The science of psychology can help, but I prefer thinking of attention as an art, and more specifically a martial art. Like traditional martial arts, the attention skills of the future sane demand a number of embodied competencies requiring will, technique, strength, and the paradox of trained spontaneity. The art of attention has spiritual, theatrical, and erotic dimensions, but these days we also need to see it as a martial art. Whether or not we consider ourselves currently subject to hybrid information warfare — which I basically do — attention now primarily moves through a multidimensional field dominated by conflict, manipulation, and lies.

One key source for the art of attention is meditation, whose popularity today may derive in part from a collective gut feeling that this shit might actually really come in handy. But unlike most forms of meditation, martial arts require a vivid and vigilant situational awareness. Such awareness aims in both directions, at once inside and out. Outwardly, attention is rooted in media critique, social research, Jedi mind tricks, and a jiu-jitsu of holds and attacks, retreats and redirections, feints and forces. But the art is also inner, requiring profound self-awareness, stable will, clear values, and some pitiless insight into our own cognitive blurs and biases.

MIX YOUR FEELS

Many of us are wrestling with strong waves of anger, fear, grief, and despair, which have now become part of a complete balanced 21^st century affect breakfast. All of these feelings are very demanding (and exhausting), and while we cannot hope to avoid them (nor should we want to, they are too intelligent), we don’t have to just hand them the keys to the car. And so we might learn to mix your feels, to enter a rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory emotional landscape in which joy and grief and fury and sadness weave into an unnameable tapestry. Such mixtures require us to disidentify with specific emotions while giving them all enough rope, a kind of intimate disinterestedness that allows them to exist alongside one another, with no one capturing the flag. Never feel bad for tasting glorious joy in these dark times, or guilt for the despondency than can abruptly drown our happiness. Just keep those feels flowing.

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CONCRETIZE AND SUBTILIZE

Navigating through the vertiginous loops of today’s hypermediated reality, it is vital to be able to generate your own ground, your own center of stability. One way is to concretize: to consciously re-inhabit the body that you are, and to tune into your basic orientation in spacetime. As things get wiggy, just draw attention to the weight of your body in the chair, the ambient temperature tickling your skin, the subtle scents lifted on the breeze. Even as you dampen your symbolic frameworks and conceptual chatter, tune into the objects and events around you.

Such concrete embodiment does not just help you ground, but also helps you clarify. When we intentionally blink our eyes to improve our visual image, or splash cold water on our face to wake up, we are re-inhabiting our sensory body in a manner that in turn sharpens the mind. Such vivid awakening can in turn anchor our awareness in the here and now, crystallizing an orientation — what Carlos Castaneda calls the “assemblage point” — even when, all around us, all that’s solid melts into air.

But it is not enough simply to ground the body in some objective, quantifiable (and trackable) sector of spacetime. There are also the subtle realms to tune into, without which we are mere sacks of meat. The act of concretizing, of re-embodying, is best paired with a reverse movement, not a return into the abstractions of thought or the switching hubs of memes and data, but toward the intangible, the evocative, the delicate overtone song that accompanies the plain speech of the everyday.

Here I reach, with some dissatisfaction, for the archaic term subtilize. As with related concepts like distill and sublimate, neither of which quite gets it either, the act of subtilizing refers to an essentially chemical (or alchemical) process of purifying a substance, though “purity” here is probably better thought of as “poetry.” The return of the hoary hippie term “vibe” to today’s discourse suggests an intuition about the value of such atmospheric readings. Build your own inner version of what my friend Graham St. John calls the vibe-o-meter, a finely tuned instrument that registers the singular feels of space and time, energies that may even elude algorithmic capture or easy simulation.

KEEP YOUR COOL

It is hard to keep your cool at a time of global warming, not to mention the intense and growing friction between individuals, tribes, beliefs, and sectors of society. We live in blazing times. But that’s even more reason to keep it on the chill side, even if, for most of us, remaining cool is less an achievement than an ongoing practice. Yet it is arguably one of the key techniques in the martial art of attention, because it provides a space of equilibrium that allows one to respond non-reactively, to achieve some freedom of movement. In Buddhist terms, cool resonates with equanimity, the acceptance of things as they are, and the release of the hope that such things will in themselves deliver you from suffering.

This is not the steely teeth-grinding cool of the soldier who ignores the gory horrors before him — nor, needless to say, the cool records on the hipster’s shelf. In his pivotal essay “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” Robert Farris Thompson calls it a “transcendental balance.” In modern counterculture, such composure is linked with the cult of the individual — the rebel, the private eye, the cowboy. Such cool cucumbers not only keep their heads in a fight, but maintain a certain reserve even in their pleasures. Coolness also remains one of the most intractable gestures of refusal, even when we have no choice but to comply, as with Bartleby the Scrivener’s “I would prefer not to.”

The idea of “cool”, like so many features of hip culture, is derived from Black American sensibility, and, according to Thompson, ultimately from West Africa, where coolness is a gift of the head. You can see it in the smooth manner of Miles Davis, a man who was angry and had a lot of good reasons to be angry, but who also had reasons to fear and remained fearless. And you can really hear that transcendental balance in Miles’ music, a disarming equilibrium amidst the high-wire leaps of improvisation, as well as an unerring ability to orchestrate and magnify his various ensembles of master musicians.

This collective dimension is key. Forget the rebel; today’s hepcats offer up coolness as a gift to their fellows. Cool heads form points of collected calm amidst the chaos, a balm to friends, family, community, and creatures facing the Great Freak-Out. Thompson notes that, in the African context, the cooler a person becomes, “the more ancestral they grow.” That is, the more they can slip out of their own reactivity, and support the continuity of human resilience.

CULTIVATE FOXHOLE HUMOR

In his book From Death-Camp to Existentialism, Viktor Frankl writes that even in the concentration camps, a situation of utmost desperation, many retained a sense of humor, however faint. “Humor was another one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.” While most of us are still a million miles from the horrors of the camps, we may do well to consciously cultivate the art that, “more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

But there is a particular flavor of humor that arises in the face of terror, injustice, cruel paradox, and colossal stupidity — not to mention the nauseating absurdity of death and the omnipresent suffering Frankl describes. Some call it gallows humor, which, given the relative paucity of gallows, reminds us at least how long this mode has been with us. But I prefer foxhole humor, the trenchant art of the trenches. Here one also faces the imminence of death, but in the social context of combatants — remember that martial art — using humor to hold precariously together in the presence of extreme misery, mindless tedium, and terror.

Again those of us reading (and writing) this can mostly only imagine the grinding hell faced by soldiers on the Western Front or in the Donbas today. (For a vivid taste, you could do worse than Dan Carlin’s fabulous Hardcore History series on World War I, “Blueprint for Armageddon.”) What right do we have to pretend to emulate their extreme situation? At the same time, it’s important to remember that if these guys can crack wise, you have no excuse.

There is a tendency, particularly on the Worried Left, to hunker down in po-faced piety, to treat the presence of humor within a realistic assessment of our apocalyptic condition as some kind of sin rather than a micro-salvation. Not only has this made for easy targeting for the griefers and trolls of the Sarcastic Right, but it represses one of the key gifts of soul that keeps us struggling on Team Human in the first place. Humor is a healer and a sword, a bonding intoxicant and the final gob of spit in the eye of the executioner. It is Stoicism without solemnity, a dark pact with the cosmic giggle, and the adult’s fatalistic trace of the child’s laugh, marvelous and free of meanings. It is a lifeline in a time of monsters.

FORM POSSES

Today we are at once afflicted with loneliness and a claustrophobic excess of human presences, and particularly of human opinions. Friendship is the middle path through this feast and famine. But given the times, we also need something more collective, collaborative, and energized, but still intimate. Call it the posse, though band, squad, coven, and crew might do as well. “Tribe” and “community” are too big and gaseous. “Family” is OK, but maybe too neurotic and homogenous.

The point is to form small and tight human collectives that actively collaborate to distribute skills and knowledges, and to do it for fun, profit, mutual support, and practical survival. Whenever possible, these posses should share meat-space, ideally to hang out in unstructured spacetime and to pursue entertaining ordeals of exploration, performance, invocation, creation. Text threads and Discord channels can support the camaraderie, but you need serious boundaries and commitments to generate the continuity of the posse online.

ENJOY THE WEIRD

One of the problems with the valorization of the weird and especially weird culture is that if the weird becomes too enjoyable and accessible it ceases to be weird. One of the qualities that has attracted me to the word and many of the things it named is a kind of vexed ambivalence, as features we might associate with wonder — enchantment, awe, mystery, delight — are mixed or fused with considerably darker and more indigestible features. There is something in the weird that is yucky, perverse, alienating, bizarre, and potentially crazymaking, like, for real. Think David Lynch, or extraterrestrial abduction narratives, or (non-plushy) Cthulhu, or strange obsessives who kind of creep you out.

We live in weird times, they are only going to get weirder. That makes them extraordinary and marked with awe, but also yucky, perverse, alienating, bizarre, and potentially crazymaking. The provocation to enjoy the weird is indeed that — a provocation. It is offered partly in the spirit of Žižek’s challenge to Enjoy your symptom — to appreciate our own weird eruptions and enigmas, and their ambivalent proximity to a tragic unconscious reality that we cannot help but miss (and misunderstand). But it is also a reminder that, for all its terrors and cruelties and looming dystopias, for however much we want to make it kinder and greener and more human for crissakes, our fate does land us in interesting times.

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The heart of this unfortunately delusional story — and it is a delusion, as I will explain in a moment — is the seemingly obvious incongruity between the accelerationist orientation of libertarian Silicon Valley technologists and the reactionary hunkering down of conservative Christian nationalists — two groups that provide some of the most dynamic cultural and political fuel to the Trump administration’s conflagration of the American state.

While each “side” actually represents a complex spectrum of positions, I follow old Max Weber: it’s sometimes helpful to essentialize or even caricature core value positions in order to understand the motivations of large groups of social actors. So here we go.

Nietzsche famously and correctly argued that the Achilles heel of modernity is nihilism, the raging abyss of meaninglessness over which the tightrope to the future is stretched. Conservative Christians living in modernity have traditionally dodged this acid bath by holding to an absolute rock of certainty, and to a fundamental(ist) establishment of moral and natural law. Leaving aside their myriad theological differences — establishing the One Way has always been the toughest of traveling salesman problems — the vast majority of conservative Christians in America, whether evangelists or fundamentalists or Calvinists or pre-Vatican II Catholics or newly minted Ortho Bros, share a profound distrust and even horror of the corrosive, tradition-eroding powers of modernity — that era when, as Marx famously said, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

This deep ambivalence about modernity also shapes the basic sense of the self. In the face of the technocultural explosion of novelty and choice, and the secular and liberal pluralism it has largely installed, conservative Christians have tended to root themselves in the embrace (and sometimes rigid imposition) of boundaries. These “lines in the sand” define the edges of one’s actions, tolerances, and ethical norms, and install crisp and often “traditional” limits on situations perceived as chaotic, unruly, or perverse. (Hence the fetishes for borders, defense, and gender normativity.) And nothing shores up such lines in the sand so much as the forceful energy of unwavering belief, an attitude captured in the bumper sticker that in a way says it all: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

This stands in opposition to the techno-libertarian ethos, which actively enjoys and intensifies the progressive disruptions unleashed by tech and markets, whose novel possibilities and radical unboundedness are seen as forms of freedom and self-making. As a style of selfing, this mode has more recently cashed out, in the Valley anyway, as a kind of nerdy postmodernism: identity is a LARP, ethics a square on a D&D alignment chart, and the closest thing to a church is Burning Man, where lines in the sand warp and shimmer as the LSD reveals a multiverse of pleasures and mutations.

When the sharper techno-libertarians acknowledge the problem of nihilism, they respond with Nietzsche’s jailbreak: the transvaluation of values. Humanity itself will change. Natural law be damned (except maybe the links between DNA and intelligence). Deploying reason and technique to hack the given, we can get out ahead of the limitations imposed by nature and social mores, not to mention our own baked-in cognitive biases. Pound smart drugs, practice jhanas, revise your priors, prep your skull for a Neuralink patch, and you too might dance across that tightrope into the cyborg arms of the Übermensch.

With its freethinking origins, libertarianism has largely steered atheist, if not outright Promethean. That may help explain why libertarianism has so long been strong among hard-headed technologists and engineers. I grew up in SoCal in the 70s and 80s, and the libertarians in the voting guides inevitably worked in technical fields. In more recent years, this spirit has manifested as technological solutionism, or the cult of genius engineers, or the alignment-be-damned school of AI accelerationism. Such bootstraps confidence has no need for ancient commandments or scriptural prophecies, and often sees them as damage to route around. As such, techno-libertarianism is only a hair’s breadth away from the Luciferian rebel yell that has long unnerved the God-fearing. Anton LaVey, head of the Church of Satan, was a libertarian who described his breed of Satanism as “Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.”

That’s why I saw a massive MAGA collision on the horizon, a Royal Rumble of the Transhuman and the Trad. But I was wrong. In sync (as is often the case) with Jamie Wheal, who recently admitted to making the same predictive error, I now realize that, rather than a collision, we are instead witnessing a prophetic convergence. What lies before us is the emergence of Christian transhumanism, an explicitly eschatological accelerationism with righteous high-tech weaponry strapped to its side and the galactic New Jerusalem in its cyborg sights.

Of course, we are also talking Bay Area technoculture here, so it’s impossible to separate memes, hype, trendy journalism, and fundamental shifts in values and vision. But this part is true: in past decades, Bay Area tech culture was mocking or actively hostile to Christianity, and it is no longer. We may or may not be witnessing a genuine “tech revival”, but something religious is slouching toward Silicon Valley to be born.

For one thing, there has been an uptick in missionary efforts to virally direct the word of God towards coders, engineers, and entrepreneurs. San Francisco’s Epic Church has recently proved very successful in bringing a self-help-tinged gospel to tech folks. According to Jules Evans, who visited Epic one recent Sunday and described the church as a pleasant mainstream charismatic affair, the pastor Ben Pilgreen:

occasionally spoke about ‘secular business’ and ‘secular culture’ as something that surrounds them in San Francisco but they will somehow resist and transform. This is classic charismatic speak— they can sometimes think of themselves as a sort of underground rebellion surrounded by ‘secular culture’ yet resistant to it, a true counter-culture. However, at the same time these sorts of churches are deeply influenced by secular business culture…The service occasionally reminded me of a tech product launch.

The New York Times and Vanity Fair both recently published pieces about a San Francisco gathering called Code & Cosmos, hosted last October by Garry Tan, the president and CEO of Silicon Valley’s mighty start-up incubator Y Combinator. Both pieces directed ink towards Trae Stephens, Christian co-founder of the defense tech company Anduril with Palmer Eldritch (uh, Luckey). This is a crucial reminder that, as Jamie Wheal explains in the post linked above, the Valley’s shift towards conservative Christianity is intimately bound up with the new patriotism that fuels its significant turn towards high-tech defense development, both here and in SoCal’s Gundo. Trae’s wife Michelle also helped build the nonprofit ACTS 17, which sponsored the Code & Cosmos event. ACTS stands for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society, while the 17th chapter of the book of Acts — PKD’s favorite book of the New Testament — follows Saint Paul as he spreads the Word through various smarty-pants cities like Thessalonica, Berea, and Athens. Get it?

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The Christian scientist Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, spoke at the ACTS 17 event last October. But the gathering the previous May featured a much more influential and symptomatic figure in this 4k holy roller redux: Peter Thiel. Rightwing billionaire, big-dollar J.D. Vance supporter, Christian, Tolkien fan, and the VC Dark Lord behind PayPal, Palantir, and the Founders Fund (which backed Anduril), Thiel also serves as what Evans calls the “Cardinal Richelieu” of the emerging sensibility: the sometimes garbled and scattershot power broker of Christian accelerationism. “We don’t want to be anchored too much on nature,” he told the ACTS 17 crowd, speaking about transhumanism. “If there’s a Christian critique of these sort of utopian scientific movements, it should always be in the direction that they don’t go far enough. Transhumanism, radical life extension. It’s not that you shouldn’t live forever, but that it’s only transforming people’s bodies and not their souls and not the whole person or something like this.” [emphasis added]

In the Valley, Thiel has long been known for propagating the gospel of René Girard, a deeply Catholic theorist of religion and literature who taught for years at Stanford. I don’t want to get too tangled in Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, which is at once fascinating, perceptive, and kinda banal, but it helps illuminate some of Thiel’s otherwise obscure arguments about God and tech. In 2020, for example, Thiel claimed that, “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief, you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.”

This is Girard’s theory in a nutshell: Left to our own devices, humans want what they want by looking at what others want. This looking around inevitably leads to envy and rivalry and sociopathic tensions. (The theory also makes investments in envy machines like Facebook — which Thiel got a very early piece of — an extremely canny bet.) To maintain cohesion, Girard argued, societies have traditionally beat up a scapegoat — an unfortunate outsider who can be laden with all this pent-up social conflict and then destroyed or banished to the relief of all (except the scapegoat). Christ, in Girard’s thought, is the ultimate scapegoat. But because he is also the all-powerful and all-forgiving God, he upends the whole demoralizing system of social media(tion), opening up a transcendental dimension that springs the trap of envy that lies behind the madness of crowds. We escape by looking up.

As John Ganz points out, Girard’s critique of “invidious competition” also provides a theological basis for one of Thiel’s standout features as an economic overlord: his profound fondness for monopoly capitalism. Rather than waste time and indulge in meaningless competitive struggles, monopolies can, in Ganz’s words, “miraculously defeat the logic of the market and commoditization and can focus instead solely on ‘innovation.’” Innovation in Thiel’s view is not a response to market competition or even human desire, but instead expresses a radical force of novelty that drives history beyond nature and beyond human murk, and towards the kingdom of God. But for all of today’s remarkable digital tools, Thiel thinks we are actually slacking in that department. Real innovation is not a new smartphone app — which in some ways just feeds the envious world of mimetic desire — but the production of real machines, medical breakthroughs, new materials, and — to judge from Thiel’s investment strategies — overwhelming surveillance and defense capabilities.

Tara Isabella Burton, one of our best religious culture commentators, characterizes Thiel’s stance as “a distinct fusion of techno-utopianism that characterizes its successes as Christian miracles.” I am not sure if miracles is quite the right word — “direct expression of God’s providential role in history” is probably closer to the mark — but you get the drift. Here the heavenly hopes that sustain personal faith are remade into a civilizational gospel of technological optimism. In a 2015 piece called “Against Edenism,” Thiel wrote that “Judeo-Western optimism differs from the ­atheist optimism of the Enlightenment in the extreme degree to which it believes that the forces of chaos and nature can and will be mastered.” This language reminds us how mythology fuels this view. We are back at the beginning of things, facing a watery void, identifying with the divine engineer or the dominating patriarchal hero.

In what way is this conservative? As Sam Adler Bell explained a few years ago in a discussion of Thiel:

What this vision is not, is a conservatism of limits. Rather, it is Promethean, progressive, in the most basic sense: It deplores any constraint on its power to govern, shape the future, despoil the planet, innovate, and expand the American economy. All limits — pluralism, democracy, ecology, human frailty — must be overcome in pursuit of winning the world game, reasserting American dominance and dispelling our decadent malaise. (At one time, Mr. Thiel [was also] interested in overcoming the ultimate limit: death itself.)

Like the early Futurists of fascist Italy, Thiel wants the power of technology unburdened from restraint, and in a way that might even triumph over death and physical decay. His stance reminds me of a fascinating feature of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s 1975 pulp conspiracy romp Illuminatus!, whose prophetic illumination of our time I discuss in my book High Weirdness. In the novel, the renegade anarchists of the Discordian Society fight an ontological guerilla war against the Illuminati, who manipulate and dominate society behind a conspiratorial veil. But the Illuminati are not reactionaries, or Traditionalists, or Straussian neocons. Like the Discordians, they are novelty junkies, “homo neophilus.” They are disrupters who shun traditionalism, embrace ecstatic techniques, and want to intensify the deterritorializing forces associated with capitalism, technology, and liberal modernity. In the great conservative historian Eric Voegelin’s timeless phrase (later voiced by William F. Buckley, Jr., and then by Shea and Wilson), they want to immanentize the eschaton.

Voegelin and Buckley wanted nothing to do with immanentizing the eschaton, which they associated with Marxism and heresy. But that’s what Thiel is talking about when he describes how the Enlightenment can overcome its secular Achilles heel by fusing with Christian eschatology. “Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth — in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present.” Immanentize it, baby!

But there’s a problem: Christian eschatology comes with a big paranoid price, because Evil is always sniffing around the prophetic archetypes. Consider the Birchers who thought the United Nations was a Satanic usurpation, or the evangelicals who identified UPC barcodes as the “mark of the Beast” (Rev. 13:16-17). You might think that the cagey Thiel might keep his public Christianity restricted to techno-optimism, the nobility of the defense industry, or the depravity of the modern university. But lately, Thiel has been talking a lot about the Antichrist, and the one-world government that prophecy tells us gets installed at the onset of the end-times.

In recent interviews, Thiel insists on something amazing: that the one-world Antichrist system is currently as great an existential risk as runaway AI or nuclear war or climate disaster. He is not thinking about China here folks, but about the visions emerging from the famously crude Greek of the Book of Revelation. The fear is that, in the name of “peace and safety” (1 Thess. 5:3), the charismatic and holy-seeming Antichrist takes over our benighted planet, waves the rainbow flag of the Big Blue Marble, and starts regulating technologies and making everyone ride bicycles and genuflect before Greta Thunberg. In the bleakest of ironies, Thiel even worries about the “gigantic surveillance state” required for such global governance if it is to have any teeth.

Thiel’s fears are legitimate — it is hard to imagine an order of global governance that could, say, actively arrest the human causes of climate disaster without leaning into some seriously dystopian controls ripe for abuse. Absolute power probably does corrupt absolutely. Indeed, in my darkest hours, I fear that the only way to put the brakes on before we hurtle over the cliff is to install an unacceptably oppressive and cruel regime of power and control. In that sense, I agree that “we are all accelerationists now.” But at a time when the Left and the Greens are in tatters across the globe, the idea that the Antichrist system is as likely or even as worrisome as nukes or apeshit AI is bonkers.

But there’s an important insight lurking in this bonkers, and it relates to the fact that we are hearing about this “gigantic surveillance state” from a cofounder of Palantir — a major provider of surveillance data management services to governments, corporations, and — most controversially — the good folks at ICE. (And because myth is part of our story, we need to point out that creepy fact that the company is named after a magical elven artifact in The Lord of the Rings that is abused by the bad guys.) Thiel’s worries give us a glimpse of the way that religious (or literary) narratives function as ideologies: by allowing you to confront and acknowledge the negative charge of your own actions and investments while simultaneously displacing them or running them through the funhouse mirror of myth. In this sense, the new dispensation of accelerationist optimism is actually shot through with pessimism, resentment, and cruelty — shadowy projections it must also conceal from itself. Techno-eschatology allows the right hand — the correct, righteous, rightwing hand — to not know what the left hand, the sinister hand, is doing.

Upcoming Events

• The Three Stigmata of Elon Eldritch. Last year I did a five-part lecture series at the Alembic where we read through Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The talks included drug politics, Gnosticism, and the prophetic analyses of our DOGE overlord (when Eldritch checks into the hospital in chapter two, he registers under the assumed name Eldon). Now my good pals over at Weird Studies have repackaged the talks into a course with me as part of their Weirdosphere world of content. Class participants will have the opportunity for a new live Q&A with me at the end of April. Class package available at the Weirdosphere.

• Embodied Writing and Spiritual Practice: If you are itching to spend five days on the dizzying edge of Big Sur, exploring the dynamic links between writing and the spiritual life, the opportunity is upon you. Between April 28 and May 2, I will once again be joining Sravana Borkataky-Varma for an Esalen workshop that combines writing practices, discussion, poetry, meditations, and chanting. In addition to being a good friend and colleague, Sravana is an initiate in and scholar of South Asian Tantra, and has a very dynamic and accessible teaching style. I handle more of the writing stuff. Come on down!

Appearances

• How to Navigate the Weirdness: I just gave two talks at the Berkeley Alembic on how to stay grounded and sane inside our current maelstrom of strangeness and dread, and they are now up for free on the Alembic YouTube channel (Part 1, Part 2). In the first talk, I tried to put the weirdness of our moment in a historical context — what Eric Weinstein calls the “70-year nap” — that focused on the beginnings of the postwar world and the 70s era I covered in High Weirdness. The second talk was more focused on survival tactics for the maelstrom while taking a Maybe Logic pit stop at the UAP rally. With my pal Christian Greer on whiteboard.

• The Affirmation of the Imagination: Speaking of Weird Studies, JF Martel and Phil Ford just posted a conversation I had with the boys about John Crowley’s book Little, Big. I wrote about this wonderful book in an earlier Burning Shore, and here we use it as a springboard to talk about enchantment, the esoteric imagination, urban fantasy, anomalous experience, faeries, and the transporting power of prose.

More Books

• Jonathan Ott. Close readers may remember that I helped fund the publication of the recent 40th anniversary edition of Crowley’s Little, Big. Another publishing project I am involved in is the remarkable Jonathan Ott Book Series. Ott is one of the great psychoactive scholars, an independent polymath with rigor, wit, an inimitable prose style, and a vast knowledge of drug science, history, and lore. The series combines re-issues of classic works (some long out-of-print) with a few new items. The signed deluxe editions of the first two series titles, Shamanic Snuffs and the classic Ayahuasca Analogues, are beautifully bound in leather with full-color frontispieces and a shared, cloth-bound slipcase. Still available!

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription, though everything is free here. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

A similar psychogeographical wobble occurred recently in India. In late January, Jennifer and I traveled to Uttar Pradesh to attend the Maha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu mega-event of the highest order and, as you have probably already heard, the largest gathering of humans on the planet. Over a six-week period, determined by the sidereal dance of the sun, moon, and Jupiter, hundreds of millions of people made their way to Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). More specifically, pilgrims were aimed at the triveni sangam: the confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, which are both Google-mappable, as well as the invisible or mythical Sarasvati. Here people would ritually bathe, rinsing away their tangled mortal karmas in the cold, polluted, sacred waters, especially on three particularly auspicious “royal bathing” (Shahi Snan) days. Many of these millions were poor villagers who spent their meagre savings to make the trek, but many were also VIPs, or fat slices of the exploding middle class, or cave yogis rocking esoteric sidhis, or hawkers of goods, or global media, or alternative travelers like us.

The central myth behind the Kumbh is the churning of the ocean of milk, my favorite of the world’s mythic cosmogonies. Back at the beginning of things, the devas and asuras (roughly, gods and demons) decided to work together to obtain amrita, the nectar of immortality. Together, using a snake and a mountain, they churned the milky sea until a kumbh (pot) containing the divine nectar appeared. Breaking the truce, the asuras tried to seize the vessel, so Jayant, the son of Indra, dashed off with the pot. During his twelve-year flight, four drops of amrita fell on four locales: Prayagraj, Haridwar, and two other spots (Ujjain, Nashik) where Kumbh Melas are sometimes held.

Back here in history, the Kumbh Mela’s aura of ancient, even timeless continuity may be more fabricated than at first appears, at least in Prayagraj. In her book Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954, Kama Maclean argues that Kumbh Melas are indigenous to Haridwar. But, while there was a well-known (and more carnivalesque) annual fair or mela in Prayagraj for centuries, there is no historical record of a “Kumbh Mela” in that locale until the middle of the 19^th century. Yet the Prayagraj sangam is now considered the pre-eminent site for a “holy dip”. Though her argument is debatable, Maclean suggests that the growth of the mega-popular pilgrimage site has in part to do with the demands of Indian nationalism over the last few centuries, and especially the need, in such an insanely diverse land, for an imagined national community.

Right in sync, this year’s Kumbh served as a massive promotional opportunity for Hindu nationalist leader Modi, who is actively remaking (and arguably flattening) Hinduism into a national identity rather than a highly variable regional reality. Kumbh-themed billboards and advertisements featuring Modi were everywhere in the airport and along the road from Varanasi, not to mention saturating the fairgrounds. Modi was often photo-shopped alongside the bald Yogi Adityanath, a former monk who now serves as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and that some see as the next BJP bossman.

But these complexities faded into the background as Jennifer and I, after a long taxi drive and a short Mr. Toad’s Wild Tuk-tuk Ride, walked those final kilometers into the site. Finally stepping off the asphalt, we descended onto the sandy earth flats ceded by the Ganga every year when the river retreats following the monsoon rains. We joined throngs of pilgrims lugging their gear through wide avenues lined with large canvas-walled camps fluttering in the mild breeze. We were gently amazed: we had arrived, after months of planning and some considerable logistical difficulties, at the pulsing mystic heart of one of the planet’s most ancient and god-mad lands.

And how did my little psychogeographical compass read? “It’s like Burning Man!”

I totally get how trivial and American (or Californian) this is. The difference in scale alone makes the comparison absurd. But hear me out. We had entered a well-engineered temporary city laid out in a large grid on a sandy plane where nature herself would assure that no trace was left. Over the ensuing days we would encounter countless colorfully festooned trucks, tractors, and sedans that resembled art cars but that we came to call “babamobiles.” We experienced exhausting intensity, unexpected cold, and dusty treks back to the tent long after the (religious) ecstasy had fled. Trucks overwatered the dusty ground and turned it into mud. There were blinky lights, bullhorns, penises on display, and intensely interfering sound systems. The sacred danced with the profane, including acrobats, streetside tatooists, marching bands, and trance beats. Bleary morning hunts for caffeine. Imaginative architectures fashioned with cheap materials. Extraordinarily varied headgear. And, at least in an echo of the earliest Burns both Jennifer and I attended, the palpable presence of actual risk.

Another echo was the existence of many plug-and-play camps for VIPs and the relatively wealthy, one of which, in a decidedly non-risky strategy, Jennifer and I were marching towards. I won’t name the glamping outfit, but they had entered into an unusual relationship with one of the seemingly thousands of swami camps that were located within the downtown mela zones controlled by the akharas, or sadhu monastic orders. These camps usually took up a fair bit of real estate, and often announced themselves with colorful signs featuring the wise, radiant visage of the resident godman (or, occasionally, godwoman — the term is common in South Asian argot). Some camps went in for fantastical structures — we saw many medieval castles, one vertical space shuttle, one large whirling damaru, and, at the popular and well-positioned ISKCON camp, massive janky animatronic figures of Krishna, Garuda, and Hanuman. The facade of the following Cinderella’s Citadel was fashioned with canvas and carved styrofoam.

The camp we were headed towards was part of the Juna Akhara, one of the largest and most ancient Shaivite orders. Many members of the akhara — but by no means all — are naked, dreaded, and ash-covered ascetics, the classic image of the Kumbh holyman. But while sadhus are certainly known for their hardcore austerities and world renunciation, they historically also regularly served as mercenary forces, a legacy that remains apparent today not only in the ceremonial weapons they often wield but in their sometimes belligerent behavior. Scores of Haridwar Kumbhs over the centuries have featured open violence between akharas, especially between team Shiva and team Vishnu, with hundreds and sometimes thousands killed. Not infrequently, the beef is over the order of the bathing precession on Shahi Snan days. During the 1998 Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, the conflict between the Juna Akhara and the Hindu nationalist administrators of the event devolved to the point that the latter called in paramilitary forces to quell the conflict.

Our camp featured no naked babas, and seemed a relatively low-key affair. There was the swami, a quick-witted female teacher who led kirtan, and a couple dozen devotees and monks from the main ashram in Varanasi. And of course, a handful of high-paying guests like us. Except that, as the manager informed us upon arriving, our booking was actually at the other camp the glamping outfit was running, which was 15 kilometers away. I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but the ensuing hassle did bloom into that almost magical liminal zone, not unheard of in South Asia, that combines grift, humor, opportunism, storytelling, fuckups, gruff comradery, and the art, or threat, of the deal. Let’s just say that by the evening we had donated a substantial amount to the ashram, and found ourselves with a pleasant tent all our own.

But there was little time to relax. Early the next morning, at around 4 am, the second Shahi Snan would begin when the first pack of naked ascetics raced to the sangam to dip. As campers, we were entitled to join the ashram crew as they made their way to the waters after the sadhu spree, following a more orderly procession that took the form of a parade of floats (aka, art cars) associated with the various akhara divisions. We napped a few hours, and woke and gathered a little after midnight.

Immediately the women, including Jennifer, were bundled off into two small cars that would conduct them directly to where the ashram float was waiting in line. That left me with a few dozen male devotees, who strode off from camp with great vim and vigor the front line, brandishing tridents and banners and barking out sacred cadences. I hadn’t had time to meet anyone, and many did not speak English, but there seemed to be at least as many middle-class followers as full-on monks. The crew:

I felt a bit like a fish out of Ganga striding along with these passionate devotees in orange, but I got into the rhythm and soon fell in with a young man who was also a glamping guest. He was a logistics whiz from a privileged family who worked in Pune for a Utah e-commerce giant. He wasn’t particularly interested in holy men, but was exploring in a “spiritual but not religious” way. It was good to have a buddy.

As we moved along, the crowds got thicker and thicker and it took more concentration to remain together. The chants helped. Finally the crew approached a row of art cars, and we could see the ashram float and the ladies. But there was a fence between us and the floats, not just a single fence but two parallel barriers about six feet apart. These, we would soon learn, were patrolled by Indian police brandishing the long thin clubs called lathis. Some of our advance party scampered over the two fences, whose railings were about four feet high. But the cops soon appeared, and there was no way the bulk of us were going to make it. The word went out that there was a passageway in the fences further in the direction we were already walking, so we flowed with the now thoroughly claustrophobic human sea to our rumored ford. It wasn’t far, though it took twenty minutes to get there. Once again, some of our advance party made it through. But then the police inexplicably decided to close the passageway, which was performed right in front of me with barely restrained thuggery.

At this point the only person from our crew I could see was Vivek. We held hands and turned to face a total cluster-fuck. We decided to head back upstream towards the float and try to find a good place to jump the fence. Punk rock mosh pit skills kicked in and I maintained a reasonably cool head as we propelled ourselves through a confused, tense, and occasionally aggressive crowd. Everyone could sense the crushing possibilities in the air. We struggled our way back to the fences. Despite the red fire blazing in the eyes of the cops patrolling the boundary, who would lunge after the occasional scofflaw, there was no other obvious option.

Vivek went first. He clambered over the first fence, landed fleetly in the passageway between the barriers, and then quickly scrambled over the second fence. A cop inside the passageway ran towards him at the last moment but decided not to hop the fence himself and go after him. My turn. I waited for a short spell but didn’t overthink it. When I didn’t see any cops in the immediate vicinity, I thrust up onto the first fence, placing my right foot squarely on top of the railing as I prepared to climb down into the passageway before scrambling over the second fence. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cop turn around inside the passageway and immediately barrel towards me with lathi raised. I flashed that if my feet landed in the passageway I would probably enter a very shitty movie, so I thrust myself forward from the railing, bounding over the space instead. My left foot landed solidly on the far railing, and I propelled myself to a running landing. I quickly found Vivek, who, like me, was shocked that this grizzled Yank not only attempted but actually executed a stunt with such relative audacity. “Mission: Impossible!” he cried. I silently thanked Hanuman.

Soon we found our crew and the long wait began, a wait that could not but recall those many nights on top of some equally outrageous art car, waiting in the clamor and growing chill for the man to burn. As luck would have it, we were placed right next to to the Kinnar Akhara, a group of transgender spiritual leaders who were accepted into the larger Juna Akhara in 2019, only five years after the Supreme Court granted Indian citizens the right to self-identify as male, female, or “third gender.” The Kinnar were vibrant, regal, and cordial, but also on sacred display. A few of the folks who approached them for blessings (particularly for childbirth) had amazed looks in their eyes, as if they were in the presence, not of religious experts, but of demi-gods. Some figures in the crowd around us even looked like demi-gods to me.

After many hours, a palpable wave of concern ran through the crowd. Soon the camp swami appeared with a megaphone, gravely announcing that there had been a stampede at the sangam and that there would be no procession that night. The vibe change was extraordinary, like the sudden hushed fall of the shadow that accompanies a solar eclipse. Some feared a reverse stampede of folks fleeing the bathing site, and so we hunkered around the vehicles until dawn, when a small pod of us made our way back through the crowds, holding hands and moving like tight-ends when we had to ford the major crossroads. Jennifer could have gone back in the car, but thankfully did not — the vehicle got stuck in a torrent of humans for nearly eight hours, with people smooshed against the windows or climbing over the car to get temporary relief from the crowds, a claustrophobic and terrifying ordeal one woman described as simply the worst experience of her life. Later that day, when the Internet was conspicuously throttled, rumors flew — 100 dead, maybe 1000. Nobody believes what came to be the official number of 30 dead and 60 injured.

After recovering from our long night, we made our way to the sangam on foot the following day. And a marvelous, joyous, and deeply earthy scene it was, something between a messy mass DIY baptism and a beach vacation with the whole human family. The lure of the holy dip was palpable as well, but for Westerners, whether we are casual visitors or serious yogis, the Ganga holds a special power: it is actually taboo, not because of its shakti but because it holds potentially devastating microbial possibilities. This perception is not deluded hysteria. Years ago, Jennifer worked with a woman whose brother swam at Varanasi, caught a bug, and was dead within a week. I know other American yogis who have plunged in with confidence. But, as I explained to those pilgrims surprised that I was not dipping, I had promised my Mom I wouldn’t get in the waters, and a promise to Mom is a sacred thing.

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We left the Kumbh a few days later, both of us relieved to escape with few hassles (but at the cost of many rupees). I was left with an interesting question. The Kumbh Mela was obviously the mother of all transformative festivals. But for me, was it transformative?

Jennifer and I have spent a lot of travel time riding the fine line between pilgrimage and tourism, sacred and profane, participant and observer. During the Kumbh, I mostly found myself in religious studies mode, trying and failing to understand what was going on rather than attending to some special inner experience. The energy and yearning of the vast and varied crowd was exhilarating, if exhausting, but the gaudy, photoshopped push of the godmen, especially within the Hindu nationalist organizational framework, was off-putting in equal measure. Luckily there was plenty of music, for me a reliable way into the divine play of human faith and devotion. My most transcendent moments occurred in my tent, as I liminally drifted into the soundscape that swallowed us up in vibratory waves of exotic joy: distant bubbling tablas, droning Vedic chants, strange feedback overtones, kirtans veering metalward through distorted PAs, old Bollywood bhajans, and a live band that cranked out a sort of Hindu qawwali music with fluttering microtonal guitar.

Like everyone else there, I felt a mighty charisma radiating from the thousands of Naga babas, Aghoris, and other ascetics present. Many stayed largely tucked away in their own camps, but others set up shop on the main thoroughfares, and produced, by way of cell phones, shades, and Enfield bikes, the inevitable “contrasts.” They played a central role in the Kumbh’s sacred attention economy through the performance of authenticity, mystery, and militant commitment. But whether from luck or karma, I didn’t have any substantial encounters, though Jennifer spent some time in one Naga camp. At one point I approached a naked dread-headed sadhu who seemed up for an exchange, handed him some rupees, and then received a wack from a bouquet of peacock feathers. It reminded me at the time of a scene in Godard’s Alphaville, where Lemmy Caution puts a coin into a vending machine and receives a plug that says merely: merci.

The morning Jennifer and I left I had a conversation with Raji, a fellow camper. Most of the devotees I chatted with were friendly, but not on my wavelength. One gleefully praised Trump; another went on about ancient Vedic in a mode of post-colonial conspirituality. But Raji, who taught management science in Delhi, was an intellectual, someone who had found his way back to the religion of his childhood, which he called Sanatana Dharma. But he still clearly recognized, with some attendant sadness, the complexity, fragility, and deep compromises of the godman gig in the age of digital technology.

“The last 200 years killed off the real saints,” he told me over chai. “They thrived within a free agricultural economy, but they cannot survive when things become absolutely monetized.” That was just the way it was, he argued. Besides, it was the energy of the pilgrims, rather than the many swamis and saints, that made the Kumbh powerful. “God is not there. God is in the faith, the longing. It is belief that creates God.”

For Raji, this Feuerbachian argument did quell his own belief in the absolute importance of dharma, especially as things get weird. “We are already in the Matrix. The churning is happening. The end of the yuga is here. When AI and robots take over, what are you going to do? You are either attached to God or you destroy yourself.”

Upcoming Events

• Practice Circle: On Sunday, March 9, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop with the lovely Jennifer Dumpert about the topic of practice. The first event, “Practicing with Practice,” went very well, and the Practice Circle will hopefully become a recurring event. According to Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, we humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves through what we do. But what do we mean by the term? How does “practicing” meditation or yoga relate to other forms of practice? What makes psychedelics a “practice” and not just a trip? The Practice Circle makes room for practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, belief, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust. We will also talk about ways to craft practices of one’s own. Suggested donation, $20-50, no one turned away. Registration here.

• How to Navigate the Weirdness: The world is weird, and only getting weirder. In two talks at the Berkeley Alembic — Wednesday, March 19 and Wednesday, March 26, both at 7pm — I will wrestle with the strangeness in our midst: UAPs, simulation hypothesis, AI gods, conspiracy theory in the White House, corporate shamanism, jhana-on-demand, media psychosis, and all manner of climate chaos and apocalyptic foreshocks. There is a thread running through all of these topics: the apparent unraveling of consensus reality, and the mind- and resource-war for the attentional future. Taking and developing concepts and strategies from my book High Weirdness, I will strive to both honestly assess our impossible situation and to identify a few navigational tools for sanity, sense-making, and creative engagement. Donation; pre-register here and here.

• The Three Stigamata of Elon Eldritch. Last year I did a five-part lecture series at the Alembic where we read through Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Prophetic analyses of our DOGE overloard occured, among other marvels. Now my good pals over at Weird Studies have reckaged the talks into a course with me as part of their Weirdosphere world of content. Class participants will have the opportunity for a new live Q&A with me at the end of April. Class package available at the Weirdosphere.

• Embodied Writing and Spiritual Practice: If you are itching to spend five days on the dizzying edge of Big Sur, exploring the dynamic links between writing and the spiritual life, the opportunity is upon you. Between April 28 and May 2, I will once again be joining Sravana Borkataky-Varma for an Esalen workshop that combines writing practices, discussion, poetry, meditations, and chanting. In addition to being a good friend and colleague, Sravana is an initiate in and scholar of South Asian Tantra, and has a very dynamic and accessible teaching style. I handle more of the writing stuff. Come on down!

Appearances

• Magic Show. My old pal Richard Metzger — media-maker, teacher, journalist, and student of the mysteries — is one of the occultural heroes of my generation. His latest work is an online masterclass in modern occultism that takes the form of a “sprawling documentary project made for occultists by occultists.” Metzger interviewed dozens and dozens of folks — including myself, Maja D’Aoust, Grant Morrison, Gary Lachman, and Doug Rushkoff — and edited the results into something tight, sharp, deep, and delightful. The first class if for free, but you gotta hop through some digital hoops.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription, though at the moment there is no paid-subscriber-only content. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

One of these people was Edith Manning, a character in Grant Morrison’s comic-book mindfuck The Invisibles, published by DC’s hip Vertigo line from 1994 to 2000. Manning, who received tantric initiation in the 1920s, announces her intentions to her sometimes lover Gideon Stargrave, whom, after meeting a decade earlier on these very same ghats, she initiated into the occult anarchist enclave known as — you guessed it — the Invisibles. There, Stargrave takes on the violent superheroic identity that also serves as a foil and doppelgänger of Grant Morrison himself: King Mob.

I thought about these fictional characters when I arrived here because, days before flying, I finished reading through the entire run of The Invisibles. And no, I don’t mean re-reading. Shockingly enough, I did not read the whole series when it came out, despite the fact that there were few more “Erik Davis” cultural touchstones in that decade. The 90s were my home base decade, when I was in ravenous culture-vulture mode, and I was plugged into many dimensions of Morrison’s masterwork: chaos magick, psychedelics, underground media, conspiracy theory, ontological anarchism, perverse subcultures, voodoo, tantra, and graphic novels (I wrote about Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, Batman and Yummy Fur). So why didn’t I scarf down a sometimes brilliantly illustrated tale of a team of colorful mutant punks taking on Lovecraftian archons in a metaphysical postmodern blender larded with so many of my favorite flavors? I had my reasons at the time — I’ll explain in a moment — but my lapse was a kind of boon, because it set up the tremendous reading experience I just underwent: an encounter that enabled me to at once reassess the decade that shaped my voice and views, and to appreciate, from the perspective of our vertiginous times, the apocalyptic and prophetic power of Morrison’s délire.

I bought my fat hardback doorstop at Comix Experience, my favorite comic shop in San Francisco. There are way hipper stores, stuffed to the gills with edgy indies and genderqueer memoirs, and more classic superhero shops as well. Comix Experience strikes the perfect balance for me, a balance also reflected in the staff — Brian is the Gen X owner, but a smart enough fellow to hire a trio of awesome and very sharp younger women who do a lot of the curation. When I bought the Morrison tome, Brian made an excellent suggestion: read only one issue a day. “You will want to binge, but don’t.” Towards the end of my reading, I scarfed down a few episodes in a single day, and the density provided a definite high. But I preferred the consistent drip-drip-drip of weirdness offered by a daily dose.

The Invisibles is one of the great representative works of the 90s, like Infinite Jest or Twin Peaks or Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It’s also the last gasp of high and mutant psychedelic subculture that stretches back through Hakim Bey, the Church of the Subgenius, Illuminatus!, the Merry Pranksters, and the Discordian Society. (I have a long argument about why “subculture” in the classic sense becomes impossible in subsequent decades, but that belongs elsewhere.) Morrison’s work also captures the buzzing apocalyptic tenor of the decade, which is as hard to communicate to younger generations as the hippie faith in the Revolution was to mine. Reflecting on the 1990s later, Morrison wrote, “The alien icon started to appear everywhere. Something was going on. I don't think it was just me. I think it's why the culture started producing more psychedelic energy. Films like The Matrix and ads that looked like surrealist films. Something got in. I'm utterly sure something got in.” It got into me, too, and Techgnosis was one of the results, a text marked by a similar frisson of ominous technocultural becoming, singed with the flickering foreshadow of some oncoming Event.

The Invisibles is also probably the best 1990s example of the phenomenon I wrote about in my 2019 book High Weirdness, which focused on the remarkable (and remarkably similar) experiences suffered in the 1970s by Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Though in some ways resembling classic religious or mystical experiences, the visionary explosions that shattered these men did not respect such neat genre boundaries. Instead, their experiences reflected an arguably postmodern and definitively weird juxtaposition of druggy hedonism, gnostic mysticism, shamanism, crackpot paranoia, science fiction, absurdist humor, media hacking, and chaos.

Morrison too is intimate with high weirdness. In one of his columns for “Invisible Ink,” the comic’s fascinating letters column, Morrison wrote that “Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that the ‘weirdest’ bits of my comics are actually the most autobiographical.” In his final column, he spills the beans, and describes his own extreme experience, “a full-on Tibetan, Sci-Fi Vision of AllSpaceTimeMind As A Single Complexifying Iteration Which Is The Larval Form Of A 5th Dimensional Adult Entity.” He was on top of a temple in Kathmandu, and his drug of choice was, surprising in some ways and not at all in others, a good old ball of Himalayan hash, as sticky as Shiva’s toejam. He directly compared his initiation to the experiences of PKD and McKenna, as well as the achievement, among Thelemites, of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Trips that fragment and unfold spacetime into an alien haunted hypermatrix of apocalyptic force are, truth be told, common enough. In a sense the high weirdness really begins when these experiences loop around to manifest as texts. As with PKD’s Valis or RAW’s Cosmic Trigger, reading The Invisibles is to enter the foaming wake of Morrison’s grand grok. Like RAW, PKD, and McKenna, Morrison never crystalized what happened to him into a stable myth, which keeps the text open and not at all religious. Instead, the dynamic multiplicity of these experiences spilled into infectious cultural objects that, for some of us anyway, and certainly for myself, possess the uncanny and sometimes creepy ability to draw you — synchronistically and metafictionally—into the visionary maelstrom.

A wizard of meta, Morrison himself admits as much. In that final “Invisible Ink,” he reflects that “for the past six years…I have been using [the comic book medium] to recreate the complete and unabridged sensation of an ‘alien abduction’, thrill-ride style. I’ve attempted to simulate an initiation into some of the secrets of time and ‘high magic’ (where ‘simulation’ and ‘reality’ are synonymous, as in the formula Fake It Till You Make It) and create something that not only pays the rent but deprograms the nervous system and unravels the wallpaper.” The following page from the first arc, illustrated by Steve Yeowell, offers a particularly psychedelic slice of Morrison’s thrill ride:

The Invisibles is no doubt flawed, with missteps in art, structure, tone and narrative. Nonetheless, Morrison succeeded at crafting a Great Work of initiation simulation, for his era and for ours. He did so in part by recognizing and intensifying the peculiar media tenor of the 1990s. In particular, he sensed the way that information and its circulation and transformation were taking on a psychedelic quality that invoked, on the one hand, a decades-long bohemian history of counter-canons, cut-ups, and media hacking; and, on the other, a raw millennialist buzz marked by data density, sampling, and remixology.

Rather than the sometimes stodgy occult pedagogy of Alan Moore’s wonderful Promethea (1999-2005), Morrison offered a more scattershot sorcery of nodes, winks, masks, and hyper-links, both spelled out and not. Gnosticism, Situationism, Zen, commedia dell’arte, Phil Hine, Marquis de Sade, Michael Bertiaux, Jim Keith, Robert Chambers, William Burroughs, Whitley Strieber, John Lennon, Valis, and Terence McKenna’s transcendental object at the end of history — all are spliced and diced into a high-brow/low-brow mosaic stretched between the poles of critical theory and porn. Consider, if you will, the way the following three panels, illustrated by Phil Jimenez and taken here out of context, manage to weave together Oppenheimer, Lovecraft, UFO lore, angelology, metafiction, and McKenna’s transcendental object-as-shamanic goop, all the while foreshadowing the world-rending implications of David Lynch’s all-time episode 8 (“Gotta Light?”) from Twin Peaks: The Return.

Morrison’s bits and bobs aren’t just floating signifiers — they are, or at least strive to be, operative and infectious signs, charged amulets of a postmodern ritual remixed on the fly, and in your brain. Rather than being a comic about magick, The Invisibles wants to be an act of magick. In Vol 1, #16, Morrison infamously called on his fans to practice sigil magic to keep the comic alive in the face of poor sales. Derived from the work of Austin Osman Spare, an important figure for chaos magicians, sigil magick involves energetically charging a self-generated glyph in order to achieve specific desire. Morrison provided the sigil and a date: anytime on November 23, 1995, which happened to be Thanksgiving in the U.S. The fans would provide the energy, which he recommended generating though masturbation.

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Edgy stuff no doubt, which Morrison wore on his black leather sleeve. But that, for me at the time, was part of the problem. While I read a lot of Vertigo comics, I didn’t really resonate with the nihilist swagger that animated titles by Morrison, Garth Ennis, or Warren Ellis. In an early proposal for The Invisibles, Morrison gave voice to this rebel yell: “If you’re driven to disrupt the structure of your office or school or of large scale Dominator culture itself (in the form of governments, dogmatic religions, big business), you may be contacted.” Such transgressive razzle-dazzle was a major feature of the cultural edge in the 90s, permeating postmodern theory, Mondo 2000, scuzzy noise rock bands, even old Greil’s influential Lipstick Traces. But the writing was on the Baudrillardian wall: subversion was also the central gesture of postmodern consumer culture, which came to simulate the repressive Big Brother you could pretend to subvert in the name of some liberated desire that, truth be told, was already a simulacrum of itself.

Today, popular culture has essentially absorbed underground culture, and with it the transgressive practices that once carved out furtive room for flesh-and-blood subculture. So while we still regularly encounter the transgressive mode, pitting sexy, rule-breaking oddballs and freaks against stodgy and monolithic forces of Control, the myth is now eviscerated, like a prop gun that goes Pop.

The System, in other words, is groovier and hornier — and soon with AI, more brilliant and creative — than you. Cultural shock and edgelord sneers gleam like sparkles on the detergent pods all the kids gobbled after watching social media. I criticized Žižek in my last column, but on this point the Ziz has it down:

Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself — in order to reproduce itself under market competition conditions — has not only to tolerate but directly to incite stronger and stronger shocking effects and products….Here again, as in sexuality, perversion is no longer subversive: shocking excesses are part of the system itself — the system feeds on them in order to reproduce itself.

Read today, the transgressive edge of The Invisibles often struck a sour note, but it was also clear that Morrison understood the bind he was in. In a chaotically dialectic work like The Invisibles, King Mob’s rebel stance is a concept ripe for deconstructing, right along with the violence that pervades the book. This violence is justified by the narrative’s reliance on the standard Manichaean comic-book contest between Good and Evil, to which Morrison gives, on the surface anyway, a gnostic-Situationist twist. But after being ensorcelled by a 64-character mind-fucking alphabet, King Mob is commanded to “generate auto-critique.” And the critique he generates is that “[t]he most pernicious image of all is the anarchist hero-figure. A creation of the commodity culture, he allows us to buy into an inauthentic simulation of revolutionary praxis.” Boom.

Over the series, King Mob grows similarly ambivalent and even bitter about his own Pulp Fiction–worthy hyper-violence. As Riley McDonald argues in an MA thesis I found online, The Invisibles ultimately questions the effectiveness of the violence it indulges in, as well as the us-vs-them dualism that motivates the mayhem. The character Boy, for example, quits the team precisely because of the gore. McDonald suggests that as the story arcs towards its end, Morrison replaces the usual Manichaean “war” with a more open-ended and postmodern framework that recalls James Carse’s concept of the infinite game. “By viewing things through the lens of a game or a rescue mission,” McDonald writes, “the viability of violence and war as a means to bring about liberation are called into question.”

As the war melts into a game, it grows into a game of masks, or masques (as per the Harlequinade, creepy commedia dell’arte figures who we ultimately learn are the secret chiefs of the Invisibles). As the game grows, RAW’s Illuminatus! looms large, and we begin to realize that “the baddies” — the perverse imps, cosmic archons, and corrupt human servitors — are not so distinct from our heroes after all. Conspiracies turn inside out, eating each other like ouroboros worms, until readers are no longer clear whose side anyone is on, including themselves. In the end, everyone seems to be driving towards roughly the same goal, the same climax that compels “both sides” of Wilson and Shea’s Discordian romp: to “immanentize the Eschaton.” This marvelous phrase — lifted from William F. Buckley, Jr., who got it from the conservative historian Eric Voegelin — also describes high-dose psychedelics to a trippy T.

Morrison plays this immanent eschatological game as a comedy, a metafictional masque that stages the next step of human evolution: imagination unbound, total freedom, the kind of stuff that Terence would tell us when he was feeling upbeat. But the chaotic vortex that Morrison releases also recalls Marx’s great prophecy about capitalism: that everything solid melts into air, or better yet, into plasma. This deterritorializing force, now shockingly evident in our dizzy everyday lives, was always only incidentally about liberation. In a sense, that’s why postmodernism ultimately failed: all that transgression and subversion and “play” bottomed out as ironic exhaustion. This has consequences for Morrison’s narrative. As Sean Rogers complains, Morrison “too often simply amplifies the spiraling, vertiginous feelings of idea-rich complexity that [he] is everywhere at pains to induce, and ignores the hollowness that resounds at the work’s core.”

True enough. But that hollowness can also be read as something more like emptiness, in the Buddhist sense of shunyata, that void that flickers through and as appearances. In the end, Morrison’s response to the double binds and metafictional loops he discovers is metaphysical. The Invisibles deconstructs dualities — between body and mind, good and evil, self and other — and it ultimately does so from a nondual perspective, which Morrison calls the “supercontext.” But Morrison’s nonduality does not rest on some anodyne abstract unity, but rather seethes with an infinite diversity of embodied appearances in series. This is what Morrison saw in his Kathmandu vision: that the complete human body is “decades long, billion-eyed and billion-limbed, the worm-cast that you leave in time.”

Beyond its magnetic appeal as an occult or psychedelic metatext, or as a 1990s Zeitgeist spore-print, The Invisibles resonates like hell today. Even though the first issue now lies closer on the timeline to the JFK assassination than to our own dizzying moment, Morrison’s maelstrom feels all too familiar, its insanity a presage of our own. Though the details don’t always match, even as myth, we also find ourselves immanentizing the eschaton, even against our deepest needs and desires. Consensus reality shatters into a hypermediated hall of mirrors shot through with elite cruelty, revivified occult forces, tangible conspiracies, nihilistic youth cultures, mindfuck technologies. But these are still features — what really resonates is the topsy-turvy vibe of ontological havoc. As Helga says late in the comic, “The culture has become addicted to the chaos it thought it was inoculating itself against.” But as the faith in inoculations is forced out of fashion, we find ourselves simply addicted to the chaos.

Upcoming Events

• Psychedelic Buddhism 2025 is the first conference of its kind (as far as we know): a gathering of scholars and practitioners devoted to the open discussion of the intersection of Buddhist wisdom and psychedelic practice. Convened by my old pals in the Psychedelic Sangha, and taking place at the New School and online, the conference is focused on pragmatic insights and building a supportive, evolving community. This two-day gathering will get started on Friday, February 21st with a pre-recorded overview of the topic from me, which will be followed by a streamed talk from the legendary Tenzin Bob Thurman and a live keynote from Lama Liz Monson. Saturday, February 22nd will include three virtual panels, all online, one of which includes the penetrating California Zen priest Kokyo Henkel. Register here.

• “Practice Circle.” On Sunday, March 9, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop with the lovely Jennifer Dumpert about the topic of practice. The first event, “Practicing with Practice,” went very well, and the Practice Circle will hopefully become a recurring event. According to Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, we humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves through what we do. But what do we mean by the term? How does “practicing” meditation or yoga relate to other forms of practice? What makes psychedelics a “practice” and not just a trip? The Practice Circle makes room for practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, belief, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust. We will also talk about ways to craft practices of one’s own. Suggested donation, $20-50, no one turned away. Registration here.

• Alembic Fundraiser: The Berkeley Alembic is just over three years old, and the nonprofit continues to grow and transform. Though it began as an experiment, it’s clearer to me now what we are doing. We have created a public center for “consciousness culture”: the pluralistic, discriminating, and creative engagement with good old altered states, in body and mind, soul and society. But running a nonprofit event space devoted to community and quality is tough, especially in the spendy Bay Area. To that end, we are holding our first public fundraiser. On Saturday, March 8, at 7pm, Michael Pollan, creator of the game-changing book and Netflix series How to Change Your Mind, will be joining me, Erik Davis, for a conversation and Q&A session about the state of psychedelics today, as well as his ongoing involvement with the field. Come and participate in the conversation, and hear updates about the future course of the Alembic. Before the event, at 5:30, the Alembic will also host a catered reception with Michael. Tickets here.

• How to Navigate the Weirdness. The world is weird, and only getting weirder. In two talks at the Berkeley Alembic — Wednesday, March 19 and Wednesday, March 26, both at 7pm — I will wrestle with the strangeness in our midst: UAPs, simulation hypothesis, AI gods, conspiracy theory in the White House, corporate shamanism, jhana-on-demand, media psychosis, and all manner of climate chaos and apocalyptic foreshocks. There is a thread running through all of these topics: the apparent unraveling of consensus reality, and the mind- and resource-war for the attentional future. Taking and developing concepts and strategies from my book High Weirdness, I will strive to both honestly assess our impossible situation and to identify a few navigational tools for sanity, sense-making, and creative engagement. Donation; pre-register here and here.

Appearances

• Howling in the Wilderness. I haven’t been doing a lot of podcasts lately, but Brian James pulled me out of my hermit cave to do this one, which begins with a discussion of the desire to stay hunkered down in a hermit cave, and to retreat from the Internet shitstorm. In episode 164, Brian and I share what seems to me a characteristically Gen X ambivalence about “success” in the attentional economy, and the question of what we are trying to achieve with our media given the changing technological and cultural conditions, even as we wrestle with the changing spiritual needs of aging bodies. My friendship with Brian does remind me of the good the Net can bring, since it has developed entirely in the context of email, podcasts, and Substack.

• Autre. My books are rarely reviewed, and I have barely ever gotten profiled in print. So I was pleased as punch that the good folks at Autre magazine, and especially the writer Riska Seval, decided to write about me and Blotter and California in their latest “Citizen” issue, which has YG in a crazy coat on the cover. Autre is a fat uberhip fashion mag, which is thankfully fragrance-free, and even more thankfully a window into a world — young, artsy, cosmopolitan, wacky, queer — that also has an appreciation of cultural history. Riska and Los Angeles editor Oliver Misraje visited me and Mark McCloud in San Francisco, and the journey is part of Riska’s essay, one that is at least as much about her as me. I say this in a good way, because I am terribly curious how folks of her generation respond to Techgnosis, which she read for the profile, and now I have a much better sense of how this ancient tome resonates with today’s fractured sense-scape of mystic nonsense. She also characterized my person well. “Davis was serious about his irreverence, intense about his lightness, and wavered between enchantment and disenchantment with the world around him.” This issue appears to be sold out already, but Riska posted the piece on her Substack.

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription, though at the moment there is no paid-subscriber-only content. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

I don’t use Notes myself, unlike Hayes, who from all appearances posts there all the fucking time. My experience of the enshittification of the platform has more to do with the pressures put on users of the platform, readers as well as producers, to keep the flow coming fast and furious. As a reader, I tend to “manage” my Substack feeds in erratic bursts of feast or famine. Flush with a new-born fascination with Internet talk, and optimistic about an expanding universe of essay writing, I might subscribe to dozens of newsletters all at once, sometimes throwing my cash into the ring to show my commitment, to myself as much as anyone. Within a few weeks, the winnowing already begins, until soon enough I am left with only a couple regular newsletters in my inbox, which I still largely use rather that the Substack app. This condition persists until, moonlike, I wax expansive again, an enthusiasm for hot new discourse mingled with the anxiety that without some new feeds I will sink into a silo of my own making.

The reality is that there just aren’t that many voices or points of view I want to hear from that regularly. I don’t read online that much, or at least I try not to, especially when I want to get some serious work or play done, not to mention continue my devotion to reading deep and sometimes difficult, you know, books. Substack subscriptions pile up like stacks of New Yorkers, except in cyberspace. I would be happier if more people published essays at the rate I do here on Burning Shore, but I promise you that is not a successful strategy, at least by those measures of success that do not highly weight chillage.

I am on the famine side of the wave at the moment, but one feed that has escaped the knife so far is the philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s Goads and Prods (I also want to give shout-outs to Rave New World, Sleeveen, and The Convivial Society). It’s partly a nostalgia thing. If you know the Ziz, you won’t be surprised to learn that Goads and Prods provides political commentary, cultural criticism, and Lacanian rants from an increasingly conservative atheist materialist who can be funny, paradoxical, irritating, and occasionally repulsive, particularly when it comes to his not so sublimated fantasies of revolutionary violence.

The Ziz has always been prolific, which means that he is well suited to the rhythms of the Net, cranking out two posts a week. But again, as longtime readers know, Žižek’s churn has always been wedded to an almost hysterical level of repetition and what could only be called self-plagiarism, or perhaps auto-collage. It’s as if Žižek long ago learned to be his own LLM, which some of the writing on the Substack very much suggests. A recent post, “The Minotaur’s Death Cramps,” included the following passage:

With state monopoly gradually disappearing limits ruthless exploitation domination imposed by state also disappear original idea cryptocurrencies new space freedom without external authority control ends up what Malabou herself calls “combination—senseless monstrous unprecedented—savage verticality uncontrollable horizontality.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe it’s a simple courtesy to copyedit your posts, even if you have to pay someone to do it (which I do). It’s like wiping the snot off your face before entering a restaurant. But this weird chunk of text doesn’t even read like a rough draft, but something more inhuman, as if it were generated by a wonky algorithm. Or maybe the passage is the symptomatic eruption of the babbling language machine that Žižek’s psychoanalytic hero Jacques Lacan identified with the unconscious, poking up its iterative nonsense head in the midst of the performance of authoritative knowingness that is the stock in trade of most public intellectuals.

I have been reading the Ziz since the 90s, when I once interviewed him in a hotel room as he hopped around looking for his Xanax. I like the avuncular crankiness of his literary voice, the vulnerable humor of his slobbery persona, and his loop-de-loop deployment of philosophy, theory, history, even pop physics. Intellectually, this stuff is mother’s milk to me, though I easily tire of academic writing these days, and no longer consider myself a materialist (I used to think of myself as a psychedelic materialist, à la Deleuze; now I am more of a whatthefuckist). Most of all, I admire and enjoy Žižek’s perverse skills as a cultural critic. He is capable of reading all manner of unexpected material—dumb movies, classical music, Internet memes—as intricate and illuminating symptoms of an infernal set of contradictions that is both inside us and without us. I find him particularly provocative on religion—at least Abrahamic religions. His 2024 post “A Glance into the Archives of Islam”, a long Lacanian riff on the tension between Abraham and Hagar, was fantastically rich. Goads and Prods also reflects his invigorating and long-standing materialist take on Christianity, a vision in which God dies on the cross—as in kaput, no more God—and the community is left to make its way into the atheist future with a post-religious gift of potentially radical and militant ethical commitment.

Unfortunately, Žižek pretty much sucks rocks when it comes to Asian religions and their various post-hippie Western adaptations. Not only does he hate Buddhism, the Bhagavad Gita, and contemporary meditation culture, but he shows his militant disdain by not offering a shred of the hermeneutic sympathy he lends the often horrific religion(s) of Christianity. A lot of the time, he doesn’t even bother to get the facts right (there is a small online industry in pointing out his errors). Decades on, the strident critique still churns. “The Buddhist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism,” a popular post from last June, based on a lecture given in 2012 that auto-samples a Cabinet piece he first published almost a quarter century ago. Though there’s some new stuff about a lazy documentary, the ideological gotcha is the same.

…although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement….Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social change, one should renounce the effort to control events, rejecting it as an expression of modern domination. Instead, one should "let oneself go," drifting along while maintaining an inner distance and indifference to the frenetic pace of change, based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not concern the core of our being.

Žižek concludes that, “The ‘Western Buddhist’ meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.” The idea here is that meditation, as it is presented by “Western Buddhism,” enables you to plunge into the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, and that what really matters to you is the “peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.”

I am not gonna play an authenticity game by declaring the trends Žižek identifies to be false, heretical, or even jejune. Religions and spiritual practice traditions are contradictory and ambiguous things, and they produce all manner of monsters—and infinite opportunities for hermeneutics, sympathetic or critical. All the trends that Žižek identifies are found in the contemporary dharma, commingled as it often is with the wellness industry, or what I like to call surveillance wellness. But I do need to insist that this is not at all the dharma I have learned or encountered among the teachers, sanghas, and texts that have fed me most along the path. I’ll take some peace when I can get it, sure, but nothing has ever led me to get comfortably numb with an inner Self, that old navel-gazing stereotype that Timothy Morton, in his attack on the “Buddhaphobia” of Žižek and others, traces back to Hegel’s know-nothing—or maybe no Nothing—dismissal of the dharma as nihilistic.

That said, there are good reasons to take the Ziz’s critique seriously, because he legitimately identifies many lazy and all too predictable dharma mutations out there in our world of turbo-driven self-optimizing therapeutics. A decade ago, a post on the Speculative Non-Buddhism blog—which harshly attacked Western or “x-buddhisms”—shared a YouTube video shot at Wisdom 2.0, a San Francisco conference that targets the commingling of Asian wisdom traditions with corporate culture. Those were the days of the “Google bus” protests, and during one mindfulness workshop, antipoverty activists interrupted the proceedings to accuse Google of decimating local San Francisco neighborhoods through aggressive tactics of gentrification. The mindfulness trainer responds to the protesters by, as the Speculative Non-Buddhists put it anyway, advising the attendees on how to dissociate themselves from the protest. “This is sort of an important moment,” he says. “We can sort of leave this moment as something we didn’t expect to have happen, and it happened, and it’s wrong. Or we can actually use this as a moment of practice. Check in with your body, and see what’s happening, what it’s like to be around conflict with people with heartfelt ideas that may be different than what we’re thinking. So, let’s just take a second and see what it’s like.”

That’s not the worst advice in any conflict, and protestors have their own tactics of dissociation and false consciousness. But you get the drift. How much do meditation practices, which produce real if open-ended shifts in awareness and perception, wind up principally managing the sort of stresses that, left alone, might erupt in more structural and collective change? Consider the “ZenBooth” or “Mindful Practice Room” that Amazon introduced to its warehouses a couple years ago (I believe they are no longer to be found). Part of the “AmaZen” program, the small booth offered employees some on-screen mindfulness programs to help them manage their “mental and emotional well-being” and “recharge their internal battery.” Given the notorious brutality of Amazon’s warehouse conditions, “parody” doesn’t quite encompass the bleak absurdity of this object, which literally incarnates the precious and boxed-in interiority that Žižek critiques.

Of course, plenty of Buddhists and modern meditators hate this shit and work against it. Buddhists have been criticizing “McMindfulness” for years, some pointing out that, shorn of the dharma’s soteriological (and religious) claims, a deracinated mindfulness practice all too easily melts into mental massage oil, gently greasing the engine that is driving us off the cliff. But we are always in some version of this predicament: fashioning keys inside locked rooms, using the master’s tools. Practices of mind and mindfulness do not necessarily liberate in themselves, and they may lead to newer and subtler trances. But to glimpse other possibilities, personal as well as social, the eye must be retrained, or released from its usual grip on things. For many of us, pragmatically engaging the mind that hosts and clings to thought creates more space—and is still complemented by the suspicions of critical discourse.

Swiping a move from Žižek, I want to dust off an episode of the 70s TV series Kung Fu, a show that managed to be simultaneously dumb, excellent, and profoundly influential. In the twelfth episode of the show, in which David Carradine’s Kwai Chang Caine wanders the Old West in search of his brother, Caine is falsely convicted of a crime and roped into a labor camp, forced to dig out a mine. It’s the brutal nadir of capitalist relations: inhuman and illegal slavery for the sovereign sake of greed. The main instrument of control is tossing men into “the Oven”: an iron box that intensifies heat and cold. Men confined to the Oven are dragged out barely alive, or possibly dead. After some of the inevitable righteous slo-mo ass-kicking, Caine is put into the Oven along with another convict, who soon starts to suffer terribly. Best to just watch the short scene:

By teaching the man to meditate, both Caine and his comrade resist the brutal order of the day. Here we see the adoption of an internal meditative practice of homeostatic regulation and its concomitant gift of mental strength, or total passivity, take your pick. The practice comes wrapped in some poetic metaphors, and requires some new beliefs, which are either charming or hokey or both, and it doesn’t really matter because the proof is in the pudding. (I have felt my body become my breath, become as light as a feather, and it feels spacious, expansive, and unrelated to my hatred, or not, of surveillance capitalism.) Caine is basically teaching a mindfulness stress reduction regimen. But here this “Western Buddhist” (get it?) practice is not individualist but social: something passed from person to person (“Sit like me”), requiring trust and an opening to otherness, and resulting in a modification of the collective body that is politically engaged, or at least resistant. Later, when the mine collapses and the men are trapped underground, Caine urges them not to waste their breath on freaking out, and to down-regulate their bodies into sleep as a way to conserve the air while the rescuers dig them out. Passivity, or passive activism?

So how should we compare the Oven to the ZenBooth? Is the prison in our mind or are we in the prison? If mindfulness, or other psycho-spiritual therapeutics, are always “ideology,” the ideology seems to shift depending on who is packaging the practices. Emerging from below, or from the margins, as modes of survival or everyday becoming, spiritual techniques can serve the cause of dignity, sympathy, and resistance. But they can also be manipulated into forms of deferral and dissociation, especially when they become absorbed into the self-optimization routines of the entrepreneurial self. But what does this say about the practices themselves? That they are the ultimate forms of fetishistic disavowal? Or that they are multivalent, dependent on context, and without an essence, political or otherwise. Just as the dharma would have it.

There is an important theoretical issue here as well. In his critique of anti-Buddhist theorists like Žižek, Marcus Boon writes that they “need to examine their own fear of bare life, and their avoidance of consensual practices that examine and realize states of non-knowledge.” This requires some brief unpacking. “Bare life” is the reduction of the human to biological life, separated from the projects, meanings and practices that make us human. It is what torturers and jailers and uncorked sovereigns do.

But meditation offers another possibility of bare life: just this body, just this breath, loosened from thought, personality, projection, and identity. Suspended in history, a living punctum. But this vision of bare life is a terrifying thing for many intellectuals, because it requires getting close to zero, which means releasing their primary means of fetishistic disavowal: discourse itself. The world ahead of us is a world of myriad altered states, mutations in consciousness, virtual dematerializations, and psychoactive slipstreams. Best to explore the possibility of experiencing ourselves, and recognizing aspects of the mind, that are not entirely locked into the carceral influencing networks of knowledge, information, and discourse. In other words, states of “non-knowledge,” light as a feather.

Upcoming Events

• “Practicing with Practice.” On Sunday, January 5, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 5 pm, I will host a conversational workshop with my brilliant and charming partner, Jennifer Dumpert. “Practicing with Practice” will create a space for folks to play with and talk about spiritual, religious, and aesthetic “practice,” which is also the subject of Jennifer’s current book project. This term lies at the heart of many people’s lived experience, and for good reason. According Michel Foucault and Peter Sloterdijk, humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves through what we do. But what do we mean by the term? How does “practicing” meditation or yoga relate to other forms of practice, like practicing the piano, or practicing being a nice person? What makes psychedelics a “practice” and not just a trip? Are practices “tools” or something more transformative? Many spiritual teachings stress the central importance of practice, but they rarely make room for practitioners to individually and collaboratively reflect on the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice—issues like commitment, belief, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust. We will also talk about ways to craft practices of one’s own, and to further dedicate ourselves to our existing regimens. Suggested donation, $30-60, no one turned away. Registration here.

• The Chalice, the Alembic’s monthly psychedelic salon, is opening the year with a bang. On Wednesday, January 8th at 7pm. Christian, Maria, and I welcome Michael and Carol Randall from the legendary Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the notorious “hippie mafia” centered in Southern California that trafficked hashish, Hawaiian cannabis, and LSD through the 60s and 70s. But the Brotherhood was also a registered non-profit religious organization founded in 1966, with LSD as its sacrament. Their mission: turn on the world and achieve universal peace through cosmic mind expansion. The Brotherhood helped plan Timothy Leary's unsuccessful 1969 campaign for governor and created an international LSD network with its own secret laboratories, giving away more than 100 million doses of Orange Sunshine. In August 1972, federal drug agents finally busted the Brotherhood. Michael, Carol and their kids spent the next 12 years on the run before Michael was finally arrested in 1984 and sent to prison for five years. Today they are unrepentant models of grounded acid mysticism, as well as great storytellers with an unbeatable combination of wisdom and humor. Register here.

Appearances

• Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium was long-listed for the Non-Obvious Book Awards. Not as ego-gratifying as getting on the Short List, let alone winning one of the awards, but still an excuse for a smile. The book is definitely not obvious!

• Burning Shore pal Jesse Jarnow just let me know that, in the recent edition of Mineshaft, the legendary R. Crumb quoted an old Gnosis magazine piece I wrote many many moons ago. Given the role Crumb’s work has played in my subcultural imagination, especially his illustration of PKD’s “religious experience”, I was immensely pleased, and even forgive him the dreaded misspelling of my first name. I have no idea how he found this piece at this late date, which is not on Techgnosis.com or the wider Internet, as far as I can see. The piece shows how the dark side of the “gnostic mind” both damns and illuminates aspects of the modern world. Reading this passage now a quarter century later, it suggests that one of the reasons that Techgnosis and other essays of mine seem “prophetic” is that I balanced my attraction to expansive views with a critical edge, as the above post hopefully illustrates!

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I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.

This disappearing year also happens to be the twenty-fifth anniversary of 69 Love Songs, that fabulous and obsessive masterwork by the Magnetic Fields, a band that, more than almost any other, is woven into the substance of what I like to think of as the Jennifer Dumpert Experience. I met Jennifer in the early summer of 1992, when mutual friends, including the punk rock photographer Pat Blashill, introduced us at her place as a way to lure the already hermitish me into hanging out more. Right off the bat I loved her gregarious chat, her taste in religious iconography, her foxy vibes. But it was her record collection that really did me in: Crimson, Eno, Love’s Secret Domain, Metal Machine Music. Fucking Metal Machine Music! She gave me a sweet hug when we parted that night, and as I crossed the threshold of her apartment door, a voice resounded through my brain: you, my friend, are fucked.

You see, I was already living with a brilliant and beautiful woman, a woman I had already hurt kinda bad a few years before, and who I still loved, at least in that confused twentysomething way. Jennifer was in a similar situation, at least commitment-wise — in deep with a musician who was definitely cooler than I. So for many subsequent months, Jennifer and I hung out within a cone of silence, always just the two of us, usually in the afternoon. But we didn’t fool around. Didn’t even touch. We were gobsmacked with attraction, enchanted with talk, drawn to gaze entranced, but we didn’t cross that line. Of course, as acolytes of the Galahad fetish know, the moral clarity of the rule can bank the fires of yearning into something utterly intoxicating, almost hallucinogenic. “A long-forgotten fairytale / is in your eyes again,” Stephin Merritt would later sing, in a slightly different context, on the second volume of 69 Love Songs. “And I'm caught inside a dream world / where the colors are too intense.”

Those heady months also happened to be the period when I was listening obsessively to The Wayward Bus, the CD released by PoPuP Records that combined the first two Magnetic Fields recordings, Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus. I reviewed the album for the Village Voice that fall — front seats on the bus, so to speak — and I praised the disc’s squelchy synths and songs, which I compared to “Dada watercolor postcards from the land of the long eclipse.” I still find this collection remarkable; Merritt’s production craft and song-writing genius — and I don’t use the term lightly — is already in full effect, here in his mid-20s. Merritt himself does not sing on the tracks, which means his droll and deadpan performance persona is not part of the music.

Instead we get the elusive, almost dissociated vocals of Susan Anway — a distant cry from the warm and personable vox that Claudia Gonson would later bring to the band. Instructed by Merritt “not to emote,” Anway, who died of complications of Parkinson’s disease in 2021, expands the otherworldly weirdness of many of these songs through a kind of porcelain abstraction. At the same time, and despite the oddball sounds that appear throughout the CD, these tracks betray a knowing and deeply familiar love of pop forms (especially Phil Spector). As usual, Merritt’s sardonic sadness runs throughout the material, but the songs aren’t half as funny as they become on later albums, and the codes of gay wit he would come to make his own take a back seat to a melancholic surrealism haunted with memory, suicide, otters, tidal waves, and impossibly long white scarves. (Les Champs magnetiques, we should recall, is the name of André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s breakthrough text of automatic writing.)

I have never quite figured out how the trufans integrate these early records into the Merritt canon. I can’t really judge, because my love of them is inextricable from my own story. Even after all these years, most of these tracks remain little wayback madeleine machines, their poignant and goofy organic vibes still channeling the vexed and intoxicated moods of that time, especially tracks like “Jeremy”, “Dancing in Your Eyes,” “Old Orchard Beach,” and the indy hit “100,000 Fireflies.” On the one hand, the band gave voice to the astral romance Jennifer and I had cooked up, “touching across the room / like lovers from the moon.” On the other hand, Merritt’s old-soul pessimism gave me serious pause as I agonized over making the leap. “You’ll see the world / diving for a girl you’ll never find.”

The dam burst that winter, I dove into the torrent, and the rest is (personal) history. But the Magnetic Fields stayed a part of it. Jennifer and I hung out with Stephin after a show in 1993, and we even met his mom, who appreciated my description of her son as a “Moog-loving Proust”. We’d see Stephin and Claudia occasionally over the years, and caught performances whenever we could. We drove across the country to Charm of the Highway Strip, holiday’d with Holiday. And of course, we put 69 Love Songs on repeat for months after our wedding, which took place a week after the album debuted in September of 1999.

For many people, twenty-five years of marriage counts as some sort of accomplishment, maybe even a sign of moral fibre. I prefer to see it as gritty grace, something between madness, a glorious fluke, and a fiendish and entertaining game finely or at least obstinately played by wonderfully matched contestants. Jennifer would largely agree, though would put a characteristically rosier spin on it.

But we have no advice to give, or if we do, I like to think it’s already tucked away somewhere inside 69 Love Songs. For though it only occasionally engages the matter of marriage (and then rather cynically), the collection nonetheless scatters much wisdom amidst the wit. To wit:

The book of love is long and boring
And written very long ago

(“The Book of Love”)

Everyone has had the experience of having their romantic triumphs or tragedies voiced uncannily by a dumb song popping up on the radio or an algorithmic stream. That’s because there is nothing new under the erotic sun. These songs are part of the “book of love”, which also contains music and “instructions for dancing.” Long and occasionally boring, 69 Love Songs is that book. While your own romantic life necessarily feels singular, you will probably find its episodes captured on one or more of these songs.

Love is like jazz
You make it up as you go along
and you act as
if you really knew the song

(“Love is Like Jazz”)

In the early years of my relationship with Jennifer, our emotional roles were pretty well-defined: I was the angsty tortured artist, and she the nurturing pillar of happy good will. A few years after we wed, Jennifer went through an emotionally tough time, something neither of us really knew how to deal with. One day, when she was a weepy wreck, I realized the song went this way: “Come here baby, and let me hug you; I promise you everything’s gonna be alright.” Only I didn’t feel it at all; if anything, I wanted to run away screaming into the night. But I didn’t. Against all the “be true to your feelings” cant of contemporary therapy culture, I totally faked it, embracing her and patting her head as if I knew the song of loving support like the back of my hand. Over time, though, I made it mine.

That’s the paradox. While all the songs have been written long ago, you still have to improvise them, especially if you want to avoid the formulaic. This is particularly true with marriage, where so many biases, agreements, habits, and attitudes come already locked and loaded, the underlying patterns much bigger and stronger and older than you are. Free jazz is occasionally required to blow out the stops on this shit, which is partly why drug-fueled Dionysian blow-outs can be so healthy. Most of the time though, it’s best to stick to riffing on the standards, making your magic moves and surprising improvisations within the well-known patterns provided by the oldest songs in the fakebook.

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You should see the things we see when we smoke

(“Queen of the Savages”)

Speaking of Dionysian blow-outs, one of the secret gifts of drugs is their capacity to weave enchantment back into long-term relationships, which, over time, become notoriously stingy about the pixie dust. I am not talking aphrodisiacs here, which is too technical and one-dimensional a concept, however useful. I mean the restoration and revivification of erotic imagination.

Nothing matters when we're dancing
In tat or tatters you're entrancing

(“Nothing Matters when We're Dancing”)

Another face of Dionysus. One of the most consistent themes in 69 Love Songs is dancing. Tatting up for a club groove or an outdoor gathering is a sweaty balm, for sure, and we still try and make at least one festy a year. But micro dance parties inside domestic space-time are absolutely essential. Do it now.

I'm crazy for you but not that crazy.

(“(Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy”)

This is perhaps the essential download in the album, the secret key towards love over time. Just as the difference between a drug and a poison lies in the dose, so has the secret sauce of our life together resulted from the proper mix of Romance and Realism. When you are out of young love pixie dust, Romance becomes a practice, a kind of ritual invocation that, like religion, must be passionate and crazy enough to cook up the juice but constrained enough to avoid idiocy, sloppiness, and delusion. That’s where Realism comes in. But if the Realism is not itself subject to madness, at least under the full moon, then desiccation sets in.

You and me, we don't believe
in happy endings

(“My Only Friend”)

This is the spiritual core of the Realism side of the equation: not just a boring capitulation to pragmatism, but a frank assessment of the ragged and inevitable eclipse of things. The humility and “settling” that comes with recognizing limits within a partnership is paradoxically enlivened by the knowledge that you will both die, and that, short of instantaneous mutual snuffage from a tidal wave or a wayward bus, it will end in tears for at least one of you. This is the reward for all that “work” on your relationships, all that digging into the depths: a long and lacerating grief. Do not hide from this possibility. Use it as a goad to shake up habit, and get some good carpe diem cooking.

You know the old refrain: a book of verse, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou. But how can we pull this off in the face of the unhappy endings ahead? Because…

La mort, c'est la mort
mais l'amour, c'est l'amour

(“Underwear”)

French is the language of love because in French, love and death rhyme. In English, it’s more ridiculous.

69 Love Songs is mostly about young love, but Merritt has a long enough view that he can see the wayward bus bearing down on us all. But if you flip the script, that makes young love a lifelong game.

Let's pretend we're bunny rabbits
until we pass away

(“Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits”)

Over time, the practice of eros becomes in part a game of pretend. The play’s the thing, but it’s a magickal play that involves the invocation of animal spirits who are pretty much always ready to get down. With a little luck, and a little moonlight, you never have to stop pretending.

I've seen you when your ship came in
and when your train was leaving
The sweetest thing I ever saw
was you asleep and dreaming

(“Asleep and Dreaming”)

Nesting is underrated. We are mammals and mammals cuddle. This isn’t just an animal fact, but a sacred one as well. The business of life, the ships and trains coming and going, the deals and transactions you inevitably make with your partner, even the sex and intimate chat, all capitulates before sleep, the other “little death” you submit to together. But when you witness your partner asleep and dreaming, and soak up that quiet intimacy, you are alone again. As in the beginning, you wonder again about their impossibly encrypted interiority, about those wonders and sometimes nightmares that insure that even here, in the dozing heart of domestic safety, the Mystery yawns wide:

We don't know anything
You don't know anything
I don't know anything
About love
But we are nothing
You are nothing
I am nothing
Without love

(“The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure”)

Jennifer and I have both spent a lot of time around Zen, which means we have spent a lot of time trying be nothing. Zen doesn’t talk a lot about love or compassion, which is kind of cool actually because, as Merritt notes in “Love is Like a Bottle of Gin,” love is “grossly over-advertised.” But intimacy is another story. In one of the best koans in Zen, Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan answered, “Around on pilgrimage.” (He might as well have said, “To fall in love.”) Dizang then asked, “To what purpose?” Fayan replied, “I don’t know.” Dizang then gave it up: “Not knowing is most intimate.”

If you don't cry it isn't love

(“If You Don’t Cry”)

Sometimes I imagine some post-mortem state where you are able to turn around and look at your life as you get sucked into the bardo, and rather than seeing ups and downs, good and bad, pain and pleasure, you just see one vast glorious tapestry, a fabulous fabric that weaves together all the threads, dangling and dyed and otherwise. From this non-dualistic perspective, love is death, intimacy is illusion, passion is a honey-covered razor blade. So what are you complaining about?

Whining and pining is wrong and so
on and so forth, of course, of course
but no you can't have a divorce

(“Busby Berkeley Dreams”)

In Living in a Material World, Martin Scorsese’s great documentary about George Harrison (the Beatle closest to my heart), Olivia Arias (the Beatle wife closest to my heart) says something brilliant about her long partnership with a very complex character: the secret to keeping your marriage together is to not get divorced. In other words, when the going gets rough, as it does for everyone, stubbornness and cussed refusal can be a worthy ally, especially in a low commitment culture like ours that celebrates loose ties and narcissistic needs. There were a few years where Jennifer and I were so messed up no one we knew wanted to hear about it anymore, but fuck if we were going to give up on the hunch that we would be sweet old farts together.

Upcoming Events

• This coming Wednesday, on December 11th at 7pm, my Chalice mate Christian Greer and his partner Michelle Oing will be presenting on what Christian argues is the ultimate hardcore cosmic practice — not psychedelics, but pilgrimage. As Burning Shore readers know, Christian and Michelle wrote a terrific account of their sacred stroll along Japan’s Kumano Kodo, and now they are working on a book about the Camino de Santiago, which they visit every year. Because Christian and Michelle are so much fun, I will be joining them onstage. It’s my last Alembic event for the year, so I hope to see you there. It’s a sliding scale donation thing, but please register beforehand.

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As a writer, I have never been interested in defining that particular breed of goat. For one reason, I don’t think the cluster of frequencies I hop between on the political spectrum are particularly interesting, or surprising, or, frankly, consistent. I am so large I not only contain multitudes, but flat-out contradictions — some historical materialism here, some anarcho-libertarianism there, with social democracy (local) balanced by realpolitik (global) and a rather fatalistic posthuman systems logic (planetary) informed by my study of media technologies and ecology — all leavened with a good heaping of cosmic drop-out dharma bum fuckitall. Like many folks, I am alienated from American political discourse, but in a pinch I fall back, like an OG conservative, on tribal loyalty to the “traditional values” I grew up with in the coastal Californian university town of my youth, with its blend of progressive sentiments, environmentalism, and “live and let live” lifestyle tolerance.

Another reason I skirt around political talk is that taking positions generally means debating such positions, and debating has never held much appeal to me. I am much less interested in crafting and defending combative stances than in mapping and understanding the environment out of which such perspectives crystalize. And that means spending a lot of time really trying to understand where other people are coming from. For a long time, I was a devoted practitioner of Robert Anton Wilson’s art of spelunking reality tunnels, sticking around long enough to get the lay of the land and catch the vibe. I subscribed to media feeds that seemed repugnant, studied weird religions and conspiracy theories, exposed myself to fetishes and fantasies that didn’t float my boat. When I met hardcore conservatives, or born-again Christians, or flat earthers, a sort of ontological diplomacy kicked in. Like a diplomat or an empath, I tended to lean in. Why play debate club when you can practice intimate anthropology?

Political discourse — as well as conspiracy culture and the weirdosphere — has grown more toxic and confrontational in the last decade or so, which makes this game a lot less rewarding, let alone fun. I got the first taste of the coming storm in my car back then, when I tuned into Rush or Michael Savage. Initially, right-wing talk radio seemed to offer a relatively unvarnished way to tap into the discourse, the ideas driving right-wing thought leaders and the lumpen voices the hosts were making room for (and manipulating). Then I realized it wasn’t really about discourse. It was about affect: raw, often inchoate emotions, like fear, outrage and resentment, stirred up into a brujo’s brew and then directed like a magic dart towards certain targets. Many of these feelings I could understand and even empathize with (that diplomat thing). But there was one vibe I could never grok, or stomach, a vibe that now, at the blazing tail end of this deplorable U.S. presidential race, seems to have seized the hearts of many in the MAGAverse: xenophobia. The ancient hates that fuel racism are obviously a huge part of this, but I think the more abstract notion of “xenophobia” — fear and revulsion of the other — lets us understand something else about the affective and existential source of this attitude. It’s what Reverend Hank Tuell‚ a New York pastor who nixed plans to open a migrant shelter after his church received violent threats, described to the New York Times as the “demonization of the different.”  

Only a smidgen of evolutionary psychology is needed to understand this demonization. Beings beyond the tribe are scary, potentially threatening, and just plain weird. But what about the millions of people like me? What about xenophiles? When I reject xenophobia as incomprehensible and repellent, I am not only giving voice to a moral principal or a political position but to a feeling, an aesthetic, an imaginal orientation. I enjoy difference — aesthetically, culturally, ontologically. Some of this stuff is pretty typical for liberal types. I like downtowns, flea markets, global travel, ethnic food, so-called “world music.” Intellectually and aesthetically, I am drawn to juxtaposition and collage, miscegenation and hybridity. I like weird stuff, especially when it gets uncomfortable. I also believe, with William James, that the reality we inhabit is better described as a pluriverse than a universe. It’s difference all the way down (even if it’s ultimately one). So while I am drawn to and informed by some premodern traditions, I understand these currents through an essentially cosmopolitan lens. This makes me an anti-racist and pro-LGBTQ by nature, but not necessarily for reasons that would earn a stamp of approval from the apparatchiks of DEI, because they smack too much of exoticism and pleasure.

But that’s not the point. I’m not claiming in any way to be noble or marked with virtue. Like reality itself, I’m a hot mess. What I am interested in, is where this love and fascination, however “problematic,” comes from? If xenophobia is natural, how is xenophilia learned? Did my Ivy League schooling program me with a belief in the infinite expansion of “rights” discourse? Nah. Am I driven by a hatred of white people or European culture? Not even close. Am I party to some kumbaya progressive groupthink? I would rather hang the Gadsden flag from my roof than plant one of those “In this house we believe” signs in the lawn. No, when I puzzle over the affective root of my attraction to the risks and rewards of difference, and the radical democracy it implies, I keep coming back to a primal scene of intoxicating alterity I first encountered a long time ago, in a Valley Circle Theatre far, far away:

Mos Eisley Cantina.

Also known as Chalmun's Spaceport Cantina, Chalmun's, or simply the Cantina, the watering hole in the dirtbag spaceport of Mos Eisley on the desert planet of Tatooine was just one of many arresting sights and sounds that jacked my pliant brainstem that spring of 1977, when, like a generation of impressionable pre-adolescents, I saw “Star Wars” after waiting hours in line over opening weekend down in sunny Mission Valley.

I am not sure how we got the word back then that something so mighty was afoot, but the word was out, and the word was good, especially those yellow words that crawled up the screen at the start of the film, receding at an occult angle as ancient and familiar as the pyramids of Giza or an astrological trine. Those words were very good. But among the many impressions that the first Star Wars film screened onto the blank t-shirt of my young soul, among the wookies and light sabers and hologram princesses and X-wing fighters, and other images etched ever deeper over the subsequent weeks of repeat big-screen viewing, easily the most lasting and influential marks were made by that weird cantina.

As is probably unnecessary to recall, Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi, accompanied by the droids C-3PO and R2-D2, arrive in Mos Eisley, which the old Jedi describes as “a wretched hive of scum and villainy.” After Obi-Wan whips out some mad NLP on a hapless Imperial stormtrooper, the crew head for the Cantina — “a rough place” — to find a pilot and ship to take them to Alderaan, Princess Leia's home planet. Makeup artist Stuart Freeborn described the Cantina sequence as a "shock" scene; until this point in the film, the audience has seen only a handful of non-human creatures, and now we are tossed into a bubbling gumbo of threatening, bizarre, and muppety otherness.

In the novelization of the film, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, which George Lucas wrote with Alan Dean Foster, the Cantina’s clientele include “one-eyed creatures and thousand-eyed, creatures with scales, creatures with fur”; everywhere there are “tentacles, claws and hands...wrapped around drinking utensils.” This language is important because, imaginally speaking, the Cantina hosts a menagerie that reaches from the angelic — the thousand-eyed — to the animal. Star Wars nerds, some of whom have itemized every figure in these shots, will count off the races represented, including Talz, Bith, Devaronian, Ithorian, Anzati, Lutrillian, Defel, Duros, Morseerian, and Aqualish. Crucially, nearly all the conversations we overhear are between different races, a potent pluralism whose spiciness was not lost on Richard Pryor later that year.

Of course, all this alterity comes in a rather familiar package. That’s part of the pixie dust of Star Wars: George Lucas raided genres of the past and hustled the goods into the future. The archetype for the sandstone cantina is, of course, the saloons of Western film. Costume designer John Mollo even included some outfits borrowed from Western films, and when Obi-Wan severs the hand of an Aqualish interloper — displaying a Western hero’s capacity for righteous and pointlessly excessive violence — the crowd responds in a familiar ritual: a moment of silence, and an immediate return to smoke and drink and chatter.

The fact that this is a “cantina” and not a saloon also reflects the logic of Westerns, and the fact that Mexico — which, like Spain, is known for its cantinas — functions as the Western’s (and Hollywood’s) own margin of otherness. It’s not-home turf. Cantinas were also typically masculine spaces, and while there are some human females present at Chalmun’s, and all manner of ungendered aliens, the vibe is implicitly male, and barely erotic. Within the genre of the Western, whose classic form involves the imposition of (white) code on ruffians, pagans, and wilderness, saloons often represent spaces of slippage, moral ambiguity, negotiated comradery, social conflict, and the mingling of classes and, at least in later Westerns, skin colors. They are the most important “third place” of the Western, which means that, for all their violence and hedonistic excess, they are the space of the demos — the anarchic agora of primitive democracy.

A truth too often missed by today’s institutionally managed multiculturalism is that diversity often thrives at the edge of settled law, outside of homogeneous cultures, and proximate to trade and, therefore, to wayward desire and enmity. It is no accident that today’s nationalists and nativists not only oppose immigration but also generally oppose global trade, that Trump wants massive tariffs. Despite the extraordinary flaws of the post-war neoliberal order, whose neocolonialist karma is now coming due, global trade demands a degree of multicultural pluralism which, for all its own hypocrisies and terrible limitations, is, let’s face it, still better than world war. In a recent New Yorker article about capitalism and national sovereignty, Gideon Lewis-Kraus describes the growth of port zones in the early modern era, freewheeling enclaves that predated the nation-state. Here two regimes existed in parallel, one for locals, and a looser one for foreign traders.

Such dual-economy arrangements later allowed the great imperial powers to make their commitment to free exchange, and to a degree of pluralism, commensurable with their ongoing subjugation of native peoples. Colonial outposts like Singapore and Hong Kong flourished as cosmopolitan hubs, honorary extensions of the metropole into alien lands. The archetype of the Mos Eisley cantina was born.

Whatever the horrors of the economies that drive them, such enclaves are hotbeds of culture. In Star Wars — OK, OK, “A New Hope” — we hear seven Bith musicians well-known in fanlore as Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes. We can learn something from the kind of music they play. Despite the bizarreness of the instruments — a kloo horn, a Dorenian beshniquel, and the ommni box — the music is weirdly familiar for a reason. Lucas gave composer John Williams a prompt: what if the band had discovered a Benny Goodman score under a rock and were doing their best to decipher it? What we hear is a mutant twist on “Sing Sing Sing,” all recorded with analog instruments like steel drums and out of tune kazoos. In other words, we are hearing jazz, a music born out of alienated dislocation in a funky and fucked-up port town, and soon flourishing as the supreme expression of urban modernity. Sure, we are hearing crossover jazz, but that’s also the point, just the way Hollywood is crossover Americana. Jews can play it, Bith can play it. And by grooving to this tune, we too are drawn into the cantina, which we suddenly recognize is closer to home than we imagined.

Of course even the most anarchic enclaves draw exclusionary boundaries. And there is a stark limitation to Mos Eisley’s bottom-of-the-barrel demos, one that we learn immediately after Luke, Obi-Wan, C-3PO and R2-D2 enter the bar and set off an alarm: no droids. “We don’t serve their kind here,” growls Wuher the barkeep. Canon fiction will later explain Wuher’s loathing: his parents were killed by battle droids during the Clone Wars. But is this simply another instance of racial hatred, now directed against technological persons? Perhaps something more profound lurks in this exclusionary gesture (one which, we need add, is no longer in effect by the era of The Mandalorian, when the barkeep is none other than EV-9D9, a formerly malevolent droid of Jabba the Hutt).

What if Wuher is an extra-diagetic prophet? Perhaps his no-droid policy is a desperate attempt to maintain the analog wonder of the late 1970s Star Wars movies against the onslaught of digital revisions Lucas would unleash when he got his hands on the toys. Lucas’ ongoing tinkering of the cantina scene, which began in the 1997 Special Edition, is illuminating here. His most famous switcheroo alters Han Solo’s gunfight with Greedo so that Greedo appears to attack first — in Western terms, a “Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” brush-up of the moral hero, a whitewashing that inspired the fan cry “Han shot first!”. But what else gets the ax? In later revisions, the devilish looking Devaronian stays, but a fat-fanged, red-eyed werewolf is replaced by some far-out aliens, as if Lucas wanted to repress his own debt to the prosthetic, monster-movie past.

But there is possibly a deeper dimension to Wuher’s policy, one that came to mind recently when I read an excerpt from an interview with Yuval Harari:

AI should not take part in human conversations unless it identifies as an AI. We can imagine democracy as a group of people standing in a circle and talking with each other. And suddenly a group of robots enter the circle and start talking very loudly and with a lot of passion. And you don’t know who are the robots and who are the humans. This is what is happening right now all over the world. And this is why the conversation is collapsing. And there is a simple antidote. The robots are not welcome into the circle of conversation unless they identify as bots. 

Now the droids are still clearly droids, but there is a deeper sense in which their presence represents the incursion of a logic that threatens the demos, even a low-rent piratical demos of mutual exploitation and violence like the Cantina. While the desert of Tatooine resonates with and recalls the landscapes of the Western, it also invokes Dune, and one particular feature of the Dune universe. I am not talking here about the spice melange, which Lucas translated into his mythos as the psychoactive “spice,” extracted at least in part from the “spice mines of Kessel” C-3P0 mentions. (Canon lore claims that, when the Cantina was run by the wookie Chalmun, it served as an illegal “spice den.”) But the spice is not the important Dune resonance here. Wuher’s Jim Crow refusal of the droids actually suggests the buddings of the Butlerian Jihad, the violent galaxy-wide campaign to rid the universe of intelligent machines and to install and implement a new moral commandment the Orange Catholic Bible puts thus: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

I don’t know about you, but that kind of scorched chip policy doesn’t sound like the worst idea to me, even if it is impossible to imagine. But does this attitude represent xenophobia, as some posthuman philosophers and AI rights activists might want to claim? Perhaps it represents the opposite. Why? Because, as older xenophiles like me are wont to tell you, it’s pretty clear that real differences are getting tamped down and even sucked out of our increasingly digitized world. Even as conflicts intensify on a shrinking globe, a flattening digital equivalence infects cultures everywhere, something that contemporary multicultural dogma sometimes aids and abets. Global chains, universal media platforms, and corporate monocultures are bad enough, but these are nothing compared to AI and its potential vampirization, repackaging, and ultimate simulation of all human cultural activities. Talk about a Great Replacement theory!

Bartender, I’ll take a Tatooine Sunset. Better make it two.

Upcoming Events

• The night after election Tuesday may not be the most obvious time to gather with your fellow freaks for the Chalice, the Berkeley Alembic’s monthly psychedelic salon. But it might make more sense than you know. For this month’s event, which goes down at 7pm on Wednesday, November 6, we are going to do something special: we are going to invent our own psychedelic religion. We’ll start with a few thoughts from Chalice co-hosts Maria Mangini, Christian Greer, and myself on the history and practice of collective psychedelic spirituality — its value and dangers, its creative possibilities, its sometimes sublime weirdness. Then we will break up in groups and, based on a core set of values and symbols we will choose, create the features of a 21st-century psychedelic religion: liturgical calendar, vestments, ritual initiations, iconography. The goal is fun, insight, humor, and visionary possibility. It’s a donation thing, but please register before hand.

• On Friday, November 22, at 7pm, one week after Cosmic Chambo presents an absolutely killer heavy metal yin yoga class that you should totally check out, the Alembic will host the second in a series of occasional workshops devoted to the senses that I’ve been hosting. Sense Gates: Smell takes up perhaps the funkiest sensory modality, and the one most magically linked to our moods and memories. For this evening’s exploration, I will be joined by Nicholas Paul, a trans-disciplinary thinker, mover, and shaker who also happens to be a total fragrance freak. We will begin the evening with some banter and brouhaha about the Path of Scent, including chat about amygdalas, rot, musk, angiosperms, Eno, and a certain famous French sponge cake. Then we will get down to business with smells at once sublime, nostalgic, and a bit nasty. Particular attention will be paid to the role that language plays in shaping and expressing our nebulous nasal experiences. Sliding scale, $15-$30. Register here.

Appearances

• I love interviewing folks, and my latest printed chat is with my pal and underground comrade Christian Greer, who has just released the remarkable Void Machines: The Paper Shrines of J. Christian Greer. In addition to his pilgrimage practice and his psychedelic scholarship, Christian is a devotee of collage, one of my favorite art forms, and dozens of his beautifully reproduced pieces are collected here. I love the materiality of collage, its relationship to print media, and the infinite, satiric, and spiritual potential of the juxtapositions that drive the energy, humor, and synchronistic power of the form. (For more of my thoughts on assemblage arts like collage and their relationship to the sacred, see my essay “The Alchemy of Trash.”) Christian’s “paper shrines” are esoteric, possessed, incandescent, delightful. In our conversation, we discuss archetypes, entropy, Philip K. Dick, Jack Kirby, “artists”, collecting, manga, and a lot more. Void Machines is edited by Christian’s brilliant and sassy partner Michelle K. Oing and published by San Francisco’s dynamite Colpa Press. Copies aren’t gonna be around forever, and the book won’t be reprinted when they go, so you might wanna snap one up. Yanks should head to Amazon; others make your way to eBay.

• One of my favorite podcast conversations ever was a chat I had with my friend and consciousness culture colleague Michael Taft for his Deconstructing Yourself podcast. For the episode Transgression, we took up something risky: the notion of risk, and its value and possibly necessary role in spiritual, psychedelic, and existential pursuits. As a historian of alternative spirituality and the counterculture, I am all too familiar with the dangers and delights of the crazy wisdom past, and its almost diametrical opposition to today’s concerns with safety, credentials, and informed consent. Recently, in his excellent Substack Ecstatic Integration, Jules Evans took up the topic of risk and responded in depth to our conversation. Though we have somewhat different approaches, I have huge respect for Jules and both the dedicated independent journalism he cranks out and the care and thoughtfulness he brings to his core concerns. In this post, I was particularly impressed with his insightful critique of an analogy I first picked up from conversations with Earth and Fire Erowid years ago: the connection between psychedelic risk and extreme sports.

• OK, this is the last media share about Blotter, I promise, at least until someone is crazy enough to make a documentary or something. This chat, short and sweet, is for Spotlight On, hosted by the seasoned cultural commentator and cool dude Lawrence Peryer.

Readership Survey

I included this last month but it would be cool to get a few more responses. Looking forward, I want to move towards posting more than once a month but I won’t always be able to do longer essays. I am also considering subscriber-only content, perhaps Zoom meet-ups or audio content. I have around three hundred paid subscribers and I would like to more actively honor that support. If you have any strong opinions or requests, please let me know at asktheburningshore@gmail.com.

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I have known Bill for a long time, though we haven’t communicated much recently. The last time I called him I was reading a book from another translator who argued for the Taoist roots of Zen (in Chinese, Chan) concepts and words. This is a very attractive idea to many American Zen practitioners, since classic Taoism is so funky and anti-authoritarian. The argument seemed fishy to me, so I got Bill on the phone. He hadn’t read the book, but said that the practice traditions of Taoism were totally different from the monastic forms that nurtured Buddhism in China. “The invention of tofu and soy sauce had more to do with the establishment of Chinese Buddhism than Taoism.” I couldn’t see him through the phone, but I could tell he was running a gentle grin.

We first met in 2001. Jennifer and I were going to visit the Holy Land that fall, but 9/11 scared us away, and we were scrambling around for an alternative. At that point, I was practicing Zen at Green Gulch Farms, and I met a friendly guy named Andy Ferguson during one sesshin. Andy had recently published a wonderful collection called Zen’s Chinese Heritage, which collates the raw proto-koan tales and aphoristic teachings of the Chinese Chan masters that form the backbone of Zen’s literary tradition. Unlike a lot of Zennies, Andy was down-to-earth and without airs. He actually spoke Chinese, and had been practicing and doing business in the country since the ’70s. He let me know that he was leading a Tricycle magazine tour of Chan temples in China that November, accompanied by the Zen teacher Enkyo Pat O’Hara. Clearly it was meant to be, since Jennifer and I had both started sitting zazen with Pat (as we called her) in the small Greenwich Village apartment she called home while teaching media at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Bill Porter wasn’t part of the tour package but he joined us at the last minute, flying in from his home base in Port Townsend, where he has lived for decades. Bill and Andy had adventured together in the Chinese boonies, hunting down ruined Chan temples and remote religious practitioners. Quests like these had given Bill the subject of one of his most famous and remarkable books, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits. Sometime in the 1980s, a high-ranking Buddhist priest in Beijing told him that the millennia-long tradition of Chinese hermits was over. Bill didn’t really believe the guy and traveled to the Zhongnan mountains in 1989 to see what he could see. What he found were practitioners young and old, Buddhist and Taoist, taking to the mountains for simple, hard, and solitary practice. Road to Heaven is a great book, and it was a sleeper hit in China; along with a Chinese-language radio show Porter recorded in Taiwan based on his mainland travels, the book gave Red Pine a modicum of fame in China, one that was supercharged a few years ago when Road to Heaven was name-dropped in Ode to Joy, a mega-popular TV show. In Dancing with the Dead, Bill explains that, as someone who happily helped feed his family with food stamps for many years, he was pleased to finally up the quality of his bourbon.

The bus tour was a blast. We traveled to some remarkable places — the Great Wall in the snow, the dizzying Mt. Lu, and a quiet valley monastery where Dongshan founded the Caodong school that Dogen took to Japan as Soto Zen. It is a blessing to pass your feet over the loam of your own practice, which was probably why Thich Nhat Hanh and his crew were also wandering the orchards there. We also visited a few temples associated with Huineng, the legendary Sixth Ancestor whose withered body we glimpsed behind glass. And we hauled our way up Yunmen mountain to Dajue Temple, which had been reconstructed extensively by the remarkable Zen master Empty Cloud in the twentieth century. The place still felt classic, perhaps because of the deep earth wisdom radiating from an ancient ginkgo tree near the temple grounds, one of the most powerful Ents I have had the honor to meet. As we drove into the temple, I looked out the bus window, and the wind blowing through the bamboo forest briefly blew open a gate in my mind, and the trees started swaying in an ordered chaos of pure appearance, their shimmering dance no longer coupled to the usual assumption that something as concrete and abiding as “bamboo trees” lurked behind the flicker.

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Choosing to spend a few weeks with twenty-odd Buddhists on a Tricycle magazine tour was, admittedly, a bit of a dice roll. I was already growing a bit tired of American Buddhism at this point, a fatigue that would shortly bounce me out of formal practice for many years. Luckily, our group was not only devoid of snobs or jerks, but included a surprising number of good-humored characters who hunkered down at the back of the bus cracking jokes. It wasn’t all laughs though. For convenience’s sake, we stayed for a few nights in a huge hotel in Nanchang, a city dense with polluted fog and locals who eyed us with suspicion as we poked around the shops (including a convenience store where I purchased my first and only bag of Lonely God potato twists — a gnostic nibble I kept for years on my slacker shrine). Then it dawned on us: the vast sloping atrium of our hotel resounded with the cries of Chinese infants, many of whom we saw in the arms of anxious young Western couples. Nanching, it turned out, was a node in the vast international adoption system that, en masse and in your face (and ears), seemed to us all like a rather grim racket.

One of the finest things about the trip was meeting and spending time with Bill Porter. Dancing with the Dead captures the pith of it: Bill is a twinkly-eyed, adventurous, earthy character devoid of pretense but possessed of a salty and self-reliant Beat charm. He also is a serious tea-head. While I had already tasted proper Chinese tea a few times before, Bill occasionally dragged a handful of us into tea shops to sample the wares, initiating me into the warm and informal pleasures of traditional gongfu, whose artful but casual deployment of uncontained hot water and multiple rinses is worlds away from the uptight if beautiful kabuki theater of Japanese chado. For this tea-head, whose best mornings begin with dank puerh or wild red teas gongfu stylee, Bill’s tea transmission was as potent as any dharma download I got on the trip. In fact, I’d say they were indistinguishable. 

One evening, when the tour group was staying in Shaoguan, Andy and Bill invited Jennifer and me to go off with them on an unscheduled hunt for a temple where Huineng supposedly preached his famous Platform Sutra (which Bill subsequently translated for a priceless volume that includes some marvelous and illuminating Red Pine commentary). The temple was being renovated, but after some banging around, we discovered that the abbot was home, and we were invited in. The youngish man was watching some Hong Kong chopsocky show on TV, a pack of Dunhills on a nearby table. He served us all some tea, which was clean and strong and almost telepathic. Most of the conversation was in Chinese, but I did manage to get Bill to translate a psychonaut’s query for the abbot: “How does the mind we have drinking this tea relate to the mind we find in zazen?” The fellow shrugged. “Same thing.”

Dancing with the Dead is animated by a good deal of Bill Porter magic, his twinkly eyes, his dharma bum spunk, his frank and informal turning words. It also tells his tale, which I didn’t know much of, and it’s a good one. Porter’s father was a bank robber who made a small fortune in the hotel business after doing time for a Michigan job. He moved to Los Angeles, where Bill was born to wealth and privilege and serious dysfunction (his father later went bankrupt). Young Bill attended the elite Black-Foxe Military Institute, and spent a lot of time in the Idaho wilderness with cowboy types. He enrolled in university, flunked out, got drafted, went AWOL, got away with it. He eventually found himself studying Chinese and anthropology in New York City, where, after reading Alan Watts, he first tasted the “watermelon Zen” of the local Chinese teacher Shou-Yeh. He dropped out and moved to Taiwan, where he lived in mountains and monasteries, scraped by, wrote poetry, fell in love, smuggled, made chap-books of his translations, and deepened his poetic dharma.

Stylistically, Dancing with the Dead is a solid if unremarkable documentary, and features a number of now familiar features: talking heads, a linear biography — including course-setting childhood trauma — and a number of animation sequences, some of which are nourishing and some of which are silly. We meet some of Bill’s travel cronies, and see him delicately fondle a fourteenth-century manuscript of Stonehouse — a key poet for Red Pine — in the Taipei Central Library. Serrill’s best decision was how to treat the Chinese poetry. Early on, Porter makes the point that poetry in China was traditionally sung, so when individual poems are featured in the doc, we see the English translations on screen while the poems themselves are beautifully and hauntingly voiced by Spring Cheng, a Chinese-American musician.

Interspersed throughout Dancing With the Dead are beautiful clips of a 71-year-old Porter clambering around Chinese mountains talking to hermits. This stuff, it turns out, is from another Red Pine documentary, this one made by a Chinese crew and released in 2015. Available on YouTube as Hermits, the film tracks Porter as he returns to the same Zhongnan mountains he explored for Road to Heaven. He discovers a few traces of his old acquaintances, including a nun who apparently achieved imperishable flesh after passing on. Porter talks with a number of younger practitioners, both Buddhist and Taoist, almost all of whom recognize him. Hermits shows a different Bill Porter than the fellow in Dancing with the Dead: the jokes and mischief take a backseat to a respectful, quiet curiosity. This is Red Pine at work, then, rather than performing “Red Pine.” He mostly asks practical questions of the hermits: how often do they go to town, what they grow, how they deal with tourists, what their daily practice is.

A lot of licensed clips from Hermits appear in Dancing, but folks are definitely encouraged to watch the Chinese film, not just for a fuller picture of Bill Porter, but as a case study in the aesthetic and spiritual range of contemporary documentary making and editing. Hermits has a pretty different vibe. The film is slow, calm, full of long takes, two-shots, and images suspended between poetry and verité — ragged prayer flags, a single leaf of grass pulsing in a stream, fancy modern lanterns. The film is also devoid of camera movement, close-ups, narration, or titles. One monk compares the pace of life in the mountains to the slow motion in film, a slow motion we experience watching Hermits, but not, it must be said, Dancing with the Dead, which proceeds at a much more conventional and accessible pace.

In a remarkable document on IMDB called “13 Commandments”, the three directors of Hermits — Shiping He, Peng Fu, and Chengyu Zhou — explain how painstaking the film-making process was, and not just because it took over three years and 14 trips to the mountains (with Porter himself only present for a brief time). In concert with the willful privation of the hermits they met, the filmmakers also chose to take on many aesthetic and practical constraints themselves. This is just a selection:

1. Zen. Everything moves except the camera position. The dynamic state of men, wind, water, birds, grass and trees contrasts with the static state of the camera. No zoom shots, no pans and tilts, no dolly or crane shots. The balance of composition is pursued, with the steady scenes to reveal inner peace and quietness.

2. Humility. For shooting the hermits, cameramen should adopt only low angle and the static camera position. The camera should be no higher than the cameramen's heads when they are shooting on their knees. Try to avoid the disrespectful high angle shots, and while shooting the conversations between Bill Porter and the hermits, cameramen should step back or leave the scene once the camera is set and rolling.

8. Silence. There may be awkward situations when the hermits refuse to let the crew in, or are not willing to talk with them, which, however, lead to precious scenes that definitely need to be captured. Moreover, the film let such shots last, in order to brew interesting and profound impression.

10. Vitality. The film does not peruse intentional vitality so as to get rid of the tediousness. In fact, the spontaneous self-mockery and movement are of vivid eastern wisdom and humor. Besides, Bill Porter's body language is vivid enough.

13. Fast. After going into the mountain, the filming team are forbidden to have alcoholic drinks, meats, scallion, or garlic.

Despite the craggy Zen that results from all this, we see the red dust of the real world lean in. The hermits all complain about tourists and hikers, occasional cars and airplanes cruise by, and massive cities glitter in the near distance at dusk. Some hermits speak to the precipitous decline of the vocation itself, even the internal possibilities of perseverance and discipline and voluntary hardship. But the draw of the ancient way is, for all of that, still compelling, a vision voiced by the ninth-century hermit poet Shih-te (Pickup) in an early Bill Porter translation:

I live in a place without limits
surrounded by effortless truth
sometimes I climb Nirvana Peak
or play in Sandalwood Temple
but most of the time I relax
and speak of neither profit nor fame
even if the sea became a mulberry grove
it wouldn't mean much to me

Upcoming Events

• I announced this event in my last mailing, but Covid got the better of my co-presenter, so now you get to hear about it again. On Sunday, October 13, starting at 2 pm, I will host Sense Gates: Sound, the first in an occasional series of Sense Gates workshops on sensory awareness at the Berkeley Alembic. For this gathering, I will be joined by the musician and mad field recordist Sam Plattner, and we will focus on the contemplative and aesthetic practice of listening — to sounds, to music, to the environment, to the Void. I’ll start out talking about sacred sound in world mystical traditions, including the extraordinary teachings in the Surangama Sutra. We will link these practices to more experimental and aesthetic approaches to “deep listening,” which will be keyed to a variety of manipulated soundscapes, drones, and musical tracks drawn from the spiritual avant-garde. NOTE: the first hour or so of the workshop, including my introductory talk and a few exercises, will be available for remote streamers.

At 7 pm, after a dinner break, Sam will present Hidden Vistas, an extended sound collage of subsurface field recordings that reveal the otherwise inaccessible resonances and rhythms residing within our urban environments and infrastructure. All of the source material was recorded with geophones, and has been composed, in both manipulated and raw forms, into a sixty-minute sequence exposing the inner vibrational lives of the components of our built environment at all scales, from massive suspension bridges to washing machines. A Sense Gates: Sound ticket gets you in for free, or you can attend the concert separately.

Appearances

• OK, now I know you have had enough of Blotter, but I still had to share the piece about me and the book by Michelle Lhooq, my favorite contemporary drug journalist, who I am happy to say is blowing up (see her recent piece on mainstream wellness shrooming in the Los Angeles Times). For her Double Blind interview (which first appeared on her priceless Substack Rave New World), Michelle interviewed me about some of my favorite blotters from the book.

• Sam Stern is the archivist and podcaster for the Esalen Institute. As a recent outing at the Berkeley Alembic proved, he also drops a mean lecture (he will be back at the Alembic in the New Year). During a recent visit to Big Sur, I was able to sit down with Sam and record this episode of Voices of Esalen. In addition to some Blotter talk, we managed to get into topics like Terence McKenna, John C. Lilly, Dick Price, madness, Stan Grof, the Spiritual Emergence Network, prep-school Deadheads, the Village Voice, and "cannabis thinking." It’s a good ’un.

Readership Survey

I want to move towards posting more than once a month but I won’t always be able to do longer essays. I am also considering subscriber-only content. I have around three hundred paid subscribers and I would like to more actively honor that support. But what would folks like to see? Relevant archive articles plus new comments? Short best-of lists? Monthly subscriber-only Zoom AMA meet-ups? Shorter essays or reviews? If you have any strong opinions or requests, please let me know at asktheburningshore@gmail.com.

Subscribe now

I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. If you want to support my work, you are encouraged to consider a paid subscription. You can also support the publication by forwarding Burning Shore to friends and colleagues, or by dropping an appreciation in my Tip Jar.