Zone Ghosts and Mango Babas

News, Reviews, and Notes

Hi folks. I have decided to make a slight change in Burning Shore posts: rather than append my almost invariably (too) long essays with news and notes, I am going to split them off into a separate post and add some brief capsule reviews.

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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