Lines Composed While Listening to Pharoah Sanders, 9/25

jazz, writing, anarchism, MLC

Pharaoh Sanders, Floating Points, LSO - Promises - movement 7

I want to write today but it’s not easy to re-enter the membrane. Not a cloud in the sky. September cloudlessness. Approach every unknown artist as you would approach something as a child. My bed is a landscape of books, envelopes, papers, no human partner. Stresses and anxieties are banished. Find the next thought that’s clean of all that anxiety-dust. How will I talk about my poetry book in the coming months? Adam Johnson called it “a concourse of naturalism shot through with mystical inquiry.” I like that. I like that I don’t fully understand what naturalism means. He also said that I had an “a priori rejection of the crowd mind.” I’ll take that too. But enough about me. Or at least the me that is supposed to occupy the promotional pulpit—what’s the word, podium. Does it matter when the sun is shining and the air is crisp and cool?

What threnody matters. I got that from Mark Leyner. I used to when I lived in Elbridge go get high on marijuana and go for hikes on Science Hill and listen on headphones to Cocteau Twins “Four Calendar Cafe” and read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. And other books of his. What threnody matters. It was an example of the clown revealing itself to be a scholar. Like Phantom Gooch (Colton?) did last night at MLC with his pinball story, with the vulgarity and silliness but then the mobile gently spins and you see an impressive chunk of artifice and cerebration. The contrast, repulsion/attraction. Intellectual objects concealed in a circular coatrack of dirty clothes at the Salvation Army. I missed a day of psych meds yesterday. What’s one day? What kind of slippage could occur in one day of missed meds?

23:45 into Floating Points/Pharoah Sanders — Promises

What is the group, what is the recording? You’re so new, you don’t know the terms. You can hear every pulsating spit bubble coming off his reed, staticky, the clicking of the sax hinges. Light electronics shimmering in the background. Twittering jungle ecology of electronic sound. Scintillant surfaces.

I want to start an underground newspaper with my friends in the 1960s or 1980s or anytime before or outside the Internet. I want to be investigated by the FBI for leftist radicalism and have our files burgled in the night by Nixonian thugs and then evidence recovered in a daring raid in Media PA when all of COINTELPRO is unmasked. Who would be the weak link in the organization that the FBI would play off each other? COINTELPRO in a twitter age. Feds in art spaces. They sowed fissions in student groups, black liberation groups, got them fighting each other.

Thought about writing a novel or long poem called Truckbombs for Greta. Greta being Greta Thunberg and it would be about the shift from peaceful eco-activism to violent eco-terrorism. The Swedish teenager getting for her 18th birthday a present of a set of truckbombs with which to assassinate fossil fuel CEOs and try to divert climate change. It wouldn’t work. It would herald more repression a la Bin Laden’s gambit. Plus all those CEOs are in survivalist bunkers by now, surrounded by private armies and are untouchable. I’m not a proponent for violence and I’m not calling for violence per se — I’m a pacifist and an observer — but I’m frankly shocked that there isn’t an Aldo Moro every week behind this climate change shit. People will go from defacing the Mona Lisa to doing armed direct actions at some point. Not me though. I couldn’t organize a one car funeral procession.

I’ve thought about anarchism. It seems like going to Mars in terms of its viability. But is politics about the goal the destination or about the conditions you create along the path, the home you raise your doomed kids in, the messages you send. The environment. Live Love Laugh. A placard calling for revolution instead. I think about how I should have raised my daughter to deal with apocalypse. Nightmare scenarios, societal collapse, mass migrations of people trying to find scarce water in North America, my daughter hunting squirrels and rabbits, avoiding gangs of Cormac McCarthy rapists in the Wolven Times.

Antiauthoritarianism. Long word. Political cartoons for my underground newspaper will be difficult to create. Fantasy of engagement, smashing the system. What would you build in its place? Please look at Excuse Me Mag, #6, “Visiting Hours.” My cartoon hinting at anarchist grand strategy. There’s a Statue of Liberty. Of course. But there’s also a much bigger Statue of Authority. Invisible. That has been under construction in America over centuries. It’s half built, just the legs and waist have been constructed so far. It’s in progress but is not of progress. Progressives want to take control and keep building, build a just society paradoxically on top of the evil lower half. But anarchists want to dynamite it to the ground (truckbombs for Greta) and start building society up again from the ground up in a more just way. Authoritarian legs cannot support a torso of freedom and progress. The Statue of Authority is invisible, located everywhere, and much taller than Lady Liberty.

In my cartoon, the sick woman Janet is made sick by apprehensions of the unjust authoritarianism lurking almost unseen behind American culture, politics, society.

“You wear the perfume of the allegorist well I see,” said the reactionary interrogator.

I reply. “And you wear the perfume of the propagandist. The smell when they collide is nauseating.” Dueling perfumes of propaganda, something ambient and unavoidable: “it’s in the air.”

Derek Maine’s glimpse of his next novel which he provided at MLC about the wartime correspondent lounging at a debauched paradise resort was radical. How many intersections with the field of political pussy will we have. I’m excited to read where that book of his goes to. A pynchonesque cross breeze of politics, war, and sex.

Time to get political? Colin Gee says to fuck the 1960s, go back to Harry Crosby days. What would radical publishing look like in 2022? I’m sure it’s out there. Eugene V Debs watching Netflix documentaries. Sacco and Vanzetti zoomers. PM Press sells anarchist books. I bought an anarchic-syndicalist t shirt from them that was so scratchy and uncomfortable. Hairshirt punishing you for being a conformist consumerist pig. The Spanish Civil War anarchists did not have credit cards nor PayPal.

The pen is mightier than the sword. The substack post is mightier than the truckbomb. Freedom of speech. Free speech absolutism in the twitter zone. I’m sure it’s all being tallied, our words, our tweets are beads on the abacus of total digital surveillance, clicking from right to left. I want to have coffee with the FBI or NSA analyst who’s been assigned to read my words. I’m harmless. And yet I want to dismantle the Statue of Authority and build something else, some new statue. Statues are just ruins waiting around to be cut out of the ancient jungle thousands of years from now. The Statue of Liberty will emerge from the foliage with a bullet-pocked Angkor Wat face and missing Venus De Milo arms holding no torch, no book of freedom. I urge my friends to if not join me making underground newspapers to get political, find nodes of radicalism in your writing, your creativity. We’re making the secret newspaper in a scattered, decentralized digital battle zone where drones drop glitter.