This brief essay was written for submission to a local Glasgow arts zine, which called for contributors to contemplate the theme “tuning in”. Life happened, the deadline passed. I present a reedited version below.
I am indebted to David Toop’s book, Sinister Resonance, as well as the writings and visual art of Christof Migone, both cut in the edit, for their continual influence.
ghosted waves
Leary’s exhortation - “Tune in and drop out” - for psychedelic consciousness. To access is a withdrawal from conditioned thought/straight society/generally being a square. That there are occulted senses not meant for polite culture. If a drug user experiences a sound and no one else hears it, can it be &c. What are the implications of the unheard, ghosted, interiorised?
Sound haunts. It arrives without source, disappears, at once formless and impactful. There is a reaction, a pulling back, from the presumed sonic map to progress into an expanded multidimensional territory. “The thing is…” likewise. Relying on an abstract subject. To be pulled into a non-thing.
The point is the moving away, this perpetual reorientation around not-being. This is psychedelic. The closing hours of LSD erasing the self. One asks, “What is the self?” and of course the point is found: extra senses becoming/altered conscience structuring. There is no such thing as a closed system. The body is in an ecology; the body itself is an ecology of microbiomes.
But note the advent of radio, new signals crossing through us. 4G and then 5G. “Tune in and drop out” has a capitalist function. Tired workers in front of Netflix or PornHub. Gysin’s Dreamachine is one salve. A nuclear family sit before flickering lights, open their eyes and recount the visions that were triggered. Personal to each of them. Communal in intent.
There is a tension then. The body’s radical potential, its need for liberation, is also the root of its collapse. As with D&G’s Body Without Organs. The “cancerous” body or the “masochist” body verses “becoming animal”.
It is of the utmost importance - I say this to myself as much as anyone else - to seize the means of our body-production from the digitised world. It’s unsexy tho: what food we eat, how clean our domestic environment is, how often we exercise, how much time we spend in front of screens. It shouldn’t be lost that Ayahuasqueros have strict dietary requirements for anyone wishing to take their medicine.
What beckons then is this not-other, this imminence, this breech. As the sun can’t be looked at directly, these ghosted waves can only been seen by their perpetual rupturing. A fraught politics of otherness. Unbecoming as radical dissent.