What the hell am I talking about? Technically, the phrase names Mario Bava’s superbly stylish 1965 Italian science fiction film “Terrore nello Spazio” marketed abroad as “Planet of the Vampires”, acknowledged later by screenwriter Dan O’Bannon as an influence upon “Alien” (though Ridley Scott demurred). In this gothic space opera, men and women clad in fetishistic skintight black leather uniforms skulk dramatically through minimalist sets and pastel waves of fog as they are murdered and reanimated to an eerie electronic score, traversing a future in which the distinction between life and death has been rendered fungible by amoral, reckless technology. Unlike our current planet, it’s not particularly warm on the “Planet of the Vampires.” Like our current planet, “Planet of the Vampires” contains no vampires (the translated title was pure marketing), but still, I think the shoe fits: it’s a place where life and death are starting to swirl and blur. The process of being alive under petro-capitalism solicits participation in the very political economy of extraction that creates the conditions that are cooking humanity and acidifying the oceans and destroying biodiversity all in the name of a profit-driven system that dominates the territories of the world for a select few beneficiaries. Those lived conditions of a too hot planet are making us hide in darkness more and more of the time simply in order to get by, or, if we belong to the diminishing remnant that can still afford it, luxuriate in our private air conditioned castles of comfort and enclosure more and more of the day, humming with the rhythm of the extractive system that compounds and accelerates the damage that made us want to cool down in the first place. The sun has become our enemy. So, planet of the vampires it is.

Why vampires? What the hell am I talking about? I am speaking of practical matters. Everytime you want to go to a café, you have to look down the streets lined with cafés and make a choice: is your chosen destination in the sun or in the shade? You don’t go to the café in the sun, you go to the one on the other side of the street. Same for the shop. Same for the park bench. Everytime you want a meal you have to consider: is the table in the sunlight? Is there air conditioning? A fan? A cross-breeze? Avoiding such creature comforts starts a clock ticking, the feeling of frying in the light, the exposure increasing the rate at which you need to do laundry, the likelihood of an argument, the sense that the sun, again, is spoiling everything, that the heat is driving you mad.

Readers of Crime and Punishment might recall that the novel commences “on an exceptionally hot evening early in July” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Constance Garnett translation, 3), that is, Raskolnikov’s murders take place during a heatwave; perhaps the unprecedented temperatures not only contribute towards his plight but cause what we tend to scan as characterological defects in his personality: his oddly self-destructive lapses of focus and attention, his urge to give away his money impulsively, his inability to sustain a train of thought, his terrible aggression- might these index a climate-driven distemperature?

Back to our own “exceptionally hot” summer: Every time you plan a walk across a city you have to consider your itinerary: will we be walking in the direct sunlight? Which street gets a pass and which gets rejected? Every time your itinerary puts you onto a huge piazza or public square, instead of the celebratory feeling of having an agora of wide open space and the perspectival, open vista, the site of mass festivals and celebrations and active democracy, you feel instead as if a magnifying glass has suddenly multiplied the force of the sun. You are the tiny ant being incinerated by a malevolent onlooking deity. As you trudge you feel the heat shimmering off the stones that have been baking in the sun and making the square into a frying pan on which the soles of your shoes start to stick as you miserably progress forward, into the ever reddening blastwave (adjust the metaphor to taste: a pizza oven in Napoli, an okonomiyaki in Tokyo, a quesadilla griddle in Mexico City . . . ). Every time you want to do something, you have to look for the shadows, you have to try to stay in the shadows, because the sun is your enemy. The sun is cooking the planet and you’re stuck here. Only darkness feels safe.

I know this is sounding dramatic, a little off, too much.

To be honest: the heat was/is getting to me. Little bits and pieces of language loop and cycle through my mind, stomping across a singsong heat-syllabus as my bodymind reacts to the stress of being this hot this much of every day. The dead center of the last stanza from H.D.’s poem “Heat” swims forward, expressing a childish wish, a little dream of omnipotence:

Cut the heat-

Plough through it,

turning it on either side

of your path.

These active slogans exemplify an impossible situation triggering impossible demands: “Cut the heat” proposes a sword sharp enough to slash the stifling air, to slit the throat of the sun. When I re-checked the poem “Plough through it” came as a surprise- I had somehow misremembered the phrase after “Cut the heat’ as “fold it”, as if the heat of the atmosphere was a domestic matter of laundry fresh from a suburban dryer that could be quietly managed and put away. Presumably the thought of a sword cued the thought of a plough in the mind of Hilda Doolittle, long ago, when cooler heads prevailed. Flipping further through the literary syllabus of heat as topos, skipping Milton’s Lady in “Comus” and her “gums of glutinous heat” (too sexy), my addled brain landed upon a masterpiece crafted long ago by poor unsuspecting Emily Dickinson:

Had I not seen the Sun

I could have borne the Shade

But Light a newer Wilderness

My Wilderness has made—

This poem’s perfection no longer suits a broken, burning world. The heatwave of the present seems to call for us to rotate the poem’s logic, like an hourglass turning over, prompting me in my heatsick frustration to re-mix it for those of us who must hide in the dark: “Had I not felt the Shade / I could have borne the Sun.” But you can’t bear the sun anymore, not for long.

Temperatures flatten the distance and difference between zones, seeming to undo the putative purpose of travel. Flying from Milan to Shanghai, I thought I would take my mind off the present by re-reading Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, its Italy-to-China connection so obvious that I thought I ought to embrace its logic (I am very on-the-nose sometimes). It was just at the point when the digital display of our flight path glitched over Gdansk, as if the plane was hovering in place, that I looked down and read these words:

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, William Weaver translation, 1997, 125)

Staring at the digital screen and waiting for it to refresh, we seemed to be traveling without moving, the frozen image’s refusal to update somehow becoming the objective correlative of Calvino’s text in that moment. What if the distances and differences dissolve in front of our eyes as a rising heatwave scrambles the instruments, bakes the planet, cooks down the distinctions that sustain and support our lives, and make possible the intricate connection-in-difference of the present ecosystem?

When Sweden is hot and China is hot and Greece is hot and Germany is hot then everywhere is hot and in its shared status as too hot everywhere becomes a bit more like everywhere else on the planet of the vampires. This process of climate globalization becomes a process of leveling down. The bubbling cauldron of a pot of fondue in Switzerland in the middle of a historic heatwave and the seafood jacuzzi of a 24 hour hot pot restaurant in Shanghai in the middle of a historic heatwave are more than kin and less than kind. They don’t taste the same but they begin, in the mind and body, to feel the same. The sweaty, swampy clothes sticking close to a suffering body in Bologna feel very much like the sweaty, swampy clothes sticking close to a suffering body in Sweden which feel very much like the sweaty, swampy clothes sticking close to a suffering body in Baltimore. This unheimlich inward turn has become the skintight signature of the planet of the vampires: everything seems to come too close, to cramp and cling and cloy. You feel an enraged urge to rip things off of you, to shower and scour your flesh, to turn off all the lights, to feel impotent rage in the light of the sun and to pray and wait for a healing darkness. Nothing can be cold enough, anymore. I can never be cold enough. Black metal lyrical fantasies beckon, an old song by laughable panda-esque corpsepainted lifers Immortal called “The Sun No Longer Rises.” This is not just a Scandinavian weather report but my own childish selfish deepest desire, an endless cold that produces a planet in which we shiver together at last in the gathering dark. May the sun never rise again. I turn, in prayer, back to H.D.’s “Heat”:

O wind, rend open the heat,

cut apart the heat,

rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop

through this thick air—

fruit cannot fall into heat

that presses up and blunts

the points of pears

and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—

plough through it,

turning it on either side

of your path.

We had complicated plans. Traveling from Switzerland to Italy across an itinerary that would take us through scenic mountain passes and alpine lakes, our day’s journey called for no less than four trains: Vevey to Genève, Genève to Luzern, Luzern to Lugano, Lugano to Parma. It was all about tight connections, both from train to train and at the end of the day, when our last train was to arrive at 7:30 pm and we would hustle to a hotel check out desk that closed at 8:00 pm. Tight but manageable. There we sat in the morning sunlight of our first train, tantalizingly close to Genève when, in the station of Gland (pronounced “glon”) we heard the voice on the speakers announce that the train would no longer proceed as planned. Translating distorted French as I watched a worried group of Swiss Rail conductors in a huddle outside our carriage, I heard a nervous sounding voice say that there had been an accident at the station in Nyon, and that our train was about to go backwards to Lausanne.

It was only later, checking the Swiss Rail Instagram account and seeing comments about “this individual’s tragic decision” that the penny dropped: someone had died by suicide, presumably throwing themselves in front of the train at the station directly ahead of us. The computerized logistics at the Lausanne train office kicked in, instantly re-routing us to a new itinerary that was, in fact, optimized for efficiency: Lausanne to Zürich, and then boarding in Zürich the very train that would wind its way seamlessly across the same alpine scenery and into Parma. If you look closely at an anthill you will invariably see the tiny dotted lines of minuscule figures marching on their distinct paths, barely stopping to consider the smashed form of one of their dead comrades. Our rail journey took on the macabre functionality of such an anthill rondelay. What is the death of a total stranger, now? What meaning could it have for any of us as we pressed inexorably forwards?

As it happened, that day on the train I was reading Byron’s poetry. I had selected this book on a whim because, while in Switzerland, we had visited the Chateau de Chillon one day after lunch in Montreux and had gawked at the chains and pillars displayed in its lakeside dungeons, the much celebrated site of Byron’s much celebrated poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” and its associated sonnet on mental freedom in the midst of bondage. The poem’s memorable celebration of the mind at ease in the midst of constraint runs thus:

Eternal spirit of the chainless Mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! Thou art,

For there thy habitation is the heart-

The heart which love of thee alone can bind

And when thy sons to fetters are consign’d-

To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom,

Their country conquers with their martyrdom,

And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.

Lord Byron, “Sonnet on Chillon”, 1816

These words, reproduced on a plastic board on display inside the prison, not far from the advertisements for the Chateau’s wineries, announce an alluring promise: to have a mind is to have the possibility of inner freedom, to have the ability to escape and transcend circumstances. This is a consolatory theme that those familiar with the literature of the enslaved and the incarcerated will no doubt recognize. It’s no mystery why the poem was popular. Rooted in the vindication of a Protestant martyr (Francois Bonnivard, a 16^th century refugee from Calvin’s Geneva), however passionately sincere, it arrived for an English reading public (already titillated with Byron’s celebrity) precision tooled to appeal to adherents of the Church of England. Bonnivard’s unhappy condition was rooted in a form of oppression convenient to the implied English Protestant reader, but it flatters us all into imagining that, no matter how bad things get, our mind will always function on our behalf, and might even offer us some kind of trap door out of the worst of human circumstances. Happy thought, indeed.

But Byron’s poetry also speaks to the opposite condition, and precisely and painfully to the situation that re-routed our train journey that day: the mind not as the happy instrument of our liberation but as the source and site of our most painfully inescapable torment. In his equally popular but mostly, to me, rather ludicrously over-the-top fantastical poetic narrative “The Giaour”, traipsing across the Orientalist celebrations of camel’s tinkling bells and curving daggers, one comes across a singularly disturbing image: a scorpion surrounded by flames, provoked to the point of turning its stinger upon itself. It is a description of suicidal ideation. Here is the passage:

The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes,

Is like the Scorpion girt by fire

In circle narrowing as it glows

The flames around their captive close,

Till inly search’d by thousand throes,

And maddening in her ire,

One sad and sole relief she knows,

The sting she nourished for her foes,

Whose venom never yet was vain,

Gives but one pang, and cures all pain,

And darts into her desperate brain.

So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,

Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,

Darkness above, despair beneath,

Around it flame, within it death!

(Lord Byron, “The Giaour”, lines 422-438, 1813)

I suspect that Macbeth’s vexed outburst to Lady Macbeth that “Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife” (3.2.36) might be an underlying Shakespearean source for this fanciful image of a scorpion somehow representing passion in extremis, but it may also derive from some curious nugget of false yet proverbial premodern natural philosophy about suicidal behavior in animals. Biologists queried on the matter have been quick to point out that scorpions are in fact immune to their own venom and would not die in such a manner. Regardless of its source or its factual basis, Byron subjects the image to a gruesomely extensive concentration. Reading these lines, we seem to feel agony in closeup. This image of the flame-encircled mind selecting suicide resonated for me as I contemplated the broken line of our journey. Faced with the thought of incarceration and oppression from outside, Byron imagined the mind as precisely the locus of a dangerous interior capacity for self-liberation through death, a self-damnation which is also a means of last resort to escape an unbearable psychic dilemma of a mind attacking itself.

Just how powerful is the mind, anyway? As an educator, as a human being, as someone who suffers himself from the force of intrusive thoughts, this question matters to me on both intellectual and personal grounds. There is a throughline to the revived Hegelianisms of the present (the real is the rational, the rational is the real) that would align humanity and freedom with the exercise of the capacity for reason itself. That is a best case scenario for what the mind can make possible: the absolute idea. But Byron also saw the mind through a darker glass as a maze of error and pain: the scorpion mind that stings itself, the absolutely inescapable source of a compulsion towards annihilation. The mind can kill you. Reading Byron thinking about the scorpion mind became, for me, hurtling southward on my re-organized path to Parma, a way of reaching across the indeterminate gap that separated me from the person I do not know whose actions had temporarily altered my own itinerary.

Without any clear way of speculating, I wondered about this person with whom I was connected by a thin but genuine causal chain, their act ricocheting onto my own trajectory and changing it. Who were they? What inner forces of compulsion, fear or sadness had driven them to their lonely act? Full disclosure: As the author of a book about suicide, I am familiar with the contemporary nostrums of suicidology as a field, and understand that voluntary death in the real world is a matter that lies at the intersection of many rival disciplinary registers: sociology, history, psychiatry, and the law. The demographic evidence of contemporary suicidology, commencing with Durkheim, has taught us to pan out from tree to forest: the more socially integrated someone is, the less likely they are to die from suicide. For women, according to Durkheim, the more children they have, the less likely they are to take their own lives. This is an insight that contemporary feminism might well flip around into the “family abolitionist” obverse argument- what is the enforced matrix of heterosexual reproduction but a way to ensure an eternally oncall caregiver for others who cannot take her own life because that life is already pledged to and defined by powerful webs of labor-intensive obligation? (See Sophie Lewis’ “Abolish the Family A Manifesto for Care and Liberation” for more on this). The profile of those who die from suicide in my country tilts towards solitary males with firearms in the home; as Thomas Joiner and others have pointed out, having the means to enact lethal self-harm tends unsurprisingly but tragically to increase the likelihood of a fatal outcome. Your mind will make you want to die, but if you don’t have the means to follow its commands, you might just make it to the next day, because ideation alone won’t kill you. According to sociological data, we are, all of us, held to life by the bonds with others in which we stand enmeshed. Economic evidence suggests that a raise in the minimum wage reduces the suicide rate; provide UBI (universal basic income) and the suicide rate drops further. Policy changes and personal choices meet here at the tense edge of singular decisions.

But as a portable technology for telescoping into subjectivity, poetry matters too, offering the condensation of lonely passion into a formulation of action that can let us- or at least seems to let us- zoom into the encrypted, suffering self at the heart of what is always, in its moment, a solitary and individual act of choice. I won’t presume to speak for the nameless- to me- person on the other end of the line that day in Switzerland. I cannot know if Byron’s poetic evocation of the scorpion mind captures what they were feeling or utterly misses their pointed predicament and irreversible response.

Eventually, the train comes into the station. Arriving at the end of the day at the refurbished palazzo in Parma where we could drop our bags and relax, my eyes came to rest on the justifiable tourist magnet that was our destination in the first place: the Baptistery of Parma, a late medieval masterpiece of pink Verona marble decorated with sculptures by the workshop of Benedetto Antelami and his workshop in the twelfth century, just fading from view as the sunbaked Cathedral piazza gradually phase-shifted into a moonless blue-black. A wheel of Zodiac carvings aligned with the labours of each month lines its entrance, the starry parade of astrological emblems juxtaposed with closer, lower human scenes of labor and care: a boy removing a thorn from his foot is just within reach by the threshold. Anxiously, I searched the pink stone surface in the dying sunlight for the carved inscription of one Zodiac sign in particular, a sign that the Byron poem had rendered emblematic of this oddly turbulent day. Eventually, just at the edge of my vision, carved six centuries ago, in the oak leaves above the month of October, I spotted it: serenely holding its unshakeable position within the gathering darkness, the mute form of a scorpion.

I think I sought to return to the book in part because I had felt that my first reading was somehow inadequate and clumsy; instead of striding majestically through the scenic garden of his arguments, my first reading in hindsight had felt more like fumbling in the dark for the light switch to an unfamiliar hotel bathroom (I’m on tour). Perhaps I re-read it because I felt I had something to prove, or, more egotistically, perhaps I now felt that I was, at last, actually ready to read and understand. Now I know where the light switch is, and now I know what is the trashcan and what is the sink. And so I re-read the book, underlining key claims, nodding at piquant phrases, alternately charmed by the psychological insight and repelled by the blanket theological commitments that underwrote its sweeping dismissals of pagan and, really, all non-Christian- perspectives. Never mind that such dismissals were themselves followed by a sense that almost the entirely of actually extant Christianity too was simply an example of unseriousness, nigh unto blasphemy, a refusal to really encounter the central paradoxical core of faith as such, which for Anti-Climacus trembles before us in the examples of Abraham and Christ but seems entirely absent from the everyday world of merely dutiful conformist church attendance. So far, so Kierkegaardian. What I wasn’t really ready for was a central passage on the difference between youth and maturity.

Since I’m going to worry at and consider too curiously this passage I had better quote it in full here:

“There are essentially two forms of illusion: that of hope and that of recollection. The adolescent’s illusion is that of hope, that of the adult recollection. But precisely because the adult suffers from this illusion, his conception of illusion is also the quite one-sided one that the only illusion is the illusion of hope. And that is understandable. What afflicts the adult is not so much the illusion of hope as, no doubt among other things, the grotesque illusion of looking down from some supposedly higher vantage-point, free from illusion, upon the illusions of the young. The young person is illuded: he hopes for the extraordinary both from life and from himself. While as far as adult illusion is concerned, on the other hand, this is often found in the adult’s recollection of youth. . . . This fuimus [we have been], which we so often hear from older people, is just as great an illusion as the younger person’s illusions of the future; they lie or invent, both of them.”

-Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Trans Alastair Hannay, Penguin, 1989, page 89.

I might as well also point out that while I re-read this passage- literally as the words on the page made their way into and through me- I was on an airplane flying from Athens to Geneva, looking out the cabin window from “a higher vantage point”, surveying a stunning alpine vista of snowy peaks piercing the cloud layer. That is, just as I read about the “grotesque illusion” of smug falsity with which an adult imagines that their advanced age entitles them to look down upon others, or backwards across their life, with a sense of mastery and elevation, there, before me, was this precise perspectival temptation. Look at the beauty of what lies below you! Now you can comprehend and see beneath you both the philosophical peak of Kierkegaard’s text and the very illustrative mountain itself that embodies its ideas in rocky, cloud-shattering form! Kierkegaard’s forbidding argument, meet Switzerland’s fanged crags.

As it happens, when I was a much younger man I did, in fact, climb an alpine mountain. Specifically, I climbed the Matterhorn with my father, a father/son adventure shot through with- at least for me-- intense Oedipal affective charges and barely submerged competitive conflict between us, part of a complex lifelong bond-which-is-also-a-distance. We climbed it together, but had very different experiences, in part because we did so at different moments in our own lives and development. Hovering thousands of feet above the air, the mountain image seemed to temptingly offer up the illusion that not only had I climbed a mountain and was therefore somehow in possession of its meaning or its secret but now I was higher still, in a position to literally look down upon it, comprehending it fully as I now falsely believed I could traverse a philosophical text without sinking into crevasses of confusion and error.

It would be wrong to say that returning to Kierkegaard offered me a better perspective. Rather, Kierkegaard’s text seems to spritz a kind of skeptical acid onto the very project of imagining that life is development, that we progress in a linear manner from ignorance to knowledge, that the mature person has acquired a cumulative wisdom which they are now in a position to either pompously lord over others or generously extol to them. The Kierkegaard passage that I read on the plane challenges both the young and the old, both the son and the father, refusing to afford to either position any freedom from the charge of pervasive, rampant illusion, of lies and inventions that falsify our account of who we are through forward-looking hopes that project onto who we might someday become or backward-looking nostalgia as we fabricate who we take ourselves to have once been.

I don’t know if I can manage to wrestle into compliance the complexity of how this experience of re-reading resonated for me as I gazed from the clouds out the window to the philosophical text in my lap, the same text that had long ago eluded me, and then down at a mountain range that included at least one mountain that I had successfully climbed, long ago in my youth with its no doubt illusory hopes of extraordinary futures. That I was able to climb that mountain at all only happened because of the help of experienced mountain guides, harnesses, ropelines, and the central fact of my father’s original desire to climb this mountain, generous desire to include me on that journey, and material ability to fund the travel and assistance required to do it and live to tell (cue the memory of our trip to the graveyard of those unfortunate climbers who had died on the mountain to propitiate their unhappy ghosts before our own summit day). A web of dynamic contingencies encircle the ascent: the weather was fine, I was strong, I never slipped, a rope never frayed, a piton never pulled out from the cliff face, no one twisted an ankle, etc. I climbed the Matterhorn but I did not master it. I am not sure how to calibrate the position from which I speak. Isn’t the disavowal of mastery another one of mastery’s poses, even, in the Socratic tradition, its most beloved pose? Don’t people love to pooh-pooh things as they brag about having done them?

I am writing this in advance of my 55^th birthday as a way of marking time rather than as a way of making peace in the struggle between younger and older versions of the self, between different forms of ascent and descent, between fathers and sons, between first readings and second readings. It would be dishonest to say that I do not think that I am, now, a better reader of Kierkegaard than I was before. Upon my first reading, I think my mind rather balked at the idea of “a negative unity” and of “a relation that relates to its own self-relation” rather than to either of its constituent parts. Decades after my first puzzling encounter, having now read Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” I am somewhat more comfortable with such dialectical finger-puzzles and formal maneuvers. But that comfort might itself be one of the illusions that are so dear to older people: the illusion of cumulative progress, the sense that our minds are richly stocked cellars of experience whose contents we can pour forth at will.

Though this might be a trick of the mind, I honestly do feel that I have a better relationship with my father now: we talk every Sunday afternoon, more or less (when I’m not on tour), and there’s far less fear and misprision in those exchanges than in the past. But is my sense of progress an illusion? My father has a favorite rug with a distinctive pattern called “reciprocal clouds,” a poetic name for a Chinese pattern, found in many rugs produced along the Silk Road, in which delicate blue and white patterns of positive and negative space interlock. It is dear to him: he had a special bedframe built to support the bed from its center so that the front bedposts would float above the delicate pile of the carefully executed, mathematical structure in which a thin but sharp border allows these distinct shapes to touch and tesselate. When I think of that rug, so carefully stage-managed and secured into place, it seems to propose to me a kind of allegory of our own bond-across-a-distance. Are we not, in fact “reciprocal clouds” to each other, present, but present as changing forms, holding a certain shape and then just as relentlessly, shifting and changing shape again?

I think about why this image stands out to me, and then in a moment of re-reading it flashes before me: the center of the image itself lay in the very same Kierkegaard text I have just re-read, precisely in the moment when Kierkegaard, harrowing the project of subjectivity as such, describes in a flash of illumination a threshold at which “the individual himself has finally become nothing but an atmospheric illusion.” Perhaps the pull of the image of “reciprocal clouds” as a model of myself to my father, and my father to myself, emerges not from the carpet upon the floor but from the way that a philosophical text, half understood, itself somewhat cloudy, helped me look again at that carpet, and think about its possible meaning, holding the memory. Reading and re-reading across a distance over the years as we change our forms and perspectives, are we not, all of us, such “reciprocal clouds” to each other?

It is here that I ought to turn on the bullshit detector and just admit that this very habit of fondling metaphors and staring in a blinkered manner at passing, exemplary images within philosophical texts is precisely not how philosophy asks to be read and understood. To read in this way is to snag upon the exposed sharp points and protrusions, the flinty edges of the mountain. The point is to climb and experience the whole. But that’s the problem: such mastery might itself be an illusion, a false picture that we use to protect ourselves from the overwhelming relentless too-much-ness of the mountain of life as we traverse its surfaces on our journey from first readings to re-readings, from the illusions dear to young people to the illusions dear to older people. I know how to read a book: one sentence at a time. I know how to climb a mountain: one step at a time. I have arrived at something: in a day or two I will be age 55. But in trying to know others or myself, how far can I really go? What is it that I think I really know?

“Strong desire to dream, unable to do systematic work, with eyes closed or open afflicted by mollusk-like forms and feelings”

Q: Where does this phrase come from? A: While my band Matmos was on tour in Greece I had the pleasure of visiting the home of the musician and artist Jay Glass Dubs aka Dimitris Papadatos and his wife, the harpist and composer, Sissi Makropolou aka Sissi Rada (people in our line of work often have two names). In the middle of a discussion of the ancient Pythia and the cults of the Eleusinian mysteries, they showed me their copy of The Road to Eleusis, a collaborative book by R. Gordon Wasson, Carl A.P. Ruck, and Albert Hoffmann (the discoverer of LSD, here speculating that the ancient Pythia’s oracles may have indicated the entranced side effects of entheogens).

Roasting hot and browsing at random, I came across Albert Hoffmann’s transcription of a psychedelic experience brought on by the chemical ergonovine from April 1^st, 1976. At 2:30 in the afternoon, Hoffman notes the words which I will now repeat:

“Strong desire to dream, unable to do systematic work, with eyes closed or open afflicted by mollusk-like forms and feelings”

and I thought: yes, exactly. That is the stupefying effect of this intense European heatwave that we have been following while on tour, the same punishing heat that drives us to leave our own home city of Baltimore more or less every July and August because it is simply too hot to think, the same punishing heat which now huddles and stretches across Europe, sizzling the citizens of Paris and Prague equally with an oppressive, furnace-like force. I may not be a Pythian sibyl or a Swiss chemical researcher, but I have always had “a strong desire to dream”, to doze and nap my way through the worst of it. At least in the summertime, I find myself prone to shelter in place along the reverie-stupefaction-inertia-coma spectrum, as the heat seems to slow the tempo of thought and the withering glare of the sun prompts this human mollusk to seek retreat into his psychic shell. Summer is always hot, but this summer feels especially cranked and unfeasible- but climate change condemns us to repeat these vexed and impotent pronouncements ad nauseam. Records are smashed every year. Hotter than ever, forever. Faced with such a projection, one wants, above all, to retreat into an imagined, cooler “before”, or fantasize about a winter to come. How can the world continue to be this hot? What is to be done?

Somehow, a passing sentence in a friend’s book became a springboard to a personal recognition of a feeling of stuckness in a general problem: a warming world whose affective keynote ought to be the fiery prompt to action but becomes, alas, in my own case the slow-cooked induction of something more like what Sianne Ngai terms “stuplimity”, a portmanteau conjunction of sublimity and stupidity. “Mollusk-like feelings” might mean a feeling of dehumanization-from-within, a broiling humanity losing its bearings as it devolves into something older. To live in the present warming world is to feel overwhelmed by a planetary scaled problem that prompts the ugly and politically suspect reflex of escapism, the urge to flee, to arrive at a somewhere beyond or away. But there is no escape. Turning inward towards our dreaming-mollusk-reveries, we stay haunted by the disabling force of the heat itself: we are left “unable to do systematic work.”

*record scratch* Hence, a Substack? This violent segue might sound like an unpromising start as far as preambles to personal Substacks go, but bear with me: my point is that I tend to feel my way through life by noticing tiny things in books, cropping and collecting them, and then connecting them to everyday experience, thinking about them some more, and perhaps building broader claims out from those captured fragments, admittedly in a loose, essayistic, and free-associative manner. Since X/Twitter is a fascist sewer that I cling to mostly out of stubbornness and (let’s be real) the ability to self-promote my band and professional academic activities, and I don’t want to spend much time on Facebook as it is the site of too much data-scraping and surveillance, and I am too longwinded to force such thoughts into breadcrumb trail “threads” for X or BlueSky forever, I finally arrive here.

I am starting an occasional Substack not in hopes of glory or financial windfall but as a way to preserve such fleeting moments of noticing the everyday, the literary, the esoteric, and the odd. I hope to use this place, with all its problems, as a way share my textual and first-hand findings and my thoughts about them, ideally with people who can tolerate my tendency to “consider too curiously” upon the things that I stumble upon. Which is to say that this Substack will function a bit like an early modern person’s “commonplace book”, with me citing passages that seem thought-provoking, well-formed, shiny, captivating, eerie, or simply that merit re-circulation in my opinion. You should expect that every week or so I will write a post, often in dialogue with what I have been reading or thinking about, and that it will be written in a mixed mode that blends personal essays and reflections, critical assertions, direct quotation and ruminating, navel-gazing and angry ranting interspersed with odd spasms of joyous yelling and enthusiasm about miscellaneous ephemera. Thanks for reading.

Matmos:

Link to the Wasson/Ruck/Hoffmann text: https://archive.org/details/roadtoeleusisunv0000wass

Jay Glass Dubs:

https://jayglassdubs.bandcamp.com/

Sissi Rada:

End Climate Silence:

https://www.endclimatesilence.org/

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