February wanderings
reading, watching, etc
Iain McGilchrist has joined Substack! Iain is one of the thinkers I’ve gone deep with the last few years, as I’ve tried to make sense of mystical or paranormal experiences that don’t seem to jibe with a physicalist ontology. Iain has studied the brain (in particular hemisphere difference) for decades and is a panentheist who believes that consciousness is “irreducible, primordial and omnipresent.” Iain is also the most articulate thinker I’m aware of warning about the awful path we are on with AI, where everything human is becoming objectified, abstracted, and disembodied.
Early in the month I saw Pasolini’s Teorema for the first time at Metrograph. I spent a week drafting a short essay about it, but the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write, and I realized I didn’t have enough free time to do justice to this vivid and agitating film. The fable-like story of a mysterious visitor who (in a surreal, spiritual way) seduces and abandons everyone in a household really destabilized me. It’s a beautiful and unsettling meditation on the dangers in our desire to be swept away by someone — or something — radical and new.
In my nearly fifty years on this earth I have somehow avoided anime, but a friend suggested I check out Jujutsu Kaisen because of a thematic resonance with a passion project we’ve been working on. I’m taken with its set-up: after his beloved grandfather dies, a young man decides to fight egregore-like “curses” that humans unconsciously manifest in densely populated areas. To do this, he must take in “cursed energy” himself. I’ve always felt like my job as a writer is to absorb as much psychic pain as possible, then dramatize it as deeply (and entertainingly) as I can. We’ll see where the show goes — I’m just ten episodes in — but so far I’m very moved by its philosophical asides and stunning animation.
I’ve not yet read Eric Wargo’s latest, but I loved his first two books about precognition and retrocausation, and I’m slowly working through his book on creativity and time, From Nowhere. In contrast to other thinkers on consciousness I’ve been studying (more on them in the future), Eric’s ideas are firmly physicalist. But they’re nevertheless radical and very compelling — anyone who has had a precognitive dream and would like to make physicalist sense of it will enjoy his beautifully written work. His latest, Becoming Timefaring, has just been published.
