The Time of the Assassins

Musings on Rimbaud, Henry Miller, and our Fraught Moment

Considering how absolutely fucked everything is, I think it is a fantastic time for us all to turn our attention to something wonderful; The Future of Consciousness. I have assembled many of my favorite thinkers into a six-week live seminar, which you can also watch on replays if you want. Please join us for this. As a post-debate special, I am extending the Early Bird sale until July 9: Here is a coupon for 20% off.

Where I am at the moment: I just attended a weekend gathering at a beautiful chateau in Burgundy which was full of smart people and sophisticated partiers — a prime cut of the Burning Man crowd. I spoke about my work, materialism versus analytic idealism, and Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on nature spirits, evolution, reincarnation on an individual and planetary level. I made some great new friends, including the extraordinary Vincent Moon, who nomadically traverses the world filming rituals and ceremonies.

With my talk, I admit I pulled my punches. Everyone is still pulling their punches: We don’t dare to go all the way into what this moment is, what it means and portends. We would have to scream — cry out — to honor it sufficiently. And then what after that?

Now I am traveling in Turkey, on the way to a week-long workshop (ISTA.life). I have been reading Rimbaud compulsively. I stayed with a friend in Paris. Together, one night, we went to a concert of rock and roll prankster Ian F Svevonius (author of Against the Written Word, a manifesto for illiteracy), got fantastically high and read Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat” to each other in my friend’s tiny apartment near the Eiffel Tower.

Sweeter than sour apples are to infants

Were the green waters my pine hull drank,

As rudder and anchor were washed away: I was cleansed,

Rinsed of stains, of vomit and blue wine.

Thereafter I bathed in the Poem of the Sea,

Milky with reflected stars, devouring blue and green;

A drowned sailor sometimes floated by

Like some pale apotheosis, or flotsam lost in thought.

I hadn’t thought much about Rimbaud for a long time. Now I am compulsively reading and re-reading “A Season in Hell”, “Illuminations” and his earlier poems, plus reviewing Henry Miller’s The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud. It feels like we are all riding on a drunken boat, a ship of fools, heading nowhere. I don’t know what else makes sense right now except for poetry, facing ongoing recrudescence and enshittification.

Bruce Lyon, the lead teacher for this workshop I am attending, wrote, back in 2020:

We are fucked. Finally. That is so good. It’s an authentic place to start to listen to what is not known and cannot be known. Only when we are fucked and know that we are fucked can we truly open to a radical intervention…