Nomad Codes

say?
    For Friday’s wake, a crew of countess lovers built a small-scale replica of the galleon, a simulacrum of a simulacrum, and all the better for it. The crowd warmed itself with a few hours of whisky and reminiscences and banjo renditions of sea shanties and La Contessa ’s two theme songs. A few speeches were made—Moms were thanked, Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” was read—and then the Extra Action Marching Band, led by flag girls bearing silvery standards, struck up a dirge punctuated by bullhorn lamentations en français , and then led the crowd and the drunken boat to the damp sands by waterline. Dr. Hal Robbins intoned Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” and the boat was committed to the sea, where it soon ballooned into flame like the Viking burials of yore. The ladies took up another round of “The Countess,” which bounced and echoed off the metal walls of nearby industrial buildings like a spectral dub track:
    They toiled for a thousand white nights to build the ship that they sail’d,
    Bound together with salt & spunk, buckets of bloody nails.
    They thought that their task would be easy; they learned their lesson well.
    So No! Let it never be foolishly be said
    That the countess is easily wooed into bed!
    2007

CODA

BARDO FLIGHT

    I just got back from a couple weeks in Costa Rica, where I spoke at the semi-annual Mind States conference and tooled around with some pals. I had hoped to herein recount some of the highlights of the trip, perhaps in an attempt to make up for my unmitigated writing sloth during the last fortnight, a laziness that was no doubt partly inspired by the actual sloths I saw blissfully konked out in the jungle foliage. But about the only thing on my mind right now is the hell-flight we endured on the return home.
    At the conference I gave a talk on Philip K. Dick and led a vigorous group discussion about the filmmaker Richard Linklater’s essayistic dream-film Waking Life , which is kinda like Sans Soleil for stoners. One of my major themes in these discussions was what Tibetans call the bardo: the insubstantial in-between state said to confront the soul after death, when the contents of mind return to seduce and terrify the ego’s disoriented after-image as it reverberates into rebirth. A Dante-esque funhouse of ravenous demons, smoky lights, and copulating parents-tobe, the bardo is no doubt one of the most evocative sacred accounts of the afterlife. It may also be one of the most useful. Early in Waking Life , Ethan Hawke quotes Timothy Leary to the effect that, even if nothing of us survives death, the last few minutes of the brain’s electrical activity may be experienced by the dying person as an entire life racing in time-lapse—or, as the film itself suggests, a nearly infinite labyrinth of dreams. From this perspective, the traditional teachings of bardo navigation may come in handy despite the basic reality of brain-death: even if we are only riding that last wave to flatline, it pays to know how to surf.
    My other major point was that there are bardos everywhere—not just in death, but in dreams, in the transitions between waking and sleep, in sneezing and orgasm and the collapsing realities of Philip K. Dick novels. Death is simply the starkest transition; we are always undergoing the dissolution of the world (especially these days, when epochal change is assured).
    Traveling, in its many guises, can be another bardo rehearsal, offering up hints and foreshadows, perhaps even a few tricks. And I am not just talking about the trials and delights of shoestring journeying through exotic and challenging backwaters where sacred images still hold sway. I am also talking about the grueling, mind-altering reality of twenty-first-century commercial air travel.
    Say you are me, and you conclude your Costa Rican trip at the airport in San Jose. You step out of the world of place, of birdcalls and smog and wet air, and enter an air-conditioned terminal, formally identical to thousands of other spaces across the globe. The terminal is the gateway to an interzone of nowheres, a network of liminality, of thresholds and passageways and vehicles designed by the principalities of the air to move and distribute large populations of souls to their destinies—or at least their destinations. Terminal . What other journey, you might ask, begins at the end?
    Moving through this system is, despite all the hubbub, a remarkably passive process—a submission that begins with the