The Brooklyn Rail

The late French philosopher Paul Virilio once emphatically stated, “speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.” Many of us remember his warning of our technology’s repackage of propaganda of progress, it would mean the new administration of fear can precipitate the acceleration of capitalism into turbo-capitalism. As we ponder on our current world’s economic machine that needs to be constantly maintained and repaired with greater speed than ever before, we ought to ask ourselves whether our ideas of investment in educating our youth is predicated on training them to fuel the machine while replacing its spare parts endlessly.

While knowing technology and its seductive power of non-stop distractions by way of “quick-fix” remedies, can we think of potential counter-frictions as means to generate the urgency of our natural warmth against machine’s algorithmic coldness? In his primi anthologia Psychedelic Psalms, Joshua D. Rogers seems to have offered his own promptus responsus. Written as a panacea of short poems, haiku, essays, quotes along with original and mesmeric illustrations by Mariano Chavez, this small, handsome book is the author’s personal synthesis of sustaining self-introspection from which nature is a mirror of human nature, and it can be read at any place and time without specific order. There are wonderful lines, for example, “Satori: / Japanese for Sudden Enlightenment. / First thought = best thought.” Then “maybe I am a warrior / a warrior for soul / ... for inquiry /… for wisdom / …for mother earth / maybe the world needs warrior poets.” Elsewhere, “You don’t resist the fear; / you let it run through you. Surf the fear.” Or “Alienist is a healer of humans from alienation.” Phrases that will etch on our minds, including “Victimhood Olympics,” or, say, “Radical vulnerability.”

Rogers’s deployment of language is simple, practical, yet acute in tone and fluid in rhythm. It embodies the wisdom of all things, and things among things. Despite the broad, arching concerns casting over the social and political issues he has observed and absorbed over the last two decades, the various and wide-ranging subjects of his interest were and are of non-static results at his own pace. By abundantly sharing his timeless references directly and indirectly from the Bible, Jewish mysticism, Aristotelian metaphysics to Confucian ethical teachings; from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Rumi, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff to Beat poetry, the connecting thread that weaves front to back, back and forth, in, out, and around is the fundamental generosity to us, the readers, to his clear thinking. To the purpose of life, and what may be done with it, we know it has always been based on wisdom. And while we may ask ourselves how our past can indeed inform our present and future, Rogers, in his encouragement to our independent spirits, seems to have arrived at his earthly and intellectual wisdom after a long process of self-education. This holds true now when Cold War II is imminent, as he writes, “If we have any hope of diffusing this Cold War with China, our leaders (and our citizens who elect our leaders) should start by reading some Lao Tzu and Confucius.”

“The path to the truth is to bring people to the table to talk.” In quoting Thomas Reid from An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Rogers follows his succinct More Social, Less Media. The same with A Renaissance of Humanism, “We have become so siloed that there is no space for real conversation and real listening—the answer is the monastery of learning.” Psychedelic Psalms is Rogers’s own syncretic philosophy that will be a welcoming addition to our present-day renaissance.