The Lure of Machine Logic: On Will Alexander
KPrevallet reviews Will Alexander's The Coming Mental Range
Keep your head on and tuned to the real frequency because this mental range ain’t it
The Coming Mental Range by Will Alexander
Litmus Press, 2023 / 312 PP. / $24.00
978-1-933959-52-8
Review by KPrevallet
In his 2023 book of essays, reviews, and interviews, the poet Will Alexander warns us about what is to come if we are to stay on this current track of complacent surrender to the mesmerizing lure of machine logic. The fact that he was composing these pieces simultaneously with AI’s stealth intrusion into human consciousness—which has now paved the way for the wrath of Muskmen to transform OUR REALITY into their video game—makes Alexander’s work even more urgent.
The essays in this book seem like communiques from the distant future, sent here via time’s spiraling nonlocality, through Will Alexander’s human body directing the transmission. This afro-futuristic prophesy takes place on the cusp –our present moment-- just before Elon Musk and his band of billionaire cronies mine all earth and moon resources to subsidize their space travel and colonization of Mars, leaving the rest of us behind to survive in the spoils of climate catastrophe and perpetual displacement. Who else is best to convey this urgent warning other than an intra-cosmic poet whose syntax, attuned to language as a “connection to the unseen,” has always defied the capitalists and colonizers of the mind?
Alexander has tuned into The Coming Mental Range and has downloaded it into his singular and unique syntactical signature, which might be described as a cross between surrealistic cacophony and subversive linguistic storm; really, it’s best to not try and define it. Alexander is a writer whose poetry and prose invites readers into both an alternate frequency and a circadian poetic logic; I find it best to read it out loud to meld my neurological circuitry into his. It is especially important to do this when I sense the takeover of my mind by the killing narratives of media, the constant catastrophe of the news, and the sabotaging fatigue of my own turbulent thoughts.
Alexander’s radical syntax is uniquely attuned to the cultural body that is suffering under the cruelty of fascist autocracy. It is with anxiety and dread, primed by our culture of capital to seek out constant growth and quick fixes, that we seek out anything to escape the pain. Our interior dialogue is fraught with “suicidal psychic clauses” composing death sentences, and no wonder. Our cultural neurology is wired to the rational of the marketplace, and is suffering a kind of “premature constriction,” a breakdown of mental health at the cellular level. Alexander’s poetic work restores the knowledge that our inner world is actually “a galaxy of magic, not unlike a telepathic monsoon culled from trans-hybridity where language simultaneously exists and de-exists, where imaginal prairies collapse and open onto kingdoms of otherness as living experience.”
If only we could remember how to access it.
What else is the poet’s role in society if not to reclaim language from the autocratic wizards who use it to brand, design, colonize, exploit and convert to capital all that is dynamic, evolving, intersectional, and flowing? They demarcate fields with fences, control the radio waves, and monetize the immune system – basically, they seek to commandeer anything that holds hopefulness for our collective human survival. The poet resists this logic not with arms & slogans, but with language that is attuned to a frequency they can’t access. The poet is a voice who is “non-aligned with the explosive dissipation of capital that has accrued under the aural principate of a psychic Tasmanian whose aboriginal connection exists prior to the earliest suns.”
The book includes interviews and reviews of visual artists, philosophers, and poets who are similarly attuned including Wanda Coleman, Majied Mahadi, James Hart, Georgiana Peacher, and Theresa Tolliver. The Coming Mental Range is a seminal book by a writer who believes, with the optimism of interconnectivity, that we humans are beings who must “gather new traction.” It may not be easy reading, but the experience is a “cognitive listening effort” with the power to infuse your tormented mind with “verbal nutrients.” As I read Alexander’s enlightened prose, I imagine each sentence dissipating poisons, as if my soul is receiving language through the syringe of a syntactical drip. Alexander’s shamanic linguistic rattle is medicine that restores mind and body to “imaginal blazing as musical incandescence.”
What we do once we are linguistically nourished just might be the key to our collective survival.
