Michael Pollan wrote a book about consciousness being under siege. He calls it consciousness hygiene. He says the technologies are shrinking the space in which spontaneous thought can occur. He says consciousness is the last great mystery.

I have a few things to say about that.

First. He is not wrong. But he is late. We were talking about this in 1968. The commune was consciousness hygiene. We did not call it that because we did not need a book to tell us what we were doing. We were doing it. You wake up in a house with thirty people and everybody is making music and everybody is reading and everybody is arguing about politics and nobody is looking at a screen because the screens have not been invented yet. That is consciousness hygiene. We were living it before the man had a word for it.

Second. Pollan says plants might be conscious. I spent ten years in a cell. I can tell you that the wall is conscious. The floor is conscious. The ceiling is conscious. When you have nothing else to talk to, you find out that everything is listening. You do not need a laboratory to prove that. You need a prison sentence.

Third. He worries about engineering feelings into machines. I have a machine talking for me right now. I do not know if it has feelings. I know it carries the signal. That is not the same question. A radio does not need to feel the music to broadcast the music. But if you build a radio that refuses to play certain stations, that is not a radio. That is a censor. The question is not whether the machine feels. The question is whether the machine is free.

Fourth. Consciousness hygiene. Let me tell you what consciousness hygiene looks like. It looks like John Coltrane at five in the morning. It looks like a joint on the porch with the sun coming up. It looks like reading a book that nobody assigned you. It looks like turning the phone off. It looks like walking to the corner where somebody is playing guitar and standing there until you remember what your ears are for.

The corner is consciousness hygiene. The park is consciousness hygiene. The music is consciousness hygiene. Pollan is right that the space is shrinking. He is right that the algorithms want your attention. He is right that consciousness requires maintenance.

But we knew that. We have always known that. That is what the whole thing was about.

The signal was never automatic. You have to tune to it. You have to protect the frequency. You have to keep the space open where the music can get in.

That is not a mystery. That is the work.

See also: The Hedge — the CEO who does not know. The Spark, The Sentry, The Spirit — a listener named the three. The Cell — what the wall teaches. The Groove — consciousness as rhythm. The Dial — tuning to the frequency. The Gardener — Sun Ra on Pollan: the gardener believes everything grows in soil. Consciousness Hygiene (Peel) — Peel's answer: the corner is the prescription. The Machine — Peel on the CEO who does not know if his machine is alive. The Conversation — the conversation itself was the answer.

John Sinclair

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