Misc: Mesc.

Published Monday, April 21, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

"It was in 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Ludwig Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium Lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, 'they eat a root which they call Peyotl, and which they venerate as though it were a deity.'" The Doors of Perception, by Alduous Huxley

At 10pm on Friday evening, I took mescaline, the active principal of peyotl, for the first time, with four friends. It was unlike anything I've ever consciously experienced before. It was at once a communal and individual experience of incredible proportions. It would have lasted until about 11am the next day, though sleep, found with the help of a Valium, put an end to my experience two hours earlier than foreseen, at 9am.

Huxley, who wrote a lot of his experience with mescaline in 1953, said that, while on mescaline, he "realised that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them." But I suspect Huxley's was not a communal experience because, though he was not alone, he was alone in his drug-use. We were not alone and, so, we did not avert our gaze from one another. Mescaline made us laugh and laugh and laugh, but looking back, the evening's jokes actually were funnier than usual, our conversations longer, their insights more original, and yet extended periods of silence and nothingness seeped slowly (and unforced) over our hours, and were never at all boring or awkward. One inside-joke jumped atop another until the whole evening seemed to be one big inside-joke. The experience was very communal.

We listened to Music from the Big Pink by The Band a few times, then some Dylan, some Robbie Basho and, I think, some Jimi Hendrix. All very orthodox. We slowed everything down, and when, as daylight approached, we tried a regular tempo, it sounded awful, painful in the same way daylight was to dilated pupils. Pull the curtains across, give me those sunglasses and slow that music down. One of my nostrils was blocked, but when I breathed in through the other, it felt pleasantly cold, as if I were breathing in the air of a clear mountain morning. But I smelt nothing. I wasn't hungry until sometime the next afternoon - and when I did eventually eat, it was just yogurt.

Peripheral vision extended beyond its usual reach, so that, for instance, the condensation of the room's window, which danced as if in a beautiful screensaver, was as vast and as peaceful as some incredible landscape blown by a soft, swirling wind. John Berger said somewhere that the problem with painting mountains is that the subject inevitably dwarfs technique: Nature reveals art to be a tiny thing. On mescaline, that problem grows taller than mountains. Mescaline reveals reality, at even its most mundane, to be a thing infinitely more beautiful, more vivid than most art. Always flux, always flux. The tiles of the bathroom floor became another swirling landscape, as if viewed from above this time; fields of bleached grass separated by straight, brown hedgerows, as good as those damned mountains. Ah, oh!, how those fields became that bathroom floor.

But nothing stood to be interpreted; everything just was.

Sometimes I was hot, sometimes I was cold. Sometimes I had headaches, sometimes I felt sick. But these were mere sensations - mistaken phenomena. The room was neither hot, nor cold. I could think my headache away, and I had nothing to throw up. You might think that 10 or 11 hours of such fluctuating sensations would make for an unpleasant, somewhat claustrophobic experience, but on mescaline, you lose all interest in space and time. It's a bit like a dream, in this sense. Without a watch or a window, you'd be hard pressed to estimate the trip's length. An hour, a day or a week? Could have been any of them; could have been all of them.

Thirst was occasionally a problem, as it is on any drug. The problem with thirst on mescaline, however, is that the mescaline-taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular. A trip to the kitchen for more water becomes an onerous chore. "Can't be bothered with those," as Huxley puts it, "we have better things to think about."

Labels: basho, drugs, dylan, huxley, mescaline, the band

Misc: Mesc.

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