And I remember thinking, Oh, I’m watching a poem. I’m watching a poem made of crows. I’m watching a poem of no words. And that’s when things really shift, and I’m edging up against infinity, which means I’m as close as I’m ever going to be to death until I’m in it. Thereness and goneness. Total propulsion. And this is when sight doesn’t matter. And this is when language doesn’t matter. Oh god, this is especially when language doesn’t matter at all. Like maybe that’s one of the main parts about it. There’s no language. No words. And there’s no language to describe it. No words right now. I mean, these words aren’t even close. In these nights, I’m telling you, it’s unreal, like—an end to the limits of the self. And then you emerge. Having touched something very very big. I come out of it something else. I come out New.”
Producing language, we wank, we eat, we regurgitate, we research, we demonstrate, we expel; with what has been expelled we repaper our bodily walls, and this wallpaper is intricate, befouled, and potentially asemic—nonsignifying scratches without a linguistic system backing them up, scratches we nominate as words by agreeing together that this scratch means wank, that scratch means cang, this scratch means diatomaceous, that scratch means masks… Literature—the respite of the fallen—is the process of making do with mask and task, diverting ourselves with tasks that mask our disenfranchisement. We are disenfranchised, regardless of our station, because we belong to an earth that will continue to bear our presence only if we remain adequate custodians of this material envelope, fragile, in which we dwell, an envelope consisting of just a small interval of habitable temperatures. To unmask the systems that will destroy our possibility of inhabiting the earth is the task of a language that operates through masks and the avoidance of tasks.”
Everything he spoke sounded like regurgitations heard before. Isn’t every word? Doesn’t all expression come from someoranother? Can it be tapped straight from an unfiltered prime/pineal source? May translate through combinations of rule, encoded through, but it can. It can it can and it might feel mad but let it.
“If flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the fact that DMT is the weirdest thing in the universe… I will never forget my first DMT trip because I was such a case going into it. I mean, if you had known me when I was 19 years old… I was into Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus, Marxism, Freud… I was a jerk. And I came down from it and I was like: I can’t believe it. I was in shock. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Jesus. I can’t believe it! And I said I’ve got to go back to square one. In a single experience, I was converted from naive rationalism/realism/reductionism to my present position, whatever it is. Really all I’ve done is worked out the personal implications of the DMT flash and tried to create linguistic models of it… It shows you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the world is made of magic. That’s what the world is made of. Not natural law. Not interlocking cause and effect. Not any of these things that are normally associated… The world is magic. Not a little bit. 100%. Every atom from one end of this cosmos to the other is magic magic magic. Certain concerns just die in the first 30 seconds of the DMT flash and can never be brought back to my mind… Some people are not good candidates for the psychedelic experience because they’ve been damaged by life in some way, and so for them, boundaries shouldn’t be dissolved because their whole challenge is to keep boundaries in place. And I remember one case particularly: a woman, who was a friend of mine, I really liked her, but I thought of her as ‘fragile’—not somebody you wanted to lean on in a crisis—she smoked DMT; thrashed, moaned, rolled her eyes back, gave all the exterior symptoms of really having grabbed on. After about ten minutes, she sat up and said: It didn’t work. Nothing happened. I said: Nothing happened? Well, you wanna try again? No way… never, ever, again. So it did work, but the personality was somehow able to seal itself off from the implication. Because the implications quite literally would have destroyed that person. It was a truth they weren’t ready for. And I suppose it’s wonderful that DMT saves you from that. I felt in danger of dying from astonishment when I did it. And I do every time I do it. I mean I don’t know how they keep the lid on this stuff. I think that this is the secret that wants to be told. I think that we are, in a sense, involved in a little cosmic drama here. Fate has chosen you to hear about this. If you’ve never heard about it before, you’re hearing about it now. Now, you don’t have to do anything with the fact that you’re hearing about it, but you have been told at this point. If you now go forward and live in your mundane-stock-portfolio-BMW existence, it’s because you’re making a choice.”
It’s easier to establish a voice away from home. Surrounded by expression foreign from your own helps you feel more alone. Background voices merge into a hush. Hidden in a cafe, away on a train. Sinking in solitude. Language becomes noise. Until I hear my own. That accent pierces past and I distract. Mind deciphers meaning. “We sold two so far.” “She was so wasted she couldn’t stand.” The words of others crowd my mind and expel my own. Familiarity pauses attention. The known pulls me out. Craving lips moving in silence. Everywhere I go, one language turns up the volume and drowns my stream of thought. The others, a sea of sound I can sense, but not grasp. A liberating loss of comprehension. Drowning in the unknown, searching for significance. A pocket of air. Choking, an inner voice becomes more clear. More distinct. I can think.
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