Our friend Irina moved to Olympia on Friday…. We helped with the packing and moving stuff to the van. She is off on a new adventure, but we will miss her here!
I spent some 20 hours this weekend on the magazine, it is almost there… Trying to get it to do just what I want, but it seems to have a mind of its own…
Gwyllm
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On The Menu
Acid Trip
DMT Experience
For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems
Art: Watts
Acid Trip
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DMT Experience
-Scott Fossel
A composite essay of my first two DMT trips
disclaimer: This is a pale reflection of a bottomless mystery.
The things I say it is, it is now – these are but linguistic
shrouds I am able to cloak it in. Please don’t think you know DMT
from having read this, you don’t. But DO please go and try some,
go extract it from a plant – then you will KNOW. Oh, this is my
experience, you can ask me any questions you like. Everything
here is with closed eyes unless otherwise indicated – this is
really the only way to go DEEP.
The small wooden pipe was in my mouth and a match was coming to light it.
The scenario almost seemed like smoking pot except I knew the taste to be
very wrong as the complex, sweetly acrid smoke filled my lungs. Anyway, my
pulse never raced like this from the anticipation of getting stoned.
The first thing was a sense of dropping away, but to say downward would be
too simple. There were all sorts of frequency modulations and crescendoed
stacatto pops as the trip descended. This sound data was quiveringly
involved with these visual architectonic dream waters that were beginning
to emerge, dripping and slipping amongst themselves, and my being became
overwhelmed by vacuous, gravity-like suction experiences which impelled me
further in. Around me I felt a crowding in of beings as if the Celtic
Faerie land of Fay had become momentarily co-present with where I was. I
sensed them, but did not experience these creatures. The sucking experience
took over for a while then, driving the morphological acrobatics of
spacelove that lay before me. There was something about it that makes me
think of a voluptuous alien seductress with big, fat lips pulling me to her
body in the weirdest feeling embrace ever. It felt like I was being smeared
sensually and lustfully around the space in some sort of vacuum-tube
funhouse. At this point (maybe a minute into the experience) I started
picking up something like the Escher painting of all those sets of stairs
with figures descending by all manners of gravity, only its surfaces were
emerald isles of what I can only describe as fractal Medusa liquid,
serpentine and sexy. There was a thought that I was in a room full of
aliens and they were playing with me, but that somehow they had conspired
to make me this way – the alien carney music bar on the planet Tatooine in
the Star Wars trilogy seems relevant.
Then I had the thought (which just seems to pop up and not really pertain):
“What have I done! How did I get this way?” Meaning, how did I come to
enter something so foreign that my petty human ontological premises and
hopeful body of knowledge seem like a wrench trying to adjust a camel? At
that point I lost any touch with my body and was thrust forward into
complete and utter amazement. The world became so crammed full of intricacy
to the nth that it seemed every nook and cranny in my spacetime was
exfoliating little crystalline dancing worlds, bellowing ecstasy. It moved
like snakes move: all rippling of muscle and sun glinting scales. I cannot
emphasize enough the catapulting, titanic motions of this iridescent zigzag
bottlerocket, this nuanced, whittling circus of form, this Brobignagian
roller coaster safari across the jeweled plains of wonderland, straining
the limits of the knowable.
This is where I was when I felt a certain sort of shockwave across the dome
of the sky which gave me memory of the real world. I then entered this
whole journey that I would call extrication. Going in was “intrication” or
delving into intricacy, so coming back out was sensibly extrication. The
experience was very literally an incedible groping back out of this wild
wooly thing until I made it “out”, which afterwards I realized was only the
physical action of opening my eyes. The pipe was in my mouth – its touching
my lips had been the reality shockwave I’d felt. The woman who was handling
the pipe for me looked like a fractal Medusa as well, but incarnate – she
was buzzing all over with this really freaky energy. I said something like,
“You expect me to call this a mouth?”, a comment which was silenced by the
stem of the pipe. One toke and I was out of my body again, yanked back
through the scrim of the worlds into the blast furnaces of heaven.
I “came to” in some sense at this point and realized that I could do
anything in a space like this, could instantly unfold my richest possible
imaginings. “O.K.”, I said to myself, “What about trying to do what you
believe possible by your perceptual theory of higher dimensional
experience?” You see, I got the idea that there is no reason why, in an
inner experience, one has to have visions only in front of one. I began to
believe this was an imprint that years of bringing the external world into
construction of inner spaces had created, but was not necessary. I then
tried to imagine what it would be like to see in every direction at once,
i.e. what would a ball look like if you could see every side of it at once?
I could sense it but not imagine it in my mind. So this is the challenge I
set myself. It not only seemed to work (though with everything else going
on inside, it was a bit like trying to do a sensitive physics experiment in
the midst of a drunken bacchanal) but it did so immediately. I rushed
upwards into this superspace that was a spun galactic ecology of stars, a
swarming hive of dragonfly constellations . . . This was very profound, but
in doing it, it seemed I had reduced the alien quality of what had been
going on previous to this excursion.
I let my will go then and tumbled forward into elfland. Terence McKenna is
apt in calling these entities “elves”. They are elves/not-elves. They don’t
appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you
know it they’re there – the whole realm is infested with these creatures
like nothing else you could ever imagine. They do sing things that are like
“self-dribbling jeweled basketballs” or whatever you want to call them.
They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2)
lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7)
existential notions of polyfidelity, 
cucumbers, 9) Beethoven’s 5th
symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an
arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away
because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized into
these hyperdimensional objects, undulating, ululating along. It makes me
think of getting home from school when your mother says that she’s baked
you some treats, only these are like no treats Mom ever made, and when you
see them you almost want to say, “Aw, mom, you shouldn’t have. I mean you
really shouldn’t have”. What you do with these elves is some sort of a game
of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of
synesthesia. In catching the things they threw, in playing with them, I
participated in the ineffable mysteries that they were. This place is the
Joycean “Merry go raum”. Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus
fragment: “The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls”. It is this. As
well I understand, “Still the first day, All Fool’s Day, here at the
center.” It is this too.
So for what seemed like centuries I played with the trippy freaky elves and
they kept bringing me into atrium after atrium in the antics annex, and all
I could do was wonder when we would get to their front door. As far as I
know, we never did. Instead they said many things, though I can’t say they
used what we would call a voice to accomplish this communication. I
remember only parts of this. At first they said, “Build this”, indicating
hyperspace. Later they amended this by saying, “Build it. He will come.”
from the movie Field of Dreams. Very funny.
Then it was as though alarms started to go off, and the whole space was
going through these quivering emergency elaborations. I get the image of a
submarine movie sequence when I think back on this, just when it has been
discovered on the surface, the periscope retracts and the whole interior
goes into haywire, preparatory gymnastics as all the hatches are battened
down. There is a phenomenally high-energy dynamic associated with this
part, as they try to get you out and shut the great bronze dancing doors of
hyperspace. It is as if everything is charged with imponderable
electricities and is racing around because someone shouted: “Places
everyone!!” They start cramming your soul out of there with a million hands
at once, grabbing you by twelve dimensions you never knew your body had.
Finally, the thing shuts and there is a sense of finality to that, but just
as soon you are on to the next thing.
Slowly then it begins to make farewells and say its goodbyes. Ancient
mythos holds that the world is supported by turtles “all the way down”, but
as I came out of it, my sense was of jeweled great glass revolving
elevators all the way down. I remember thinking that I was passing back
through the 50,000 veils that the Sufis say the mystery has, one by one,
and I clearly remember the awe I felt that each one of them was closed,
sealed, and put away in a unique and voluptuous, succulent way. It was
without question the most beautiful goodbye I have known in this life.
There was no regret of leaving or longing not to leave, just an
overpowering acceptance of the imminent return. This went on and upon
opening my eyes I had this very zap experience and I was right back in this
world, amazingly enough, only ten minutes gone. Slight tracers on light and
then these gone too. I was amazed of the idea that one could go back there,
could in fact just go there, that where I had been felt entirely like it
was a whole hyperspace, raging right next door. I remember saying, and
being very sure of this as I still am now, “Those are the gods”. By which I
meant, of all the things I’ve experienced in life, they are the most like
real living gods, and should be called that. It was very interesting to me
that I didn’t need to process a whole lot, which I usually require after
the mushrooms. Instead, I think I was in a state of being so existentially
surpassed by the quality of what I had just been a part of, that I couldn’t
muster any sort of conceptual or descriptive response to it at all. By
default, I was left with just a purity of acceptance for it – I just simply
had nothing to put to it in any sense. Instead I resorted to looking wildly
and deeply into other peoples eyes and by some existential-perceptual
force, to impress upon them the utter beauty of what I had just been. This
seemed to work somewhat, though probably not. I definitely felt I had been
closer to the core of the real than ever before and that this mystery is
front and center to who we are as humans, who we really are. I felt very
connected to my universe, very sensitive and strong and in touch with
things. Because I apparently have the gift of being able to remember it
quite well (others do not), I have to live with memory of its being out
there somewhere: very real, very powerful, very alive. There has not been
an hour to pass since I did it that I haven’t thought of it and tried again
to reference it to this world, failing. I do feel it is a very important
experience to have as a human being, and in some sense a whole lot safer
than mushrooms or acid. I say this because I am aware that I usually have
time and opportunity in a traditional trip to come up with weird ideas and
believe them which can be hell to integrate when things return to normal.
DMT seems to be so awe-inspiring, one is just so floored by it, that there
is no chance for trying to figure it out.
This is left for when you return, spacecraft still steaming.
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For Irina: Anna Akhmatova Poems…
“Along the Hard Crust…”
1917
Along the hard crust of deep snows,
To the secret, white house of yours,
So gentle and quiet we both
Are walking, in silence half-lost.
And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,
Are this dream, becoming the truth,
Entwined twigs a-nodding with favor,
The light ring of your silver spurs…
—
“I Was Born In the Right Time…”
1913
I was born in the right time, in whole,
Only this time is one that is blessed,
But great God did not let my poor soul
Live without deceit on this earth.
And therefore, it’s dark in my house,
And therefore, all of my friends,
Like sad birds, in the evening aroused,
Sing of love, that was never on land.
—
Our Native Earth
1961
There are not any people in the world –
So simple, lofty, tearless — like us.
1922
We do not carry it in lockets on the breast,
And do not cry about it in poems,
It does not wake us from the bitter rest,
And does not seem to us like Eden promised.
In our hearts, we never try to treat
This as a subject for the bargain row,
While being ill, unhappy, spent on it,
We even fail to see it or to know.
Yes, this dirt on the feet suits us fairly,
Yes, this crunch on the teeth suits us just,
And we trample it nightly and daily –
This unmixed and non-structural dust.
But we lay into it and become it alone,
And therefore call this earth so freely — my own.
—
Muse
1924
When, in the night, I wait for her, impatient,
Life seems to me, as hanging by a thread.
What just means liberty, or youth, or approbation,
When compared with the gentle piper’s tread?
And she came in, threw out the mantle’s edges,
Declined to me with a sincere heed.
I say to her, “Did you dictate the Pages
Of Hell to Dante?” She answers, “Yes, I did.”
