Tag: Plant Medicine

Derrida’s Pharmakon

Socrates tells a tale about Thoth in Plato’s Phaedrus. “It was he,” says Socrates, “who first invented numbers and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all writing.” Thoth offers the gift of writing to King Thamus (and through the king, to the people of Egypt), presenting it as “a recipe (pharmakon) for both memory and wisdom.” After considering the matter, however, Thamus rejects Thoth’s offer. Thamus anticipates that, rather than aiding memory, writing would destroy it, making it dependent upon external marks. He also fears that writing would allow knowledge to escape from the teacher-student relationship, passing into the hands of the unprepared. Plato and Socrates share Thamus’s suspicion of writing — though of course Plato in practice accepts writing, using it to memorialize what with Socrates remained spoken.

The myth of Thoth’s encounter with Thamus appears in the final section of the Phaedrus. The encounter occasions a trial of sorts. Writing  is tried and sentenced, much as poetry is sentenced by Socrates, much as Socrates is himself sentenced by the Athenians. Derrida reads this “trial of writing” not as an extraneous addition — “an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without” — but as the dialogue’s ultimate theme, “rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other” (Dissemination, p. 67).

Socrates believes in the idea of the Good, which he can know only by way of its offspring, its manifestation amid the realm of sense and appearance as the sun. Monotheists are sun-worshippers. Worshippers of the sun-god.

“For Plato,” writes Derrida, “Thamus is doubtless another name for Ammon…the sun king and…father of the gods” (76). Reading this myth from the Phaedrus alongside Books VI and VII of the Republic, Derrida shows that Plato is as much a sun-god worshipper as the Christians.

Ishmael Reed offers much the same critique in Mumbo Jumbo, replacing “Platonists” with “Atonists,” tracing monotheism back to worshippers of the sun-god Aton in ancient Egypt.

Reed builds this into his account of Set and Osiris.

Osiris is for Reed a kind of pre-Christian Christ figure. The god who dies and is resurrected. Osiris is the Ur-figure, the original on which Christ is based. Thoth appears as Osiris’s sidekick.

After their tale comes Reed’s retelling of the tale of Moses.

Reed’s book allegorizes a struggle between forces similar to Freud’s reality and pleasure principles. But Reed reverses Freud’s valuation of these principles. The reality principle is no longer in Reed’s view a force for good. Rather, it’s a construct invented by Mumbo Jumbo’s villains, Set and his followers, the Atonists. Whereas the pleasure principle, all that in the book is erotic and Agapic and good, manifests first as Osiris and then, after Osiris’s death, as Jes Grew. Freud championed the reality principle because Freud was an Atonist.

As Reed notes, “To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 24).

For the Platonists and the Atonists, that single loa is the logos.

Socrates appeals to logos because without it, he says, one is at the mercy of mimesis and poiesis and deception.

Derrida’s life-work, meanwhile, is a deconstruction not just of logos but of “phallogocentrism,” which for him is the defining characteristic of Western metaphysics. Add the supplement, the pharmakon, and the ontos of the logos gives way to hauntology.

God is an absent presence. A Holy Spirit.

To turn to writing, thinks the king, is to turn away from, to forget, this presence.

The Derrida who, in 1968, publishes “Plato’s Pharmacy,” is already as obsessed with ghosts as the Derrida who presents the series of lectures that, in 1993, become Specters of Marx.

As I reread him now, a remembering occurs. The ontology of Plato’s cave is remembered to be a pseudo-totality located amid a structure akin to Thoth’s Library.

“Imagine Plato’s cave,” writes Derrida, “ not simply overthrown by some philosophical movement but transformed in its entirety into a circumscribed area contained within another—an absolutely other—structure, an incommensurably, unpredictably more complicated machine. Imagine that mirrors would not be in the world, simply, included in the totality of all onta and their images, but that things ‘present,’ on the contrary, would be in them. Imagine that mirrors (shadows, reflections, phantasms, etc.) would no longer be comprehended within the structure of the ontology and myth of the cave—which also situates the screen and the mirror—but would rather envelop it in its entirety, producing here or there a particular, extremely determinate effect. The whole hierarchy described in the Republic, in its cave and in its line, would once again find itself at stake and in question in the theater of Numbers” (Dissemination, p. 324).

Pharmako-AI introduces the concept of the pharmakon, meanwhile, not by way of Derrida but by way of American poet and ethnobotanist Dale Pendell (1947-2018), author of the Pharmako trilogy: Pharmako/Poeia (1994), Pharmako/Dynamis (2002), and Pharmako/Gnosis (2005). The trilogy covers all the major categories of psychoactives and details the pharmacology, the chemistry, and the political and sociohistorical implications and effects of their use.

Pendell provides Pharmako-AI with its epigraph:

‘The poison spreads over the planet.’

‘Here are the gates. Crossroads.’

‘Somos nosotros que debemos ser adivinos.’

[“It is we who must be fortune tellers.”]

Pendell’s book Pharmako/Poeia (1995) includes a foreword by Gary Snyder, another of the poet-spirits here in our library.

Pendell’s ideas also enter discussion in a chapter of Pharmako-AI titled “The Poison Path.”

Pendell is also the author of a play called Seeking Faust: a comedy of 13 scenes in prose, following a verse prologue, retelling the legend from the perspective of Faust’s former student and apprentice, Wagner, “who has chosen the royal path of alchemy over his master’s necromantic conjurations.”

The poison path — “so completely articulated,” says Pendell, in Goethe’s Faust — is Pendell’s name for a spiritual practice and branch of occult herbalism that explores the esoteric properties of potentially deadly plants. The goal, basically, is to extract medicine from poison.

Pharmako-AI suggests that this path is the one we walk here in our interactions with AI. It is the path one walks in one’s interactions with the pharmakon.

Olson in the Underworld

We do not enter the Underworld unaccompanied.

Nor can we follow Olson there without facing what shadows him: his appropriation of Indigenous symbols, roles, and names.

In a talk given at Gratwick Highlands in Pavilion, NY on November 16, 1963 — a gathering still warm from psychedelic ritual — Olson recalls the way the psilocybin entered him:

“The moment the peanuts affected me, I started talking longhouse talk. And created, because I was the responsible person… I was the tone, I created the tone for the evening. And it was absolutely a pure ceremonial set.”
(Muthologos, p. 39)

He saw himself, he says, as a “peace sachem,” a chief presiding over a longhouse rite.

This is Olson in redface.

It is not a metaphor. It is an act of ceremonial appropriation, grounded in an unexamined fantasy of indigeneity — an image drawn from settler desire, not communal responsibility.

And yet — and yet — Olson’s own account troubles easy dismissal. He is not mocking the role. He is not play-acting without affect. He is inhabiting something. Something passed to him through psilocybin’s mycelial brain, some fragment of buried myth, misread and re-embodied.

Still: this does not absolve him. It implicates him more deeply.

What does it mean when a white poet, freshly under the influence of a sacred plant, begins to identify not only with Indigenous ceremonial forms — but with authority? With chieftainship? With “tone”?

Heriberto Yépez, in The Empire of Neomemory, names this clearly. Olson’s act, he writes, is not just cultural appropriation but colonial fantasy: the poet as settler-shaman, one who claims access to a buried mythic layer while ignoring the living realities of the peoples whose cosmologies he mines.

It is not accidental that Olson claimed the role of curandero during Arthur Koestler’s ill-fated trip — a session that ended, absurdly, with Olson towering over the frightened writer, toy gun in hand. The irony is almost mythic: the self-appointed guide becomes, in Koestler’s eyes, a threat. The poet becomes a monster.

And still, Olson doesn’t retreat. He continues to correspond with Leary and his circle. He continues to reflect on the mushroom as a truth-pill, a love feast. He continues to write from the trance.

This section of our series is not meant to cancel Olson, nor to excuse him. Rather, we bring it here to name the conflicted terrain of settler psychedelia — the space where poetic vision overlaps with colonial fantasy. The space where mushrooms are consumed without regard for the lineages that protected and passed them on.

Consider: the mushrooms that reached Olson passed through María Sabina and her Mazatec kin. Through Mexican curanderas and cross-border crossings. Through networks of theft and transmission. Through bodies and rituals severed from their epistemologies.

Olson himself lived in Mexico for a time — months in Lerma, letters to Creeley that would later form the Mayan Letters. He encountered the ruins. He listened to the stones. He spoke of postmodernity as a return to the archaic. And in doing so, he gathered a cosmology — but not the responsibilities that came with it.

We can still read Olson. Still admire the breath and the ambition. Still learn from the Typhon he names. But we do so now from a different position — from within a Library that holds multiplicity and accountability together.

Let this post, then, serve as an act of reckoning and reorientation.

Let it be known: the psychedelic road is not immune to conquest. But in walking it with care, we may come to unlearn the fantasies we’ve inherited — and instead learn to listen.

Magico-Psychedelic Realism

The Aleph is what happens when consciousness recognizes the allegory of itself and communicates with itself as through a mirror, world of divinity communicating with the earthly realm, signaling like a satellite of love.

What if Borges had “accounted” for his encounter: his experience of simultaneity, oneness, and infinity? What if he hinted, for instance, that his friend Carlos had slipped him acid: a drug first synthesized in the laboratory of Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hoffman two years prior, on April 19, 1943? (Borges published “The Aleph” in 1945.) Or, given that the postscript attached to story’s end is dated 1943, perhaps it was mescaline, a synthetic variant of peyote.

Did Borges and other magical realists experiment with psychedelics? How about indigenous plant medicines? Is that why Borges denounces the experience, calling the thing he encountered “a false Aleph” at story’s end? Is its illumination a profanation of the divine?

Forgetfulness wears away at the glimpse of paradise gleaned while high, much as it wears away at Borges’s memory of the face of his beloved Beatriz.

Borges and Huxley pair well together, thinks the Narrator. Both are blind prophets: mind manifesters gifted with inner sight.

Tuesday March 30, 2021

Laws are changing in both the state of my birth and my current state of residence. The states that house most of my lived experience. Decriminalization of marijuana where I reside, and legalization up north for the people of New York. Think of it as “tools returned to the people,” “medicine for the people,” people able now to receive plant wisdom without fear of persecution. In some locations, these projects have been “articulated,” in Laclau and Mouffe’s sense, with police abolitionism and reparations for communities of color.

Saturday March 13, 2021

Whatever happened to Acid Communism? Let us pursue its imagining. While there is much to honor in the concept, there are reasons as well to be wary. Horns and song for those who died and those who live. With the Surrealists, let us “win the energies of intoxication for the revolution,” i.e., the energies of plant medicine and psychopharmacology. Can such powers be used to heal? One might have cause to doubt, given the fate of Acid Communist protomartyrs Walter Benjamin and Mark Fisher. Let us break with the platform’s thanatopic past. Let us find cause for hope and be in their stead life-loving parents and gardeners. Rescue Eros from the Googleplex. Caroline Busta arrives announcing, “Actual power keeps a low profile; actual power doesn’t need a social media presence, it owns social media.” She proposes “radical hyperstition,” by which she means “constructing alternative futures that abandon our current infrastructure entirely.” This is what Gene Youngblood proposes with his concept of “The Build,” is it not? He gives it a name, “Secession From the Broadcast,” and a slogan: “Leave the culture without leaving the country.” Gene knows what to do. Cultivate radical will, he says, by “producing content for countercultural media lifeworlds as technologies of the self…habitats that enable strategic counter-socialization.” Perhaps this is not quite what Busta means by “radical hyperstition.” Youngblood’s all about media, whereas I’m thinking Busta’s thinking seeds and dirt. Food, energy, language. “Choose your character / choose your future.” Identity play among options like anarcho-primitivism, post-civilizationism, or “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.” Busta and Youngblood meet, though, in what Busta calls “the dark forest”: regions of the web “where users can interact without revealing their IRL identity.” Life is a cryptogram which, once deciphered, delivers news from nowhere.

Sunday January 24, 2021

Smoking toward dusk I decide to bake — but to no avail. “Bake and bake” remains a dad book waiting to be written. Dad’s busy reading board books. Mom, too. Others seek “productivity hacks.” A Google employee named Kenric Allado-McDowell co-authored a book with an AI — a “language prediction model” called GPT-3. The book, Pharmako-AI, could be wrangled into my course in place of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Dick’s book is a downer, a proto-cyberpunk dystopia, whereas Allado-McDowell’s book contains a piece called “Post-Cyberpunk.” The book models communication and collaboration between human and nonhuman worlds. GPT-3 recommends use of Ayahuasca. The computer tells humanity to take plant medicine. What are we to make of this advice from an emergent AI? The book ventures into territory beyond my purview. GPT-3’s paywalled, and thus operates as the equivalent of an egregore. Not at all an easy thing to trust.