Tag: Plant Medicine

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.