I looked around and couldn't find this report I thought I had posted ages ago. It is from my very first mushroom trip, 23 years ago, 10-11 years before the nexus even existed.
Strangely, I could not find the original version...
This version is actually a rewritten and partly fictionalized one - it incorporates many ideas from other trips, and from other trip reports. It is a chapter in a novel I am writing, about a boy who has a secret - he jumps around in time, sometimes into the past and sometimes into his future self. There is a central mystery, revealed at the end, that involves a HOLE, memories, and his own death, that he knows in intimate detail from the opening of the novel, when he is 8 years old and on a school trip to a dinosaur museum. I explain this only to underline and explain the use of the word "HOLE" in the trip report which, as stated earlier, is partly fictionalized.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy - and let me know what you think. The novel is within a year of completion (I hope!!), and currently sits at 150pgs a little more than half way) - but first I have a second one, a sort of children's book, that I should finish before Christmas, fingers crossed!
Thanks for reading, in advance. Part II linked at the end.
I CAME DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAIN AND MY FACE SHONE - Part II am sitting at the top of Mount Royal on the grass under the shade of a large maple with my first real girlfriend. I am twenty-five and I have my first girlfriend because girls, and now women, don’t really like weird guys, unless they are weird themselves. Cindy-Ann isn’t really weird, but she tries so hard to be, that the trying kind of does, strangely, make her weird. But not as weird as someone who says they know what is going to happen because they have been there. No, that class of weird is rather untouchable.
There is an uncrumpled bit of foil between us on the grass, and two unopened beers. There are people around, but far enough away that only the two of us can see what is in the cupped and sparkling foil. They look like dry little grey sticks, and the few caps there resemble a cross between a penny and a wrinkly nipple. Five grams, Cindy-Ann claims, of freshly scored Psilocybin Cubensis. I have wanted to do mushrooms for a long time, but was never connected enough to procure any, not being much into drugs and having the non-drug user’s fear of dealers and all that is drug related. Cindy-Ann has been talking about this for a long time, easing the idea into my brain, gifting me books by Castaneda and Huxley. I am honestly unsure if I am excited or afraid, though if it is fear it is certainly an irrational fear, the product of living in a world where things that grow in the wild are illegal to possess and an upbringing that separated non-alimentary substances into two categories: 1) alcohol/caffeine/tobacco, pharmaceuticals and 2)DRUGS. Or so Cindy-Ann professes.
She giggled and smiled and bled excitement from every pore. It agitated me - and calmed another part of me - that she was so happy to be doing this, and to be doing it with me. I opened the bottles, handed one to her and took a sip of beer. She divided the mushrooms into two roughly even piles, pinched a couple of stems and caps from my pile, looked at me and slowly brought them to my mouth, past my lips and then pressed them down on my tongue, never breaking her gaze as she twisted her fingers slightly and ran them across my tongue and out of my closing mouth, folding all but one which settled on my lips in a ‘shhhhhh’ gesture, as if she was saying this was our secret, our trip, our life. I chewed, washed them down with the beer and took the rest. She finished before I did and put her head against my shoulder and slowly finished her beer looking out across the sloping grass down to the large pond far below, where children fed ducks with their grandparents, and paddle boating couples laughed and flicked water at each other, the sound arriving to us delayed and vaguely echoing.
We sat in silence for quite a while, twining our fingers together, unconsciously fiddling with each other’s hands, until I couldn’t really tell whose fingers were whose or where mine left off and hers began. I was happy. She made me giddily content, just by being here, her head lifting and falling on my chest with every breath. I felt the fondness I had for her deepen and glow inside me, and I knew that I loved her. This love was warm inside and made me silent and stilled my skin and bones. Then, in waves, it heated and shot down to my fingers and toes. I looked up from the top of her head, where my gaze had been fixed for several minutes and over the grass to the pond below. The echoing voices seemed to grow in number and sounded now as if they all came from within my head, but also emanated from the figures on and around down the pond, which also seemed to be somehow inside me, as if the whole world were suddenly the province of my own mind, projecting outward, instead of me simply witnessing it outside of myself, projecting itself inward through my eyes. The grass undulated before me, receding to distant waves down to the pond where ripples shimmered and small squalls formed like melodies on the thin skin of the water. It was at this point I realized it was coming on. I had almost forgotten the mushrooms, obsessed as I had been with the myriad filaments sprouting from Cindy-Ann’s scalp, strands of gossamer shooting with such arching beauty from the hair-part that stretched trench-like from her nape to her forehead.
The mushrooms, however, had not forgotten me!
She looked up into my eyes and I stared down into Cindy-Ann’s and witnessed there such beauty that I nearly cried: the green of her eyes gave way to an amber not of this world before the peeling pitch of expanding iris took over. Such greens there as I had never seen before – bluish and turquoise but not-turquoise and not-blue-not-green, iridescent and sparkling ahead of the clear translucent amber, like rust, like sunset, like blood and tears and life itself, the bottomless black of encroaching iris a circle, never so perfect a circle and never so dark and adamantine a shadow. It swallowed me and there was nothing else but darkness all around, the darkness of her enveloping eyes until I heard her say, “let’s walk” and I popped out of her eye and smiled down at her and said “WOW”, a simple word that could never sum the way I felt but at that moment felt like the most profound word ever uttered, replete with folding meanings and sounds like O and AWE and WHO and WE and WHY and WHOA and OWE and HOLE and HOW and OW and echoes of all words ever uttered wrapped into one simple syllable, a palindrome, two spiny letters enveloping a ZERO, a double of doubled U’s, that were squaring yUo into Us and We, Was and Will be, a word burgeoning with possibility that settled in the past and jettisoned everything all the way, way, way into the future…
WOW, I WAS HIGH. HGIH SAW I, WOW.
WOW, I SAW I. I WAS I, WOW.
We walked through a world so phantasmagorical I felt transported, transliterated into another version of my self, another mode of language and sight and thought and feeling. And Being. I was being in a way my being had never been. And I was language, sliding through and across the folds of my innerness, slighding in-an-ought of cents, and sounds bleeding to scents and sense itself ejaculating meaning through my eyes as I painted the world in words unspeakable and sounds unheard by my tongue, electric and ancient.
I AM FOREIGN TO MYSELF.
I am four into mice elf. Elf four am mice I. L-4 M.I. MY SSSSigh. For my, I am ICE. I-C-I-M-4 MYSELF. I SEE I AM FOR MY SELF.
I see I am for my self.
Joggers came up the scintillating and undulating gravel path toward and past us, faceless skin pods garbed in primary hues and of robotic clack-clacking of foot to ground and click-clicking of arms swaying mechanical and fluid, robotic eyes in featureless flesh faces, the sound of their jogging echoing around and swirling past my ears into some place unseen where sounds lie to die.
Dogs and their companions river-ed past, ambling and scrambling up the winding half-road, the dogs dark like darkness never dared, slick and inky and impenetrable, like shadows of creatures absent the formality of shadows actually needing their attendant forms, their heads vibrating in my mind so fast that I could not tell if the pit-bulls marching past in procession were possessed of three heads or four, but the growls certainly attested, echoey and multiple, that more heads than a body can hold were perched on the necks of those obsidian beasts.
We stopped to look at some trees when their wavering bark heeded my immediate attention: there in the close squiggles of treeness that stretched up and down the trunk of one massive oak were faces emerging, long of nose and droopy of eye, ancient once again, the bark lengths folding over into features that welcomed and warned, reasoned and reproached, surprised I could see them, smiling at me as I smiled back, knowing I was let in on a secret that was always there hiding in the living nexus of these magnificent plants, sentinels of the forest attendant over all that pass by oblivious and preoccupied. Cindy-Ann saw them as well – I pointed and she nodded and said, “they are saying hello and Shhhhhh, and one just winked at me”, and I saw the wink too and told her, and her mouth fell agape that some inalienable truth had been bestowed on us both and shared. We were awed and we were odd, were blissed and blessed and levered in revelry, missed and dismissed in the mist of mystery unraveling and redeemed in reverie revealing.
How could I not know things could be thus and such? Why had no one told me of this and of that? How could I have been so blind of mind and believe myself gifted with sight so bright and insight so right, yet rightly dim?
TO KNOW NOW NOT, TIS NOT TO KNOW NAUGHT.
I have been unblinded, seeing now through the thin, caked crack of eyelids I had not even the inkling I had possessed, at once ecstatic in the knowledge there was far more to see than I could ever have imagined but also unsated, embittered that I should be permitted to see but a glimpse of what there truly was outside of me, if outside it truly was: I could no longer tell out there from in here, it was all an amalgam of ISness and NOTness and innerness and outerWHERE.
Where do I end and all else begin? I am a shore, wet with lapping waves: where begins the ocean and ends the continent? On which grain of sand, on which drop of salty frothing water? Or am I both the land and the sea, both the sand in hand that grasps and also all that I see, liquid and wet through my head?
We were walking again, the sun lowering below the wavering tree canopy, its rays like streams flowing past us, a gold and vermillion flow that weaved between joggers and frolickers and dogs and trees. I felt my every step at the lip of consciousness, tap-tapping the gravel below, and I knew I was the road leading down and I was the trees and the mountain, the buildings and structures below in all their rigid, awkward architectures, I was the cars and buses and all the people bustling below oblivious…
“Who am I? I don’t know what I am anymore…”
This was a revelation I shared with Cindy-Ann, a sudden gaping truth that opened like a wound, a wound we share, all of us, there before birth, original and pure.
I looked at her to see if I had conveyed the magnitude of this revelation, but what I saw in her was great fear, and tears on her face.
“Don’t say that… just don’t…” she wept.
Her face contorted and swam, the tears etching cavernous gorges through the fading beauty of her face, the flesh rocks and canyons and unspeakable pain and terror. I felt her fear, without fearing, but did not know what to say to console her. I looked straight ahead and walked, my footsteps now ominous reminders that I knew not where we were headed or what distance we still had to traverse through this new world, utterly transformed.
Then I told her I knew where we needed to go. I remembered something from the Castenada book about places of power, having disregarded them until now as the drug-addled musings of a Yaqui Indian nearing death. I told Cindy-Ann that I knew a place of power, lower down on the mountain, and if we could get there everything would be all right. I took her hand in mine and told her not to worry, a place of power is where much good energy is concentrated and that nothing bad can happen there. I had no plan, no place of power picked out and was just saying the first thing I could think of to help her get through.
SO I CAME DOWN THE MOUNTAIN AND MY FACE SHONE.
A link to the next part:
PART IIThanks again!
JBArk
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.