I am a gentleman scholar of fields divers and transmundane. My lot and lineage are, not without design, startlingly unremarkable, such that I shall refrain from commenting upon them in order to preserve my meticulously constructed obscurity. Suffice to say that, quite contrary to my bourgeois mien and starched-collar comportment, my provenance is of the fungus.
Many times these past years, ensconced within the decadent privacy of my lounging chambers, I have taken opportunity to imbibe those most sacred fungal fruits of Asia and the Americas (first delivered unto my person, not without intrigue, via the hollow recesses of the obscenely-scrimshawed pegleg of a deranged Yemeni sea captain).
The visionary fugues conferred by these mushrooms were... most edifying.
Upon return to this waking sphere I forged a solemn vow: ever shall I strive to nurture my mycelial brood, at present deep within the moth-strewn annexes of my family estate, and there with them my body shall also dwell, in nepethe-sotted perpetuity, slumbering amidst my prized arcades of idolatrous grotesquerie, as echo the rhythms of a clock set ticking to no man-known increment of time. Elsewhile, my spirit shall sojourn beyond.
It is true that, over the ensuing years of enacting my vow, the mushroom has been a callous teacher to me, and frequently I have been a poor student of it. Myriad are the sheltering delusions by which the wastrel ego may find refuge from thunderous authority, and moreso the distractions that would render the fruits of such guidance forfeit to oblivion. These are the challenges of every arcane initiate: having grasped the truth, to marshal the courage to look upon it, and thence again the courage to remember!
Of what I do recall of those ultra-stellar odysseys, I tremble. I have seen my soul cast adrift in Uranian seas. I have heard the chanting in the black winds that whirl between worlds. I have stood transfixed in the shadow of mountain thrones besat by emperors whose heritage is of the stars. On naked feet I have tread the ebon pathway to the the titan wall of the Absolute Outside and thereupon have espied the gate the first dream raised.
Indeed, my mind is become erudite in the epic alienage of the psilocybin vision, such that my waking eyes now dim to look upon the blunt-edged geometries of the merely homocentric world. Readily would I go further still into that plutonian abyss of dream; to lay palm against the door of lucent horn, and step forth.
To this end, I seek that most singular apex of eldritch vision: the hallucinogenic saltes of which madmen only whisper, and of which gods are made.
Ave, fellow scholars! As I now scribe, my couriers scurry to deliver the apparatus required for my first distillation experiments. Notes of these efforts and their outcome shall be presented in due course, and interlocutions welcomed.
May I be suffused with your wisdom, and in return may the Cosmic Octopus undulate his tentacles upon you, and may you know a fleeting bliss before reaching his voracious maw.
l.b. III
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.