|
Certain tribes in Siberia trade several sheep for one Amanita
muscaria and use the mushroom for orgiastic practices. The women
chew the raw mushroom and the chewed pulp is mixed with blueberry
juice. This is drunk by the men and is productive of
hallucinations. It also changes the relation between the ego and
social ideals. Thus, the urine of those who have been affected by
the mushroom is in high demand and is drunk with pleasure, for it
contains a sufficient amount of the drug to continue its wild
effects. The Vikings who went berserk are thought to have done so
by means of this same mushroom. ¶ Nowadays we hear of biochemical
experiments using Amanita muscaria or other hallucinatory
mushrooms or the drugs synthesized in imitation of them —
experiments in which professors, students, or criminals become
temporarily schizophrenic, sometimes for the novelty of it, other
times for purely scientific purposes. Just as we soon will travel
to the moon and other earths, and add to our telephone
conversations the practice of seeing one another while we speak,
so one will do with his mind what he now does with his hair, not
what it wants to do but what he wants it to do. People in the near
future will not suffer from schizophrenia; they will simply be
schizophrenic if and when they have the desire. ¶ Life is changing.
One of the ways I’m trying to change mine is to get rid of my
desires so that I won’t be deaf and blind to the world around me.
When I mention my interest in mushrooms, most people immediately
ask whether I’ve had any visions. I have to tell them that I’m very
old-fashioned, practically puritanical, that all I do is smoke
like a furnace — now with two filters and a coupon in every pack —
and that I drink coffee morning, noon, and night. I would also
drink alcohol but I made the mistake of going to a doctor who
doesn’t permit it. The visions I hear about don’t interest me. Dick
Higgins said he ate a little muscaria and it made him see some
rabbits. Valentina Wasson ate the divine mushrooms in Mexico and
imagined she was in eighteenth-century Versailles hearing some
Mozart. Without any dope at all other than caffeine and nicotine,
I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow hearing some of my own music and
on Sunday, God willing, I’ll awake in Hawaii with papayas and
pineapples for breakfast. There’ll be sweet-smelling flowers,
brightly colored birds, people swimming in the surf, and (I’ll bet
you a nickel) a rainbow at some point during the day in the sky. |