The brain is not the mind.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., just shaking off the effects of ether, convinced that he had come across ‘the one great truth that underlies all human experience,’ staggered to his desk and wrote: ‘the smell of turpentine prevails throughout.’ Henri Michaux, repudiating omniscience in the aftermath of one of his mescaline trips, expressed irritation at the overmany shades of pink.

A superbly imaginative writer of preternatural psychological insight, Michaux initially maintains that he is separate from the drug and its effects, an objective witness of “the retinal circus,” the mad vibrating motions of cascading images. He is amused by the urge to make proclamations “about what I did not know or care.” But. Over the course of the journals both writer and reader are drawn nearer and nearer to “the insufferable winds of mind,” mental speed and rhythm accelerating beyond control. The self banished by the incessant mingling of tiny rivulets, swarmings, fractured barriers. Cats high up in the trees, the absurdity of Argentina. After inadvertantly dosing himself with six times the usual amount, he undergoes an “experiment in schizophrenia,” developing in his mind a fascination with the aberrant, the desire to shove a stranger off a great height, or to throw himself under a train just pulling in to the station. Four weeks later he is still recalibrating his mental equipment, recuperation hastened by drumming a rhythm on the wooden bedframe, and mountains. He feels himself as a fallen leaf, returning to the tree.

In a series of addenda written decades after his experience with mescaline, Michaux attempts an answer to the question of whether the effects ever really wear off. The kind of unconventional insight apparent in these pages suggests that the effects last a long strange time. ( )

Beautiful dwarves in skin-tight gold lamé pantsuits. Cats who scratch out dreams on your wooden leg. Pleistocene fists pounding frenetic rhythms across your naked skin. Heretic wishes left to their own devices. Soaring stories built second by second moment by moment until nothing is left but a wish a thought a syllable and a sill upon which sits the things left over, after, above and between, always between never complete, always left over, never beginning, only between the things, the shape of a shape, the crevasse where the self is/was, the outside not the inside, the space around a cup that doesn’t exist that does that only exists that only does that leaves you helpless that symmetric asymptotic line drawn from your self to the outside world, the hypothetical world, the assumption, the consuming assumption that things that things where they are they go with you. Get closer get closer never reaching your destination never like Zeno suggested despite the disproof you can never reach a thing no matter how many distances you cut in half and in half because nothing touches electrons repel atoms mingle like gyroscopes fighting touching. Mescaline dreams mescaline the subject of a poetic exploration, a dissertation, a beautiful torture, a gorgeous nightmare, a shape that leaves you shattered, ego spread across the bathroom floor like blood wrists cut and bled out the victim, the deserving victim, realizing the Hindu vision, the multiplicity of oneness, the artificiality, the psychosis of psychedelia, the psychosis of

patience, my friend, have patience with the impossible. An overdose left disturbed for months, hashish for the simpler times, for the investigation, the examination, looking close closer the resolution is infinite, don’t look at the subject, behind it, that figure, that ambiguity, the mountains in the distance, the sound of feet walking, the feeling of shapes and leaving a taste in your mouth of curiosity, the infinite confidence to leap into your mind and perhaps never come back, you might not come back, the fever, the speed of Mescaline, unquenchable, irresistible, to know what it’s like to not be/ing able to stop your mind, to be quiet to have peace, every moment an eternity so painful so beautiful you are dying over and over you can’t get off the merry-go-round, but the face of death is…later…is worth it, you touched it, you survived the terror of insanity so you know, you walked the fragile surface of consciousness, you understand, every surface is essential and simultaneously nothing, you understand

madness. It’s always interruption. The indisputable concretely is disputable. During nirvana, after samsara, the challenge being can you take a piece with you and understanding the artificiality so that maybe you might just love a little bit more and live a little bit more and breath a little bit more. Or you might just be a douchebag. It really depends. 50/50 odds, I say. Everyone has to make up what’s in their own mind. ( )

A memoir of mescaline experiences by one of my all-time favorite writers. Engaging, instructive, occasionally terrifying. ( )

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