The Time I Did DMT and Other Vignettes

On the Nature of Time

I

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I woke in a small room to see figures of paint shifting, shifting, shifting. A forest green, accompanied by a dirt brown; a mandarin orange. Some girl’s purse? That twinkling, fake gold. Cigarette-buts and beer-bottles lined the floor. It stunk of ash. Cheap perfume trying to break through.

“What happened?” I asked.

The Shaman said, a clownish smile upon his face, “Look. There!” On my right shoulder was patch of goo. “You dribbled all over yourself mate. You scared all the others; they’re not going to do as much now.”

In his hands was an enormous bong. I exhaled, pushing myself up in my seat, “How long was I out?”

“Two minutes.”

“Two minutes! But … but … I -”

“What did you see? Come on tell us.”

I recalled to him the eternity of only two minutes previous. Upon clearing the bong, it felt as if I was going to pass out, vomit, and make a fool of myself. Voices merged into one another. Visuals into one another. I heard every pitch together, every colour - a sensual mess, and then everything went black.

Completely black. It is difficult for me to describe to you how black this was. In the novel The Book of the New Sun, the protagonist Severian wears a cloak, Fugilin it’s called, that is darker than black. That might be it. From this void, like a timelapse of a plant growing after the last frost of winter, bloomed tiny explosions, each particle an original colour that had never existed before. Into bigger explosions they grew, until in front of me was a beauty of a kind I will never be able to accurately describe.

About two hours later I was standing in a line to go into a bar. All I could hear was the jibber-jabber nonsense of extended adolescence all around me. I remember being utterly baffled - and increasingly disturbed - about this situation. I had witnessed the beginnings of the universe; the soles of my shoes were now pressed against the fertile rock that billions and billions of years later was to form as a result of such creation. I seen not merely our origins, of humanity; I had seen the origins of an inexplicable vastness, space as well as time … and now I was off to get a few more beers? Maybe meet a half-drunk young lass?

The juxtaposition of the sacred next to the profane was too much. I walked home.

II

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Degradation is noticed right away. It is just that it is forgotten. What was degrading before, to your family, to your name, to nature, becomes habit. The psychologists call this ‘normalization’.

I have this keen memory of the first time I did MDMA. A yellow glow hazed in the windscreen from the street. The lights in his car were broken. Purportedly. This young man was a liar and I had never respected him. His eyes were like plexiglass: Plastic, made to look like glass. But here I was, getting lectured, “So - did you hear me?”

“Yes, I fucking heard you.”

“Alright mate, chill out. What you have to do - is two ways. Up your nose is okay, but just make sure you crush it up. Like a lot because … I think this batch has glass in it.”

“What?”

“Shut up, just listen. Don’t be a pussy. Just crush it up, like a lot, as I said. Or … or you can just drop it, you know, swallow it.”

I held out my hand. He drew back into shadow. A ghoul, sponsored by the evil who lives beneath all of our homes, enticing, a salesman indeed. The glow caught the crumpled edges of the baggie in his hand. We waited like that, as children do, playing the game of patience, until he finally dropped it into my palm.

“Good luck.”

And his car was off and I was standing there, under the yellow glow, the Auckland city-scape haunting me from behind; the faceless individuals who built this shithole had already suffered my doom. In my hand, within the plastic crumples of the bag, was a little object. I glanced left and right, before I drew it out, and pushed it up to the streetlight.

So pink it was, even precious. There was a shape pressed into it. A little daisy. Pink Daisies. It made sense now. All the boys had been talking of these ‘pink daisies’. They had been ‘fiending’ them. I looked at it again. How can this be dangerous? Some of the chemical had already started to crumble off onto my palm.

Fuck it. Under the streetlight, I grated the side of the pill with a lighter on to a card, and crushed it as much as I could with spilling it. With another card I straightened it into a line. Exhaling, swallowing, without a rolled note, I snorted it. Glass and all.

I stood there feeling my heart-rate rise and rise, my excitement bleed out my eyes. And then I felt something I did not expect: An awareness of the true nature of time. It moves forward, forward. And as a child never do you notice this until you perceive something becoming what it is not; never what it sought out to be.

I had wanted to be an artist, a sportsman; I now perceived a very different future indeed.

I shook my head, and walked up the driveway to my house.

My parents' love was sleeping.

III

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“When a thought comes, I want you to imagine it pass by, like you are sitting on the banks of a stream, and there are twigs, driftwood, floating, floating by. And you watch it pass, not focusing on it, but let it pass out of your periphery, your awareness. And inevitably, do not be frustrated, there will be more such driftwood. Such thoughts. And like the last one, let it pass by.”

The voice was Sam Harris’. At that time he had been in my ear coming up three years. The Waking Up App. My girlfriend had suggested we meditate because I ‘needed to control my anger’. Said it was ‘essential to staying together’.

I opened my eyes to look out the window. Over the fence stained with moss, was a man and a woman, bickering in Spanish. Even if it was in English, I was in that state of mind where my disfigured thoughts drowned out all the sounds of time. The driftwood, burned and mangled, went down the stream and back up; apparently I never let it ‘pass me by’.

They had been bickering for a long while. I had heard them all hours of the day, of the night. One time, a day after new years, my best friend and I had a tab of acid left. We spent hours in the hot sun, getting burnt, throwing a frisbee to one another. Bliss, really. Then the fuckwit threw it over the fence.

He leapt over and five minutes later he returned, “This will crack you up,” he said. “When I went over there, I saw the frisbee nestled in the bush at the back of their porch or whatever. When I went to pick up, the curtains were like, fully drawn, except for a small gap. Human-sized gap.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. And there was this guy, shriveled up, looking cracked as, getting ready to do a line on a mirror. On his dining table.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. He must’a been going since before New Years. Even Christmas. Those Spanish cunts go hard.”

I laughed, “Yeah hard.”

Sam Harris’ voice was droning on. The man and the woman were still bickering. She screamed and stormed down the pebble driveway and out of sight, her arms flaying side to side as if she had been stuck in a straight-jacket all her life.

“Loving-kindness …” Oh shut the fuck up, Sam Harris. I pulled out my earphones.

My girlfriend and I had been broken up a year.

IV

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The lecture hall stunk of mediocrity. The communitarian air of the tall-poppy syndrome. The sounds of wooing. Congratulations. Impersonal congratulations. Fake congratulations. Nobody was telling the truth in this place.

The claps ended and at the plinth the girl was replaced by another: This version was plump, had a bird-like twisting of the neck, and a command of feminist-English. Once upon a time she had been pretty, I supposed.

She said, “My study idea is a randomized-controlled-trial of ketamine therapy. Research shows that ketamine, in controlled doses, administered by psychiatric nurses and doctors, who are controlling the situation, can be used to treat depression and anxiety, but especially depression.”

For five more minutes the over-weighted bird chirped, until she was replaced by a younger woman who had controlled her feeding. She was very attractive, but when she spoke with a soft dignity, it was clear she was one of those rare types that failed to recognise her effect on men. Or, at least, pretended she did.

She said, “My idea is similar, actually. But with MDMA. So like, research has shown that … one way to get people out of a rut, you know, stuck in their lives, or are like, close-minded, is to administer to them - in a controlled environment - MDMA. It gets them to open up with people. Really connect. Express the compassion inside them that every one of us has.”

I’d vote for her. What was the policy again? She was replaced, this time by a … I was about to call him a man but that was clearly untrue. And no, he was not a transgender. He was thin and had a pubic hair beard. Balding, at twenty-one. Probably played in the ‘mixed’ sporting teams rather than the male-only category.

He said, “It seems all of us are talking about drugs! Ha! … So my study is instead with lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Yes. Acid. I am sure we have all done it! …”

There’s good-cringe, the cringe needed in a development period necessary for success, like when sharing one’s art, music, and so on, and then there’s this guy. Too much. What did I expect? I was ten years older than these kids. Was it not even more cringe I was back at university at my age and now their peers?

I pushed my closed eyelids onto my corneas. In the blackness swirled white-snakes, pulsating, snapping at each other with their fangs. When I opened my eyes the snakes stayed, swimming about the impish boy at the front of the hall. Behind him on the projector screen, in enormous lettering, were the words:

‘Lecture 4#: Combating the male mental health epidemic.’

V

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The church was designed in the 13th Century Gothic style. Bluestone, from local quarries, made its foundation. The spire, that pierced the pale blue of winter morning, was Oamaru stone. The plan was Latin, a cross. I had never been in.

Mostly I stared at it while sipping my coffee at a cafe across the street, thinking, “What is all that about?” It was what I was doing at that very moment.

A brace of 19-year old girls approached, stepping around a man who had just lit a cigarette. They were dressed in that wear now common in young women: The gym-slut. For some reason it was okay for modern fathers to allow their daughters to expose their breasts and their buttocks to both the observer on the street and the internet. No, it is not classical to be a hoe; the Greeks knew the difference between beauty and the merely erotic.

As they glided by, my thought that had progressively devolved in recent times into aggressive debates with imaginary enemies, was wrenched toward a memory of the senses: The smell of cheap perfume, of ash. The man smoking the cigarette, the lines in his face evidence of the fact his body had long passed its used-by date, glanced at me, and turned around.

I sat back in my seat. He was waiting too, just like me. We all were. Waiting. It had a negative connotation, understandably so. One was in transition, between one event of life and the next. I realised there would come a time when I would be waiting for the last event, the ultimate event.

Would it feel any different to right now? Waiting then compared to this moment? Would I have an answer?

A crowd, loud and unjustifiably proud - the youth - bowled passed; as they did so, revealed once more against the pale blue sky, was that spire. I let my elbows rest on the table. They professed to have the answer, didn’t they? I never trusted people who had ‘the answers’; it is perplexing, if you think about it, this stance on existence, to not trust anybody with ‘answers’. If there is only uncertainty, there can be no meaning. If there is no meaning, what are we waiting for?

I sighed; the Neo-gothic church sliced through its environment, sharp edges defined against the softness of today, a beauty we had sold off, traded for consumption. Can you believe it? That for Wall-mart. Amazon. The iPhone. Fucksakes.

Maybe I should go in. Maybe I should.

I was nodding to myself, following the rhythm of my thoughts, the thoughts of opportunity, of ‘answers’, when I began to focus on what was written on the large chalkboard outside the church. It wrote:

“We stand with Palestine; we stand with trans; we stand with you, and with everyone.

“Peace for all!”

I chuckled. I take it back: Good luck getting me in there.

VI

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I was in love. It had happened so quickly. That was what I was told in fact; if two people were honest with themselves, were together conciliatory pieces of the foundational masculine and feminine of the universe, then friction in the beginning would be minimal.

And so it was.

My thoughts of late had been this miracle; it indeed felt like one, given the seemingly inherent fragility of all my past relationships, both one night long and several years long. The blame was mine and theirs; no longer are boys and girls taught to be lovers. They are expected to figure out all by themselves the needs of the opposing sex and the needs of their own while being told boys and girls are essentially the same. I could not think of a worse recipe for success.

Here was an answer, certainly. The code of man and woman, their combination of procreation. It may be, pragmatically, this order which matters the very most: If man and woman are jumbled, their roles spiritually misunderstood, then perhaps it is all the evidence one needs to answer the question as to whether civilisation is at its end.

Anyhow, it was on a day that appeared like any other when I was spoken to. As I said, my thoughts of late had been this miracle. I was further inspired by the nature surrounding me; a hike I did often, overlooking a small town in certainly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Cresting the final path toward the hill’s peak, a hundred metre death-fall just to my right, I had stopped thinking. There were chirps of birds, the sound of my boot releasing small stones as I walked, also the wind humming faintly, and the music in my earphones had stopped, I must have been in the transition between songs.

It was not a voice; there were no words. Language as we know it was no use here. I was not aware of anything beside from not being alone. The absence of loneliness. It was unity and it was totality. The emotions of anxiety and fear I saw from above, as if they were carriages connected to the train of time.

And the moment passed and I remember thinking, “What would it feel like to have one’s face smash against the rocky floor, all the way down there?”

It was as far from a suicidal thought one can have; it was its opposite, given suicide is the desire to not exist and this was to understand the true nature of our existence. Such thoughts - of being dead, with the emphasis on ‘being’ - I always thought were associated with that feeling of unity, of totality. In that experience, we had been reminded of what we once were, of what we had been birthed from. And when consciousness returned, the mind fabricated it into a thought: What would it be like to ‘be’ dead?

Only an hour later and I was in a cold, dark room, thinking. I was ruminating in fact. Thoughts, the mangled, burnt driftwood, floated down and crept back up the stream.

“You are speaking to yourself,” the thought went. “There is no deity, no higher consciousness, no otherworldly place. Silly little man. How can you ‘be’ dead? There is only nothing. You are creating this experience, this relationship with ‘the otherworldly’, for yourself; it is an adaptation. See how it alleviates your anxiety, the ‘feeling of time’? It helps you operate as a biological machine. If this process did not occur, then consciousness would not have developed to its present state: Every man would be his own asylum.

“Just as you should be in an asylum if you keep this up.”

I think this is the conversation that defines my entire life.

I fear I will never escape.

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