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parishthethought · 7 years

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Here’s one to start us off

“Then yesterday (Sunday) I tripped on mushrooms. It was simultaneously very frightening and distressing, and yet revelatory and generally valuable. And somehow it all seems to relate to Gadamer. R and I were tripping together, and I think that was part of the problem. He and I started having very different experiences, and I found this very frightening and emotionally isolating. I was intensely aware of the the fact that I couldn't understand him, and that he was something other than me. It also didn't help that these were just a strong batch of 'shrooms, and more visually and cognitively intense than most of the eighths I've taken in the past. One of the images that stuck in my mind of the early part of the trip involved me sitting in my room, reading a passage from Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia regarding humanity transcending itself and the material world. As I did so, the air and my skin became covered in blazing words and letters, and the book appeared to glow from within with a fiery yellow-orange luminescence. I leaned back, spread my arms out, and believed that I was about to ascend into the sky. That was pretty neat, but the trip turned much worse from there. I wasn't able to understand or process the idea of things that I couldn't understand or assimilate to myself, things that weren't me. This, by a process that remains hazy to me, led me to believe that I was about to die. I also, paradoxically, believed that I was becoming God and the entire universe, but that this in itself was overwhelmingly frightening. Images of parasitism and pregnancy from my trip the week before kept entering my mind, and I recoiled at the notion that the only purpose in my life was to create some new life or idea, that anything like this was a process of parasitism like a wasp laying its eggs on a spider or caterpillar and letting its young eat the other animal from the inside, or the xenomorphs from the Alien movies. Even if I was to become God, that God would not be me, it would be a parasite, a monster born from my used-up corpse. At first I called out to the people, thing, concepts, and memories that I cared about, begging them to save me. I tried desperately to gain some perspective on my situation, to remind myself that this wasn't real in the usual sense of the word, that there was an external reality that wasn't this perceptual vortex, to which I was accountable, but which also had some power to reduce or at least qualify my suffering. None of this served to alleviate my fear, and I came to believe that I was just using these things I cherished as bargaining chips to save myself. From there the next step seemed to be that I could and should use people in any way possible if it would preserve my own life. I started thinking about serial killers, primarily the fictional Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, though Ed Gein and Elizabeth Bathory also came to mind. I believed that the only choice available to me was to be dead or to be death, and that this explained the mentality of at least some of the serial killers I was considering. The idea occurred to me, as on my previous trip, that rather than being the corpse, the food, the host, I could be the parasite, the predator, the one who would survive. As I put it last weekend, "I am the bugs' revenge upon the cattle." The problem, which I hadn't drawn out to its logical conclusion last week, was that these "cattle" had no less ability to think, feel, be happy, or suffer, than I did. I began to think of myself not as God but Satan, and as Cain, the part of humanity that was willing to sacrifice everything else to preserve its own life. The image of Buffalo Bill kept coming into my mind, and I realized that I would be willing to wear the cut-off skins of other people if it meant that my own life would continue. At times I felt that it would be best for humanity if I killed myself, as I represented an aberrant, self-destructive, all-destructive offshoot of the species. I felt that I was the only one who was truly human, the only one who mattered. Yet at the same time I was frightened and disgusted at this idea. I was afraid I would hurt R if he got near me, and the few times during this in which he and I saw one another I warned him to stay away from me, on the grounds that I didn't feel in control of myself. I saw a recurring image of myself awakening from a pleasant nap, only to find myself wearing R's blood-slick skin. And yet even this seemed somehow basically alright, because I would remain alive. At this point I was feeling fairly good, even kind of powerful and sexy. I tried to talk to R again, but I felt like we couldn't communicate, and after we parted I became convinced that I had somehow harmed him and our friendship irrevocably. I felt even more guilty than I had before, and started conceiving of myself as a vampire (last trip I was a werewolf...I'm not sure what it is with my recent trips and mythical monsters), in Fred Clark's sense of the term. (His article on the subject, which is amazing, is available here: http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/09/vampires-crosses.html#comments ). I became convinced that my belief that I was everything evil in humanity was itself the problem, as even then it made me out to be the special one. That half the point of the story of Cain is that nobody else gets to be the first murderer; we are not archetypes, we are not special, we're just people. No matter how many people we kill or fuck over, we all still die.”

#drugs cw #gore cw #pregnancy cw #'and somehow it all seems to relate to gadamer'#really hashtaggart? does it really?#this becomes an even odder account if you know who R is

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