By Geoff Dyer (Author of Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It, which I recommended to my brother, to his annoyance)
(Shamelessly stolen without any permission whatsover in the most irresposible way possible from Colors Magazine, which has an online archive that is really quite brilliant)
*Disclaimer: Kids, ask your parents before taking Ayahuasca
This is the basic premise: any experience, however fantastic, can always be enhanced by drugs, or — and how simple life would be if this were not the case — diminished by them.
Take, for example, Death Valley in the Western US. When the
photographer Edward Weston first visited in 1937 all he could say,
apparently, was “My God! It can’t be.” So mind-blowing is Death Valley
that you want to make it more mind-blowing. Hence, not surprisingly, it
has for some time had
an almost canonical reputation as the place to take LSD. The French
philosophe Michel Foucault tried acid for the first time in 1975 at
Zabriskie Point in Death Valley National Park and enjoyed what he later
called the greatest experience of his life. “The sky has exploded,” he
said, “and the stars are raining down upon me. I know this is not true,
but it is the Truth.” A few years ago in San Francisco, an aging
psychonaut helpfully summed up what characterizes the best LSD, namely
its capacity to produce “open-eye hallucinations.” That’s Death Valley
in a nutshell: an open-eye hallucination.
Since a full-fledged acid trip is no small commitment,
the author thought he would be content with just getting very stoned in
Death Valley. The effect of being stoned, however, was twofold. First,
to make him regret, with every fiber of his being, the decision not to
take LSD. The place cried
out for acid! Being stoned enhanced the experience of the place to such
an extent that it made him crave a further enhancement of experience,
which in turn diminished the already achieved enhancement, making him
wish he had not even gotten stoned.
Something similar occurred in Hampi, India. Formerly
known as Vijayanagara, Hampi is famous for its ruins, which can be
something of a disappointment. The ruins are too ruined. It’s only
after clambering up into the surrounding landscape that you appreciate
how richly Hampi merits its top status in the world stoner circuit. The
boulder-strewn landscape is utterly demented: it doesn’t make sense.
Everything is just piled on everything else; boulders sit on even
bigger boulders. You come to realize, in a bold surge of post-bong
enlightenment, that the planet itself is no more than a vast, densely
populated boulder. You end up saying the word to yourself — boulder, boulder — until it either drains of all meaning or become so dense with meaning — so, as it were, bouldery
with meaning — that it robs all sense from the surrounding world, until
there is, in fact, nothing but boulder. “Boulder is great,” you cry.
“There is no boulder but boulder!”
The Tungabhadra River curves through the midst of the
still-active Hindu temples of Hampi Bazaar, and sparkles in the sun
like the Lost City of the Incas. What a place! When the author was
there, Hampi was becoming a bit of an offshoot of Goa in that a trance
scene was taking root. On the night of the full moon, there was to be
some kind of party across the river at Virupapuragadda, a spot popular
with hard-core Israeli trancers. The author arrived just before
sunrise, but evidently the party had never really kicked off. It didn’t
matter, though. He was happy to get stoned and set off over the
boulders. Hampi is one of those destinations where
it
is never too early in the day to get completely basted, and it was
wonderful to go bouldering like this. The sun slanted over the rocks.
Shadows curled up, stretched, and slowly began to move around. It was
perfect — except that the combination of being stoned and needing to
concentrate while climbing conspired to make him superconscious of
where he was putting his hands as he hauled himself over the rocks, and
as soon as he started to think about where he was putting his hands, he
began to worry that he might be putting his hands on a snake warming
itself in the risen sun. From here it was, of course, a short step to
becoming concerned that the whole place was full of snakes, that it was
actually snake infested, and that it was best not to do any more
clambering, that he was better off just sitting there in a state of
pathologically heightened vigilance (i.e., terror).He
has a thing about snakes, you see — but then he has a thing about many
things, which is why the drug experience is such a tightrope for him.
Not that this has dented, even slightly, his faith in the benefits of
narco-travel. The number of occasions when the author has wished that
he had not attempted to narcotically improve his responsiveness to a
place is far outweighed by the number of occasions when he has lamented
the impossibility of doing so.
The most psychedelic place he has ever been is near
Sossusvlei, in Namibia. Huge red sand dunes roll on into the infinite
distance. This is incredible in itself, but the best place of all is
called Dead Vlei: a dazzling white lake bed, dotted with dead
camel-thorn trees, surrounded on three sides by red dunes — all
presided over by a sky of the deepest blue. This place is more
hallucinatory than even Death Valley or the Black Rock Desert in
Nevada: it is, in fact, the very epicentre of the psychedelic sublime. The author was not even able to smoke grass there.
And it is the sublime we are speaking of and searching for — a
place where you dissolve into the landscape, become so immersed that
you’re oblivious to your own presence. This is the goal: to see without
being, to be what is seen.
The desert is a natural site to explore the potential
for achieving this kind of state, and so, for related reasons, are the
ruins of Greek and Roman antiquity. Thanks to the relentless
expansionism of the Roman Empire, spectacular examples are scattered
across North Africa (Leptis Magna in Libya) and the Middle East
(Palmyra in Syria, Baalbek in Lebanon). All things considered, though,
Hadrian’s Villa near Rome is a more accessible and less demanding
environment.
It is difficult to say why psychedelics and the ruins of classical antiquity go so well together, but it probably has to
do with the conjunction of different kinds of timelessness. This is
also what provides the connection with deserts: they are without time.
They are their own aftermath. Ruins, on the other hand, are places
where time has stood its ground. On a clear, hot day, the sight of
ancient columns framed by blue sky is like a glimpse not of time
stopped but of time stilled. At the peak of a trip — if all goes well —
you enter a zone in which there is no time. In other words, the
psychedelic experience shares with the desert and the sites of
classical antiquity (where—and this is not the case for deserts — the
remnants of time are preserved) a special silence and stillness. To
experience both simultaneously is to be sealed completely within a
dreamspace undisturbed by any human presence, even your own.
i highly recommend the deserts of Chile for any kind of psychedellic experience. San Pedro de Atacama, El Valle de la Luna ( Valley of the Moon ), and the read shores of Antofagasta. Also, you can visit southern Chile, take an expedition into de forests of Valdivia searching for de mighty Amanita Muscaria.
Posted by: bripbop | March 31, 2007 at 08:16 AM