Piso Mojado (2010)
The fabled Scottish Nuff, a thimble-sized dwarf mushroom that grows in the faerie bogs around Inverness, is a powerful sleep-inducing psychedelic that's been used as a folk remedy for ages. It is collected in the cold autumn wilderness, dried and ground into a fine dust, which is then inhaled. It is, among other things, reputed to have aided the reveries of William Shakespeare, and is the likely medicine behind A Midsummer Night's Dream -- as noted in a quarto dating from the early 1600s, where the great bard famously inscribed, "This wond'rous poem I doth dedicate solely to a delicious pygmie powder."
Nowadays, it's an exceedingly rare substance. It was offered to me once during a walking pilgrimage on a mountain in Jalisco, where, at altitude, the effect was appropriately doubled. I understood, as I sat
beneath the glowing darkness of the Mexican twilight, that the restless sediment swirling about our active brains, is, quite simply, the result of life itself. Something beyond our stewardship, something we can only approach, something we can, perhaps, only attempt to wrangle. Something we can't tame. Something both kicked up by and something that propels our endless walking -- the simultaneous source and product of an underlying current, the always-on, fruitfulness-seeking machine. It is the ever-nomadic force of thought.
And yet, continuously, contemptuously even, we try to thwart it. To throttle it. I cannot quite grasp, in the constant half-light of my own awakening, this paradox: the thing that wants to throttle itself. It's an amazing device, the mind, but something somehow stained and wicked. It is an enigmatic, mercurial, curmudgeonly engine that threatens to unravel under its own power. Screws and bolts unthreading themselves as the rumbling choke is released. The fuel coursing wildly through it.
But the drug allowed me to part the silt, to peer deeper into my mind's black pool. There I swam, basking in the state of a semi-shrouded dream for what would be seven full days. During this time, I saw many things: for example, a towering, long-legged figure with a curved spine that roamed the cactus-studded desert. He was spire-shaped, about three feet in diameter, and about as tall as a mature pine tree, with wiry arms that dangled and swung in time with his languorous gait. This monster was known to the locals as the Ghihi, the commander.
When I woke, I had somehow been transported off the mountain and found myself, mouth parched with dehydration, crumpled on the valley floor. My face was caked with grit; my beard was completely infused with dirt. I squinted upward and saw a distant winged figure in the dazzling midday sky -- a hawk of some sort, circling above me. My possessions had vanished entirely, but my cracked hand contained a crushed piece of paper -- a note, which simply read: "Thanks for the memories, you stark raving lunatic."
Nowadays, it's an exceedingly rare substance. It was offered to me once during a walking pilgrimage on a mountain in Jalisco, where, at altitude, the effect was appropriately doubled. I understood, as I sat
beneath the glowing darkness of the Mexican twilight, that the restless sediment swirling about our active brains, is, quite simply, the result of life itself. Something beyond our stewardship, something we can only approach, something we can, perhaps, only attempt to wrangle. Something we can't tame. Something both kicked up by and something that propels our endless walking -- the simultaneous source and product of an underlying current, the always-on, fruitfulness-seeking machine. It is the ever-nomadic force of thought.
And yet, continuously, contemptuously even, we try to thwart it. To throttle it. I cannot quite grasp, in the constant half-light of my own awakening, this paradox: the thing that wants to throttle itself. It's an amazing device, the mind, but something somehow stained and wicked. It is an enigmatic, mercurial, curmudgeonly engine that threatens to unravel under its own power. Screws and bolts unthreading themselves as the rumbling choke is released. The fuel coursing wildly through it.
But the drug allowed me to part the silt, to peer deeper into my mind's black pool. There I swam, basking in the state of a semi-shrouded dream for what would be seven full days. During this time, I saw many things: for example, a towering, long-legged figure with a curved spine that roamed the cactus-studded desert. He was spire-shaped, about three feet in diameter, and about as tall as a mature pine tree, with wiry arms that dangled and swung in time with his languorous gait. This monster was known to the locals as the Ghihi, the commander.
When I woke, I had somehow been transported off the mountain and found myself, mouth parched with dehydration, crumpled on the valley floor. My face was caked with grit; my beard was completely infused with dirt. I squinted upward and saw a distant winged figure in the dazzling midday sky -- a hawk of some sort, circling above me. My possessions had vanished entirely, but my cracked hand contained a crushed piece of paper -- a note, which simply read: "Thanks for the memories, you stark raving lunatic."
posted by Jeweled Accumulation at 2:06 PM
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