meta star – foto by lady
“I know what’s important in life,” I tell Smith. “You, and mushrooms.”
“You know,” he says, “Three days ago it was just me. Now I’m sharing the title.”
~ ~
I’ve eaten all kinds of things out of banana leaves here: tomales, seed paste, chili sauce. I’ve used banana leaves to cook tortillas, transferring the wet tortilla to circular comal, a cook top used over charcoal or gas flame. Tuesday night at 6:45 p.m. I opened a folded banana leaf to pick out a half mass of skinny mushrooms. There were 24 in all. I started with ten of the larger ones, wiping them cleaner with paper towel.
Smith put our pillows at foot of the bed so we could look at the early evening sky out our half oval window. The view had an asian, terraced look of mountains and a couple village streets. Kinda like a huge terrarium, I thought. I started to discern more variation and color in the gray clouds blanketing the mountain village, and felt calm and happy.
At 7:30 I still wasn’t tripping, so I opened my banana leaf and ate the rest very slowly, holding the chewed up mushroom paste on my tongue and the roof of my mouth a long time to try to absorb the hallucinogens more directly. My tongue became a little numb, and I couldn’t taste the paste. By 8:07 I’d eaten the last of the mushrooms and I felt euphoric and very friendly towards my banana leaf. Smith tried to tidy up and take the leaf away, but I said, “No, let it stay here for a while. I like it.” And I smoothed it out on the bed between us.
He lay back down and watched the window with me. I saw the clouds as the underside of a comforter. I held Smith’s hand, and the cloud light silvered our hands and the folds in our clothes, and I felt that the light was from the clouds and was connected to us, especially to our breathing. Our breathing lungs and the clouds were one, part of the same thing. I told Smith, “Light is the eye of God, and you and I are being caressed in so many ways.”
For an hour past sunset we watched the half oval window. I was immensely aware of the changes of color as the sky turned darker and darker, subtle gradiations from minute to minute. The city lights started turning on, and it looked like the lights were in the trees, or that they were a band of entities, or a star field. As the sky turned darker, the metal window frame kept changing color, very beautiful, almost iridescent. The window lit up in silver gold purple blue brilliance as car lights passed.
I felt that everything outside the window was personal, connected to us and aware of us as though we were the actors on a set. The water pipes in the hotel became melodious, singing tones for me. I told Smith about the tones. “The aliens are testing us to see which tones we respond to,” he said. “Aliens do that. Sometimes they’ll remove one star from the sky or add one and watch to see what we do, and if I run to tell somebody, they put it back, quick, to make me look stupid.”
I turned around to watch the candle burning on the dresser in front of the TV, its flame reflected on the TV and on the side of an adjacent water bottle. I thought, the flame is an eye from the other side. The nature of the TV is modern, more modern than looking out the window. I preferred the window, but appreciated the candle as a fellow spirit watching the window with me or as a metaphor for my spirit sheltered in the artificial dwelling of concrete hotel with TV accoutrement. The candle/dresser/TV “set” was visually interesting because of the light, reflections and shadows. Wires stretched from both sides of the set to electrical outlets in the walls. I thought, the wires have their own energy, magic, it’s just being channeled and harvested by man. Electricity seemed a kind of artificial magic, but strong, modern.
My awareness of the layout and nature of the room changed from time to time, always friendly, but distorted spatially and as though I was looking from someone else’s eyes as a new being in my body. Sometimes my sight seemed to come from a different place, a foot above or below my eyes.
Then I focused on Smith for a while, lying on the bed next to me. I saw many layers of light on his face. Sometimes it looked alien, sometimes old, always wise and good. The shape of his head changed from the side such that it looked as though he had a folded head behind his neck, kinda like an alien turtle head. Or sometimes his beard appeared to be waving tentacles of light, or his glasses a fundamental part of his face, kinda melted in or welded to his four eyes. Sometimes as he talked it seemed as though the words came from the line in his forehead. He’d blink his eyes and I felt that all his consciousness was behind the eyes, the face just a rock, a terrain, or something residual from the process of life, something excreted, the mind true spirit. Often I saw lines like an antennae or breathing apparatus coming down from the air to his temple, connecting him to all the stuff I was starting to hallucinate, his true face.
I held him and felt my arms part of his body, or felt that he — who I was watching — was me. Then I kissed him, and as I kissed him I held him to me, and it was as though I scooped up fluid material, or a plane of material, from the soup of the planet and was kissing it through his face. “Thank you for allowing me to kiss Reality through you,” I told the face.
I looked at his hands, and asked, “Why four fingers?”
“Nobody’s ever asked about the fingers before,” he said. “It’s always been about the opposable thumb. The thumb’s important, because without it, there’s a whole buncha things we wouldn’t do. Without it, we wouldn’t have transistors. And imagine just trying to untie a knot or unzipping a zipper without a thumb.”
“You’re a thumbist,” I said.
“I give my beatnik thumb snap to you.”
“Imagine if we had EXTRA thumbs,” I said. “we’d be EXTRA intelligent.”
“Some people are all thumbs. I gotta take aspirin, and roll a joint. I couldn’t roll a joint without thumbs.”
If I looked at the wall — it was gilt yellow with candlelight — I saw little iridescent ribbons, thousands upon thousands of them. When I closed my eyes, many patterns, like a fractal kaleidescope. Smith was wearing a shirt we’d printed with his art, a collage of a wavy background and zebra woman. The pattern on the shirt hovered above his chest and waved in the air. (You can click here to order this shirt. I recommend ordering black or white t-shirts, because cafepress’s two-color printing on colored backgrounds is a bit off.)
I looked out the window which by this time was smeared with condensation from our breath. The village lights lush through the smear, and told Smith, “People need to know how velvet everything can be. I like this. I like this a lot. I’m getting a lot out of this.”
“Lesson of journey: you gotta put stuff in to get shit out. It’s called digestion,” Smith said.
“This trip is full of metaphor. Everything is full of meaning.”
“The big 4,” Smith said. “The metaphor. The master answer plan for where we are.”
There was so much more to this trip than just these words. It was one of the most important experiences of my life, if not the most important. I felt an awesome interconnectedness and a potential for participation in a great spiritual reality. I saw metaphors, constant meaning, in everything. The last shred of my former uber-estranged-engineer-rationality is gone. I was in contact with the big IT. I am so happy that mushrooms are there for me whenever I feel the need to connect to this ultimate reality.
Coming down, I sat up, put on a sweater. Everything felt as though I was doing it for the first time, pulling my arms through the sweater as though putting on a web. “It feels like I’ve just landed,” I told Smith.
I decided to eat. We’d bought some strange Mexican junk food, “rebanadas,” hard toast covered in frosting. “I don’t know if this is cosmically acceptable food,” I told Smith, but I ate it anyways. Tasted good, like sugar crack.
Went to bathroom, looked in mirror and my face was all distorted. I looked like an alien elf. I couldn’t see the “me” in me. The alien elf turned into a thirtyish woman with lots of flaws and smeared eye makeup, messed up greasy spiky hair, ill-fitting nightgown. Grossed out by my menstrual pad. Returned to the bathroom mirror later relieved to find myself attractive. I think I shouldn’t have looked at myself while I was tripping. I am a gauche physical being in contrast to the ultimate, patterned reality.
e = mc squared collage by Smith
I am smiling