Marijuana
I am by nature curious. In particular, I am interested in that type of perceptual modification known as "oceanic experience", in which the individual 'self' undergoes a feeling of mystical oneness with the rest of nature. Nirvana, ecstasy, beatitude, whatever you want to call it - what Freud dismissed as a wishful return to our state in the womb. Freud's explanation of oceanic experience may well be true psychologically, but the fancy prefix doesn't make the word 'logically' any the less mean-minded. At least not in my opinion. So why seek this experience? Well, it sounds attractive. "Over my spirit flash and float in divine radiancy the bright and glorious visions of the world to which I go," moaned St Teresa. It also sounds mysterioso. "Where I awoke I did not stay; where I stayed I cannot tell you. The sun I did not see, nor saw I land or people: but of what I saw I cannot tell you. I was where I had been for all time and where for all time I shall go, in the vast realm of universal night. But one knowledge there is ours - divine, eternal, total oblivion!" Thus wrote Wagner in his 'Tristan und Isolde'. Forgive me for rambling on about der Meister, but he does happen to be a very good case in point. As one commentator has written: [Wagner] "aimed at reducing the audience to an unthinking, highly suggestible mass in which the individual was transported out of himself and made to drift with the tides of the universe ..." Drift with the tides of the universe ... Who would NOT want to undergo such a transformation? Great truths might be revealed. * * * * Well, I was too impatient to try yoga or meditation. I wasn't about to rush out and acquire 75-odd micrograms of dextro-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate 25, since it would be hard to guarantee the safe purity of an horrendously illegal drug. 'Ecstasy' was out because, being a type of amphetamine rather than a true psychedelic (methylene-dioxymethamphetamine to be precise), it is a gibberingly dangerous substance. Likewise hard narcotics, which, pace Judge Pickles and the loony-libertarian Right, should probably not be legalised, even if a 'freer' century did produce a 'Kubla Khan'. * * * *
So it was that I pondered a holiday in "friendly old Amsterdam", as Terrance Dicks put it, where preparations of the cannabis sativa plant are as legal as sherbet dips. Cannabis - marijuana, hashish, pot, weed, grass, ganja, bhang, kif, &c. Mild, largely innocuous hallucinogen - but which, taken in large quantities, can produce visions and sensations which at least hint at what an LSD trip must be like. One may not "touch the hand of God" but one might possibly see traces of His footsteps ... I had, in fact, already tried the stuff before I went to Holland, at a friend's house in Nottingham. He was in the habit of cutting up balls of resinous hash, but he knew nothing really about it: the amounts were so ridiculously small that the only effect was the rush of the hot smoke in the throat, a sensation which he thought was the action of the drug itself ... Well, I sensed there was more to it than that and so, after having read up on the subject, I took a trip to the land of the civilised and tolerant Dutch. Overnight on the ferry and the tour coach dropped us at about 3pm the next day at Dam Square, in the very centre of the city. Our guide/driver warned us about the young people clustered on the circular steps around the obelisk : "Most of them are drug pushers. Avoid them, OK?" Sure enough, almost as soon as I had stepped off the coach a young Dutchman approached me and began talking in the vernacular. I smiled mechanically and brushed past - I had no business with him. My destination was Damstraat, a longish, narrow street off the Square ... A milling, thronging timewarp: I had anticipated the groups of 45+ year-old Americans with greying beards and ponytails, but I had no idea there would be quite so many modern-day freaks as well, shambling around proudly displaying their beads and bandannas ... Strange long rolled cigarettes were everywhere. Exotic "Headshops" offered windows full of paraphernalia and accessories: hookahs, pipes, king-size papers ("Reefer Rollers"), badges, pendants, packets of seeds, thick books on how to grow your own, Jim Morrison postcards, Purple Haze T-shirts, Present From Amsterdam T-shirts, T-shirts based around a well-known sports logo ("Adidhash Gives You Speed!"), cartoon T-shirts ("Gee, how friendly everyone is here!" murmurs a bemused US tourist surrounded by a crowd of giggling, blissed-out heads), knives for cutting up hash, Rastafarian colours, stickers, earrings, Double Your Potency Powder Packets, yin-yang symbols, Eye of Horus brooches, rings, mandalas, buddhas, masks, joss-sticks, ceramic skulls, Red Indian peace pipes, paisley, CND plus doves in dayglo colours, hubble bubble pipes, skeletons, enamelled equivalents of snuff-boxes, laser hologram effect crystal mobiles, crystal balls, and everywhere - over all - the distinctive green seven-leafed serrated plant symbol of "pot".
Here, I felt, I could have my "oceanic experience". I felt at home here, even if my boater, black velvet jacket, green corduroy trousers and green silk waistcoat did seem a bit staid. Clutching my dog-eared copy of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", I ventured in search of coffee-shops. The Mellow Yellow, the Goa, the Exstase ... the Paradiso! That looked friendly. In the window an English sign proudly read : "The Best!" (Every coffee shop in Amsterdam has "The Best!" in the window.) Inside was a brown, smoky darkness, Rasta colours, and a few heads lolling around in a haze. A coloured moutstachiod guy glanced up at me from the counter and drawled something in Dutch.
Moments later I was presented with a delicious cup of black coffee with a little jug of milk and two sugar-cubes. Also a small cardboard 'menu' offering 'Afghan', 'Dutch', 'Lebanese', 'Moroccan', 'Columbian', etc. Four grammes for 25 guilders each. Off the slightly nervous and embarrassed cuff I chose and ordered Columbian, since I understood that country had been in the news recently. I got more or less what I had expected - a little sealable polythene bag stuffed with dark green/brown stiff but bendy vegetation. I clumsily rolled a joint there and then in the Paradiso with my coffee, but it had little effect ... * * * * That night in my hotel room ("Do Not Disturb") I smoked the rest of my purchase, four decent-sized tokes one after the other. And no effect. Shit! What a ripoff! What a freaking ripoff - okay, I knew it was as harmless as alcohol, more so even, but all the same ... I had blown the equivalent of nearly a tenner and had nothing to show for it except a very sore throat, burned by that blasted hot smoke. I collapsed on the bed, feeling pretty browned off at the whole business. What the hell was I doing here, puffing away at some disgusting hot shit which was having absolutely no eff- On the wall, opposite my bed, illuminated in the darkness by the bedside lamp, was a painting, a reproduction of a Van Gogh. A clump of writhing, swirling olive-coloured trees in a sunlit garden somewhere. Later I learned that this painting was called simply 'Three Trees', painted in 1890, but at the time I hadn't seen it before, just knew it was a Van Gogh. Writhing, swirling olive-coloured trees ... Oh my God, they were writhing, were swirling, were actually moving! And the painted ground of that earthy sunlit garden was - three-dimensional! Absolutely three-dimensional. I could see into it!! And it was shifting, moving, before my eyes; yet not in any blurred or swimmy sense but maddenlingly, frustratingly solid! And then - I saw the pictures in the picture. You know how it is, you look at something, a cloud in the sky say, and suddenly it seems to form - a face; or a cat; or whatever, simple optical imagination, half deliberate. Well it was like that now, but unbelievably fast, almost instantaneous, and real and moving. Wherever I looked at that painting I immediately saw faces emerging from the near-abstract patterns. The illusion was so strong that I felt that I knew Van Gogh had deliberately painted them in like that. He must have done! One of the thick, swirling clumps of tree had become a jolly green giant, like a stumpy living tree-trunk, topped with a grinning, merry, laughing face, batting out with a snaking arm at a winged angel that was flying out of the sky towards its head. And both, giant and angel, were moving, swatting and hovering respectively ... Both were so good-natured. I couldn't help it, I began to laugh. That arboreal giant: he was laughing, eyes creasing up, mouth spreading, spreading as I watched into the broadest, blackest, sharpest, crescentest smile you ever saw! I was laughing in sympathy on the bed, shaking in helpless, silent giggles. I had never - never - seen anything so unutterably funny in my life: how ridiculous, yet how - how unpretentious! Oh boy! Wonderful! I began to subside in long happy breaths. And then I looked again at the Van Gogh. I could still (just) make out the smiling trunk-giant, but what I really saw now (panic!) was a spindly demon with a huge head, a head that split open like a sick melon in a yawning hole fringed with curving fangs. Not too bad - but then I saw demon after demon, monster after monster, all smaller, marching across the painting towards me, fanged, slant-eyed, every twirl was a cackling gibbering demon reaching out - God, my imagination was simply flying - PANIC!! Real panic. Silent, but real. I looked at my hand clenched on the blanket (it took an effort to tear my gaze away from the painting). I was trembling and sweating, breathing hard, my breath whistling harshly in my ears. I looked again after I had clamed down. (Shit! I was thinking. This is an actual hallucination!) The painting - well, I could see everything, but fascination had replaced fear now. Now the trees, the whole clump, was a dog, with a shining, black triangular nose, and very white teeth, strange but not ... that unfriendly. The green ground swelled. I turned my eyes away, and each time I looked back it was ... bigger, swelling, more solid and 3-D. I saw a green seagull, the bottom half missing, hollow. (The green ground.) I tilted my head and looked again: a green, hollow seagull, but in a different way! My eyes were acting weird, but by this time my brain had gotten used to the shock and was functioning pretty calmly and clearly. (Though I had very little conception of time, a wholly theoretical concept.) Jesus, I must have looked at that damn picture until well into the early morning, never bored for an instant, utterly enraptured. I recreated the giant, the angel, the imps & demons, the dog, the gull, over and over. No panic, just fascination, somehow both absorbed and detached, at what my perceptions were doing. Gradually, very gradually, I became aware that things were fading. An infinitely slow process, but eventually the painting was just a painting again - good old Van Gogh. Before long I was in a deep sleep. * * * * An extraordinary experience. Thinking about it the next day, it was the sheer speed of the eye/brain/imagination link that struck me most forcibly. As I say, when you look at a painting or whatever, it's not too difficult to make your imagination "see faces" or the like. But this - wherever I looked, I could see something instantaneously, seemingly with no pause for thought. And the illusions were genuinely uncanny. They seemed so ... so obvious, and so real. It wasnt't a "pleasant" experience, no way. But I wasn't too intimidated. I reasoned that a lot of the panic I had experienced was due to plain surprise: I had simply not expected anything so dramatic and unusual to happen when I took marijuana, even though I had deliberately taken a large amount in one go. Also, there was the fact that I had been looking at a painting by a deeply disturbed and unhappy man. Might not something of his mental darkness and despair have, through his painting, affected me, however slightly? I remember thinking precisely as I looked at that reproduction while stoned: "Van Gogh was mad - he saw hell when he looked at Nature - and he painted it in - he really did paint devils and demons - maybe unconsciously, but real pictures within the larger picture ..." Well obviously I think now that that's a bit too literal, but a disturbing quality was in that picture even viewed when not high, and I think it's quite possible that my experience was determined accordingly. I remember the previous day when I had visited the Vincent Van Gogh Museum, feeling an edge of depression in the air, and unhappiness mingled with the visitors' awe and admiration. Because the paintings ... well, they were ravishingly beautiful, were Beauty, no doubt about it ... but ... they were sick as well, that Irises with long narrow leaves shooting up out of the pot like frozen lightning, green claws ... and I think the crowds picked that up, which mixed their amazement with something profoundly upsetting. Next night I would look at something more simply pretty.
A glorious sunny day. The Cafe Exstase supplied me with 4g of Afghan hash resin, a brown black bendy rectangle (like all hash containing a higher concentration of the active principle tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, than mere grass) which necessitated the purchase of a suitable pipe from one of the Headshops. The Old Man turned out to me the best of them, with the friendliest paper carrier bags, not unlike those Forbidden Planet used to stock before that shop richified itself. Some of the pipes on display behind glass cabinets were wooden, some painted, some blue-enamelled. Some had water-chambers to cool the smoke. Most were not particularly large, although some were full-blown hookahs or complex arrangements of glass tubes tinted purple. My choice was long, golden, bulbous (an air chamber) with a small wooden bowl and grills to hold the chopped-up pieces of resin. (It might be worth adding at this point that one does not have to smoke this stuff if the idea of smoking anything seems dangerous and distasteful. Cannabis can be swallowed or drunk as an herbal infusion ("tea") if so desired.) * * * * That still warm evening I demolished the remains of yesterday's Columbian weed and all of the sweeter Afghan. My bedside lamp was trained on a single postcard held in my hand. Jan van Huysam's 'Flowers and Fruit', a very mystic painting. A riotous floral still-life, a huge spraying crammed mass of flowers, all different sorts, bursting exuberantly out of an orange glazed pot. Leaves, tendrils, shoots, buts, spilling down onto a brown-marble table top. Over-ripe clusters of fruit, on the point of going rotten. The effect was instantaneous. The sense of movement was gone, the impression of 3-D less. In its place - intensified colour, each individual flower glowing like a stained-glass, bunches of red grapes transformed into shining hunks of amethyst brain-cluster lying among the scattered fruit, bobbly and crimson. Beautiful. The imagination whirred fast: a clump, a spray of blue forget-me-nots were a countless crowd of giggling littler bearded faces. Vague leafy shapes came together to form a Cavalier's head, scowling beneath his brown plumed hat. When I turned the postcard on its side the edge of the brown marbled table-top became a tree in a black, damp, misty forest - and straight away I could feel part of my brain igniting in an involunatary attempt to make up stories, things to happen in that dark wood ... I resisted this and experimented instead with closing my eyes - Vague fizzy green ovaloids moving slowly and silently out from a central point against a black background (imagine the opening of Pertwee II and you'll know what I mean). "Let's have something different," I thought dizzily and straight away - A kind of range-finder's submarine-periscope grid was etched out against the darkness in pale rainbow-coloured fire (imaging the opening of S&S and you'll know what I mean). * * * * I opened my eyes again. I could focus. It was as if my eyes had increased their power of magnification a hundredfold. The tiniest, the most minute detail on the postcard was crystal-clear and razor-sharp. A greenish-white fibrous tendril of painted plant: it wasn't that it looked bigger, as under a magnifying glass - rather it was as if my eye could see down to it it clearer, perceive every micro-millimetre of its shape and curvature, like a ribbon. My sight went wild, bouncing back and forth across the picture like a ping-pong ball, the cumulative effect was like being able to perceive every detail close-up in a flash: I thought of a section and almost before my thought had been completed there it was in front of me. Exhilaration began to creep in at what my sight could do. Trembling I followed a bunch of lettuce leaves past creamy, blobby peaches, down below the table, green crinkly whiplines that blew and flapped wetly in a shivering windy darkness ... I put on my Walkman and played some music, and felt I could detect rythms in the lower string parts that I hadn't noticed or heard before. A curious thought came into my head, a sense of gratitude that it was so lo-fi. The distortion acted as a kind of lifeline back to the real world; I had the feeling that a perfect recording (on CD say) would have been too much like pure sound and would have swept me away into panic, without the sense that it was coming from a machine ... In the middle of the flowers were three pink-and-white roses, melting and flaring. And somehow the supernova of the roses stretched until it touched and blended into the yellow oblong of my bedside lamp. 'Parsifal' soared and floaters, dead cells, floated across my wet eyeball - only they were coming streaming down just one beam of glowing yellow light, and forming strange symbols like transparent Chinese writing. By an effort of will that seemed both unthinking and tremendous at the same time I made the symbols flip out into straight lines, lots of little translucent verticals spaced at regular intervals moving down that light-beam. I saw one of them forma a tiny English word "love" - with incredible directness, a tiny tiny little word moulded out of clear jelly but unmistakeable - through no conscious thought or effort of mine. Then all I remember is following this light-beam until it disappeared in the glaring centre of the lamp. * * * * I was aware that the music had finished, and I breathed in, the first time I had consciously taken a breath, it seemed, for about ten minutes (a moment of fright, there). I was back in room, giddy but otherwise in one piece, sober, down. I fell asleep and didn't dream. Next day I had a headache and felt a bit nauseous, but it was kittens compared to a bad alcohol hangover.
I tried again the next evening but with little effect - probably because I kept glancing at a number of different postcards repeatedly instead of concentrating on just one. Nevertheless - - I stared at the collarbone of a skull-and-shoulders painting by Van Gogh and it ... detached itself from the skeleton, hung for a split-second with shining intensity on its own in a blackness ... - The dress of Vermeer's milk-pouring maid-servant shone a brilliant blue, and I could see every last minute fleck and dint of detail on the wall, her starched white wimple and her beige, plasticine forehead ... - But all only for a brief moment, nothing more. I had high hopes of Odilon Redon's madonna with a halo: and, yes, I saw a still pond of deep water, hidden by a circle of black cliffs. The water is a fiery, electric blue, in which golden sparks dance slowly. The sky is the same deep blue shade as the pond, repeatedly overlapped by a silent shimmering of raspberry-silver storm-clouds. Up against a flickering lime-green, white, and pale powder-turquoise halo, a pale and instense flickering backdrop to the dark hooded head. The sky somehow flips into negative, rich blue puffy clouds now, against a pale metallic-red sky. The glory now pouring, raining down upon the cowled figure is sidden an glaring and brittle - a lucent red tide, frosted with silber ice-patterns, like on a window. - As I say, I saw all this, but felt totally unimpressed, the reason being, I think, that Redon's painting is from the beginning too contrived in precisely that direction. By setting out to be overly weird and otherworldly the final effect seemed dull, stodgy, lacking the startling spontenaity of the Van Goghs or the Van Huysam. (& of course one feels the same normally; it's just that marijuana heightens the impressions and the differences as described ...) * * * * Strangely enough, in each and every case, what I saw was less important than the fact that I was seeing it. In other words, I experienced no true hallucination because I was always more than half-aware that what I was seeing was unreal, an optical or mental illusion, albeit one of an unprecedented vividness and power. In this sense it was all rather uninvolving. By contrast, a true hallucinogen like lysergic acid, psilocybin or mescalin appears to alter one's whole conception of 'reality' itself - to the extent, at times, of inducing the Beatific Vision. Certainly, despite words forming out of floaters, I never remotely felt on the brink of any revelation or ultimate answer ˆ la Huxley soaring on mescalin. Indeed I probably came closer to that listening to Wagner at home with a bottle of wine as my only stimulant ... But if marijuana is not a drug that touches on the spiritual in the way that LSD apparently can do, this is no ground for beliuttlement. What remains is an experience so unusual and so interesting that it does one good. I really do feel improved after taking it! Without question my aesthetic appreciation of both art and nature feels renewed and refreshed. Walking down a country lane is no longer the same. And, perhaps partly as a result of this, I have the feeling myself of being less high-strung, less likely to feel needless anxiety over trivial matters. Dare I say it puts things in their proper proportions? After all, when one now perceives the movement of air and light, the relationship between form and colour and function in a wholly new way, how can one be concerned about such hugely irrelevant, such mastodonically unimportant matters as The Spirit of Wealth Creation, Cost Effectiveness, and Marketing Strategies - about Whther You Get There Before Your Competitors Do, like that snotty brat in those dreadful ads who shoots bolts of blue light from his fingertips: "Aye, we're doing good, but we're no' doing good ENOUGH!!! What this company needs is a bit of WHOOOSH!!!" Wow! Whoosh! Instead of hiring all those snotty whizzkids, why don't they all just troop off to jolly old Amsterdam and get all the whoosh in the world, complete with bolts of blue light if they're lucky ...? Psychomimetics clear away the cobwebs, refortifying the mind against the assaults of cant and blather, the eternal arsenal of the cheap thugs, pimps and grotesques who dare to tell us what to do and how to live; shitsuckers, lice, grubs and bugs, materialist blackbeetles in positions of power who foul the spirit of Art with their masturbations before the idol of the Golden Calf, and who must be stamped on hard if humankind is to attain the ultimate goal of all yearning:- the surging, roaring ocean of love, the Flux, the Eternal Present in which all those of the Herren-Moral must joyfully plunge to be swallowed up - in the Prelude to the great reformation. * * * * Did you know that David Dimbelby was one of those who signed the notorious 1967 'Times' advertisement calling for the legalisation of cannabis in the UK? There - if a sensible blow-wave BBC chap like David is for it, it can't be bad, can it? Or are all the BBC chaps nowadays supposed to be pinkos? I can't remember. * * * *
A Manly Word to Young Menby Rev. Dr Guyler, Boys' Own Paper, 1891 "As if these internal foes were not enough, you are surrounded with forces that are hostile to both happiness and holiness. Evil fashions and customs must be encountered, and many a pathway is mined underneath with explosives that are deadly as dynamite. In these times there is no little malaria of Scepticism in the air. A certain glorious old field-marshal of the Lord condensed it into one line when he wrote to a young man, 'Fight the good fight of faith!' ... To stand the sneers of scoffers ... to conquer fleshly appetites, to hold an unruly temper under control, to keep base passions subdued, and to direct all your plans and purpose straight towards the highest mark, requires a power above your own. Christ's mastery of you will give you self-mastery - yes, and mastery over the powers of darkness and of hell. Faith will fire the last shot, and when the battle of life ends, you will stand among the crowned conquerors in glory." Some Good Advice to Growing Ladsby Dr Gordon Stables, Boys' Own Paper, 1891 "... And now for my advice about NERVOUSNESS ... The class of boys who consult the Editor on this trouble is unfortunately a very large one, and I am sorry to say they as often as not have themselves to blame for a state of misery and wretchedness which is painful even to think of. Now no cure can be attempted until purity of mind, thoughts and habits is secured. Then, by the blessing of a Supreme and Forgiving Power, the following plan may be adopted. Have the cold bath and big sponge all ready the night before, then before getting out of bed go in for massage ... Keep good company. Abstain from all thoughts of evil. If you guard your thoughts, half the battle is won." Dear David, I've found you out! You were prevaricating in 107 - I've discovered the REAL reason why your so-called "fanzine" is called 'Five Hundred Eyes' - I quote from my trusty copy of Doctor Who Monthly :
The effects of this drug are also described in luxuriously attractive detail :
No wonder Ian Levy writes for you! I point my finger at you, David so-called 'Gibbs' and scream "J'accuse"! Your evil fanzine is named Five Hundred Eyes to promote the use of illegal drugs! You are trying to drag innocent young Doctor Who fans down into a squalid, sordid world of debauchery and crime! I'll have the law on you, pal! Yours with strawberry jam, Ian Berriman. |