true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
acknowledging that I had completely lost control of the situation, I agreed to all suggestions.
Vanessa had more news. An airplane was coming. It was not coming to take us out, but it would enable us to begin our withdrawal, since it
would allow one of us to get a lift over a hundred kilometers of jungle to San Raphael, where we had left the cache of equipment before
making the overland march to La Chorrera. This was the only opportunity to fly rather than walk back to those supplies, and Vanessa pressed
that we should take advantage of it. I agreed with everything. I assumed that the eruption of the millennium would soon obviate all such
mundane concerns, but that was a fact that I would let others discover for themselves as they made their way into the ever-deepening
dimension of the future.
Dave volunteered to go on the airplane—the decision was made almost at a moment's notice. He would reach our supplies and singlehandedly
undertake to have them and himself shipped up the Rio Putumayo and then back to Bogota. We would meet him back there when
and if we got out by some means not yet clear. A bag was hastily packed. The airplane came skimming in, and then it was gone again, and
with shocking suddenness we were four.
Dennis was moved to the river house, and Vanessa and Ev became his nurses. I preferred to continue to live at the jungle house to avoid
crowding. The debate continued as to whether the direction in his raving was toward improvement or whether he was only drifting further into
the world in which he had become lost. As residents of Berkeley, we had all encountered acid casualties; comparison of Dennis's state with
those lost souls was not reassuring. Dennis's move to the river was a turning point, for from then hence the effects the phenomenon unleashed
were less in our minds and more in the world.
Through it all, even after the move, he and I were still after the lens-shaped object. What the teacher told me in the first few days after the
experiment was, "You almost got it; you didn't quite get it." Or rather it used the metaphor of condensation: "It is condensing."
It was like a perfect alchemical metaphor. The stone is everywhere. It is here.
Dennis would say, "I can see the lapis. It is two hundred and fifty feet away to the left; it's down near the waterhole, hovering above the
water." I continued to ask him each day for the stone, and each day the Sophie hydrolith—a.k.a., the universal panacea—would get closer in.
There were freak lightning storms. Slowly I noticed that meteorological phenomena tended to concentrate in the southeast. I began to look
there and whenever I did, I would see rainbows.
Our intuitions concerning what was going on ranged from the religiously profound to the utterly absurd. On the afternoon of the twelfth of
March, Dennis underwent a few hours when he was able to respond, however cryptically, to the questions we put to him concerning how
things appeared to him. This conversation went on at the river house underneath which a handsome rooster and his mate were living. He was
perhaps the very cock that I heard crow at dawn on the day of the experiment and again two days later. There was a perky alertness about this
cock and hen that had received comment among us before. This particular afternoon, Dennis called our attention to the little hen, saying that if
one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? Only the one who could have
fashioned the peculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own
punch line:
"James Joyce."
Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of
the relation of the human mind to time and space and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities
of overseeing this corner of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the
afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.
"Jim and Nora," as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera,
particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the Wake was one of
these things. It was Joyceaen humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and
they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace. They did not, however,
shed much light on our predicament at the time.
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