Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  The road was very dusty, but my dear friend Luke saw the dust as a magical sheen which had settled on the leaves and dead limbs lying on every side of us. He pointed out the red-neck hawks circling in the distance, in search of lunch. Everything was completely enchanting and he was enjoying himself immensely. And where was I? I found myself seeing only the negative: my unexpected physical inadequacy for the climb; the dead limbs covered with brown dust, the mutilated trees and the ugly fate of whomever the hawks would choose for lunch.

  I looked down to find myself sitting on an old, dead log which was undergoing a crumbling transition back to the earth. I realized I had no choice but to try to sort out the difficult thoughts that were running my show at the moment. I seemed to be reviewing my actions of the last few years through a very dark glass. Looking to the future, I could anticipate nothing there that seemed any happier. I clearly saw myself for what I really was, an old man who had a physical and emotional age that was no longer in the forties, but, rather, in the all too real and brutal sixties. How the hell did I get here? I hadn't asked for such sudden maturity! I was overwhelmed by this stark and un-looked-for truth, and I could not remember having been aware of any of the subtle steps and stages by which the maturing process must have actually occurred.

  Hold on, I thought, just whom am I kidding? This is not maturity. This is simply Old. It's been developing at a steady pace all along, but I chose to look the other way. It isn't maturity, and it hasn't been sneaking up on me. It's the dying process, and I have been moving steadily towards that final moment at a crashing pace. I've simply been fooling myself by all of these game-playing deceptions. I am an old man, and my death is a certainty. Who knows when?

  Maybe right now. Is this the time and place to close it all off? The Ponce de Leon search for youth was absurd when it took place in the Everglades of Florida, and it is equally absurd when trying to act the young fool with a consciousness-changing psychedelic drug. Dan-unit it - grow up and act your age! You are a dying old man who cannot face the fact of your own mortality.

  I was feeling too exposed and too ponderous, sitting way up there on my log. My instincts said to me, get closer to the earth. I slid forward and down, off my dead log and onto the ground, where the log became my back-rest. I declined Luke's offer to talk, so he wandered off to see more of the marvelous things that surrounded him. I just wanted to dwell in my own thoughts.

  I wondered, is the German word that would describe my state of mind, "Weltschmerz?" I was indeed sick of the world, in spades. I reviewed my continuing burden of trying to stay active, to maintain a high volume of productivity in writing, and to keep trying to make this and that in the laboratory for everybody under the sun. It was all such an obvious waste of effort.

  Everything would slowly close down about me, with nothing completed and all communication forever closed off, and it really would make no difference at all. On the previous evening, Luke and I had talked about death and transition, and the state I found myself in right now could well be reflecting that conversation. It was not a good place to be.

  I once heard a terrible joke about a man who had a trained mule. It would sit when told to, it would lie down, beg or fetch. It would follow any verbal order it was given. But whenever the owner was asked to put on a demonstration, and before he gave the mule his first command, he would pick up a piece of two-by-four and hit the animal over the head with it. His explanation was simple, "First, you have to get his attention." Old mule Shura had been hit over the head with a chemical two-by-four. Something, somewhere, was trying to get my attention.

  My buddy bounced up to me again, and this time succeeded in breaking through my funk. He told me he had observed that, "If you look at distant scenery, and there's something located at arm's length that you can focus on, and you do focus on it, then the thing close to you can be seen in full detail, but the backdrop suddenly looks like it's made of cardboard!" He was insistent.

  I struggled down a few feet to the right, from where my back-rest log disappeared into the weeds, and found a spider suspended on its web. I sat down and focused on it, somewhat resentfully, (how could Luke have been so selfish as to have wrested me from my rich self-pity?), and indeed, Wow! The distant trees and landscapes were flat and unnatural. They looked like a badly painted backdrop. I moved my gaze to the left. No spider, no illusion. Back to the right; the spider was clear and, again, the distance became artificial.

  I was reminded of another experience with 2C-E many years ago in Tennessee, when I had looked through a closed window to see what appeared to be a painting of a medieval lady watering her plants in the back yard. This vivid memory had been with me for a long time and it was just now that I realized it might have been the panes of window glass that had become the focus of my eyes, serving as the counterpart of the spider web. A nifty parallel, I thought, although by no means an explanation.

  The memory of that garden illusion caught me up again in turmoil, because there was another resemblance between this 2C-E experience and that dramatic one I had weathered in Tennessee over a decade ago. There had been a death thing there, as well, another playing of the role of the tired old man. But there, I had seen myself externally as wizened, with wasted, wrinkled arms and sunken face. Here, this time, it was a viewing of my inner self. I thought, I am seeing myself as an old person, a tired person, someone saddened by the knowledge that he cannot possibly complete everything he wants to complete. Hell, most of what I want to do, I haven't even started yet! So here I sit, wallowing in self-pity, bemoaning the fact that my most important work is not done and never will be done.

  The query came from somewhere inside me, quite gracefully. Are you interested in walking, by any chance? I chuckled/ realizing that the spiral down into the world of despair was an endless one, and I must try to step out of it. Tired, tired, tired. The best way to combat tiredness is to walk it off. I turned my body around in order to push myself up from my strange position on the ground, feeling extremely awkward, and was finally able to get on my feet. I dusted debris off my behind, and moved on again with Luke. The pace started slowly at first, but began picking up as I got out of myself and into the visual pleasures of my surroundings. We were soon at the far-point of the trail where it branched, and had to choose whether to continue on around the outer trail (some three hours of hiking still ahead of us) or whether to cut back onto the middle road. Our canteen was more than half empty, and the 2C-E had given us dry mouths. We agreed to take the shorter route.

  We tried and failed to analyze the spiderweb painted-backdrop illusion, and I was just starting to share the dark, dark places where I had so recently been, when, Whammo! There was the two-by-four again. I had a sudden, very strange sensation in my groin. It was on my right side, and I knew that something had happened to me; something was very wrong. It was not really painful, but it felt as if the right testicle had gone back up inside my body. I had an overpowering urge to push it out again.

  I stepped to the side of the road (we were still far from home base, both drug-wise and trail-wise) and lowered my pants. I stuck my hand inside my shorts, and discovered that when I put the edge of my right index finger against the cleft between my genitals and right thigh, and firmly pushed inward, I felt okay. When I took my finger away, it felt all wrong again. Oh for Heaven's sakes, please/1 thought, not a hernia!

  I had had some such thing when I was 10 years old, but couldn't remember how it came to be.

  There was a vague impression of sliding down a banister in the Spruce Street house, but I have been told that you have to lift something too heavy in order to separate the tissue.

  Certainly, just getting up from a ground-level sitting position to a vertical hiking stance could not have been such a strain. I could recall with total clarity my wheeling myself to surgery during the childhood event, and the friendly smell of ether. And, since they removed my appendix for good luck at the same time, that hernia had also, probably, been on my right side.

  Must I u
ndergo some stupid surgery, now, at my present age, just because something-or-other is trying to get my attention? And just exactly what is my present age, anyway?

  With great reluctance I proposed to Luke that we abort our hike, and seek out some competent and unstoned medical opinion as to the status of my body. We walked very slowly back to the valley floor; I with my hand down inside my pants, underneath a loosened belt, and my friend with a benign look of amusement on his face. Once back, we boarded one of the mini-buses that patrol the Grove roads all day long, and I requested that the driver take me directly to the Owl camp hospital. In the lobby, I found four men sitting in what struck me as ridiculously puffy easy chairs. I asked - a rather silly question, in retrospect - if anyone there was a physician. "Yes," said a voice, "We all are."

  "Well," I said, somewhat sheepishly, "I think I may have hurt myself."

  One of the young men, a cardiologist as it later turned out, glanced at the others (who nodded at him), and got to his feet. He led the way to a private examination room, donned obstetric gloves, and asked me to drop my pants. Push your finger in there and cough, he ordered, then said something about feeling a bit too much tissue here, and suggested that I go to the nearby town and get a truss (inguinal, medium size, right hand side), to give me support until I could get to my own physician. At least my intestines were not hanging out of my body, he added pleasantly.

  I thanked him, ran the gauntlet of quietly smiling professionals in the front room, and rejoined my friend, Luke, who had been contentedly waiting for me on a shaded redwood bench.

  For me, the entire experience had been completely bizarre and excru-ciatingly embarrassing.

  Upon entering the hospital, I had become somewhat paranoid, seeing the incident from the point of view of a very sober emergency physician, hired to be in attendance at an encampment of 2000 titans of industry - or, to be more exact, 1,900 titans and a scatter of musicians, actors and artists - having been told to expect at least three heart attacks and two accidental ice-pick punctures.

  And - so went my uncomfortable fantasy - suddenly there appears a disheveled and uncoordinated grey-hair of sixty-something, with his finger in his crotch, mumbling vaguely about having hurt himself, hiking on the trails. Is it possible, thinks the physician, that at one of the camps a bet had been made that they could get a young emergency MD to jiggle the balls of a titan? How would they do it? Have him stagger into the hospital with some cock and bull story about a maybe hernia, that's how. After all, if such a bet had been made by bored, drunken men with nothing else to do - so reasons the physician residing in my suspicious mind - he, as a doctor, has no choice but to put on his gloves and inspect the presented balls and inguinal canal.

  No matter that the examination had been conducted with complete professionalism and no hint of disbelief in either face or voice. I was sure I was suspected, perhaps by all four of the doctors, of playing some part in an elaborate, puerile joke. I felt I had been placed in a situation that was neither of my own making nor under my control, and I was miserable.

  Luke and I walked away from the hospital, moving slowly. We would find a cold glass of soda water somewhere, and try to avoid running into anyone we knew. He was still bouncing happily about with the 2C-E, but I had ended up with a pretty heavy load of stuff for consideration.

  I decided, as the effects of the material slowly declined, that I had been whacked yet a third time by the nasty piece of lumber, with the hospital experience and my disturbingly paranoid fantasies of how I was being perceived by the physicians.

  Damn-lit, I said to myself. Enough. I get the message. I'm no longer in my forties, and when I go hiking on the Owl trails, I must pay attention to my body and remember, like it or not, that it's been around for sixty -something years and can no longer be relied upon to have the resiliency of forty-something.

  I survived, but the darkness of the imagery was not easily dispelled. It was all of four days before I was able to get completely out of the dying mode, and realize that the instinct for life was still predominant. But I could not effectively reset my self-image clock back to my forties.

  I was now a much older person than I had been. I had aged twenty years in three hours.

  I spent those four days looking about me and observing closely my friends in the Owl Club world - musicians, business men, teachers, retired this and that - who were also in the sixty to seventy year old age slot. How were they conducting themselves? My God. Two of them had walking problems, in one case due to hip trouble and, in the other, a bad knee. One friend had lost his voice box to cancer. Most of them had hypertension, and were being medicated for it.

  Prostate surgery everywhere. Impotence, incipient senility, and a pandemic narrowing of political tolerance, along with a decreasing curiosity about new things. Several had recently gone to the extreme of dying. But, there was a spark of hope. There were a few, sadly only a very few, but a few nonetheless, who were up there in the eighty to ninety year old slot, but acted and carried themselves as if they were still in their sixties. Might there also be hope for me?

  A dozen questions had to be addressed. Was this new, old-man self-image the truth of what I really was? How might my relationships with others change, now that my warts and blemishes had suddenly become apparent to me? Since I had suddenly leapt into a new age bracket, must I conduct myself in some new way? Could I manage to recover that fortyish self-image, or was I destined to be sixtyish from here on? For that matter, did I even have the choice of surviving a little longer from here on? Was the deterioration that comes with aging never to be invisible to me again? Did I want it to be? Might I see myself, when I am eighty, as a person of sixty-five? Or is that remarkable age displacement unique for this particular time in life?

  I have been unable to recover the innocence of my earlier age-gap. Some of it, maybe, but by no means all. I find myself now, from time to time, weighing the virtues of being an antique, in that, for instance, there are some audiences in my world who will not give serious attention to a person who is only in his forties.

  I feel that my mind, while it is now housed in a container which is beginning to look like an elder statesman of some sort, still - most of the time - has the bounce and wit of age forty; in fact, I sometimes suspect, with pleasure, that it never left the twenties.

  Be that as it may, no matter what my apparent age or appearance, I remain capable of acting on my beliefs, and my beliefs are strong.

  I have no intention of softening my insistence on the preservation, at any cost, of the human freedoms and liberties that we still have; I cannot anticipate yielding on the demand that we must recover, again at any cost, the freedoms and liberties which have already disappeared from our society.

  I intend to persist in being curious about the unknown. It is in the urge to learn, and in the drive to understand, that youth is to be found.

  I will continue to honor the values of all the religions of man, as I believe they were originally conceived and taught, not as they are presently practiced. I intend to remain open to new forms of expression taken by the human spirit, wherever I shall find them.

  And finally, I must admit that I now look forward with total fascination to discovering the shape - and age - of my self-image, when the calendar tells me I have turned eighty-five!

  CHAPTER 41. 2C-T-4

  (Shura's voice)

  A few years ago, I was again graced with a Plus-Four. The following are my notes/ written during the experiment and completed a few days

  ^ 9:00 AM is (0:00) of the experiment. April 3,1985, on the Farm. 12 me, 2C-T-4 in water.

  Trivial taste.

  (:50) Aware.

  (1:20) To a plus one.

  (1:30) To a one-and-a-half plus.

  ^ò2?^ A^P1115^0^ climbing. Alice ready to leave about here/ and I fibbed and told her I was at a plus-one only. If I had said plus-two

  and climbing, she would have been interested/concerned, and would be trying to reach me by telephone and - maybe n
ot getting me - might

  have worried. Forgive me the small white lie, my love. (2:30) Greater than plus two.

  (3:00) To a plus three. This is not an out-in-public drug. One would be compelled to be guarded, to tone things down, to continuously monitor On8 lnterac.tlonso ^y^tic. Obsession with things physical, sexual. Once past this, one can allow the richer aspects to be manifest (3:15) There is some visual brightening - not quite that of 2C-T-2 but the potential is there. This seems excellent for thinking about relationships.

  (3:40) This is a very profound plus three. And I will try to compose notes for the first time on the computer, rather than trust to handwriting.

  This is so long, so profound and implacable, that an unhappy person would have nowhere to go to get away from it. It would follow him everywhere he went, into the bathroom, into a book, into his memories.

  For the last hour I stayed out of the house, in part because I felt blackmailed by the telephone.

  I was afraid it would ring, and I simply did not want to interact with anyone in that world, not for the moment. So I stayed in the lab and started a reflux on the steam-bath. Then I went up behind the lab and sat a while with my thoughts. These became bittersweet memories, strongly encouraged by the magic place I was in; it was warm and I was almost completely hidden. But not totally, so there remained a connection with the outside world. I thought that to avoid the house was giving in to blackmail. Then - so simple - it came to me that I would not answer the phone. Rather, I decided, I will count the times it rings and try to deduce, with some humor, who it is. Or, rather, who it might have been, that was so insistent on demanding a response. So, freed from blackmail, I am here and have started my report on a remarkable substance.

  A completely remarkable substance. It is as if I had just rediscovered the Alephs - a plus 1 at one hour, then plus 2 at two hours, and not a full plus 3 until the third hour.