“They are under control,” insisted Pig. “Anyway, we don’t need much longer. Another few weeks at most. A month, maybe two.”
“Which? Weeks or months?”
“It’s not dependent on time; it’s dependent on quantity.”
“Oh, so now you’re saying time doesn’t exist?”
“No, I’m saying we’re close to getting enough.”
“Even with Musil gone?”
“Even with Musil gone. Four people are already lined up to replace him.”
“Four good people?”
“Good enough.”
“They know that that line ends up at the morgue?”
Pig shrugged. He’d once seen a famous Russian painting called The Sleigh Ride of a troika driver throwing a terrified girl to a wolf pack chasing the sled. Pig was like that driver. As soon as someone got close to what he was doing, his intention was to throw someone off the sled to distract the wolves. “Not our concern. Nobody lives forever. They were all going to die anyway. From vodka. At least this bought some time in a life worth living. When you chop wood, sparrows fly. Some of them get caught under the axe.”
“What were you?”
Ask Bykov or Pig that question about their former professions before Communism fell and the answer would have been “thug.”
Kolya spent the entire night curled up under the Documents Control counter with his ring of garlic sausage and a flask of raspberry-jam-spiked tea waiting for something to happen.
Other than determining how many wads of old chewing gum had been stuck up under the counter, nothing did.
The next night, Kolya supplemented his food cache with a supply of sunflower seeds. The third night, he tried black bread and hard cheese. The fourth night, he took off in order to do laundry, buy groceries and clean his room. That was the night the office was burgled again. Again, nothing could be found missing. All records seemed to remain intact.
Kolya decided to begin his vigil again. If you wait, he thought, they will come.
“‘The mind is a monkey chasing its tail, suffering and desire going around in a circle like a merry-go-round.’”
Magda had stopped by Snow’s porta-cabin unannounced with a casserole dish of mushroom stroganoff, bean salad and a bottle of homemade huckleberry brandy for supper. “There, that’s your koan for the evening. Now I don’t have to phone you with one later.” As she spoke, Scrotum curled his body around her legs, then plopped onto his back for a belly rub. Magda happily complied.
News of Snow and Magda’s relationship had spread through camp like the smell of rotting eggs. Like most things, people assumed the worst, that the rich Westerner was bonking the vulnerable poverty-stricken Russian or that the whore was blatantly milking the fat foreigner. As with most things, neither impression was true.
“Damn cat thinks he’s a dog,” Snow commented. He was well aware he was no prize, nothing worth chasing, even with a Westerner’s fat oil pay cheque. There were others right here in the same camp far more alluring than him. Plain looking, dull of intellect and wit, body comfortably sagged into middle age, Snow told no jokes, had no great fame or talents; he wasn’t even good at being loving or devoted.
“Maybe a c-og,” Magda supplied. “A cat-dog.” In truth, Scrotum was a cog, although Snow didn’t know it. A cog in his step to recovery.
“Look,” said Snow, holding out a bottle with a picture of an elephant on the label.
“What’s this?”
“Amarula. A liqueur made from South African fruit. I went online and found it. Then used Pig’s website to order some instead of the vodka. I’m amazed he even had it in stock.”
“Why has it got the picture of the elephant on it?”
“They wait ‘til the fruit ferments, then knock it off the tree and get sloshed.”
“Sold,” said Magda. “How can you resist a sales pitch like that? Get me a glass.”
Snow opened the lid on the casserole dish and sniffed inside. “Mushrooms?”
“Yes. And scalloped potatoes.”
Snow pushed the dish away. “Thanks anyway. Not hungry.”
“Eat,” commanded Magda, pushing the dish back.
“They’re turning blue!” complained Snow.
“Yes, they are,” smiled Magda in return. “They’re blue so you don’t have to be.”
There’s a mushroom that, when nibbled by an ant, will take over the insect’s nervous system, instruct its brain to walk over to the absolutely perfect spot for spreading its own spores, then kill the ant by growing a long tuber that snakes out of its head. Oyster mushrooms can be used to make up a killer pasta sauce—or clean up an oil spill. There’s a mushroom that, if you ate it, would make you pass water through every orifice in your body, including your ears. There are bioluminescent mushrooms that attract insects like “a bug disco.” There are also mushrooms that some claim can save the planet by cleansing toxic waste from the land, acting as nature’s recycling bin and detoxifier. The world’s largest living organism is an armillaria ostoyae in the Blue Mountains of Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is at least 2,400 years old.
The mushroom is perfectly engineered to save wisdom and pass it through time and space. Some consider it as a device to preserve the world’s soul or consciousness, converting it into a format saved in an organism designed to prevent its loss. The mushroom, after all, is perfect for long-term duration and survival. Its mycelium is simply a cobweb in the soil of any planet and yet it synapses upon itself and is full of neurotransmitter-like psychedelic compounds. It’s like a thinking brain, yet it condenses itself down into a thing three microns long, of which several million per minute can be shed by a single carpophore. Spores are perfectly designed to travel in space. They can endure extremes of temperature. Their colour reflects UV radiation. The surfaces of spores are composed of the most radiation-impervious organic material known.
Mushrooms are pretty weird, just like the people who consume them. Some make you hallucinate, others make you horny, and a few are deadly. The “weird” people claim mushrooms are sentient beings—and possibly evolutionary hosts to an alien life form that came from outer space and provided the magic nutrient for human consciousness. “Psychonaut” Terence McKenna speculates that psilocybin helped primitive man evolve by enhancing his visual and mental acuity.
Who’s to say they’re wrong? Go ask Alice when you’re ten feet tall.
“Mushrooms are the fruit of the mycelium and this subterranean network is the real worldwide web. It’s all around us. We just don’t notice it.”
--Ron Mann, Director, “Know Your Mushrooms”
“How do the mushrooms work?” Snow asked. “What’s going on? Scientifically, I mean.”
“Chemically, there’s all sorts of compounds being released. How they work isn’t that interesting. What they do is. People like Martin Luther or Lenin or Osama bin Laden want to change the world. But it’s not just revolutions and bombs that change the world. Quantum physics has already changed the way we think about time and space, even our daily lives. It’s forced us to see the world the way a Buddhist or Taoist sees it. Just like the mushrooms. We know lots about space, but sweet fuck all about time. The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. The feeling of being outside of time is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelics. The reason everybody from the Marxists to the Muslims to market capitalists all prohibit mind expanding drugs is because of the social effects they have, not any medical reasons. People who start munching mushrooms or drinking strange teas go on trips that start them thinking of reality in different ways. Suddenly, Mohammed or Marx or Milton Friedman don’t seem so important any more. Society starts to fear going out of business, ‘cause that’s the business it’s in, keeping you inside a box it determines the dimensions of, working at an activity it decides is useful and buying the things it decides it needs to produce. It doesn’t want you sitting alone in your room making your own box, your own reality,
your own rules.”
“You got this thing with time, don’t you? Every time I ask you a question, you bring it back to time.”
“I don’t. It does. Like the misunderstood child, it keeps butting in to tell me I need to get to know it better.”
“Why you?”
“Not just me. I think it’s screaming to the heavens, but maybe no one else but me is listening. Or maybe I’m just hearing voices in my head. I don’t know. I think the reason wrapping our heads around the concept of time is that it’s fractal; you know we never even invented that word until 1975; that shows how uncommon the concept is to us.”
“Fractal?”
“Fractals are non-regular geometric shapes that keep that same degree of non-regularity on all scales, whether you get bigger or smaller. Like how a stone at the foot of a mountain can resemble the peak it fell from. And vice versa.”
“You said shapes, not time.”
“Same idea. There’s a limited set of variables and then those keep getting repeated on the microscale, the macroscale, the human scale ... they're all operating on the same architectural constraints, just at different scales.”
“Non-regular; that means you think each measure of time is different from the other.”
“Well, it is, isn’t it? Newton’s idea of time as pure duration is just ridiculous. That time is a place we put things so they don’t happen all at once; like it’s flat, plain, featureless. Einstein proved it’s not, that space–time is curved when it’s around gravity. What I’m saying is that even at our level, in our own lives, time is variable. I think we’re going to eventually discover that time is like matter. There’s a hundred and fifteen different elements we know about right now and we keep discovering more. I think we’re going to discover that time is the same.
“Think about it; there are times in your life where everything seems to go right and other times when it all goes wrong. You know, the way science works now, it’s all about repeatability; in other words, probability. If you want to know how much energy is flowing through a wire, you take a thousand measurements, you add them together and you divide by a thousand. And then you have the current flowing through the wire. But that that assumes that it doesn't matter what time you make the measurement. When you study statistics, the first thing they teach you is when you flip a coin the odds are fifty-fifty, heads or tails. If that were true – and it’s not -- the coin would land up on its edge every time. But that almost never happens. So what's really happening is that something else is affecting that coin. Why not time? There are zones in time where heads are favoured and zones in time where tails are favoured.
“There’s a British scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, who believes everything has a kind of memory -- objects, organs, ideologies -- attached to it like an aura that follows them in time. It's almost as though organisms have a hyper-dimension ... they're objects with time folded inside of them, and at death you simply withdraw back into whatever dimension you came from in the first place. It's not that it falls apart or dissolves, it's that it retracts from matter. It clothed itself with matter for some decades and now it's simply releasing its organizational power over matter. But it isn't destroyed. You can take a heart or kidney out of a dead body, but when you transplant it into another body, that person often takes on the personal characteristics of the donor. Even though the two people have never met and the recipient doesn’t get to know the donor’s identity. There’s documented evidence of that happening. You know why that is? Because time is fractal; the two auras, fields, whatever you want to call them, are resonating with each other. Resonance: action at a distance. You can play a note on a cello and a piano fifty feet across the room sound the same octave. Why should that just exist in music? It exists in time. Any given moment in time is a holographic interference pattern of all other moments in time. Together, they make up the whole. But they’re not all the same. That’s why different eras have their own fashions, styles, histories. The universe is just one giant hologram.”
“You mean like a Disney cartoon.”
“You’re joking, but yeah. Objective reality doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy agreed on. You know what a hologram is, right? It’s a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears. That’s how you get that cool little identity square on your credit card.
“That’s not the cool thing, though. The really cool thing is that if a hologram of Dumbo the Elephant is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of Dumbo. Cut the halves again and each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. It’s fractal. Western science has always taught that the best way to understand something is to break it down, to take it apart. That’s why we dissect frogs and construct enormous atomic super-colliders to study neutrinos and quarks. And then we’re surprised it doesn’t work. We shouldn’t be. When we break things apart all we’re doing is getting smaller wholes. Atomic particles can exist in two places simultaneously or communicate with each other despite being light years apart because their separateness is an illusion; in reality, they’re not individual entities, but just extensions of the same fundamental something.
“What the brain really is is a filter that limits reception. In the ‘normal,’ ‘real’ world, serotonin and dopamine configure it to act as receptors that let only certain wavelengths in. Add the chemically similar psilocin and different wavelengths are received. You’re not hallucinating, you’re suddenly given another channel to watch on the cable package. It’s only an accident of evolution that our nervous systems, and the version of reality they provide us through their chemical makeup, have come to be structure the way they are and to be accepted as the ‘real’ reality. Mushrooms change reception of brain to see things that are real but we normally can’t see. Dark matter consists of ninety five percent of the universe, known to exist but unable to be detected. Likewise, science only sees three percent of DNA as useful. Ninety seven percent is called junk DNA with no known purpose. Again, other realities and dimensions could be detected using that portion.
“We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience, we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. Our human brain acts as a threat-detection device, a filter separating us from that reality while we undergo this human experience. Mushrooms remove that filter. Dreams, too.
“Dreams? You’re saying they’re real, that that’s the true reality?”
“I’m saying that in our dreams the filter gets removed and we get back in contact with that oneness, that reality.”
“Just like with psychedelics? That dreaming is the same as getting high?”
“In a way, yeah. They’re both called ‘trips,’ aren’t they? We’ve talked about the psilocybin and chemicals in plants and what they can do. About how they’re naturally inside our own brains. So that governments are making illegal what’s already inside us. If you analyze cerebrospinal fluid, the greatest concentration of neurotransmitters present is between three and four o’clock in the morning, the same time we’re doing our most intense REM dreaming. That’s when the filter is being broken down, during our dreams. Just like during a mushroom trip. It is a mushroom trip.”
Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. Myth is more individual and expresses more precisely than does Science. Whether or not the stories (of myth) are true is not
the problem. The only question is what I tell is my fable, my truth.
-- Carl Jung
“Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
--Comedian Stephen Wright
“Did you know an elephant consumes fifty tons of food per year? A four thousand kilogram elephant needs twenty five thousand calories for every meter it climbs vertically. That’s why you’ll never see them climbing an incline of five degrees or greater. Just a tooth alone can weigh five kilos, same as his testicles, which are the size of cantaloupes. The trunk by itself alone can weigh five hundred kilos.”
“The trunk, huh?”
“Yeah. There’s forty thousand muscles in there. Forty thousand! The entire human body only has six hundred and thirty nine. You know, the only thing most mammals use their noses is is for breathing. Elephants use their trunks for water storage and sucking up mud to clean themselves or cool off. It can even just store four litres of water in there. It can siphon up to nine liters in a single sip, fifteen liters in just one minute.
The mushrooms weren’t having any effect yet. Magda was just excited. It can take up to half an hour after ingestion to feel any change in consciousness.
“Hey, do you know how to make an elephant float?” Magda asked.
“I give up,” Snow answered. “How do you make an elephant float?”
Magda smiled. “With two scoops of ice cream, a bottle of cream soda, and an elephant, silly.”
“Enough elephants,” said Snow. “What do you know about pigs?”
Magda spat on the cabin floor, never mind that it was tile and not dirt. “He’s a bastard. I know that much.”
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