Chapter I
FOREWORD
This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored.
From the thirty two autograph pages reproduced out of the hundred and fifty written while the inner perturbation was at its height, those who can read handwriting will learn more than from any description.
As for the drawings, begun immediately after the third experiment, they were done with a vibratory motion that continues in you for days and days and, though automatic and blind, reproduces exactly the visions to which you have been subjected, passes through them again.
It being impossible to reproduce the entire manuscript, which directly and simultaneously translated the subject, the rhythms, the forms, the chaos, as well as the inner defenses and their devastation, we found ourselves in difficulties, confronted by a typographical wall. Everything had to be rewritten. The original text, more tangible than legible, drawn rather than written, would not, in any case, suffice.
Flung onto and across the paper, hastily and in jerks, the interrupted sentences, with syllables, flying off, frayed, petering out, kept diving, falling, dying. Their tattered remnants would revive, bolt, and burst again. The letters ended in smoke or disappeared in zigzags. The next ones, similarly interrupted, continued their uneasy recitation, birds in the midst of the drama, their wings cut in flight by invisible scissors.
Sometimes words would be fused together on the spot. For example, "Martyrissibly" would recur to me time and time again, speaking volumes. I couldn't get rid of it. Another repeated untiringly, "Krakatoa !" "Krakatoa !" or sometimes a quite ordinary word like "crystal" would return twenty times in succession, giving me a great harangue all by itself, out of another world, and I could never have augmented it in the least or supplemented it with some other word. Alone, like a castaway on an island, it was everything to me, and the restless ocean out of which it had just come and of which it irresistibly reminded me, for I too was shipwrecked and alone end holding out against disaster.
In the huge light-churn, with lights splashing over me, drunk, I was swept headlong without ever turning beck.
How to describe it ! It would require e picturesque style which I do not possess, made up of surprises, of nonsense, of sudden fleshes, of bounds and rebounds, an unstable style, tobogganing and prankish.
In this book, the margins, filled with whet ere epitomes rather than titles, suggest very inadequately the overlappings which ere en ever-present phenomenon of mescaline. Without them it would be like talking about something else. I have not used any other "artifices." It would have required too many. The insurmountable difficulties come (1) from the incredible rapidity of the apparition, transformation, end disappearance of the visions; (2) from the multiplicity, the pullulation of each vision; (3) from the fen-like and umbellate developments through autonomous, independent, simultaneous progressions (on seven screens es it were); (4) from their unemotional character; (5) from their inept, and even more, from their mechanical appearance : gusts of images, gusts of "yes's" or of "no's," gusts of stereotype movements.
I was not neutral either, for which I do not apologize. Mescaline and I were more often at odds with each other than together. I was shaken, broken, but I refused to be taken in by it.
Tawdry, its spectacle. Moreover it was enough to uncover one's eyes not to see any more of the stupid phantasmagoria. Inharmonious mescaline, an alkaloid derived from the Peyotl which contains six, was really like a robot. It knew only how to do certain things.
Yet I had come prepared to admire. I was confident. But that day my cells were brayed, buffeted, sabotaged, sent into convulsions. I felt them being caressed, being subjected to constant wrenchings. Mescaline wanted my full consent. To enjoy a drug one must enjoy being a subject. To me it was too much like being on "fatigue duty."
It was with my terrible buffetings that It put on it show. I was the fireworks that despises the pyrotechnist even when it can-be proved that it is itself the pyrotechnist.
I was being shoved about, I was being crumpled. In a daze, I stared at this Brownian movement- disturbance of perception.
I was distraught and tired of being distraught, with my eye at this microscope. What was there supernatural about all this? You scarcely got away from the human state at all. You felt more as if you were caught and held prisoner in some workshop of the brain.
Should I speak of pleasure? It was unpleasant.
Once the agony of the first hour is over (effect of the encounter with the poison), an agony so great that you wonder if you are not going to faint (as some people do, though rarely) you can let yourself be carried along by a certain current which may seem like happiness. Is that what I thought? I am not sure of the contrary. Yet, in my journal, during all those incredible hours, I find these words written more than fifty times, clumsily, and with difficultly : Intolerable, Unbearable.
Such is the price of this paradise (!)