CHAPTER III
CHARACTERISTICS OF MESCALINE
A blow in the face makes you see a thousand candles or a thousand stars but not a cart-load of soot or an act of one of Shakespeare's plays, even abridged.
When the action of mescaline is at its height, it produces blinding images, or images ringed with lightning, trenches of fire, as well as, in the distance, lilliputian* men whose motions are more like those of the pistons of an engine than human gestures.
Any amount of crystals, and sooner or later everything turns into crystals.
Growing weaker, but still very turbulent, mescaline spreads out great sheets of colors with millions of distinct points and assembles crowds with the agitation of crowds. Later it is capable only of the agitation of marching caterpillars. The forms almost always innumerable, incredibly elongated, exaggeratedly frail and slender, hollowed out in the middle, disclosing hair-thin minarettes, columns like needles, little pinnacles that are altogether too dainty, lozenges, and all the things that are thinnest and most elongated, elongated and frail. Often instead of being hollowed out they are broken** in the middle or in several places. For any one who has taken mescaline, even once, the arts of Mexico (Zapotec and Toltec statues; Aztec temples), with their multiple broken lines, become eloquent, take on new significance.
Still weaker, mescaline makes everything tremble with constant little tremblings, oscillations, junctions -disjunctions. There is a permanent miniature seism which makes one think of a ruinform process, yet in spite of all the fissures nothing ever collapses.
*Would the lilliputian image, common to most toximanias, be due to the fact that the normal enlargement of the prodigiously small image does not occur, the enlarging mechanism (or that seems to enlarge) no longer functioning.
** If you tried to draw a straight line the vibration would keep breaking it.
Still later mescaline makes everything undulate* with an almost imperceptible microscopic swell. On this sort of conveyer belt that unrolls from one extreme of the field of vision to the other, one can recognize, according to individual temperament, one's own preoccupations, one's last impressions (importance of last) resulting from occurrences of the moment (fortuitous noises, words heard, or even thoughts transmitted, for one has become extremely receptive) one can, as I say, recognize anything, provided only that it is in myriads, as for instance crowds of people, flowerbeds, cities, herds, unploughed fields, gods or, for those who have no imagination or refuse to use it, simply innumerable points of color.
A certain thickness, but nothing actually in relief, and surfaces which would be slightly disagreeable to the touch.
Just as mescaline has a style of its own, there are colors that belong to it. Show them to any one who has taken mescaline and he will recognize them. (Not always the very same but with a strong family resemblance.)
First of all the gaudy ones**. Strident reds pass next to emphatic greens. It is an optical melodrama. The repulsive ones next. Precious stones in quantities, patently false, are an inexhaustible offering.
Growing still weaker, mescaline will distribute, to the point of surfeit, watered silks, dubious satins, nickled objects with the nickle chipped, and linings in flashy tones. At moments, very intense pure colors, but sooner or later the bazar returns, nullifying the effect of the former beauty. Whatever the color, the sweetish tone, a regular cajoling through the eyes, is the most common.
It will enrage any one who detests easy seductions.
Why then go looking for the titillation of the nerves?
Mescaline provokes a vibratory state. Multiple vibrations, almost overwhelming at first, of abnormal amplitude and with a great many points. This should be tested
* The impression of undulation, Dr. Ajuriaguerra suggests, might be due to the irregular appearance of points on a surface.
** Is it owing to the frequent proximity of primary colors perhaps? See Rouhier, Le Peyotl. La Plante qui fait les yeux emerveillés. (The Plant that fills the eyes with wonder.)
experimentally. It is curious that in the case of mescaline one is conscious of this state but not in epilepsy when a person simply falls. The electrical discharge of the neurons is probably less massive and the waves different. The state of schizophrenics should also be examined from this point of view.
The fantastic elongations of the images in mescalinian vision might be related to the points. At the beginning of the intoxication the points are very high and, several following one after the other, very close together. The visual image is (or is accompanied by a phenomenon that is) in the same size-category as these enlarged vibrations. This would also explain the wave-image interference as well as the wave-thought interference (though disturbed to the point of madness) phenomena noted in several places in this book (see page 64, Chapt. V).
It is curious that in the Yoga technique (and a few others), keeping the eyes in an excessively convergent position while contemplating, without moving, the tip of one's nose, is sufficient by this abuse of the eyeballs, to give rise to visions and hallucinations and to provoke the second state, a sort of autohypnosis. The reverse of the path taken by the drug. Mescaline goes from the optical cortex toward the eye, the other from the eye to the optical cortex.
"Come back." said the gourou to whom I had been entrusted, "when, after meditating in this position, you see a light there." "There" being my forehead. I am reminded of this now. For, once more, through excessive pride I probably missed something essential. It was distasteful to me to employ a method so entirely corporeal. Stupidity of the noble attitude ! One must, without aim or shame, traverse the mediocre human condition from beginning to end. Freeing oneself from it afterwards, not before ... if that is really what one should do.
* * *
Mescaline diminishes the imagination. It castrates, desensualizes the image. It makes images that are a hundred percent pure. Laboratory experiments.
Normally mine, like those of a great many people, like those of non-scientists, invariably live in odors, sounds, contacts, warmth, flesh, and mingle with everything.
But Mescaline makes images so completely stripped of the pleasant fur of sensation, and so wholly visual that they are the vehicles of the purely mental, of the abstract, of demonstration.
It is also the enemy of poetry, of meditation, and above all of mystery. Perhaps it does differ a little. Thus a cavalcade though not conducive to meditation might seem for anyone who seized the meaning of it, as slow as the interminable death of an old man. But, oh the speed ! An opium addict questioned me about mescaline. Does it, he wanted to know, excite you or does it make you calm (that is, capable of grandeur) ? At my reply, he scornfully changed the subject.
* * *
Mescaline is a disorder of composition. It elaborates stupidly. Elementary, mentally deficient, senile.
Associated with words. it proceeds by enumeration. Associated with space and representation, it draws by means of repetition. And by means of symmetry (symmetry and more symmetry!)
The seism which at first attacked the visual cortex, now sends out its vibrations all over. You can situate certain ones. Where the others go you can't tell. You suspect that many workshops are no longer intact. Word workshops suffer and many useful barriers fall. Words you dislike keep coming, colors and tints you have always shunned.
Two weeks after the last experiment, I still could not write without constant repetitions and in the most banal fashion, due largely to a lack of images, natural ones, images I would have needed as examples of laws I thought I had discovered. Or else I would revert to images imposed on me by the drug, but without being able to take any liberties with them, no possible variations -imagination completely paralyzed.
Even in conversation, though more talkative, less reserved, I had become destitute of images. "The chaste plant*" (Rouhier) is the terrain and the triumph of the abstract.
In spite of appearances, one is in the abstract, in the swift abstract. (Especially swift if there are no words being dragged along.) One cannot "settle anywhere. These beings are diagrams; these forms, rough drafts. Here, image does not summon image. An image appears, only if evoked by a thought, a word, an abstraction. **
The image : fixation of the idea. The abstract is a way of remaining in motion. The image is a means of getting anchored, the return to solid ground. Without images abstraction would not prove its point. You couldn't tell whether it were really an idea or an ignis fatuus. The image is the proof of its successful arrival, its landing, its well-earned rest. One advances only by means of abstractions, but one finds rest only in the image.
In mescaline, the images are epiphenomina (abundant and encumbering), but it is the abstract that counts.
One is inundated with light. The most commmonplace thought, for one is very matter-of-fact, after a few rebounds becomes metaphysical. Bounding and rebounding on other ideas which serve as springboards, grasping connections instantaneously, it never stops advancing at a dizzy pace, never stops illuminating, discovering, flying along with an all devouring appetite for detection, so that the optical carnival accompanying it, or the idiotic stammerings of language it has superseded, are promptly forgotten.
The additions to the principal idea develop with pheno
* Chaste, anti-erotic, and though it leaves a man's virility intact, even coition does not succeed in de-abstracting it.
**Contrary to what has long been believed, clairvoyance (see Dr. Jarricot's observations) is not visual. The clairvoyant suddenly (by intuition) knows, let us say, that a certain person whose name is mentioned, is pregnant. Afterwards, badly and gropingly, and erroneously he manufactures images at random : congestion of the ovaries, various anatomic details based on an insufficient stock of scientific knowledge and faultily described. First man knows, then he understands, last he sees, or thinks he sees, and embroiders. In the same way the true poet creates, then understands . . . sometimes.
minal speed, the emendations still more quickly, and sudden backward flashes like lightning, fall on all the things that had remained in shadow, making them glaringly evident. In this abstract, unlike the visions which vainly try to keep up with it, there is na stammering, no circus parade. The prodigious speed of the visions is laughable, a snail, compared to that of the abstract idea which, constantly in the lead, ignores them as it pursues its headlong flight.
Through mescaline, the intelligence, instead of being constructive, is above all interested in covering ground. It excels in covering ground. Never resting, non-contemplative. It is without the power of being panoramic, of having an all-embracing view, of working synoptically. This traverser of space lacks a critical sense (but is critical of the other intelligence), pursues its course and plunges ahead without ever looking at anything around it. I myself, misled by the light it threw on everything, on every problem (and everything became a problem presented for my solution), I yielded to the temptation (which I know so well, but against which I am usually on my guard) of believing in each new enlightenment which is really an illusion, or at best the forerunner of new obscurities and to be avoided like the pest. What irony ! It was mescaline, through it own mescalinian defect, which gave me the illusion of understanding mescaline, and plunged me into explanations in the first place, and led me to make a hundred reflections ... and this book.
Difficult to introduce an image into mescaline so that it will stay, but when it is a question of ideas, even fleeting ones, mescaline will realize them, will "image" them, on the spot. Those at least that can circulate on mescaline's vibratory ground, where they will be shaken in ludicrous idiotic crowds, but more idiotic still, any one who allows himself to be distracted by them.
The Huichols, the Tahahumaras, and many other Mexican tribes were formerly in the habit of coming together for the same mental pabulum. Or was it the same? They sought a god seeking the Peyotl, and the other gods, incited by the solemnity of the sacramental act, were never far off. The gods of volcanos, of fire, of harvests, of rain, the god of the stars and of the Universe. It was enough for an Indian to pronounce the name of the god he worshipped, for the god, by order of the word, to appear.
What we learn in demonology seems now quite clear that the name is everything. Here verified.
The demon, once called, even if he does not exist, will appear to any one who, being in the second state, has had the imprudence or the audacity of pronouncing his name, No matter whether the trance comes from religious exhaltation, through the dance, or as practiced in all parts of the world according to ritual, simply from having first chewed a few datura leaves, or the flowering tips of Indian hemp.
As for the Westerner today, so long an unbeliever in the gods and now incapable of imagining a form in which they might appear to him, what his mind grasps, the only god he can still conceive, a god it would be vain to worship, is infinite relativity, the unending cascade, the cascade of causes and effects, or rather of what goes before and of what comes after, where everything is driving wheel and follower wheel. Besides this constant passage of wheel into wheel, erroneously called dispersion, is disturbing to many people, for their minds are bent on assembling. Not enjoying this speed, incapable of flying, they simply go to sleep as they would in a train.
In place of gods : Pullulation and Time.
In mescaline time is immense. The fantasie acceleration of the images and ideas has created it. Now it is supreme. The rocket heads of the ideas shoot through it at a prodigious speed without affecting it. This is the kind of time God would inhabit if he existed ...
The other time does not touch him.
On that sensational Sunday when I was able to change times, I lived in security.
A new time, a time which does not seem in the least inconceivable but, on the contrary, seems like true time rediscovered. The_ incommensurable is natural. It alone is natural. Strange as it may be, you have come home. Of this you are sure.
Space ! Space too has changed. Why couldn't mescaline be satisfied with space and, like ether, let you plunge into it and live like a prince in complete and lordly isolation?
Why can't mescaline stop bothering us with all these images? Absurd desire, for this space is determined by these omnipresent images. I am a continent of points. I am walled in by cliffs of points. An endless wall of points is my frontier.
Pullulation ! Pullulation everywhere. Pullulation and no possibility of *escape
Space that is teeming, a space of gestation, of transformation, of multiplication, whose swarming, even if ,only an illusion, would give a better idea than our ordinary vision of what the Cosmos is like. A quick, a unique means (though people who are homesick for infinity find it more or less in all drugs) of entering into communication with corporeal infinity. This stellar interior is so amazing, its motions so accelerated, that it is not recognized as such. Cellular autoscopy, or beyond the cellular where energies are discerned better than particles, and where the images released by an overactive mind are instantly superposed as on a screen.
In this crumblejumble, directed more by the waves than by spherules, there reigns at moments a no less unbearable and infinite rectilinearity.
The symmetry (more mechanical than mental, arranged for the most part without rhyme or reason and wildly repetitive) might well be derived from the waves, the attention following their interminable chain, and jumping to the right and to the left of an imaginary line. Undulation is a model of symmetry, but, since there are a hundred others in the body and in the mind, this explanation may be discarded.
The repetition (also creating symmetries) is far more curious. No question, naturally, of figures being repeated only three of four times. In mescaline there is no repitition under a hundred, and what is more, the last one is only
*See at the end the remarks by Be. S. on space, determined, according to him, not by the swarming images, but chiefly by a durable system tending to return, which he calls "Privileged image." This he believes has its analogy in the image of the "furrow" in my visions, which is both variable and permanent.
provisional, only until one is conscious of it, then immediately it goes on repeating itself two, three, four hundred times.
Strange multiplication (this entire universe is born by means of spasmodic gestation).
The successive generations of a body, the successive multiplications of a figure (geometric or natural) are accomplished by means of successive discharges, with a complete halt between each one, or after each series, then starting up again almost immediately, and the whole thing at so incredible a speed as to be at times almost instantaneous. Generally each phase is clearly visible, clean cut, startling : speed and increment by quanta of energy.
No matter what happens in this space, you have plenty of time to view the spectacle. With your new time, with your minutes made up of three million instants, you will never be in a hurry, with your attention superdivided you will never be outdistanced.
And yet, little by little, a strange slow rhythm, evidence of the complex harmonies that install themselves in ones being in the most extraordinary situations (in fact the body takes more than three hours to find this rhythm), establishes itself in you and forms the cycle of four minutes, which seems much longer. No matter what the spectacle you were watching in your vision, after that length of time it will suffer a general overthrow. Another composition will at once take its place, will be developed, will be repeated until a new upheaval occurs and your attention will turn to the next sight. It is then that you give a low sigh, a sigh of extreme relief which is very moving to anyone who hears it and understands. But the new presentation will follow without delay. Here it comes it emerges, grows distinct, is developed, is manipulated, changes, multiplies, then in turn, when its time has run out, it collapses and is not seen again.
These spectacles thus oddly embedded in their four or three minute nest, come only when mescaline has already grown somewhat calmer. Very different its beginning, its full force, the height of its tempest. Then the whole theater of action, dislocated by the other jolts, by the other "seizures" suffered in every part of one's being,
breaks up and becomes meaningless. Multiplicity and overlapping are at work in you.
At the same minute, that is, in the twenty minutes which equal one ordinary minute, in a third of a second perhaps, I feel a frisson (a shiver), I see the word shiver (frissoner), I see little "friss's" written to infinity, and "s's" whistling, but making no sound. At the same time I am being raked, I am being jerked, I fall on the rocks, I want to shout aloud, and everything that is happening has been happening since the beginning of the world, it is suffix and confectioner at the same time, and innumerable scumblings are produced, and superlatively is what is, and it is certain, absolutely certain, superlatively in the uninterrupted jolts ...
Thus the overstimulating drug strikes a great many keys of my head, but does not know how to play, does not know how to make me play.
Endlessly broken up, our attempts at composition admit only this one constant ... Very ... It is very ... Everything is very ...
* * *
What is a person saying when he says "infinite being?"
I should be boasting if I spoke more presumptuously about the infinite than about the finite. I never touched anything. I was in an infinity mechanism. Everything that appeared was caught in this mechanism. And I am also boasting when I say "everything." Always what was paltry appeared in it rather than what was important.
But contrary to what happens with the finite, it made no difference. In any case the size would not have been greater or any less in need of being stretched out and stretched out and stretched out and forever, forever, forever.
Nor was it because my mind was more receptive, more comprehensive that I had arrived there, but-how shall I put it? - through greater division, and not at all from having desired to touch "infinite being" (?) either, but rather because, against my natural instinct, I had accepted infinite fragmentation, the teeming state composed of what is smallest, which divides and overruns everything.
I was witnessing a "series* in infinity" but it had nothing to do with the magnitude of the pressures, but with, for example, an error, from which, as soon as I was aware of it, I extricated myself only to fall into another, from which, as soon as I was aware of it, I extricated myself, only to become the victim of another, from which, as soon as I was aware of it. I extricated myself, only to be overtaken by another error, from which, as soon as I was aware of it, I extricated myself only to be caught by a new error, from which, as soon as I was aware of it, I extricated myself only to fall into a new error . . . just as I might have gone on indefinitely from one room to another in a palace that had innumerable rooms, but built and visited in such rapid succession that fifty seconds would probably have sufficed. The phenomenon resides precisely in the fact that counting is out of the question. It occurred to me that the madman who, thanks to his madness, knows a similar lightning course, must certainly view with pity the miserable simplification of the reasoning of the normal men around him, who want to have him locked up. And he even allows himself to be committed as just another mistake like the hundreds of mistakes he sees stretching to the horizon in an interminable suite that discourages all speech. Because of his sense of infinity he offers no resistance.
Toward the fifth hour after taking mescaline, and after the first tremendous shocks and the extensive developments that follow, in your fatigue (and possibly due to fatigue) the phenomenon of ideas gravitating like planets is striking and easy to follow (except when they launch their dance in earnest). An idea arrives, quickly ceases to exist. When it returns a few minutes later it seems absolutely new. Just before it disappears again you have a fugitive notion, if not of recognizing it, at least of having passed close to it before. But when? Three minutes ago? An hour ago?
* Series says clearly enough that there will be an end. But having, by the speed of its components, got beyond the possibility of measurement and precluded the very idea of counting and appraising, it became a "model" of the infinite.
Peace through a kind of dotage.
It is probably in the same way an old man repeats a phrase a hundred times, an idea that ninety-nine different zones of darkness have successively hidden from him, so that it comes back to him as many times, fresh and spontaneous. All men know this uncontrollable rambling, but are able to keep it to themselves. The old, no longer having the same control, betray themselves. As for a child, why should he hide this. For him it is his circus.
Any one who takes mescaline will learn all about his own inner dotage, much exaggerated because of the speed, or because the system of brakes controlling this speed has stopped functioning.
But what of the inventor who is said to make a discovery by continually thinking about it?
The difference from ordinary dotage, which does not improve the idea no matter how often it returns, is that the inventor or the creator makes a new connection each time the idea passes, accumulating here, taking away there, until, after a number of tentative modifications he has created a work corresponding to his secret desire.
Notwithstanding these ramblings, the apparently planetary revolutions of an accelerated universe are one of the wonders of mescaline. Also, experimentally, mescaline creates the world of relativity. Makes a display of relativity. Suddenly, forty minutes after mescaline has been taken, the speed of the images is fantastically increased and time turned topsyturvy. Everything is modified. Ideas are balls rather than ideas. The improbable unreality of reality is obvious, violent. The swift, shining thoughts revolve like astral bodies.
Coming out of mescaline you know better than any Buddhist that everything is nothing but appearance. What came before was only the illusion of health. What has just been was only the illusion of the drug. You are converted.
It is the next day and the following days that you are better able to call to mind the train of thought during the constant acceleration. At the time the speed of appearance and disappearance is too great.
Thoughts go by at a tremendous rate, each element perceptible for only an instant. One must catch enough on the fly to make a mental connection, to join together properly or to disjoin. It was in this way I spent the first days of my return to "mental health," for I almost forgot to say that mescaline is an experiment in madness. Its use in the study of mental disease is still uncommon, but will not remain so much longer. It is "experimental schitzophrenia."
I found this out later, otherwise certain of its tricks, for which I was unprepared, would have surprised me less, and would perhaps hive seemed less worth noticing.
It told me more about the madness of others than about my own, and more about symptoms than fundamentals. Above ill it threw light on mental automatisms and on the constitution of different mentalities. For the first time I understood from within that animal, till now so strange and false, that is called an orator. I seemed to feel how irresistible must be the propensity for eloquence in certain people. Mescaline acted in such i way that it gave me the desire to mike proclamations. On whit? On anything at ill. It was always coming back to that, insisting upon my being i ranter, but about what I did not know or cire. Particularly, as everything was to be proclaimed as fact, positively, absolutely ... J. P. speaks of the absolute and universal certainty he hid felt. But I didn't. My notes, written on the instant, are full of superlatives (which tormented me), but up in the air, related to nothing, to none of my thoughts, and couldn't be used in my book attached to nothing.
I wonder by what means mescaline provoked superlatives in me? Was it through the intensity of its pressure and through the proportional and twin intensity of my resistance? Quite likely. Most orators hive high blood pressure.
If I hid yielded to it, I should have been well on the road to megalomania.
The strings that set the megalomaniac in motion were being jerked, and violently. Violently and mechanically. But I did not respond. One good reason would have influenced me more easily.
The great demolisher also put me into certain normal states, which for me were not normal.
Taking mescaline or some other well chosen drug will one day perhaps be required in university stadiums and by the future "manipulators" of men.
More than anything else mescaline demolished some of my effectual barriers, the ones that make me myself and not one of the others among my possible "me's." It took me weeks and weeks to reconstruct them and to shut myself inside them again.
Just as some modern painter whom you begin by detesting, find incongruous and reject, later on spoils for you the painters who formerly satisfied you, makes them seem dull and too facile by comparison, so the day following my experiment with mescaline no painting seemed interesting (except to a mild degree, mediumistic pictures). They all appeared to me stupidly (and wilfully!) directed away from the innumerable, if not from the infinite.
Those that two days before were the most beautiful, because the most sober, were now the ones that seemed the most foreign to me, the most miserably in accord with man's superficial appearances, his chest, his hands, his feet, . . . or with his house. In the same way the most beautiful pages of literature seemed devoid of interest, blind, beggarly and cramped.
The swarming, even though unconscious, was still in me, preventing any communication with simplicity, while greatness too closely linked to measurement had no longer any meaning. It was lost to me.
* * *
I was still writing in snatches. It was impossible for me to compose continuously and freely. Everything came in snatches, very small snatches, isolated words, bits of sentences, comparisons, sometimes only the correction of a word that had arrived half an hour before, never several whole sentences one after the other. Nevertheless, at the end of three weeks, these little scraps "held" a subject, having been guided secretly but deliberately by the compass of an unforgettable North.
In short, I had no longer any authority over words, I no longer knew how to manage them. Fairwell to writing !
After other barriers, my barrier against approximation, against "almost" was no longer working.
Like my unknown brothers of Zacatecas, mentioned in 1737 by P. de Arlegui in the Chronica de la Provincia de Zacatecas, as being "incapable when drunk on their horrible Peyotl, of keeping a secret," I too, for the first time in my life, preferred telling a secret to keeping it. Even worse. I could hardly wait to divulge secrets which, though personal it is true, I had promised myself never to reveal.
Releasing them was like a sort of ejaculation.
My barrier of hesitations and tergiversations no longer existed either. I would answer letters by a "yes" or a "no," according to circumstances. without looking for complexities. I approached people wide open, enjoying laying myself open, of seeing them open, deplorable state that I hope soon to change.
* * *
Most of mescaline's images had disappeared. Certain ones would still come and go, but I hardly noticed, being neither proud nor ashamed of them. If I began to draw, a compelling symmetry, foreign to me before, warned me that I was still living in the memory of those images.
Fully conscious, only the furrow still remained, the furrow of the fracture, distinct as on the first day. The pullulations after an apparent eclipse, had returned, pullulation of the infinitely small, that of the infinitely possible, that of the infinitely farther on.
But the furrow remained the central problem.
Could this trench, which had been so dominant, and so constant for hours on end, and whose existence I would have sworn was more evident than my own, could it have been a sign made to me by the baboon Mescaline through its silly images?
Or was it perhaps only a simple comparison? A wordreflection such as, "I am more open" that had occurred to me and out of which It had made images without end, and a film.
But why, although my reflections varied, did mescaline always come back to this same, or an equivalent, image?
And now after more than twenty days, whether I am lying down, sitting, or walking, the furrow is there, passing straight through my head without paying any attention to the brain or to the diencophalon or to the gray matter which must certainly be there, splitting me from one end to the other, joining me to infinity, by an infinite path, a magnetic field strangely linked to . . . linked to what?
* * *
Little by little I am finding myself again. Though not yet fully recuperated, I am getting farther from this drug which is not the drug for me. My drug is myself, which mescaline banishes*. I am getting away from that which mescaline banishes.* I am getting away from that change of character which mescaline created in me. I am returning to my slowness, to my filters, to the bridges I build between things, and which I prefer to the things themselves, and above all I am farther from the aseptic images of mescaline, I am returning to my own great mixer that intoxicates me as mescaline never can.
The incessant mingling of little rivulets converging from all over, is what keeps the "health" resevoirs sweet, true infinity, and it is only their great variety that prevents them from seeming infinite.
Joy -for the first time in my life the a joy of discovering that I have a will, of recovering my will, about which I had always been unjust (no matter) and not very astute either. My great discovery after the drug : will power. At present I am conscious of it everywhere, I feel myself full of it, finding it where I least suspected its existence.
Should I perhaps add this? I keep seeing cats on the high branches of the trees in my garden even when there are none there. Sometimes pigeons. More than once I have had to pick up my binoculars -these pseudo cats are such perfect imitations !
* There must be temperaments that are more mescalinian than others, who, due perhaps to adrenochrome, a hormone whose composition is very similar to mescaline, from a word immediately form a picture. I know several. Races too, perhaps.