REFLECTIONS

On the Probable Importance of Interruptions

The interruption of attention makes them uncertain whether or not someone has entered the room. Becoming suddenly aware that there is someone present they think people have been coming and going as in a windmill. This too is a phenomenon complained of by innumerable psychotics.

It is natural for them to feel that something disagreeable has happened in their absence, that they have been robbed or ill-treated.

The interruption of the consciousness of occupying their own body makes paranoiacs say that their body has been used for strange purposes, that it has been used by others, for others, that it has been violated.

The interruption of observation also produces mentally retarded individuals, those for example who can never learn geometry because the demonstration of the problem requires a constant image and for them the figures are not permanent enough.

The interruption of will-power makes a patient say, "They have gained control of me, they are going to gain control of me." The mere presence of someone is the first encroachment, the beginning of persecution. The rest will follow.

These interruptions of will-power give them a sensation of weakness. Before reasoning on the consequences of this weakness they sense the effect. They no longer feel enough inner strength to defend themselves. They are not sufficiently in possession of their bodies, of their beings. They are being entered. They are being attacked. A mere glance pierces them dangerously.

It takes a very very great deal of strength to guard one's body. A king. who has lost his throne discovers that he has innumerable enemies. Children throw stones at the timorous, dogs snap at their heels, sensing their inadequacy.

What saves one in the case of mescaline poisoning is the lack of duration. If the second state lasted longer, those who take the drug would suffer the permanent ills of the interruption of consciousness and many others. But they do not have enough time to become bound up with the drug.

On Rhythms as Antidotes

Weeks after taking an ordinary dose of Mescaline, if I begin to draw I go on endlessly making parallel lines, precipitate, innumerable, and almost maniacal. Repetitive jitters, as I have called it. But the evening after I had taken six ampules, the evening after the attack that was so severe I was unable to hold a pen (it would not in any case have had any relation to me or set me free) my head was so tired I did not know where to turn for relief. I was experiencing in my head the same useless repetitions which on other days my pen had made visible.

What gave me the greatest relief, even more than recovering bodily sensations, which I had almost entirely failed to do, was to make my hand beat out a rhythm on the woodwork beside my bed.

Its slow unaccustomed rhythm seemed really to raise me from my bed of pain, my drunkard's misery. In a few moments, unbelievably relaxed, I was already feeling the benefit of this happy experiment. In my weakened condition, however, the effort had been too great to be repeated immediately, but I hoped that once reoriented everything would be all right.

The following evening, afraid of the return of that metaphysical fear of the night before, I began again, though it cost me an enormous effort (a wrenching of myself out of my present state), to beat out a few rhythms. The beneficial effect was instantaneous.

Thanks to this expedient I, in turn, dislocated, counterbalanced the infinitely small oscillations that were shaking my thoughts and intoxicating my brain.

I recalled that Chinese saying which had in the past surprised me. "Music is made to moderate." - But I had

remembered it wrong. It says -the idea originating with Yo-Ki : "Music is made to moderate joy." Joy ! Is joy then so exorbitant? Certainly not at that moment. It was my whole being, grown excessive through those monstrous hours, which had to be moderated. With surprising ease, rhythm was soon successful. The man torn to bits and scattered over all the roads of himself was reassembled in an instant and calm restored to him through those ordered sounds.

Till now I had been able by means of drawings to accompany my state of disjunction, never to save myself from it.

The Mountains as antidrug

Next to music (my own rhythm, not that of anyone else) the only thing that was able to steer me away from mescaline, was altitude. Not very high, about 1,500 metres at the Col de la S., where I stayed for a few days. It was a month since the last time I had taken mescaline, but it was still with me. Already on the very first evening in that different air I felt "diverted." The third day mescaline had lost all meaning for me, I no longer understood it.

The mountains ! Of course. Why had I never thought of them before?

As in the past (but more deeply now with a new attentiveness) I felt the same calm returning and with it the same exhilarating uplift for no reason, punctuated by a respiration, sure and slow like a faithful steward. In my new-found strength, I felt a surge toward a great wellbeing, toward a great better, an ineffable better, a better that nothing could ever satisfy but a great ideal. Indeed, in the long run it could very well prove embarrassing.

It is in the mountains that most apparitions of angels and saints occur, and that God talks to his own. Even in the closed cell of a monastery, and even in a hotel room one's "virtue" is tonified, one feels de-perverted. Untitillated. Sound. The natural intensifier of the positive and of energy was at work. I wonder what the effect of a drug would have been in the mountains?

I once more found the qualities I love in the mountains, and they helped me withstand my state of mes-

calinian nerves. The mountains reject what is feverish, exclude the obese. They reject titillation, compromise, flabbiness, the silly "five-and-dime" sentimentality of the world's capitals; capitals are always situated in flat country. The mountains do not like turmoil and prevent one from becoming degraded by it. They are against pleasures won too easily, as if stolen, not paid for in effort. Real antidrug. They suited me . . . anti-complaisant. The mountains stir in one a sort of elementary courage. They make you stand up straight. One cannot live in the mountains without a certain amount of effort. The mountains form, not the belly-man, but the couple, "lungs-heart," the man of courage and of enthusiasm and idealism. One is called to action, victorious action. Here, walking, which everywhere else seems very much like a loss of time, is noble, is like a conquest. They correct at once any tendency to give up. They point the other way. One is ordered to climb, and to climb higher. It is almost a moral necessity.

One is called upon to become once more the pilot of oneself.

I watched the first effects and enjoyed all the oxygenizing obstacles that the virilizing mountains set up against the last mescalinian residues in me. I saw only traces of them, and without understanding them, and generally just when they were disappearing,- as though warned by an increased stability in me and a new strengthening which I so desperately needed and which, without realizing it, I had so longed for.

The privileged image. Observations by Be. S.

Observed in the visions in the dark

a) quantities of fugitive glass beads, enough to make you ashamed of having all that stowed away.

b) a privileged image of very much greater interest.

First on the black ground appear shining beaches, with streaks, extremely close together, cutting across them. The ground growing gradually more animated, the streaks become evolutes of immaterial surfaces, the evolutes alone revealing the surfaces, which grow more and more distinct, and attain the perfection of mathematical models. (For example, the asymptotic figures are of an extraordinary sharpness.) Their number* and the complexity of their configuration increase. There seems to be a continual circulation running through the evolutes, producing a whirling system in perpetual evolution, certain surfaces spreading in sheets, reappearing in profile and becoming the limit of a new whirling system, and all this with the most serene regularity. When the image is in danger of becoming too complicated to be made out, a slight iridescence, the coloring almost imperceptible, makes one system distinguishable from another, or else an immaterial dot appears like a sort of convention, "marking" an evolute and allows one to follow the interlacing of the figures.

Toward the end of the intoxication, the circulatory movement was weaker and the configurations less ornate.

The permanence** and the persistent reappearance of this system (in evolution) is diametrically opposed to the lability of the other images, which come and go.

It is the visualisation of a rhythm***. As soon as I became familiar with this phenomenon, in its basic idea, it seemed to me that the vision was just a way of making a rhythmic evolution tangible, in the same way that the little conventional dot served to make the different whirling systems more distinct. The entire vision was nothing but a visual metaphor.

I had the impression (without placing any faith in it, the experience being, moreover, monotonous in the end and really boring) that this was in a way primordial space and that objective space, and even that of the other visions, were only epiphenomenon.

The affective neutrality, almost indifference, with which I followed the unfolding of the phenomenon was like a

* There may sometimes be a transition from a to b by means of rose-windows becoming gradually brighter.

**Once I was able to follow the phenomenon for almost twenty minutes.

*** If I might comment on these notes of Be. S. I should say that just as mescaline makes images with, or on, ideas one is not aware of and which one does not detect until later, in the same way it makes images on music one does not know and on rhythms one does not hear.

sort of pre-personal state, a "before existence" state, infinitely archaic.

Remaining master of one's mental speed

To judge by mescaline and from what I have learned from other sources, all drugs are modifiers - usually accelerators - of the mind's speed (of images, thoughts, impulses). Mental health on the contrary, would consist in remaining the master of its speed, of their speed.

Without continually putting on the brakes, or "limiters," to use the cybernetic term for retro-active circuits, the mind would soon begin to circulate too fast as it does in dreams when it is out of our control. Its speed must be safeguarded.

Of all animals man is the one that controls the greatest number of road-blocks and of open roads, of Yes's and of No's, of what is permitted and of what is forbidden. A mammal with brakes. The animal that can manage the most complicated instrument-panel.

The chains of reflexes, not really so very reflex at that, take care of things pretty well, but do not take care of everything. What is it in life that is most exhausting and that leads most surely to madness? It is to stay awake. It is to remain too long at one's instrument-panel.

A night's sleep is not too much to allow us to recover from all the continual, the innumerable operations of control, and to submerge (or neutralize) the multitude of impressions, of points of view, of response to stimuli and of the beginnings of thoughts we don't know what to do with and which dreams agitate and more or less stabilize for a little while.

For the supervisor anything that lasts is intolerable. He has to leave. He has to have his rest, or suffer the disease of the controller, that is to say, madness. For he will not just give up. He will get excited, go on some wild escape, talk without stopping or write endlessly, rave, hear voices, plan and undertake all sorts of things, imagine others, as if all the mind asked was to function much, much faster than usual, to function at perhaps its "free" speed, that of nightmares (estimated at fifty times faster than normal) the speed that is born in seconds in the mind of the drowning, the speed that occurs sometimes in the dying and causes delirium, or at moments of great stress and even of sudden joy - the joy that has more than once in an instant and in the most spectacular fashion driven mad those persons who have been unable to "counter" it and all its too marvelous cortege of thoughts.

Certain sentiments, in this case rightly called evil, manufacture certain nervous poisons capable of damaging the controls, like that of the diencephalon, the great regulator and master of sleep, and others besides, and, through the non-resistance of the controls start a new acceleration of ideas over and above the first, thus breaking through all restraint, all self-control.

Not to let themselves be carried away, to remain master of- their; speed seems to be the underlying, the constant and secret preoccupation of all men, no matter how metaphysical or how worldly their occupation may be.

Below the man who thinks, and much deeper down, there is the man who controls, who controls himself.

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