Mushrooms

Written with Static

At Destiny, a perfect summer afternoon -- the meadow was empty because most people had gone down to the river to swim. We took a middling dose of mushrooms and lounged around on the yoga platform, looking at the view of the distant hills through the trees.

It was beautiful -- not enough to get nauseous, just a gentle rolling high that turned the left brain off and opened up the right-brain world. Mushrooms make it impossible to talk -- they make it impossible to think in narrative: how fabulous! what a relief! No language, no way to process linguistically, just a total rest from the incessant nattering. Most of my life I've privileged my left brain, protected it, nurtured, it, encouraged it; now I have no way to shut off and make it leave me in peace. Finally, a little hiatus.

Afterwards, we were thinking about that, and what happens. It's as if the organizing energy of the left brain moves over to the right brain: everything around you comes into clear focus -- nature looks incredible, fresh, bright, new. You see things clearly, and then the right brain tries to organize them into visual patterns -- complicated designs like extraordinary rugs: do rug designers do mushrooms or hashish to visualize those patterns they weave?

What you see is the same and different. Your brain sees things as unique, and then puts them in patterns to make them the same. There's a constant push/pull -- your brain wants both things, two opposite desires pulsing in different directions. But they're yoked together and can never be separated. They're in balance, taking turns, in a trembling equilibrium. Unique/universal. It's a new vision of the yin yang.
Our natural urge is to desire the new and then to familiarize it: we want the new, and yet we resist it when we want the comfort of the familiar. We want this in what we see around us, and in our art, and we want it in ourselves: we want to be special, but we want to be the same as everyone else.

Our human energy bursts in those two different directions at once. It explains the artistic avant garde, and the cooptation of new ideas. It explains the dialectic and the dionysian. But in order for it all to work, you have to let the right brain loose sometimes.