You can’t really write about a mushroom trip—or an acid trip for that matter—you’d end up with Alice’ in Wonderland. You also can’t write about dreams—because nobody gives a shit. You can write about what you learned on a mushroom trip, but then you end up with philosophy—à la Aldous Huxley. So bear with me.
Jules is looking at my painting. She’s developing a relationship with it. That’s what you do on mushrooms. You think you have a relationship with something—that isn’t there.
"Come see this," she says.
I can already see it. The forms are changing slightly. I’ve seen it before.
"I think you have some late color in this one." She says this. Late color. As if colors could be late or early? Who ever heard of such a thing? (Starting to sound like Alice?) It goes deeper. "You have some crashable hues," she says. As in: hues..that can crash. Have you ever thought of hues crashing before? Blending, maybe, or hues on a continuum. "This one needs a nap," she says, "before it’s ready. It’s in preparation. It’s still learning." She shakes her head. The painting disgusts her—if anything could right now. She’s not judging it but she can’t look. I can’t look. Not anymore. The crashing and learning and hue-ness of it all is..just..not..lookable at the moment. She drags me to the next.
"This one is middling. Middling shrift and whereabouts. Do you know the play I’m talking about?"
I shake my head yes.
"Torrents of—no. Terrible..nasalnifty—do you have nose spray?"
I move my face in a circle.
"That’s—because I might need some that’s—not an expression. This." She moves my head with her hand, in the exact motion that I made with it, the circle. "Toddlers trying on..tassels might have painted this more clearly because in a minute I might need some—no—it’s clearing up. Ix-nay on the ’ose n’spray."
I’m smiling.
"Do you know that I need you?" Jules asks me, as we’re descending into mushroom-land (hilarity is listed as one of the effects). Side or primary, I’m not sure. "Do you need that I know you?" Oh! That makes sense! How terribly strange (said Alice, to some creature larger than a house, who would normally fit on your fingernail); how terribly, terribly wonderful and strange that one should mix the words and letters around in such haphazard ways—and that such constructions would continue to mean what I originally meant to mean! (Terrible, wonderful, strange.)
"But do you?" she’d say.
"Do you what?"
"Do you..oh..my. What do..you do?" That pause right there would have taken about eight seconds, Normal Conscious Time. Between "do" and "you": "What do.................................you do?"
And the reply would be: "You do."
Then for a while you might think about the construction: "You do you." Which would be followed by infinite thoughts about "Do you do?" This is how mushrooms work. Read those final Aldous Huxley words. You get at a way of thinking—it really is a philosophy—about what a thing is. You make thoughts wherein, finally, the isness of a thing makes sense.
Because there is an elephantness to an elephant.
And a treeness to a tree.
And so on.
It doesn’t make any sense to explain mushroom consciousness or LSD consciousness or Aldous Huxley consciousness to someone who’s not on mushrooms or LSD..or who isn’t Aldous Huxley. It also doesn’t make sense to explain normal consciousness to someone who isn’t on normal consciousness. If you’ve switched consciousnesses you know exactly what I’m saying. If not: it’s like this: when you buy something in present-day American culture, you don’t just give it away unless you think you’re getting something in return. When you make a painting, nowdays, you sell it. You hang it on your wall. You give it to someone you love. You don’t give it to someone you may never see again, who you hardly know.
You’d have to explain that to someone on mushroom consciousness.