n an unseasonably warm night shortly before Christmas 1966,
I took a large dose of LSD. It was late, around two
o’clock in the morning. Susan went off to sleep, and told me to wake her
if I needed help. A strong wind was rattling the windows and whirling rain
and garbage through the streets. I turned off the lights, lit several
candles, took off my clothes, sat down on a large Turkish cushion. Near me
on the rug stood a bowl with fruit and a glass of water. After a while my
hands started to look strange, a familiar sign that the acid had taken.
Unsuspected ranges of blue, rose, and green played over my arms and legs.
The whole room with its soft dancing lights was steeped in a sort of
visual perfume – tactile, too, as I discovered when I dipped my fingers
in the water and touched them to an apple and a plum. A splatter of rain
against the window passed through me like an exquisite wingbeat. The more
I immersed myself in sensation, the more beautiful and the more subtly
articulated it became. What better setting for the rest of this trip than
under the blanket with Susan? But on the way to the bedroom, I saw my
reflection in a tall mirror, and stopped. It looked like one of those
ithyphallic representations of a pharaoh, made of brass or gold. At the
same time, the dance of light and shadows gave his skin a shifting,
transparent quality, like the wind-ruffled surface of a clear pool of
water. On closer inspection, I saw that the body had breasts, full and
round, like ripe fruit, and the golden phallus was replaced by a
triangular grove of dark pubic hair. Then the breasts were annulled by
thick curls on a broad, heroically muscled chest. The arms, too, were
powerful and adorned with metal bracelets. A peculiarly vaginal wound
opened up in the chest, which was hairless now, with a web of blue veins
beneath the skin, blood flowed down the belly and onto the legs, the body
turned a dull greenish gray, the skin cracked and split, worms swarmed in
and out of the putrefying innards, a new, pink, adolescent body blossomed
out of the corpse, whether a girl’s or a boy’s wasn’t clear,
ballooned into obesity, shrank and shriveled into a withered, hollow-chested
old man with a long, pendant scrotum. I knew that what I was seeing was
the reflection of my thoughts, but that was no comfort, because my
thoughts were no longer mine. Two rooms away, Susan was sleeping. I
started walking in her direction. The dining room was almost
unrecognizable, much too long, the distant door to the bedroom was tiny.
Asleep on the floor, twitching, our sick little dog lay in my path, a
breathing monument of reproach. He had some kind of spastic nerve disease
which, according to the veterinarian, was incurable. Why had I not taken
him to another vet? Because I didn’t care enough. Because I wanted
pleasure and was always banishing pain from my thoughts. Because I would
court pleasure as long as the rack and the scalding oil were out of my
sight. A flash of lightning lit up the apartment. I needed help, fast. Far
off to my left, on a couch, in the glow of a wall lamp, lay the Bible. I
stepped around the twitching dog, walked the three endless steps to the
couch, picked up the black book, sat down, opened the book to a column of
red words which was at the same time a tall building the color of blood,
with empty spaces in place of windows, but of course I knew it was not a
building, this was the Bible and these were the words of God which, once
read, would be words of salvation. Inside each word were letters and
clusters of letters all pulsing their own unpronounceable meanings – stn
thh es gpr – fierce little strongholds for the eye and against the ear,
and that felt extremely uncomfortable. Then a burst of thunder decided the
issue, and the opening phrase stood before me: “Seest thou these great
buildings . . .” which I assumed meant the house of words on the page,
and I thought: How wonderful, this must be God the Father’s house with
its many mansions, and it looked to me like some sort of hotel where a
soul could find shelter from the storm, and maybe a hospital, too, where a
sick dog could be healed. To enter it you had to read with faith in your
heart and fight off any temptation to join the revolt of the parts against
the whole. So I read: “There shall not be left one stone upon another,
that shall not be thrown down . . .”, and as I read, there was a
knocking against the windows, which I knew was the wind, but it was also
the unnamable trying to barge in, and the house of stone and the house of
words were the same thing threatened with ruin, and the words on the page
and the sounds in the room and outside had the same awful meaning. There
was a thumping sound, for instance, which I recognized as the beating of
my heart, but it was also a cosmic drumbeat portending some unimaginable
climax. Nothing was more important now than to keep the building intact by
reading each word in its divinely intended sequence, but a nasty trick was
built into the message: several lines down from the top I was warned not
to “go down into the house neither enter therein,” an instruction that
should have been posted on the roof. But before I could turn back again, I
was unequivocally told not to do that and not to “take up my garment”
either, no doubt meaning the clothes I had dropped in the living room. How
good on such a night to be in the house of God. But the next sentence
chilled me: “Woe to them that are with child and to them that give suck
in those days” – Susan! – and
there was a flash of light followed by a tremendous crash, and that shock
blew away the subtle membrane that sets apart the everyday self from the
deathless soul and the domestic cave from the roofless, bottomless
universe. But my heart was still locked in, pounding the walls like a
desperate prisoner. Nothing was what it was any longer, the masks had
fallen, the dog was all the sickness and suffering of life, and I had been
put naked into the world to take care of it and had made such a sorry mess
of it through the aeons, and now I had swallowed a poison concealed in a
sugar cube that was setting free a horrific power that had lain encoded in
words from the beginning of time, the same power that had created the
world and was now tearing it back into chaos. I shut the book, as if to
clamp shut the mouth of God, but the message continued in the steady
scratching of the dog’s claws, the fiendish whistling and howling
outside. Why, when I still had the chance, hadn’t I taken my stand with
the letters against the text? Their revolt might have made other meanings,
other outcomes possible. Now it was said and done, irrevocable, written in
blood, and it was my fault, because my nerves and cells were the conduits
by which the world was not only perceived but sustained, and I had
swallowed a poison which no human body was meant to absorb and which was
now racing through the most sacred and secret halls of the temple like an
invading army, trampling the statuary, burning the scriptures, and it wasn’t
my body only that was going down in thunder and ruin, it was the world.
There was a shout on the street, a metallic clang. A police car passed by
with a wailing siren. And then a new element appeared in the text, a hard
bang on the door, and another one, and a rustling, swishing sound in the
hallway, and a third, brutal bang -- and this, too, was my doing, though I
didn’t know how I had done it or whose dread arrival those knocks were
portending. I didn’t answer, or even dare to move. I thought of calling
Susan for help. She was asleep. Asleep! How was this possible? How could
the same divine power (mine!?) crush the world in one hand and cradle it
in another? And how could I dare disturb the grace that protected her? Let
her at least be saved . . .
I was lying prostrate against the back of the couch,
with my arms stretched out right and left on the pillows in the position
of the crucified. The mind, racing in circles, and seeing itself trapped
and exposed on all sides, cowered, and waited, voiceless, for the final judgment. The dog whimpered in his sleep, bared his fangs, let out a
growling sniff. Then our white cat came in from the bedroom, stopped at
the sight of me, fixed me with his malachite eyes, or was it my eyes that
had caught his, was I reeling him in telepathically, for he was walking
toward me now, leaped up on the couch, put the cool weight of a paw on my
leg, stepped onto my groin, my belly, my chest, and lowered himself down
on my stomach, purring, and still steadily gazing into my eyes. Impossible
to approximate, now, in the dim light of memory and with words, the
strangeness of that stare. It was not to be read, that was one
essential ingredient. It was not an element in the mad text of
destruction. Nor was it blank. It came from a different world altogether,
a world untouched by symbols and signs, and because that world perceived
me, I knew that I existed in it, and that in it all was well. The gaze was
not mute, it spoke plainly in the pure language of being – as all
creatures and things do, as indeed thunder and lightning do, so that, if
we could hear and perceive the good news that streams in upon us
perpetually from all directions, if we were not forever distracted by the
lure and the menace of the non-existent, we would not be in need of
salvation; but here the eternal message was being delivered to my address,
with perfect detachment and at the same time with something like
magisterial command, as if to say: this is for you, and I will not be
refused. Calmly, the animal outgazed my terror. I, too, became calm.
Outside, the storm abated and gave way to a steady strong rain that
clattered on the tin window-sill. For a long time, I listened to the
rumbling swell and subsidence of the cat’s pleasure. He was flexing his
front paws in rhythmic alternation, sinking the tips of his claws into my
chest.
n an unseasonably warm night shortly before Christmas 1966,
I took a large dose of LSD. It was late, around two
o’clock in the morning. Susan went off to sleep, and told me to wake her
if I needed help. A strong wind was rattling the windows and whirling rain
and garbage through the streets. I turned off the lights, lit several
candles, took off my clothes, sat down on a large Turkish cushion. Near me
on the rug stood a bowl with fruit and a glass of water. After a while my
hands started to look strange, a familiar sign that the acid had taken.
Unsuspected ranges of blue, rose, and green played over my arms and legs.
The whole room with its soft dancing lights was steeped in a sort of
visual perfume – tactile, too, as I discovered when I dipped my fingers
in the water and touched them to an apple and a plum. A splatter of rain
against the window passed through me like an exquisite wingbeat. The more
I immersed myself in sensation, the more beautiful and the more subtly
articulated it became. What better setting for the rest of this trip than
under the blanket with Susan? But on the way to the bedroom, I saw my
reflection in a tall mirror, and stopped. It looked like one of those
ithyphallic representations of a pharaoh, made of brass or gold. At the
same time, the dance of light and shadows gave his skin a shifting,
transparent quality, like the wind-ruffled surface of a clear pool of
water. On closer inspection, I saw that the body had breasts, full and
round, like ripe fruit, and the golden phallus was replaced by a
triangular grove of dark pubic hair. Then the breasts were annulled by
thick curls on a broad, heroically muscled chest. The arms, too, were
powerful and adorned with metal bracelets. A peculiarly vaginal wound
opened up in the chest, which was hairless now, with a web of blue veins
beneath the skin, blood flowed down the belly and onto the legs, the body
turned a dull greenish gray, the skin cracked and split, worms swarmed in
and out of the putrefying innards, a new, pink, adolescent body blossomed
out of the corpse, whether a girl’s or a boy’s wasn’t clear,
ballooned into obesity, shrank and shriveled into a withered, hollow-chested
old man with a long, pendant scrotum. I knew that what I was seeing was
the reflection of my thoughts, but that was no comfort, because my
thoughts were no longer mine. Two rooms away, Susan was sleeping. I
started walking in her direction. The dining room was almost
unrecognizable, much too long, the distant door to the bedroom was tiny.
Asleep on the floor, twitching, our sick little dog lay in my path, a
breathing monument of reproach. He had some kind of spastic nerve disease
which, according to the veterinarian, was incurable. Why had I not taken
him to another vet? Because I didn’t care enough. Because I wanted
pleasure and was always banishing pain from my thoughts. Because I would
court pleasure as long as the rack and the scalding oil were out of my
sight. A flash of lightning lit up the apartment. I needed help, fast. Far
off to my left, on a couch, in the glow of a wall lamp, lay the Bible. I
stepped around the twitching dog, walked the three endless steps to the
couch, picked up the black book, sat down, opened the book to a column of
red words which was at the same time a tall building the color of blood,
with empty spaces in place of windows, but of course I knew it was not a
building, this was the Bible and these were the words of God which, once
read, would be words of salvation. Inside each word were letters and
clusters of letters all pulsing their own unpronounceable meanings – stn
thh es gpr – fierce little strongholds for the eye and against the ear,
and that felt extremely uncomfortable. Then a burst of thunder decided the
issue, and the opening phrase stood before me: “Seest thou these great
buildings . . .” which I assumed meant the house of words on the page,
and I thought: How wonderful, this must be God the Father’s house with
its many mansions, and it looked to me like some sort of hotel where a
soul could find shelter from the storm, and maybe a hospital, too, where a
sick dog could be healed. To enter it you had to read with faith in your
heart and fight off any temptation to join the revolt of the parts against
the whole. So I read: “There shall not be left one stone upon another,
that shall not be thrown down . . .”, and as I read, there was a
knocking against the windows, which I knew was the wind, but it was also
the unnamable trying to barge in, and the house of stone and the house of
words were the same thing threatened with ruin, and the words on the page
and the sounds in the room and outside had the same awful meaning. There
was a thumping sound, for instance, which I recognized as the beating of
my heart, but it was also a cosmic drumbeat portending some unimaginable
climax. Nothing was more important now than to keep the building intact by
reading each word in its divinely intended sequence, but a nasty trick was
built into the message: several lines down from the top I was warned not
to “go down into the house neither enter therein,” an instruction that
should have been posted on the roof. But before I could turn back again, I
was unequivocally told not to do that and not to “take up my garment”
either, no doubt meaning the clothes I had dropped in the living room. How
good on such a night to be in the house of God. But the next sentence
chilled me: “Woe to them that are with child and to them that give suck
in those days” – Susan! – and
there was a flash of light followed by a tremendous crash, and that shock
blew away the subtle membrane that sets apart the everyday self from the
deathless soul and the domestic cave from the roofless, bottomless
universe. But my heart was still locked in, pounding the walls like a
desperate prisoner. Nothing was what it was any longer, the masks had
fallen, the dog was all the sickness and suffering of life, and I had been
put naked into the world to take care of it and had made such a sorry mess
of it through the aeons, and now I had swallowed a poison concealed in a
sugar cube that was setting free a horrific power that had lain encoded in
words from the beginning of time, the same power that had created the
world and was now tearing it back into chaos. I shut the book, as if to
clamp shut the mouth of God, but the message continued in the steady
scratching of the dog’s claws, the fiendish whistling and howling
outside. Why, when I still had the chance, hadn’t I taken my stand with
the letters against the text? Their revolt might have made other meanings,
other outcomes possible. Now it was said and done, irrevocable, written in
blood, and it was my fault, because my nerves and cells were the conduits
by which the world was not only perceived but sustained, and I had
swallowed a poison which no human body was meant to absorb and which was
now racing through the most sacred and secret halls of the temple like an
invading army, trampling the statuary, burning the scriptures, and it wasn’t
my body only that was going down in thunder and ruin, it was the world.
There was a shout on the street, a metallic clang. A police car passed by
with a wailing siren. And then a new element appeared in the text, a hard
bang on the door, and another one, and a rustling, swishing sound in the
hallway, and a third, brutal bang -- and this, too, was my doing, though I
didn’t know how I had done it or whose dread arrival those knocks were
portending. I didn’t answer, or even dare to move. I thought of calling
Susan for help. She was asleep. Asleep! How was this possible? How could
the same divine power (mine!?) crush the world in one hand and cradle it
in another? And how could I dare disturb the grace that protected her? Let
her at least be saved . . .
