Threshold

by Rob Doyle

  I went back outside. In the storm’s fury it felt as if our survival depended on the continuation of our ecstasy, on not giving in to terror. The taita played a cheerful melody on his harmonica, the music rising and falling from the roar of the wind and the crash of thunder. I wondered at what I was seeing, these unassuming people from the cities and islands coming here to connect with something grand and ancient within themselves, communing with an alien superconsciousness that dwelled inside a jungle plant. There was all of Colombia here: the blood of Spain, Africa, the Caribbean and the tribal Amazon; negro and blanco and moreno and mestizo.

  Then I looked at Consuelo and became afraid. She was sitting in her chair on the veranda, facing out at the booming night, lit up in flashes of lightning. She was jerking back and forth with unreal speed. Her face contorted in grimaces and her body spasmed violently. She clawed at the air and moaned. Dark-clothed, she appeared as a black hole about to swallow itself, or through which something terrible was struggling to be born – an uncanny form raging to break through to our world.

  On the second night smoking DMT with Matt in Rosslare Harbour, when I worked up the courage for a breakthrough dose, this is what happened: I encountered a being so beyond my capacity to comprehend it, so dwarfing of my categories of thought and belief, that it may as well have been a god. Scepticism was no longer possible: I was flung into the presence of something whose very existence was an affront to all that my society believed in, all it didn’t believe in. There was no message, no communication in the encounter beyond that which can be summed up in a single word: Behold. Intuitively I knew I was in a realm absolutely without morality, beyond good and evil, where my values, beliefs and concerns were terrifyingly insignificant. The encounter left me dumbfounded, aghast, and haunted by questions I suspected would never yield adequate answers.

  It is an admission of failure when a writer calls something indescribable, yet there are limits to what can be performed by language, and categories of experience that can only be gestured towards, never conveyed in words. Describing psychedelic experiences to those who have never had them is as futile as describing music to someone who was born deaf. This is what makes DMT in particular so maddening: the inherent frustration of being unable to talk about it. Just as the encounter is ineffable, the implications of the experience can only be met with scepticism if one voices them in public, so fantastically at odds are they with the orthodox models by which we conceive of reality. I consider myself a sceptical person, allergic to deluded and wishful thinking, the saccharine credulities of the New Age and the self-serving beliefs of religion. Nevertheless, after smoking DMT, I found myself giving serious consideration to the most outré speculations: for instance, that the drug allows us to perceive dark matter or parallel universes; that it is a technology, perhaps put on earth by extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings, or sent from the future, that causes hidden realms to become visible; that what we call reality is merely one small pocket of a much vaster, teeming multiverse that we will continue to inhabit after physical death. In the wake of my experiences, I became newly interested in the cosmologies of Buddhism and other ancient belief systems, for the first time wondering if such multidimensional universes and their inhabitants were not metaphorical supplements to the core philosophies but attempts at literal truth. I wondered if yogis and Buddhist monks in states of deep meditation perhaps flooded their brains with a superabundance of DMT, allowing them to perceive the astonishing realms glimpsed by smokers of the drug.

  From the perspective of the scientific, materialist paradigm that has prevailed in the Western world for three hundred years, no such phenomena are possible. All that can happen through the use of psychedelic drugs, we are told, is agitations of brain chemistry, the production of mere hallucinations. If one remains within that paradigm, claims about the ontological implications of DMT are hokum. However, in a sort of gnostic double bind, it is extremely difficult to maintain faith in the validity of that paradigm after peering behind the veil. The DMT rush is a genuinely gnostic experience: it can only be known directly, and when known directly it cannot be denied. Lived experience indicates that the drug is not psychedelic, not ‘mind-manifesting’ at all: it opens on to an abyssal and disturbing beyond.

  Certainly, the drug’s appalling and inexplicable nature encourages obsession. After taking it, I found myself thinking about little else for weeks afterwards; trying to steer every conversation towards DMT; mentioning it in every email I sent; feeling exasperated with anyone who was incurious. I sent long emails to writers and artists I admired, urging them to try the drug; I fought the temptation to flood social media with similarly evangelical appeals. It was the same for Matt and other friends of mine. A group of us would text and email each other late into the night, sharing theories, speculations and experiences, linking to articles or YouTube videos, quoting books on DMT, comparing Buddhist mandalas and hieroglyphic imagery. We set up an email forum to share this stuff. It began to feel like the inauguration of a cult.

  On a Friday afternoon towards the end of May, I met Matt and our friends Fran and Paul on a cafe terrace on South William Street. Dublin was lit up with bare arms, bright dresses, the colour and Eros of imminent summer. We took a LUAS to Stoneybatter and walked up Parkgate Street, into Phoenix Park.

  Paul would not be smoking DMT, but he wanted to show us the megalithic tomb nestled away in a corner of the park. Paul was a long-term mental-health patient who resided in St Mary’s Hospital on the park’s inner fringe. He had been diagnosed with paranoid psychosis two decades earlier, initiating a total exclusion from the official world of jobs, relationships, property and communal engagement. For all his life he had heard voices, seen spirits and entities, roamed invisible landscapes. In other cultures he would have been a shaman, living with dignity and experimental curiosity on the edge of a society that respected him; here in the Irish twenty-first century he was a nobody – medicated, pitied and marginalised, his lived truth explained away as developmental pathology and aberrant brain function. His life was a case study in hellish unhappiness. Once he had figuratively described his status in the universe: he was, he told me, the worst knacker’s one-eyed donkey. He wandered in the Phoenix Park most days, drinking cans and smoking the odd joint, and spent his mornings painting. Fran, his oldest friend, had recently developed a website to display and sell the work. A few days earlier, Paul had sent me a text:

  Hi RoB fran was tellin me aBout yeR dmt BReak thRU i have Books Coming out my eaRs on this occult stuff and a lot to say too plus some pRaCiCal adviCe on the pitfalls of having a mystic expeRienCe so you dont end up like me mistakes Cost a lot at this point so Be CaReful fuCk nietzsChe

  As we descended into a glen, Fran pointed towards a copse through which the sun was dancing: it was the park’s herd of deer, migrating slowly to the forested areas.

  ‘Knockmaroon, the tomb place is called,’ said Paul as we walked on. He was interested in our experiences on DMT and reckoned it would be a good spot at which to smoke it. He told us that the tomb dated back to some three thousand years bc, and suggested that it was an ‘energy point’. I liked the sound of it, but really I was happy just to be back in the Phoenix Park, in the afternoon sunshine, with the sounds of the city in the distance.

  The tomb was a thick, raised slab of rock, fringed by a low fence, unseen from the footpaths that wound through the hills in that part of the park. Before turning off my phone, I opened a news app and saw that an airliner had just gone down over the Mediterranean, killing everyone on board.

  ‘I’m getting that dread,’ I said.

  ‘It’s normal,’ said Matt.

  ‘It’s bad,’ I said. ‘I always imagine the worst.’

  ‘Breathe,’ he said.

  ‘There are things in my mind I probably shouldn’t see.’

  ‘It’s not about your mind.’

  We sat down in a sunlit clearing, strewing our briefcases and bags around us. Fran had got off early from his ‘soul-destroy
ing’ job maintaining surveillance systems, and was relaxed and eager. He had smoked DMT for the first time a week earlier with Matt: the experience, he said, had been ‘metaphysically shocking’. He wanted to try it again and not be so dazzled this time, so he could observe more. After his first experience he had texted me:

  My impression: 100% there is categorically another consciousness present AND they have better computers than we do.

  None of us would bother with lower doses this time: 70 mg was what Matt measured out on the Digi scales. Fran went first. We sat in silence as he closed his eyes and commenced his trip. Afterwards, he shook his head. ‘Wow,’ he kept saying. He laughed, frowned, laughed again. He spoke about bodhisattvas, negative space, Quetzalcóatl, tokamak machines, quantum computing, the dance of Shiva, the gods of ancient Egypt, game theory, Heidegger’s nightmares, the eternal return, CERN and the God particle, war machines, the Red Book that Carl Jung composed in secret, glossolalia, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, the Rig Veda, the rose and the fire.

  He said, ‘Tell me this: what the hell would Richard Dawkins say if he smoked that?’

  Matt laughed.

  ‘Seriously,’ said Fran.

  ‘You can still be an atheist up to forty milligrams,’ Matt said.

  ‘The world in its nakedness is vast, vivid and shocking,’ said Paul.

  Matt went next. Upon smoking the DMT, he was taken yet again to what he now called ‘the Machine’ – a realm of code, unfathomable technology, and busy, whirring worker entities who, he had come to believe, were exerting themselves in the construction of reality – our reality and perhaps many others too. The world we inhabited was a kind of simulation, Matt concluded. He speculated that when we died we would go straight there, to the Machine, and learn what happened next. At one point he mentioned being shown the ‘source code’.

  ‘This world seems to be only some sort of minor realm,’ he said. ‘Like a suburb. The Kilnamanagh of the megaverse.’

  ‘People are still bleeding, though,’ said Paul. ‘There’s still responsibility.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean the game’s not rigged.’

  ‘It makes it more sinister,’ said Fran.

  Paul said, ‘Each of us is guilty before the others, and I more so than the rest of them.’

  Matt thought for a moment. He said, ‘There’s no comfort in all this. It was reassuring when I still believed that this material world was all there is, and we’re annihilated at death. There was an ease in thinking nothing matters, the whole Western nihilism rap. Which is the fucking orthodoxy, the basic view, even if they dress it up as humanist progressivism. It’s so much scarier to think that everything matters, every little thing is of the utmost consequence. That’s the shocker. Now there’s, yeah, responsibility, and no escape.’

  All was quiet in the park. It was my turn. I am a fearful person. I imagine the worst, anticipate abysmal horrors and fates worse than death. DMT was the most bizarre phenomenon I had confronted in my life, eerier than the life forms lurking in the deepest ocean trenches, weirder than the recesses of space or the unconscious mind. I wanted everyone to try it, and then have a global conversation, the human race applying its brightest minds to the mystery. Everything would change, it seemed to me then: the science books would demand drastic revisions; even the religions would appear simplistic and naive in the cosmologies they posited. It wasn’t that Nietzsche, Sartre and Descartes had been wrong about everything: they’d simply lacked the technology we had now. I took a deep breath. Matt tapped the pale-orange powder into the pipe bowl. He held the lighter as I drew on the translucent pipe and watched the bowl clouding up, then took all the smoke into my lungs, tasting plastic. Matt withdrew and I lay back on the ground. The afternoon sun was high above, the sky clear and bright. When I couldn’t hold it any longer I let the smoke plume from my nostrils, out into the blue. I recalled what a white-haired San Diego hippy had told me once in Dharamsala – unless you’re worried you’ve taken too much, you haven’t taken enough. There was no point being afraid – it was too late. My palms dampened and my heart rate accelerated. The blue sky above me began to dissolve, and as it filled with something ancient and nameless the quickening came on – a sense of imminent and awesome power. I knew it was going to be overwhelming like never before. And then I began to be pulled out past it all, into the unfathomable, with the sense, euphoric and terrifying, that everything was possible again.

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to everyone who helped or supported me in writing this book, not least my editor Alexa von Hirschberg for her faith, passion and encouragement, and Alexandra Pringle, Marigold Atkey, Callie Garnett and all the team at Bloomsbury. Thank you to my agent Sam Copeland, and to Silvia Crompton for copyediting. Thank you to Brendan Barrington for consistently superb editorial input when parts of the book were published in The Dublin Review. Herzlichen Dank to Róisín Kiberd for friendship, love, mutation and support, along with continuous intellectual and comedic stimulation. Special thanks to Simon Kelly, Andy West and Phil Kelly for generously reading and commenting on the book as I wrote it, often chapter by chapter. Thank you to Alice Zeniter for advocacy of my work, even before I’d ever published anything. Thank you as ever to my parents, Jimmy and Antoinette. For inspiration and support of various kinds, thank you to Katie Standen, John Holten, Liam Cagney, Geoff Dyer, Ángela Rivera Izquierdo, Mike McCormack, Simon Brennan, Joanna Walsh, Dave Banim, Arnold Thomas Fanning, Cormac O’Síocháin, Lisa McInerney, Teddy Wayne, Alex Donald, and Joseph O’Connor. I am grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland for their generous financial assistance, and to Sinéad Mac Aodha, Oona Frawley, Literature Ireland, and everyone who was involved in the residencies I availed of while writing the book: at the University of Maynooth; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Les Récollets in Paris; and the Literarische Colloquium Berlin.

  Note on the Author

  Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916–2016’. Doyle has adapted it for film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle’s collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the anthology The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He lives in Berlin.

  robdoyle.net

  @RobDoyle1

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  First published in Great Britain 2020

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  Extracts from the following used with kind permission:

  True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. Copyright © 1993 by Terence McKenna. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

  The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna. Copyright © 1991 by Terence McKenna. Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 by Georges Bataille. English translation copyright © 1985 by the University of Minnesota. Originally published in George Bataille’s Oevres complets; copyright © 1970 by Editions Gallimard.

  DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, M.D. published by Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company, © 2000. All rights reserved. http://www.Innertraditions.com Reprinted with permission of publisher.

  Nadja by André Breton, translated by Richard Howard. English translation copyright © 1960 by Grove Press. Original publication copyright © 1928 by Librarie Gallimard. Used by permission of Grove Atlantic.

  I Love Dick by Chris Kraus. Copyright © 1997,
2006 by Chris Kraus. Used by permission of Serpent’s Tail (UK) and Semiotext(e) (US and Canada).

  ‘Mirror in February’ by Thomas Kinsella. Originally published by Dolmen Press in Downstream; copyright © 1962 by Thomas Kinsella. Used by permission of the author.

  George Bataille: Essential Writings by Michael Richardson. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Richardson. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Sage Publishing and Grasset.

  Robert Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations compiled and translated by Melville House Publishing. ‘The Last Interview’ originally published by Playboy Mexico; copyright © 2003 by Monica Maristain. Used by permission of Melville House Publishing.

  The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Copyright © 1965, 1966 by Thomas Pynchon. Used by permission of Melanie Jackson Agency.

  Tres by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Laura Healy, copyright © 2000 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño, translation copyright © 2011 by Laura Healy. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Tres by Roberto Bolaño. Copyright © The Estate of Roberto Bolaño, 2000, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

  ‘The Sea Close By’ in ‘Summer’, 1954 by Albert Camus, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy © 1970, used by permission of Penguin Random House LLC (US) and the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited on behalf of the Camus estate. Lyrical and Critical Essays copyright © 1950, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1959, 1963 by Editions Gallimard.

  Rob Doyle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  For legal purposes the Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page