Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  Sam was asking me, "Would you like to sit here for a bit, just to get your bearings?"

  We were inside the park, and he was pointing to the base of a big oak tree. I spread my raincoat on the ground and sat with my back against the tree trunk, Sam next to me. We were surrounded by trees - eucalyptus, live-oak, cypress, others I couldn't identify - and by grass growing in at least five shades of green.

  Across the path from us was another large oak, and as I looked up at it, I saw - with Van Gogh eyes - energy moving up the trunk, out each branch, bursting into tiny, leaf-shaped explosions; a tree massively still, yet alive with continuous, urgent motion. I knew that what I was looking at was real; I had just forgotten how to see it.

  (Years later, at a museum exhibit of Morris Graves' paintings, I would hold my breath for a stunned moment at my first sight of his incredible pine trees. Another one who had remembered how to see!)

  It's some kind of life-force; is it what they call the etheric, the life-body? Is there some way I can see that continuous movement all the time, not just when I take a drug?

  The answer presented itself instantly, "All you have to do is take the time to pay full attention."

  Tracing with my eyes the line of a thick lower branch as it rose, giving birth to increasingly slender extensions, I found that I could also hear it as a line of music, a single note branching into an elaboration of harmonizing notes.

  I remembered standing outside the walls of the girl's boarding school I had attended in Canada, when I was 16, looking up at the sky where a bird was riding a high air current, and discovering that I could mentally translate its line of flight into sound.

  "Try something, Alice," said Sam. It was funny, hearing him use my name. In fact, now that I thought about it, I couldn't remember his ever having called me Alice before.

  My, my! Apparently it takes a courageous leap into the depths of the unknown, or whatever it is I'm doing today, before Doctor Golding is going to rack his brain for whatever the hell my name is!

  I giggled, but decided not to share the joke; it was too complicated. Besides, I didn't mind Sam not having used my name until now. It was part of his peculiar brand of shyness.

  I smiled at him, "Yes?"

  "Hold your hand up in front of you and look at it."

  That seemed simple enough. I held up my right hand and froze in astonishment. It was the dear, strong, pianist-square hand I was used to, but the entire surface of it was a mass of infinitely tiny points in incredibly rapid motion. I knew what I was seeing; I didn't have to check it out with anyone else.

  "My God! So that's what atoms look like!"

  I turned my head and met the biggest Sam grin I had ever seen.

  He's so pleased - this must be wonderful for him, too - seeing someone opening up to all this for the first time.

  I went back to my hand, watching the extraordinary energies bursting through and around the skin. Then I looked at the big oak tree, at all the other trees and their leaves, at the grass around us; everything, everywhere, was surging with this continuous movement.

  Everything is energy, energy which assumes the shapes of grass blades and rabbits and human bodies and rocks, but we move around in a world which we've learned to see as stable, quiet, solid. Wonder at what age we begin to screen out this other reality level? Must be very early.

  "Care to share some thoughts?" I realized that Sam was being very considerate, wanting to know what was going on, yet determined not to intrude more than necessary. I felt a rush of warmth for this dear, stubborn, brilliant maverick, this so very odd man out, who had gone to a lot of trouble to open these doors for me.

  I looked into his eyes and said, "Thank you, Sam. Thank you very much for giving me this day." He blinked, then rubbed his nose vigorously, mumbling that the day wasn't over yet; there was still a long way to go.

  "Sam, there's a thing I've got to tell you before I forget it, because it seems important."

  "Okay - say on."

  "You know that everything I've been experiencing is new and - well - every time I turn around, I see something I didn't expect to see - ?"

  Sam was sitting beside me, head bent, listening.

  "The funny thing is that, despite all the newness, there's something about all of it that feels -

  well, the only way I can put it is that it's like coming home. As if there's some part of me that already knows - knows this territory, - and it's saying Oh yes, of course! Almost a kind of remembering -!"

  Sam was nodding, "That happened to me, too, the first time. A feeling of familiarity. I'm used to it, now. I mean, I'm used to the idea that somewhere in my soul I see this way all the time, but the conscious mind has learned to screen it out. Maybe it hasn't the survival value that the ordinary way of seeing does."

  "Why wouldn't it have survival value?"

  "Well," said Sam, getting to his feet and reaching down for my raincoat, "If you think about it, in this state a man-eating tiger could very well appear the epitome of beauty and enchantment, and a person might just stand there in awe and appreciation - right? - at the ruby-red tongue and the softly glowing ivory fangs - 'Tiger, tiger, burning bright' - and there goes one member of the human race, too busy being full of wonder to notice that he is about to become lunch."

  I was hooting with laughter at Sam's tiger image, when something said, "Careful," and I checked myself as a group of four people walked by on the sidewalk; they were wearing tweeds and raincoats and looking over at us. I found myself doing for the first time something that would, many years later, become a habit - scanning my surroundings to pick up, as best I could, the reality level being experienced by others, then moving body and adjusting face to fit in with that level, in order to be not noticed, not demanding of attention. The people who had passed us were conveying a mixture of amusement, disapproval, boredom and curiosity.

  Nothing troublesome. Just a reminder to keep my laughter and talking at a polite and unobtrusive level.

  "Oops," I muttered to Sam, taking my raincoat from him and putting it on. As we moved from under the tree, I felt raindrops on my face, and pulled up the hood. Sam took my hand.

  We walked slowly. The tree trunks were black in the rain; there was fresh grass beneath my feet and nobody around. I went ahead, needing to be alone for a few moments. Moving over green-jeweled hillocks, I remembered how tired I always used to feel, as a child, when I was climbing any kind of rise. How tired I was most of the time, as a child.

  Here, in this quiet dripping wood, I was stepping with a sure lightness, a lover making herself known to the body of the beloved. I didn't have to think about whether the ground was sloping up or down, or whether there might be stone or stick to avoid; my feet were taking care of all that. They knew how to go and where to go and I was walking in pure pleasure.

  A knowing spread from the soles of my feet, up my legs and into the rest of me, that the earth I walked on was indeed a body, a living body, that it was a sentient thing, with a consciousness of a kind I could not yet comprehend, and that it truly was The Mother.

  I stopped and waited for Sam to catch up.

  We were deep in Golden Gate Park, walking down the side of a road, not talking, just listening to the breathing of wet trees and other growing things, when just ahead of us there was a harsh screeching of car brakes, followed by the terrible, unmistakable sound of an animal injured unto death. We rounded a curve and stopped.

  A man in an overcoat, obviously the driver of the braking car, was squatting in the road, one hand on his car bumper, the other hovering helplessly over the body of a panting, squeaking dog which was trying to die, to get past the pain and go, and on the sloping hill to our right, frozen under the dripping trees, were three young women in raincoats. A yellow raincoat uppermost, just below her a red raincoat, and to the side of that one, a white raincoat. They stood like figures in a Greek tragedy, a silent, stricken chorus, hands to their mouths.

  While we stood there, waiting for the little dog to be rel
eased, I became aware that all living things around us - every tree, bird and insect - had gone quiet, clenching with the struggle of the dog. All of us were trying to push his soul free of the body, free of the pain, and I knew when he'd made it because suddenly I could feel everything relax and let go. One bird chirped, then the woods were filled again with bird sounds and the croaking of tree-frogs.

  There arose in me then a certainty that all life on this planet is connected, all the time, at some unconscious level; that whatever is felt by a single living one of us is experienced, in some way I couldn't define, by everything else that lives.

  I didn't try at that moment to formulate it, to put the right words to it. I was just aware of being taught something I was meant to learn and remember. I had read it a thousand times in as many places; it was an old, lovely cliche - "No man is an island" - and all that. Now I was being shown the truth behind the cliche, and it went farther than the poet had implied. It wasn't just human life we were connected with; it was everything alive.

  There was the sound of a woman's voice, calling out in the woods, not very far away. Calling for her dog, whose still body lay on the road before six people who were standing around in the rain, crying quietly to themselves.

  As we walked slowly past the car, past the crouched driver, past the now moving figures on the hill, I realized something else. I told Sam what I had felt while the dog was dying, the sense of everything around us squeezing tight, holding its breath.

  "When the dog died, it was all right again," I told him, " mean, it isn't death that is the - the terrible thing, the enemy; it's pain. The trees and everything else around me, I could feel them all start breathing again when the pain stopped."

  We walked in silence for a few moments, then Sam said, "I remember seeing a dead bird lying in the grass, once, in the middle of a peyote session. I stopped to look at it because I wanted to understand death, to know what it was, what it seemed like when I was seeing differently. I was looking down at the bird and it came to me that all the parts of the body were being dissolved back into the earth, some of them very fast, some of them slowly; it was all going to return, one way or another, to the earth, and that that's the way it's supposed to happen. The life that used to be in the bird belonged somewhere else, and it had gone there, and what was left, the physical part, was going back to where IT belonged. There was a rightness about it.

  Death was simply a moving from one state to another."

  I nodded, remembering some of the phrases I'd read in books and articles about psychedelic experiences, phrases like "Everything's all right just exactly the way it is," and the equally infuriating, "I'm okay, you're okay," which had always sounded unbearably fatuous and self-satisfied. I'd often thought angrily that the writers had conveniently forgotten about the babies in Calcutta garbage cans, sorrow and hurt and loneliness, and the rest of a planetful of miseries. I'd said to myself, here's some whacked-out idiot rhapsodizing about life being all right just the way it is. It had never stopped me from reading about such experiences, but my liberal soul had always ground its teeth at that aspect of the reports.

  Now - now I would have to take it all back, all that resentment, because I was beginning to understand. I stopped in the road and looked at Sam and looked past him, and around and up at the grey sky and knew that everything in the world was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing; that the universe was on course, and that there was a Mind somewhere that knew everything that happened because it was everything that happened, and that, whether I understood it with my intellect or not, all was well. I simply knew it and I knew that I would try to figure it out later, but that I had to absorb the truth of it now, standing on a wet road in Golden Gate Park with a patient, quiet friend who was waiting to see if there was anything I wanted to tell him.

  I said, "I just understood that it's all going the way it's supposed to be going. Hope that makes sense to you, because it's the only way I can say it, right now."

  Sam nodded again. ã

  We walked on until we found ourselves nearing the California Academy of Sciences, a huge stone building which stands on one side of a circle that includes, at its opposite side, the De Young Museum. In between the two, there is a small park, bare of grass, with a band shell and lots of trees with room under them for chairs, where people sit in the spring and summer and listen to music played from the little stage.

  "Let's go in," said Sam, pulling me up the steps of the Academy. I trotted obediently after him, practicing normal facial expressions, trying to dull my eyes so that they wouldn't lift an innocent bystander off the floor if I should happen to glance his way.

  My God, how do you not broadcast this kind of energy?

  We walked through the immense rotunda without attracting any attention, and Sam led me to the aquarium, which was nice and dark, except for the lights in the fish tanks. I stood in front of a window full of tiny, darting fish and became all the little silver bodies at once.

  How is it I'm aware of being completely me - J can locate my Self, my center -yet, at the same time, I can scatter my consciousness into hundreds of fishes?

  I moved to the next tank, where an immense grouper swam in lonely dignity, and I became the big, ungainly fish, lower jaw protruding. It was a restful place to be, however briefly, because the grouper didn't seem to be particularly involved with anything complicated, like thinking. I looked around for Sam and smiled to see him at another window, as rapt as I had been. I walked over and joined him.

  We stood, side by side, gazing into a tank full of tropical fish, trying to assimilate the extraordinary sight. One creature swam by, wearing a canary yellow bib outlined in velvety black, its mouth a prudish pout;

  behind it came a small gem in bright orange, marked by two broad tapering blue splashes, while above darted several tiny zebra-striped characters. The parade grew more fantastic as we watched: meticulously painted red stripes alternating with black-bordered blue stripes; a pursed blue mouth topped by a fashionable black eye mask, leading a body of blue and yellow stripes, the whole piece of enamelwork finishing in an orange chiffon tail.

  Watching all of it - the designs, the brilliant geometric patterns, the funny, pompous little faces - it occurred to me that the creator of these little bits of sea life had a tremendous sense of humor.

  (It would be a long time before the rest of that train of thought would present itself: how is it that human beings are equipped to see whimsy, beauty and comedy? What is it in us that makes us respond to the colors in nature with awe and delight, and to some natural designs with laughter? What strange quirk was wired into our genes which causes us to see something as funny? Were we made that way because the God-mind wanted company when it laughed?) We moved out of the aquarium and spent time looking at the reptiles in their glass cases. All I could feel was pity and the need to send an apology to them; they belonged out in the woods and the desert, not in here.

  I leaned over the edge of a deep wet pit in the middle of the reptile room and let myself be captured by the crocodile that lay there, unmoving. The beast seemed to be almost entirely stomach; his soul lived in mouth and gullet and intestine, and I was sinking into a stolid heaviness. I broke the contact, shuddering a little.

  Then I found the sea horse tank. I planted myself in front of the delicate grey-brown miniatures and went into a world that tasted of a certain sweetness, then I was feeling the strength, the firmness of the tiny bodies balancing themselves in the water, fins flickering.

  They seemed to carry small sparks of light inside. I laughed to myself.

  Hello, little darlings! Hello, there. My, aren't you just the answer to that ol' heavy in the pit!

  I found Sam again and we wandered through the immense rotunda of the building, past people standing in line for the Planetarium show, and into a portion of the museum which presented dioramas behind glass, showing early cave-dwellers, progressing to later cave-dwellers, all the figures life-sized, caught in the act of doing ordinary daily ta
sks.

  There was no one else in the hall.

  Around us were low walls of polished stone, topped by the glass exhibit cases; there were metal strips running up the edges of the glass. I was looking at the first exhibit - a stone age man wearing animal skins, apparently trying to light a fire - when I began feeling very odd.

  It was as if the center of my body - just above the navel and below the ribcage - was suddenly becoming an empty space, a void. It felt like a rapidly widening hole in me where, seconds before, there had been only humming aliveness. I stepped back from the wall and stood in the middle of the hallway, focusing all my attention on this new sensation.

  In front of me there was now a transparent curtain of pale grey, like silent rain falling, and I could feel the magnificent energy draining out of me. I realized I was beginning to come down, losing my place in the peyote-opened world, and I didn't want that to happen. I looked around me, and a suspicion formed in my mind. I said to Sam, "Excuse me for a moment; I have to try something out, but I'll come right back."

  He looked at me, puzzled, but said nothing. I went down the corridor to the rotunda and kept going until I had drawn almost level with the Planetarium queue. The hollow in my middle was filling in again. I stopped just a few feet behind the last person in the line, feeling the hunger subside. Something was being replenished.

  I looked around me and breathed deeply. The falling grey rain had disappeared. I was a being of energy again, back in the world of the gods. If I'm right about what made this happen, I can test it pretty easily.

  I went back to the hallway where Sam stood waiting for me. I walked slowly past him, continued for a few feet, then turned around again, my question answered. It had taken less than half a minute in this place for the draining sensation to return. I smiled broadly at Sam and said, "I'll explain everything, but I have to get away from here," and took his hand, pulling him out of the corridor and across the rotunda, to where we could lean against a wall while we talked.