Deep Impact

I'll call this a level 2. I consider this my most introspective trip, so I'll provide a little bit of background:

A few months ago I suffered a health set-back from which I am just recently starting to recover. It limited my mobility and left me thinking alot about limitation and mortality in general. The human situation seemed increasingly frustrating and absurd; a spark of creative innocence tethered to base impulses and perishable matter, it's bounderies marked off by worldly needs and pressures. And what does it amount to, and what is my place in it, and blah-de-blah-blah. It's no exaggeration to say that such matters were heavy on my mind for several months.

So I thought it was high time for a dose of crap-fruit to help me work some things through, but I waited for my health concerns to relent (lest they negatively affect the experience). This month, the time seemed right, so I had a modest dose of cubes.

On the way up, I began watching "Deep Impact" on video. I'd only rented it because I thought the action and visuals would give me some needed distraction. But luck was truely on my side in providing such profitable viewing. I was transfixed by Tea Leoni's portrayal of a driven but distant woman forced by the total upheaval of her existance to tap heroic inner reserves and rediscover her humanity. I felt this actress could say a half dozen things with a single look. I found myself rewinding over and over to watch the father/daughter reconciliation scene on the beach. At the time, it seemed that I could hardly have found a more apt model of the human condition.

This trip, I also decided to try drawing something. I highly recommend this. I was fascinated to watch the fluidity which shrooms lent to my use of lines and shapes. The image that emerged was of a young woman in an inegmatic expression of pious contemplation. Actually, she looks like a refugee from a psychedelic 60's folk art poster, love-beads and all. The draft bore an interesting array of technical defects, but I liked it enough to try and finish it sober.

In so doing, I've been forced to wonder just what notion inspired this anachronistic image. It's hard to retain now that the trip is fading from memory. But, I think I can relate the gyst:

There is a type of love the counter-culture types of my parent's generation used to talk about; a new (or very old) concept of what love is supposed to be, that they intuitively believed would transform human existance. Psychedelics permitted them to grasp this elusive concept, if fleetingly. Perhaps it is the very spirit of the "theos" in "entheogen"; or the "agape" written of by the Greeks. In any case, it's integration into workaday reality proved inconsistant, lending itself to facile as well as cogent interpretations.

That is because this confident and serene love, which peers with X-ray vision into the noblest elements of our common heritage, eludes most of us outside the transient throes of certain chemically or religiously induced altered states. Perhaps only at some future time will technology and the wisest strains of thought (whatever they may be) synchretize to propel humanity to a higher vantage point; where our distant descendants will abide in this spirit continuously. Then none need fear expressing it in a halting or inept way.

Such are the thoughts that unfold as I attempt to complete the wistful, shroom-addled portrait of a distant descendant. But as well, I must point out that earthier observations presented themselves on this trip, particularly in my reactions to Tea Leoni's "Impact" character. I felt I was shown something in the ancient, tribal elements of human nature that I have subconsciously (fearfully?) insulated myself from by my use of technology and my penchant for abstraction. Amongst the baseness that lurks in the primitive impulses of the human animal, there of course shines an element of nobility as well. I realized that I need not always go so far afield in search of it, even though that may seem the "safe" way out.

Hence the trans-human and the human-affirming came together in this single experience; possibly my most valuable trip to date. I can't claim it brought sweetness and light forth from a rough situation, but perhaps it helped me figure out where to begin looking for it myself.

Peace all,
Chako