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cais's review
5.0
Michaux's middle-age experiments with mescaline were not fun (“Should I speak of pleasure? It was unpleasant.”), but they were fascinating enough that he wrote extensively about them, then went on to try hashish (for the sake of comparison) and then mescaline again. It's wild and chaotic, but, amazingly, he is able to articulate the chaos in a way that is as intelligible and insightful as such writing can be. His accompanying drawings are also fascinating. He doesn’t romanticize drug taking at all or claim that his experiences are akin to those of, say, a heroin addict’s, which are far more likely to be lethal than enlightening. His reflections are about how, as Octavio Paz writes in his outstanding introduction, “The so-called human experience is a point of intersection with other forces.”
In lesser hands this book could have been nonsensical, a don't-try-this-at-home-kids absurdity. However, Michaux was a poet and an intelligent man who was able to describe such deeply inner experiences in a way that is perceptive and compelling.
In lesser hands this book could have been nonsensical, a don't-try-this-at-home-kids absurdity. However, Michaux was a poet and an intelligent man who was able to describe such deeply inner experiences in a way that is perceptive and compelling.
schmidtmark56's review
5.0
I let others do drugs so I don't have to. Then they create something simultaneously wonderfully creative and alarmingly unnerving. This book is just that. The author takes you with him on his journey with the drug mescaline, a hallucinogen which elongates everything impossibly. This work is perhaps one of the greatest about the dream state or that blurry border between the conscious and unconscious, between the boring order of normal life and the unendurable erraticism of true chaos.
daviddavidkatzman's review
5.0
Beautiful dwarves in skin-tight gold lamé pantsuits. Cats who scratch out dreams on your wooden leg. Pleistocene fists pounding frenetic rhythms across your naked skin. Heretic wishes left to their own devices. Soaring stories built second by second moment by moment until nothing is left but a wish a thought a syllable and a sill upon which sits the things left over, after, above and between, always between never complete, always left over, never beginning, only between the things, the shape of a shape, the crevasse where the self is/was, the outside not the inside, the space around a cup that doesn’t exist that does that only exists that only does that leaves you helpless that symmetric asymptotic line drawn from your self to the outside world, the hypothetical world, the assumption, the consuming assumption that things that things where they are they go with you. Get closer get closer never reaching your destination never like Zeno suggested despite the disproof you can never reach a thing no matter how many distances you cut in half and in half because nothing touches electrons repel atoms mingle like gyroscopes fighting touching. Mescaline dreams mescaline the subject of a poetic exploration, a dissertation, a beautiful torture, a gorgeous nightmare, a shape that leaves you shattered, ego spread across the bathroom floor like blood wrists cut and bled out the victim, the deserving victim, realizing the Hindu vision, the multiplicity of oneness, the artificiality, the psychosis of psychedelia, the psychosis of
patience, my friend, have patience with the impossible. An overdose left disturbed for months, hashish for the simpler times, for the investigation, the examination, looking close closer the resolution is infinite, don’t look at the subject, behind it, that figure, that ambiguity, the mountains in the distance, the sound of feet walking, the feeling of shapes and leaving a taste in your mouth of curiosity, the infinite confidence to leap into your mind and perhaps never come back, you might not come back, the fever, the speed of Mescaline, unquenchable, irresistible, to know what it’s like to not be/ing able to stop your mind, to be quiet to have peace, every moment an eternity so painful so beautiful you are dying over and over you can’t get off the merry-go-round, but the face of death is…later…is worth it, you touched it, you survived the terror of insanity so you know, you walked the fragile surface of consciousness, you understand, every surface is essential and simultaneously nothing, you understand
madness. It’s always interruption. The indisputable concretely is disputable. During nirvana, after samsara, the challenge being can you take a piece with you and understanding the artificiality so that maybe you might just love a little bit more and live a little bit more and breath a little bit more. Or you might just be a douchebag. It really depends. 50/50 odds, I say. Everyone has to make up what’s in their own mind.
patience, my friend, have patience with the impossible. An overdose left disturbed for months, hashish for the simpler times, for the investigation, the examination, looking close closer the resolution is infinite, don’t look at the subject, behind it, that figure, that ambiguity, the mountains in the distance, the sound of feet walking, the feeling of shapes and leaving a taste in your mouth of curiosity, the infinite confidence to leap into your mind and perhaps never come back, you might not come back, the fever, the speed of Mescaline, unquenchable, irresistible, to know what it’s like to not be/ing able to stop your mind, to be quiet to have peace, every moment an eternity so painful so beautiful you are dying over and over you can’t get off the merry-go-round, but the face of death is…later…is worth it, you touched it, you survived the terror of insanity so you know, you walked the fragile surface of consciousness, you understand, every surface is essential and simultaneously nothing, you understand
madness. It’s always interruption. The indisputable concretely is disputable. During nirvana, after samsara, the challenge being can you take a piece with you and understanding the artificiality so that maybe you might just love a little bit more and live a little bit more and breath a little bit more. Or you might just be a douchebag. It really depends. 50/50 odds, I say. Everyone has to make up what’s in their own mind.
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