Updated 2 weeks ago
Or is his cosmic egg just a little bit cracked?
Ed. Note: This was the first I’d heard of Terence so it has special significance to me.
Terence on Wikipedia
JUNE 1, 1992
MARK JACOBSON
EIKA AOSHIMA
So then I was under the ground, diving through dirt, past the roots of trees, the bottoms of boulders, the tissues and sinews of the planet. A swooping mole I was, twitch-nosed, incisors chompy, plumbing all geology, fur around my face. The pound got louder (was it the pulse inside my chest, volume turned up past ten? Or more? The beat . . . a beating, boundless Heart!). Then: inhale, exhale, an incredible bellows, rising, falling. (Lungs! Terra breathing!) That’s when I saw them, up ahead, insect faces poked through the thicket, a green-and-black-eyed swarm.
Except the picture smeared, the insect faces (the exoskeletal visage of the onrushing New Order? Memory traces of the Martian ancestors?) stretching like expressionist Silly Putty in the Buñuelian shadow. Away went the unthinkable beating heart, the colossal bellows, and I wasn’t under the ground anymore. I was lying on a mattress in an indifferently furnished room in Occidental, California, the wan morning light clamping down my irises. “It’s something about the earth,” I said.
“It’s something about the earth,” Terence echoed, putting aside his bedside copy of Chaldaean Oracles and Theurgy, his voice that intoxicating, ever-inclusive nasal lope that says: Yes, we share the same dream, so let’s dream some more. Not that my report was particularly unique, at least in the context of these matters. It was quite run-of-the-mill, actually, Terence seemed to indicate, the shamanic empiricist patting the neophyte on his willing, if addled, head: a good beginning, no more. I hadn’t pierced “the chrysanthemum,” which is what the subterranean curtain of insect faces is called. Terence McKenna, of course, has been beyond the chrysanthemum. Way, way beyond it.
Terence has had long-term transit with “the meme-trading, self-transforming machine elves” who live on the other side of the membrane, a race of impish alien tykes who have been known to greet the weary psychonaut effusively, smothering him with wet, gooey leprechaun kisses. Then again, Terence has found himself lying paralyzed on a beach while a crab crawled across the sand and used its pincers to clean all ten of his fingernails. Terence has also felt himself suddenly flying in the company of silvery disks, moving over Soviet Siberia, ahead of him the Great Plain of Shang and red-yellow waste of India, sailing through the sky until he reached the rooftop of his very own house in Boudanath, west of Katmandu, where he encountered a woman in a satin evening dress. “Pure anima,” she was “Kali, Leucothea, something erotic but not human, something addressed to the species and not the individual, glittering with the possibility of cannibalism, madness, space, and extinction.” Then they were fucking, Terence and this wraith woman, their bodies reflected in a cool, obsidian liquid, “a translinguistic matter, the living opalescent excrescence of the alchemical abyss of hyper space.” And through it all Terence heard himself shouting, both a harrowed plea and triumphant declaration: “I am a human being, I am a human being.”
This is how Terence McKenna likes it, where he wants to be. The further gone the better. “I’ve always gravitated to the patently strange,” he says, recalling his voracious intake of Weird Tales, the Book of Knowledge, and creature features during his 1950s “odd kid” upbringing in a remote Colorado town. And likely it’s safe to conclude that few other six foot two fourteen-year-olds in the Rocky Mountain state busied themselves reading Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy on their walk to school, not to mention committing to memory whole swatches of Stephen Dedalus’s well-documented day. In retrospect, Terence assumes the obsessive autodidacticism of youth would have led to “nothing beyond the staid precincts of academia.” Except then, like magic, it wasn’t the ’50s anymore and McKenna was in Berkeley, California, regarding a tiny pink pellet of LSD-25, an encounter that Terence says “would set my course.” Indeed. Now when interviewers ask McKenna, “How many times have you taken LSD?” he replies, “Oh, maybe 150 times when I was young. Not a lot.” Then Terence will go on to define the “heroic dose” of psilocybin mushrooms. “Five dried grams. Five dried grams in silent darkness will flatten the most resistant ego.” Saying things like this is how Terence McKenna makes his living. A semiregular on the spiritualista/new-age lecture circuit, cassettes of Terence’s psychedelic polemics titled The Ineffable Tremendum, have been underground audio staples for some time. But now, as the decade-long Reagan-Bush “war on drugs” staggers under the weight of its own contradictions (as we used to say), lumbering toward what increasingly seems a high tech version of Reefer Madness, Terence McKenna has caught a tiny but unmistakable culture wrinkle (just recently The New York Times ran a full-page, decidedly unjudgmental article denoting LSD “a drug of allure”), and he’s riding it. Within the next year no less than five books detailing McKenna’s primary concerns, not one of them printed on a desktop computer and held together with plastic rings, will be published. One of these, The Archaic Revival, a compendium subtitled “Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History” and blurbed by Tom Robbins as “a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas,” basically circumscribes the territory.
Given all this, what surprise could there be in Terence’s failure to be impressed by my under-the-earth riff? Terence has heard low-level tales like mine from the skulkers who grab his sweater in the supermarket and speak with hot breath about gelatinous hyperspace amorphs when all he’s trying to do is buy some cold cuts and a carton of orange juice. He comes home and his answering machine is clogged with missives from unseen legions pledging undying fealty to “the point man in the great cause to which we fight for.” When you’re penciled in as the Timothy Leary of the ’90s (by Leary himself), acknowledged as the leading spokesman for “the psychedelic position,” people tend to bring you accounts of their drug narratives like chewed bones, then sit there big-eyed and panting, desperate for approval. Likely, the stories have a tendency to run together.
For me though, nearly twenty years from the psychedelic everyday, being under the ground, pressing my suddenly besieged ego to the beating heart and breathing lungs of the planet like some shock-troop extra in a mulch-pile remake of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, had the novelty aspect of a transformative freak-out. One of Terence’s numerous homilies indicates that the N,N-dimethyltryptamine (N,N DMT) experience reveals a world that is not only weirder than we might suppose but weirder than we can suppose. The idea that even if it looks like the discolored dentition of an extinct species and smells like a fill-up of unleaded, it came out of the ground (from the Amazonian chacruna plant, Psychotria viridis), no product of the laboratory but a naturally occurring representative of earthly flora, or to put it in McKenna’s parlance, “a premeditatedly positioned transdimensional doorway to the vegetable mind of the planet”—somehow that made a difference. I mean, it was so Big down there. Big and Dark and Sober and Important and absolutely Other.
Ten minutes it took! Ten minutes to the Gaian womb and back again!
Now it was over and I was glad to see Terence still sitting there, his face not unlike the one you might see on a club fighter who occasionally forgot to keep his left up. After all, you don’t pierce the chrysanthemum a thousand times, wrestle with the Other for twenty-five years without it showing. But no matter, surfacing from my own hollow-earth novel, I was happy to see Terence’s battered mug, his right eye drooping slightly, his hair a rowdy helmet about a narrow, lanternous head, all gangly, as if he had been drawn out on the procrustean bed of psychedelia. He still looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and that was good too because those things had remained the same. As for what’s different—and something very definitely is—well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.
ONE WEEK EARLIER, as I arrived in San Francisco, en route to attend the workshop Terence was teaching at Esalen Institute in Big Sur (Esalen! Forget memory lane, this was the Major Deegan!), I had little inkling that I would find myself under the ground, corkscrewing, like, Jules Vernesville toward the center of the earth. I was more concerned with the air, how it had turned black, at least on the eastern side of the plane. It had been nearly fifteen years since I’d set foot in the Bay Area, and now half of Berkeley—where I’d gone to college and been chased by the police for throwing a brick at Edward Teller’s house—was on fire. It was the worst wildfire in United States history. The “perimeter” of the blaze, someone said, had been established as ranging from Grizzly Peak Boulevard on down to the area behind the Claremont Hotel. “Once lived on Grizzly Peak, behind the Claremont, too,” I told the Hertz man. Driving down the road, I had to flick on the wipers to knock off the floating ash. From miles away, the fire’s destruction was spewing a flood of black feathers over the four-lane freeway.
In view of the current project, the Berkeley pit stop seemed to make sense. After all, Berkeley was where I’d taken most of the acid I took, where I’d eaten peyote, consumed many mushrooms. I’d walked down Dwight Way as the Sun King, whimpered for my mommy in Blake Street bathtubs. My psychedelic past, for years cordoned into a dark and ambivalent corner of my mind, remote (or so I thought) from Pandora’s clutch, lurked in Berkeley. The Sixties are like this youth curse, the way they won’t let you grow into a normal grown-up. You can blame ham-fisted retro-populists like Oliver Stone or the “classic hits” stations that refuse to allow my nine-year-old daughter a chance to hear a new song on the radio and call it her own, but we know it’s us—desperately clinging Peter Pans all. And now, like Ahab strapped to the Whale, those old days beckoned yet again. It seemed no great coincidence that Terence had lived in Berkeley, too, up in the Hills and in a house behind the Park and Shop for years. We were, at least intermittently, contemporaries on the scene. Who knew how many times we’d passed each other on the Ave, stood shoulder-to-shoulder skimming books in Moe’s, hitchhiked to the City, thumbs out on University, attended the same Antonioni movie in Wheeler Auditorium?
But I didn’t go to Berkeley. Friends told me it was full of people who knew a lot about wine and would break my heart. So I never crossed the Bay Bridge, and my heart was breaking anyhow, watching what I took to be a significant portion of my past rain down black and burned.
That’s how it is when you’re trying to redream a bygone dream: one mess of static after another. Whizzing past Garlic World and the stooping artichoke pickers, I stopped at a Safeway to get a piece of sprayed fruit and was immediately confronted by a gauntlet of evangelicals brandishing their Bibles and “just say no” literature. The rest of California, oh, yeah, it all comes back now. I probably would have gotten in and out of the store unscathed if it wasn’t for this Mexican teenager planting his thin body upon the rubber mat of the automatic doorway. He was a Christer, too, but not one of those Cream-of-Wheat-faced fear biters. Such a sweet-looking kid he was, nicely turned out in an over-laundered white shirt and Kiwi-larded boots. “I lost my brother to drugs,” he said to me, holding out his papers. ‘That is why I carry the message of Jesus, so the hellfire of my brother’s final days does not overtake us all. He is coming you know, any day now, and we want to be clean for Him.”
I was about to lurch into my rap, how it is insane to lump all drugs together, when this kid started crying. It was his brother, dead in the street in East L.A., that needle in his arm. Didn’t I want to prevent more horrors like that? “You are a gentleman, I know you understand what I’m talking about.” He reached over and felt my cuff. It was only then I remembered that I had a suit jacket on. Tie too. Somehow, I was under the impression I was wearing a work shirt, cutoff jeans, with hair down to my shoulders. Somehow, I’d managed to forget, yet again, that I was forty-three, not twenty-one, a freak no more but rather a father of three who much to his surprise and chagrin had found himself occasionally worrying about “drugs” in a manner not completely unlike that professed by the most brimstone-laden Falwellian. So, with that sweet-faced Mexican kid moving closer, donation cup in hand, crying about his dead brother, desperate for salvation from the looming hellfire, what was I supposed to tell him, “Maybe next time, I’m already late to talk to a guy whose whole bottom line it is to just say yes”? I just turned and split.
I slapped a Terence McKenna tape into the deck. It was in the middle. The first sentence I heard was: “Without a symbiotic relationship to the biodynamic, God-laden constituency in the exterior natural environment, the unaided human mind is almost certain to fail in its effort to assimilate the mystery of being.” It’s always like that. Let me show you. An experiment. Randomly selected Terence McKenna tape into deck, PLAY pushed. First full sentence: “It’s so counterintuitive, it’s so unexpected, but if ships from Zeta-Retricle were to arrive tomorrow and land on the South Lawn of the White House, it would not change the fact that the DMT flash is the weirdest thing that you can experience this side of the yawning grave.” Oh, that Terence! He’s such a tonic; he really knows how to talk you down from a deficient reality trip. A sudden influx of his Paul Lynde-in-the-planetarium cadence antidotes hours of watching the Clarence Thomas hearings.
The tape I was listening to, Psychedelics Before and After History, contains a relatively succinct rendition of McKenna’s current Ur theory, a flamboyant construct detailing how psilocybin, the psychoactive component present in the stropharia cubensis mushroom, is the missing link in the development of human consciousness. Doggedly comprehensive, it goes like this, more or less: About one hundred thousand years ago, due to the increasing desertification of the African continent, man’s forerunners, the advanced, aboreal primates of the increasingly withering tropical canopy, were pushed southward. Abandoning vegetarianism in favor of a more diversified omnivorous diet, they developed a taste for the beetles and other insects that can be found on the underside of ungulates’ excretion mounds. It was during this process that the primates encountered the cubensis, a coprophilic, or dung-loving, mushroom that is often found growing out of cowpies. They ingested small-to-middling amounts of the psilocybin-containing fungus, which has been proven to increase visual acuity and stimulate sexual desire, two traits that would likely be valuable assets to a baboonlike tribe looking to establish a foothold as hunters and gatherers in a foreign land.
McKenna’s mushroom-as-monolith idea hurtles on from there, an overheated chain of free association. He posits psilocybin’s “pivotal” role in the development of language. Then, getting only slightly more expansive, suggests that mushroom “spore fall” has created an intricately connected matrix spreading across time and space, “a divinely spun cobweb of planetary information that has been the catalyst for everything about us that distinguishes us from other higher primates, for all the mental functions that we associate with humanness.”
This particular spiel was not unknown to me. Much of it is contained in “Having Archaic and Eating It Too,” one of McKenna’s semiprepared talks a couple of us chickens happened to catch a few months earlier. The lecture was delivered inside the Great Hall of Cooper Union where Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James once addressed crowds, and maybe we just got giddy, but right then it didn’t seem an egregious stretch to put Terence in that line of liberating visionaries. So what did it matter there was no proof in the fossil record (and no chance of there ever being any) that some red-assed monkeys got smashed on mushrooms and that’s how come us hepcats are walking the set, talking like Mezzrow, and digging the Duke? What mattered was that here was someone saying it, someone who’d read a book once in his life, someone who didn’t mind quoting Joyce (ad infinitum) and Yeats (ditto), someone who would never use the word causality when causzooistry would do. There wasn’t harm in hearing it, was there? I mean, outside the homeless were freezing, the crack dealers stalked, and the bubble-gum lights of cop cars went round. Outside, it was a grim, tyrannizing world of uncertain authorship and even less distinct destination, and in here was this living contact high.
It was like hearing a deejay play all those records you forgot you liked. But this wasn’t more of the same moldy whole wheat, another would-be time-traveling eighteen-year-old Deadhead yearning for the touch of gray. For amid his shamelessly tautological, multisyllabic prose poems (a McLuhanist prerequisite, considering the nature of this particular message), Terence McKenna presents a wryly knowing, studiously updated, wholly passionate version of the Pyschedelic Revolution, circa 1992.
“The psychedelic position is the antidrug position,” Terence proclaims, calling for an etymological reevaluation of the word drug itself. The “repetitive, obsessional, unexamined” behavior of the dope fiend is not only dumb but it plays directly into the hands of the power structure, which, as “we” all know, is behind the coke-and-smack trafficking to begin with. To combat this manipulation, synthetic drugs of all types must be banished from the pharmacopoeia. Underground designer substances without proper laboratory testing, from the export of the Medellin cartels to whatever a hairy-bellied biker might whip up on a hot plate in South Philadelphia, are to be avoided. Terence’s attitude toward the hallowed LSD-25 and its derivatives proves fulcrumatic. While acknowledging acid’s seminal (and sentimental) role in unhinging ’60s perceptional doors, McKenna lambastes the “better living through chemistry” ethic as the fundamentally wrongheaded last gasp of the science cult. An expansively conceived green politics of intoxication is the basis for renewal. The plant hallucinogens—primarily the tryptamine-containing psilocybin mushrooms, DMT, and the South American brew ayahuasca—are paramount. These naturally occurring representatives of the biosphere function, according to Terence, as “Gaian information centers” capable of imparting the most necessary of global news. This, of course, is no bulletin to the supposedly primitive elements of humanity. As thousands of years of shamanistic practice reveals, human interaction with plant hallucinogens is often central to the very core of religious expression, or as Terence puts it, it is “an alchemical pheromone for infusing the devalued profanity of everyday life into a prima materia of the sacred.”
That’s it: The psychedelic is not only nothing to be taken casually, an anonymous pill popped into the mouth at a mall or on the street corner, but it is the very opposite of a recreational drug. Ideally one should have to quest for the psychedelic, go to the ends of the earth, suffer through the black jungle night and raging tropical sun before you’re allowed to lay your hands on it. Because it’s important. Essential. The key to our continued existence on this spinning rock. The planet knows the mess we’re in! It’s trying to tell us how to save ourselves! “Whether the object waiting for us at the end of our historical adventure is the mushroom of Teller, Fermi, and Oppenheimer or the one that grants us entry to the revisioned archaic paradise of the shaman remains to be determined,” Terence says, as calmly as he says everything else. Prohibition of hallucinogens (almost all are listed as Schedule One substances, indicating “no currently accepted medical use”), McKenna maintains, is just one more instance of negative backscatter in the long line of soul-alienating acts perpetrated by the patriarchal “beer and wool” hordes that swept down from the northlands in the late Neolithic. Allying himself with feminist myth-revisionists, Terence asserts that the vanquishing of the earth-based Great Goddess-worshiping societies by male “dominator” tribes has resulted in the adversarial relation to Nature that has lockstepped humanity into a ruinous, fifteen-thousand-year “death march of history” culminating in the Bomb, Auschwitz, eco-disaster, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, it was some fun, walking off the street to hear a guy tell you that it was your sacred birthright to get wasted and if you didn’t you were not pulling your weight in the fight against global warming. Put simply, Terence is a hoot. It’s that meld of that nutty, distended voice (is he talking underwater or what?) and those outside ideas. An impressive polymath of the off angle, it would be difficult to find anyone outside of a paranoiac ward with such an extravagantly articulated personal cosmology. One moment he’s blizzarding you with left-field references from Meister Eckehart, Teilhard du Chardin, and the great Blake, giving chapter and verse on sci-fi masters like Philip K. Dick (of course) and Alfred Bester, then backtracking to impart how people used to come from miles around just to watch St. Augustine read a book in silence because they’d never seen anyone do it without moving their lips.
From him, you can take it all. For, to the grizzled veteran of these matters, Terence McKenna carries none of the class-ridden baggage of, say, the gilded Leary who, for all his ardent sloganeering, never mixed with the great unwashed of hippiedom. As with Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), John Lilly, and even the estimable Ginsberg and Burroughs, Leary, a West Point cadet whose father once served as Eisenhower’s dentist, arrived as a Leader. Terence McKenna was a foot soldier in that movement, a small-town doper kid who showed up in Berkeley because he heard that was where it was happening, went wow when he saw a book of Escher engravings, just like everyone else. Especially attuned to the romance of the time, he went the Far East route, dealt hash in such exotic locales as Bombay until he got caught and wound up on the lam, spending a year gathering butterfly specimens (“a blood sport,” Terence calls it) in Eastern Indonesia. Eventually (or so the saga goes) the DEA agent obsessed with his case got transferred to Des Moines where, in perfect Robert Stone fashion, the narc was killed by bikers.
In short, while McKenna’s ’60s credentials appear very much in order, he led no nocturnal army’s march, threw no pies in faces of senators. It was a decidedly heartland/Beat life pitched against the grand backdrop of the last American era everyone agrees was, for better or worse, legitimately itself. Terence says one of the reasons for the rise of fundamentalism is that it’s reflex for a drowning society to grasp backward to “the last perceived moment of collective sanity”; well, that would also apply to the last moment of collective idealism. Maybe that’s the secret to Terence’s appeal, the way he emerges from the Reaganist dark ages as a forward-looking redeemer of the treasured, maligned past, the keeper of a certain land of faith. A freak then, he’s a freak now. Oggabooga, one of us.
“You see,” Terence said that night, “what I’m offering here is really a very-low-demand program. No one’s asking you to give them all your money, or telling you to sweep up around the ashram for ten years and then, maybe, they’ll lay a bit of the good on you.” No, Terence said, it was the mushroom, psilocybin, and the DMT plant that really were the Way, the democratic, low-cost, 100 percent-natural hope for the future. Right then, it seemed the most marvelous dream. I mean, where did we sign up?
THE SINKING FEELING BEGAN with my arrival at Esalen, the quasi-legendary spiritual/self-help Shangri-la fabulously situated on the Big Sur sea cliffs, not too long after I checked into my fit-for-Buddha, tastefully spare room, which bore no number, saying only WATERFALL on the door so as to distinguish it from SUNSET down the hall. Framed by a picture window affording a spectacular view of the sun over the ocean, Terence sat on the floor of a thickly carpeted room wearing an oversized purple sweater and dhoti pants, his bandy legs wrapped into the lotus position. There were twenty or so other people in the room, each one of them paying upwards of $700 to attend Terence’s weeklong workshop, Tao and the Timewave. Among the seminarians were a former doctor with a haunted look, a relative of Marlon Brando, a man dressed in black with an abiding interest in the works of the former naval-intelligence officer William Cooper, who claims to have proof that Kennedy was shot by the driver of the limo (just splice back in the “missing” frames of the Zaprüder film and it’s plain as the nose on your face), and a southern boy who said his bid for the governorship of Arkansas was cut short by the same nefarious forces who murdered his father during the elder’s campaign for the senate. Terence described this group as “about normal” for one of his “gigs.”
It was this talk of the Timewave—officially known as Timewave Zero and described on the introductory screen of its software application as “a precision instrument for explaining the theory of time as a fractal wave derived from the king wen sequence of the I Ching hexagrams. Based on extraterrestrial communications to Terence McKenna”—that was making me upset. It wasn’t Terence’s claim that the idea for the refutation of the Euclidean/Newtonian/Einsteinian concept of the ticking continuum came to him during an epic 1971 Amazonian DMT/psilocybin-driven communion with an ineffable object that he referred to as the transcendental Other that bothered me. If Terence said the mushroom itself revealed to him a model of time and space beyond the concept of “pure duration,” well, if you’re going to go down the road with a guy, there are some things you just have to accept as givens. My problem—at least the first one I recognized—had to do with multiculturalism.
It’s always been a problem within the psychedelic persuasion, the lack of a social agenda. Basically forgotten now amid the ongoing nightmare of race relations, the “social” issue was one of those ’60s things that used to come up constantly, say at the Berkeley Community Theatre with Bobby and Eldridge railing: Psychedelics have always been a white man’s aesthetic. Hendrix-like crossovers aside, you could say differing drug preferences accounted in some possibly significant way for the failure to forge a more formidable freak/blood ecumenicalism. If the collective altered-state mandate of psychedelics includes attempting to see the world from others’ points of view, apart from the specious cries of “student as nigger,” white heads displayed a decided denseness to the act of reimagining the universe from the vantage of their prospective African brothers and sisters. Acid might have been big, but race was bigger. This was exactly the sort of thing you’d expect someone like Terence, as a latter-day psychedelic utopian, to address.
But this was not the case. Seated in front of an open copy of the London Times Atlas of World History, Terence sought to measure Timewave Zero’s uncanny receptivity to change. A workshopper would call out a meaningful year (“1066!” “1215!” “1848!”) and McKenna would manipulate the software, saying, “Look at that deep descent into novelty during the latter portion of the eleventh century.” The proceedings took on the aspect of an exceedingly stoned parlor game. With, alas, a decidedly Eurocentric bent. There was much talk of how the Wave reacted to the onset of the Black Death and the “discovery” of the New World, but little note taken of subaltern views of these, or any other, events. When this problem was pointed out by a workshopper who wondered about Native American impact on the Wave, Terence zoned, making comments to the effect that if several thousand Bangladeshis were killed in a flood this wouldn’t register on his projection since these things “happen all the time” and therefore could not be thought of as “history.” In the context of the next-to-all-white environs of Esalen’s new-age Club Med, this perspective created a considerable clang in the mind of the would-be McKenna follower.
More unsettling, however, was Terence’s insistence that his “revelation from the oversoul of the human species” had led him to believe that “the metaconnectedness of the twentieth century” precursored what he took to be “the end of history”—that, in fact, “history” would end on December 22, 2012. It is on this Zero Date, which happens to coincide with the terminus of Mayan calendrical time, that Terence postulates the world will come face-to-face with the transcendental Other that “haunts time like a ghost.” And what was this transcendental Other? What sort of “encounter with the Eschaton” did Terence envision at the discontinuation of our “peregrination through the profane labyrinth of history”? Some hard-eyed Yahweh hunkered twenty years hence, viciously teasing us with a massive electromagnetized stick and carrot? Or was it some user-wimpy Spielbergian pillow people? The mind reeled.
Ah, what a dispirited phone call it was that I made to my wife that evening, my first at Esalen. “I guess it was just too much interface with those meme-trading, self-transforming machine elves,” I said unhappily, as I watched the rolfers and wildman drummers go off to their sensitivity-training workshops. It was too bad too, my wife and I agreed, since we’d been so entranced by McKenna’s basic come-on. We figured Terence was a fun guy; but this millennial number of walking about with a Book of Revelations sandwich board seemed too gratuitously bizarre. The consensus was that Timewave Zero was a (bad) joke that introduced an intolerable degree of cynicism into our basic schemata of Terence as a charming raconteur, a well-meaning P.T. Barnum of the Loaded. Or worse yet: that McKenna really did believe it, and in that case was as mad as a hatter. Either way, it was a drag, because Terence had made us dream a nice dream, and we wanted to keep dreaming it. Not that Terence seemed unaware of the dangers Timewave Zero presented to his credibility. Adherence to the idea, he said, threatened to catapult him from the realm of “relatively incisive critic” to that of “complete nut.”
This became my consuming task: to attempt to measure and codify the existential state of Terence McKenna at this point in Gregorian calendrical time. Was this guy’s cosmic egg cracked and/or poached or what? More soberly put: Since everyone present agrees that the use of psychedelic drugs is nothing to be taken lightly, and being that Terence is emerging as the leading spokesman on their behalf, it seemed incumbent to decide whether he seemed capable of bearing what appeared to be an awesome responsibility. Was Terence the one for this job? Was he a sweet-throated trickster, a reckless thrill seeker? Or an honest Magellan of the mind, a trustworthy, if slightly gone, visionary? A good man, or not a good man? When I announced my planned journalistic thrust, Terence smiled uneasily, saying only that Esalen, where he has often been “scholar-in-residence,” would provide “a rich frame for the investigation.”
It was within Esalen’s rich frame that Terence and I hung out, getting stoned. Very stoned, since Terence (being Terence) had the most intense grass I’d come across in years. This was very amusing because it’s always amusing to be in the presence of a master, and Terence, with all that practice, is a genius of the stoned nuance. A fervent role player fond of testing his confederate’s dexterity on the uptake, his humor tends to the barbed abstract. Like: We’re sitting in the hot tub watching the naked masseurs walk to and fro and I’m just spaced out until I notice Terence has moved closer to me, contorting his stringy body into a coil from which I immediately get an early twentieth century, musty European vibe. I think he might be holding a clipboard. Then he’s right in my face squinting like some remote authority figure and saying, in a perfect-sounding Viennese accent, “Yes, we’ve been seeing a lot of that recently.” And you crack up because, somehow, you saw it all coming.
Oh, yes, we conversed about many interesting things within the general ken. Was it not true that crop circles were likely nothing more than an ingenious plan by Japanese multinational corporations to test-market various brand-name logos? Didn’t it form an uncommon twentieth-century synchronicity when you juxtaposed Albert Hoffman’s legendary bicycle ride through the streets of Basel after his accidental discovery of LSD alongside the incident of Leo Slizard blinking at a London traffic signal and hatching the core notion for the chain reaction? And wasn’t it a pity that after years of allowing the story to stand, Dock Ellis, the former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher turned substance-abuse counselor, was now denying he hurled a no-hitter while under the influence of acid?
One thing about drugs, you can just keep talking about them. Nevertheless, and perhaps this has to do with the sort of prophetic discourse Terence engages in, it was clear that the one-on-one conversation is not his most natural setting. Suffering occasional minor rhetorical-scale-down malfunctions, Terence, for all his approachable allure and quirky social skills, can experience difficulty in shoehorning the Big Idea into small talk. Then again, he could have just been tired. At Esalen he looked weary, kind of dazed.
He’d just returned from a two-week tour of Europe, flogging his message across the Continent. He’d arrive in a strange town and never have a problem picking out the individual sent to meet him. “I’d just look for the most insane person. I knew they were waiting for me.”
Being the new Timothy Leary can string you out. Especially since, to hear Terence tell it, he never asked for the job. Gone from Berkeley, he was living with his wife Kat (whom he met during his “opium-and-cabalist phase” in Jerusalem) and two children in Occidental, a formerly-rural-now-edging-toward-Mercedes-ghetto small town north of San Francisco, their lives “an oasis of happiness” amid the trappings of a Doctor John-scored sitcom: things like living on a road called the Bohemian Highway, driving a 1975 Ford Granada with the license plate NN DMT, which his kids were embarrassed to be seen in, Hindu gums stopping in unannounced for dinner, and a rather large cache of psilocybin mushrooms spawning in the basement. Can’t you hear it? Disgruntled preteen: “No, I can’t play, Dad’s got me watering the damn Psychotria viridis.”
This was fine, especially since Terence and Kat had secured a parcel of land on the big island of Hawaii where they’d established Botanical Dimensions, a garden/farm dedicated to collecting tropical medicinal plants, most particularly those endangered by habitat destruction. But there wasn’t any money. “I needed a job and the mushroom gave it to me,” Terence explains. Or at least it was all that psilocybin that “turbo-charged” his “innate Irish ability to rave” and turned him into “a mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos.” It didn’t happen all at once. Terence has been around what Ram Dass used to refer to as “the holy man circuit” (but now is filed in the new-age bin) for some time. He gave his first talks in Berkeley in the late ’70s. More than a bit disingenuously, he says, “It was as though my ordinary, humdrum personality was simply turned off.” Tapes were circulated through the company he formed with Kat, Lux Natura, which also disseminated spores guaranteed to grow magic mushrooms. He appeared on underground radio stations, joining such seasoned practitioners of the form as Robert Anton Wilson, John Lilly, and various paganists. Eventually Terence, who refers to his mouth as his “ax,” made it to the new-age equivalent of a Catskill comic’s big room, joints like Esalen, where he pocketed “about two grand” for his week-long Timewave workshop. It seems to work. Paul Herbert, who’s been recording (and marketing) tapes of workshops and lectures at Esalen and has been around for more than thirty years and seen them all, says, “Oh, Terence is a special one. He’s more entertaining than Aldous Huxley. Why, he’s twice as entertaining as Aldous Huxley.”
“You go where they’ll have you,” says Terence with the unfeigned desperation of the freelance wage earner, flinching at the prospect of running his spiel past still another gaggle of low-end crystal hoarders and past-life analyzers. I mean, he does wear Birkenstocks, but the look on his face as he lines up with his bowl, singsonging under his breath, “oh, tonight we’re having veggie stew,” tells you that for Terence, fitting into the job description “new-age guru” has its ups and downs. Immediately upon leaving Esalen, he drove like a maniac to a gas station where he bought three Hershey bars and a bag of Doritos.
But as he lurches from the underground, Terence will leave the realm where he can count on running his spiel to rooms of wall-eyed acceptors. Now this shit is going to come under scrutiny. For instance, there’s the time Terence decided to present his findings to Dr. Gunther Stent, a famous molecular biologist. Inside Dr. Stent’s somber office at the Donner Laboratory of Virology and Bacteriology, with the austere Scandinavian professor sitting in his leather chair, Terence, holder of only a humble B.S., and that in a flukey “distributed major” encompassing “ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism,” attempted to explain his refutation of Newton. After a few moments, during which increasingly horrified Dr. Stent seemingly contemplated the possibility that his bawling visitor might launch a physical attack, Terence sought to “bring matters to a head.” “Dr. Stent,” he asked, “do you feel this theory has any validity or is it simply fallacious?” The professor rose from his chair, walked to the window, and peered through the blinds to the light settling on the Berkeley Hills. “My dear young friend,” the professor sighed in his thick accent, “these ideas are not even fallacious.”
It’s something to consider, this “notion of rejection,” Terence says, now sitting in his barely furnished apartment with nothing but a jar of pickles in the refrigerator, a place that smacks much more of the divorced than the monkish. After nearly sixteen years, his marriage is busted up; next week his thirteen-year-old son, Finn, whom he warns off hard drugs but buys Butthole Surfers records for, will move in with him. Struggling through three years of marriage counseling, “analyzing everyone’s childhood,” Terence now contends “it’s simple: People who can’t get along shouldn’t live together.” Even though he obviously is upset about all this and loves his children very much, it’s clear that Terence regards much of this unpleasantness as an ingress of the hated commonplace. After all, this is a man who, when his car is rear-ended, comes screaming, ‘The mundane! Oh, the mundane!” Rather than continue to converse about “this emotional stuff,” he typically goes off on a rant, placing the blame for his failed marriage on the Industrial Revolution and the deathblow it dealt to the nuclear family. “We were hippies,” he shouts. “Why did we get married in the first place? Hippies weren’t supposed to get married! We used to think how wonderful it would be to have two houses. Now we have two houses and it’s a catastrophe.” Then he says that probably it was “being away from home and on the road” that doomed his relationship. “You know, my missionary zeal.”
It’s curious how, out of thousands of invocations of the supralinguistical predilections of octopi and allusions to the reverence with which Siberian shamans regard reindeer urine (the animals eat the Amanita, it only gets stronger in the excreted form) that a deepbore view of Terence’s current existential positioning was to be found in the most prosaic of references, a Peanuts cartoon. “Charlie Brown is talking to Lucy or Linus, I can’t remember,” Terence reports, non sequiturily, in the Esalen hot tub. “He says, ‘When I grow up I want to be a burning-eyed fanatic.’” Then Terence turns, in that demented zoom-lens way he has, as if he’s asking you to furnish the unspoken punch line along with him: “And now I am.”
To get to the core of the mania at hand, it is instructive to look at True Hallucinations, Terence’s epic account of the journey he and his younger brother Dennis undertook with three companions to the Amazon in 1971, ostensibly in search of the mythical shamanistic drug of the Witoto, oo-koo-he. Likely, many prefer the acoustical McKenna to the typeset version (the sixty-minute lecture is his most arresting form), but it would be hard to find a drug narrative more compellingly perched on a baroquely romantic limb than this passionate Tom-and-Huck-ride-Great-Mother-river saga of brother bonding. Terence tells how he and Dennis never exactly found oo-koo-he, instead embroiling themselves in a rising wave of psilocybin and DMT exhilaration that culminated in the Experiment at La Chorrera, so named after a small settlement along Putumayo. During this time, Terence writes, Dennis became obsessed with the notion that the mushroom offered entry to “the bonded complex of superconductive harmine-psilocybin-DNA” of the planet. Eventually entering “the turbulent maw of the vortex,” where he sees “titanic archetypal forms unimagined . . . gibbering abysses touched with the cold of interstellar space,” Terence reports that Dennis soon assumed “the embodiment of all the members of our vast and peculiar Irish family.” It is in this state that the younger McKenna comes to believe that he is capable of a kind of electronic-impulse time travel that gives him the power to make any telephone (in the history of telephones) ring, simply by concentrating on a specific, “undisclosed” image. Dennis demonstrates this ability by mind-dialing the McKenna brothers’ recently deceased mother back in the fall of 1953. “He caught her in the act of listening to Dizzy Dean call a World Series game,” Terence notes, going on to say, “she refused to believe he was on the phone as she could see his three-year-old form asleep in the bassinet in front of her.” Ultimately, Dennis reached the point where he sought to “confront and resolve the question of whether he was Dennis or Terence,” finally and “thankfully” coming to rest with the realization that he was, indeed, Dennis.
According to Terence, Dennis (now a respected ethnopharmacologist with a Ph.D. in botany who says he remembers little of these events and “prefers to keep it that way”) remained in what normative medical practitioners would likely refer to as a schizophrenic state for nearly two weeks. While not refuting this, Terence alternatively suggests his brother was actually undergoing a transformation not unlike the classical mental/spiritual death and rebirth of the shaman. His own experience, while less antic, was similar. During the time at La Chorrera, Terence found himself walking through what he imagined to be ground fog only to see the sky begin to “swirl inward like a tornado or waterspout. It was a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly. It was making the whee, whee sound of science-fiction flying saucers.” Despairingly calling his vision stereotyped and already debunked, Terence nevertheless maintains that the thing was there, indicating that “by appearing in a form that casts doubt on what it seems to be it achieved a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.” In the end, he concludes that the experience was “an ecstasy, an ecstasis that lasted hours and placed the seal of completion upon all my previous life.”
At the time, I was hard-pressed to explain why reading about the Experiment at La Chorrera so shook me that I found myself next to weeping. Wasn’t this still another, albeit stupendously mounted, drug story? But there was something in Terence’s testimony of what can only be called an invocation of postmodernist mysticism—how else to describe the act of seeing something all rationality tells you was nothing but an illusion of the culture, some preconditioned, prepackaged vision, yet seeing it nevertheless, feeling it, and knowing it is absolutely real—which imbued me with a profound sense of optimism. Of possibility.
Perhaps it has to do with flying saucers, how they hover, beyond our reach. Jung’s last book, Flying Saucers: A Modem Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, intimates that the saucer, which is seen as “a spinning disc,” or “the rotunda,” very closely resembles the archetype of the mandala, which is usually taken as symbolic of the human soul. If this is true, we are in some fix, since that would mean that we are so alienated from the nature of being that the image of our innermost selves now appears only in the night skies over truck stops, a fleeting metallic blur intimately known only to the Betty and Barney Hills of the world, the province of crackpot rumorists, a shadowy specter the government spends millions of dollars to deny exists at all. The human soul locked up in Hanger 18! Like a Coney Island sideshow!
That’s why I was moved by Terence’s ecstasy at La Chorrera: It was as if a twenty-four-year-old Berkeley doper had looked up into the sky, felt that horrible distance between what was and what he hoped for, and then, in one epiphanic instant, sought to draw down this burning, dying thing and hold it to his breast, and in that single act redeem both the object and the entire species.
Herein, I thought, was the essence of Terence’s “burning-eyed” fanaticism on behalf of the psychedelic. For this was where all that direct commerce with “the vegetable mind of the planet” had brought him: to a place where he felt himself capable of an ultimate act of love, the culmination of a deeply felt, yet so often thwarted romance. As an old ’60s communalist, he came to realize that this grand moment was available to anyone willing to take the plunge and keep their eyes open. And so, it came to me that I loved Terence for pointing out these things to me, again. And he loved me because I listened. And we were all together with everyone else, old Berkeley dopers or no, collectively crying out: “We are human beings!”
IT’S A FUNNY THING about Terence McKenna. Even as you doubt his sanity, you find yourself talking in that same deliberate roll, how you’ve come under his sway. Odd things happen. Like on the plane coming home from California. I was sitting there reading Terence’s Food of the Gods when I noticed a small, elderly man looking over my shoulder. “Ah,” the man said in a faint European accent, “you reading that book makes me remember my good friend R. Gordon Wasson.” This got my attention since in the ’50s R. Gordon Wasson, onetime J. P. Morgan & Co. Bank vice-president and noted mycologist, had journeyed to Mexico with his wife, Valentia, where they were given the magic mushroom by the famous Oaxacan shamaness, Maria Sabina. It was Wasson’s journey that inspired Terence’s excursion to La Chorrera. “Oh, yes, Mr. Wasson was a very intrepid soul,” the man sitting next to me said. He turned out to be a rare-book dealer specializing in botanical works; he’d appraised Wasson’s library. I thought it made perfect sense that he’d wind up sitting next to me on that plane.
Then, of course, there was the Experiment on East Seventh Street. In the interests of balanced reporting, I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak of the Experiment on East Seventh Street.
This occurred a few weeks after my return to New York. But now we were heading into the fourth or fifth hour of ayahuasca (yagé), I’d already thrown up a few times and was getting a very clear picture of what William Burroughs meant when he sent Allen Ginsberg a yagé poem entitled, “I Am Dying, Meester?”
You see, that’s the thing about ayahuasca, it’s not like the mushroom, you don’t pick it out of the cowpie, enter into direct commerce with the vegetable mind. Down along the no-doubt malarial and muddy banks of the Rio Putumayo in the upper Amazon, the ayahuasqueros hack
large strips of bark from the Banisteriopsis caapi, the massive, harmine-containing woody climber, which can extend to one hundred meters, and then beat it with a club until it’s soft. The mash is then set in an enameled pot with chacruna and a variety of other plants—a millennial muck of the forest itself—and boiled together to render just the right bubbling crude. Richard Evans Schultes, the pioneering ethnobotanist, says of ayahuasca: “One wonders how people in primitive society, with no knowledge of chemistry or physiology, ever hit upon a solution to the activation of an alkaloid by a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.” Yessiree bob! Clever fuckers, those Putumayan magicians. Bet they knew someday a would-be hepcat like me would come trying to tap into the Gaian info net, then they’d lick their cracked lips and think: Oh, you want something weird? Here’s something really weird.
So, this time I wasn’t under the earth, soaring by boulders for a fleet ten minutes. I was in the jungle, my feet cold and clammy, and if I had any concern about the lack of social reality in the psychedelic experience, those Indians were about to teach me a thing or two about the social reality of what it was like to be them—how you notice that it rained yesterday morning, and it rained this morning, and it’s going to rain tomorrow morning and there’s nothing you can do about it. And how, sometimes, you open your eyes and see the river but it’s not the river but the endless stretch of time, an inexorable continuum with no cataclysmic encounter with the Other up ahead to break the tedium, and how there’s nothing beyond the horizon but an eternally indifferent, ever-ticking clock that will go whether you’re there to hear it or not.
And that: This is it. That’s what I learned from being a jungle-bound Indian, the utter finality of: This is it. There isn’t anything else. Trying to keep notes during my trip, I wrote “this is it” on a piece of paper several times, although my handwriting is not what you’d call legible. I keep this paper in my wallet as a souvenir. Would you care to see it, I have it right here.
The whole time my fellow traveler kept asking me if I was okay. He was concerned that I’d been sitting on the couch in his apartment for hours with my head in my hands, groaning. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I told him. And, in truth, that was so. Because my experiment—the nature of which I didn’t realize at the time—was a success. I wanted to see if, at forty-three, father of three, I still could weave the psychedelic into my “normal life,” to ascertain if these experiences were, for all my goony romanticism about them, truly consigned to my past. I suppose I could have picked a better day, one on which my four-year-old daughter didn’t wake up with a 104 temperature and my two-year-old son didn’t fall down the steps and bust up his lip. Probably it would have been better too, if I didn’t live on the Lower East Side of New York and there weren’t maniacs outside my window at all hours of the night. Things work out funny. One moment you’re twenty-one in Berkeley cresting the Zeitgeist, the next you’re changing still another diaper in a tenement apartment, all hell is breaking loose and: This is it.
I was thinking about these matters as I managed to stumble out of my friend’s apartment on East Seventh Street after the ayahuasca let up a bit. Along the Putumayo, the shamans dole out the dusky liquid after nightfall, so that’s how we did it, according to Terence’s regimen. Now it was dawn. I had a brown smear on my sweatshirt from where I’d spilled some of the ayahuasca. I held my hand over the blotch as if it were some Hawthornian letter. Not that anyone in my neighborhood might notice or care. Anyway, as I got closer to my apartment, I began to get happier. Happy in a wholly different way than I ever remember being happy. Maybe it was a little like how Dorothy, gone from fabulous Oz and returned to flat, awful, Republican Kansas, was happy. Because I was home, no place else, and this was it. I went around hugging the kids like an even-more-maudlin Jimmy Stewart. Then my wife told me this strange thing. Seems as my son had crawled out of his crib in the middle of the night, which he’d never done before, and come into our room. Seeing I wasn’t there, he said, “Daddy . . . jungle.” He’d never said that word before, ever.
So, of course, I had to call up Terence and tell him about this interesting hyperlinguistical detail of my ayahuasca experience. His response was properly eloquent, befitting the mouthpiece of the incarnate logos. “Far out,” he said. Telepathy is a well-documented aspect of the ayahuasca state, Terence imparted, but for it to work in New York, “with all that concrete and steel”—this was truly remarkable. Certainly one for the books. Then Terence said he’d been taking ayahuasca, too; he’d done it twice in the past two weeks. Not that he’d called it fun.
That Terence, benighted Irishman, he’s got more staying power than most; good thing he’s still around. I have one last picture of him to share right now. We’d been chatting in the hot tub at Esalen about the recent discovery of large amounts of DMT present in a freely occurring Midwest weedy plant called Illinois Bundleweed, when Terence excused himself, said he was going up for dinner. I sat there in the steaming tub and watched him walk up the hill. He walks like a trussed-up stork, slowly and in short steps, wringing his hands in front of his gangly body as he goes. I remember thinking he reminded me of a character in an askew Robert Bresson movie when a snatch of Esalen conversation, something about “bodywork,” distracted my attention. When I turned back to the hillside, Terence had disappeared. For a moment I thought he’d fallen out of history, vanished to the hyper space. But the path he was following had only wound behind the jut of the cliff. Now he was there again, walking up the hill, making his way, making his way.
