Drug Abuse

Each one telling a different story. Multiple versions of a single experience intersect and pinpoint the correspondences, tracing a map of an unknown dimension.

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse

'You're ready?' asked Hermine, and her smile fled away like the shadows on her breast. Far up in unknown space rang out that strange and eerie laughter.

I nodded. Oh, yes, I was ready.

At this moment Pablo appeared in the doorway and beamed on us out of his gay eyes that really were animal's eyes except that animal's eyes are always serious, while his always laughed, and this laughter turned them into human eyes. He beckoned to us with his usual friendly cordiality. He had on a gorgeous silk smoking-jacket. His limp collar and tired white face had a withered and pallid look above its red facings; but the impression was erased by his radiant black eyes. So was reality erased, for they too had the witchery.

We joined him when he beckoned and in the doorway he said to me in a low voice: 'Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For madmen only, and one price only—your mind. Are you ready?'

Again I nodded.

The dear fellow gave us each an arm with kind solicitude, Hermine his right, me his left, and conducted us upstairs to a small room that was lit from the ceiling with a bluish light and nearly empty. There was nothing in it but a small round table and three easy chairs in which we sat down.

Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No, I was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in a stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme.

Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it not, too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a lost and frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermine's grey ones?

Pablo looked at us good-naturedly as ever and with something ceremonious in his friendliness; and he talked much and long. He whom I had never heard say two consecutive sentences, whom no discussion nor thesis could interest,' whom I had scarcely credited with a single thought, discoursed now in his good-natured warm voice fluently and without a fault.

'My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long wished for and of which he has long dreamed. The hour is a little late and no doubt we are all slightly fatigued. So, first, we will rest and refresh ourselves a little.'

From a recess in the wall he took three glasses and a quaint little bottle, also a small oriental box inlaid with differently colored woods. He filled the three glasses from the bottle and taking three long thin yellow cigarettes from the box and a box of matches from the pocket of his silk jacket he gave us a light. And now we all slowly smoked the cigarettes whose smoke was as thick as incense, leaning back in our chairs and slowly sipping the aromatic liquid whose strange taste . was so utterly unfamiliar. Its effect was immeasurably enlivening and delightful—as though one were filled with gas and had no longer any gravity. Thus we sat peacefully exhaling small puffs and taking little sips at our glasses, while every moment we felt ourselves growing lighter and more serene.

From far away came Pablo's warm voice.

'It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have the privilege of being your host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for 'escape? You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. Now I invite you to do so. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture-gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.'

Again he put his hand into the pocket of his gorgeous jacket and drew out a round looking-glass.

'Look, it is thus that you have so far seen yourself.'

He held the little glass before my eyes (a children's verse came to my mind: 'Little glass, little glass in the hand') and I saw, though indistinctly and cloudily, the reflection of an uneasy, self-tormented, inwardly laboring and seething being—myself. Harry Haller. And within him again I saw the Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with frightened eyes that smoldered now with anger, now with sadness. This shape of a wolf coursed through the other in ceaseless movement, as a tributary pours its cloudy turmoil into a river. In bitter strife, in unfulfilled longing each tried to devour the other so that his shape might prevail. How unutterably sad was the look this fluid inchoate figure of the wolf threw from his beautiful shy eyes.

'This is how you see yourself,' Pablo remarked and put the mirror away in his pocket. I was thankful to close my eyes and take a sip of the elixir.

'And now,' said Pablo, 'we have had our rest. We have had our refreshment and a little talk. If your fatigue has passed off I will conduct you to my peep-show and show you my little theatre. Will you come?'

We got up. With a smile Pablo led. He opened a door, and drew a curtain aside and we found ourselves in the horseshoe-shaped corridor of a theatre, and exactly in the middle. On either side, the curving passage led past a large number, indeed an incredible number, of narrow doors into the boxes.

'This,' explained Pablo, 'is our theatre, an enjoyable theatre. I hope you'll find lots to laugh at.' He laughed aloud as he spoke, a short laugh, but it went through me like a shot. It was the same bright and peculiar laugh that I had heard before from below.

'This little theatre of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter the theatre as you are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry and the old spectacles of the Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to lay these spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed personality here in the cloak-room where you will find it again when you wish. The pleasant dance from which you have just come, the treatise on the Steppenwolf, and the little stimulant that we have only this moment partaken of may have sufficiently prepared you. You, Harry, after having left behind your valuable personality, will have the left side of the theatre at your disposal, Hermine the right. Once inside, you can meet each other as you please. Hermine will be so kind as to go for a moment behind the curtain. I should like to introduce Harry first.'

Hermine disappeared to the right past a gigantic mirror that covered the rear wall from floor to vaulted ceiling.

'Now, Harry, come along, be as jolly as you can. To make it so and to teach you to laugh is the whole aim of this entertainment—I hope you will make it easy for me. You feel quite well, I trust? Not afraid? That's good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with unfeigned pleasure, enter our visionary world. You will introduce yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide, since this is the custom.'

He took out the pocket-mirror again and held it in front of my face. Again I was confronted by the same indistinct and cloudy reflection, with the wolf's shape encircling it and coursing through it. I knew it too well and disliked it too sincerely for its destruction to cause me any sorrow.

'You will now extinguish this superfluous reflection, my dear friend., That is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet it, if your mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school of humor. You are to learn to laugh. Now, true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.'

I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the wolf were going through their convulsions. For a moment there was a convulsion deep within me too, a faint but painful one like remembrance, or like homesickness, or like remorse. Then the slight oppression gave way to a new feeling like that a man feels when a tooth has been extracted with cocaine, a sense of relief and of letting out a deep breath, and of wonder, at the same time, that it has not hurt in the least. And this feeling was accompanied 'by a buoyant exhilaration and a desire to laugh so irresistible that I was compelled to give way to it.

The mournful image in the glass gave a final convulsion and vanished. The glass itself turned grey and charred and opaque, as though it had been burnt. With a laugh Pablo threw the thing away and it went rolling down the endless corridor and disappeared.

'Well laughed, Harry,' cried Pablo. 'You will learn to laugh like the immortals yet. You have done with the Steppenwolf at last. It's no good with a razor. Take care that he stays dead. You'll be able to leave the farce of reality behind you directly. At our next meeting we'll drink brotherhood, dear fellow. I never liked you better than I do today. And if you still think it worth your while we can philosophize together and argue and talk about music and Mozart and Gluck and Plato and Goethe to your heart's content. You will understand now why it was so impossible before. I wish you good riddance of the Steppenwolf for today at any rate. For naturally, your suicide is not a final one. We are in a magic theatre; a world of pictures, not realities. See that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that you really are not in love with your highly questionable personality any longer. Should you still, however, have a hankering after it, you need only have another look in the mirror that I will now show you. But you know the old proverb: "A mirror in the hand is worth two on the wall." Ha! ha!' (again that laugh, beautiful and frightful!) 'And now there only remains one little ceremony and quite a gay one. You have now to cast aside the spectacles of your personality. So come here and look in a proper looking-glass. It will give you some fun.'

Laughingly with a few droll caresses he turned me about so that I faced the gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself.

I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked unusually good-humored, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely had time to recognize myself before the reflection fell to pieces. A second, a third, a tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror was full of nothing but Harrys or bits of him, each of which I saw only for the instant of recognition. Some of these multitudinous Harrys were as old as I, some older, some very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy and comic, well dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, longhaired, and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash, recognized and gone. They sprang from each other in all directions, left and right and into the recesses of the mirror and clean out of it. One, an elegant young fellow, leapt laughing into Pablo's arms, embraced him and they went off together. And one who particularly pleased me, a good looking and charming boy of sixteen or seventeen years, sprang like lightning into the corridor and began reading the notices on the doors. I went after him and found him in front of a door on which was inscribed:

ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT

The dear boy hurled himself forward, made a leap and, falling head first into the slot himself, disappeared behind the door.

Pablo too had vanished. So apparently had the mirror and with it all the countless figures. I realized that I was now left to myself and to the theatre, and I went with curiosity from door to door and read on each its alluring invitation.

Diego Rivera

Errol Flynn

He stood in front of a cactus bush, breathed heavily, remarked that some people wanted him to paint still life. The thought of it provoked more Mexican expletives. He was the most explosive personality I had ever encountered.

'You were talking about the glories of color. I heard you talking about the color in my pictures, and you are telling me that color is more important than what one has to say. What the hell do you • know about color?'

I waited. He asked, 'Can you get emotion out of color?'

'Yes. '

'More than from music?'

'No.'

'Now, Mr. Flynn, I know that you don't know what you're talking about.'

'Senor Rivera, isn't it possible that perhaps I could like both?'

He looked at me as if I were some novice in this area—which I certainly was.

'Now, I will show you something. I want to show you how little you know ... All right?' 'All right.'

'You see those little potted cacti? You see this one?'

He pointed to where a lovely Mexican flower had closed itself up like a rose with sunset colors, a delicate pastel shade. 'That is how they go to sleep. Amusing, yes?' He said, 'Now watch ...'

He took the cigarette out of my mouth, put it to the flower. Sure as hell, the flower opened. 'You see,' he remarked, 'like women. You have to be tough. Rough. Brutal.'

I kept quiet. There was a lot I could still learn about painting, color, women, and men like Rivera.

'This plant has power,' he said. 'I have carefully cultivated this myself and I take a great deal of pleasure in seeing it growing alongside that convent you keep staring at.'

He seemed to be in a lighter mood as he talked of the plant and he even laughed a bit. He asked, 'Have you ever heard a painting?'

'Heard what?'

' I said, suppose you looked at a painting and heard it play a symphony, would you be surprised?'

I didn't follow.

'Suppose you returned to my studio and you stood in front of one of my paintings and you heard it, you heard music coming from the canvas...?'

As he talked he moved from one potted plant to the other, fingering them, pressing them fondly, almost caressing them.

He took from a pocket a few sheets of zigzag French paper, the kind of little tissues you use in rolling cigarettes.

'This plant,' he explained, 'will allow you to do both. After smoking this you will see a painting and you will hear it as well.'

It dawned on me that he was rolling in that zigzag paper the 'loco weed' referred to in 'The Conquest of Mexico', the plant called marijuana in Mexico, ganja in Jamaica, anis abiba in other parts of the world, hashish in the Far East.

As he took a puff he said, 'Look, be sure that nobody besides us knows what we are going to do. I will take you up to the storeroom. You will see paintings there I show to nobody else.'

He glanced into the interior of the house, then nudged me in the direction of a side door. We went inside, up a stairs. It was a storeroom for his materials, his paints, canvases, frames. He crossed the room to where there were a couple of big pots of turpentine. He pulled out from under or near them a little can.

The lid opened easily.

I peered in. It contained some brown pulpy material that looked the color of the bottom end of a cigarette holder.

'You can either chew it or smoke it,' he said. 'This is the same weed the Spanish found here in the fifteenth century. Cortes brought back gold and silver, but he forgot this.'

'I will hear the painting?' 'You will hear the color!'

The idea of having sounds translated into terms of paintings, and paintings translated into terms of music ... a fascinating idea.

I smoked some of it, ate a little of it.

Diego was talking, observing me. I didn't hear much of what he was saying. I was absorbed, waiting for a reaction.

Suddenly I started to sweat. I could feel my extremities going numb, from the elbow down to the hand, and from the knee down to the foot. Felt a strange sense of touch, yet you wanted to touch things, and if you did there was a numb feeling.

Now I felt paralyzed, yet capable of motion.

Over me came the sensation of being suspended in time. All sense of its passage was gone. Everything about me seemed frozen, taut, permanent.

I wasn't certain where we were going, whether among his paintings, or in his garden. Yet we were moving slowly, timelessly. His voice came to me hypnotically. It was getting dark— Mexico—where was I ?

I could hear from the convent across the way a girls' choir singing in Latin. Strangely, I could distinguish the peculiar Latin litany. Beyond was the brilliant evening sky, the sun lowering like a great round diver. The pyramids pushed upward into the same red sky. I had the extraordinary feeling that I couldn't cope with this sensation.

Immobile, transfixed, still we were moving, thickly. Once at the studio doorway, looking within, there was a momentary vision: his wife now wore a violently colored robe off the shoulder, and it swept ankle-length.' There was a small red bow at the back of her neck around the fluent length of hair; and then the raven mane dipped downward like a black snake to the cleavage of her buttocks. I stared ... all was exotic, heightened ... and Rivera himself stayed close by talking talk that only dimly entered into me.

By now too I lost the sense of balance, which was remarkable for me.

From somewhere came a cry that dinner was ready.

Food! I shouted to the heavens, arms up, singing, imploring, I sip no sup and I crave no cup, while I cry for the love of a ladee!

Rivera was amused at my disabled reactions, he talked on in a Mexicanized English, directing me into a showroom of pictures, his early works, intended, he said, for the Mexican people.

'Here it is quiet,' he suggested. 'Listen to Mexico. Look at my pictures and listen to Mexico ...

Whether it was autosuggestion or not, whether it was the suggestive power of a tremendous personality profoundly affecting a young man so much of his time, or whether it was the marihuana—as some will say it was—I heard these pictures singing: the simple Mexican themes, a woman on a mule moving through a field of cacti, the peasants at their labor, in rhythm: illumination and color and sound in a symphony I could see, feel and hear—but can never translate into words.

No question about it.

Bizarre, I know ... but I was there.

Island

Aldous Huxley

'What's in a name?' said Dr Robert with a laugh. 'Answer, practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names—the moksha-medicme, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it's dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in.'

'What does His Highness say to that?' Will asked.

Murugan shook his head. 'All it gives you is a lot of illusions,' he muttered. 'Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of~'

'Why indeed?' said Vijaya with good-humored irony. 'Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!'

'I never said that,' Murugan protested. 'All I mean is that I don't want any of your false Samadhi.'

'How do you know it's false?' Dr Robert inquired.

'Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and ... well, you know—not going with women.'

'Murugan,' Vijaya explained to Will, 'is one of the Puritans. He's outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligram's of moksha-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners— yes, and even boys and girls who make love together—can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.'

'But it isn't real,' Murugan insisted.

'Not real!' Dr Robert repeated. 'You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn't real.'

'You're begging the question,' Will objected. 'An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull, but completely irrelevant to anything outside.'

'Of course,' Dr Robert agreed.

'Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you've taken a dose of the mushroom?' 'We know a little.'

'And we're trying all the time to find out more,' Vijaya added.

'For example,' said Dr Robert, 'we've found that the people whose EEG doesn't show any alpha-wave activity when they're relaxed, aren't likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen per cent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation.'

'Another thing we're just beginning to understand,' said Vijaya, 'is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What's happening in the brain when you're having a vision? And what's happening when you pass from a pre-mystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?'

'Do you know?' Will asked.

' "Know" is a big word. Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas—they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection—the visual cortex, for example. Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out.
The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.'

'And how do the silent areas respond?' Will inquired.

'Let's start with what they don't respond with. They don't respond with visions or auditions, they don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing pre-mystical stuff. Their response is the full-blown. mystical experience. You know—One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries—boundless compassion, fathomless mystery, and meaning.'

'Not to mention joy,' said Dr Robert, 'inexpressible joy.'

'And the whole caboodle is inside your skull,' said Will. 'Strictly private. No reference to any external fact except a toadstool.'

'Not real,' Murugan chimed in. 'That's exactly what I was trying to say.'

'You're assuming,' said Dr Robert, 'that the brain produces consciousness. I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more far-fetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name "mystical experience". I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large "M" to flow into your mind with a small "m". You can't demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can't demonstrate the truth of mine. And even if you could prove that I'm wrong, would it make any practical difference?'

'I'd have thought it would make all the difference,' said Will.

'Do you like music?' Dr Robert asked.

'More than most things.'

'And what, may I ask, does Mozart's G Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman-Brahman?'

Will laughed. 'Let's hope not.'

'But that doesn't make the experience of the G Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it's the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-mediciae, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn't refer to anything outside itself, it's still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you're prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one's skull. Maybe it is private and there's no unitive knowledge of anything but one's own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one's eyes and make one blessed and transform one's whole life.' There was a long silence. 'Let me tell you something,' he resumed, turning to Murugan. 'Something I hadn't intended to talk about to anybody. But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people—an obligation to tell you about this very private experience. Perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways.' He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, 'I suppose you know my wife,' he went on.

His face still averted, Murugan nodded. 'I was sorry,' he mumbled, 'to hear she was so ill.'

'It's a matter of a few days now,' said Dr Robert. 'Four or five at the most. But she's still perfectly lucid, perfectly conscious of what's happening to her. Yesterday she asked me if we could take the moksha-medicine together. We'd taken it together,' he added parenthetically, 'once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years—ever since we decided to get married. And now once more—for the last time, the last, last time. There was a risk involved, because of the damage to the liver. But we decided it was a risk worth taking. And as it turned out, we were right. The moksha-medicine—the dope, as you prefer to call it—hardly upset her at all. All that happened to her was the mental transformation.

'Liberation,' Dr Robert began again, 'the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it's like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this time-lessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that the mokshamedicine will bring you in the years to come?. Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be? Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you'll cooperate with the grace and take those-opportunities. But that's for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird's advice: Attention! Pay attention and you'll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar.'

Steady Roll
George Andrews

Clint's psyche wriggled through the shining horn. Greet the living jewel of the eye that bums the flesh to ashes, beaming love's light laughter upward to the star where our ancestors dwell. Curves whirl in coils to cluster round the spiral sound that weaves lines of radiant souls into their place in matter. Angels swarm like bees. Drum beats rouse the blood to pulse more freely as the heart pumps wild sounds to the brain. Call down the spirit, gasp for breath, cry out the name. From its nest the eagle comes, its talons clutch my flesh, and we soar into the land of no return. Sing love, sob pain, woe to those who fear. Dance into a trance and see the sun inside the heart, one ray is yours, ride it to the centre of things and stay there, live in it all the time, that spark of light you are born to feed. A rose the color of the moon sprouts between the eyes, rich in the odor of harmony. I clasp a gold disc in my right hand, a silver crescent in my left, crouched like a cat, coiled like a snake I sit erect, white waves streaming from my skull. Drenched and governed by the source of light, peel off the layers that obscure me, for one glimpse of perfection confers immortality. Liberty in death, a ghost dance for the slave of love who heeds the language of the birds. A phoenix builds its nest of spices. Find the way past the cherubim with the flaming sword and eat of the tree of life. The flower smells of starlight. Orange odors from far away sound very near and shine. The wind fills the bones with thunder. Beyond life and death is the dream. Think all the way back to the egg, not yet touched by sperm, the spirit slumbers in a single cell, unstained by the divisions of desire, both and neither dead nor alive, in need of nothing, alone and passive and infinitely new, pure as the word that makes the worlds, the point in which a circle is a straight line, afloat on the waters of chaos, the source of all my power, before time began and death was born. Dragons are stirring in the night, let us frighten them with toys. I hunt the unicorn, I ride the dolphin's back, I talk with the unborn, have four winds in a sack. Satyr chases nymph around the bowl ancient Greeks drank wine in. Classic beauty eludes the grasp of time. Crouch above the fumes at Delphi, rave to the profane, muse on the fate of mortals. Invoke the spearshaker armed by the gods, tempest-tried inheritor of Merlin's wand. Beneficial rays stream through his eyes, healing ruins, arousing memories of life to come, broadening our knowledge of that ideal world hidden in the imagination. Flee as a bird to the mountain. Voices from the grave show the end of life when the sun goes down and the blood leaves the brain. Make a fog for this trysting hour until the landscape blurs and the dead scamper through our sleep so shamelessly that they are visible to our waking minds. Arise, Osiris! Be thy mouth given unto thee! Triumphant, shout: my heart, my mother! My heart, my coming forth from darkness! The word of a hundred letters resounds in the tomb. The mummy wakes like a bear from its winter sleep.

They walked off the bandstand, got in Can's car, drove to Gansevoort Street, and walked out to the very end of the pier. They sat with their legs dangling over the water and watched the tugs turn the nose of a tramp steamer downstream as they smoked their atom grass. King had some from the Congo. Euphoria said

—I see a falling star.

Can threw a pebble at a floating grapefruit rind. A. liner boomed. There was a fresh breeze. A little vessel beeped. The tramp steamer slipped away in the fog. Clint took a piss off the end of the dock. The river slapped and gurgled against the logs

—How long must I bear your sewage to the sea?

Clint was somewhat taken aback. As a matter of fact, he was astounded. A talking river? What next? The water sloshed around the wood

—In my depths are too many murdered men.

—River, why do you talk to me? —The story of the hidden

A sea gull passed between them

—Once my water was clean as the sky. Now I bear the stain of man. In the old days, before they worshipped money, the trout did not turn from my waters in disgust. There were ceremonies performed beside my banks to keep me happy. Henry Hudson should have stayed in bed. Give me back to the Indians. People don't know I have a heart because it beats so fast, almost as fast as stone's.

—I hear my pump, that's the reason I hear yours, said Clint. The thread thins and frays and breaks, the voice of the water I cease to understand. My flesh is transparent, I see my intestines, my skin is like ice. Clint was incapable of motion as a statue, his body paralyzed by the wild flights of his mind. Euphoria snapped her fingers before his eyes, but he was gone. His eyes saw like an x-ray the bones in her fingers and did not respond to them. She caressed his sex and he returned. She danced before him by the light of the moon. It was time to go back to work. As they got out of the car, their extravagant behavior congealed behind a mask of normalcy. Clint told the doorman

—A clown is a stone airplane.

A few courageous couples squeezed on to the postage stamp sized dance floor. Clint put on his dark glasses. He tried 10 play his horn and eat a chocolate bar at the same time. He goofed unbearably. There he was, working for a living, an affiliated member of the entertainment industry. The trumpet growled like a lion full of spears. Age-old intensity of jungle heartbreak swims through mud, floundering through turgid depths, all the puzzled pain released in one great thick brooding moan, a snarl gut-full of agony. Play it all night long. Play it for yourself. Do you want to romp, children? Taste these wild oats. Old man grifa. Reefer rising. The Missithinki is in flood. Inhale the paradise plant, exhale the ultimate in absolutes. I and the flow of life are one. I see a flower of marihuana. It is a superb specimen and I am in admiration of its beauty. The flower begins to grow in a strange way: it becomes a face that is neither human nor animal nor insect, yet it resembles all three and is metallic and luminous besides. O God, I am seeing the spirit of the marihuana plant. I see marihuana plants dancing like human beings. Firefoam sceptre, castle in the thunderbolt, treasure of the mountain signals. Spectrum song tastes the odor's touch. Grow insane, feast on the imagination until the reason cracks, shut out entirely the world's intrusion. Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Eden exists in each human brain. Awaken the memory of the age of gold. The forbidden tree is the key to the door of the forgotten garden. In the land of the dragon the secret is hidden. Follow the unicorn to its lair. Taste the centre of all suns in this flower from the womb of earth, blossom on the tree of life, fruit forbidden by the jealous god. Seed of endless joy sings euphoria in orgasm. I dissolve into a river of light, swim along the path of the milky way, out the navel of the universe, beyond the stars to my natural home. The flesh of the eater of the sun quivers on a thin point between illumination and annihilation. Deeper than sleep I sink. From far away and with a strange indifference I see my body writhe. I die. My mood changes from black to grey, from grey to purple, turquoise brilliance flares around me, then royal jewel colors in swift snake motion, each scale on the serpent a feathery fountain of diamond purity. All the ordinary objects in my field of vision are aglow with the inhuman and unearthly fire of the endless snake. Blood of other bodies in my bones. I see my dead grandfather. Ancestors awake. Out of a pandemonium of incredible visions Adam comes. Birds the size of trees fly timidly around his head. From me to you is the longest way. In the giant's hand is a dirty egg. There is one spot on the egg that is clean. The voice of the giant thunders that the egg is an image of my soul.

A customer became angry because King refused to play a request number. Clammy Sammy, the boss of the night club, looked up from behind the cash register and frowned.

Clint trumpeted his way back across the border of sanity. Earth's outcast is sky's child. Tearfully I leave this dirty rock, vault through the airless waste to absolute zero, out to regions infernal as a comet's centre, and sink back to the ocean floor where my wounds will heal. A cloud of stars pierces the black wind with a song, each birdnote a crystalline cluster of liquid light, each spark a life, each kiss a cosmic explosion endless as love's rhythm. The priests of Ra go forth in the morning, they wash their hearts with laughter. Bum to find the sound that flings one from the circle. If the eye cannot behold the sun, how can the spirit behold its source, since the brilliance of the sun is only a shadow of the brilliance around which all suns spin. It is said of the perfect that each of his gestures moves all the worlds. A little god made of yellow light comes and sits between the eyes. A great sun with innumerable tiny suns inside, each a different color spinning in a different direction at a different rate of speed in order to excrete the waste of evil from the system, each little globule an indispensable part of the great organism which will contract into one point composed of what was perfect in each little 'globule. The little god of yellow light rises from the lotus seat and begins to dance between the eyes. A face without a throat, without a body, the oldest face I have ever seen, no flesh on it, nothing but the skull and skin, never have I seen anything so fragile and so full of life as this Oriental face thousands of years old which flickers on the mental mirror one precious instant and disappears. The brain fills the sky. When East meets West, heaven mates with earth. The nervetree sings of the new flesh, the body made of light that music is the language of, Colors nourishing as mother's milk, not physical but psychic food. Purple flashes on the glimmering green, igniting unscrupulous red and orange rainbows. Wit tweaks the nose of logic. Comedy liberates the inhibited. Candor erases guilt. Elastic egos bounce and recover from the shock of meeting others. Money is the idol it is wiser to die than to worship. Heaven and hell are dreams woven by a lifetime's action in which we are taken like fish in a net. Heaven is the subtlest trap of all because it implies a hell. Light hides the seed of darkness, and darkness hides the seed of light. Find the unity that duality is based on, then find the void that unity is based on. Behind the curtain of fire is the black sun that veils the face of the original light. Chain reaction changes cosmos. A murmur of relief rustles through the marrow of the bones. Bursting stars gem the ocean of silence. The peacock's tail, the leopard skin, the red flower, and the platinum blend into a drop of rain. Night drenches the skull in saffron and musk. A turquoise sun throbs in a golden sky. The heart's tempo smites the temples as I peck my way through the shell of the cosmic egg. Lonelier than the eagle's scream it is to seek the laurel crown. Graveyard lonesome it is to eat of the forbidden tree. Plunge into a trance where the truth that cleaves us to the core and makes us partners is hiding, deep is the chasm into which the mind topples, and the earth closes over me. Dazzling forms ravish the sight, like abstract paintings that not only move but are living creatures. Exquisite shapes there are no words for pass before the eyes. Soak the flesh in wonder. Dissolve back into light. Spectrums expand and contract to the heartbeat. Wild patterns shift in shape to form a gleaming image. Immaculately invulnerable, the multifaced comes from all directions. Lines of clean bright power descend in undulating layers through varying degrees of perfection. Divinity is in humanity like salt is in the sea. Enter vibration, eggborn, become a color, be a sound, meticulously perform the incredible, connect diverse truths with the thrill of belonging to the one and only tip of the pyramid. The eye that contains all oceans can wash stains from the soul. Concentrate all the energy on a single point, aim that point straight upward, and disappear through it. To die without losing consciousness is to be born wise. The spirit aims for the place in space its actions earned. When the heart is weighed against the feather of truth, one reaps what one has sowed.

They walked off the bandstand. Instead of getting in the car, they strolled over to Washington Square. They sat in the Circle and looked up at the sky. The night was full of drunks festooned in green. One of them leaned against a lamp-post and took a piss. A policeman led him away. Clint got up and walked over to a house near the Square. The others followed him. Clint began throwing gravel at a window.

Pontius Pangloss, the famous psychoanalyst, was deep in his hard-earned slumber. His wife shook him.

—Someone is throwing gravel at our window!

—Oh, no! Not him again!

Light Through Darkness

Henri Michaux

Although written on the subject of mescaline, this also holds true for Indian hemp.

After a brief phase of nausea and discomfort you begin to become particularly aware of light. It proceeds to shine, to strike, to pierce with its rays which suddenly become penetrating. You will perhaps have to shield your eyes under thick layers of fabric, but you yourself are not shielded. The whiteness is in yourself. The sparkling is in your head. A certain part of your head which you can soon feel by its fatigue: the occipital; that is where the white lightning strikes.

Then come visions of crystals, of precious stones, of diamonds or rather their shimmer, their blinding shimmer.

To the excessive stimulation the visual apparatus responds with brilliancies, with resplendencies, with excessive colors which shock, harsh, crude colors which form combinations which 'shock, as your, visual cortex is presently shocked and maltreated" by the invading poison.

And you come upon multitudes. A host appears, of points, of images, of small forms, which pass very, very very quickly, a too swift passage of a time which has an enormous crowd of moments, which streak past prodigiously. The coexistence of this time of multiple moments with normal time, not wholly vanished, which returns at intervals, only partly obliterated by the attention given to the other, is extraordinary, extraordinarily unrealizing.

The coexistence, too, of space having innumerable points (and all very 'detached') with more or less normal space (the space around you which you look at from time to time), but drowned, as it were, and sub-perceived, is likewise, and, in a parallel way, extraordinary.

And multitude spreads (with speed which is linked to it) in thoughts which nose about dizzyingly, in all directions, in the memory, in the future, in the data of the present, seizing unexpected, luminous, stupefying relationships, which one would like to retain but which the crowd of relationships that follow carries away in hot haste and obliterates from memory.

Multitude in consciousness, a consciousness which spreads until it appears to double, to multiply itself, avid of simultaneous perceptions and knowledge, the better synoptically to observe and embrace the most distant points.

The abnormal excitation radiates. Hyperacuity. The prodigiously present attention, at the height of the possibilities, registers fast and clearly. The separating and evaluating power increases in the eye (which sees the finest reliefs, insignificant lines), in the ear (which hears the slightest sounds from afar, and is hurt by loud ones), in the understanding (observer of unapparent motives, of what lies beneath the surface, of the most remote causes and consequences that ordinarily pass unperceived, of interactions of every kind, too multiple to be grasped simultaneously at other times), finally and above all in the imagination (in which visual images, with unparalleled intensity, crowd out a shriveled and shrinking reality) and, last but not least, revealing at times to the subject, in the paranormal faculties, the gift of clairvoyance and of divination.

The orchestra of the immense magnified inner life is now prodigious. However agile the mind has become in apprehending on several fronts, you often, all too often, return to the visions which, among all the elusive ones that pass through you, still appear the least elusive. Continuous multitude. Vibratory, zigzagging, in continual transformation. Lines swarm. Here are the cities with a thousand palaces, the palaces with a thousand towers, the halls with a thousand columns about which so much has been said. But the sight is a most trivial one. Tiny columns, much too slender, mere needles which could not support anything. Towers, too many towers, or turrets, rather, graceful, frail, unbelievably slender. Ruins, false trembling ruins. Tangled ornaments (ornaments within the ornament of the ornament) which introduce themselves everywhere even, for example, into a team of runners you were watching and which, unaccountably, forms a ribbon, a serpentine, loops into a series of loops, into endless spirals... .

At this point of ridiculousness you stop watching the inner show in which nothing corresponds to your tastes. That type of absurdity and a thousand other similar features really do not seem to have their origin in intelligence, even when the latter is turned against itself, even when it is outgoing, but in something which is totally foreign to it, as a piece of mechanism would be. Yet you are seized with a craving to swallow the glue pot, or else the package of steel paper clips, to jump out of the window, to call for help, to kill yourself or to kill someone, but only for half a second, and the next again a mad craving, and so the 'yes' and the 'no' pass back and forth, now the one, now the other, without gradations, unpremeditated, with the regularity of a motor piston. You begin to write strings of superlatives which mean nothing. There is a call of the infinite, enormous, all-invading. Why? How? As the wall closes in and recedes rhythmically, and your arm seems to lengthen periodically, there are also gales of unquenchable laughter, which mean nothing either.

Don't forget that you have swallowed poison. Psychological explanations are all too tempting. Tracing everything to psychology is poor psychology.

One phenomenon in mescaline intoxication appears to underlie a very large number of what are precisely the most common as well as the most preposterous characteristics.

Ceaselessly, in one form or another, it manifests its presence. This phenomenon is the waves. Is it absurd to think that cerebral waves, which are on the whole slow, become perceptible in certain states of violent nervous hyper-excitation, especially of the visual cortex? New experiments are required in this field, and a more thorough study of encephalograms of subjects in a state of mescaline intoxication.

When people who are unaware of the very existence of cerebral waves speak of waves, of wavelets, of undulations, of oscillations which they see, which they have seen, are we to believe that they are only translating in visual terms an impression of vacillation—an operation which is, in fact, possible, which would not replace the other, but would be additional to it, an example among dozens of parallel, echoing or recall effects which can be observed in drug disturbances?

Why, if they do not have a direct and naked perception of them, could they not experience them obscurely (nearly all mention them; some say they are attacked, submerged by them) and transfer them to different scales and to another frequency, for example to the furniture around them, which they see as shaken by waves. Thus I would sometimes mechanically transfer them to sheets of paper without attaching any great importance to the fact, yet they would nevertheless reflect the oscillatory changes of the various phases of the mescaline disturbance.

So writing, even when it involves taking notes as best 'it' can, also 'renders' the wave and at times produces the very curve of a bristling encephalogram.

As for myself, I perceived slight sinuosities when all went well; great slantwise, whiplash, S-shaped movements when things went badly, before the grave disturbances resembling madness; saw-toothed waves at the beginning of the experiment, when the first violence occurred (at this moment solely in the visual sphere).

Finally I perceived the even, ample, sinusoidal arches and waves, a little before the ecstasies or pseudo-ecstasies.

Here are the different aspects and accidents noticed in the cerebral waves detected up to now, particularly in the alpha waves:

Asymmetry of amplitude, asymmetry of rhythm, total change of rhythm. High voltage rhythmic paroxysmal outbursts. Isolated peaks. Multiple peaks. Bifid waves. Sharp waves, strings of waves of bristling appearance in the shape of comb-teeth, saw teeth. Slow waves. Slow sinusoidal, hypersynchronous outbursts.

Laughter. Common to all hallucinogens. The interminable fits of laughter caused by hemp are well known and easily recognizable.

Laughter enables the subject to abandon positions of too great constraint.

With hashish, laughter comes after a kind of sinuosity, extremely relaxed, which is at the same time like a wave, like a tickling and like a shudder and like the steps of a very steep stairway. Sudden releases. The comic comes afterwards. It is not slow in coming.
Everything fascinates the imagination. Everything stimulates it, and immediately it begins to embroider, to tabulate, to place and to displace. One thing leading to another, there is then an interminable succession of bursts of laughter, cascades of release which release nothing at all, and the laughter, ever racing, after a moment's halt to get its breath, starts off again, impossible to satiate. Laughter on conveyor belts. Laughter without any subject for laughter. Subjects are found at the beginning. Thereupon the imagination wearies but laughter goes on running.

Like the mad laughter of certain lunatics, it particularly expresses the prodigious absurdity of everything, both metaphysically and (by the tickling) very physically felt, felt in an extraordinary conjunction.

The infinite in mescaline. Its characteristics: Sense of the infinite, of the presence of the infinite, of the proximity, of the immediacy, of the penetration of the infinite endlessly passing through the finite. An infinite on the march, with an even step which will never stop, which can never stop. The cessation of the finite, of the mirage of the finite, of the illusory conviction that anything finite, concluded, terminated, arrested exists. The finite, whether prolonged or broken up, taken off guard by a crossing, overflowing, magnificent infinite, annulling and dissipating everything that is 'circumscribed', which can no longer exist. An infinity which no longer allows you to finish with anything whatever, which sets off in infinite series, which is infinity, which becomes modulated into an infinization which no finite can escape, where pettiness itself, reobserved, is immediately prolonged, deepened, loses itself and infinizes itself, decircumscribes itself, in which any subject, and mood, emotion or sentiment takes the path of the stupefying and ever so natural infinite. An obsessive, vexatious infinite which rules out everything but itself, return to itself, passage through itself. An infinite which alone is, which rhythm is. If the rhythm is majestic, the infinite will be divine. If the rhythm is hurried, the infinite will be persecution, anguish, fragmentation, maddening, ceaseless re-embarking from here to further on, further, further, further, further, further, further, further, further, forever far from any haven. An infinite infinizing everything, but wonderfully attuned, more than to any other sentiment, to goodness, tolerance, mercifulness, acceptance, equality, pardon, patience, love and universal compassion.

Would anyone dare speak here of waves? Yes and even of a certain wave. A genius is after all nourished by vitamins and animal flesh and sustained by hormones. Is it so scandalous that what is most immaterial in matter should contribute to sustaining the sense of the infinite? Teyote helps to worship,' one of the addicts has said. The wave that helps to worship. He who has taken mescaline has taken a bowl of vibrations, that is what he has taken and what now possesses-him. Helped by his exaltation, may he establish in himself the best wave, the one which by its wonderful inhabitual regularity, and by its" fullness, lifts and gives majestic importance, a wave which is a support for the infinite, its sustenance, its litany.

The impression of prolongations, of persistence, of fascination, by inhabitual repetition which you don't get rid of, a certain rambling, the sinuous track of a continuation within yourself which hypnotizes, also appear to come from the sweeping wave. Faith by vibratory path.
Alternation. Oscillation in ideas, desires.

Characteristics of this alternation: First an example: if, in mescaline intoxication, you feel the urge to see someone and no longer to remain alone, no sooner has it appeared than this urge seems to be snapped up by an immaterial grip tugging in opposite directions. Fifty times in a single minute you pass from 'I'm going to call him' to 'No, I won't call him,' to 'Yes, I'm calling him,' to 'No, I'm not calling him,' etc.

This alternation is not intellectual. It is not a matter of judgment. You are absolutely no further ahead after fifty about-faces than after the first. Nothing has ripened. You are no closer to a decision. The arguments for or against have had no chance to appear, even less to develop. You have experienced, like so many physical thrusts, fifty impulses in one direction, and as many in the other (or were they cessations of impulses?).

Of these alternate impulses, one is totally 'for' without a trace of 'against' or of 'doubtful' (and always full of impetuosity). Thrusting you into the 'for' and the other perfectly against, or at least canceling out the other, leaving you without urge, without the slightest trace of an urge, in perfect repose (and, with no reason, absolutely over the urge that was so extreme an instant before).

Only the final result is ambivalent. Never do the two impulses appear together, in a picture containing them both, in a harmonious or unharmonious combination. That seems impossible, contrary to nature. The impulses appear as separate, successive, without the slightest trace of combination.

It is difficult not to think of an oscillatory drive, of an imposed drive ... of a wave strong in amplitude and voltage, whose frequencies rule out an effective functioning of the mind. The least that one can imagine is a periodic phenomenon affecting the nervous cell, like a more rapid succession of polarizations and depolarizations.

Is duality always present, is consciousness an oscillatory state, creating antagonism of which the present state is but the acceleration and the amplification, but such that the system no longer functions, a suitable choice being no longer possible?

The duality is in this case fanatical and its two poles equal in the mind's judgment. At one moment you see the usual aspect, the next moment the bad, perverse, incorrect aspect. The one, and then the other. Without their ever combining. The perverse side, then the pure side, then the perverse one (perverse acts, perverse reflexes, the hidden impulses), then again the pure or the correct, or the normal which is perhaps but the cessation of the perverse. An absolute non-mixing. A diabolical clairvoyance.

By itself alone, the mechanical phenomenon of oscillation (once amplified and accelerated) may be a disaster. The contradictory passages break one's courage to live, break the will. Certain oscillating passages are such as not even to permit an image to form, to subsist, to permit an idea to maintain itself, to come intact. Waves so intolerable that they have led lunatics who were subject to them to jump out of the window, to put an end to that infernal serpent without thickness, which prevented them from thinking and pushed them to thinking, which detached and attached and detached them without end, without end. By committing suicide they put an end to it. Craze-inducing waves.

While the normal state is a combination, an examination and a mastery of antagonistic pulsions and views, while the state created by the drug or by a mental disease is oscillation with total succession and separation of the antagonistic pulsions and opposed points of view, there is a third state, which is without alternation, as well as without combination, in which consciousness in unparalleled totality reigns without the slightest antagonism. Ecstasy (whether cosmic, or of love, or erotic, or diabolic). Without an extreme exaltation one cannot enter into it. Once in it, all variety disappears in what appears an independent universe. Ecstasy and ecstasy alone opens the absolutely without mixture, the absolutely uninterrupted by the slightest opposition or impurity which is the least allusively, other. A pure universe, of a total energizing homogeneity in which the absolutely of the same race, of the same sign, of the same orientation, lives together, and in abundance.

That, and only that is 'the great venture', and little then does it matter whether or not a wave helps this autonomous universe, in which a rapture, comparable to nothing that is of this world, holds you lifted, beyond mental laws, in a sea of felicity.

The animation of the scene under the influence of hemp deserves a special examination. It is not increased in the same proportion as the. lighting, the coloring, the smells. No. It stands out among these, even though these have acquired a new and exalted status. Its increase-intensification is incomparable. This vividness itself carries you away into another realm. Almost all who have used hemp have encountered it many, many times. For myself, in the visionary scenes I have experienced, there have occurred thousands of bursts, splashes, explosions, jets, flights. Hemp shoots, hurls, darts, scatters, bursts, erupts, whether in the whole (which is more rare) or disconcertingly, in only a small part of the vision where its filiform dash is all the more surprising, more vehement, more ardent. With stupefaction you witness those sporadic eruptions, thin, mad fountains, those jets of water, more jet than water, bursts primarily, punctiform excesses of forces, delirious spectacle of inner geyserization, signs of the prodigious increase in the potential of the neurons, of their sudden nervous discharges, signs of hurried releases, of micro-movements, of beginnings of movements, of 'budding movements' and of incoercible, incessant micro-impulses, which in the case of some subjects end up by provoking a maniacal agitation.

Hashish is the travel of the poor. You are particularly offered the 'materials'. By their rejuvenation I was often able to recognize the first sign of the effect of hashish, by their sudden importance emphasized without apparent reason, almost detaching themselves from vision. Sandstone, schist (which I ordinarily pay no attention to), slag, skin, a bacon rind, would appear as they would to a geologist or a craftsman. Deep-napped carpets, horse's or sheep's hooves, and also the granular, the prickly, the bumpy, the woody, the wrinkled, the porous, the knotty, the moist also and the hollow, the elbowed, all this comes to you 'as in nature'. Hashish is a paradise by sensations, by the 'elementaries'.

Unlike mescaline, which provides solely visual visions, or thoughts which are translated into pure visualizations, much more intense it is true, corresponding to a view of specialists (landscape painters, or portraitists), hashish furnishes, better even than reality, the casing of impressions concomitant to sight, furnishes a feast of them.

The garden which appears to you in inner vision will not be solely composed of touches of color, far from it.

This garden will be before you, or around you, with its potentialities, its proposals of movements, of pleasures. With your tactile imagination overexcited, you are there as though ready to pluck, to walk, to turn, to stoop down, to slide, to climb a hummock, to approach a terrace, to move away from it and, though motionless, you are at the feast of 'participation'. The garden—a real garden, therefore, and not a colored residue of a garden—exhales its temptations for you. You are surrounded by them.

Isolated sensations are at times furiously revived. Holding the photograph of a street in Rotterdam in my hand, all at once I had to fling it away from me, as I was suddenly overcome by the reek of herring, and the detested, unendurable taste of rollmops forgotten for thirty-five years was there again intact in my mouth and I could not get rid of it. I would not have tasted it better if I had really had a piece on my tongue.

Am lifted
elevation
extreme elevation.

The impression of one's body lifting is one of those which everywhere and by all have been the most generally felt. And odd levitation, by spurts, but so marked that from time to time one verifies if one is not up in the air. The first nomads who in the Persian or Arabian deserts used hemp, stretched out on carpets, felt themselves lifted, unable to get down, carried afar. How many of those flying carpets have taken to the air in the course of luminous oriental nights! This illusion is not for us; nevertheless ascension remains one of the adventures of the hemp smoker. This power establishes itself so discreetly, however, so outside the range of consciousness (quite different from the impression of lightness, more mental, more abstract) that it can happen that one notices it only through the intermediary of a photograph, in which one suddenly finds oneself 'en rapport' with what appears most elevated in it, by virtue of a wholly new preference for peaks, summits, roofs, the tops of trees, the tallest chimneys, the rocks from which, having (mentally) alighted on them inadvertently, one has the greatest difficulty getting down, caught by the malice of the hemp which has lifted you and keeps you there.

Having taken some one day, on the beach of Arcachon, to see what would happen out in the open, I found myself all at once at a good altitude, climbing, fast, fast, fast, behind a football which had been sent sky-high by an athlete's powerful kick. I followed behind, in swift ascent, having clung to it as soon as I had perceived it, like iron to a magnet. It was altogether extraordinary. I had become a strange aeronaut of a new kind. The descent was far from being as remarkable The other beach games did not strike me as being greatly modified. The beach was swarming with people without being really transformed for me, except here and there, by those sudden rises 'behind' balls which periodically pulled me up into the air.

Those instantaneous altitudes always take one by surprise. One ought to be able to foresee them better. One rarely succeeds.

The modulations, indeed, which 'hemp' is able to achieve from such neutral beginnings are so astounding, so wondrous, so demonstrative of its superhuman power, so luminous, that no metaphysical brain, even with the most magnificent idea, could equal them. Meanings either contrasting or coupled almost to infinity and in a minute space of time, lightning parentheses: there is no greater miracle of the 'grasping' intellect. Thus it is not surprising that these prodigious 'exchanges' have given many a drug addict, even among the most mediocre, a somewhat exalted idea of his intelligence. No one, in fact, has a greater density of ideas than they do at certain moments, nor is capable of more unexpected associations of ideas—of which they subsequently have not the slightest recollection.

Now Led By The Hemp Now Leading It

The session of intimacy

It had been three years or more since I had experimented with hemp, going back to it reluctantly at long intervals, convinced that I was missing something, when one day, perhaps a little less impatient than usual, I discovered what thousands upon thousands of persons, in the Orient, have known and more or less practiced for ages. It was quite simple, and it is quite simple, and it can be taught in five minutes to a novice. I was, then, looking at some reproductions of paintings and at some photographs. One of these was a portrait of a woman. I was about to pass on to another when she ... became alive. Yes, she was alive. In my home. There beside me. She stayed. I had just discovered the hashish paradise, about which so much has been written, which has relations with Mohammed's paradise for the use of the simple-minded, father relations. There must of course have been something other than hallucinations or visions for people of all kinds to have enjoyed it for so long, in all countries.

The woman, then, showed no sign of leaving, developed her life before me, a vibrant life, an immediate life, a life linked to my company. The impossible living together was becoming a reality on the spot with miraculous ease. This secret of secrets was an open secret, in which any number of men in several countries of Asia and Africa had found bliss, of which they had made a habit, their paradise on earth. With perfumes, bells, with crudely suggestive daubings the absent one could be made to appear surrounded by birds in enchanting gardens, she could be made to dance, and the sordid shack or the ill-smelling tent became filled with the grace of the houris, of their arms, their bosoms, their utterly natural presence. They came to the tryst. They arrived irresistibly, accepting 'to be with'—with anyone, so long as he used the powder that has power.

Ah! if I had had this faculty in the natural state! If the capacity had been given me to bring persons to life instantly before me at the mere sight of their photograph!

This present power I needed to verify. One has all too great a tendency to illusion, when it comes to women. I must therefore now try a man. Let's see this photo. A prolonged gaze ... and the man comes. Neither faster nor less fast than the woman. Let us increase the difficulty. This group of three now. I look. It works. The first, the second, the third. They are there. No, they are here. I go from one to another. They continue to live, to communicate among themselves, with me present. Not too fascinating, the company of those three fellows, molded by politics and vulgar ambition. Out with them! A few more tests on groups, a few others on isolated individuals, on men of different appearance, of different ages, of different types and, having established the proof, I come back to the first person observed.

I look at her. She comes back. She comes back without any reluctance. She comes back automatically. I find her again. She hardly moves. And does she even move? She moves on the spot. She vibrates. Her eye, her mouth, this or that part of her face which I look at, as if caught up in an imponderable, almost psychic haze, or oscillation, or subtle balancing, becomes animated, not really moving, but able to move, having perhaps just moved, having been able to take advantage of a moment of inattention to move. You feel ever on the point of catching her having moved, having frankly smiled, having markedly bowed her head to one side to cast a sidelong glance, having really turned round to burst out laughing. An extraordinary and indefinable animation, of which no actress on this planet is capable. A kind of psychic trembling, so fine it is, so perfectly does fineness suit it (this is why women's faces, the most beautiful, the most harmonious, are so completely pre-adapted to it), incapable of leading to crudeness, attuned only to the vibrant, the radiant, gradations of fineness which would be lost in the theatre and are meant for intimacy. The same minute variation, endless and mysterious, which produces visions of fabulous cities with slender towers and the iridescent palaces of Kubia Khan, indefinitely different and alike, makes this moving face vary, indefinitely, makes it reform and become other.

How many expressions the infinitely variant can convert into life! ' If the woman has a simple, naive face, she will radiate simplicity, if her face is mocking, she will be ravishingly mocking, if witty, she will radiate wit, if it expresses goodness, her goodness will radiate, will be convincing, if it is sensual, her sensual impregnation will be magnetizing, if she is pure, she will be adorable, angelic, yes, she will be an angel perhaps better than anything for she irradiates. The beyond, in her, radiant, transpires ... and renews itself.

For modulation is probably the most extraordinary character. This face is in movement, in fluid movements, an admirable screen on which inscriptions of sentiments appear and vanish, on which new inscriptions tirelessly recur. She is in movement. Her life, her soul, a miraculous company. The stream of moments, the stream of emotions with its alterations, its micro-alterations (for an emotion, a sentiment, is but an average, an average of outpourings, of impulses, of impressions, of inclinations or of distastes felt, drops and particles of the emotional flow that is in you, vibrant, trembling, with multiple currents and eddies), this stream, then, which constantly turns, which changes affectively every second, which you are unable to see in yourself, this stream you do see in those paradisiacal moments, before you, on the moving face, in unbelievably delicate alterations, which lovers would like to and cannot make out on the loved faces. There they are, the variations are no longer concealed from you, pass under her skin, like a naked body beneath a transparent chiffon. An endless screw. A life continued continuously, whose instants, however, are 'distinguished', detached, like words spelled out by a child but fast, fast, fast, following lovingly in a vertigo of passionate attention.

Deciphering faces

Deliberately leaving aside faces capable of seduction, those women's faces unfailingly transmuted by a yearning which definitely persists in us for a lifetime to the day of our death, I began to look at the faces of men, and of unprepossessing men. Faces which I have no desire to be surrounded by or to have turn up in my house, faces which I want to understand, to penetrate. No more closed faces which tell me nothing, or very little. I enter them. They would ordinarily be hostile to me. Perfect. I have to exert myself for three or four seconds and then ... I penetrate and I am inside them. I seem to know them. If I were to meet them later in a gathering I should, it seems to me, make no psychological blunder with them. I already know them. I have entered their capital, whence they direct and feel and practice their lives. When I am affected by hashish, and by this investigating mood, I aim at them, I aim at their centre.

Nothing vague subsists before me. They have become expressive. I open them. I explore them. When I can make no further substantial progress in the understanding of a head (at times of a body), I put it aside, I draw aside and pass to another, to which I force entry in a few seconds and at once make for the essential, for what then manifestly appears his centre of strength, of control, the centre from which his decisions and his actions spring. I am in his current. Everyone has certain areas on which his body more particularly balances and which he uses as take-off points for a leap, energy-distribution centers, crossroads of force components, bases of confidence, of assurance, of certainty, locus of the dominants of his constitution, all of which form a point of departure for his impulses to action and his releases of tension. This it is with which I am in syntony—for the moment (which explains why no one then can be antipathetic to me, since in his force, with his force, I feel and sense his impulses which I must inevitably at least excuse).

I think I have found his focal point. But on becoming normal again, hesitant and somewhat resistant, I have lost it. Yet I thought I had found it so completely that it would remain unforgettable to me. I was wrong. I can no longer find it. I therefore took to marking those centers with a cross or several crosses, as best I could, during the observation under the effect of the hashish, with the directions and the approximate depth (for these psychic axes and these lines of departure must be apprehended in depth). More or less in vain. Sober, I was confronted with the discovery that each head had again become an obstacle, an enigma, an uncertainty, his present inner self no longer superimposing itself upon his previously divined inner self, had become a head which I now opposed. To be sure, this very opposition, special and appropriate to each, enlightened me in its own way as to the person, as to the possible relations between him and me, a not negligible but reduced understanding, with which I had to content myself. There would be no penetration for me before the next dose of hashish. What was this clairvoyance worth, if such it was? Others, more gifted, could study it with greater profit.

Reading while under the influence of hashish

After an average dose of hashish one is unfit for reading. This is well known. Even a literary text can be followed only with difficulty ... followed at the same pace line after line. Nevertheless I have-found hashish to be an admirable detector. Some of the greatest authors of literature and of mystical theology have not resisted its 'penetration' for a minute. You can hear the authors in person, they are no longer imposing, or ever so little. You meet them as certain cool-headed men, meeting them during their lifetime, must have gauged them and estimated them. You have them in their natural state. Words no longer play any part. The man who is behind them comes out in front. You immediately perceive his limitless conformity, his tepidity, and his tiny audacities, his prudence, the slightness of his ventures into imprudence, the enormous pocket of his ignorance, on which was applied a thin film of personality and of personal reflection. Everything or nearly everything about the man is unconsciousness, surface efforts and self-satisfaction. A highly revered saint is suddenly shown me. What a disappointment! No doubt she has devoted herself, worked, made progress. She still had a long way to go. Garrulous dame that she was, she proved to be nothing but a lightweight. I shall never be taken in by her again. Others, rare wonders, have something to say to you, are really behind their words, which are true, without emphasis. What a joy (of too short duration)! Ramana Maharshi was one of these surprises.

There is matter here for future study. The text, at whatever point you pick it up, becomes a voice, the very voice that suits it, and the man speaks behind this voice. The one who wrote it is there, of little substance as he was, no longer given solidity by the printed character, he is there again, immediately engaged in thinking, in expressing himself, finding his way among his ideas. He begins over again. An end of abstractness, of vagueness. The man behind his name comes with his weight, his lack of weight.

Treacherous hashish, hashish as hunting dog, instructive hashish. It sees quicker than we do, pointing to what we have not yet understood. At the outset, and each time, there is an effort to be made. Which is the reason why it has not been used to this end. It Is doing violence to the hashish-smoker to call upon him to make an effort just when by letting himself go he can experience so many wonders. He has to force himself to make the contact, to maintain it, to pierce through. But once the contact has been made in depth, what an experience!

One day when during one of these moments I was looking at a study in a review having a very limited, almost secret, circulation, the study by an erudite young philosopher, I heard something that sounded like the murmur of crowds gathered to listen to these words! Well, well! The sentence, even when later I read it cold, philosophic though it appeared, was a model of the kind of false thinking that is trying for effect, a sentence that could never come from the pen of one who had not caressed the idea of multiple approbations and ... of appearing on a platform.

Thus, by virtue of a succession of short circuits, I heard the applause with which this writer had felt himself surrounded, having without the slightest doubt sought it. The rest of the article showed in several places that he was not a man to content himself solely with ideas (ideas thereby invalidated despite their metaphysical and difficult appearance). Presently, though he was still soft-pedaling this ambition, his projects, it was clear that it was acclaim which would interest him in ten years, having an audience right up in front and reacting immediately. Hashish opens the inner space of sentences, and the concealed preoccupations come out, it pierces them at once. It is curious that this hashish, when I used it to test a few authors, never proved vain, or eccentric. Set at the quarry, it never faltered. It was diligent as a falcon. The author thus unmasked never altogether recovered his mantle or his former retreat.

Marihuana And Sex

Alexander Trocchi

Experts agree that marihuana has no aphrodisiac effect, and in this as in a large percentage of their judgments they are entirely wrong. If one is sexually bent, if it occurs to one that it would be pleasant to make love, the judicious use of the drug will stimulate the desire and heighten the pleasure immeasurably, for it is perhaps the principal effect of marihuana to take one more intensely into whatever experience. I should recommend its use in schools to make the pleasures of poetry, art, and music available to pupils who, to the common detriment of our civilization, are congenitally or by infection insensitive to symbolic expression. It provokes a more sensual (or aesthetic) kind of . concentration, a detailed articulation of minute areas, an ability to adopt play postures. What can be more relevant in the act of love?

Kif—Prologue And Compendium Of Terms

Paul Bowles

One of the great phenomena of the century is the unquestioning worldwide acceptance of the accessories of Judaeo-Christian civilization, regardless of whether or not these trappings have any relevance to the peoples adopting them. The United Nations, like a philanthropical society devoted to reclaiming and educating young delinquents, points the way grandly for the little nations just recruited, assuring them that they too one day may be important and respected members of world society. Political schisma do not really exist. Whether the new ones study Marx or Jefferson, the destructive impact on the original culture is identical. It would seem that the important task is to get -them into the parade, now that they have been convinced that there is only the one direction in which they can go. Once they are marching too, they will appreciate more fully how far ahead of them we are. These are faits accomplis; in the future it will be fascinating to watch the annihilation of the entire structure of Judaeo-Christian culture by these 'underprivileged' groups which, having had only the most superficial contacts with that culture, nevertheless will have learned enough thereby to do a thorough job of destroying it.

If you are going to sit at table with the grown-ups, you have to be willing to give up certain childish habits that the grown-ups don't like: cannibalism, magic, and all the other facets of 'irrational' religious observances. You must eat, drink, relax and make love the way the grown-ups do, otherwise your heart won't really be in it; you won't truly be disciplining yourself to become like them. One of the first things you must accept when you join the grown-ups' club is the fact that the Judaeo-Christians approve of only one out of all the substances capable of effecting a quick psychic change in the human organism—and that one is alcohol. The liquid is sacred in the ceremonies of both branches of the Judaeo-Christian religion. Therefore all other such substances are taboo. But since you are forsaking your own culture in any case, you won't mind giving up the traditional prescriptions for relaxation it provided for you; enthusiastically you will accept alcohol along with democratic (or communist) ideology and the gadgets that go with it, since the sooner you learn to use these things, the sooner you can expect to be patted on the head, granted special privileges, and told that you are growing up—fulfilling your destiny, I think they sometimes call it. This news, presumably, you find particularly exciting.

And so the last strongholds fashioned around the use of substances other than alcohol are being flushed out, to make everything clean and in readiness for the great alcoholic future. In Africa particularly, the dagga, the ganja, the bangui, the kif, as well as the dawamesk, the sammit, the majoun and the hashish, are all on their way to the bonfires of progressivism. They just don't go with pretending to be European. The young fanatics of the four corners of the continent are furiously aware of that. They are, incidentally, also aware that a population of satisfied smokers or eaters offers no foothold to an ambitious demagogue. The crowd pleasantly heated by alcohol behaves in a classical and foreseeable fashion, but you can't even get together a crowd of smokers: each man is alone and happy to stay that way. (Then, too, there is the fact to be considered that once one gets power, one can regulate the revenue on alcohol, and sit back to count one's take. The other substances don't lend themselves so easily to efficient governmental racketeering.)

Cannabis, the only serious worldwide rival to alcohol, reckoned in millions of users, is always described in alcoholic countries as a 'social menace'. And the grown-ups mean just that. They don't infer that it's detrimental to the health or welfare of the individual who uses it, since for them the individual separated from his social context is an irregularity to be remedied, in any case. No, they mean that the user of cannabis is all too likely to see the truth where it exists, and to fail to see it where it does not. Obviously few things are potentially more dangerous to those interested in prolonging the status quo of organized society. If people refuse to play the game of society at all, of what use are they? How can they be enticed or threatened, save , by the ultimately unsatisfactory device of brute force? No, no, there are no two ways about it: society has got to go on being played (and quietly directed); alcohol is the only safe substance to allow human beings, and everything else must go.

In spite of the Madison Avenue techniques being applied to the launching of campaigns in praise of the new millennium, old cultures do not lie down and die merely because they are told to. They have to be methodically killed, and that takes a certain time. Deculturizing programs have. to be arranged, resettlement projects undertaken, rehabilitation camps set up and filled, and all this in each place before the party in power is superseded by an enemy party, which in Africa often means very soon indeed. It is not astonishing, then, that the drive to standardization should have proven to be a bumpy one and that, now, there should be geographical pockets on the continent where all kinds of anachronisms are the temporary norm. There is still bangui in the Congo precisely because the region has not yet been successfully unified and steam-rollered by the grown-ups' pets; the hillsides of South Africa are still covered with dagga because no organized group has had the time to uproot it, kif is still widely smoked in Morocco because the forces which would otherwise be being used to suppress the practice are too busy tracking down illicit arms and black-market currency. There is so much the African progressives find themselves unable to do that this complaint might almost seem premature, were it not for the fact that their eventual success is guaranteed: they are implemented by all the technology of the Judaeo-Christian world.

The terms expounded below have nothing esoteric about them; they are as much a part of the everyday vocabulary in North Africa as. words like chaser, neat or soda are in the United States, with the difference that over the centuries cannabis has played a far more important part in shaping the local culture than alcohol has with us. The music, the literature, and even certain aspects of the architecture, have evolved with cannabis-directed appreciation in mind.

In the wintertime a family will often have a 'hashish evening': father, mother, children and relatives shut themselves in, eat the jam prepared by the womenfolk of the household, and enjoy several hours of stories, song, dance and laughter in complete intimacy. 'To hear this music you must have kif first', you are sometimes told, or: 'This is a kif room. Everything in it is meant to be looked at through kif.' The typical kif story is an endless, proliferated tale of intrigue and fantasy in which the unexpected turns of the narrative line play a far more decisive role than the development of character or plot.

Quite apart from the intimate relationship that exists between cannabis and the cultural and religious manifestations of both Moslem and animist Africa, there exists also the explicit proscription of alcohol in the Koran's accompanying Hadith. The moral (and often the legal) codes of Moslem countries are based solely upon Koranic law. The advocated switch to alcohol can cause only moral confusion in the mind of the average Moslem citizen, and further lower his respect for the authorities responsible for it.

Chqaf (plural chqofa) The L-shaped bowl, generally made of baked clay, which fits the' end of the pipe-stem and holds the kif. The diameter of the bowl's opening is about a quarter of an inch. In the throat, at the angle, is a tiny uvula upon which the chqaf's efficacy depends. In order to avoid damaging this, smokers never clean their chqofa when they get clogged with tar, but put them into the fire until they are burned out. The chqaf breaks with great ease, usually as it is being fitted on to the stem. Attempts have been made to obviate this by fashioning chqofa of metal (a failure, since no one will use them) and of stone. In Taroudant there are artisans who carve excellent ones out of a translucent soapstone; these have the advantage of enabling the smoker to see just how far down his ash has burned in the bowl. The only objection to these is that they cost roughly twenty times as much as the clay ones.

Corredor (northern Morocco). A small-time kif retailer who sells to cafés and acquaintances. Never has a large quantity on hand.

Djibli Third-grade kif, grown in the lowlands. The plant attains a great height, but is short on cannabin. There are two categories of djibli kif: hameimoun, considered slightly better because it is at least able to cause hunger, and the ordinary—the harsh, cheap kif sold to tourists.

Hachich The word has various meanings. First, it is a blanket term for all parts of the kif plant save the small top leaves. In the preparation of good smoking kif, these small leaves are the only part used. At least two-thirds of the plant is discarded. Large, dried or damaged leaves, flowers, seeds and stalks are all rejected. The term is also used to refer to candy made by boiling these unusable parts with water and sugar. This is the poor man's majoun. You can buy two pounds of it for a quarter of a dollar. (Xauen, 1960.) True hashish, made with the pollen of the flower, is not commercially available in North Africa. The word r~ hachiyich indicates the state of mind induced by having eaten the candy.

Jduq jmel (known in northern Morocco as Qoqa) Tiny snail-shaped seeds, available at the magic stalls of Marrakech and other cities, which are sometimes used to intensify the active properties of edible kif preparations, and even on occasion in kif for smoking. Popular belief holds that too many seeds can cause permanent mental derangement.

Ketami Adjective derived from the place-name Ketama, a town in the western Rif, centre of a large kif-growing district. It is still legal to grow the plant here, since it is the only crop that can be grown on the steep mountainsides. In other words, it can be grown, but. not transported. As soon as it leaves the vicinity of Ketama the chase is on; if the shipment gets through the blockade, it reaches the consumer directly, by the normal channels. If it is captured by the authorities, the route to the consumer is of necessity more circuitous. Fines are levied according to quantity seized. Several thousand people of the area depend for their livelihood upon its cultivation. Ketama, at an altitude of about five thousand feet, supplies all of Morocco with its first-grade kif, and the word ketami is a synonym of the
best.

Khaldi Second-grade kif, grown in the mountains around Beni . Khaled, which although in the Rif lies at a lower altitude and thus produces a somewhat inferior smoking leaf.

Kif The cannabis sativa plant of Northern Africa and the Middle East. (The cannabis of East Africa, South-east Asia and the Americas is of a stronger and less subtle flavor.) Also the small leaves of the plant, chopped to a coarse, slightly greasy, grayish-green powder for smoking.

Ksess The cutting of the kif. No matter how good the quality of the raw material, if the cutter does not know his business, the result cannot be the desired one. It takes roughly eight hours of steady hard work for a professional to cut a pound of finished kif properly. The cutter has the marks of his trade emblazoned in callouses on his" fingers.

Majoun Literally, jam, but universally understood to be jam containing cannabis. There are almost as many procedures for making majoun as there are people who make it, but the ingredients are more 'or less standard: kif, honey, nuts, fruit and spices in varying proportions.

Mkiyif The state of the individual who has smoked enough kif to feel its effect clearly. (Usually followed by the phrase ma ras plus the proper pronomial suffix.)

Mottoui Leather pouch for kif. There are always at least two compartments in a mottoui, and sometimes as many as four. A different grade goes into each compartment. If you know A well and watch him offer kif to B, you can tell the degree of his esteem for B by the kif he gives him to smoke. The ceremonial facets of kif smoking are fast disappearing as persecution of the custom increases. Good mottouis are no longer made, and the average worker now carries his kif in a small tin box, or, even more abject, in the paper in which he purchased it.

Msouss Kif which has not a sufficient quantity of tobacco blended with it is described by this adjective (as are unsweetened or partially sweetened tea or coffee). Kif is never smoked neat, the popular belief being that kif msouss is bound to give the smoker a headache.

Naboula A cured sheep's bladder for storing kif. Glass and metal are not considered as efficacious for preserving the highly volatile preparation. The naboula, tightly tied at the neck, is truly hermetic, and the kif kept in it remains as fresh as the day it was packed.

Nchaioui A man whose entire life is devoted to the preparation, smoking and appreciation of kif.

Rhaita. The datura flower. A square inch of the petal dropped into the teapot is enough to paralyse five or six people, particularly in combination with kif. (Generally added by the host without the knowledge of his guests.)

Sboula The unit by which kif is sold wholesale. A sboula comprises a dozen or more stalks tightly tied together. Stalks are about eight inches long.

Sebsi (plural Sbassa) The stem of the kif pipe. A few decades ago the sebsi was commonly, anywhere, from sixteen to twenty-four inches long, and usually came in two parts that could be coupled to make the pipe. The recent tendency has been to make them increasingly shorter, so that they can be pocketed as swiftly as possible under adverse conditions. The elaborately carved sebsi is becoming a thing of the past; nowadays they are often simple wooden tubes. The variety of wood determines the quality of the sebsi. Olive and walnut are considered good, run-of-the-mill materials, although there are still numerous recherché varieties to be found by the connoisseur in the interior of Morocco. There are sebsi stalls in the public markets of most towns.

Sminn Rancid butter, preferably aged for a year or longer, which when mixed with kif makes an unpleasant-tasting but powerful and cheap substitute for majoun.

Zbil The residue of stalks, leaves, seeds and flowers which is thrown out after the small leaves have been extracted. The foreigner is always appalled the first time he sees this great quantity of what elsewhere would be considered perfectly good material being tossed into the fire. In cafés it is chopped up and used by unscrupulous corredores to hoodwink the ingenuous foreigner. Moslems refuse to smoke it.

Zreya The uncrushed seeds of the kif plant, sold until recently in pharmacies and apothecary shops as a culinary adjunct.

He Of The Assembly

Paul Bowles

He salutes all parts of the sky and. the earth where it is bright. He thinks the color of the amethysts of Aguelmons will be dark if it has rained in the valley of Zerekten. The eye wants to sleep, he says, but the head is no mattress. When. it rained for three days and water covered the flat-lands outside the ramparts, he slept by the bamboo fence at the Café of the Two Bridges.

It seems there was a man named Ben Tajah who went to Fez to visit his cousin. The day he came back he was walking in the Djemaa el Fna, and he saw a letter lying on the pavement. He picked it up and found that his name was written on the envelope. He went to the Café of the Two Bridges with the letter in his hand, sat down on a mat and opened the envelope. Inside was a paper which read: 'The sky trembles and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers.' Ben Tajah did not understand, and he was very unhappy because his name was on the envelope. It made him think that Satan was nearby. He of the Assembly was sitting in the same part of the café. He was listening to the wind in the telephone wires. The sky was almost empty of daytime light. 'The eye wants to sleep,' he thought, 'but the head is no mattress'. I know what that is, but I have forgotten it.' Three days is a long time for rain to keep falling on flat bare ground. 'If I got up and ran down the street,' he thought, 'a policeman would follow me and call to me to stop. I would run faster, and he would run after me. When he shot at me, I'd duck around the corners of houses.' He felt the rough dried mud of the wall under his fingertips. 'And I'd be running through the streets looking for a place to hide, but no door would be open, until finally I came to one door that was open, and I'd go in through the rooms and courtyards until finally I came to the kitchen. The old woman would be there.' He stopped and wondered for a moment why an old woman should be there alone in the kitchen at that hour. She was stirring a big kettle of soup on the stove. 'And I'd look for a place to hide there in the kitchen, and there'd be no place. And I'd be waiting to hear the policeman's footsteps, because he wouldn't miss the open door. And I'd look in the dark comer of the room where she kept the charcoal, but it wouldn't be dark enough. And the old woman would turn and look at me and say: "If you're trying to get away, my boy, I can help you. Jump into the soup-kettle." ' The wind sighed in the telephone wires. Men came into the Café of the Two Bridges with their garments flapping. Ben Tajah sat on his mat. He had put the letter away, but first he had stared at it a long time. He of the Assembly leaned back and looked at the sky. 'The old woman,' he said to himself. 'What is she trying to do? The soup is hot. It may be a trap. I may find there's no way out, once I get down there.' He wanted a pipe of kif, but he was afraid the policeman would run into the kitchen before he was able to smoke it. He said to the old woman: 'How can I get in? Tell me.' And it seemed to him that he heard footsteps in the street, or perhaps even in one of the rooms of the house. He leaned over the stove and looked down into the kettle. It was dark and very hot down in there. Steam was coming up in clouds, and there was a thick smell in the air that made it hard to breathe. 'Quick!' said the old woman, and she unrolled a rope ladder and hung it over the edge of the kettle. He began to climb down, and she leaned over and looked after him. 'Until the other world!' he shouted. And he climbed all the way down. There was a rowboat below. When he was in it he tugged on the ladder and the old woman began to pull it up. And at that instant the policeman ran in, and two more were with him, and the old woman had just the time to throw the ladder down into the soup. ' Now they are going to take her to the commissariat,' he thought, 'and the poor woman only did me a favor.' He rowed around in the dark for a few minutes, and it was very hot. Soon he took off his clothes. For a while he could see the round top of the kettle up above, like a porthole in the side of a ship, with the heads of the policemen looking down in, but then it grew smaller as he rowed, until it was only a light. Sometimes he could find it and sometimes he lost it, and finally it was gone. He was worried about the old woman, and he thought he must find a way to help her. No policeman can go into the Café of the Two Bridges because it belongs to the Sultan's sister. This is why there is so much kif smoke inside that a berrada can't fall over even if it is pushed, and why most customers like to sit outside, and even there keep one hand on their money. As long as the thieves stay inside and their friends bring them food and kif, they are all right. One day police headquarters will forget to send a man to watch the café, or one man will leave five minutes before the other gets there to take his place. Outside everyone smokes kif too, but only for an hour or two—not all day and night like the ones inside. He of the Assembly had forgotten to light his sebsi. He was in a café where no policeman could come, and he wanted to go away to a kif world where the police were chasing him. 'This is the way we are now,' he thought. 'We work backwards. If we have something good, we look for something bad instead.' He lighted the sebsi and smoked it. Then he blew the hard ash out of the chqaf. It landed in the brook beside the second bridge. 'The world is too good. We can only work forward if we make it bad again first.' This made him sad, so he stopped thinking,, and filled his sebsi. While he was smoking it, Ben Tajah looked in his direction, and although they were facing each other, He of the Assembly did not notice Ben Tajah until he got up and paid for his tea. Then he looked at him because he took such a long time getting up off the floor. He saw his face and he thought: 'That man has no one in the world.' The idea made him feel cold. He filled his sebsi again and lighted it. He saw the man as he was going to go out of the café and walk alone down the long road outside the ramparts. In a little while he himself would have to go out to the souks to try and borrow money for dinner. When he smoked a lot of kif he did not like his aunt to see him, and he did not want to see her. 'Soup and bread. No one can want more than that. Will thirty francs be enough the fourth time? The qahaouaji wasn't satisfied last night. But he took it. And he went away and let me sleep. A Moslem, even in the city, can't refuse his brother shelter.' He was not convinced, because he had been born in the mountains, and so he kept thinking back and forth in this way. He smoked many chqofa, and when he got up to go out into the street he found that the world had changed.

Ben Tajah was not a rich man. He lived alone in a rooni near Bab Doukkala, and he had a stall in the bazaars where he sold coat-hangers and chests. Often he did not open the shop because he was in bed with a liver attack. At such times he pounded on the floor of his bed, using a brass pestle, and the postman who lived downstairs brought him up some food. Sometimes he stayed in bed for a week at a time. Each morning and night the postman came in with a tray. The food was not very good because the postman's wife did not understand much about cooking. But he was glad to have it. Twice he had brought the postman a new chest to keep clothes and blankets in. One of the postman's wives a few years before had taken a chest with her when she had left him and gone back to her family in Kasba Tadla. Ben Tajah himself had tried having a wife for a while because he needed someone to get him regular meals and to wash his clothes, but the girl was from the mountains, and was wild. No matter how much he beat her she would not be tamed. Everything in the room got broken, and finally he had to put her out into the street. 'No more women will get into my house,' he told his friends in the bazaars, and they laughed. He took home many women, and one day he found that he had en noua. He knew that was a bad disease, because it stays in the blood and eats the nose from inside. 'A man loses his nose only long after he has already lost his head.' He asked a doctor for medicine. The doctor gave him a paper and told him to take it to the Pharmacie de l'Etoile. There he bought six vials of penicillin in a box. He took them home and tied each little bottle with a silk thread, stringing them so that they made a necklace. He wore this always around his neck, taking care that the glass vials touched his skin. He thought it likely that by now he was cured, but his cousin in Fez had just told him that he must go on wearing the medicine for another three months, or at least until the beginning of the moon of Chouwal. He had thought about this now and then on the way home, sitting in the bus for two days, and he had decided that his cousin was too cautious. He stood in the Djemaa el Fna a minute watching the trained monkeys, but the crowd pushed too much, so he walked on. When he got home he shut the door and put his hand in his pocket to pull out the envelope, because he wanted to look at it again inside his own room, and be sure that the name written on it was beyond a doubt his. But the letter was gone. He remembered the jostling in the Djemaa el Fna. Someone had reached into his pocket and imagined his hand was feeling money, and taken it. Yet Ben Tajah did not truly believe this. He was convinced that he would have known such a theft was happening. There had been a letter in his pocket. He was not even sure of that. He sat down on the cushions. 'Two days in the bus,' he thought. 'Probably I'm tired. I found no letter.' He searched in his pocket again, and it seemed to him he could still remember how the fold of the envelope had felt. 'Why would it have my name on it? I never found any letter at all.' Then he wondered if anyone had seen him in the café with the envelope in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other, looking at them both for such a long time. He stood up. He wanted to go back to the Café of the Two Bridges and ask the qahaouaji: 'Did you see me an hour ago? Was I looking at a letter?' If the qahaouaji said: 'Yes,' then the letter was real. He repeated the words aloud. 'The sky trembles, and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers.' In the silence afterwards the memory of the sound of the words frightened him. 'If there was no letter, where are these words from?' And he shivered because the answer to that was: 'From Satan.' He was about to open the door when a new fear stopped him. The qahaouaji might say: ' No,' and this would be still worse, because it would mean that the words had been put directly into his head by Satan, that Satan had chosen him to reveal Himself to. In that case He might appear at any moment. 'Ach haddou laillaha ill'Allah. .' he prayed, holding his two forefingers up, one on each side of him. He sat down again and did not move. In the streets the children were crying. He did not want to hear the qahaouaji say: 'No. You had no letter.' If he knew that Satan was coming to tempt him, he would have that much less power to keep Him away with his prayers, because he would be more afraid.

He of the Assembly stood. Behind him was a wall. In his hand was the sebsi. Over his head was the sky, which he felt was about to burst into light. He was leaning back looking at it. It was dark on the earth, but there was still light up there behind the stars. Ahead of him was the pissoir of the Carpenters' Souk which the French had put there. People said only Jews used it. It was made of tin, and there was a puddle in front of it that reflected the sky and the top of the pissoir. It looked like a boat in the water. Or like a pier where boats land. Without moving from where he stood. He of the Assembly saw it approaching slowly. He was going toward it. And he remembered he was naked, and put his hand over his sex. In a minute the rowboat would be bumping against the pier. He steadied himself on his legs and waited. But at that moment a large cat ran out of the shadow of the wall and stopped in the middle of the street to turn and look at him with an evil face. He saw its two eyes and for a while could not take his own eyes away. Then the cat ran across the street and was gone. He was not sure what had happened, and he stood very still looking at the ground. He looked back at the pissoir reflected in the puddle and thought: 'It was a cat on the shore, nothing else.' But the cat's eyes had frightened him. Instead of being like cat's eyes, they had looked like the eyes of a person who was interested in him. He made himself forget he had had this thought. He was still waiting for the rowboat to touch the landing pier, but nothing had happened. It was going to stay where it was, that near the shore but not near enough to touch. He stood still a long time, waiting for something to happen. Then he began to walk very fast down the street toward the bazaars. He had just remembered that the old woman was in the police station. He wanted to help her, but first he had to find out where they had taken her. 'I'll have to go to every police station in the Medina,' he thought, and he was not hungry any more. It was one thing to promise himself he would help her when he was far from land, and another when he was a few doors from a commissariat. He walked by the entrance. Two policemen stood in the doorway. He kept walking. The street curved and he was alone. 'This night is going to be a jewel in my crown,' he said, and he turned quickly to the left and went along a dark passageway. At the end he saw flames, and he knew that Mustapha would be there tending the fire of the bakery. He crawled into the mud hut where the oven was. 'Ah, the jackal has come back from the forest!' said Mustapha. He of the Assembly shook his head. 'This is a bad world,' he told Mustapha. 'I've got no money,' Mustapha said. He of the Assembly did not understand. 'Everything goes backwards,' he said. ' It's bad now, and we have to make it still worse if we want to go forwards.' Mustapha saw that He of the Assembly was mkiyif ma rassou and was not interested in money. He looked at him in a more friendly way and said: 'Secrets are not between friends. Talk.' He of the Assembly told him that an old woman had done him a great favor, and because of that three policemen had arrested her and taken her to the police station. 'You must go for me to the commissariat and ask them if they have an old woman there.' He pulled out his sebsi and took a very long time filling it. When he finished it he smoked it himself and did not offer any to Mustapha, because Mustapha never offered him any of his. 'You see how full of kif my head is,' he said laughing. 'I can't go.' Mustapha laughed too and said it would not be a good idea, and that he would go for him.

'I was there, and I heard him going away for a long time, so long that he had to be gone, and yet he was still there, and his footsteps were still going away. He went away and there was nobody. There was the fire and I moved away from it. I wanted to hear a sound like a muezzin crying Allah akbar! or a French plane from the Pilot Base flying over the Medina, or news on the radio. It wasn't there. And when the wind came in the door it was made of dust high as a man. A night to be chased by dogs in the Mellah. I looked in the fire and I saw an eye in there, like the eye that's left when you bum chibb and you knew there was a djinn in the house. I got up and stood. The fire was making a noise like a voice. I think it was talking. I went out and walked along the street. I walked a long time and I came to Bab el Khemiss. It was dark there and the wind was cold. I went to the wall where the camels were lying and stood there. Sometimes the men have fires and play songs on their aouadas. But they were asleep. All snoring. I walked again and went to the gate and looked out. The big trucks went by full of vegetables and I thought I would like to be on a truck and ride all night. Then in another city I would be a soldier and go to Algeria. Everything would be good if we had a war. I thought a long time. Then I was so cold I turned around and walked again. It was as cold as the belly of the oldest goat of Ijoukak. I thought I heard a muezzin and I stopped and listened. The only thing I heard was the water running in the seguia that carries the water out to the gardens. It was near the mcid of Moulay Boujemaa. I heard the water running by and I felt cold. Then I knew I was cold because I was afraid. In my head I was thinking: if something should happen that never happened before, what would I do? You want to laugh? Hashish in your heart and wind in your head. You think it's like your grandmother's prayer-mat. This is the truth. This isn't a dream brought back from another world past the customs like a teapot from Mecca. I heard the water and I was afraid. There were some trees by the path ahead of me. You know at night sometimes it's good to pull out the sebsi and smoke. I smoked and I started to walk. And then I heard something. Not a muezzin. Something that sounded like my name. But it came up from below, from the sequia, Allah istir! And I walked with my head down. I heard it again saying my name, a voice like water, like the wind moving the leaves in the trees, a woman. It was a woman calling me. The wind was in the trees and the water was running, but there was a woman too. You think it's kif. No, she was calling my name. Now and then, not very loud. When I was under the trees it was louder, and I heard that the voice was my mother's. I heard that the way I can hear you. Then I knew the cat was not a cat, and I knew that Aicha Qandicha wanted me. I thought of other nights when perhaps she had been watching me from the eyes of a cat or a donkey. I knew she was not going to catch me. Nothing in the seven skies could make me turn around. But I was cold and afraid and when I licked my lips my tongue had no spit on it. I was under the safsaf trees and I thought: she's going to reach down and try to touch me. But she can't touch me from the front and I won't turn around, not even if I hear a pistol. I remembered how the policeman had fired at me and how I'd found only one door open. I began to yell: "You threw me the ladder and told me to climb down! You brought me here! The filthiest whore in the Mellah, with the pus coming out of her, is a thousand rimes cleaner than you, daughter of all the padronas and dogs in seven worlds!" I got past the trees and I began' to run. I called up to the sky so she could hear my voice behind: "I hope the police put a hose in your mouth and pump you full of salt water until you crack open!" I thought: tomorrow I'm going to buy fasoukh and tib and nidd and hasalouba and mska and all the bakhour in the Djemaa, and put them in the mijmah and burn them, and walk back and forth over the mijmah ten times slowly, so the smoke can clean out all my clothes. Then I'll see if there's an eye in the ashes afterwards. If there is, I'll do it all over again right away. And every Thursday I'll buy the bakhour and every Friday I'll burn it. That will be strong enough to keep her away. If I could find a window and look through and see what they're doing to the old woman! If only they could kill her! I kept running. There were a few people in the streets. I didn't look to see where I was going, but I went to the street near Mustapha's oven where the commissariat was. I stopped running before I got to the door. The one standing there saw me before that. He stepped out and raised his arm. He said: "Come here."'

He of the Assembly ran. He felt as though he were on horseback. He did not feel his legs moving. He saw the road coming toward him and the doors going by. The policeman had not shot at him yet, but it was worse than the other time because he was very close behind and he was blowing his whistle. 'The policeman is old. At least thirty-five. I can run faster.' But from any street others could come. It was dangerous and he did not want to think about danger. He of the Assembly let songs come into his head. When it rains in the valley of Zerekten the amethysts are darker in Aguelmous. The eye wants to sleep but the head is no mattress. It was a song. Ah, my brother, the ink on the paper is like smoke in the air. What words are there to tell how long a night can be? Drunk with love, I wander in the dark. He was running through the dye-souk, and he splashed into a puddle. The whistle blew again behind him, like a crazy bird screaming. The sound made him feel like laughing, but that did not mean he was not afraid. He thought: 'If I'm seventeen I can run faster. That has to be true.' It was very dark ahead. He had to slow his running. There was no time for his eyes to get used to the dark. He nearly ran into the wall of the shop at the end of the street. He turned to the right and saw the narrow alley ahead of him. The police had tied the old woman naked to a table with her thin legs wide apart and were sliding electrodes up inside her. He ran ahead. He could see the course of the alley now even in the dark. Then he stopped dead, moved to the wall, and stood still. He heard the footsteps slowing down. 'He's going to turn to the left.' And he whispered aloud: 'It ends that way.' The footsteps stopped and there was silence. The policeman was looking into the silence and listening into the dark to the left and to the right. He of the Assembly could not see him or hear him, but he knew that was what he was doing. He did not move. When it rains in the valley of Zerekten. A hand seized his shoulder. He opened his mouth and swiftly turned, but the man had moved and was pushing him from the side. He felt the wool of the man's djellaba against the back of his hand. He had gone through a door and the man had shut it without making any noise. Now they both stood still in the dark, listening to the policeman walking quickly by outside the door. Then the man struck a match. He was facing the other way, and there was a flight of stairs ahead. The man did not turn around, but he said: 'Come up,' and they both climbed the stairs. At the top the man took out a key and opened a door. He of the Assembly stood in the doorway while the man lit a candle. He liked the room because it had many mattresses and cushions and a white sheepskin under the tea-tray, in a corner on the floor. The man turned around and said: 'Sit down.' His face looked serious and kind and unhappy. He of the Assembly had never seen it before, but he knew it was not the face of a policeman. He of the Assembly pulled out his sebsi.

Ben Tajah looked at the boy and asked him: 'What did you mean when you said down there: "It ends that way?" I heard you say it,' The boy was embarrassed. He smiled and looked at the floor. Ben Tajah felt happy to have him there. He had been standing outside the door downstairs in the dark for a long time, trying to make himself go to the Café of the Two Bridges and talk to the qahaouaji. In his mind it was almost as though he already had been there and spoken with him. He had heard the qahaouaji telling him that he had seen no letter, and he had felt his own dismay. He had not wanted to believe that, but he would be willing to say yes, I made a mistake and there was no letter, if only he could find out where the words had come from. For the words were certainly in his head. '. . and the two eyes are not brothers.' That was like the footprint found in the garden the morning after a bad dream, the proof that there had been a reason for the dream, that something had been there after all. Ben Tajah had not been able to go or to stay. He had started and stopped so many times that now, although he did not know it, he was very tired. When a man is tired he mistakes the hopes of children for the knowledge of men. It seemed to him that He of the Assembly's words had a meaning all for him. Even though the boy might not know it, he could have been sent by Allah to help him at that minute. In a nearby street a police whistle blew. The boy looked at him. Ben Tajah did not care very much what the answer would be, but he said: 'Why are they looking for you?' The boy held out his lighted sebsi and his mottoui fat with kif. He did not want to talk because he was listening. Ben Tajah smoked kif only when a friend offered it to him, but he understood that the police had begun once more to try to enforce their law against kif. Each year they arrested people for a few weeks, and then stopped arresting them. He looked at the boy, and decided that probably he smoked too much. With the sebsi in his hand he was sitting very still listening to the voices of some passers-by in the street below. 'I know who he is,' one said. 'I've got his name from Mustapha.' 'The baker?' 'That's the one.' They walked on. The boy's expression was so intense that Ben Tajah said to him: 'It's nobody. Just people.' He was feeling happy because he was certain that Satan would not appear before him as long as the boy was with him. He said quietly: 'Still you haven't told me why you said: "It ends that way".' The boy filled his sebsi slowly and smoked all the kif in it. 'I meant,' he said, 'thanks to Allah. Praise the sky and the earth where it is bright. What else can you mean when something ends?' Ben Tajah nodded his head. Pious thoughts can be of as much use for keeping Satan at a distance as camphor or bakhour dropped on to hot coals. Each holy word is worth a high column of smoke, and the eyelids do not smart afterwards. 'He has a good heart,' thought Ben Tajah, 'even though he is probably a guide for the Nazarenes.' And he asked himself why it would not be possible for the boy to have been sent to protect him from Satan. 'Probably not. But it could be.' The boy offered him the sebsi. He took it and smoked it. After that Ben Tajah began to think that he would like to go to the Café of the Two Bridges and speak to the qahaouaji about the letter. He felt that if the boy went with him the qahaouaji might say there had been a letter, and that even if the man could not remember, he would not mind so much because he would be less afraid. He waited until he thought the boy was not nervous about going into the street, and then he said: 'Let's go out and get some tea.' 'Good,' said the boy. He was not afraid of the police if he was with Ben Tajah. They went through the empty streets, crossed the Djemaa el Fna and the garden beyond. When they were near the café, Ben Tajah said to the boy: 'Do you know the Café of the Two Bridges?' The boy said he always sat there, and Ben Tajah was not surprised. It seemed to him that perhaps he had even seen him there. He seized the boy's arm. 'Were you there today?' he asked him. The boy said 'Yes,' and turned to look at him. He let go of the arm. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Did you ever see me there?' They came to the gate of the café and Ben Tajah stopped walking. 'No,' the boy said. They went across the first bridge and then the second bridge, and sat down in a corner. Not many people were left outside. Those inside were making a great noise. The qahaouaji brought the tea and went away again. Ben Tajah did not say anything to him about the letter. He wanted to drink the tea quietly and leave trouble until later.

When the muezzin called from the minaret of the Koutoubia, He of the Assembly thought of being in the Agdal. The great mountains were ahead of him and the olive trees stood in rows on each side of him. Then he heard the trickle of water and he remembered the seguia that is there in the Agdal, and he swiftly came back to the Café of the Two Bridges. Aicha Qandicha can be only where there are trees by running water. 'She comes only for single men by trees and fresh moving water. Her arms are gold and she calls in the voice of the most cherished one.' Ben Tajah gave him the sebsi. He filled it and smoked it. 'When a man sees her face he will never see another woman's face. He will make love with her all the night, and every night, and in the sunlight by the walls, before the eyes of children. Soon he will be an empty pod and he will leave this world for his home in Jehennem.' The last carriage went by, taking the last tourists down the road beside the ramparts to their rooms in the Mamounia. He of the Assembly thought: the eye wants to sleep. But this man is alone in the world. He wants to talk all night. He wants to tell me-about his wife and how he beat her and how she broke everything. Why do I want to know all those things? He is a good man but he has no head. Ben Tajah was sad. He said: 'What have I done? Why does Satan choose me?' Then at last he told the boy about the letter, about how he wondered if it had had his name on the envelope and how he was not even sure there had been a letter. When he finished he looked sadly at the boy. 'And you didn't see me.' He of the Assembly shut his eyes and kept them shut for a while. When he opened them again he said: 'Are you alone in the world?' Ben Tajah stared at him and did not speak. The boy laughed. 'I did see you,' he said, 'but you had no letter. I saw you when you were getting up and I thought you were old. Then I saw you were not old. That's all I saw.' 'No, it isn't,' Ben Tajah said. 'You saw I was alone.' He of the Assembly shrugged. 'Who knows?' He filled the sebsi and handed it to Ben Tajah. The kif was in Ben Tajah's head. His eyes were small. He of the Assembly listened to the wind in the telephone wires, took back the sebsi and filled it again. Then he said: 'You think Satan is coming to make trouble for you because you're alone in the world. I see that. Get a wife or somebody to be with you always, and you won't think about it any more. That's true. Because Satan doesn't come to men like you.' He of the Assembly did not believe this himself. He knew that Father Satan can come for anyone in the world, but he hoped to live with Ben Tajah, so he would not have to borrow money in the souks to buy food. Ben Tajah drank some tea. He did not want the boy to see that his face was happy. He felt that the boy was right, and that there never had been a letter. 'Two days on a bus is a long time. A man can get very tired,' he said. Then he called the qahaouaji and told him to bring two more glasses of tea. He of the Assembly gave him the sebsi. He knew that Ben Tajah wanted to stay as long as possible in the Café of the Two Bridges. He put his finger into the mottoui. The kif was almost gone. 'We can talk,' he said. 'Not much kif is in the mottoui.' The qahaouaji brought the tea. They talked for an hour or more. The qahaouaji slept and snored. They talked about Satan and the bad thing it is to live alone, to wake up in the dark and know that there is no one else nearby. Many times He of the Assembly told Ben Tajah that he must not worry. The kif was all gone. He held his empty mottoui in his hand. He did not understand how he had got back to the town without climbing up out of the soup kettle. Once he said to Ben Tajah: 'I never climbed back up.' Ben Tajah looked at him and said he did not understand. He of the Assembly told him the story. Ben Tajah laughed. He said: 'You smoke too much kif, brother.' He of the Assembly put his sebsi into his pocket. 'And you don't smoke and you're afraid of Satan,' he told Ben Tajah. 'No!' Ben Tajah shouted. 'By Allah! No more! But one thing is in my head, and I can't put it out. The sky trembles and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers. Did you ever hear those words? Where did they come from?' Ben Tajah looked hard at the boy. He of the Assembly understood that these had been the words on the paper, and he felt cold in the middle of his back because he had never heard them before and they sounded evil. He knew, too, that he must not let Ben Tajah know this. He began to laugh. Ben Tajah took hold of his knee and shook it. His face was troubled. 'Did you ever hear them?' He of the Assembly went on laughing. Ben Tajah shook his leg so hard that he stopped and said:

'Yes!' When Ben Tajah waited and he said nothing more, he saw the man's face growing angry, and so he said: 'Yes, I've heard them. But will you tell me what happened to me and how I got out of the soup-kettle if I tell you about those words?' Ben Tajah understood that the kif was going away from the boy's head. But he saw that it had not all gone, or he would not have been asking that question. And he said: 'Wait a while for the answer to that question.' He of the Assembly woke the qahaouaji and Ben Tajah paid him, and they went out of the café. They did not talk while they walked. When they got to the Mouassine mosque, Ben Tajah held out his hand to say goodnight, but He of the Assembly said: 'I'm looking in my head for the place I heard your words. I'll walk to your door with you. Maybe I'll remember.' Ben Tajah said: 'May Allah help you find it.' And he took his arm and they walked to Ben Tajah's door while He of the Assembly said nothing. They stood outside the
door in the dark. 'Have you found it?' said Ben Tajah. 'Almost,' said He of the Assembly. Ben Tajah thought that perhaps when the kif had gone out of the boy's head he might be able to tell him about the words. He wanted to know how the boy's head was, and so he said: 'Do you still want to know how you got out of the soup-kettle?' He of the Assembly laughed. 'You said you would tell me later,' he told Ben Tajah. 'I will,' said Ben Tajah. 'Come upstairs. Since we have to wait, we can sit down.' Ben Tajah opened the door and they went upstairs. This time He of the Assembly sat down on Ben Tajah's bed. He yawned and stretched. It was a good bed. He was glad it was not the mat by the bamboo fence at the Café of the Two Bridges. 'And so, tell me how I got out of the soup-kettle,' he said laughing. Ben Tajah said: 'You're still asking me that? Have you thought of the words?' 'I know the words,' the boy said. 'The sky trembles... .' Ben Tajah did not want him to say them again. 'Where did you hear them? What are they? That's what I want to know.' The boy shook his head. Then he sat up very straight and looked beyond Ben Tajah, beyond the wall of the room, beyond the streets of the Medina, beyond the gardens, toward the mountains where the people speak Tachelhait. He remembered being a little boy. 'This night is a jewel in my crown,' he thought. 'It went this way.' And he began to sing, making up a melody for the words Ben Tajah had told him. When he had finished '... and the two eyes are not brothers,' he added a few more words of his own and stopped singing. 'That's all I remember of the song,' he
said. Ben Tajah clapped his hands together hard. 'A song!' he cried. 'I must have heard it on the radio.' He of the Assembly shrugged. 'They play it sometimes,' he said. 'I've made him happy,' he thought. 'But I won't ever tell him another lie. That's the only one. What I'm going to do now is not the same as lying.' He got up off the bed and went to the window. The muezzins were calling the fjer. 'It's almost morning,' he said to Ben Tajah. 'I still have kif in my head.' 'Sit down,' said Ben Tajah. He was sure now there had been no letter. He of the Assembly took off his djellaba and got into the bed. Ben Tajah looked at him in surprise. Then he undressed and got into bed beside him. He left the candle burning on the floor beside the bed. He meant to stay awake, but he went to sleep because he was not used to smoking kif and the kif was in his head. He of the Assembly did not believe he was asleep. He lay for a long time without moving. He listened to the voices of the muezzins, and he thought that the man beside him would speak or move. When he saw that Ben Tajah was surely asleep, he was angry. 'This is how he treats a friend who has made him happy. He forgets his trouble and his friend too.' He thought about it more and he was angrier. The muezzins were still calling the fjer. 'Before they stop, or he will hear.' Very slowly he got out of the bed. He put on his djellaba and opened the door. Then he went back and took all the money out of Ben Tajah's pockets. In with the banknotes was an envelope that was folded. It had Ben Tajah's name written across it. He pulled out the piece of paper inside and held it near the candle, and then he looked at it as he would have looked at a snake. The words were written there. Ben Tajah's face was turned toward the wall and he was snoring. He of the Assembly held the paper above the flame and burned it, and then he burned the envelope. He blew the black paper-ashes across the floor. Without making any noise he ran downstairs and let himself out into the street. He shut the door. The money was in his pocket and he walked fast to his aunt's house. His aunt awoke and was angry for a while.

Finally he said: 'It was raining. How could I come home? Let me sleep.' He had a little kif hidden under his pillow. He smoked a pipe. Then he looked across his sleep to the morning and thought: 'A pipe of kif before breakfast gives a man the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard.'

The Three Alis

Mohammed Ben Abdullah Yussufi (Translated by Irving Rosenthal.)

The author died at the age of 21 in the prison hospital of Tangier, after having been beaten during questioning.

A man had three sons. All three were named Ali. When the man was on his deathbed, he said 'I leave half of my land to my son Ali and the other half to my son Ali.' And then he died. The three Alis fought among themselves as to which two of them would inherit their father's land, and then they decided to take their dispute to the Sultan. They set out for the Alcazar or Sultan's Palace with a donkey laden with their belongings. One night while they were asleep, a one-eyed man led away their donkey. In the morning they discovered the theft, and so they sat down and began to smoke kif. The first Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'The thief has one eye.' The second Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'The thief's name is Amar.' The third Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'The thief lives in the Alcazar.' So the three Alis completed their journey to the Sultan's Palace, and once there began looking for Amar the one-eyed. When they found him they accused him of stealing their donkey. He denied it, and so the three Alis decided to complain about Amar to the Sultan at the same time they were asking him to settle their dispute about their father's land. When the Sultan had heard their story, he said to them 'You did not see Amar steal your donkey. How can I believe the ideas you had while you were smoking kif~' The three Alis asked the Sultan to test them, and so he ordered a covered bowl to be brought into the room. He asked them what was in the bowl. The three Alis took out their sebsis and began to smoke kif. The first Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is. round.' The second Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is orange.' The third Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is a tangerine.' The ' Sultan removed the cover of the bowl and lo! there was a tangerine, But the Sultan demanded one more proof. He ordered another covered bowl to be brought in and asked the three men what it contained. The three Alis refilled their sebsis with kif and began to smoke. The first Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is couscous made from wheat which is unfit to eat.' The second Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is couscous made from lamb which is unfit to eat.' The third Ali took a few puffs on his sebsi, expelled the burning ash, and said 'It is couscous made for a Sultan who is unfit to rule.' The Sultan removed the cover of the second bowl and lo! it was filled with couscous. The Sultan asked the three Alis to appear before him on the following day when he would give them a decision about their inheritance. Then he ordered the chief cook to appear and taste the couscous. The cook did so and immediately became violently ill. Then the Sultan sent for the man who had ground the wheat for the couscous. Under threat of torture this man revealed that he had been violently ill the day before, and that just before grinding the wheat he had taken a shit and had not washed his hands afterwards. Then the Sultan sent for the man who had prepared the meat for the couscous. This man was in perfect health, and so the Sultan asked him whom he had bought the lamb from. This man answered 'From a peasant woman who brought it to the Alcazar.' The Sultan sent for the peasant woman, and she confessed that the lamb's mother had died, and the lamb had been put to suckle with a bitch. Finally the Sultan went to his own mother and said 'Who was my father?' His mother answered 'Your father was my husband the Sultan before you.' The Sultan pulled out his sword, held it to his mother's throat, and said 'I will kill you if you do not tell me who my father is.' The woman trembled and confessed that his father was a wool merchant in the market place. On the next day the three Alis returned for their audience with the Sultan. The Sultan took them for a walk in the Alcazar and led them to a room with three doors. He turned to the first Ali and said 'You told me the wheat in my couscous was unfit to eat. In return I give you everything behind this door.' The Sultan opened the first door on a roomful of gold. Then he turned to the second Ali and said 'You told me the lamb in my couscous was unfit to eat. In return I give you everything behind this door.' The Sultan opened the second door on a roomful of jewels. Then he turned to the third Ali and said 'You told me my couscous was made for a Sultan unfit to rule. In return I give you everything behind this door.' The Sultan opened the third door on a roomful of rocks. Then he said 'Those who see what is base deserve what is base. Moreover you are the Ali your father left without an inheritance—unfit to inherit—for you saw that I was unfit to inherit the kingdom. We recognized each other.'

In Morocco the smokers of kif have a patron saint. According to legend, Sidi Hidi was the man who first brought the seeds of the plant to Morocco from Asia. His prehistoric tomb is a shrine to which pilgrimages are still being made.

Night At The Burning Ghat
Allen Ginsberg

Night at the burning ghat-25 np. two triangle paper packets of ganja at Nimtallah St pipe shop—Long haired scruffy orange robe sadhu with thin nose and long droopy hip face, chattering animatedly in broken English—from Gauhati, his ashram—we go there?— Benares?—Pranayam—On main Ganges waterfront street, the cymbal chorus in the brick shed—'men from Bihar'—chain clashes and chanting all night?—A body burning in the first ash pit—pile of wood and the head slowly bubbling up around mouth and nose—cheeks blackened with sheets of flame clasping the volume of the face—splitting, and pink underskin sizzling open—Sat on the bench and watched five minutes, staring at the head— feet painted red sticking out the other end of the wood structure bed—

In the mandir, the handsome naked torso with big strong face, and red bushy-curled hair— sitting with red robed wanderer, black faced beard with little eyes who exchanged amicable glance, full eyed stare at me—my strained back against the marble door post—sharing a pipe I coughed and so began roll my own cigarette—staring at the handsome sadhu whose chest glistened with oil, muscular shining breasts and happy smile—he massaged his thin sadhu friend, rubbing down the belly—and beamed with joy when in return the thin sadhu. anointed him, a hand passed round and round his chest from nipple to nipple rubbing in the heated oil—Then burned a pan of ghee, and one pea of prasad for ceremony—then lay down to sleep on a thin piece of white cloth in the corner—'You're a beautiful man' I said to him thru sadhu Broken English—he brought out a big handful of. prasad, smiled like a child at me—'Healthy he smoke all day people come sit down make him smoke smoke all day all night—he just sleep an hour—lay down head with all that in it'—I lay and snoozed next to him a while, sleepy Darshan. Then walked out for tea—gave bhog tea and leaf of chapatties and potato curry to another looney sadhu I seen dance jazzy burlesk to Kirtan music that nite—he smiled too—a boy next to him stole his cigarette off table. I watched secretly-said 'I ate it' and gave him another—he all ash smeared and a humpbacked rump at base of his spine and spidery arms, with dusty tantrik red loincloth and a white worn spread over his shoulder. Back to ghat from tea, sat at fire by old babu with Kailash-pile of hair on his head who slept greyly on his side—In front of burning ground gate an old ashy unshaven fellow in pants followed me for an anna—I said no, irritably—touched his feet—he begged again—I touched his feet he reached for mine and I slipped away—listening at 2.30 A.M. last chant crisis of Bihari boys—Returning saw him squatting on step of sleeping mandir, chanting ram hari bolsong alone in froggy beautiful lone voice—long long, as I passed I placed 25 np. at his feet and he reached out and touched my foot—I lay down awhile along side handsome sadhu's corner, near his charcoal brazier still glowing with a new chunk taken from the burning pits—But the priests came and sloshed water and opened gates and turned on lites so I left and went wandering back to the burning pits again—Now all the groups had gathered, silent and grey, crying a suave together round several pit fires they cared for warmth—one half-naked sadhu stretched on ground with his loincloth slipped off his buttock looking like one of the dead corpses beside the all nite fire of the old man whose head I saw adorn the woodpile earlier that even (now all ash in the Ganges spreading out near the steps on the brown muddy surface like huge inkstain)—a few kids at another fire with a gentle round-faced bald saffron Pop. And my singing beggar now squatting over a red pit, lucidly chanting away god's name—I thought perhaps this be master-sign since I been earlier so rejectful to him and he turning out to be such a simple holy sustained all night praying fellow like this in front of my eyes—I sat on bench near his fire and he talked to me in a loud' voice, a speech I couldn't follow, sounded like he complaining my being so selfish waving his arms at me from his little brush-wood hot flamy pyre—I moved away, just in case he get further noisy and mad—Back to the handsome sadhu's side in the mandir—A stranger sadhu in orange robe squatted down nearby and made us a pipe. I blasted enough till my throat dry and panicky—Then walked up and down my body trembling my neck constricted till I peed and still the trembling came on me, as if I vomit soon or Ramakrishna appear in the river—or Krishna in every animal eye all around, each of the beggars—lay down to sleep finally on marble bench in inner waiting room—Baul singers and rags and sadhu buttocks sheeted on the floor—left my rubber sandals below my bench—when I awoke—I had drifted to sleep as earlier nites before on ganja seeing a sort of crystal cabinet Krishna beribboned and jeweled in mind's eye—thru universes of feet and skulls and fire and wars and firesides—crystal cabinets a-million—Found my foot rubbers disappeared from their place on the floor. Walked out gleaned around each old spot of the night—where ash pit men were smearing their morning skin—I had wakened, thinking it all a cartoon dream, no longer trembling, as the temple bell-gong shout rose to a noisy Bong climax like the end of a laughing-gas movie—Shoes gone like Donald Duck—went barefoot for tea and puries and potatoes. Tram car 19 home all the way to Dharamtala 8 A.M.


`High Season'

Simon Vinkenoog

Theun got his cigarette paper from his pocket and started making sticks. One, two, three, four went around ... Immediately the full blast of the stuff hit me. Thousands of words and thoughts stumbled for priority and formation within me. I didn't say a thing, looked inside and listened outside, only an ear until I found that Klaas was asking for my attention. I
performed violently gesticulating pantomimes with him, then fell silent in great astonishment when he began talking, quietly and deliberately, with a vocabulary I hadn't thought him capable of, he who always stutters with the one hundred words normally at his disposal.

Suddenly he appeared to be a new Einstein, enunciating clearly a new cosmic law, fitting in all the details. He, whom I had always considered almost an imbecile, had been thinking over a problem for centuries, an enormously important problem (I have forgotten which), and now at this exact moment he had found the precise words for it, which made his speech as correct as could be. Not one word too many. Each sentence supported by gestures was a detail of the great closely-knit story, towering erect over us sitting listeners.

I followed his story step by step, surprised that I was able to follow his complex arguments, happy that I had been privileged to witness this moment. And the others? I looked at them, they smiled at me, sunk within their own worlds.

'Do you want to write it all down?' Klaas asked me at the end of his lecture. With a broad and elegant gesture he drew our attention to Cecile, who had been listening sunk in the deep sofa, delighted and astonished, almost crying from compassion. I had become the disciple of Mad Klaas, forever I was turned to him, and would have cried too if I'd had the tears at my disposal. I tried to press them into existence, but they wouldn't come, my tear-glands stayed dry even though my eyes were moist from the sweet and silly smoke. The laws were meant not only for our misty party, but for a completely new world, hardly discovered and not yet mapped at all, still without dates. We were floating between heaven and earth, loosened from all the others yet at one with everything. I felt for an indivisible moment as sad as could be because people who have something to say these days are hardly able to articulate.

Low-toned gramophone music hammered against my temples, spread clickety clack through my body. Benevolently languid, I had settled on the bed with the others, who didn't move. As I pulled up my knees, tremors of emotion rolled through me. I was aware of the fact that I was being looked at. The first words from far behind my consciousness began to come out, and I listened to them just as the others did. Slowly I started paying attention to my own words, listening to my greedy voice, somersaulting sounds which were not to be overtaken nor to be repeated, volatized like the ether Klaas used to sniff, hanging in the air, deja vu, waiting for a command from my fingers to be magically snapped into existence again.

Impossible, it can't be done.

I was no longer talking aloud. Without will I drifted back into a pre-natal state, my head grew heavier and heavier, larger than my body. A few more difficult swimming motions brought me into the realm of the archetypes, eternally renewed. After an endless silence:

'The more people fill the room, the more the silence grows.'

The first words groped their way to us, searching for our ears. The clumsiness left our legs. Whispering we discussed the high, almost' respectfully. We got up and went downstairs slowly.

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