Stirred and shaken
Faced by difficult choices both in his life and fiction, and encouraged by the examples of Peter Matthiessen and Allen Ginsberg, Henry Shukman tried ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic Amazonian vine
Henry Shukman
Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
Santa Fe, the “City Different”, known to some as FantaSe, is the city where you can hire a horse to be your shrink (“equine-assisted psychotherapy”), where your child can play with a hula-hoop “charged with Plutonian energy” (more grounding than Neptunian), and where the nose can be the centre of all health diagnosis (“Noseology”).
New Mexico’s state capital stands at 7,000 feet on a desert plateau that reaches all the way to Arizona, with the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising to blood-red, 13,000-foot peaks behind. At the end of the long trail from St Louis, Santa Fe – with its many giant mud buildings that look as if they belong in Timbuktu, but are in fact modern hotels, banks, shopping centres – has been the natural home of the eccentric since the turn of the 20th century, when the five painters known as the Cinco Pintores fled the straight-laced East Coast and settled nearby. New Mexico is the only place where DH Lawrence ever owned a house. Dennis Hopper and the infamous Bean Farm Commune (where the acid trip in Easy Rider was filmed); Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Aldous Huxley, Kerouac, Kesey – there’s hardly an artistic or counter-cultural luminary of the past few decades who hasn’t passed through.
It is now the mecca of heterodox DIY spirituality. So it’s not surprising there are no fewer than two “churches” in town devoted to the use of ayahuasca, an Amazonian vine of terrifying narcotic potency. One of them was in the news lately. A member of the congregation, a prominent industrialist, challenged a legal ruling that had made ayahuasca, his sacrament, a banned drug. He won, and in spite of its being one of the strongest hallucinogens known to humanity, it is now officially legal in New Mexico (a state whose last governor was pro-cannabis).
The literary apology for – or anyway fascination with – hard drugs is nothing new. From Homer’s lotus-eaters right through to Irvine Welsh’s e- and smack-consumers, western literature has always had room for drugs. But the extent of the accommodation surely expanded hugely in the 1950s, when that pre- or proto-Beat Huxley famously experimented with mescalin. The idea that drugs could offer not just a short-cut to pleasure and escape but a glimpse into a fundamental spiritual reality entered the zeitgeist, as well as the canon, then. Take this pill and become as enlightened as a mystic.
No wonder writers, ever hungry for experience and understanding (like everyone else but maybe more so), have been drawn to them. But in spite of its potency, ayahuasca has had relatively little literary treatment.
I first heard of it in an ethnographic film during which an anthropology don from Cambridge, squatting in a clearing in the Colombian Amazon, clad in a loin-cloth and several necklaces (and visibly whiter and more bearded than everyone else in shot), submitted to having powdered ayahuasca blown up his nose. An Amerindian elder put his lips to one end of a blow-pipe, while the innocent anthropologist waited curiously at the other, the tube jammed in a nostril. Suddenly he spun away clutching his face as if he’d been knifed, shrieking.
If he had been hoping to step through the doors of heaven and hell, he’d found hell first. After a few moments of stumbling about in agony, he bent double and started to vomit. A voice-over blithely commented that yag?© , as they call it down there, typically caused severe nausea in the user, and that the Indians regarded this as an important function of the drug, which was a purga del anima, or purge of the soul. It didn’t look like a lot of fun.
On the whole, other people’s drug experiences are probably about as interesting as other people’s dreams, on or off the page. It may have the biggest cult following around, but Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas left me wishing I’d read it at the right time, back when I was a student happy to supplement the syllabus with a chemical education. But some literary drug trips make spectacular reading, and one of the best (up there with Will Self’s breathtaking psychotic sex session in Great Apes ) happens to be an ayahuasca trip, rendered brilliantly by Peter Matthiessen in his under-read masterpiece of a novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. It goes on for a few dozen exhilarating pages, in the course of which an imbiber of a double-dose of ayahuasca tea flies his private plane over the vast carpet of the Amazonian forest, and finds himself bailing out (he somehow remembers his parachute) over an uncontacted Indian village. Matthiessen’s gravity, imagination and powers of description are at full throttle. Drugs can be good for a writer; you can tell he’d tried it, and can’t help being glad he did.
Ginsberg too experimented with it, in Peru in 1960, and it features in his correspondence with William Burroughs (published as The Yag?© Letters ); WS Merwin wrote a long poem about it (“The Real Life of Manuel Cordova”); and Mario Vargas Llosa touches on it in The Storyteller. But other than this, ayahuasca remains for the most part an obscure or unknown initiation.
Considering Santa Fe’s heritage, it oughtn’t to have been a surprise when a local friend told me he’d taken this elusive intoxicant recently, with a visiting Peruvian shaman, and wouldn’t I like to try it? He had turned into a panther stalking the rainforest (feline-assisted psychotherapy?), had never felt so good, and so on.
And the vomiting? I asked. He shrugged. Once or twice. No big deal.
To cut a long story short, he persuaded me. As it happened, I had been working on a novel set partly in Peru, and I thought maybe the influence of a Peruvian shaman and his potions might somehow help, especially since I was stuck, and had advanced little in weeks. I was also pondering whether to apply to extend the teaching job I had in New Mexico, and couldn’t make up my mind. Perhaps a little rainforest synaptic adjustment would shake out some decisive clarity. And on top of that, I was curious.
First I had to call someone called Ramon.
“Sure, hey,” Ramon said, like he had been expecting my call. “We’re meeting this Saturday to do some singing.”
Singing?
“Sure, we’ll be singing all night,” he said with an odd emphasis, and the penny dropped: code.
“Don’t eat that day,” he added.
The whole day?
So five days later, ravenous and already light-headed with fasting, I found myself standing outside a dance studio in Santa Fe, along with about 40 others, as another watery New Mexican twilight lingered beneath a high glassy sky. We filed in and sat around the walls on blankets. The “ceremony” would go on all night. The shaman and his white-robed helpers went round the room with incense and holy water, and everyone was given a small plastic bowl for the anticipated purge. After that came a glass of a disgusting, gruelly, riverine potion – the tea itself. The lights went out. Some of the assistant shamans started to sing songs. Others mimicked the calls of Amazonian birds so well that the room seemed to echo like the rainforest, and I wondered if the drug was already taking effect.
The first effect was the appearance out of nowhere of geometric multi-coloured patterns forming and re-forming in time with the songs. I could “see” them whether my eyes were open or closed. They were embarrassingly hippie-kaleidoscopic, but there they were. The “eye of the soul opening”, apparently: seeing in the dark. Then suddenly everything vanished. No singing, no kaleidoscope, no nothing. I felt that I had shot up out of my body and was floating in the midst of black, silvery space. It was silent and still, and I was completely calm. I needed nothing, never had and never would.
Then I somehow became aware of a ruinous, exhausted tangle of four human limbs far, far below me, slumped on a wooden floor.
Alas, I knew that somehow I was committed to that body, I had a responsibility to it, and it was drawing me back. The next thing I knew I was back in the room vomiting all over myself, groping for my little bowl.
I became a motionless lizard coated in many-coloured tiles, as if each cell of my hide were a piece of a mosaic. I couldn’t have moved a muscle if I’d wanted to. Then the nausea came back and I started to get scared. I don’t like being sick at the best of times, but here, each time I felt the nausea, it seemed it would last for ever. In that grossly altered state if something lasted a minute it was an eternity. A deep discomfort sprang up from nowhere, and once again I retched. Then once more, ethereal silence, complete peace.
I sweated, I groaned and curled up in a ball, trying to get comfortable, I lay down, and moaned to myself. After every seizure of the stomach, perfect peace. Then back the nausea would come.
The shaman attempted to rouse and fortify me at one point by grabbing my wrists. “Fuerte, fuerte [be strong],” he exhorted me. By then, I longed to sleep. Around me the singing had long since stopped. Instead there was a chorus of violent retching coming from all over the room.
When the drug began to wear off I looked at my watch and could understand what it said again. Three in the morning. The singing resumed. Slowly, one by one, people stood up and moved about. Some danced gently. It was maybe another hour after that that I felt able to stand. Afterwards a woman said to me: “This is as close as a man can get to knowing what it’s like giving birth.” There had been moments of perfect bliss, which it felt good to have known, but mostly there had been nausea and terror.
Yet strangely there were pay-offs. Firstly, the relief of having my mind back afterwards. Maybe my mind wasn’t so bad after all. I was exhausted, but also glowing, scoured, somehow clean within. When I walked outside into the dawn air, and saw the pale sky, the green mountains in the distance subtly infused with gold light, I felt like I was 19 again.
“First time?” a silver-haired old hand asked me afterwards, as I stood blinking in the cold dawn, wondering where I had just been.
“Yes.”
“Did you die?” he asked me.
So that was what had happened. “I thought I’d given birth to an asteroid,” I explained seriously. “Except I was the asteroid.”
“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “That’s good. We are asteroids.”
Right.
Be that as it may – and good or not – that afternoon the novel I was stuck on opened up like an Ordnance Survey map, and I could see the whole plot at last. I covered a giant sheet of A2 with notes and plans.
Are there shortcuts in this life? Do those ancient tribes of Amazonia know things we don’t? The only things I could be sure of were that with or without ayahuasca’s help, there would be months of hard slog ahead if I was ever going to finish the book; and that I hoped very much never to touch the stuff again.
¬? A paperback edition of Henry Shukman’s Darien Dogs (Vintage), and a new novel, Sandstorm (Jonathan Cape) are published in June.
Link courtesy John Coulthart
Arthur Magazine 