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

Cleveland Plain Dealer

Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Hints of cosmic crash at Serpent Mound
Bill Sloat
Plain Dealer Reporter

Sifting through rocks snagged from twin boreholes punched deep into the planet’s crust, scientists have detected an unearthly substance hidden for eons in Ohio’s basement.

And its presence 1,412 feet beneath the forests and farmlands near Serpent Mound in south-central Ohio — already on par with Britain’s Stonehenge and Egypt’s pyramids as one of Earth’s most mysterious manmade structures — adds to a puzzle shrouded in legend and lore for centuries.

When scientists peered into the geo-strata that emerged from beneath the mound, they were confronted with pure, weird data. Under their microscope, they saw quartz crystals with flaws like those found at nuclear test sites and in moon rocks brought back by astronauts.

It pointed toward a massive energy burst that left behind telltale traces of a cosmic crash.

Now, those findings are rattling through the world of geology, shaking up long-held conceptions and misconceptions about Ohio’s distant past.

“I think we can say with authority today that this is an impact from a meteorite,” said Mark T. Baranoski, a state geologist. “It affected the region in a spectacular way.”

Rock samples from beneath the mound contain significantly higher than normal concentrations of iridium, an extremely rare metal. Because it is so heavy, iridium seldom shows up anywhere but near the planet’s molten core.

At Serpent Mound, the levels measured were 10 times beyond what is usually present in the Earth’s crust.

Occasionally, volcanoes bring it up in lava. But there are no lava fields in Ohio. So the questions started. Where did the iridium-rich rocks come from?

While iridium is scarce on Earth, the silver-gray metal is common in asteroids and comets.

In other words, it often is a strong sign that the sky has fallen.

Geologists, including researchers from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, describe the recent discovery as powerful new evidence that Serpent Mound sits upon a slightly oblong crater created when a massive extraterrestrial object slammed into Earth.

They have reported that the heavy metal find is “good evidence for an impact origin” and that dark, stony material recovered from the deepest borehole has a “significant enrichment” that must have come from outer space.

Iridium is already at the center of another scientific mind-bender – the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

In a widely accepted doomsday scenario, an asteroid the size of Manhattan plunged into the sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. The explosion devastated the planet and unleashed a worldwide wipeout that caused 70 percent of all living things to die.

Scientists say they have found an iridium line in the Earth’s crust that few species crossed. Under the great extinction theory, the iridium showered down in debris after the asteroid struck.

Not all scientists accept the doomsday scenario, but many say it does seem to explain why the dinosaurs died off.

A similar event – although without those dramatic global effects – looks to have taken place in Ohio.

The crater touches portions of Adams, Pike and Highland counties, about 200 miles southwest of Cleveland in the state’s rolling Appalachian countryside.

The mound, built about 1,000 years ago, straddles land near the crater’s southwest edge and may have had a religious function, although nobody knows for sure what philosophy and beliefs shaped its origin.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from speculating about Serpent Mound’s builders and what they were up to. Some say they were mystics and priests. Others say magicians and soothsayers. Still others see them as prophets.

There are those who claim that the builders were shamans who practiced human sacrifice, while some believe that they were ancient astronomers who were the intellectual caste of woodland America.

Fact is, nobody can say. The mound builders left no written records.

Erosion and Ice Age glaciers have erased most of the crater from the surface.

But underground it’s a far different story, and the boreholes exposed the geologic record.

Fine grains of sand taken from 1,439 feet down appear deformed when viewed under a microscope. There even seem to be particles of soot left from scorched limestone, although researchers say additional work is needed before the strange black material is positively identified.

Still, everything seems to point to a cosmic jolt. While some aren’t convinced, they agree the evidence is piling up.

Mike Hansen, a retired state geologist who runs an earthquake warning system and teaches at Ohio State University, said there is no doubt that the Serpent Mound area was disturbed by some unknown force. But Hansen thinks the stresses were triggered by natural shifts in the Earth’s crust.

Around the time the rocks were deformed, Hansen said, Africa was pushing into North America and the Appalachian Mountains range was thrusting up higher than today’s Himalayas. He said a major tectonic event like that could have created the underground chaos at Serpent Mound.

Still, Hansen concedes that the meteorite hypothesis is gaining adherents among geologists.

The object, if it did strike Ohio, would have been gigantic. Maybe up to three times larger than Cleveland Browns Stadium. Traveling up to 45,000 mph, it would have been moving much faster than a speeding bullet.

The searing heat, blast and shockwaves from such a crash would have instantly carved a 1,000-foot-deep hole and crushed rocks miles below the five-mile-across crater.

That is exactly what samples from the two boreholes show. Researchers have spotted microscopic cracks in quartz crystals far beneath the surface and horsetail-shaped fractures called “shatter cones” in geological formations from the ground on down. The cracked crystals have patterns resembling those appearing after U.S. nuclear weapons tests in Nevada.

Other than iridium, there is no trace of an asteroid or comet.

It would probably have vaporized when it hit 256 million years ago.

“I don’t think we’ll ever find it,” Baranoski said. “It would have gone up in smoke. If anything was left near the surface, it would have been eroded away.”

Doyle Watts, a geophysicist at Dayton’s Wright State University who worked on the international team that studied the core samples, said the impact theory explains why so much of the terrain around Serpent Mound appears jumbled.

Some rock formations rise 1,000 feet above the ground. Others look like they have slid straight down.

Those oddities were first noticed not long after Europeans settled Ohio.

John Locke, a geologist who explored the area in the 1830s, thought he had found a “sunken mountain” and reported that “a region of no small extent had sunk down several hundred feet, producing faults, dislocations and upturnings of the layers of the rocks.”

Even more weird was the 1,348-foot-long Serpent Mound, which looked like an undulating snake atop a plateau overlooking Brush Creek.

Watts said he believes that the Indians saw the strange features in the land and were moved to build the mound, perhaps as a sacred monument. He said the Indians were deeply attuned to the natural world.

“It just begs the questions: Why would Native Americans lug tons of soil and shape it into a slithering serpent? Why would they choose to do so on the scar of an ancient impact when they had all of Ohio and the Midwest?” Watts said.

“My guess is that they could have noticed something strange about the rocks. It has to be more than coincidence.”

To reach these Plain Dealer reporters:

bsloat@plaind.com, 513-631-4125

Brazil authorises Indian reserve
By Tom Gibb
BBC News, Sao Paulo

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has signed a decree creating an Amazonian Indian reserve the size of a small country in northern Brazil.

The reserve, Raposa Serra Do Sol, is called “the land of the fox and mountain of the sun” by the 12,000 Indians who live there.

Its hills, rivers and forests cover 17,000 sq km (6,500 square mies).

The move follows 30 years of campaigns by the Indians, which led to bitter conflicts with settlers and farmers.

During that time, human rights groups say at least a dozen Indians were killed in conflicts with miners and settlers.

Parts of the reserve, in the northern state of Roraima, are now planted with rice or grazed by cattle.

The decree for demarcation – the last step in a long process – has been sitting on the Brazilian president’s desk for a couple of years.

Whenever he has looked like signing, it has provoked fierce protests against the reserve from settlers and local politicians.

Justice Minister Tomas Bastos said that over the next year, farmers inside the reserve would be moved to alternative land.

Only roads, a frontier military base, and a small town inside the area have been excluded from the reserve.

Lula, as the president is known, will be hoping the decree will head off anti-government protests planned for next week by Indian groups.

They have been accusing him of not living up to promises over land.

sfweekly.com | The Karmic Kitchen (Printable) | 2005-04-06

From sfweekly.com
Originally published by SF Weekly Apr 06, 2005
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Karmic Kitchen
Annalakshmi brings karmic dining to San Francisco; a convenience store groupie attends the “University of 7-Eleven.”
OVERHEARD BY JOHN MECKLIN

Imagine walking into an upscale Indian restaurant, its menu filled with delectable-sounding choices like Malabar avocado and coconut soup (made with plain yogurt, cumin, and lemon juice and served with fresh cilantro chutney and whole wheat chapatis) and drinks like the Saffron Sandalwood Fizz (lime juice and pure water, cooled overnight by the light of the moon). You sit down with friends and enjoy a delicious, ayurvedic vegetarian meal, served with a smile. Then you finish, feeling satisfied, and signal for the bill — but none comes. This scenario is not merely a fantasy: At Annalakshmi, you decide what to order and how much to pay.

Inspired by Swami Shantanand — a Hindu monk from Rishikesh, India, who came to Southeast Asia in the early 1970s — the small international restaurant chain operates with an uncommon trust in humanity: that people will pay what is fair because we are inherently good and because it is in our own best karmic interests to give. Although its concept may sound too idealistic to stand a chance, Annalakshmi has been in business for 19 years, and has thriving outposts in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and India. And now it’s geared up to open its first eatery in the United States — in an as-yet-undetermined spot in San Francisco.

Behind the scenes is a 35-year-old Marina District woman named Lalitha Vaidyanathan, who, late last year, quit her job as a co-founder and vice president at SquareTrade, a company that facilitates fair online sales, to pursue the restaurant’s local development full time. “I always felt like Annalakshmi has so much to offer people beyond just food,” she explains. “It really provides a whole new way of seeing the world and its possibilities. I felt that San Francisco would be a perfect place to open one. Why not? I figure if it’s meant to happen it will. I have complete trust in whatever’s meant to be.”

One of the reasons Annalakshmi — named after the Hindu concept of abundance — has succeeded is because it is run mostly by volunteers, called “Annalakshmis.” “People naturally want to volunteer because it allows them to tap into something divine within themselves,” says Vaidyanathan. “The human heart and its inherent generosity is the secret force behind Annalakshmi. There is nothing wrong with making money, but it’s also nice to give in a way that does not seek returns.”

Annalakshmi is actually part of a larger organization called the Temple of Fine Arts International, and is one of its main sources of revenue. TFA, also inspired by Swami Shantanand, exists to provide a variety of services such as pay-what-you-can dance and music courses, free medical clinics, and art galleries and handicrafts that direct proceeds to the artisans, bypassing any middlemen. TFA’s most recent event was an Indian cultural performance at New York’s Lincoln Center, put on without admission tickets.

So how does the restaurant do it? On a trip through Singapore with a friend recently, we stopped by to see for ourselves.

The Singapore outpost is ornate and beautiful, surrounded by exquisite handicrafts. Nearby are TFA’s gallery, medical clinic, and performing arts center. The eatery also has several smaller to-go outlets as well as a thriving catering business delivering lunches to businesses.

Ganesh Krishnan, its operations manager, says, “In any business, the goal is to have satisfied customers. That is our goal as well. When you have satisfied customers, they will return. That is the reason Annalakshmi is always full. Some people will pay less and some will pay more. The important thing is that they pay what they feel is right for them. In the end, it all balances out.”

When asked what happens if people take advantage of the system, Krishnan seems to imply that it’s not much of an issue. One customer, he says, came in and paid only a dime, to test the system. The next night he came in and paid only a dime again. The third night, the same. When he realized that there was no gimmick, he became a regular customer and increased his payments. For Krishnan, personal growth is part of the whole equation.

Another regular customer, who gives her name as Padmeeni, explains why she dines here instead of somewhere else: “I like to eat at Annalakshmi because the food is excellent and I feel good about where my money is going, through the various causes they support.” How much does she pay? The going rate, she says, if not a little more; it gives her a clear conscience.

After investigating Annalakshmi for a little while, we decided to volunteer — cutting vegetables — and it quickly became apparent that running a restaurant is an enormous undertaking for a largely unpaid crew. Still, when the eatery comes to San Francisco, we’ll be back in the kitchen, supporting a worldview built on abundance. (John Silliphant)

COURTESY JOSHUA BABCOCK!

HIMvsMRSQUIRREL

Photo by Arthur webmaster Chris McKenna

Senator Threatens to Block Vote on E.P.A. Nominee
April 14, 2005

Senator Threatens to Block Vote on E.P.A. Nominee
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, April 13 – Stephen L. Johnson, President Bush’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, won nearly unanimous approval from a Senate committee today, although one member said he might block confirmation by the full Senate.

The vote of the panel, the Environment and Public Works Committee, was 17 to 1. The lone dissenter was Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, who complained that the agency had not responded to his requests for detailed analyses of antipollution proposals differing from the administration’s.

Each member of the Senate has the power to delay confirmation of a presidential nominee, and after the committee vote, Mr. Carper did not rule out doing so if he did not receive the information.

Suggesting that the blame lay with the White House, the senator said: “Steve Johnson needs to be unfettered by this administration to do the job as it needs to be done. We need legislation, but to get the right legislation, we need good, timely technical information.”

Last week two other Democrats, Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Bill Nelson of Florida, also threatened to block confirmation. Their objections sprang from a program in Florida, co-sponsored by the E.P.A., in which low-income families would have been compensated to allow research about the effects of pesticides on their infants.

Mr. Johnson, the agency’s acting administrator, agreed on Friday to cancel that study. Yet Ms. Boxer said before voting on Wednesday that she still had “great reservations” about his stewardship. She mentioned concerns dealing with other human testing programs, decisions that the agency’s critics have said are made on the basis of politics rather than science, and financial support for the Superfund program.

“I am going to go with my hopes, not my fears,” Ms. Boxer said of her vote backing the nomination.

Mr. Johnson, who has a background in pesticides, would become the first career scientist to lead the agency. He has held several senior positions there and been acting administrator since Michael O. Leavitt left in January to become secretary of health and human services.

Mr. Carper’s concerns underscore a major division on the committee between Republicans who favor the Bush administration’s approach to reducing emissions from power plants and members who back alternatives that, unlike the administration’s initiative, would set limits on carbon dioxide emissions in addition to those of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. Mr. Carper and Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, have introduced one alternative; Senator James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, has offered another.

The administration plan failed to win committee approval last month for the second consecutive year, in part, Mr. Carper says, because the agency has refused to analyze the two alternatives to determine their costs and effectiveness, as it has the administration approach.

In attributing the agency’s reluctance to the White House, Mr. Carper suggested that Mr. Johnson would exercise only as much independence as officials there would allow.

He said he believed that Mr. Johnson “would serve the agency well if the White House would let him,” adding, “Unfortunately, I don’t believe the White House has let past administrators do their jobs effectively, and I don’t believe they’re ready to do that now.”

Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, declined to respond to Mr. Carper’s comments directly, on the ground that confirmation was still pending. But “the president believes Mr. Johnson is the best-qualified individual to lead the E.P.A.,” Mr. Duffy said, “which is why we selected him.”