The light of many worlds

It’s one of those passages in which I cannot find my glasses. Will our hero find them before he crushes them? My record has been good. And based on luck. Blind luck, quite literally.

***

Light changes my mood. So do dry days. Much is possible during them.

Gwen and I won’t be going to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival this weekend because neither of us has the money, and even that doesn’t dampen things. I must be in a good mood.

Books disseminated recently: (I alluded to this before. It meant more than a mention’s worth.)

I gave Carol seven works of fiction that, in one way or another, have pinged social speculation in a way that has left me happily musing off and on for years, or decades.

There was the lovely novel The Santaroga Barrier, by Frank Herbert, which draws out a curious sort of utopia in a small little California town. Relevant is Herbert’s comment in an interview later that he had wanted to write the interesting sort of utopia where half the readers would be saying, what a wonderful place!, and the other half wouldn’t be caught dead in it. (If a requirement of utopias is that they be stable in their in-some-sense perfection, Herbert is probably right about the solution set.)

There was the novel Heart of the Comet, by Gregory Benford and David Brin, which is a story of people and factions under the stress of both survival and new dangerous strangeness and possibility, both external and human-devised. … Good grief, that’s a blurb sentence, isn’t it. Foul. Anyway, it takes place on the surface of Halley’s Comet during one of its future circuits, in a human universe in which technology and ecological mishaps have both advanced considerably. … My summary sentences are annoying me today. You should read this book if you find it in a secondhand store, is the point. It’s really good.

There was the novel Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock, which… (wait a minute, I said that these were books that pinged social speculation. That doesn’t fit Mythago Wood at all. Am I expected to tear up my whole list in search of a new framing device?! I refuse to. Just bull it through… ) This is a book that makes interesting comments about, er, society through the medium of the most mindblowing new vision in mythic fantasy I have ever seen. The remarkable dreams that a reader is likely to have for several nights following completion of the book will result in, um, greater insight into cultural and political issues. (Did they buy it?? Move along quickly –) Seriously, this book is jaw-dropping. Whatever you’ve thought about, for example, Robin Hood, it was nothing like this, and no, it’s not what you’re thinking of now either. Mythago Wood is one of those magical new doors.

There was the anthology The Survival of Freedom, edited by John Carr. The topics are tyranny and liberty’s prospects into the future. From its own fascinating angles, but then ideological particularities are universal on this subject. It includes wonderfully annoying stories (anything that forces you to think is annoying) – one of which, “Lipidleggin'”, may be the short story that I have recommended the most times over my lifetime – and also poems by Rudyard Kipling and Robinson Jeffers, and also essays like “The true horror of Soviet internal exile.”

There was the anthology Power, edited by S.M. Stirling, also a collection of short stories and strange nonfiction essays that talk about the cruciality of energy societies in society and civilization. I think I want to point at the very funny story “Originals”, by Pamela Sargent, as my favorite in the book – although there’s heavy competition. It was written just after the flash of excitement about possible cold fusion in 1989, and contains the most lucid explanation of what that was all about that I’ve ever read, by Isaac Asimov… as well as the most gorgeous explorations of what it might mean if and when cold fusion, or a range of other developments that would be just as revolutionary, ever did break loose.

There was an anthology of Larry Niven’s fiction, All The Myriad Ways… a collection of whimsies and wonders. I don’t know whether to call the essays fiction or nonfiction; they offer Niven’s definitive technical discourses on time travel and teleportation, as well as, famously, the sex life of Superman. And the short story “Inconstant Moon” has greatly added to the splendor of every full moon I’ve admired since age nine.

And there is The Princess Of All Lands, a book of ghost stories by Russell Kirk, architect of classic American conservatism in his other work… which contains the stories “Balgrummo’s Hell” and “There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Winding.”

That was all seven to Carol.

***

I have gotten very bad at describing things that aren’t made of words, I think. I cannot decide how much I want to describe the days that have lifted my happiness – there are the still-chill days when the sun is a new loud shout upon my head through parts in the clouds, there are the perfect days that carry the tiny scents one had almost forgotten, there was the tiny woodpecker this morning on the power pole as I was leaving for the bus in shorts and Vietnamese bamboo hat to go to my doctor’s appointment, but I don’t know what I want to tell. I don’t know what goes across. I don’t know what’s the center.

And I don’t know how to explain what sharing those books is to me. I have grown to mistrust poetry, even if it’s a day when I’m good at it. What would I say of this flowering of universes – when I mean nothing figurative? Books are windows, books are doors, seeing new things is miracle of miracles, even the chance of it is. The splendor of us, of our eyes opening, of the world growing into new dimensions, see, it’s impossible. If you’ve read books that have stunned you, or transported you, or reconstructed your next three weeks worth of musings, you have some idea. (The natural course of this conversation does not involve ever directly talking about this. It goes toward implementation instead: “You’ve never read Lord Valentine’s Castle? Oh, my, that’s a travel novel, let me tell you. Here, take my copy, where did I put it, here it is. Never mind the strawberry jam on the cover. Take it. Trust me.“)

***

I’ve also had occasion to give a friend the book Psychedelics Encyclopedia, by Peter Stafford, and perhaps one or two books as well that I’ll send to follow it. Which shows how the magic of books, fiction and non-fiction, can interact with other magics of discovery – cookbooks would be another example – as would any nonfiction – but as I was saying… (… I’ll be trying to fingerpaint in a second to make graphs.)

(I wish I could find my glasses. Slight extra eyestrain.)

(I’ve just realized that this is the day that the movie Iron Sky opens in Australia. You bastards.)

Anyway. A friend was out camping recently with a truly wonderful gathering of souls she has fallen in with. One thing that happened was that she accepted some mushroom tea. It was a lovely experience; word is the campfire was amazing. The experience has left a nice afterglow, and in conversation she expressed an interest in exploring more of the psychedelics. And she mentioned ayahuasca as one thing that people she knew might be able to get holdof.

… Ah. See, this is a lead-in to the value of good information as opposed to sparse or bad information.

People should know as much as possible about anything they’re going to be involved in. This avoids certain pitfalls.

One of those possible pitfalls is that, in discovering the niceness of one member of a category, one can conclude that other members are just as nice. This can be exacerbated if the original nice thing had dark warnings and evil rumors about it that one has discovered to be false.

In particular, people should know, in detail, about any mind-altering substance they’re going to decide to try. This is why good books on the subject would be indicated even if my friend had said that she was only ever going to be interested in the mushroom tea. But what I very much hope to provide my friend with is a sense of the individuality of these things. Psilocybin mushrooms and mescaline-bearing cacti, for example, are – well, if you had a bad trip you might not call them gentle, but they are at least safer than they have any right to be, and less toxic. But, having had a lovely experience with them, one should not begin speculating in the same way about ayahuasca – Banisteriopis caapi with a dash of Psychotria viridis – the mighty vision-vine drink of the Incas. One does not become the same as the other because a bunch of nimrods came up with a class named “hallucinogens” or “psychedelics” to put them both in.

Needing an attendant. Possibly needing to be restrained. Loss of perception of consensus reality. Full-blown visions. Yes, the hairs stood up on my arm when I heard her mention this, and I was going through my mental bibliography before the conversation was over.

(At least she didn’t mention datura, say. That would have been truly alarming. Scopolamine. Quite dangerously toxic… and true hallucinations and loss of contact with reality – to the point of smoking invisible cigarettes, having conversations with people not there – or running from invisible monsters fully believed in. Basically, the perfect image of what the more nervous man on the street thinks all hallucinogens are.) (Now and then in New Mexico, I would occasionally hear about some kids, who might have dreamily braved a school day undetected stoned or on LSD, trying the same thing with “jimson weed”, datura, some of the seeds possibly. I’d hear about them because they really, really didn’t make it.)

So, Psychedelics Encyclopedia. And I think also From Chocolate To Morphine, by Winifred Rosen and Andrew Weil, which gives a range of good advice to people who may try the various things, and maybe another one. For all I know my friend may indeed one day decide to give ayahuasca a shot, and she’s an adult and her own pilot, but she’s going to know as much as possible about it.

(For those who know the book Where Did I Come From? – yes, that book informed my view of books and of the bookshelf just as much as it did my early sex education. “The facts of life with no nonsense and with illustrations.”)

***

It comes to me to say, and it makes a fit ending to this bookish entry: The best book I read during one of the last five years, and I cannot remember if I said, was The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade, by Cecil Woodham-Smith. So very good a book.