As the title of his collection The Archaic Revival implies, McKenna has found a key to the future in the dung heap of the past. (It is entirely appropriate to note that psychoactive mushrooms often sprout from cow pies.) During the European Renaissance, scientists, artists, and enlightened citizens turned back to a much older Greek civilization for the marble sparks with which to ignite their marvelous new bonfire. In more than one place in his collection of essays and conversations, McKenna is urging that we turn back—way, way back—to Paleolithic shamanism, to retrieve techniques that not only could ensure our survival, but could assist us in mounting a fresh golden age: in fact, the golden age, the one toward which the plot of all history has been building.
McKenna doesn’t consider himself a shaman, although he has studied with shamans (and drunk their potent potions) in Asia and the Amazon. He says, however, that he is attempting to “explore reality with a shamanic spirit and by shamanic means.” Indeed, the shaman’s rattle buzzes hypnotically throughout his essays and lectures, although it is sometimes obscured by the whoosh of UFOs, for McKenna’s imagination (and expertise) ranges from the jungle to hyperspace, and only a dolt would ever call him retro.
Here, let me squirt a few drops of Terence’s essence into the punch bowl, so that we might sample the flavor and chart the ripples:
My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body, so that the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture during our psychedelic bar mitzvah.
The problem with Christianity is it’s the single most reactionary force in human history. I don’t even know what is in second place, it’s so far in front. And I believe that the destruction of paganism was probably the greatest disservice to the evolution of the human psyche that has ever been done. The repression of “witchcraft” is really the repression of botanical knowledge…
I don’t believe that the world is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language.
If hallucinogens are operating as exopheromones, then the dynamic symbiotic relationship between primate and hallucinogenic plant is actually a transfer of information from one species to another.
Reality is a domain of codes, and that is why the UFO problem is like a grammatical problem—like a dangling participle in the fourth-dimensional language that makes reality. It eludes simple approaches because its nature is somehow embedded in the machinery of epistemic knowing itself.
I scoured India and could not convince myself that [its mysticism] wasn’t a shell game of some sort or was any more real than the states manipulated by the various schools of New Age psychotherapy. But in the Amazon… you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different… [yet] more real than real.
These tiny sips from McKenna’s gourd, served out of context and stripped of his usual droll garnishes, are nevertheless intoxicating and, to my mind, nourishing. In larger gulps, his brew may even heal the ulcers through which the modern world is bleeding.
Our problems today are more complex and more threatening than at any time in history. Sadly, we cannot even begin to solve those problems, because our reality orientations are lower than a snowman’s blood pressure. We squint at existence through thick veils of personal and societal ignorance, overlaid with still more opaque sheets of disinformation, thoughtfully provided by the state, the church, and big business (often one and the same). The difference between us and Helen Keller is that she knew she was deaf and blind.
Radical problems call for radical solutions. Conventional politicians are too thickheaded to conceive of radical solutions and too fainthearted to implement them if they could, whereas political revolutionaries, no matter how well meaning, ultimately offer only bloodshed followed by another round of repression.
To truly alter conditions, we must alter ourselves—philosophically, psychologically, and perhaps biologically. The first step in those ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS will consist mainly of cutting away the veils in order that we might see ourselves for that mysterious Other that we probably are and may always have been. Terence the Tailor has got the sharpest shears in town. And he’s open Sundays and holidays. Once the veils are severed, we, each of us, can finally start to attend to our self-directed mutagenesis.
With his uniquely secular brand of eschatological euphoria, Terence McKenna is inviting us to a Doomsday we can live with. Be there or be squared.
Foreword to The Archaic Revival, HarperCollins, 1992
NOTE: When Terence McKenna was killed by a brain tumor in 2000 (a cruel irony considering the astonishing range and vibrancy of his cerebral equipment), his obituary in The New York Times reported that he had gone around predicting the “end of the world.” This is patently false. What Terence talked about so convincingly and optimistically was a potential end of history, of our temporal paradigm—the end of a world system being a far different thing than the end of the world. It goes to show you that America’s “newspaper of record” cannot always be trusted to get its facts straight, particularly when dealing with subjects that bloom outside the gray-walled garden of cultural orthodoxy.
Thomas Pynchon
Although I’m hypnotized by the colored lights he plays upon the dark waters of history—by the way he illuminates a shadowy ocean of conspiracies, atrocities, buffooneries, and arcana, causing it to sparkle in every direction—what I ultimately find thrilling and inspiring about Thomas Pynchon is an ostensibly far simpler thing. It’s his choice of nouns.
His verbs, adverbs, and adjectives are engaging as well, but Pynchon is most impressive when he reaches into a vast bin of squirming language and somehow plucks out a noun that is fresh and unexpected, yet totally appropriate. For example, in Mason & Dixon he has the Reverend Cherrycoke (a splendid appellation!) wipe his bum with “a fistful of clover.” A lesser writer might have settled for “grass” or “leaves” or “straw,” none of which could have lit up the scene the way that clover does. It’s small choices such as that one, choices to which, except subliminally, the general reader is oblivious, that tote the freight of genius.
Mark Twain opined that the difference between the perfect word and one that is merely adequate is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Well, move over, Zeus! Take to the storm cellar, ye firefly farmers! Thomas Pynchon has got both hands on the thunderbolt machine.
Bookforum, 2005
Debra Winger
She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey, between sulphur and roses, between sarcasm and succor, between monolith and disco ball, between hairshirt and hula skirt, between daunting daughter and doting mom, between the girl next door (gone a little bit wild) and international diva (with democratic sentiments). And now after marriage, maternity, and a relatively long hiatus from Hollywood, she’s walking an unfamiliar line between fame and obscurity. She’s walking down the creaky hallway of public memory.
Few who’ve ever heard it forget her voice—which sounds as if it’s been strained through Bacall and Bogey’s honeymoon sheets and then hosed down with plum brandy. Or her laugh—which sounds as if it’s being squeezed out of a kangaroo bladder by a musical aborigine. Men remember her astride that mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy and fantasize about exchanging places with it. Women recall her salt-raw vulnerability in Terms of Endearment and issue wet sighs of identification.
Acquaintances and paparazzi, upon mention of her name, reminisce about her boyish Huck Finn swagger, her chain-saw intensity, her Algonquin-caliber wit. What the curious chroniclers of celebrityhood focus on, however, are the figure sixty-nines she’s allegedly skated on pond after pond of life’s thin ice.
Starting at about sixteen, when she joined the Israeli army, then deserted to go on the bum in Paris, the Cleveland-born Valley girl sowed a fairly huge hopper of wild oats, it’s true, though whether she was rowdier than her peers or just
more imaginative is debatable; and though she isn’t exactly sitting home these evenings knitting prayer shawls, it’s been a long time since she’s waltzed with the devil on a broken rail or rooted for jewels in the Andean snow. Nevertheless, it’s hard to move out of one’s pigeonhole, whether or not one ever signed a lease, and now as her film career resumes, the media’s memories of her days as a saucy little troublemaker (don’t those who insist on excellence always make trouble for those who’re all too willing to settle for mediocrity?) obscure a more comprehensive picture of a woman whose complexities are as immense as her talents.
As for my personal recollections…
The first time I met Debra Winger, we spontaneously ducked out of a boring Tinseltown business meeting to take refuge in a dimly lit Santa Monica dive, where we caused the bartender to develop repetitive-motion disorder from the incessant refilling of our tequila glasses. Late in the day, as I recall, we borrowed a razor blade from the barkeep’s kit, slit our thumbs, and exchanged blood by the light of the jukebox, bonding as siblings of a sort while we danced (illegally) to blues records and puffed Havana cigars. Memories are made of this.
Now, nine years later, and a mile or two southeast, we’re sitting in a health hutch called I Love Juicy, sipping carrot froth and spinach squeezings like a couple of toothless old rabbits on a chlorophyll binge, and the only things bleeding are the beets in the blender.
While it’s no secret that rehabilitation, recovery, and self-denial are the hallmarks of the American 90’s, I’d like to believe that we’ve neither succumbed to trendy asceticism nor been born again as pea-pod puritans. I prefer to think we’re cavorting with Bugs Bunny instead of José Cuervo because we’re temporarily functioning somewhat below the summit of our physiological potential.
For more than six months, I’ve been blitzed by a mysterious virus that I took aboard on a pilgrimage to Timbuktu, while Winger is beset by environmental asthma she developed on a shoot in the dustlands of West Texas.
Thus afflicted, we hold celery stalks like pretend cigars while staring uneasily at the tape recorder that sits on the table next to our cabbage coolers. David Hirshey, brilliant editor and unwavering Winger fan (he’ll never forget) has persuaded me to interview his dream girl for Esquire, to grill her about her recent return to the screen.
We’re no more accustomed to relating in this formal way than we are to the lettucey libations of I Love Juicy, but we profess to be troupers, so, after much hesitation, I stub out my celery in an ashtray and switch on the machine.
“It’s not fair,” I begin. “How could a wise and loving God load up this vegetable juice with thousands of vitamins and not put a single one in tequila?”
Rising, as usual, to the occasion, Winger flashes me that ol’ hellcat grin and says, “Oh, you can get nourishment from tequila, Tommy. But you have to eat the worm.”
Esquire, 1993
STORIES,
POEMS,
& LYRICS
TRIPLETS
I went to Satan’s house.
His mailbox was painted black.
A fleet of bonecrushers was parked in his driveway.
The thorns on his rosebushes were longer than shivs.
And sixty-six roosters scratched in his front yard, their spurs smoldering like cheap cigars.
I went to Satan’s house.
It was supposed to be an Amway party.
I wanted one of those hard as hell steak knives.
The ones that can’t tell the difference between mama’s sponge cake and a chunk of rock cocaine.
I went to Satan’s house.
I felt a little out of place.
But Satan’s twin daughters soon put me at ease.
They tried on funny hats for me, showed me jewels, danced around my chair.
They read my fortune in a bowl of ashes, let me pet their Dobermans, and watch while they rinsed out their pink underthings.
I stopped by Satan’s house,
I just happened to be in the neighborhood.
Satan came downstairs in a Raiders jacket.
His aura was like burnt rubber, but his grin could paint a sunrise on a coal shed wall.
“I see you’ve met Desire and Fulfillment,” he said, polishing his monocle with a blood-flecked rag.
“Regret is in the kitchen making coffee.”
DREAM OF THE LANGUAGE WHEEL
Ancient elf bones stewing in the rain,
Angels the size of fruitflies circling a buddha turd,
Star maps drawn in lipstick on the mud walls of opium towns.
Images like those,
scenes such as these—
The red midgets of hell challenge Suzy’s friends to a snowball fight
Or
In the cave behind the waterfall
the ant king licks the clitoris
of the sleeping anthropologist.—
existing only on paper
are yet more important
than flags, bibles, gold,
guns and reputations.
So
throw off your armor of acronyms,
your layers of numerical padding and
come bathe with me,
come slide beside me naked
into the world’s steamy honeycomb
of words.
CATCH 28
The phantom arrived in a neon speedboat
ferrying a cargo
of coconuts and diamonds.
From the veranda of the malaria hotel
we saw it coming:
a kabuki magazine published by a hurricane.
Its clown-head prow sawed the surf in half
causing Crayola buddhas to run
over the hill with sacks of tadpoles on their backs.
A fat old tropical radio
interrupted the news to announce
that it was now king of the waterbugs.
Watching it turn wine into mink milk,
bedsheets into sandwiches of snow,
we imagined it must be a wind-up toy
designed by a mad scientist
to brighten the long frown of time.
But…
in the end
it was just my old mistress
and your new boss,
the moon.
THREE HAIKU
Brown spider dangling
from a single strand.
Up down, up down:
Zen yo-yo.
They’ve built their nests
in the chimneys of my heart,
those swallows that you lost.
Everywhere she walks,
that ghost is right behind her:
Ah, panty outline!
Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata
I
The witch-girl who lives by the bend in the river is said to keep a fart in a bottle.
It’s a poisonous fart, green as cabbage, loud as a shotgun; and after moonset or before moonrise, her hut is illuminated by its pale mephitic glow. For a time, passersby thought she had television.
Of course, no antenna sprouts from her thatched roof, no satellite dish dwarfs her woodpile, and can you imagine the cable company stringing wires across the marsh and through the forest so that a witch-girl could watch the Occult Channel? Anyway, how would she pay for it? With the contents of her mushroom basket, the black candles she makes from hornet fat, her belladonna wine? With that cello she saws with a human bone?
It’s conceivable that she could pay for it with her body: her body’s been admired by many a fisherman who’s chanced upon her wading the rapids in loonskin drawers. But no man’s ever bought her body, and only one has had the courage to take it for free.
That fellow’s gone away now. It’s said he fled back to South America and left her in the lurch. Oh, but she still has a hold on him, you can bet on that. Our witch-girl’s got a definite hook in that fly-by-night romeo. She’s woven his mustache hairs into a tiny noose. She’s got his careless fart in a bottle by the stove.
&nbs
p; II
Turn a mountain upside down, you have a woman. Turn a woman upside down, you have a valley. Turn a valley upside down, you get folk music.
In the old days, the men in our village played trombone. Some better than others, obviously, but most of the men could play. Only the males, sad to say. The women danced. It was the local custom. The practice has all but died out, though to this day, grizzled geezers are known to hide trombones under their beds at the nursing home. It’s strictly forbidden, but late on summer nights, you can sometimes hear nostalgic if short-winded trombone riffs drifting out of the third-story windows, see silhouettes of old women on the second floor, dancing on swollen feet in fuzzy slippers or spinning in rhythmic circles in their wheelchairs.
As noted, however, our musical traditions have virtually vanished. Nowadays, people get their music from compact discs or FM radio. Who has time anymore to learn an instrument? Only the witch-girl by the bend in the river, sawing her cello with a human tibia, producing sounds like Stephen King’s nervous system caught in a mousetrap.
When milk sours before it leaves the udder or grain starts to stink in the fields; when workers go out on strike at the sauerkraut factory, the missile base, or the new microchip plant down the road; when basements flood, lusty young wives get bedtime migraines, dogs wake up howling in the middle of the night, or the interference on TV is like a fight in hot grease between corn flakes and a speedboat, people around here will say, “The witch-girl’s playing her cello again.”
Turn folk music upside down, you get mythology. Turn mythology upside down, you get history. Turn history upside down, you get religion, journalism, hysteria, and indecision.