Into The Cyclone -- Grok Issue #1 - 2002

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The center of the cyclone is that rising quiet central low-pressure place in which one can learn to live eternally.

 

 

– John C. Lilly, 1915 - 2001.

 

Experimentation of this order demands the most sustained and dedicated abandon. If I am to get where I am going, it’s crucial that I peak inside the tank, and everything has been prepared to this effect. Undressing by my kit, I fold away my clothes and set out the tracksuit like I’ve practiced. I shower and dry. From the kit, I take the aerosol band-aid spray and seal my testicles against the Epsom salts, then pluck in some earplugs. My goggles snap loosely against my head. They’re comfortable, splash proof and black out all light with an opaque mandala of red and yellow spirals. Finally, I jam a humbug in my cheek and mount the step. The water pump shuts out and I climb into the tank.

Knock out the lights.

Check.

Set the volume of piped-in noise.

Check.

Lower my goggles.

Check.

Lastly, I grip the hood, drawing it closed and then I’m floating in darkness with my journey coming on.

The late American researcher and medical doctor, John Cunningham Lilly, conducted his first experiments with solitary-isolation confinement and floatation tanks at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda – Maryland during the summer of 1954. He would conduct four years of research there, spending hundreds of hours suspended in the darkness of sensory deprivation, delving meditative consciousness for the US government. But it would be a full ten years after those first experiments before he would bravely add the chemical lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate to the experience, as a tool for exploring the strangest limits of the mind. He would carry out his series of caribbean experiments across two years until 1966, when he would be forced by the drug hysteria of the sixties to return his legal supply of LSD-25 to Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer for whom Albert Hoffman had accidentally isolated the psychedelic indole in 1947.

This leaves the engaged researcher of the new millennium, when psychedelic drugs remain uniformly off the legal agenda, with a difficult philosophical conundrum, and this is what I explain to Dave, way back when all this begins.

"The problem," I say between sugar jubes. "Is acquiring a cheap and reliable source of hallucinogens in our draconian politico-legal climate. I am heretofore forced by the very laws of my own country to suppress my religious and spiritual obligations to myself or to contravene those laws, vis a vis accepting freely and without guilt the socio-contractual consequences of any possible discovery of the situation we are discussing by the repressive apparatus of the state."

Dave scratches his dreads. "And those would be?"

"A maximum fine of two thousand dollars plus a possible jail term of two years for collecting any psilocybin containing mushroom."

"But you have a plan?"

"Of course, mate." I pick out another humbug. "You take a sickie and we annexe the CALM vehicle with a second uniform for a scientific survey of the Blackwood catchment."

"You’re half my size, man!" He waves his arm over my head. "I’ll be sacked."

"Have no fear." I crunch my lolly hard. "This can’t possibly fail."

Weeks pass, waiting for the climate of a favourable season to settle and keeping Dave ready for the call. But the moment arrives and then we’re bouncing the four-by-four out of Bunbury on the winding South Western Highway, turning and rolling through the sleepy stonefruit towns – Boyanup, Donnybrook, Kirup – toward the goldentop triangle unmarked on any survey map: Balingup-Nannup-Bridgetown and the pine plantations in between. The floor is awash with foil wrappers and desiccated coconut and I have a problem.

"Dave, I’ve gotta stop in Balingup."

"We agreed, man – stay outta town to avoid suspicion?"

"The sugar’s got the better of me," I say. "I need a bloody shit."

He addresses the wrappers at my feet. "Man, your nerves are rooted. Give up the fucking sweets."

"They’re more addictive than heroin." I thump the dash. "Fuck! Do some reading, man. Don’t turn off this fucking highway."

"Shit." He shakes his head. "We’re fucking doomed."

But he smoothes the four-by-four along, and none to soon for me, down into the misty valley town.

"This should be a minimum stop for petrol," insists Dave. "Absolutely visit the toilet only and make no unnecessary contact with these locals. You’re a freak in that baggy uniform."

Dave brings the vehicle into the station and pulls up by the pump. The toilets are sign posted around the side. He cuts the motor and we climb out. Foil wrappers fall out everywhere and glimmer on the ground. I walk around the side but the toilets are locked so I go back by Dave and inside for the key.

Wide-eyed, he watches me. "What?"

"Keys."

He scrubs his whole face and scraggy beard and pumps the fuel, but I get the key and go around the side again and do my business. My trousers unroll so I do them again and tighten the belt against them slipping down before I come back. Dave has been killing time fidgeting with the cap and makes signs for cash to pay. I nod and he shakes his head and I step inside with him footing in behind me.

"There’s your keys back," I say to the old man at the counter. "Just the fuel and these chocolate bars."

"That’s a sweet tooth. They must be keeping you busy to be needing all that energy. What you doing?"

Dave knocks some country tapes off the counter display.

I pay and fill my pockets. "Scientific survey."

"What you surveying?"

Dave interjects. "Coniferous precipitation."

"It’s good for the logging," I add.

The old man nods. "Well, then it’s good for us."

We smile and nod agreement, then step outside and climb into the vehicle. In no time we’re bumping and cackling back out of town, falling pinecones indeed. Then were off the highway and into a plantation.

"I’ve never seen a magic mushie," Dave says, walking away from the car.

"Identification is the key," I say. "They bruise blue when picked and have a purple-black spore print."

"So you’ve actually seen one?"

I huff. "Of course – not."

"Then what do they look like?" He smacks his brow.

"Like any other toadstool," I say. "But if we eat the wrong thing, we could be dead in two days."

We stalk deeper into the trees, emu bobbing over logs and butting in on little families of mushroom caps, descending into the valley shade.

"Here!" Dave flags me over. "These look magic."

I take a look at the cap and stem of the carpophore.

"Well?"

"No." I sigh. "These gills are yellow. Let’s try over there."

We drop to the valley bottom and cross a small brook. Dave slips and his leg sloshes into the stream, wetting it to the knee. He treks up the other side after me, swearing madly.

"Dave, man?"

"What?"

"Mushroom disneyland…"

And there on the sunward slope of the valley, peeking through the homely floor of grass and pine needles in the dappled country light of a Jane Austen novel, is our crazy grail, Psilocybe subaeruginosa.

John Lilly would drop his first acid in the early sixties, across the weekend of a hippie love-in with an experienced psychologist, a veteran of LSD therapy when it was still legal in the fifties. He would read "practically everything that had been published about acid and acid trips." He would take immaculate care to create a comfortable scene and setting, but psychedelics are an awesome force and there can be no guarantees. He recalls the aftermath:

 

I almost died. I had been in a coma for approximately twenty-four hours, and had been blind for two days. I literally didn’t know what had happened for a week.

 

What had happened? At a medical conference very soon after, too busy to recapitulate the consequences of his second trip, he injected "a foam made with detergent" under his skin, which he knew could be lethal. He had studied the bends during World War II, conducted experiments injecting "foam into the leg vein of a dog" and seeing it "go through the lungs and into the brain." Lilly would spend six weeks convalescing after his suicide attempt, but it wouldn’t dampen his spirit to take LSD into the tank.

For an avid student in his footsteps, that first purple-black smack of spores pouts at me from the paper like the gothic kiss of a nubile witch. It is our blue stained confirmation.

"These are they," I say.

"These are they," Dave repeats like a mantra.

We retrieve a dose, a share of a dozen good size caps, from the dried stash in Dave’s best Tupperware and billy up a tea. Sitting in the kitchen, we wait the patient half-hour that starts our six-hour tour.

"It’s a shorter trip than acid," I say.

"Shit." Dave grins.

"No," I say. "It’s enough. It’s not a complete brain-fry like Ketamine."

"I love lamb’s fry." He giggles.

"And like DMT, metabolises to serotonin, the brain’s own feel good, but nowhere near as fast. In short it is the entheogen – and in lighter doses the recreational drug – par excellence."

Dave laughs. "Things are getting very shroomy."

I agree and we retire to the shamanistic dark like a pair of Matazecan Indians, in search of visions and listening for the Logos. It’s inexpressible. You’re either in here or you aren’t and it can’t be represented, just a pale skirting around the edges of an ineffable heart of lightness.

"The wonder, the wonder," I repeat elfishly and shoot sparkling off another rainbow twist into the lap of all love. Wish! I vow to drop this again when I can float, the perfect sustenance for lunacy.

But Lilly had perfect titrations of pure Sandoz funded by the government. He didn’t have to cook his own, and after the first blast of hyper-enthusiasm wears off, hobby growing magic mushrooms takes insane persistence. When Dave gets back from a more legitimate scientific expedition, he wants to see the outcomes.

"I’m an outcomes man," he says.

"Take a shower and put these on." I hand him a white t-shirt and tracksuit from the linen press.

He pinches his brow. "Is all this really necessary?"

I nod and after showering, we stand by the linen press again, finishing off our suits.

"I’m not fucking wearing that." Dave points at his shower cap.

I tug it over his dreads. "Who knows what you’re crawling with."

He shrugs.

"Eyes," I say.

"What?"

I spray him down with Glen 20.

"I smell like a granny," he complains.

But I walk him to the junk room at the end of the hall and slowly turn the handle. "Welcome to my garden…"

Which returns us roughly to the here and now, not long after breakfast, a safe entheogenic dose of homegrown caps, the day spa staff massaging and pandering others elsewhere, unaware of the freaker in the bottom of their float tank with his journey coming on.

Before using it in the tank, John Lilly "proposed trying LSD on dolphins," one of his many passions, to help understand the dangers of tripping underwater. He reported:

 

Each of the six dolphins tested apparently had very good trips with no problems attendant upon their breathing, heart action, or swimming activities.

 

But with no dolphins to spare, I can only trust his crank science in the dripping dark. The white noise from the speakers warbles schizophonic moans from ear to ear, lashing in and out. Dark green gyrations whip to and fro in the dark, then water drips on a bare concrete floor and I’m lying on broken glass.

In the moonlight beyond the shattered louvres, naked palm stalks sway slowly to a halt. The wind and rain abate. An old familiar man smiles in a doorway at the far end of the shed, beckons me come see.

He lays an arm on my shoulders. "Sublime," he says.

And the jaundice moon shines on the towering bowl of cloud, the quiet eye swirling like a pass of vertigo overhead.