|
Article Excerpt
Twenty, minutes in, like clockwork, the visions begin. They are strong trot I was expecting them this time.
Norma, the vegetalista who so astonished me with her care, skill and knowledge during my first ceremony two nights prior, had packed a big bowl with a knot of the local Nicotina Rustica and had blown curling, whistling smoke over a plastic liter bottle filled with an opaque orangish liquid I knew to be ayahuasca, the potent brew of tryptamines and MAO inhibitors that has been prepared in the Upper Amazon for perhaps sixteen thousand years. I knew it to be ayahuasca, since I had, after all, helped mix it the day before, pounding a kilo of the soft woody vine of fresh B. Caapi liana and tossing about fifty green glossy leaves of P. Viridis, a DMT-containing relative of coffee, into the black cauldron simmering over a wood fire on the shores of the Yanayacu River, one of the eleven hundred tributaries of the Amazon. Back home this could be a felony. Here, I now understood, it's a medicine.
The smoke whistle is a trope, a refrain that often begins or ends an Icaro, one of the beautiful songs sung and whistled continuously throughout the four-hour shamanic ayahuasca ceremony. The smoke and its whistling inflection act as protocols to open up a spirit portal, an active earth surface, while keeping unwelcome entities--what I think of as affects--at bay. After my first session, I had also learned that the songs serve to orient the ayahuasca drinker. The songs mime and sample the birdsong of the region, an ecosystem with over two thousand species of birds and the poly-rhythms of chatter from over 500,000 insect species. I held onto and was held by the Icaros, giving intense thanks for the whistled orientation.
I took the coffee mug and fearfully eyed its contents. My first contact with ayahuasca had been perhaps the most difficult experience of my life that didn't involve somebody (else) dying. For I had indeed palpably and unmistakably died--the accounts of ego death were not at all greatly exaggerated.
Nonetheless, here I was, two days later, again looking into the flickering, refracted and reversed image of myself that I think I spied in the mug lit only by candlelight in the Amazonian night. The liquid was dark and iridescent, but I now knew that tales of its horrid flavor were something like an urban legend from the rain forest. My first gulp of ayahuasca tasted like nothing so much as my first pint of draft stout slurped in Ireland at the age of seventeen with my now departed brother.
Still, I was fearful and full of respect for this plant intelligence with which I had seemingly interacted. The mug appeared nearly two thirds full, easily as large a dose as the first, most difficult, night. I had secretly hoped for a tinier tourist dose, but had no choice but to drink down the cup I was offered.
As a result of my extensive research into the ceremony (as well as the work of John Lilly), I carefully addressed the ayahuasca to orient my journey. Having toyed with the I Ching as a writing tool, I was comfortable posing questions to non-human entities as a rhetorical experiment, a practice of rhetorical invention that seeks interaction with other forms of order and its disruption. Among other things, I asked how I could possibly integrate the knowledge from my first journey into my life back in North America. Then I threw it back like afar shot of tequila, opening my throat to the entirety of the flow.
Like I said, twenty minutes of mediation later and the visions began, the same as the first night. A pixilated doorway appeared in my closed-eye visuals and I went through it. Here goes, I thought to myself--what have I done ?
Haptic Gaze Smack: Ayahuasca Pilgrims in the Rain Forest
This specially designed tour is for those serious seekers who long to have a direct experience of other dimensions of themselves and the universe.
--Ad copy for Soluna Tours
Iquitos, Peru's largest jungle city of 500,000, cannot be reached by road. The pilgrim's route toward "mother ayahuasca," the ecodelic brew prepared for millennia by Upper Amazonian shamans, usually begins with a boarding pass and a security check. With great quotidian efficiency, guards sort through twined boxes covered in tape, crates of wool, and soft drinks toted by the indigenous family in front of us, and then wave my radio producer through. Fears that his recording equipment would be the occasion for a border hassle turn out to have been as unfounded as my decision to wear shorts on a flight to Lima in August. The other passengers had the decency not to laugh, but I envied them curled and coiled under the tiny airline blankets shielding them from the aggressive air conditioning, and they were ready for the chilled coastal morning when we arrived. An hour and a half after we shuffle through customs, bleary eyed and sniffling, our plane is soaring over the Andes. Iquitos announces itself through a green labyrinth-the Amazon and its tributaries begin their fractal "S" fifteen minutes before we are due to land. The pilgrims are greeted by handlers, guides to help us navigate the impoverished but quite friendly streets. The ubiquitous moto taxis of Iquitos sketch a lattice work with their routes through the dirt grid, and the two stroke engines play a layered, rhythmic soundtrack over broken-very, very broken--Spanish, as they transport us to the waiting canoe, prepared for a practiced, motorized drift toward the camp of an ayahuasquera. There, one will drink a noxious and viscous liquid and begin the interdimensional journey, which often starts with vomit.
Finding ayahuasca in Iquitos is not difficult. One does not need a sense for occult locales to locate it--it is, according to anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios, an integral part of the medicine of the region. But the pilgrim/tourist who seeks the enlightenment of the yage way of knowledge has probably begun training well before the departure gate. Or should have. For by all accounts, ayahuasca (a potent admixture of various DMT and Monoxidase Inhibitor containing plants found in the region) is hardly a recreational drink. Like other ecodelics, ayahuasca can yield very different kinds of journeys, depending on the "set and setting" of the tea drinker, including programming offered by curanderos in the form of Icaros--the rhythmic and often whistled songs that accompany and guide the tea drinker on her journey. Anxious, even terrifying trips are not uncommon, and unlike the legendary brown acid of Woodstock, it is usually not the psychedelic agent that is the ultimate or even proximate cause of the distress. The problem, the drinker discovers, is the self, which must give way on its attachments if it is to abide the massively parallel consciousness induced by ayahuasca. This parallel consciousness is often presented as a multitude of entities and forms for whom death is a transition but not a destination--"Ayahuasca" means "vine of the dead" in Quechua, and is sought out for its ability, among other things, to erode the very distinction between the living and the dead. But to abide this parallel presentation, an enormous flow of information not verifiable in the serial time of the body, the pilgrim prepares the self for its momentary disappearance through a culling of the self and its wants. Each pilgrim begins with a regime of selective self-negation or denial: the would be interdimensional traveler must fast prior to the ayahuasca ceremony, or face the wrath of a possible inadvertent serotonin crisis provoked by a piece of cheese or chocolate and their MAOI ingredients.
Some will, of course, rely on chance to be their shaman: if the mood is right, they will drink whatever disgusting beverage is put before them. But most pilgrims seeking out the ayahuasca experience in the Upper Amazon will have been drawn as much for the context as the content. The plants that make up classic ayahuasca are legally and readily available on the Internet. Recipes abound on the Web that enable would-be ayahuasqueros to concoct brews out of plants that grow readily and widely around North America and Europe and Australia. (2) Some contemporary ayahuasca drinkers even create the admixture entirely through pharmaceuticals--so called pharmahuasca combines MAOI inhibitors (such as the prescription anti-depressant Nardil) and a source of DMT, the reputed active ingredient of most brews and an endogenous product of the human brain.
The proliferating and extensive literature on ayahuasca seldom fails to inform the reader that the brew is essentially a mixture: a plant like Baanisteria Cappi (yage, "force") is needed to block the human gut's destruction of DMT, and a source of DMT (such as Psycholria Viridis, a relative of coffee, "light") needs to be potentiated. But given the well-established importance of programming to ecodelics, there is at least a third, crucial component to the experience, one tuned to the legendary accounts of modern psychonauts such as William S. Burroughs, Terrence McKenna and innumerable anonymous posters to the Internet: the ecosystem, knowledge and spirituality of the rainforest. (3) What draws many of the tourists seeking the ayahuasca experience in South America is a unique, albeit globalized context of an erudite and healing shaman guiding visions in a vanishing rain forest, the very habitat of the alkaloid exuding plant allies. This is most certainly what is being sold in ayahuasca tourism, as a glimpse at websites offering these trips makes clear. In this sense, a look at ayahuasca tourism helps us understand the nature of contemporary tourism in general: Why do globalized citizens bother to go anywhere in an increasingly interconnected universe? With my bare legs, surrounded by bundled passengers, perhaps I sought a capacity to sustain all of the interconnection, the formation of a commons.
Pilgrims to an apocalypse, ayahuasca tourists are, nonetheless, tourists. And they bring with them the penumbra of Western consumerism even as they seek enlightenment through an older and perhaps more sustainable mode of being. Already ecodelic, the ayahuasca tourist has become sensitive to all of her inputs and outputs: the diet is begun two weeks earlier, a cautious tourist wondering about the body's chemistry as cheese begins to appear as waxen lard, a repulsive leaden block throwing images of a future serotonin crisis right into my gourd....
|
