L., Edinburgh, Scotland
I am interested in experimenting with my brain because I want to know how I can modulate experience and feel new things. I don’t need to treat any particular suffering, nothing more than the ordinary things we all feel. I don’t need to heal any particular trauma or illness. I just want to know what my mind can do and to step out of the realm of my normal sensation and mindset. What do you think about experimenting with substances – psychedelics, among other things – to feel new things for the sake of novel experience? The only thing is I am very afraid of losing control.
L.
KSP:
I wonder what the desire for the novel or new stems from for you? You say you are not suffering from any particular trauma or illness, but the search for meaning is an essential part of our subjectivity. In the individualised societies that we generally live in, individuals are set the task of defining their own lives and goals in a private capacity. That can create a huge burden to negotiate, particularly when one becomes stuck in routines of work, bureaucracy and vapid consumption.
I have no opinion against drugs or psychedelics necessarily – though there are risks which should be researched thoroughly. Perhaps undertaking with a seasoned friend would be advisable if you decide to do it. I would suggest though that you look to see if you have exhausted other, more sustainable, means for novelty and stimulation.
Newness can be developed in many ways – perhaps through meditation, or a new intensity to listening to music. Engaging in new activities can create a feeling of being out-of-control: learning a new language, being watchful and observant on your trips through the city and finding new strange portals. Being open to chatter on the street, making new connections. Getting involved with activist groups or community groups. Going to the cinema regularly. Committing to a creative or technical practice. These are ways of connecting with yourself within a wider social imaginary on an everyday level. Perhaps you have tried all these things and want a new perspective? Whether you decide to experiment with psychedelics or not, trying to trace where that desire for the new stems from will keep you in good stead.
I give you a Will Alexander poem below which reveals the vitality and weirdness of the everyday, enhancing horizons. Perhaps it will help you to rework your everyday experience – “systematically derange the senses” as Rimbaud would have us do.
Towards the Primeval Lightning Field
The old chronological towers are ash, are prisms of disfigurement, symbolic of a world cancelled by consumptive inmelodias. As for alchemical transition, we face the raising of new sea walls, of banished and re engendered electorates, trying to cope with new intensities of weather, as the anomalous hypnotically increases with the power of inverse subjective.
The body is now weighed on a broken axial cart, its blood conjoined as it rises within a nuclear darkness of ravens. So as Piscean chronology now shatters, dawn becomes an unclaimed resurrection, a tumultuous eikon of skin no longer formed around its old dendritic artifacts. The calendar of draconian enfeeblement with its integers of the past 20 centuries, erased, its linear Babels darkened by the extreme necessity for a new perpendicular burst, transmuting in demeanour, with history consumed in a roll of flaming aural dice, with its wizardry of tools subsumed in arcane vibration, turned into a power of splendiferous scorpions. The psychic wounds of the past eclipsed in this new millenium by the power of smelted dragon’s blood.
And so, I speak of a new being of symbols, of lucid catacombs and spirals, its language being spun in fabulous iguana iridium. Now, with the decayed constitutional stages exploded by telepathy, by invulnerable oneiric intuitives, the mental axis transmutes, like a reddened swan, with a new cosmic skeletal reprieve, afloat amongst the forces of the primeval lightning field, taking on the dharma of the great sustained emotion of eternity.
-Will Alexander
