The Second Phase: Going Up

“So you think you know where madness lies?”

My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, “Yes.”

Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure… Roses : The flowers are easy to paint, The leaves difficult. So passionately alive that they seemed to be standing on the very brink of utterance, the flowers strained upwards into the blue. Drooping in green parabolas from the hedge, the ivy fronds shone with a kind of glassy, jade-like radiance. By means of such devices as recorders, clock-controlled switches, public address systems and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact.

“And you couldn’t control it?”

We re-entered the house. A meal had been prepared. A moment later a clump of Red Hot Pokers, in full bloom, had exploded into my field of vision.

“Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would you not be able to hold it?”

This bank of red and white geraniums, for example-it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots -all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial. And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has added its quota of synthetics – chloral, for example, and benzedrine, the bromides and the barbiturates… revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot… decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms… should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote.

Most of these modifiers of consciousness cannot now be taken except under doctor’s orders, or else illegally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted use the West has permitted only alcohol and tobacco. All the other chemical Doors in the Wall are labeled Dope, and their unauthorized takers are Fiends.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

“And I ask my lovers do you know where the desert roses bloom and grow?” Perhaps a few of the lost souls might in this way be helped to win some measure of control over the universe – at once beautiful and appalling, but always other than human, always totally incomprehensible – in which they find themselves condemned to live. None too soon, I was steered away from the disquieting splendors of my garden chair.

We walked out into the street. A large pale blue automobile was standing at the curb. At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment. What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest enamel! Man had created the thing in his own image – or rather in the image of his favorite character in fiction. I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks. The flowers in the gardens still trembled on the brink of being supernatural, the pepper trees and carobs along the side streets still manifestly belonged to some sacred grove.

Eden alternated with Dodona. Yggdrasil with the mystic Rose. And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection, waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard. The Red Sea of traffic parted at last, and we crossed into another oasis of trees and lawns and roses. As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering… The transition from a regular pattern of the solution manifold of a dynamical system to regimes of chaotic motion, as a function of control parameters, can happen in various ways.

“…Their intention is both totality and differentiation.” This bank of red and white geraniums, for example-it was entirely different from that stucco wall a hundred yards up the road. But the “is-ness” of both was the same, the eternal quality of their transience was the same.

The dynamical system exhibits chaotic behavior if and only if the leading Liapunov exponent is positive.

What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in the long run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable. If it does not possess these qualities, its production, like that of wine, beer, spirits and tobacco will interfere with the raising of indispensable food and fibers. It must be less toxic than opium or cocaine, less likely to produce undesirable social consequences than alcohol or the barbiturates, less inimical to heart and lungs than the tars and nicotine of cigarettes. And, on the positive side, it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition.

I’m ripping my hairs out by this point, dropping them one strand at a time, they flutter to the ground. My jaw is clenched, teeth are grinding and clicking in anxiousness. My nails have been chewed past the fingertips and then some. Blood trickles down my arms from the open flesh. My bones begin to itch from the inside. Shivering as if cold or tired, but neither. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.

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Source(s): The Doors Of Perception by Aldous Huxley, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Slur by Coil, Mechanics From Newton’s Laws To Deterministic Chaos