Chris — your work is amazing — can you tell our readers more about what you were doing before you had any Ayahuasca experience?

Thanks. I had been living for a few years in a free house in West Oakland provided by my friend and patron, Tajai Massey of Hieroglyphics and Souls of Mischief fame. Tajai had rescued me from a horrible Rastafarian Boer veggie-diesel mechanic with a dreadlocks combover who had taken me in after a stretch of homeless wandering post-rehab and was ruthlessly exploiting my labour. At Tajai’s, I was doing large tattooed pieces on ghetto-scavenged plywood with this gratuitously over-sized tattoo machine I made that was beefy enough to dig into wood. I made iteration after iteration of a scorpion madonna entity veve I had contracted through a scorpion neurotoxin injection whilst riding a hollow log in the Gulf of Mexico just off the wild North Yucatán coast.

How did you end up being interested in Ayahuasca?

Icaro (Quechua: ikaro) is a South American indigenous colloquialism for magic or alchemy, or any esoteric modality by which an experienced user can channel their energy to manifest their will. Today, this term is commonly used to describe the medicine songs performed in vegetal ceremonies, especially by shamans in Ayahuasca ceremonies to induce a profound state of healing, awareness or amazement. It is also commonly used to describe a traditional artisanal pattern of the Shipibo tribe based on the visions induced by ayahuasca.

Someone loaned me Narby’s book, The Cosmic Serpent, and I was hooked. I began researching, watching documentaries, and became singularly obsessed to the exclusion of all else which seems to be quite a common experience. Of course, I later learned that this was the medicine calling to me.

Did you have any experience with other psychedelics before?

When I was much younger, beginning as a teenager, who didn’t? While such psychedelic trips can do nothing other than shape our conceptions of reality and reveal basic truths, without the expertise of dedicated practitioners, there’s just so much wasted potential and blind floundering. We wonder what may have been had we discovered curanderismo much earlier, no?

Did psychedelics influence your work before?

Well, if you consider Scorpion neurotoxin as a psychedelic, and you might! I was giddy all day, dreamy for weeks, writing magical realist poetry quite out of character for me. Better than molly. In fact, I kept that big black scorpion in a jar by my bed, feeding it giant crickets, and there were times when I was tempted, my pinky finger poised just out of striking range….ah, but I chickened out, it’s just so damn painful! It was a trap, you know. I had spied a hollow log riddled with woodpecker holes lapped in the surf, spouting delightfully from every hole with each wave. So, I pushed it into deeper water to push it home and make a fountain out of it. While playing on it, riding and rolling on it, SHE emerged all wet and amorous and gave me a little kiss on the tip of my pinky finger. It was hysterically funny, just imagine the tableau: just me, the log and the scorpion in the sea, no one else around for miles, just a vast mangrove lagoon past the beach filled with crocodiles, flamingos and feral dogs, the jungle’s expanse past that, jaguars, and the scorpion chasing me up and down the length of the log all the way home because I was higher, dryer ground! You see, no one else for hundreds of miles would have been so enamoured by that spouting log to ride it in the sea, just me. Such a brilliant trap.

Can you please describe in as much detail as you can tell to the public what happened in the ceremony that triggered your new woodworking technique?