The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (20 page)

For Nietzsche the “art and power of forgetting” consist in a kind of radical editing or blocking out of consciousness everything that doesn’t serve the present purpose. A man seized by a “vehement passion” or great idea will be blind and deaf to all except that passion or idea. Everything he does perceive, however, he will perceive as he has never perceived anything before: “All is so palpable, close, highly colored, resounding, as though he apprehended it with all his senses at once.”

What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence—a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. Something very like it can occur during sex, too, or while under the influence of certain drugs. It is a state that depends for its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing. (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing.) If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything else (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away.

Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel as though we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time—clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality. Not that this state of mind doesn’t have its drawbacks; to name one, other people cease to matter. Yet this thoroughgoing absorption in the present is (as both Eastern and Western religious traditions tell us) as close as we mortals ever get to an experience of eternity. Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was “to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.” Likewise in the Eastern tradition: “Awakening to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.” Yet we can’t get there from here without first forgetting.

• • •

I am not by nature one of the world’s great noticers. Unless I make a conscious effort, I won’t notice what color your shirt is, the song playing on the radio, or whether you put one sugar in your coffee or two. When I’m working as a reporter I have to hector myself continually to mark the details: checked shirt, two sugars, Van Morrison. Why this should be so, I have no idea, except that I am literally absentminded, prone to be thinking about something else, something past, when I am ostensibly having a fresh experience. Almost always, my attention can’t wait to beat a retreat from the here and now to the abstract, frog-jumping from the data of the senses to conclusions.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Very often the conclusions or concepts come first, allowing me to dispense with the sensory data altogether or to notice in it only what fits. It’s a form of impatience with lived life, and though it might appear to be a symptom of an active mind, I suspect it’s really a form of laziness. My lawyer father, once complimented on his ability to see ahead three or four moves in a negotiation, explained that the reason he liked to jump to conclusions was so he could get there early and rest. I’m the same way in my negotiations with reality.

Though I suspect that what I have is only an acute case of an attention disorder that is more or less universal. Seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, or tasting things as they “really are” is always difficult if not impossible (in part because doing so would overwhelm us, as George Eliot understood), so we perceive each multisensory moment through a protective screen of ideas, past experiences, or expectations. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit,” Emerson wrote, by which he meant we never see the world plainly, only through the filter of prior concepts or metaphors. (“Colors,” in classical rhetoric, are tropes.) In my case this filter is so fine (or is it thick?) that a lot of the details and textures of reality simply never get through. It’s a habit of mind I sorely wish I could break, since it keeps me from enjoying the pleasures of the senses and the moment, pleasures that, at least in the abstract, I prize above all others. But right there you see the problem:
in the abstract.

All those who write about cannabis’s effect on consciousness speak of the changes in perception they experience, and specifically of an intensification of all the senses. Common foods taste better, familiar music is suddenly sublime, sexual touch revelatory. Scientists who’ve studied the phenomenon can find no quantifiable change in the visual, auditory, or tactile acuity of subjects high on marijuana, yet these people invariably report seeing, and hearing, and tasting things with a new keenness, as if with fresh eyes and ears and taste buds.

You know how it goes, this italicization of experience, this seemingly virginal
noticing
of the sensate world. You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly
hear
it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand,
really
understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into
your
mind.

Or that exceptionally delicious spoonful of vanilla ice cream—
ice cream!—
parting the drab curtains of the quotidian to reveal, what?—the heartrendingly sweet significance of
cream,
yes, bearing us all the way back to the breast. Not to mention the never-before-adequately-appreciated wonder of:
vanilla.
How astonishing is it that we happen to inhabit a universe in which this quality of vanilla-ness—this
bean
!—happens also to reside? How easily it could have been otherwise, and just where would we be (where would
chocolate
be?) without that singular irreplaceable note, that middle C on the Scale of Archetypal Flavors? (
Paging Dr. Plato!
) For the first time in your journey on this planet you are fully appreciating
Vanilla
in all its italicized and capitalized significance. Until, that is, the next epiphany comes along (
Chairs! People thinking in other languages! Carbonated water!
) and the one about ice cream is blown away like a leaf on the breeze of free association.

Nothing is easier to make fun of than these pot-sponsored perceptions, long the broad butt of jokes about marijuana. But I’m not prepared to concede that these epiphanies are as empty or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day. In fact, I’m tempted to agree with Carl Sagan, who was convinced that marijuana’s morning-after problem is not a question of selfdeception so much as a failure to communicate—to put “these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.” We simply don’t have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They may well be banal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also at the same time profound.

Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception of something like ice cream, our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment. The cannabinoids are molecules with the power to make romantics and transcendentalists of us all. By disabling our moment-by-moment memory, which is ever pulling us off the astounding frontier of the present and throwing us back onto the mapped byways of the past, the cannabinoids open a space for something nearer to direct experience. By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time, so that even something as ordinary as ice cream becomes
Ice cream!

There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is
wonder.

• • •

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting—on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive—it’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true—that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.

This, at least, was Aldous Huxley’s conclusion in
The Doors of Perception,
his 1954 account of his experiments with mescaline. In Huxley’s view, the drug—which is derived from peyote, the flower of a desert cactus—disables what he called “the reducing valve” of consciousness, his name for the conscious mind’s everyday editing faculty. The reducing valve keeps us from being crushed under the “pressure of reality,” but it accomplishes this at a price, for the mechanism prevents us from ever seeing reality as it really is. The insight of mystics and artists flows from their special ability to switch off the mind’s reducing valve. I’m not sure any of us ever perceives reality “as it really is” (how would one know?), but Huxley is persuasive in depicting wonder as what happens when we succeed in suspending our customary verbal and conceptual ways of seeing. (He writes with a wacky earnestness about the beauty of fabric folds, a garden chair, and a vase of flowers: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”)

I think I understand Huxley’s reducing valve of consciousness, though in my own experience the mechanism looks a little different. I picture ordinary consciousness more as a funnel or, even better, as the cinched waist of an hourglass. In this metaphor the mind’s eye stands poised between time past and time to come, determining which of the innumerable grains of sensory experience will pass through the narrow aperture of the present and enter into memory. I know, there are some problems with this metaphor, the main one being that all the sand eventually gets to the bottom of an hourglass, whereas most of the grains of experience never make it past our regard. But the metaphor at least gets at the notion that the principal work of consciousness is eliminative and defensive, maintaining perceptual order to keep us from being overwhelmed.

So what happens under the influence of drugs or, for that matter, inspiration? In Huxley’s metaphor, the reducing valve is opened wide to admit more of experience. This seems about right, though I’d qualify it by suggesting (as Huxley’s own examples do) that the effect of altered consciousness is to admit a whole lot more information about a much smaller increment of experience. “The folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’ ” Huxley tells us, before dilating on Botticelli draperies and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” The usual process by which the grains of perception pass us by slows way down, to the point where the conscious I can behold each grain in its turn, scrupulously examining it from every conceivable angle (sometimes from more angles than it even has), until all there is is the still point at the hourglass’s waist, where time itself appears to pause.

• • •

But is this wonder the real thing? At first glance, it wouldn’t seem to be: a transcendence that’s chemically induced must surely be fake.
Artificial Paradises
was what Charles Baudelaire called his 1860 book about his experiences with hashish, and that sounds about right. Yet what if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate, or enter a hypnotic trance by way of chanting, fasting, or prayer? What if in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, thereby suspending short-term memory and allowing us to experience the present deeply? There are many technologies for changing the brain’s chemistry; drugs may simply be the most direct. (This doesn’t necessarily make drugs a
better
technology for changing consciousness—indeed, the toxic side effects of so many of them suggest that the opposite is true.) From a brain’s point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.

Aldous Huxley did his best to argue us out of the view that a chemically conditioned spiritual experience is false—and he did so long before we knew anything about cannabinoid or opi-oid receptor networks. “In one way or another,
all
our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely ‘spiritual,’ purely ‘intellectual,’ purely ‘aesthetic,’ it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.” He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.
*
The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry—the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.