Uncanny Ground of All Psyche
It is regularly said that one cannot overdose on the psychedelic substance, that the substance flows through your psyche as a surge of water flows in a gorge, leaving behind a glittering landscape. The long glowing afterburn of these experiences is what remains incredible to me, the exact opposite of a hangover; whereas whiskey or MDMA steals chi from tomorrow, the psychedelic can add continual revelations to your tomorrows: new colors, depths of feeling, awakening to the more-than-human world, the whole world becoming rather more alive and far more strange than you had previously imagined. At least this is what happened to me: the journey from a dead and mechanical nature, to an all-too vivid world of spirit and ever-flowing intensities, as if my own consciousness had spilled outwards into a greater consciousness that had always been there this whole time. If there had been a rift between myself and, for example, the forest as a living minded entity, these medicines filled this rift with lightning. In short the forest became sacred. Make no mistake about it, this is a religious position that I’ve somehow dosed myself into the conviction of. I believe in the forest.
The other curious feature of the psychedelic topography is that there is no ground; were we to propose a kind of psychedelic materialism: the first principle of which would be that material, the literal ground, is not really there, can vanish in an instant, turn at once into an abyss of rainbows. Even a scientist will admit that colors are not material; and yet here one passes through a vortex where color becomes material. One does not overdose because one merely falls away into neon impossibilities; the very structure of reality, that one had been so dependent on, that had been so real, phase shifts into uncanny refractions of impossible geometries, chromatic absurdities, flows of affect, and together with the curious and new presence of entities, whether organic—insect, plant or bird—or otherworldly, the non-organic, pure spirit, neither material, nor ideal (for all I know anyways); is that spirit a part of me? I don’t know that either. The real resides beyond the limit; but what is real has no limit. The ground is always already uncanny; not entirely there. Where one runs out of ground, one invents it.
I am always struck by the child’s ability to recognize spirit. It can seem at times as if the child lived in a world alive with sprites, if not, in fact the actual spirit world; made of half raw imagination and half visionary states of perception. Like William Blake’s four-fold creativity: It’s the kind of imaginal power that seems to create the world as it is perceived. The world is invented, is made up, by the child, even as it appears to them. Either this or what we call imagination is just a kind of radical perception without limits, where the doors of perception had not yet been set on the hinges, where there is not even a wall to put a door in yet. Just as one may travel into a realm of unthinkable chromatisms with aid of plant-medicines, so the child proceeds from out of that realm, began way down in the uterine dark, (the black universe, where all colors are one) as if they had been delivered straight from the fairy realm. The aesthetic link between childhood entertainment and psychedelia is no accident. Could not all the bright colors and basic shapes of childhood be an inverted representation of the impossible world out of time: the land of the fay, (or the very least aesthetics in the style of tryptamine) it is an alphabet world, where the first alphabet is color and shape written in the day-glo stylings of the beyond.
The Five Lives of Hilma Af Klint, 2022, Philip Deines
