Psychotomimetic
I stopped smoking weed when it began to make me feel crazy. I’m not sure what doorway I passed through, or what life-circumstance fell on me that made this change happen, except that at some point in the last three years it did happen. I never smoked all that often to begin with but somehow I became highly sensitive to sister cannabis.
Once upon a time marijuana was revelatory, a turbine for aesthetic practice in which the salient points of whatever it was I was working on became clear; all of the uncertainties of writing resolved into a passionate conviction. The flower offered an elasticity of thought that allowed heretofore unthought connections to become thinkable. It felt like I had discovered the lightning path to the muse; a secret power of untold insight. But at some point each journey into cannabis began with a crucible of break-down, a moment of terror transfixed by my own imminent demise. “Oh my god!” I would say clutching my head. “I’m going to die!” Mortality became the unthinkable thought that cannabis made me think. In the morning I would recall this freak-out as one recalls a fading nightmare. Dying? That’s not so bad. But over time these bouts of mortal-terror increased to the point where I would literally faint, where if I smoked even a little weed, I became convinced that I was schizophrenic.
Not so long ago in the dawn of modern psychedelic research, the term psychotomimetic was tossed around as a possible name for these novel substances. The idea being that mushrooms, LSD or marijuana, each produced a transitory psychotic state; that they mimicked an acute psychosis with its delusions, delirium and disorganization. This idea has been reinforced by a series of recent papers regarding the psychotomimetic effects of delta-9 Cannabinoid in particular, together with the psychedelic substance in general. While we must admit a certain amount of ignorance about what exactly is happening in any given mushroom journey, let alone psychosis, the concept of psychotomimetic can function, at the very least, as an heuristic device, if not a kind of pragmatic mythology.
The psychotomimetic mythology being first of all a mythology of boundary dissolution. That the ego-self is organized as if it were a castle or a bunker, and that what is occluded and kept outside the castle walls, is precisely what the ego finds most distressing because it is the most destructive to its specific organization; the ego is organized against this disorganization. Now if psychedelic medicines are a so-called non-specific amplifier, that they amplify whatever it is that you encounter in the journey—like for example the raging ocean at night, or an eruption of affect—then we might conclude that this amplification happens because the ego-fortification is a kind of volume knob for experience that had been, up to this point, turned way down low (not so dissimilar to Aldous Huxley’s reducing valve) and that these medicines turns this knob way up, or break it altogether. On this point I remain convinced: that the mushroom is a medicine because it offers a radical increase in perception, even a form of awakening; one becomes acutely aware of one’s position in the universe, as if for the first time, and in a very literal sense, perhaps the most literal.
But because the defensive network is temporarily off-line, one may encounter that infamous breakdown that had already happened. Like for example, imagine an infant, in a state of total helplessness, left alone in a dark room for hours with only their own screams for company. An older era assumed that this child feels very little: on the contrary, this child feels rather more than you or I can imagine. What the psychotomimetic may uncover, or seem to make happen, as if for the first time, is just this cosmic terror left over from a very early fall that had never been dealt with, never even experienced, so that what is profound and unbearable in the medicine journey is the ability to have this experience, maybe for the first time and, hopefully, to roll with it, to move the whorl of energy and, if not to organize it—because probably it can’t be organized—then at least to re-organize the defensive apparatus around what has now become a known void, as opposed to an unknown catastrophe.
Which is to say that the myth of the psychotomimetic is nested inside of the larger practical axiom that schizophrenia is environmental. Schizophrenia may run-in-the-family, so to speak, but it does so because trauma runs in the family first. This is how I’ve organized my own family history of mental illness, that it is the result of a family history of racialized violence going back generations. The abysmal feeling states I’ve encountered, the feeling of falling forever—and in particular the pursuit of intellectual abstraction to the point of madness—is, I think, the gravity left over from the traces of an event, or a series of events, that had yet to be integrated, let alone thought about.
The greek philosopher described a peculiar kind of madness known as telestic madness, divine or ritual madness; a transitory result of the festival of the mystery cults, whether Eleusinian, or Dionysian, the philosopher claimed that such madness rivaled even the rational approach of dialectical philosophy in the access to the divine forms. Should we not view the psychotomimetic in the same manner? That the anthropologist even still refers to the shaman as schizophrenic is one of those weird facts that can begin to draw our square into a circle, if not a spiral; showing in rough outline the weird continuum between the psychotic and the mystical.
The Temptation and Fall of Eve, 1808 William Blake
