Tom Robbins - Wild Ducks Flying Backward

She’s also in touch with the sweet bird of youth. “Ceramics and cowgirl stuff are each a part of the child in me, and I’m interested in keeping that part alive. So many of the harsh realities of the adult world are unnecessary and absurd. People kill themselves because they’re alienated from the child they really are.”

Neither as flaky nor as flamboyant as you might suppose, Ruby comes across as the kindly enthusiastic schoolteacher she must have been. In pop culture, she searches for depth and meaning, not frivolity or escape. Her Pinto Pony is a gathering place for serious collectors and those attracted to the benevolently bizarre. Someday they may be able to ride the range with her as well. Ruby’s professed ambition is to open a dude ranch. Complete with a personally decorated Roy Rogers suite — and a salt and pepper museum out back of the corral. Pink, no doubt. Like a twister of newborn mice, or a cowgirl’s bubblegum cud.

House & Garden, 1991

From my downtown Seattle apartment, a number of provocative neon signs are visible, silently reciting themselves like lines from a hot, jerky poem. Above the entrance to the Champ Arcade, for example, there flashes the phrase LIVE GIRLS/LIVE GIRLS/LIVE GIRLS, a sentiment that never fails to bring me joy, especially when I consider the alternative. Less jubilant, though more profound, is the sign in the dry cleaner’s window. It signals simply, ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS, but it always reminds me of Terence McKenna — not merely because Terence McKenna is the leading authority on the experiential aspects of mind- altering plants, or because his lectures and workshops have altered my own thinking, but because Terence, perhaps more than anyone else in our culture, has the ability to let out the waist on the trousers of perception and raise the hemline of reality.

Scholar, theoretician, explorer, dreamer, pioneer, fanatic, and spellbinder, as well as ontological tailor, McKenna combines an erudite, if crackingly original, overview of history with a genuinely visionary approach to human destiny. The result is a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas. When Hurricane Terence sets one’s mind back down, however, one will find that it is on solid ground; for, far from Oz-built, the theories and speculations of McKenna are rooted in a time-tested pragmatism thousands of years old. Many of his notions astonish us not because they are so new, but because they have been so long forgotten.

As the title of his collection The Archaic Revival implies, McKenna has found a key to the future in the dung heap of the past. (It is entirely appropriate to note that psychoactive mushrooms often sprout from cow pies.) During the European Renaissance, scientists, artists, and enlightened citizens turned back to a much older Greek civilization for the marble sparks with which to ignite their marvelous new bonfire. In more than one place in his collection of essays and conversations, McKenna is urging that we turn back — way, way back — to Paleolithic shamanism, to retrieve techniques that not only could ensure our survival, but could assist us in mounting a fresh golden age: in fact, the golden age, the one toward which the plot of all history has been building.

McKenna doesn’t consider himself a shaman, although he has studied with shamans (and drunk their potent potions) in Asia and the Amazon. He says, however, that he is attempting to “explore reality with a shamanic spirit and by shamanic means.” Indeed, the shaman’s rattle buzzes hypnotically throughout his essays and lectures, although it is sometimes obscured by the whoosh of UFOs, for McKenna’s imagination (and expertise) ranges from the jungle to hyperspace, and only a dolt would ever call him retro.

Here, let me squirt a few drops of Terence’s essence into the punch bowl, so that we might sample the flavor and chart the ripples:

My vision of the final human future is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body, so that the exterior soul will exist as a superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the body of each of us at a critical juncture during our psychedelic bar mitzvah.

The problem with Christianity is it’s the single most reactionary force in human history. I don’t even know what is in second place, it’s so far in front. And I believe that the destruction of paganism was probably the greatest disservice to the evolution of the human psyche that has ever been done. The repression of “witchcraft” is really the repression of botanical knowledge…

I don’t believe that the world is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language.

If hallucinogens are operating as exopheromones, then the dynamic symbiotic relationship between primate and hallucinogenic plant is actually a transfer of information from one species to another.

Reality is a domain of codes, and that is why the UFO problem is like a grammatical problem — like a dangling participle in the fourth-dimensional language that makes reality. It eludes simple approaches because its nature is somehow embedded in the machinery of epistemic knowing itself.

I scoured India and could not convince myself that [its mysticism] wasn’t a shell game of some sort or was any more real than the states manipulated by the various schools of New Age psychotherapy. But in the Amazon… you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different… [yet] more real than real.

These tiny sips from McKenna’s gourd, served out of context and stripped of his usual droll garnishes, are nevertheless intoxicating and, to my mind, nourishing. In larger gulps, his brew may even heal the ulcers through which the modern world is bleeding.

Our problems today are more complex and more threatening than at any time in history. Sadly, we cannot even begin to solve those problems, because our reality orientations are lower than a snowman’s blood pressure. We squint at existence through thick veils of personal and societal ignorance, overlaid with still more opaque sheets of disinformation, thoughtfully provided by the state, the church, and big business (often one and the same). The difference between us and Helen Keller is that she knew she was deaf and blind.

Radical problems call for radical solutions. Conventional politicians are too thickheaded to conceive of radical solutions and too fainthearted to implement them if they could, whereas political revolutionaries, no matter how well meaning, ultimately offer only bloodshed followed by another round of repression.

To truly alter conditions, we must alter ourselves — philosophically, psychologically, and perhaps biologically. The first step in those ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS/ALTERATIONS will consist mainly of cutting away the veils in order that we might see ourselves for that mysterious Other that we probably are and may always have been. Terence the Tailor has got the sharpest shears in town. And he’s open Sundays and holidays. Once the veils are severed, we, each of us, can finally start to attend to our self-directed mutagenesis.

With his uniquely secular brand of eschatological euphoria, Terence McKenna is inviting us to a Doomsday we can live with. Be there or be squared.