Rivers of the Mind Episode 11: The Gift of Language

Episode 11: The Gift of Language

There is no time. Time is meaningless. Time is now. The past is meaningless. The future is meaningless. The past is only memories, the future only the flickers of neurotransmitters fluttering between synapses inside of our brains—the only thing that exists, is now. The past seems distant, buried in the wake of a psychedelic explosion—or perhaps not distant—distance implies that it even exists at all. Rather, I recognize it suddenly as the abstraction that it is. I see a different person, in the past, driving down the road, than I do now, here, huddled together with this crying family of strangers underneath a helicopter. I wanted to run. But I always wanted to run. From the second that I got in my car that day I wanted to run. Where to, I didn’t know, but I knew that I wanted to, almost needed to. The aching to do so had been in my bones for some time. The memory of a fragment of a dream had pulled me in, offering the vaguest glimpse at an escape. Or perhaps not an escape, only a departure. A distance, a perspective, a coming home into my own self from the outside. I remembered it clearly. A man stood in the field, in a neat polo shirt streaked with blood, yelling at a stampeding herd of cows. A voice in my head told me that it needed me to help it get back into it’s physical body. For a moment I thought I was going insane, but only of my own volition--I welcomed insanity. Life had become so boring. Grinding through my days and trying to keep my eyes on the road ahead had left me desperate to veer off onto some kind of uncharted wilderness.

All of it seemed like magic, and I quickly gave up any hope I had of understanding it all—I’d just do the best I could, I decided. John, a homeless guy I met at work, led me outside, and started mumbling something about…well now I don’t remember. It seems like forever ago. He took me into the field, and suddenly, it was like I was tripping harder than I ever had in my life. A strange energy filled the air around us, emanating from the mushrooms in the pasture, which appeared to pulse with light and color. My mind and the mind of this stranger linked together, and I felt myself conscious of an entire other world. Some kind of strange Beyond, an apocalyptic and hellish force was descending on us—and perhaps even worse, I got the most distinct impression that it was real—Hyper-real, even. Something that ought not to have been real, but that was real nonetheless.

Lightning surged from the mushrooms, which spoke in a mumbling and unintelligible language—the Beyond dripped down from the sky onto the convulsing body of the man I’d seen in the field. The other world flickered and receded intermittently only to surge back to life. All of the sudden, John’s body lept with brilliant flames, and he collapsed down to the ground. And what happened next was something I could not even fathom at the time—all across the field, which was trembling, almost starting to sink, blue and purple lights raced between the mushrooms. I felt my mind drawn into them, their brilliant energies towards the Beyond. They were preparing to die—to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the universe. As they readied themselves for oblivion, they started to speak to me, and stranger still, I could understand them--their language coursing through my brain like a river bursting through a dam. All around, a roaring shockwave split the air. Pieces of the earth split off from on another, collapsing like broken glass into an immense, underground cave system. I was flung upwards.

Down below, I could see my physical body, growing more and more distant, as a trillion images flashed through my mind. I saw the heart of the mushrooms, rising and rising into the sky like a cloud, and enveloping my wandering spirit. I could feel myself splitting apart—parts of my ego, my id, my superego, my unconsciousness, spasmodically and joyously erupted into life, dancing through dimensions and upon the winds of eternity. I felt myself pulled into the stars, rising above the planet and into the hidden corners of existence, through levels upon levels of existence, as memories and words flooded my brain. Eventually, I was surrounded in a radiant white light, where nothing moved and all seemed still—a frigid and hollow emptiness. In my stomach, I felt a pit open—an overwhelming sense that I was going to die. An all-encompassing impression of my impending death. Rather than turn away, I leaned into it and found my self breaching above the light to arise, to my surprise, into my physical body, before I rose even further from the top of my skull, back through the Beyond, and then into my body once more—again and again—endlessly rising only to find that I’d only ascended from one layer into the next. My mind and my body began to crash back together—the pieces of my psyche which had been separated flung themselves back to me, recomposing my brain—in a slow and gentle collapse back into myself, I regained control of my body. And there it was. The singularity. Now. Now was time. Time is now. Time will be now. Time has always been now. I conjugated the thought in my brain in a loop, feeling myself drawn into the darkness of the void now torn into the earth.

Into a looming and hollow abyss I stared—a steaming pit, on the edge of which stood a hulking pillar of metal that had been transmuted by the magic of the Beyond. Everything felt almost unreal, my arms and legs and hands were strange, held together and given their shape by some kind of odd power. Or not power. Perhaps a force. Better, it was a binding. One which existed more as conception than as construction. Born out of semantic reasoning. Out of language. I stumbled, feeling the ground beneath me shift. The unsteady nature of my footing occurred to me on all dimensions. Mortified and frozen stiff, I could do nothing but look into the pit. Stare into the abyss, watch the void, feel the sensation, understand the colors of and fall into the grammar of infinite language--poesis, stasis, inability to detach, to come clean, to release myself. An endless tunnel of words to meanings to ideas to concepts to strategems to emotions—infinite, endless, serene, menacing, totalistic—the edges of my own language, my own perceptions, my own culture, seemed miraculously and fragile, breakable, a glass animal on the edge of a razor blade teetering into the sink where I’d left the water running and I could tell that amidst this perpetual dialogue with myself I was losing grip, a slippery slope to the tires of a hulking semitruck like my mom was always afraid of sliding on when she drove to Colorado, a state where I could study one day because they smoked weed and had plenty of snowy days to spend to myself and not have to go anywhere, I would-------I tried to drag myself from the grip of its power. The gravity of language. Everything I said, thought, felt, imagined became a typhoon of words, trailing into the sea of chaos around me. I faced up, and looked into the Beyond, the other world, fading from the sky, which loomed above me like a marble dome of turquoise and white and grey that crumbled like pastries, fluttering in a deep and unconscious music unlike anything that had been ever been heard or felt or seen. In the momentary glimpse I caught of the fading antiworld, I felt it surging with a life constructed from strange and alien physics. Harmonized with my own world, there was a dissonance between spheres, which manifested itself in rays and bolts of sparks and lightning cascading down my arms and my body, rolling through my mind in noetic pictures I had painted in my mind when I had no clue what it meant to run wild. All at the same time, simultaneously, I wanted to kill someone, and hug someone, and fly to the moon—overwhelmed, I wrung my hands over my face, on the verge of tearing out my eyes and collapsing in on myself, when I felt coming from deep within a will to press forward; the voice of a dead mushroom, lingering in a celestial spore planted in the back of my mind.

All of it was a poem, I began to understand—realizing itself continuously with no end and no beginning, writing itself into a poem of and about and by itself—the world around me was an infinite deep of poetry, of language, in which I was fluent somehow without even knowing—a language not of symbols but the symbolized. A language, effervescent and resplendent with potential. A language, like dynamite, like caged lightning in between my fingertips. A language, distant from myself, yet all the same my only friend. I rode the tide of the infinite poetry, feeling myself crest the waves of the grammars and rhetorics I had once taken for granted, my hands drifting along the sides of the architecture I’d once taken for granted. No. That I took for granted, I corrected myself, that I took for granted. The idea of having taken suddenly became a part of perfect past, no longer left to endless imperfection—took for granted. I was learning. I have learned. I will learn. Learning, once an act of struggle, now an act of wonder, conjugated into eternity. The connection recemented within my brain. To learn is to wonder. To wonder is to learn. And so I wondered. What can I do to save the universe?

The act of marking out my sentences seemed to let me grasp it. No, it did. The act most certainly did. The act of thinking in complete and active sentences made me feel somehow intact. Specific words, no pronouns, let me know what I meant to think, attached the image to a word, or a forest of words, even a solar system sometimes. That which is loose and meandering, winding like roads along the flesh of burning volcanos, gerunds and participles that melt together, to lead into infinitives in an endless stream of clauses, compartments, sections, clarifications, makes me feel wayward, makes me tumble into my own imagination. But this is easy chaos. Short phrases do wonders for the estranged. I am alive. I am here. I am a person. Even this chaos, punctuated by fragments, framed with the right clauses, reaches balance. Holding together my senses in a delicate tension, I orchestrate a battle between order and disorder, sparking fire as I strike them against each other, and I bring the act full circle.

I imagined myself shooting lightning up at the last piece of the Beyond, and saving the universe. I was certain I could do it. Determined to shoot lightning, I breathed in deep and slowly raised my hands, very seriously and sternly. I imagined myself as some kind of superhero like I’d seen on TV, and concentrated on my fingertips. In my own English language, I found myself screaming inside of my head, “Shoot lightning. Shoot lightning, bitch. Do it already.” Nothing happened. That was when it hit me. It was wrong. The grammar, the syntax was wrong, I told myself. English doesn’t shoot lightning into infinite dimensional voids. English wasn't built for that. It builds cities, writes poems and plays, assimilates new words with ease, and finds itself inclined to trading. The noun, first, does whatever it does, to the object. All else is secondary. I needed to change. Something slipped over my mind, like a blanket was being peeled off it. I fell into myself, moving backwards into my skull to find myself again in my body, albeit in a strange world. The sky was filled with machines, the ground became a part of me, I was a collective not a singularity. My language had been built as a group survival mechanism, for an undying plant. Fluently, I had slid into the grammar of the mushrooms, giving way to a world where the earth seemed to vibrate with a resonate music. I drew from it, feeling a shockwave from my roots down to the core of the planet bounce back to me, and surge through my limbs. A radiant violet lightning shot up at the Beyond. The invading mass of energy sulked back towards it’s portal—I fired again, and again, letting my body become a transmitter for the earth and her will to survive, in the form of great bursts of energy until the threat receded into the sky.

Shooting lightning into the cosmos, I lost track of who I was until I was genuinely and entirely a mushroom in a field. In turn, my thoughts became mushroom thoughts, my body became a mushroom body, with roots spreading through the ground to a forest of fruiting bodies. Watching this all from the human aspect of my consciousness consciousness, I saw myself as practically almost a single cell. Entirely aware of my humanity, but at the same time, such a concept had been translated in a new language. The memories of distant days came to me. I was a sacrament that the humans must honor. I had fought battles on the behalf of all the earth’s creatures, together with the help of all her plants. But these verbs were not past, nor future. They knew only three intertwined tenses: once, now, and forever. Their language, their cosmos, their understanding, spoke in effortless collectives, only using individuals for rare and exclusionary exceptions. I felt myself humbled by the power with which I’d been entrusted. The gift of language. When the bald monkeys first found it, they used it to communicate. And in myself, it had been amplified. Greatly amplified. The Beyond now gone from my sight, I was free to be however I wished. I could reason and feel in new colors and shapes. Each language for me slid on and off like sets of clothing. I listened to the grass, and I became a blade of grass, growing lonely in a field, not with much to speak of. I listened to the cows, and I became a cow, oriented to the herd. I listened to the panicked birds flying overhead, and knew a language of flight, my body felt keenly aware of North and South and Up and Down, and I almost imagined for a moment I could fly. And then back into English.

Returning to my mother tongue was disappointing. English felt like a cage. The first thing I realized was that I needed to work tomorrow. I realized I had immediately responsibilities, and I wondered when I’d come down from these shrooms. But I supposed John had wondered much the same thing, hadn’t he? At some point, he’d found himself, God only knows how, tripping on acid for a few hours too long, reading the thoughts of all those around him, his skull filled to the brim like a leaking bucket with psychedelic sensation, sensations that that tried to overflow and escape from it’s unwitting vessel. And what was worst, I hadn’t wanted to take shrooms, not today, not tomorrow, not for a while, not until my grandma has passed out of hospice and the world was at rest. The anxiety that laced the words I knew and the language I knew hung about like cobwebs, an endless mess of entangled obligations and fears and the sense of isolation, a sense which was magnified by the knowledge of another language, one where time was only now and forever, with no true past. Burgeoning and backbreaking, hammering and nailbiting quakes of stagnant terrors, mortifications and melancholia burst through the caked over grime and muck of my unsettled soul. I recoiled, cracking under the pressure cooker tight burning of a finite human stranded in the infinite.

The catatonic freeze in which I’d caught myself was shattered by the creeping concern that I felt for Cassandra, the woman I’d met in the house, and Gerry, along with her three kids. They seemed like such sweet little kids. They reminded me of myself and my brother. And the old man made me think of my grandfather, who these days has seemed so lonely and distraught. I broke myself away. The scene around me was one of violence, and pain. I empathized deeply with the broken soil, the aching and comatose body of John, the moaning and frightened cows. I could sense, in the spaces between bricks, a memory of pulverization—I could feel inside of the rain gutters the labor in factories that had brought them to life—within the gestalt of the house, I could sense the love of it’s architect and his hope for tomorrow. Again, the same tension—the tragedy of broken pieces of ground and earth and wood and suffocated life underneath the triumph of dreams made manifest in the form of a brick home. The void, the massive steaming underground, lay exposed just to the right of the house—the homes foundation had sunken, and now rested only barely askew, sliding incrementally towards the pit. I feared for it. I feared for the dreams that it held and for the people within. I put myself aside.

Running like mad, I barreled from the field onto the porch of the house and tore open the door, which had been nearly shaken off of it's hinges by the earthquake. The brick walls of the interior had long, wide cracks, and the floor towards the back had become warped. Furniture had tumbled over; plates, pots, and pans had fallen out of their cabinets. The feelings of the others in the room felt like forcefields pressing up against me—entering the house, my emotions pooled with those of Gerry and Cassandra and the children, lost in a mess of pain and fear. I needed to help them. I desperately needed to help them. Gerry had fallen down in the earthquake, and Cassandra was finding herself not strong enough to lift him up to his feet. The children, cowering in the corner, cried—the ipad was no longer enough of a distraction. Overwhelmed, their minds gave way to a creeping terror. They all felt so alone, so isolated—the disaster, the pit which now threatened to swallow them, seemed to be an impossible dream. In the horror of the moment, they were each distant from themselves, their own minds dissociated from their bodies and situations, locked like newly formed moons in the grasp of an alien planet. Gerry’s house. This was his house. His dreams. His life. His memories. I helped him to his feet, feeling unstable, and tried to assure him it would all be okay. I helped him out to the porch and the driveway to lay him down. He’d landed on his hip. That was where it hurt. I knew because when I looked at him, I could feel the pain, and it was awful. I stood up, and, manically, ran back into the house to try to rescue whatever I could from his room. I gathered up photos and paintings from the walls, flailing about in a panic with my heart pounding. I set them on the ground in front of him—Gerry felt a slight, melacholy peace. I headed back in, followed briefly by Cassandra.

“What are you doing?”, she asked. She felt warmth towards me, a strong warmth. “I’m trying to save his stuff in case the house falls into the pit.”, I said. Locking eyes with her, it hit me that her husband was lying on a tall metal pillar in the center of that pit, and she was yet to see him, his broken and transmogrified metallic corpse. I couldn't help but imagine she'd be devastated. “Let me help you”, she asked, deeply admiring what I was doing. I dashed towards the rear of the house, flinging open what looked like a bedroom door. Quickly, I sprang for the closet. Layers of clothes…do people need clothes? Do they like them? I hated clothes. I actually did. And shoes. A lot of people think that I like clothes but they’re wrong because I don’t. They're like prisons for your entire body. I threw all Gerry's clothes to the side, and found a few boxes of photo albums, handing them to Cassandra, before I pulled, out from underneath the bed, a mandolin.

The room made sense. The spatial layout of the house, I mean. Enough time, and architecture was a language in and of itself. The private places. The public places. The spaces for friends. The spaces for family. It was the diorama of the old man’s mind. A display of his thoughts. All throughout the home, the arrangement of Gerry's routines and patterns were beaten down like paths across a mountainside. I knew, with almost complete certainty, that his spoons were probably in the second drawer away from the sink, and though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew they were there. I was carrying all of his possessions, but the thought bugged me. The spoons. Why were the spoons so important? Did I just want to be right? I did want to be right. I wanted to be right very badly. Before I rushed out of the house, I dove for the spoon drawer and thrust it open. A plethora of spoons, and forks, and knives, and miscellaneous cutlery. Victory. An ecstasy flooded through me.

“What is it?”, Cassandra asked.

“I was right! I was right!”, I exclaimed with joy, “It’s full of spoons!”

“Do we need them?”, she raised her eyebrows in confusion. I winced. We did not need the spoons. Why would we need the spoons? “Of course not.”, I replied, hurrying out of the house behind her, “I just wanted to be right.” I followed her towards the door, before a strong sensation pulled me back. There was something else. Something critical. Important. I looked to the right, to see a blue crystal hanging from the window. It swayed back and forth, with worry. Worry? It couldn't think. No, I thought, but it can feel. The crystal can feel. The crystal can see me. You're turning into a lunatic, I told myself. Let the crystal go. I couldn't let the crystal go. It could feel. It was frightened. If it was shattered, perhaps it would be killed. None of the other crystals thought, though. I didn't get that impression from any of the stones that they were feeling things. Only this one. And I couldn't bear to part it. Awkwardly fumbling to place the rest of Gerry's worldly possessions into my left arm, I quickly tore the stone from the window, breaking apart the knot that held it up. The crystal breathed a sigh of relief. No it didn't. I'm absurd.

Gerry stared blankly at the pile of his things that had been amassed before him—he was grateful, relieved that he would not lose them. But even then, he kept pushing back against his tears. He felt ashamed. Men don’t cry, I imagined him thinking. He didn’t probably didn't think a real man would have been so sentimental as to have held onto all this, and he was baffled that I'd managed to excavate it all from his closet. Cassandra looked on with guilt. She’d never, not in a million years, imagined that this would happen today. Suddenly, she regretted having treated her father in law with such ambivalence. He needed her now. Everyone needed her. The children were terrified. The entire family felt incomplete, like they were one half of a space station spiraling out of control with no gravity to slow it down, a car with a blown out tire skidding on an iced over lake. The air smelt funny, and they could see smoke everywhere. Daddy had tried to kill them. What did they do wrong?

Beginning to cry, I retreated into the mushroom language, feeling myself spread out in roots to the other humans, bringing them into what I could only describe as an empathic field, a sense of peace that hovered amidst them and dwelled upon them. Oneness. Eternity. The children and their mother and their grandfather felt themselves rooting down to the earth, feeling, between them, an overwhelming sense of security. Gerry burst into tears, years of repression made worthless by the shift of language; Cassandra felt the boundaries of her self dissolving and the love from her children and her supposedly distant father in law flooding inward, crushing her sense of loneliness. She crawled towards her children and tried to cradle them in her arms, tears streaming down her face as she, unable to form words, tried to assure them it would be okay. The children felt themselves surrounded in love, the world awake with mystery; the troubles redefined as adventures, the danger redefined as only fear—a bravery came about them. They were three generations among many—the continuation of a spirit, a lifeblood, a common species—vital to it, in their own ways, even if not central, even if characters on the side—they had, in their DNA, the memories of famines and wars and plagues and oppressions, but they had survived—for thousands of years they had survived, and the flame of human consciousness and hope had carried on, inspite of darkness and fear and hatred bearing down on them.

I thought of my own family. Their house was not far from here. It must have been near the end of the sinkhole, if it did not collapse in it's entirety. The whole ordeal likely seemed like a bit of prophecy to my aunt, a geologist turned Certified Nursing Assistant turned cherished alien truth advocate in Austin, TX, who swore that, since our house was built on limestone, it wouldn't be long until a sinkhole took us all under. For my brother, the sinkhole would be yet another emotional horror for him to solve by pouring anaesthetics and stimulants into his nervous system; dreaming of a numb and overworked existence without feeling. For my mom, I feared it would put an end to the helpful bit of hypomania that had propelled her out of bed by eight in the morning sharp every day and let her work on the computer in the afternoons. For my dad, I imagined it would bring a boost to construction jobs in the area, at least—which could be an upside, maybe, for all of us. I loved them. The people that had made me, that had raised and shaped me. I wanted them to be okay—out here, I felt like an island—away from them, with no way to help them—I wanted to hold them. They were all at the hospital right now, but never mind that—I was certain the whole ordeal would be, at the very least, mentioned on Fox News, which my grandmother kept on at all times.

What did this mean? I interrupted the spiral—What did it mean? For my every day life? The road I took to work was blocked by a sinkhole. Not too mention, this. The power of language. It wasn't like I'd taken a drug. I'd—I mean—if I'm being honest, I was kind of stoned when I got here, but not that stoned, just a little stoned. But I hadn't just—made the choice to trip for a few hours—I didn't go into this knowing that, with 100% certainty, the trip would start around 12 or so, and end around four or six in the evening. How was I going to interact with my family? Would I take them into the mushroom language, like I was to this whole family of strangers? Would they think I was high all the time? Would they take me to the hospital? How was I going to go to work? Was I going to drive like this? Would I get drug tested? Because I smoke weed every fucking day and I have for like five fucking years so if that happens I'm screwed. Would I have a customer ask me where to find the onions, and I'd fall into a trance where I collapse through layer upon layer of idioms and synonyms and ideas, and then realize that the onions were living, and switch into their language, and become an onion? There were too many damn questions.

“Hey”, one of the kids said, tapping me on my knee, “It's okay.”

I forgot that I'd brought them into the mushroom language—they were especially in touch with my emotions as a result. I sat down, and the kid gave me a hug. Faintly, I started crying along with them. The empathy ran deep—detaching from my own worries, I became a part of them—the love and empathy and worry and alienation that coursed through the veins of our united mental body moved from one single, beating heart. The house, beside us, continued to fall apart, the rear side of the house crumbling into the pit. We heard sirens echoing across the hills—the approaching sounds of helicopters who had come to survey the damage stalked closer and closer. Eventually, one of the terrible steel birds began to float above the house, descending upon us and kicking up clouds of dust. I shielded my eyes. This was terrifying in the mushroom language. It had no sense of how to describe it other than a dreadful anger at the helicopter itself. I felt myself tempted to launch a strike of purple lightning at the invader and it's strange heretical magic. But I did not, since the dominant, English part of my brain still recognized, ultimately, that there were people in that helicopter, and that they shouldn't be struck by lightning.

COMMENTARY

Kyla Valenti plays the part of Meagan in this episode. Pretty shortly after I developed John, I started working on what superpowers other drugs could give people (although the superpowers are not actually direct consequences of the drugs, but their underlying personality/disposition). I thought Meagan would be a good character to give mushroom powers, based on my limited imaginary conversations with her.

Streaming links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1PSsnuuZNU&t=1s
http://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/rivers-of-the-mind-episode-11-the-gift-of-language
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

All episodes by Timmy Vilgiate. No drugs harmed in the making of this podcast. Nothing in this is real. Nothing at all is real. Everything is a lie.