Previously: Part 7, in which there was darkness.
A few weeks ago I went and did some backing vocals for another musician in the studio. While we were all talking, the topic of this trip (no pun intended) came up. It was the first time I tried to describe much of it to anyone. Until then I’d usually let Sarah tell her story because it covered most of the details people wanted and was also much funnier and, you know, story-like. Most importantly, it existed, unlike my story which I hadn’t really managed to work through at all. So as I sat there in the studio I tried to explain some things, and was talking about the icaros when I realized I had recordings of some on my iPad (not the ones from our ceremonies, just some I’d found online, and why I had them is something I’ll try to explain before I’m done with all this). Before I played a little of them, I said, “Look, I don’t have any idea what these will sound like for you. When I listen to them I don’t just hear them, there’s a lot of other stuff attached to them that I feel, so when you hear them they may just sound like a random guy singing native songs pulled from a PBS documentary.”
That’s how I feel about trying to explain all of this, in particular the second ceremony. These are just words describing something that happened to me, possibly they’re funny and interesting, but do they convey what it felt like? Because that’s really the crucial part. That’s what made it all matter, that’s what made me so fucked up as the time passed after I came back home and I couldn’t feel it any more, and that’s what has made such a huge difference over the past couple of months as I’ve reconnected to that feeling and processed more and more of what I learned. Without that, this is just a wacky drug story, which is fine, I suppose, but not really what I’m hoping to get across.
Nothing to do, really, but try and write.
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I wrote the above a month ago.
I think what stalls me over and over is the idea that trying to put that second night into words ends up belittling it. That no description I can give it will contain any part of the experience I had. Last night, I was reading “The Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley before I fell asleep, because I’m still trying to process, still trying to learn, still trying to get perspective and create permanence for the whole thing. I was struck by this passage…
“By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies–all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
…and later by this…
“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”
In the end, what I want is to GIVE MY EXPERIENCE IN PERU TO YOU, and I can’t. It can’t be anything other than just a story for you. I don’t know why that should be so important to me, or maybe it’s more accurate to say I do know but feel as if it’s been foolish to expect I could.
So, why keep writing? That seems like a fair question. The answer, really, is that part of processing this has been finally writing about it and trying to convey it to myself as much as to anyone reading. I re-read all of these posts tonight in an attempt to jumpstart writing about it and it seemed, at least to me, that I could see my tone change over the course of writing. Those first few posts don’t read with the same “voice” to me that seems to be speaking in the more recent ones, something that seems even funnier to me now as I notice that they’re only two months old. The cynic in me says I’m imagining it, but of course he rarely shuts up about this sort of thing and, anyway, I’ve learned a lot of valuable things about the cynic in me over the past year, which I’ll come to eventually in the course of all this nonsense you’re reading.
Somewhere along the way I forgot, if I ever knew, how to just write for myself, with no purpose other than to express something to myself, and to count managing to express it to anyone else as an unexpected bonus. So, like I said a month ago, nothing to do, really, but try and write. If you’re still reading: thanks, sorry for the delay, and more soon, I promise.
Next: The second ceremony.