For the Love of Peyote

The fog parted just enough, and I could see the thinnest sliver of moon hang right over the edge of the mountain, setting about the same time as the sun, the broken yolk of sunset spilled through the doorway of fog. Everything was so dry. The oak trees looked tired and thirsty; the tall grasses were just a brushwork of kindling now. Rabbits hopped calmly around, keeping an eye on me standing by the truck with the others. A gofer or something pushed a pile of dirt out of the way, and poked his head out, and quickly pulled back into his cool dark tunnel.

I used to know an old man who lived way out in the middle of the Sonoran desert in Arizona. He used to bring me fresh buck meat he had killed the day before, when I worked on a farm out there, and we’d chew coca leaves under those brilliant night skies. He knew everything there was to know about every strange desert plant and animal and mushroom, and wouldn’t have much trouble surviving if he was dropped naked in the middle of nowhere. But he spoke often about how so many species were disappearing. Even there, in the Sonoran desert, the most biodiverse desert in the country, life was all too challenged by our constant sledgehammering of the world. Because of air and water pollutants, much of the scientific community argues there isn’t a square centimeter on earth left unaffected or unaltered somehow, and you wonder what our real legacy is going to be. What if we could speak a little more closely with all those wild things?

The Caribbean ground sloths are gone. The steppe bison are all gone. The shrub-ox. The Atlantic gray whales. The Caribbean monk seal. The Eastern elk. The Mexican grizzly bear. The dwarf hutia. The spectacled cormorant. Indigo-capped hummingbird and temper’s warbler. Too many salamanders and toads and tree frogs to ever conceive are all gone. Damn, the golden toad from Costa Rica is gone. Fish like the endorheic chub and silver trout and stumptooth minnow. Infinitely long lists of mollusks and butterflies and beetles and moths, shoveled off into the rotting heap of eternity. And the documented species we know have gone extinct are only a fraction of the ones gone. The extinction models vary widely, based on computer modeling, anywhere from 24 species extinct a day (The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, involving more than a thousand experts) to 150 a day (the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity).

But for most of us, they may as well all be gone. The wilderness — in the truest sense of that word — is in exile, banished at the marbled and pixelated edges of time. We’ve fortified ourselves behind cathedrals of make-believe, and plan on dying before having to deal with anything real. We walk around, staring indifferently with slouched necks as our dogs sniff each other’s prairie-thick assholes lost in the shrubbery of curly fur, like a battered memory, following the fading beautiful impulse that animals are supposed to be by our sides. Performing the same dreary routine of talking about breeds and names and ages. We dress our cats up in sweaters, and start their own Instagram accounts. And quickly turn the terraqueous world of overgrown moss and redwoods and mushrooms into stampeded lawns for the cows, and the fog-drenched lakes with singing reeds at the embankments into hog lagoons. In the U.S., farm animals produce about fifty times the slurry of stinking waste that humans do.

There’s handfuls of them left. Perhaps a pigeon limping along in the gutters somewhere; a seagull disassembling a bag of French fries and used ketchup packs; a squirrel shivering his tail against the branch of a tree — like starving couriers from the frontier, they maintain the edges of some distant pastel memory, a broken hymn of what was once a great symphony. The verdant shores are beside themselves, documented in encyclopedic lore; probably one day a whole hall in the Louvre will be designated for the memory of tall mature trees and the animals. Who cares.

I participated in a peyote ceremony the other night, with a Lakota Indian chief, his brother, and a dozen or so other guests. And I feel these sort of things need to be written down before I forget them, before they evaporate in the warm avenues of daily gossip, in the blistering chaos of what this year has been, and what every succeeding year will outdo. And before I tell any number of friends some iteration of “yeah, it was fucking crazy,” it seems worthwhile to try to spend a moment to articulate it a little more clearly.

Because most days are the same. I wake up and cook some eggs in my underwear, staring down puffy eyed at the bubbling whites of the eggs, still hungover from drinking alone the night before. By the time they’re ready, so is my Italian stovetop espresso. The half-and-half is foamed, the grapefruit is cut in half, and I take it all out to the table in my garden, listening to an hour of news radio as I water the plants, accepting the generally insufferable tone of this routine. I try to read a bit. This morning, I read Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Theatre. It was good, I guess. Then I paint or write, or go to work as a contractor for the day, come home, masturbate dully, as routinely as the cup of coffee, maybe watch a pirated foreign film I think will elevate me somehow. You have your own version of this, and it’s not that much better.

For the ceremony, I pulled up to this secluded lot, tucked away on the Valley side of the Malibu mountains — a few dirt bikes and partially constructed barn frames, beyond the patchwork of horse corrals, hidden in a smaller valley of oak trees and dried tall grasses. I used to know this area well — I built a cottage for this old guy Buck, who’s dead now, who told me stories of delivering hay and horse feed to Charlie at Spahn Ranch. It wasn’t far from here actually. This property didn’t exist formally. There was no street number, the buildings were clearly unpermitted, and they’d no doubt change the code to the gate once we all left. There wasn’t another house or light in sight, and after the usual introductions around, sizing up who you were going to be cramped in a teepee with for fifteen hours, who you’d be puking next to and being delivered messages from the spirits or messengers from Mother Earth or whatever, we all drove down the broken and weaving dirt road to a small clearing between the trees.

So a few of us erected the teepee in the dark, by headlamp. The Lakota chief’s friend, Roger, directed us on how to erect it. They called each other brothers, but Roger is Cheyenne. He’s another old long-haired Indian, from New Mexico, who didn’t say much. He intently watched everything around, occasionally looked at you if you were speaking, but only for a second. He had those same familiar eyes, that observes the world around him with a gentle sternness, as if from another world. Native Americans generally have the astute quality of not speaking much if there isn’t much to say, not compelled like most of us white people are to fill the empty space and silence between people with dithering small talk.

In one of the opening chapters of Lila — Robert Pirsig’s sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — he commits many pages to the “directness and simplicity” of the way the Indians speak and conduct themselves: “It seems to always come from deep within them. They just said what they wanted to say. Then they stopped.” Pirsig was in the middle of his own peyote ceremony, on a northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana. He defines their speech as “Plains spoken,” being all that similar to Woody Guthrie songs or Henry Fonda’s cool laconical ease in The Grapes of Wrath. The Indians didn’t unwittingly mimic their speech or mannerisms after the white man, but rather, they “were the originators,” he concludes, speaking the American Western dialect more authentically than the immortalized cowboy protagonists we have whole generations still impersonating to this day. I know what he’s referring to; I think most of us do. I’ve sat with myself before, for many hours on powerful psychedelics, with the horrifying realization that my entire schtick is fraudulent, that my well-tailored persona is a bumbling mimicry of two dimensional heroes, like we’re all in some way mildly traumatized from middle school, trying our adult-best not to be made fun of anymore.

During the ceremony, the chief spoke a great deal about the Spirit World, or Mother Earth, or the animals that reside here amongst us. It’s all the same, I suppose. The animals, of course, have even more of this quality, unburdened by the laws of fortune and despair, an entirely egoless persona, an individuality without persona. We see it in the animals nearest us — the four young foxes that live nearby me and come through my property from time to time, are unburdened by our crushing demands of vanity, the way Roger seemed unburdened by them.

We all sat together, staring hypnotically at the fire sending gentle sparks up to the top of the teepee, as the chief and Roger filled the space with warm songs. I didn’t feel anything for a while; but soon enough your thought changes to looking deeply inward and outward at the same time, in that they are one and the same. You realize it’s as much the songs and the fire and the teepee as it is the cactus rushing through your veins.

And when it really gets going, when the song of the animals and trees come blowing through the open door of the teepee and around the chief and his instruments and through you, you remember the humanity you long ago forgot. I’m forgetting it again now, but it was there for a few moments — the impassioned swelling of your own heart, that a world of decay and beautiful orgy has somehow given birth to you. It shoved you out into the clearing, naked and trembling. And the fire rages, and some poor woman next to you pukes her guts out, heaving and moaning, and the coyotes are right outside on the other side of the canvas, yipping and howling together. And Joe — the roadman maintaining the fire — is out there in the starlit wilderness, surrounded by oak trees, blowing the flute in a prayer to each of the four directions. I start laughing because holy shit it’s just wild that we’re alive like this. Joe comes back in, and opens a fan of eagle feathers, and ceremonially drops a pinch of cedar into the coals, and gives each of us a prayer, patting the major points of our body with the feathers and smoke.

At some point, my veins turn into crystal clear rivers, surging through to my fingertips and passed my toes. Flesh becomes the undulating sinews of muscle of a large animal. I can see the smell of dried sandy soil coming off of me like great billowing perfumes. You can grow to the size of a mountain, and your heart thuds to the beat of the deerskin drum, and before long the drum is actually coming from your heart — you are the origin of song, music, language, time. You don’t hear the tread of cars driving in the background; only the sound of a raven’s wings when it flies. No other birds wings make that sound; and I want to listen to it for the rest of my life. Sure, I think, I have suppressed everything, and hammered myself into an impenetrable edifice — a life lived through a mastered, relentless poker face that I never let down. But there are times I feel so much love inside me I think I’m gonna burst. Why is watching birds shake themselves off in the bird bath so beautiful? Why are grapes so nice to pick off the vine hanging over you? Why is thick rolling moss a better place to sleep on than an expensive bed set? Remember Walt Whitman writing, “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”

Joe raked the bed of coals from a moon shape, into a heart, and towards the end of the fifteen hour ceremony into the commonly distinct waterbird, the Anhinga anhinga, the symbol of the peyote ritual and bringer of visions. At times, the chief spoke between songs, at times crying for the animals disappearing all around, always giving prayers to the Nature that birthed us.

I don’t think any of us took enough of the peyote to achieve the mythic visions we have all heard so much about. And while the coyotes howled nearby outside the teepee, and a great white owl soared by my head earlier that evening, no mythic waterbird walked in through the rolled-up canvas door. A caribou didn’t let me ride him bareback into the warm frontier. A honeybee landed and rested on my finger for several minutes after the ceremony, as the warm sun came over the clear ridge of the mountain; but this could have happened easily regardless. And yet still, there was an undeniable presence, like a thick morning fog that finds you and spreads through you, and is hopefully gently with you forever.

The animals probably paid no such attention to us, mostly well-to-do white people sitting in a circle, hallucinating around a fire. They are probably too involved in much more meaningful things. But if we can remind ourselves it’s the same glowing arena we’re all trampling through, together with the snakes and the bison and the toads and the bobcats, maybe we can find what we’ve been looking for so hastily in the business and busyness of our days. Maybe we can again cherish what we lost sight of, and let our shivering love of the world breathe.