12 August 2003
11:30 PM
By now, I’ve become more or less a weekly salvia practitioner ("salvianaut"). The fascinating improbable worlds of Salvia Space excite my traveler’s curiosity as no visit to an exotic country ever has. At first apprehensive of the bizarre and extremely intense visions from smoked salvia divinorum, I’ve grown fond of “Lady Salvia”, the nurturing and reassuring female presence felt by many voyagers to the Sage's hyperspatial realm—a vast place limited only by the innumerable dimensions of our psyche.
For this, my fifth trip, I’ve improvised a water pipe. It consists of a plastic soda bottle with two vinyl hoses drilled through it and taped in place. One hose serves as a mouthpiece, while the other connects to a tobacco pipe bowl packed with a single large salvia leaf.
I fill the contraption with cold water and leave it in the freezer for a few minutes. This step makes the filtered smoke much smoother. From hard experience, I’ve learned how fiery the blast from a blue hissing torch lighter flame can be.
I’m feeling a little tired and nervous, so to relax, I start the CD player with “Tranquility Silence Follows Rain”, a meditation music collection that’s a favorite among Salvianauts. By the time I’m ready, “Pinnacles” (by Michael Becker and Stevan Pasero) is playing.
I sit at a small oak round table in the kitchen. The table’s circular top is composed of three parts connected to each other by hinges, like a triptych. Levers under the table can be moved to collapse the flanks, so that only the central part remains in place.
Time to go…. The fierce flame hisses. On the first toke, I’m able to deeply inhale the rich smoke. I wait thirty seconds before exhaling, and then breathe in the small amount of leftover smoke in the pipe.
Already—too soon—I’m feeling the familiar disorientation and “whirlpool effect”. I fire up the lighter a second time. This isn’t right. I remember reading that three or four tokes with plain leaf are needed.
An invisible vortex from below sucks me in. I manage to briefly hold the flame against the pipe bowl. I'm feeling "two-dimensional", yet my right hand and the lighter appear to be miles away. Something or someone is pulling, bending, folding me into a curved surface. “Whoah! Wait a minute, I’m not done toking yet!” I protest.
I inhale, but cough out the searing smoke. It’s too late. Eyes wide open, I morph into some kind of fluid two-dimensional manifold with an extremely complex geometry. Unfortunately, I remember only two stages among many in the “lifecycle” of this restlessly evolving manifold. I now describe these stages with great difficulty, due to their bewildering and highly convoluted shapes.
During the first stage, I morph into half the tabletop (a semicircle) and the table’s single leg (the central support). The fingers of my right hand grow long like the roots of trees, then bend and fuse with the semicircle. My upper jaw bends backward 270 degrees and melts into the table’s central leg. The rest of my body is somewhere in the middle. Thus contorted, I try to memorize the incredibly rich geometric details and mathematical ramifications of my new body—unsuccessfully, as I now realize. My best description (above) does not convey even one percent of the details of my extraordinary metamorphosis.
Contemplating my puzzling new existence, I hear a soft, reassuring voice whisper my name several times.
In the second stage of “evolution”, I’m transformed into a complex of rectangles joined to each other by hinges. For a moment, the hinges look like the table’s hinges I mentioned earlier. What could be more natural? If I must be part of this table, then I ought to have my fair share of hinges!
Suddenly, I realize that I’m not part of the table anymore, but am a separate configuration of rectangles and hinges. What have I become this time? After some thinking, it dawns on me that I’ve turned into the lid of a huge barbecue grill! What the hell does all this mean?
The visions break, and as I recover, a flash of insight: now it all makes sense! For dinner, I remembered, we had barbecued pork ribs. While savoring the meat, I kept feeling sorry for the poor animal that died to provide our meal.
Then here comes Lady Salvia telling me by this bizarre vision that an unbreakable link has formed between that pig and me, that our paths have finally crossed, and we’ve fused together through the grotesque yet perfectly natural processes of cooking and digestion—a brief incarnation of the great Cosmic Cooking and Digestion.
Holy shit, this is too funny, this is too much! I drag myself away from the chair and laugh uncontrollably.
I feel like a Zen monk who has finally guessed the answer to some stubborn unresolved koan.
“What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”
I realize from this salvia experience that the answer to such a question must be both grand and absurd. It has to be: “The Sound That Can’t Be Heard” or something similar. Like the invisible hinges and links of the universe, it’s the sound that no one hears, yet is in each sound we hear. And it’s the only sound there ever really is.