for jacquie

i was reading aldus huxley's doors of perception when this part especially struck me, so i copied it down in my journal a few days ago. funny things, parallels...

in this excerpt, mister huxley has just taken mescaline for the first time, as part of an experiment, when scientists first came across lsd. the object of his focus is a vase of three flowers.

"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.)

"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is."

Istigkeit--wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy-- except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were--a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

---

i, too, am ready to go home.