That psychedelia, properly considered, is the world seen as a wholeness: a single body with any knowledge of unit and seemly division forgotten. That psychedelia appreciates and seeks taperings, matchings, and series—at once as single and as various as the shoots from a common bulb.
Use—being the employment of units, proscriptive words, filing, the like—is itself the unit consumed by psychedelia. Psychedelia destroys usual constructions necessary for a directed negotiation of the world, and accomplishes this by presenting the backdrop of higher fact that these constructions are dug into and founded upon. Psychedelia is precisely the view that is not conducive to anything at all, but is only conducivity itself. (As it were, a broken lamp in a broken pitcher of water—electric charge awaits the unwary walker.)
Ten characteristic expressions:
1. The mystical, which is an incorrect excrescence, but operates along certain discrete and negotiably true axes (the planets, certain perceived stellar groups, an inventory of named human inclinations). It operates between disparate phenomena and declares their unity on a wholly causal basis, a wholly knowable level. Most notably, it works--it assumes independent and unsubsidized life.
2. The transposition of colors hints at the arbitrary nature of all color phenomena. It generally insists on inarguably human-born dye-compounds suffusing the otherwise tiresome effusions of nature at large.
3. Glowings. That the nature and influence of any given object extends beyond what we agree to set as its bounds. The clearest example is that the UV-treated object sprays more light than it is generally credited for. To extend the thought, though—is it not true that every scratch left in the floor is actually a working part of the chair itself?
4. Questions of scale are wrestled with, as Jacob wrestled with his better, the angel. A textbook could portray on a page the single-armed galaxy and the spermatozoon, as ‘picted indeed close analogues. It proceeds, well beyond the ken of many, that our own eyes are well capable of such feats of juxtaposition given slight and simple aids. We often hear of the lesser wheel nestled in the greater, without any convincing talk of how this housing works mechanically. Nonetheless, it is observed to; furthermore, the suspicion exists that is intended precisely as a purposed, producing, working model. A characteristic question: does the discovery of any gear necessitate higher gears to tooth to?
5. Synesthesia—and any sensitive observer will be struck with the innocence, the improbable recurrence of, the essential loneliness that clothes the professing synesthete. By our lights, the synesthetic operates by playing a keyed organ in accompaniment to all data, with absurd specific hues (or other sensations) tagged to each discretum. Could it not also be true that our every impression is similarly procrusted upon a sort of tempered scale—our impressions (save the synesthete’s) in strict monophony?
6. Time is bandied about; but scarcely, we notice, with any striking deformation. A minute takes longer, or an hour is missed. Scarcely any wholesale deformation, tumor, keloid. Memory may make interjections beyond its usual wont; but these incursions are quickly dismissed, as we indeed dismiss any of memory’s operations. Should memory be so despised? Is it faulty, incapacious, and permeable storage? Is it a misfiring true time-sense? If time is only a tool that is built into the human, why is index of error so slight and narrow?
7. Oracular talk; the Sibyls, as should have been clear all this time, were victims of wholly adverse inhalations. The discouragement of such proceedings proceeds apace; so that respectable people teach Isaiah or John of Patmos, and take care not to move as they moved; and might importune a sweet chariot, but not with any whole conviction. We deprecate any speech that might show—no, we show often enough, but fail to consruct linkages behind ostensible discreta. But then, there is too much work to be done these days, and even flowers of leisure must, for the sake of utility, be expertly pruned of their superfluities.
8. Swirling occurs, because any qualities extended through space or time are curled from their accustomed paths by fancy. Is this fancy free? No—it occurs, sport as it may, only in a select orbit, around a central point of collapse. New elements are continually poured along the sides, play for their term, and are discarded as they arrive at the terminus. This arrangement might be attributed solely to the curiously indefatigable concept of view.
9. Echo, confirming that any utterance is not the sole property of the speaker. Proclamations into an immensity swerve in the air and confront the mouth that breathed them with a suspicious celerity. Upon applying characteristic psychedelic operations to space-time, the problem appears in a simpler light—what had shown as the boomeranging and proliferation of one emitted vector appears as a contemporaneous flow’ring of brothers or sisters. The utterance, then, is only a inert model on the speaker’s tongue.
10. Tenderness, as elements human and otherwise declare a newfound willingness to enter into each other. From a strict regime constituted by male-female piston-work, unyielding prickers and abject sinks of oil, the model softs into sighs and willingness—“you may, you may, you may”.
