I took 3-MeO-PCP for the first time in a long time in the baby-blue kitchen of L & N’s apartment. I dissolved into litboard conversations on
The Brothers K and then went to the Rubin at 7:30 and smoked a spliff by the entrance and went inside and went down to the theatre and went upstairs to get my ticket and went downstairs to find the group.
We were watching
Fantastic Planet, a beautiful ‘73 Laloux animated sci-fi with a raga group doing a live score. I had no idea the Rubin was so New Agey; the next night they’d scheduled an exploration of trance that sounded adjacent to a sober rave, and the curator who introduced the film incited us consider “time: the past, the present… and the future.”
The movie's full of conceptual blending, the cross-domain mapping of complex inputs such that many facets of the inputs can be compared (metaphorically; juxtaposed...); such that each facet (and by extension input) is illuminated through its definition in the light of the other.
Someone I think it was Phillip Prager?
said conceptual blending is what Dada does, stuff like Man-Ray’s
Gift and obviously Duchamp’s
Fountain—illuminating the
qualities of the iron through those of the nail, or illuminating the “male” through the domestic, feminine sensibilities the iron and nails suggest. (Or, Illuminating the qualities of art through non-art; Or, the architecture and choreographies of the salon through those of a bathroom.)
Conceptual blending basically seems like a variation on the Lakoff/Hoffstadter theses about conceptual metaphors and
figurative cognition—that we understand abstract domains like
love and
romance through more concrete domains like
journeys. Like in conceptual blending, conceptual metaphors are “general mappings across conceptual domains,” a “fixed pattern of ontological correspondences… that may or may not be applied to a source domain knowledge structure or a source domain lexical item.” Time is a space we move toward; night is death; “we’re driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love.”
3-MeO is an afternoon drug, not an evening drug. After the initial hour of confusion and dissolution, when things begin to come back together and your brain reorganizes itself, that's when there's so much opportunity. Anything seems possible. "Intrinsic empowerment" in RL land.
Acid is a morning drug, since the visuals tank at night and the literal darkness casts emotional shadows. MXE is an evening drug. I got the idea during
Fantastic Planet to get out a Windows OS and start mapmaking flash games again as an art form.
Maybe because I’ve been reading poetry and training my neural nets to be more self-observant, or maybe because it was a long long time since last dissociating, but I came away with words I hadn’t had before to describe the relevant headspace, body noises like
neck crack and
knuckle pop. There were mild audio distortions, the sounds of music, full coherent melodies being top-down projected onto street noise and radiators. Buzzing, whistling, ringing. Wasps around making me think of the Sartre quote about
crabs.
I wrote on a Rubin calendar handed out pre-show “If I’ve ever believed in fate it’s now” and then added “or drugs” after “fate.” Then I wrote about SWIM: “Sometimes, elocutions she found particularly well-coined she repeated a second time, in case someone hadn’t heard it the first time around.”