Ah, I see. I was wondering how a coffee filter would fit the conversation.
I was, foolishly I suppose, in retrospect, quite interested in exploring those peculiar effects. In some sense I peered into the void, and I'm not sure I ever fully recovered. A slight overdose of reality, unfiltered.
Burroughs hated the psychedelics. He didn't even like to smoke pot. The opiates - ah, that's another story altogether. My brief experience with opium helped me to understand addiction. I realized that I was one of those people for whom the opiates really work well. Actually at that time I believed everyone would find them pleasurable, but later I discovered that there are people who hated having to take morphine, for example. So there must be quite a lot of variability in brain chemistry. Speaking of filters, the opiates are filters for pain, both physical and psychic.
Which reminds me that in his last years God himself - I mean Beethoven - denied himself laudanum to treat the terrible pain of his illness, because he preferred to have the pain and his ability to compose, over no pain and no creation. Now, if I was Beethoven, I'd do the same. |
