This story begins with me, staring hopelessly and standing helplessly at the edge of a dense, dark forest. Flashing lights, strange sounds, odd shapes and massive bubbles all blinked seemingly into and out of existence before my, wide and dangerous, UFO pupils. Normally such a scene of strange beauty and odd behaviour would attract me like a moth to a flame; like deep sea scavengers to the decaying flesh of freshly deceased humpback. This night was different. This night all I could do was stand and stare and fear and panic and sweat and indecisively sway from side to side as the brutal combination of utterly stupid doses of various psychedelics worked their terrible magic upon me. I was a statue caught in the deadly gaze of a chemical Medusa, my Perseus lost to the hedonism of the event, probably doing kegstands and nitrous balloons while I experienced the true terror of hallucinogenic over-consumption. I was doomed to stand at the precipice, balanced perfectly on the edge of fight and flight, unable to decide whether it would be more appropriate to meet my maker in the darkness of the forest, or have him smite me down as a coward too feeble to face the challenge before me.
It would be easy at this point to write me off as a lunatic, drugged and stupid, afraid of a patch of woods made horrible by the torrents of lsd and psilocybin awash in my cerebral cortex. But, brave reader, to do so would be an error. You see the hedonistic event of which I speak is the first Rothbury festival, and the woods which so terrified me at the time, was actually one of the most beautiful, breathtaking, unique and wonderful art installations anyone has ever dared undertake. The lights and shapes and bubbles and sounds etc., were, I swear, all quite real. I was not stunned stoic by mere fear of forestry’s pervasive darkness, oh no, before me was a living realm of perfect hallucination. Under the doses I dared take that night, I was hallucinating quite wildly, make no mistake, but such a state was nothing new to me, and certainly nothing that I couldn’t man up, ride out and handle like a professional. The magic forest however, was another thing entirely. To peer through the dense trees and see a three dimensional pyramid of multitudinous light appear and hover for a moment twelve feet off the ground, only to disappear leaving no trace and not be able to tell whether the hallucination was my own, or the artists, was......well...it was fucking intense. People entered this Draconian fairy tale willingly enough, but the occasional screams of bloody horror told my mind “fear this place...they enter, but do they exit? Caution!”. So I stood, long bereft of any known companions, alone and utterly terrified as the epic beauty of the Rothbury Magic Forest both called and warned, pushed and pulled, begged me to enter and dared me to take a step.
I believe I would have stood there forever, or at least until I collapsed into a sad lump of living proof that the power of the woods was enough to stop a man midstep, had I not felt a small warm hand envelope my own cold and clammy collection of twitching phalanges. I felt that faerey touch, and turned to see my first, true angel. She was younger than I, perhaps nineteen (the perfect age for exploration, discovery, ignorance and the accidental poetry of living a life where you just don’t know any better) and beautiful. A tiny hippie girl, a full foot shorter than my lanky six feet, with long hair made colorless by the odd mixture of darkness, moonlight and psychedelic visuals. Her eyes shown with such kindness that my fear melted like sunbathing gelato, vanished like the disappearing light of a solar eclipse leaving only the fleeting look in my eyes, which like the brilliant corona shining from around the moon, gave proof that terror had been present,but was gone. My Perseus arrived as a dryad daydream, giving warmth and color to the night and beheading the chemical beast which held me so fast and so slow. She freed me completely with her touch and said only this, “I’ll go in with you if you like.” The sweetest words I had ever heard. This barefoot cherub had read my situation completely and perfectly, explaining that for the last ten minutes she had been watching me from about twenty feet away, wondering if I was ever going to move and truly hoping that I was alive and okay, and of course, not dangerous. Finally, she decided that I needed help and made her move, connecting us and sending us forward in to the strange beauty of the journey to come.
Hand in hand, we walked namelessly as old lovers into the perfectly designed dreamworld that had been built purely for our pleasure and wonder. Immediately I was embarrassed and ashamed that I had been so full of terror, while such a living a fantasy stood, gates open, trumpets blaring before me and I told her as much. She replied, telling me that, despite being many, many levels less dosed than myself, she too was, lit up, adrift and apart from her friends and afraid to enter the mystery alone. Sweet, delicious serendipity. I thanked her, and she raised up on her tip-pie toes to plant one lingering kiss on the corner of my mouth, the feel of it sent tremors and waves of pure love through every cell of my body. My atoms aligned to form the crystalline geometric shapes of unleashed, unchecked happiness.
The next hour or so I experienced one impossible wonder after another. We would follow trails lit by what looked like fireflies, but blinked on and off in a myriad of colors, and pulsed to the rhythms, beats and melodies of music being played live more than a quarter mile away. Music itself would occasionally burst forth from some dark niche, deep in the unknown depth of the woods, bend and echo, bounce and teleport from place to place, like a some magic jester too frivolous to ever get close enough for any real listening or interpretation. Above our heads, as we strolled hand in hand, giant balls of phosphorescent alien light, aligned in geometric shapes like hovering visions summoned into existence by some coven of hidden shamans or magicians, led us down this path or that. We were following a vast system of endless enigmatic light breadcrumbs towards some space between realities, we walked, hallucinating together, through a visceral, man-made psychedelic experience created wholly for our enjoyment, excitement and contemplation. My hat goes off and my deep thanks go out to those visionaries who helped create what, to this day, is the most wonderful living work of art I have had the pleasure of sharing in. Seriously, Thank You.
After some indeterminate amount of time exploring, and being explored, we decided to find a quiet place, away from the various groups of joint smoking fun lovers gathered here and there amongst the trees, to sit and talk and get to know each other in a more standard, more usual way. Again I thanked her for saving me from myself and again my thanks was met with kiss, this time of the more active and passionate variety, for many cupids fired many arrows in the magic woods of Rothbury. We spent quite some time sitting together, alone in the darkness and away from the flashing majesties of the geometric UFO’s that marked the wider pathways through the woods. We were, for the first time, truly alone and we made the best of the situation, exploring each other’s minds and bodies, basking in the unusual and beautiful randomness that brought us together to share this wondrous moment, in this wild, sensual, alien environment. There were, we knew, other groups of people not far from us, but none close enough to hear our conversation, or see our playful escapades. We were as alone as two people can be in a small wilderness, that just a day ago was an empty untouched piece of marvelously lush Michigan landscape and now found itself filled with seventy thousand travellers and everything that large number brings with it.
So it was in this moment of unattended bliss, this beautiful shared moment of two strangers brought together by magic, art and the unique love only the true adventurer can ever hope to feel, that I, in a moment of perhaps awkward touching, or tickling, let out a small, nearly imperceptible laugh. A “ha, huh” perhaps. Nothing more than a quiet chortle between lovers alone in their love, in the impenetrable darkness of our chosen corner of a queer, wild world. So you can probably understand our utter shock and surprise when, from about six feet directly above our heads, came parroting back my small laugh, only slightly louder and differently toned. Before we had even a moment to consider that this was anything other than some naturally occurring echo, another even louder chuckle came from the far left of us, about eight feet off the ground. Our heads shot in that direction, but before we could interpret that sound, two more, louder chortles came, one from high above to the right, one almost right next to us. My laughter, it seemed, had begun to echo and grow exponentially through the trees around us. It took seconds or less for the entire canopy of vegetative growth above us to become full of growing and bouncing, unstoppable crowing. Still deep in the grips of drugged delirium, I could see this laughter, growing, propagating and multiplying in volume, taking shape before my eyes. As it spread and spread, shapes became evident in my astonished vision, first simple triangles connecting three points of, the now unstoppable belly laughter, then octagons floated above me in every possible color, mimicking the artists renditions we’d just an hour ago walked beneath in wonder and amazement. As my initial chortle grew and grew, I saw spheres pop into existence and spin, disappear and reappear as dodecahedron soccer balls of connected giggles. Above me, in perfect hallucinogenic technicolor all shapes and colors moved and danced as the cacophony of cachinnation continued to grow in volume and intensity. Great lightning bolts of energy fired from point to point in empty space as one chuckle fired photons of hilarity to several points of uncontrollable air-sucking laughter. There was no explanation, and absolutely no time to even begin to dream of one, because as the event increased, my dryad savior and I fell rolling on our backs caught in this wave of infectious, glorious, joyful howling. We were cracking-up, literally and figuratively, for we could barely breath as our laughs became nothing but giant gasps for more air to continue the game. What could we think? Had we set off some holographic laughter machine, another beautiful trick, well-placed by the god-like designers of the Rothbury Forest? Had the acid and mushrooms finally cracked my mind, unleashing a hallucination so powerful that it shook the very space around me, filling the silent darkness with a synesthesic tidal wave of geometric complexity beyond any mind’s power to truly understand? Could mere proximity allow my Perseus saviour, wrapped in fairy dust and pure love, to experience my own brain melting? Could my breakdown, my insanity, my full and utter loss of connection to all that was real and true and solid in this world be so powerful as to be infectious, shareable? I ask these questions, because as I laughed myself to death, staring up at a holographic cat’s cradle, the vast hallucinogenic network of a visual geometric laughter machine, she too chortled and snorted in the dirt, wide eyed and wildly staring up at the same impossible vision above us. Had I cracked, and taken this young girl with me, two strangers made to be a sacrifice to love, laughter and the joy of the infinite impossibilities of a life lived with all three eyes wide fucking open? No, not this time kids.
The unstoppable fit lasted for minutes and felt like hours. By the time we had stopped laughing our solar plexus were so sore that we laid in each other’s arms in an awkward entanglement, the only comfortable position left for two bodies beaten to a pulp by the paint shaking violence of such powerful laughter. It was only then that we looked above us, through eyes finally steady enough to see, that we realized what had just happened, and how incredible it truly was. Our dark little nook, our little piece of cozy emptiness that we chose to play out our cute little love carnal-val, was not nearly as secluded or empty as we thought. From our crumpled pile in the dirt, we looked up, and through the moonlight could make out what must have been a hundred hammocks, each filled with anywhere from one to four people, swinging just feet above our heads. I guess when we showed up, the hammock people thought it would be great fun to just hush up, let us believe our isolation was complete, and like the voyeuristic vultures we all secretly are, just shut up and watch. Watching two young lovers, alone, in the dark, too high to do anything well, is going to be really really funny every time, and the hammock folk said it was nearly impossible for them to keep their silence as long as they did. When I finally let my little chortle loose, a guy just above me just could not take it anymore and let his giggle flag fly, setting off a chain reaction that I SAW as beautiful crystal shapes, morphing and dancing through through the air above me. It never once crossed my mind that there were people making those sounds, I could only gaze and wonder at the massive power of hallucination and watch the game unfold before my eyes.
The hammock-folk came down from their lofty perches and sat with my me and my little dryad, each recounting how they perceived the experience from their point of view. I was not the only one to visualize the situation, for the magic forest had it’s hooks in all these fascinating freaks and many of them experienced the same synesthesia and sensory overload that I did. Others were just glad to have had the opportunity to be a part of such a unique, once in a lifetime moment of pure light and joy. Herb was passed around, stories told and everyone agreed wholeheartedly that they would never forget that moment when the hallucinogenic nature of holographic laughter revealed itself for us that crazy night. We cracked jokes until the sky began to swell with first tenuous light waves of the coming morning, and with many promises to meet back at the same spot the next night for more fun and games, we parted ways and spread out through the forest the way early man must have during those first moments of evolutionary exploration. As for Perseus, my dryad, my savior, my strength, my momentary love and accidental partner in a voyage through deep hallucination, unbridled joy and perfect communication, we parted with the same promises to meet again, never exchanged names and walked in different directions out of a dream and into the rest of our lives. Little girl, I hope you read this someday, and I truly hope your memory of this strange, exotic, mystery of life is as visceral and joyful as mine.
Selah,
Roxbury
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