SUBJECT: So there's an amazing book called Drugs and Travel
in 20th Century Literature, which makes the case that drugs
and travel are so discursively entangled, so discursively
intimate, that we use the same metaphors
and analogies to describe the subjective experiences of each.
I mean even the term hallucination
derives from the Latin term [LATIN],
which means to wander in our minds.
So when we are hallucinating, we are travelling in our heads.
Why travel?
Well, the hero's journey, right?
This map that describes a departure from the ordinary,
leaving normal thoughts behind, treading forth
in the new environment dealing with conflicts,
real ones or cognitive ones, slaying the dragon,
solving the conundrum in the existential itch,
and then making the return with a new lesson learned.
Wandering in our minds and taking the physical journey
both incorporate this motif of transformation, an unfolding
that happens in time.
We cross over, I mean, implicit in the term ecstatic drug
experience is this notion of ecstasy, the non-static, right.
The pushing through, the crossing over,
the breaking the threshold, the piercing the veil.
The curtain parts and what has never been seen
is devoured by the eyes.
We take a trip, we call it tripping.
You see the analogies, you see the parallels
these two discursively intimate universes revealed to us
that the outer journey and the inner journey
mirror each other.
In fact, there are one in the same.
And I love that.
I love that because I have the travelers itch,
I have the wanderlust.
I yearn for the holy other.
I look at the departure monitors in the airport listing
all those destinations.
As Alain De Botton sites in his book The Art of Travel,
we look upon those screens and we
think to ourselves London, Amsterdam, Prague, Berlin,
Mozambique, South Africa, whatever
it may be, it's anywhere else but here, right.
We long to crossover, we long to experience,
to take the trip, to take the journey.