Today Larissa shared Sx-Ed’s “texts,” including something I wrote after my first ayahuasca ceremony:
She taught me how to worship her.
Not what do I want? but I want.
Authentic desire … human desire PAR EXCELLENCE … the desire for desire, reveals the secret truth of the desirer, which renders him or her truly human.
Desire renders us as subjects. She subjected me to her worship by returning me to my desire. And my desire was to worship her. And to worship my desires. So green, so fertile, unapologetic in my wildness, my wilderness. untamable and untamed, I was an invitation, all I could do, I felt, was call to her, to take me, take me, take me, come inside, stay awhile. Lush, my hair in my face, my skin rich, I am the gift I could give, a gift worth giving. She has never “held still,” explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance, she takes pleasure in being boundless…stunning, extravagant, one who is dispersible, desiring and capable of the other, of the other women she will be, of the other women she is, of him, of you.
Ayahuasca is a vine. Woody, rope-like, she wraps the Peruvian rainforest, then harvested and brewed into a thick te. She goes by abuela, doctor, vegetal que ensena, genio, espiritu, iman. She has a way about her. She’s a teacher, a healer, she guides, her will rising from the smolder of the shaman’s chant. We are not her patients—dependent, tolerant. She doesn’t inject, doesn’t prescribe, doesn’t diagnose, doesn’t reduce healing to normalizing, numbing, silencing, as if our pain wasn’t a song, the tremor of resistance still pulsing in our blood. She whispers—listen. Disease is language. She demands we speak to her with a voice that listens. What does our sickness sound like? What is it trying to tell us?
Our bodies speak but we do not know how to listen.
Depression deflates motivation, gives into an exhaustion of the soul. It summons an incapacity—not an inadequacy. It’s not that I can’t; it’s that I just won’t any longer. The depressed individuals are not up to the task, they are tired of having to become themselves. To the powers that would have me produce my subjectivity into the endless churn of content, depression is coded as a paralysis of the soul. Instead, it’s protest; a struggle that renders my spirit wasted, my soil barren. A psychic unwillingness to comply. Rather then defeat; depression is a site of resistance.
Impotence, in the same way, is my refusal, our refusal to work. Although consciousness has been colonized by an indifferent desire that gets hard for anyone—meaning for anything—on command, there’s still an ember of will nested deep in my tissue that refuses to get up. My flaccid cock refuses the pharma-porno-apparatus that strains to yank it taught with it’s little blue pills. It stays soft, it stays depressed, unmotivated, unwilling, utterly useless, still human.
A case study: In Brazil, where the brew has brewed religious ceremonies for centuries, ayahuasca is administered to convicts accused of murder, rape, kidnapping. Not administered—inmates tend the gardens where the vine grows.
At the temple here in Ji-Paraná, the inmates appeared to experience a range of reactions after drinking the ayahuasca. Sitting on plastic lawn chairs under a tile roof, some were stone-faced. Others seemed lost in contemplation. One was constantly in tears, as if demons were at the door. All of them sang at the top of their lungs when the rhythm of the hymns intensified.
Can healing be, more than just restorative—redemptive? Can it radicalize? Rather than reform, can healing forgive?
A vision: I want the smallest thing. I think of the smallest, smallest thing I could want—and I think of a cell. Her cell. Her cell spills from my unwelcoming womb, turning into a river of blood, pouring out from our legs. It’s her blood, but also my blood, our blood. And I am swimming in it. A river of our blood. Of us. The joy of “us”—of feeling in communion, of summoning our pain. The fullest moonlight spills onto the river. The moon sings. She sings of our suffering. And we repeat—we listen, and we never forget. We never forget. The moon is a reflection, a mirror, and soon we are swimming in the moon, and she is filled with our blood.
In other words, to the persecution that works me over most patiently and which is the anonymous passion in myself, I must not only respond by off-loading it out of my consent; I must also respond to it with refusal, resistance and combat, returning to knowledge, to the self that knows, and knows that it is exposed.
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