My tendency toward barbaric flowing is charming.  I admire the reflection of the moon in water swirls... tumbling off the edge of a Mohawk’s paddle.  Slipping through the water he controls the dugout tree with precision.  Fine fluctuations of his trajectory massaged incessantly.  Forms of control, weather to walk or stroll?  

                I don’t necessarily consider cannabis consciousness to be as the sun to a mole, yet I find myself in tunnels, rather obscured by their subterranean creation.  Seeing the sun is such a hallowed zenith to that mere plumbing of photosynthesis.  That vile greek gibberish, that compound absurd deconstruction of  a winking miracle.  Should I see the roots in the shoots?  Or must I graft my branch of fear to the bow of the future?  See how the guillotined cowering branch is fed by the stem of the future…  Into a thread of life sewn through with inspiring looms and inorganic knits, moments of piercing stitches, that connect pain with serenity.  My needle hasn’t the neck to swallow my heart.  So I purse on prostrating myself to the guru of mystery.  I conceded my deed to a passing cloud.  The fruits cut from the fear tree are bountiful.  My appetite for new tastes is ravenous.  My palette demands two scoops of supernova.  Tongue touches confirm my lust for intimacy with the unknown.  Whether a new beet or a bud pregnant with waves of caresses…

             How many times have I found myself reading diligently only to find that I am not reading.  Holding a squarish object, obediently surfing through sentences of chaff that scatter to the winds.  When I really read... when I feel my psyche's liquid quality... an osmosis of vicarious intoxication occurs and I drink the letters.  They float down my spinal cord, throb in my veins, and often I find myself flying.  How else should one enter another? The Hasheesh Eater had me flying, sometimes as a butterfly, sometimes as Archangel Gabriel, sometimes like a F-22 Raptor.  His prose are so ripe and juicy.  He is so intense that often I thought THC might be a bit much when it comes to muses.  But no, I revel in his visions and am baptised by his epiphanies.  In short it is obvious that Ludlow has a tremendous intellect.  His turbo-charged brain and cannabis, a glorious tincture that is now a counterculture relic.

    " Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changed to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy. The palace of Al Haroun could not have brought me back to humanity."

    Whoooaaooooooooooo!!!!   Take me with you!!!  

      Passages like this abound.  Occasionally I felt as if they were overabundant because the images just started to turn into a intergalactic unicorn vine swinging bonanza.  Nevertheless, it is obvious that our man has found a way into his imagination.  The gates to the imagination, the infinity of inspiration, the exponential elation of time spent, inert contemplation, tickle me.  I consider his recounting of being stoned as a goose to be epic.  It is beautiful, captivating and completely ridiculous. 

 When I laugh, I fly.  Fortunately, my comic blasters are tuned in to the Old Fitz. 

    Fitz Hugh Ludlow has obviously got more than one funny bone.  Whether it be his ridiculous chronicles of his hash exploits or his cloaked excitement while sober, he spreads the humor on thick.  He is so effusive in his description that it often borders on hyperbole.  His description run the gamut from heaven to hell.  I try to welcome all experience with fascination and thus the intensity of his stories assert the benefit of his experiments. 

"Till I die, that moment of unveiling will stand in clear relief from all the rest of my existence. I hold it still in unimpaired remembrance as one of the unutterable sanctities  of my being."

    This passage seems to do the job of relating a transcended impression that can occur while experiencing altered consciousness.  I tend to find unutterable sanctity rather comforting. 

  The sacred seeps out of his work, not only because he is so well versed but also because his imagery is distinctively spiritual.  The Night of Apotheosis says it all.  Having out of body experiences where your soul is separate from your body is gonna do it.

"I was the Christ, come in the power and radiance of his millennial descent, and bearing to the world the restoration of perfect peace. I spoke, and it was done: with a single sentence I regenerated the Creation. A smile of exultation beamed from the awakened earth. I could hear her low music of rejoicing as she perceived that the fullness of the times with which, for centuries, she had travailed in woe, had at length been brought forth. All men once more lived in love to God and their neighbor, and, secure in an eternal compact, began marching on harmoniously to the sublime end of spiritual greatness.

  The power of light never ceases to amaze me.  It's constant fluctuation is at root of my environment.  It's visibility and invisibility, it's dance with air, how it sculpts form...   My proclivity to see its metaphorical significance towards deciding emerging truth.  The rudimentary semantics of the word "enlightenment."

            "There was a light in one of the upper windows, and I hailed it with unspeakable joy, for it relieved me from a fear which I could not conquer"

  Fear is definitely a theme in The Hasheesh Eater.  Danger and risk seem to be woven into our lives thoroughly.  In particular, regarding paths that venture deep into an individuals perception.  Advances in the amoeba of experience have always been brave, possibly irrational steps toward danger.  Ludlow's experiments are brave.  He is opening himself up.  In so doing he is able to realize ineffable aspects of being.  Fear is often maligned as some regrettable aspect of existence.  It's plays an inexorable role in life.  Fear is something that guides in an ever so natural way.  I love how fear jogs my imagination.  I wouldn't mind having eyes on all sides of my head. 

     Often I felt his narratives of intoxication hearken tangents to dreams.  A sacred property of every-one's lives is dreaming.  The rational is abandoned, control is simultaneously greater and weaker and the unfathomable is soon forgotten.  Dreams are precious, ephemeral and ethereal experiences that rival shadows in their bounty.  Hallucinating can often be dreamlike and I sympathize with the connection intensely.

      I account for the rather steep descent in Ludlows appreciation for hash because he wasn't using the underlying entity properly.  There are many ways to ingest and smoke cannabis and of course an unlimited range of quantity.  His realm of experimentation isn't diverse enough and thus I am able to dismiss his negative rhetoric as the piece goes on.  Furthermore, he could have experienced a subconscious realization that he didn't want to be the man that saved the world.

  "It may be thought strange that, after that experience of infinite agony which I have last related, I should ever take hasheesh again. “Surely,” it will be said, “another experiment with the drug would be a daring venture into the realms of insanity and death. The gentlest name that could be applied to it is foolhardiness.”

The morning immediately succeeding my night of horror found me as vigorous and buoyant as I ever was in my life. No pain, no feeling of lassitude remained, and on my face there was not the faintest record of the tortures through which I had passed. In the midst of the very astonishment with which I noted this fact, I felt assured that I had done myself no injury. Yet, mentally, I had the conception of being older by many years than on the night previous; all past experiences in life seemed separated from me by a measureless gulf of duration, and when the demon faces or hellish songs of my vision flashed up into memory, I shuddered and turned my head as if they were close at hand. Quietly I made a resolve that I would experiment with the drug of sorcery no more, for I dreaded another plunge into the abyss of terror as I dreaded hell itself."

    Sounds as if getting stoned for him was like taking a ride on an asteroid into a supernova.