Can't Get It.

Before I took the chemical called L.S.D., it was as if light, color, smell and touch could not reach me. It was as if I were outside looking through glass. But that day (I think it was the second time) I was finally inside. I looked at the rug on the floor and it was no longer a plain rug but a moving a swaying mass like hair floating on water or like wind over a field of wheat. The door knob ceased to be a plain door knob. It melted and undulated and the door opened and all the walls and windows vanished. There was a tremor of life in everything. The once static objects in the room all flowed into a fluid and mobile and breathing world. The dazzle of the sun was multiplied, every speck of gold and diamond in it magnified. Trees, skies, clouds, lawns began to breathe, heave and waver like a landscape at the bottom of the sea. My body was both swimming and flying. I felt gay and at ease and playful. There was perfect communicability between my body and everything surrounding me. The singing of the mocking-birds was multiplied as if I had a hundred eyes, a hundred ears, a hundred fingertips. On the walls appeared endless murals of designs I made which produced their own music to match. When I drew a long orange line it emitted its own orange tone. The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange, gold. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down my back and came out my fingertips. I was a cascade of red blue rainfall, a rainbow. I was small, light, mobile. I could use any method of levitation I wished. I could dissolve, melt, float, soar. Wavelets of light touched the rim of my clothes, phosphorescent radiations. I could see a new world with my middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the walls behind the sky, the sky behind the Infinite. The walls became fountains, the fountains became arches, the arches domes, the domes sky, the sky a flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I looked at a slender line curving over space which disappeared into infinity. I saw a million zeroes on this line, curving, shrinking in the distance and I laughed and said ‘Excuse me, I am not a mathematician.’ How can I measure the infinite? But I understand it. The zeroes vanished. I was standing on the rim of a planet, alone. I could hear the fast rushing sounds of the planets rotating in space. Then I was among them, and I was aware that a certain skill was necessary to handle this new means of transportation. The image of myself standing in space and trying to get my ‘sea legs’ or my ‘space legs’ amused me. I wondered who had been there before me and whether I could return to earth. The solitude distressed me, so I returned to my starting point. I was standing in front of an ugly garden door. But as I looked closer it was not plain or green but it was a Buddhist temple, a Hindu colonnade, Moroccan mosaic ceiling, gold spires being formed and re-formed as if I were watching the hand of a designer at work. I was designing spirals of red unfurled until they formed a rose window or a mandala with edges of radium. When one design was barely born and arranged itself, it dissolved and the next one followed without confusion. Each form, each line emitted its equivalent in music in perfect accord with the design. An undulating line emitted a sustained undulating melody, a circle had a corresponding musical notation, diaphanous colors, diaphanous sounds, a pyramid created a pyramid of ascending notes, and vanishing ones left only an echo. These designs were preparatory sketches for entire Oriental cities. I saw the temples of Java, Kashmir, Nepal, Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, in all the colors of precious stones illumined from within. Then the outer forms of the temples dissolved to reveal the inner chapel and shrines. The reds and the gold inside the temples created an intricate musical orchestration like Balinese music. Two sensations began to torment me: one that it was happening to quickly and that I would not be able to remember it, another that I would not be able to tell what I saw, it was too elusive and too overwhelming. The temples grew taller, the music wilder, it became a tidal wave of sounds with gongs and bells predominating. Gold spires emitted a long flute chant. Every line and color was breathing and constantly mutating. The smoke of my cigarette became gold. The curtain on the window became gold. Then I felt my whole body becoming gold, liquid gold, scintillating warm gold. I WAS GOLD. It was the most pleasurable sensation I have ever known and I knew it was like passion. It was the secret of life, the alchemist’s secret of life. ”When I gradually returned from this dream-like experience I was in your studio. I looked around at your collages and recognized them. It was as if I had been there for the first time. I saw the colors, the luminosity and the floating, mobile, changeable quality. I understood all your stories, and all you had said to me. I understood why you had made your women transparent, and the houses open like lace so that space and freedom could blow through them.