John Simpson on the Moon

A moonlit fire. Photo by Trevor Manternach

….and off his head.

I’m still sorting out stuff as I try and move books around the around. Several are going into the attic, including John Simpson’s Strange Places, Questionable People. It’s the first volume of his autobiography, and it’s fascinating stuff. There’s a passage which suggests that there’s a big hole in observations of ancient sites. We’re simply not approaching them in the right way. At Eleusis the participants ate fermented grain and who knows what else. It must have had a huge effect on perception as the following passage of John Simpson’s experience in the Amazon shows. He’d had to drink some hallucinogenic as part of a ritual to cure someone. It had no effect on him. At least not at first.

And then, at 9.20 it started. The first I knew, the gigantic golden full moon slammed right down from the sky and into my face, then shot back across into its proper position as though it was on a 249,000mile spring. While I recovered from that, I started making notes. The writing got bigger and bigger, and makes increasingly silly reading.

Starting to see shooting stars.

Now my head is somedistance from my body.

I just banged my pen on the ground because I thought it was a beetle.

I am making a strange face, and red light is coming from the pen as I write this.

The light from Mike’s flash gives hallucinogenic effect to the hopheads who are sitting in a row watching the dancing. Now stars and colours.

My hands are very heavy. I’m also laughing stupidly.

Alex is talking about people being bright, lit up with radium. The words are taking on all sorts of meaning, and more than merely sound.

I’m finding it incredibly hard to get the pen onto the paper.

The trees over there look like the winged figure by the gates of Babylon.

And just then when I closed my eyes I saw a goldfish with glasses on.

Yet I can speak perfectly normally and remember difficult words.

My head weighs a lot.

Halo round moon and an ENORMOUS cloud round it.

I’m not planning to take drugs in ancient tombs, but then I’m not writing a phenomenology of sites. —–