Dorothy is nearly to the Emerald City, she can see it glittering green cross the poppy fields, its architecture that of an hopeful congregation of grain-filled silos. She and her friends rush into the blaze of scarlet blossoms carpeting the broad, open hills and the Wicked Witch appears, waving her arms as if to rouse the blossoms, alert her most beautiful of armies to the strangers in their midst so they will release in profusion their heaviest, sweetest, captivating scent. Dorothy becomes drowsy. She is encouraged to continue but is unable. Her eyelids grow heavier than ever they have before, her legs drift away from her so she is unable to stand. Down to the ground she slips and falls into a deadly, satisfied sleep, her friends crying out for help. Eventually a rescuing light snow falls, dispelling the soporific effect of the poppy.
At the end of Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” as McCabe is buried by snow in the desperate, poisonous gold rush town where he went to make his final fortune, the prostitute Mrs. Miller, a customer in an opium den, reclining on her bunk, reveals at last to the viewer the treasure that has captured her heart, her devotion, her soulful companionship. Withdrawn from the world, eyes reaching far beyond the town, unaware of McCabe’s death, she emerges from herself into an isolated, exclusive landscape that steals her away from her surroundings and us.
Meanwhile, the town saves the Protestant church from burning.
In the book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, there is no snowfall. Instead the Scarecrow and Tin Man carry Dorothy out of the field. Not long beforehand, in the grasp of another contest that threatened to keep them from the promise of the Emerald City, the Tin Woodman had said, “This is bad, for if we cannot get to the land we shall be carried into the country of the Wicked Witch of the West, and she will enchant us and make us her slaves.”
I’m thinking of Dorothy and Mrs. Miller because of Alternet’s posting of Peter Thompson’s article, “Confessions of an Ebay Opium Addict”. A contributor to Hustler and the Reno News, he describes his hunger for the ultra-mundane, an appetite that is for a time appeased by Ebay poppy pods sold as craft items. In the end, quest becomes another kind of slavery to habit, and he writes that he is undoped two weeks but will succumb again.
I wonder what is it that makes the swell of poppy pods culminating in a star-burst lock so exotic-beautiful and consider if millenias of use have made them a part of us in the way that a snake’s hiss is seeming born resident memory to some mammals. Devoid of blossom, their form, however ancient an acquaintance, appears alien to all that is normal and everyday. And yet it speaks. A womb of seeds of eclipses of dreams that beg your presence for their coming to consciousness. They once crowned the heads of goddess icons, promised prophecies and medicinal aid. They were sacred to Demeter, whose daughter Persephone ate the seed of a pomegranate in the underworld and thus had to spend a portion of every year there. The story has never made sense to me, the why of the pomegranate being the culprit seed, and I wonder if it was originally a seed of the poppy. The pomegranate recalls the poppy pod.
If the poppy was popular into the Middle Ages, and yet 19th century writers were extolling its praises as if its transcendent properties were novel, then somewhere along the way its place as a sacrament was lost, perhaps with the Roman Catholic church’s emphasis on the wine and wheat. For at least 3000 years the poppy, a companion plant to wheat and barley, was welcome in civilization despite its dark side, then became a taboo subject by the time of the Spanish Inquisition from what I read), and (from what I read) when revived had effect intensified via the new practice of smoking, and from then on people insistently probed its properties for faster and more intensified exercise.
Medicine, experiment and novelty is not the same as sacred consumption and by sacred I mean, at least in my personal lexicon, a general attitude toward life rather than religion. With sacred consumption comes parameters established by tradition.
Disregarding any AA or NA belief or jargon, science or medicine, I am thinking of all this because of the contrast of the contrast of Protestantism with mystic sojourns (“McCabe and Mrs. Miller) and Peter Thompson’s speaking of how before experience of any type with mind-altering substances he desired them and was looking for them by the age of 12, about the onset of puberty, which is also a fairly traditional age for acceptance into the body of a church as an adult. What is missing? Is it just the sense of being different (as some say), or a matter of chemical constitutional difference (one may then ask how does the mind and body sense it is different and begins the search for “alteration”) or is it something more?
I can see where there would be room for considerable disagreement made by some, but it seems to me that the majorty of Protestant Christian sects don’t afford much room for mystic exploration that takes within. The Protestant evangelical and charismatic experience is largely outgoing, reliant on community experience and the individual slipping into their appropriate place. The mystic, inner search is largely abhored as too independent, dangerous.
Are mind-altering substances the only means to transcending the mundane, a means of turning and looking and appreciating it more? No, but they have had a place traditionally in numerous societies. So why not Western culture? Why the emphasis on outgoing, community experience to the denial of any other, with the exception of alcohol which is state-approved, accepted by most clergy?
I’m thinking of this because in his article Peter Thompson mentions watching, in dull, finally complacent reveries, his wife browsing through her “Lucky” magazine, placing “wish” stickers on wanted items. My senses are already reeling with Thompson’s description of desperate gluttony, a few steps removed from his cooly-expressed but naive remarks in Weird scenes inside the drug mine , written in 2003. At the Lucky website there’s more assault. A barage of ads, of hot colors cascading off the screen, a magazine about shopping conjuring a universe of unappeased desires, forums bulging with thousands of messages on what shirt what shoes what skirt did you buy what goes with what what should be worn with what. Lucky discounts and giveaways. Lucky breaks. Get Lucky. A Las Vegas style roll of the dice shopping excursion, pull the lever, pull the lever again again, pull and paste wish stickers as one seeks the winning combination, delights from around the world, the more there is the more one wants.
Peter Thompson wrote in his 2003 article,
New myths are created every day. Banning substances or banning books, all I see is a blur. Corporate drug cartels, depression, enervation. There is a certain risk people are always going to be willing to run. Everything is the next big thing, readily replaced by the next big thing, which is bigger and ostensibly more “thing” than the last. The same old arguments and malaise always follow. We are complex chains of chemicals searching for reactions. Whether it’s a middle-aged woman in 1903 guzzling “Doctor Smitty’s Feel-Fine Tonic, Good For What Ails You,” a Pontiac salesman gobbling Dexedrine in the 1950s, or some bored teen in 2008 snorting a tube of Preparation H and banging himself on the head with a piece of plywood, somehow, somewhere, somebody will find a way. What are we so afraid of? Feeling somewhat resolved, I puke into Harry’s trashcan, get up, and go get a sandwich.
The Lakota-Dakota-Nakota have a word which some take as meaning only “white” and others as meaning something more. Wasichu, the fat-eaters. The story is that the trickster spider, Iktome, warmed of the coming of the Wasichu. Iktome said, “There is a new man coming; he is like me, but he has long, long legs and many new things, most of them bad. And he is clever like me. I am going to all the tribes to tell about him.” And so he went and told of the coming of the White Long-Legs who would steal the grass, the trees, the animals, even the air. He would give many new things including sickness, hate, prejudice, greed.
A great, dark, insatiable hunger takes in more, more, never satisfied. Perhaps the hunger that was doomed to subdue the earth, to conquer it, to take all–the grass, the trees, the animals, the air–and refashion to fulfill its own desire, forgetting the integrity and sacredness of what it was eating. The spoils of war against the earth, against nature.
Which is where Peter Thompson has gotten it wrong. Not every way of being is a matter of the next big thing, a complex chain of chemicals searching for reactions, a constant attempt at remaking self and the world around one.
But it’s difficult to find the way back to the point where one can begin to seek balance, if not impossible while the Spirit of the Romanus Pontificus Bull of 1455 roams the world:
We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso — to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and , and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.
Separation of church and state is impossible when religion is confused with spirituality, especially religion focused on external assurances and rewards. Religion which conceives itself as god’s great government and has as its essential mission the mandate to conquer and divest. The politicians it produces are more than secular mediators. They are, no doubt, its clergy. There is no difference between them and its missionaries.
An alarming thought, that Bush is a twenty-first century Sun King.
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