Notes
317 Notes Introduction: Glimpsing the Peacock Angel Chapter epigraph: Jünger, 34. 1 “Big whorls have little whorls that feed on their velocity, and little whorls have smaller whorls and so on to viscosity.” (Richardson, 66) 2 In 2003, extreme heat waves caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people in Europe, and more than 1,500 in India. 3 If so, what might Schwartz and Randall’s “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for National Security” (2003) have in common, a priori, with that notorious memo of August 6, 2001? While National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has characterized the PDB document detailing Al Qaeda intentions as “historical” in nature, in fact it was part of a different rhetorical genre altogether: scenario planning (U.S. Department of State 2004). This is a genre whose very medium is uncertainty, and as such must be read less for “information ” about the future than “inclinations” toward it. This capacity to evaluate the difference of the future relies on a detachment from the present—what we “know,” now—and a connection to the strangeness of the future—what we might become, then (U.S. Global Change Research Information Office 2002). 4 “5) Rehearse adaptive responses. Adaptive response teams should be established to address and prepare for inevitable climate driven events such as massive migration, disease and epidemics, and food and water supply shortages.” (Schwartz and Randall) 5 This recognition is isomorphic to the recognition of Gaia itself, emerging as it did from James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s meditation on the earth as seen from space (Lovelock, vii). 6 This ecosystemic aspect of human subjectivity was named by Ted Nelson (1974) with his neologism “intertwingled.” 7 An interview with a founder of the Deep Ecology movement, Arne Naess, was published as this book was in production, and offers intriguing insights on and possible confirmation of this “ecodelic” hypothesis (Cf. Schroll and Rothenberg). 8 Qtd. from Smokeloc on The Vaults of Erowid, posted January 18, 2002. Available online at http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=5684 (accessed March 28, 2008). 9 “The purpose of the following is to show that bureaucratic self-interest and predatory public finance in the form of explicit or implicit sin taxes have been and continue to be the primary determinants of public policy in the area of illicit drug control.” (Benson and Rasmussen, 164) 10 So too should we be mindful of etymology, whose alluvial and labyrinthine accretions of tropes suggest that mind is first and foremost a verb, an awareness of borders at play in the London Underground imperative: “mind the gap.” A spatial practice of the body—and not simply or primarily a representational one—consciousness or mind is thus an essentially interactive and embodied practice subject to both habit, volatility, and becoming. 11 Section epigraph: Deleuze, 3. 12 So, for example, in the Controlled Substance Analog Enforcement Act of 1986, the United States seeks to prohibit even the intention to experience psychedelic states, regardless of the materials used: “with respect to a particular person, which such person represents or intends to have a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system that is substantially similar to or greater than the stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic [sic] effect on the central nervous system of a controlled substance in schedule I or II.” A literal reading of this statute—a reading thinkable within the present encroachment on civil and cognitive liberties—suggests that even the reading of this book is itself in violation of this statute, as I fully intend to induce “hallucinogenic” effects. For more on rhetoric as a psychedelic tool, see chapter 2. 13 Cf. D. McKenna 2006; and Shulgin and Shulgin 1997. 14 As potent treatments for addiction, psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline, and Iboga have demonstrated great efficacy even in the context of the prohibition, with heroic treatments taking place under difficult conditions. The remarkable work of ethnobotanist and animal ethnologist Giorgio Samorini suggests that psychedelics function as “depatterning factors” for the diverse set of creatures that eat them (85). 15 Ayahuasca was itself the object of “biopiracy,” so not all ecodelics have always been open source, but the plants and molecules treated as sacraments in these traditions have proved difficult to control or otherwise “schedule.” Cf. The Center for International Environmental Law and Nwabueze. 16 See the discussion of Leary’s contact with poet and yage drinker Allen Ginsberg in Leary, 1983. 17 Cf. Vernadsky 2005. 18 Leary...
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