"DMT" by Elijah Perseus Blumov

Mea culpa: When referring to the practice of poets, I should've used they/them pronouns rather than he/him. I was caught up in thinking of the poet as myself! 

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

-The "Psychedelic Renaissance"

-The kind of trip depends upon the mind that trips. 

-How to have a good time your first time

-Don't be Pentheus

-The difference between a cliche and an earth-shattering truth

-My version of Plato's cave

-Chasing the dragon of enlightenment

-DMT vs. everything else

-Getting Rocky Mountain High

-The toke ain't no joke

-The curious case of tripping sober

-It's an English sonnet, mate. 

-Heads are gonna roll

-Word painting revisited

-Metrical problem children

-The Mayfly Method

-Magpie appreciation

-From psychedelia to anagogy

-A time to live, a time to die

Text of poem:

DMT

 For D.K. 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

Sober forms and true reality

the revelation: tree, and friend, and bird

more wondrous than mindless infinity. 

No angels spoke but they— yet them we heard:

“It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night—

For you, young suns, to lend the world your light.”

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 2-10: “DMT” by Elijah Perseus Blumov

            A quick content warning before I begin: today’s episode features lengthy discussion of controlled substances. If that isn’t something you’re comfortable with, or if you’re a rebellious, impossibly nerdy child listening to Versecraft without a guardian’s permission, I encourage you to skip this one. Furthermore, I’d like to stress that this episode in no way constitutes a blanket endorsement for the use of the substances under discussion. 

            To the rest of you, welcome to the final episode of season 2. As per my new tradition, I’m going to close out this set of ten episodes by focusing on one of my own poems. My hope is that these self-featured episodes are not so much exercises in self-indulgence as opportunities for me to disclose elements of my life and craft with you all, and thereby make the show a little more intimate. 

            For those interested in hearing a condensed autobiography, I recommend you check out episode 1-10, where I discuss my poem, “The Eclipse of Meaning.” I won’t repeat here what I said on that episode. Instead, I’d like to focus on one aspect of my intellectual life that I only briefly touched on previously, namely, my relationship to psychedelics. 

After decades of libelous, medically unsound propaganda by the U.S. government, mainstream American culture is now, in our time, finally realizing the tremendous potential of psychedelics, both as a tool of cognitive and spiritual development and as an incredibly powerful aid to psychiatric and therapeutic practices. In the wake of promising studies on the mental health benefits of MDMA and psilocybin therapy on PTSD and terminal cancer patients, the advocacy of dietary influencers like Michael Pollan, growing disgust with the psychopathic greed of the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and the decriminalization of psilocybin in states like Colorado and Oregon, more and more people beyond hippie communes and college dorm rooms are becoming curious about the role psychedelics might be able to play in their lives, from microdosing LSD in order to improve mood and cognitive performance to undergoing Ayahuasca rituals in the Peruvian jungle in order to radically change their lives. Some have gone so far as to say that we are in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, a movement more serious in both form and content than the escapist, utopian delusions of the 1960’s. 

So it is that when I tell people about my own psychedelic experiences, I tend to be met less with shock or reprehension than curiosity. In particular, many educated middle-aged adults have realized that psychedelics are not the brain-melting menace they were once warned about, and may in fact hold the key to wondrous, constructive experiences—all the same, many are still afraid to take the plunge. I completely respect, understand, and support this caution—psychedelic trips have moments where they can be frightening, grotesque, and disorientating, and they are not for everyone. 

Beyond the critically important factors of mindset and setting, the kind of experience you have is to a large extent determined by the kind of mind you have, and people with unstable minds or strong anxiety are more likely to experience negative episodes than others. By the same token, people who have a philosophical or spiritual bent are going to get much more mileage out of a psychedelic experience than those who don’t— it can mean the difference between a whacky afternoon full of interesting colors, shapes, and feelings, and a sublime, life-changing encounter with the nature of reality. I do however believe that with the right guidance, the majority of people can have incredibly valuable and unforgettable experiences with psychedelics, and if by sharing my experiences I can raise awareness for what psychedelics are actually like, and convey an inkling of how simultaneously beautiful, educational, and harrowing they can be, I will feel that I’ve done my due diligence in helping people make more informed decisions about this mysterious and powerful existential option. 

I don’t have the space here to trace the full bildungsroman of my experience with psychedelics, but I’ll provide a brief and incomplete sketch. I first took LSD when I was nineteen, nearly a decade ago, on a sunny morning in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. My oldest friend David— who, by the way, is the one who designed the logo for Versecraft— had come up to visit me, and having recently tried acid himself, insisting on sharing the experience with me. I was skeptical and a little fearful, but because he had done it before, because I trusted him, and because we weren’t doing very much of it, about half a tab, I decided to go for it. To anyone who hasn’t tried a psychedelic before and wants to, I would recommend this exact formula: take a small amount, in the morning, do it with one other person who’s done it before and whom you trust deeply, and do it in a beautiful outdoor space with no other plans for the day. 

Almost without exception, when people have had a bad first experience with psychedelics, it’s because they’ve done the opposite of this advice: they tried too much at once, at night, in a crowded indoor space, with people they didn’t know very well—this is a recipe for disaster. To treat a psychedelic like a party drug is to debase both yourself and the drug— it’s like inviting Dionysus himself to drink with you at your local dive bar—unless you’re already good friends with Dionysus, you’re messing with forces too powerful to control, and too profound for the setting in which you’ve brought them. In such a chaotic, confined, frivolous space, the god will crush you. On top of that, you’re missing out on two of the greatest aspects of the psychedelic experience: intensely enjoying the beauty of the outdoors, and getting into deep, revelatory, hours-long conversation with a dear friend. 

My first acid trip was under optimal conditions, and it felt, to paraphrase Kant, like I had awoken from a dogmatic slumber: I became, for the first time, truly aware of the utter strangeness and glory of life as a phenomenon. One of the important things to understand about psychedelics is that, while you can often have mind-blowing breakthroughs while on them, nothing that you come up with while tripping is something you couldn’t have thought of while sober—the difference is that when you’re tripping, you don’t just think of ideas at a faster rate than usual, you feel the emotional weight of them in all their implications. It’s easy enough to proclaim and even to believe clichés like “god is in all things” or “we are the universe experiencing itself” or “all things are connected” or “love is the engine of the universe.” On psychedelics however, such ideas do not just come to you, they are impressed upon you in all their complexity, and with sometimes overwhelming force. What T.S. Eliot once said of John Donne: “an idea to him was an experience” is a pithy and apt description of this phenomenon. 

The most earth-shattering truth that I took away from my initial psychedelic experience was the awareness that the perception of reality that I had taken for granted all my life was provincial and arbitrary— altering my brain’s neurochemistry from its default settings even the slightest bit showed me just how small and myopic my understanding of reality was. It was as if, having been stuck on the same radio station my whole life, I had assumed that all of radio was just that station. Turning the dial just half a notch, just enough to pick up some new static, the hint of a new melody, showed me just how wrong I was. Not only was the physical universe, the universe of science, vast and infinitely incomprehensible in itself, but this sober, scientific view of the world was entirely based on information picked up from a very limited number of sources using very limited instruments. The infinity I had previously been in awe of was like the infinity between 0 and 1, and I had just become aware that there were numbers higher than one, and lower than zero. To be an atheist in the traditional sense or a religious believer in the traditional sense had both become instantly impossible. 

Predictably, as a cocky and vigorous young man, I quickly determined that I personally had to figure out what the hell was going on. Due to a combination of my personal disposition, my philosophical convictions, and my awe-inducing experiences, I never went through a phase of angsty nihilism, but I did feel, like every person of sufficient reflection and ambition, that existence was a mystery that needed solving, at least insofar as a human mind could solve anything. As a result, I determined to read more philosophy and do more drugs.

Transformative as they are however, both philosophy and drugs have diminishing returns. At a certain point, you become convinced of a modest number of basic propositions beyond which lies pure speculation, and the question becomes what to do with that information. An interest in metaphysical foundations eventually gives way to an interest in the architecture of ethics and aesthetics. As for psychedelics, taking them over and over again, even when you take them sparingly, as I do, is like opening the door to Narnia over and over again— it may be beautiful, it may be inspiring, but there is only so much to learn from it. When I take psychedelics now, it’s less to learn new insights than to make a special day an even more special day, and to remind myself of certain things that I find beautiful and good. I said just now that psychedelics are like a door, but they’re also like good friends—ones who, even if you know them so well that you know exactly what they’re going to say most of the time, are still capable of surprising you, still capable of helping you through your problems, still capable of delighting you. 

All of which brings us to today’s poem, which concerns my first and so far only experience with the drug known as dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. For those who don’t know, DMT is often considered the king of psychedelics—unlike LSD, peyote, or magic mushrooms, which in regular doses lay a hallucinogenic glamor over reality which you can choose to engage with more or less intensely, DMT is much more rapacious, capable of violently thrusting you out of reality entirely and into a kaleidoscopic spirit world where many people have claimed to have made contact with divine or alien entities. Having been well acquainted with acid and mushrooms for years, David and I decided one day that we were ready to see what DMT was all about. 

On a visit to him in Colorado, we climbed to the top of a mountain, found a suitably vacant clearing, and chaperoned each other as we took turns having our experience. We were able to do this because unlike LSD or mushrooms, DMT only lasts for a few intense minutes. We decided that I should go first. I took the pen and inhaled deeply, once, twice, thrice, four times. Immediately the landscape began to grow squiggly before my eyes, and I began to hear a ringing in my ears, as if the more I inhaled the closer I was to taking flight. I admit it was a terrifying feeling. What I hadn’t prepared for was the fact that the actual act of taking DMT is difficult— in order to break through to the other side, as it were, you have to inhale a lot, and because the drug begins to work immediately, each inhalation becomes harder to accomplish than the last. I thought that four inhalations would do the trick, but it didn’t—instead of being transported to the astral plane, I crouched down on the ground, nauseous and shaken, closed my eyes, and began to experience the most vivid geometric hallucinations of my life for the next seven minutes or so.

 More notable than the quality of these hallucinations however was my state of mind—mentally I felt completely sober, which, given the fact that I was watching my imagination like a TV, was very odd and surprising. People who haven’t done psychedelics don’t always realize that the significance and power of the experience usually comes from the fact that your mind is operating differently than it normally does—the hallucinations are just icing on the cake. In this case however, the hallucinations were it. As a result, the experience, while intense, was cognitively quite superficial. David, after his experience, felt similarly. Puzzled, disappointed, yet intrigued, I wrote the following poem to make sense of the experience: 

DMT

For D.K. 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

Sober forms and true reality

the revelation: tree, and friend, and bird

more wondrous than mindless infinity. 

No angels spoke but they— yet them we heard:

“It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night—

For you, young suns, to lend the world your light.”

With fourteen lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, we know we have a sonnet on our hands. If we look at the rhyme scheme, we see that it divides the poem into three alternate rhyming quatrains and a balanced couplet: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. We can therefore easily identify the form as a textbook English sonnet. 

Metrically, the most interesting thing to notice here is the prevalence of acephalous lines. As a reminder, “acephalous” means headless, and refers to an iambic line where the first foot is missing its first unaccented syllable. Such lines can easily be mistaken for trochaic pentameter since they begin on a strong accent and alternate between strong and weak throughout. However, if we consider these lines in the context of the larger poem, it makes more sense to read them as acephalous iambic lines. That being said, because the first, third, and fifth lines are all acephalous, we can read the first six lines as an instance of metrical counterpoint: trochaic and iambic rhythms alternate with one another, creating both a songlike call-and-response effect as well as a sense of underlying tension which mirrors my ambivalence, my contrasting excitement and fear, about undertaking this experience. 

Now before Matthew gets a bee in his bonnet, as he likes to say, about me identifying parallels between sound and sense, I would like to remind everyone that I don’t think that these instances of word painting are usually conscious choices—the counterpoint I just spoke of I only discovered after analyzing my poem for this episode. Even when they’re writing very carefully, poets tend to compose poems phrase by phrase rather than foot by foot, and as long as the phrase sounds good, matches the meter, and expresses the thought precisely, the poet is likely to use it, without regard for the exact particulars of its scansion. 

This doesn’t change the fact however that the phenomenon of word painting does occur quite often, and if anything, the fact that it usually occurs subconsciously rather than consciously makes it all the more interesting. It’s an important reminder that the act of composition is always a collaboration between the poet’s rational mind and his intuition, and that as a result, the poem is capable of being artistically richer than the poet intends it to be. I will not go so far as to say that poems can be smarter than the poets who write them—I think this is a fanciful notion— but it is certainly true that experienced poets, much like experienced musicians, can often rely on their instincts to do extra work for them. 

            There are a couple other metrical oddities worth discussing. In line 2, the phrase, “and sought out a ground” can be scanned a few different ways. The ambiguity comes from the fact that both “sought” and “out” are quite strongly accented, though “out” is stressed slightly more. Because “out” is stressed slightly more, I scan “and sought out” as an anapest, which, followed by four iambs, maintains the integrity of the pentameter line. Alternatively, you could read “and sought out a ground” as an iamb followed by a cretic: “and SOUGHT, OUT a GROUND” This reading, while preserving five feet, has the downside of counting six accents, which compromises the integrity of the pentameter line. You could also read the line as beginning with a three-syllable foot that goes weak-strong-strong, what is called a bacchius: “and SOUGHT OUT.” Again however, this would result in a six-beat pentameter line, which we would prefer to avoid. To my mind, the heavy anapest is the preferred reading. 

            In line 4, with “all our spirit’s hopes” we begin with another heavy anapest, and again we have at least three different readings to choose from—this time, the intermediately stressed beat is the first one. As a result, we can read “all our” as a trochee, though this reading not only makes the lines six beats, but actually turns the line into trochaic hexameter. We can read “ALL our SPI” as a cretic, and though this brings us back to pentameter, it still leaves us with six beats when we would prefer five. Reading “all our SPI” as an anapest is again the preferred reading and creates a parallel scansion with line two. 

            Let’s now begin the poem again, starting with the first quatrain: 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

            The phrase “warm in life’s late morning” might confuse the reader at first, but hopefully the meaning is evident upon reflection. On our hike up the mountain, David and I were, as usual, talking about mortality, and I brought up the idea that one way of alleviating our anxiety about accomplishing things by a certain time in our lives was to conceive of life as a single day, in which case the two of us were at about 11 am. At 11 am, the majority of the day still remains ahead of you, and there is still plenty you can accomplish. “Warm in life’s late morning” thus refers to the fact that we’re currently between young adulthood and middle age, and warm with vitality. I also hoped to evoke the leisurely feeling of waking up warm in the late morning, with the sun’s rays beaming down on you through the blinds, as well as suggest the fact that our hike literally happened in the morning.

            In line 2, “sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face” works on a couple of levels. Literally, we are seeking good ground on which to smoke DMT, somewhere on the face of the mountain. Figuratively, we are seeking both the logical ground upon which to base a conception of the world, as well as the metaphysical ground of being, the source and sustainer of all things. The Holy Face primarily refers to the face of God, or the encounter with divine entities associated with the DMT experience. 

            In line 3, “high on our own summit” is yet another pun— we are literally high on the summit of the mountain, we are high on the summit of our creative and physical powers, and we are soon to be high on DMT. In line 4, the contrast between “our spirit’s hopes” and “synthetic grace” is meant to ironically point to the ridiculousness of projecting religious weight onto the consumption of a chemical, an absurdity which isn’t lost on those who take psychedelics seriously. 

            Now let’s begin again, and continue on through the second quatrain: 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

In line five, “all began to melt except the mind” refers to the phenomenon I referenced earlier—though the hallucinogenic effects of the drug were quite strong, my inner thoughts and ego were unaffected. I describe the geometrical visuals as “limitless and crass” because although the hallucinations gave the impression of an endlessly unfolding kaleidoscope, it struck me at the time as meaningless and mindless showiness, hardly the profound spiritual experience I was expecting. I describe myself as “the ego” largely because, when one is on psychedelics, one feels one’s sense of self as a distinct character reacting to the strange thoughts and sensations of tripping. The spiritual significance that I sought for in vain in the geometric hallucinations I felt much more strongly when looking at the magpies that flutter and roost on the mountains of Colorado. 

I don’t know how many of my listenership are familiar with magpies, but they’re truly marvelous birds—not only are they highly intelligent and curious, famous for collecting trinkets, but they’re incredibly beautiful in a way antithetical to bright kaleidoscopic geometry—their shape is supremely graceful and streamlined, like a long-handled spoon, and their plumage is a sleek, austere, and brilliant combination of solid white, solid black, and iridescent blue. After my nauseous carnival ride of the DMT trip, the sight of the magpies seemed a far more eloquent sign of God’s grandeur than anything the drug had induced me to experience. 

            Now let’s read through the poem one more time, this time all the way through: 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

Sober forms and true reality

the revelation: tree, and friend, and bird

more wondrous than mindless infinity. 

No angels spoke but they— yet them we heard:

“It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night—

For you, young suns, to lend the world your light.”

            I say that “sober forms and true reality” are the revelation because the wisdom I experienced from taking DMT came not from within the experience, but without it. Compared to the garish sound and fury of the DMT experience, the actual world around me struck me as far more interesting, wondrous, complex— hallucinations could not best the world that we see every day: “tree and friend and bird more wondrous than mindless infinity.” The value of the DMT experience, for me, was that it gave me fresh eyes to see the inherent value of the world around me. I didn’t meet machine-like angels in a psychedelic dream world. Instead, I was spurred to look at the real world anagogically:  to hear in the chirping of the birds, the conversation with my friend, and the rustling of the trees, the voices of God’s messengers. 

The final couplet, the volta, reveals the message that I took away from these messengers: “It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night— for you, young suns, to lend the world your light.” This of course calls back to the life as day metaphor of the first line, though here David and I have ourselves been transformed into suns, making our trail across the sky and creating the day that is our lives. It is fitting that “setting souls,” that is, those who are elderly and soon to die, should “seek their night,” that is, acquaint themselves with oblivion, by practicing death through the ego death of extreme psychedelic experience. Because we are young suns however, still at a point in the sky where we should be more concerned with sharing our light than setting, it is inappropriate for us to seek oblivion, to seek escape from this world. Our bodies resisted the DMT, or perhaps the DMT resisted us, perhaps because we weren’t ready for what it had to give us. Our wills, identities, and metabolisms are still too strong, too antithetical to the utter release of self which the drug requires. I’d like to think that though I failed in my goal, I learned something anyway, and perhaps, when the natural DMT in my pineal gland is released at the moment of death, I will be ready to receive it. Or, maybe next time I should just try to breathe in five times. 

Before I close out today, I just want to let all of you know that I’ve got another special between-seasons bridge episode coming up. I hope that I can have it ready for you by next week, but it’s a hefty topic that I want to do justice to, so it may take a little longer than usual to release. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

DMT

For D.K. 

Warm in life’s late morning we ascended 

and sought out a ground to meet the Holy Face. 

High on our own summit, we commended

all our spirits’ hopes to some synthetic grace. 

All began to melt except the mind— 

yet limitless and crass geometry

held nothing that the ego could not find

far better in the magpies on the tree. 

Sober forms and true reality

the revelation: tree, and friend, and bird

more wondrous than mindless infinity. 

No angels spoke but they— yet them we heard:

“It’s fitting setting souls should seek their night—

For you, young suns, to lend the world your light.”