Monday, December 17, 2012

Professor David Nutt - The Inconvenient Truth About Drugs

Professor David Nutt - The Inconvenient Truth About Drugs

Terence and Dennis Mckenna on James Joyce from True Hallucinations

On a recent re-reading of 'True Hallucinations' by Terence Mckenna, this paragraph jumped out at me like a Jaguar:

"This particular afternoon, Dennis called our attension to the little hen, saying that if one thought of her as art, then the achievement she represented was immense. Who could make such a hen? only the one who could have fashioned the perculiar world that we had fallen into. And that was? He looked around expectantly, but finding no takers he delivered his own punch line:
"James Joyce.

Over the next few minutes he proceeded to make his case: that Finnegans Wake represented the most complete understanding yet achieved of the relation of the human mind to time and space and that therefore Joyce, at his death, had somehow been shouldered with the responsibilities of overseeing this corner of God's universe. In this Dennis was only following Wyndham Lewis, who made Joyce's ascent to eminence in the afterworld the subject of his novel The Human Age.

"Jim and Nora," as Dennis called the newly revealed deity and his consort, were both in and acting through everything at La Chorrera, particularly in the things that Joyce had loved. The little hen as the symbol of Anna Livia Plurabelle of the wake was one of these things. It was Joycean humor that radiated outward from everything in our jungle Eden. These ideas were absurd but delightful, and they led me eventually to reread Joyce and to accept him as one of the true pioneers in the mapping of hyperspace."--Terence Mckenna. Looking Backward. Truse Hallucinations. pg. 147.