"McKenna - Mckenna vs The Black Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)
To: [email protected]
From: Erik Davis
Subject: Terence on death and dying
TERENCE MCKENNA VS. THE BLACK HOLE
Note: The following are some excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November last year, in preparation for a profile that will appear in the May issue of Wired. For obvious reasons, I have chosen selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwent a craniotomy, and he therefore spoke a bit more frankly about his condition than during November, when I spent a week with him and his wonderful girlfriend Christie Silness during his sort-of recovery in Hawaii.
The comments have been edited and are not chronological; I have included my questions only when necessary. Perhaps someday the full text of our talks will be made available. In Hawaii, we had an especially entertaining routine: during the day, I would ask him the professional interviewer questions, and in the evening, after he had napped, we would get thoroughly baked and ramble through the wilds of esoterica and bibliomania. The evening chats were recorded on DAT; they need serious editing, but there's some mind-bending loops in there.
I first met Terence in the early 90s, and I feel blessed to have been able to spend some time getting to know him a little better during the last six months of his life. I found him kind, generous, and unpretentious, although he clearly had a potent dark side. He was even more brilliant and well-read than I had expected, with fistfuls of references at his command. But most remarkable for me was how he seemed to face his situation: with an admirable blend of humor, compassion, stoicism, and a willingness to stay open and awake in the midst of the big awful questions without trying to console yourself with answers. And that, for my money, is the ultimate lesson of the psychedelic path -- not the Gaian mind, or the onrushing apocalypse, or those ridiculous elves, but a radical openness to ambiguity and the unknown.
At one point I asked him what advice he had for someone about to down 100 ml of potent ayahuasca alone in a rainforest. His words were spare, the utter opposite of the guru some made him out to be: "Pay attention. And keep breathing." Words to live by, until you stop.
Erik Davis
TM: These cancer doctors give you very little hope. They tell you, Nobody escapes, it will return, you have 6 to 9 months to live, go home and make your will, you can eat anything you want do anything you want because, fella, there's nothing we can do for you.
ED: How did you initially react?
TM: With disbelief. I still find it very hard to emotionally connect with it. When I was taking high doses of steroids we had what I called the "tears and philosophy hour" ever morning, where it all came into focus and the tragedy of my passing was starkly confronted. [LAUGHS] But over the weeks, hell, we're used to it by now.
The paradox is that you don't feel bad, or at least I don't. So its like being an actor in a play. Pretend you have a lethal disease.
ED: Tell me what that play is like.
TM: There are various options. One is cure-chasing, where you head off to Shanghai or Brazil or the Dominican Republic to be with these great maestros who can save you. The other thing is, do what you always wanted to do. So that means, head to Cape Canaveral to see a shuttle launch, on to sunrise over the pyramids, on to a month in the Grand Hotel de Paris, on to Jerusalem. I wasn't too keen on that either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all.
ED: What did you think about?
TM: I was interested in how I got into this mess. Was it my lifelong enthusiasm for recreational drugs? Was it my messing around with rocket fuel as a kid, or chemicals associated with collecting plants and insects? Was it sitting in front of my computer and firing it up morning after morning? How do you get into a mess like this? There's only about 16 of these glioblastoma multiformes a year, so its a rare disease. I never won anything before, so why now?
ED: What about the fact that it's a brain tumor?
TM: The irony of it for me is incredible. I always made my living as a brain guy, thinking. That was my department. Perturbing the brain physically, with drugs, ideas, and so forth. And I offered these doctors the chance to scold me. So what about it? A lifetime of recreational experimental drug taking, you wanna hammer on me about that? They said, Oh no, absolutely not. Well how about a lifetime of daily cannabis smoking? Oh no, look, we have data here, cannabis may actually retract tumors. I said, Listen, if cannabis retracts tumors, we would not be having this conversation. I am a study of one that can be considered definitive.
***
I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, its a kind of blessing. Its certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that your going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights.
It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.
***
Nothing lasts. That's one thing I think you learn from life, psychedelics, or just paying attention. Very little lasts.
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