The Onomatopoeia of a Sappy-Chalky Esophagus
The Telephone Inside Me
The call comes early --- you know when. When your eyelids should be tightly furled up to provide a backdrop for the theater of dreams; when the night just begins to withdraw its sheet of black as a languid sun slowly ascends its invisible staircase. It's now, of all times, that the gastrointestinal caller decides to speak.
"GET THE FUCK OUTSIDE!"
I hang up (... "how do you hang up a stomach?" ...) to run outside and purge...and purge...and purge. Each time a river of acidic fluids jumps through my mouth like water rushing through a small crack in a dam.
"Time for breakfast" some joker yells in the distance.
Perhaps I should sketch out some background. The reason for all this is dragon's blood, sangre de drago, a sappy-chalky purgative distilled from a tree of the same name and served to me in a small unassuming glass. It sticks to the walls of my esophagus like bees drawn towards their death on hot wax paper, calling forth all that which needs to come out --- "you, yes you, come on" it motions. As the dragon's blood does its internal bidding, I gulp down a liter or more of lukewarm water before...
BLAHHHH!!!
Onomatopoeia doesn't really do justice to the strange humble of exaggerated howls, grunts, and stilted breaths that make up this experience, but it will have to do for now.
Gunk and goo and gibberish too continues to stream out for a few minutes until that small voice that has been with me since the beginning grows to a yell.
"No more!"
No more water, no more puking, no more chalky insides -- no more!
So I step aside and watch this ritual of synchronized puking and perk up at the interspersed tones of surreal laughter that bubble over every once in a while. Eventually everyone reaches their threshold (for now) as all that is inside becomes outside, soaking into the vibrancy of topsoil to convert that which is dead into the womb of new life.
After a light meal (as you can imagine, our stomachs weren't too keen on letting in much more), Don E. prepares a special plant bath consisting of water, mucuru leaves, white onion, menthol, and nepthaline. This bath acts to reinforce and accentuate the intent behind imbibing the purgative, namely to drain our bodies of accumulated toxins so as to sensitize it to the spirit of ayahuasca. Don E. methodically pours a few cups of the cold strange brew onto my hair and as it descends my body, he blows mapacho smoke and concentrates the diffused energetic imprint radiating around my being by symbolically squeezing the four sides of my skull and chest.
Ceremony Two: What Are They Floating?
The ayahuasquero Don E. prepares our medicine with the same prescriptive pours and mapacho blessings as before. For reasons unknown, the ayahuasca barely worked itself into me after an hour of anticipation. I gulp down another cup and wait. Twenty minutes later C., the retreat organizer, asks if I'm mareado (feeling the effects of ayahuasca).
As I'm rattling off my response --- "a few geometric patterns but not much more" --- the effects really begin to take hold. Don E., hearing my translated response, starts an icaro that he encourages everyone to mimic, thus increasing the likelihood of visions. This certainly helps because the mareacion comes fast, but it frightens me and I start to pull back, fighting off the urge to explore the fearful landscape. I'm walking down a long trail inundated with Christian symbols strewn like garrish billboards as death metal and other mall-goth cultural acoustics play satirically in the background. Eventually the road bifurcates and to my left emerges a tall black gate of cold and spiky metal forming the entrance to a cemetery of unknown residents with a powerful evil-satanic-scary feeling beaming forth. To my right stands an indistinct blurry gate with a this-is-good feeling. The left side pulls me towards exploration with a sort of teenage rebellious curiosity, but I was wary because I thought it meant dabbling with brujeria.
Brujeria Interlude
A common misconception of shamanic practices, heavily ingrained in New Age circles, is that Light Shamanism, or practices concerned with healing oneself, others, and learning, is all that exists. This misunderstanding leads people to be unaware of Dark Shamanism, or brujeria, which is intended to harm and even kill others; it’s heavily invested in gaining power for oneself by disempowering others. Don E. was hesitant to even utter the name “brujeria” because it’s such a feared practice in the Shipibo culture he grew up in. Brujeria might or might not have a long historical tradition, but it seems to have gained popularity in recent history as a form of political resistence against invading Westerner’s who were desecrating the land and culture of indigenous peoples.
Ceremony Two Continued
In hindsight it seems that the satircal and frightening landscape offering itself to me was more a reflection of some inner conflict that needed exploration rather than a shiesty tactic used to ensnare potential candidates for brujeria. My own fear dissolves the contours of this vision and I’m deposited back into the maloca to waft in-between worlds for a few moments. But it isn’t long before the synesthasia of the collective icaro singing weaves itself into the contours of a new and more beatific vision. Voice becomes used as an advanced technology by a group of mayan looking priests I call The Divine Sound Technicians. They sit meditatively and chant glossolalia, using the energy of Don E.’s incomprehensible tapestry of sound to suspend this enormous Mother Goddess entity in a spatio-temporal vacuum. I had the feeling that they had been doing this for an eternity and that I was incredibly fortunate to have caught a brief glimpse. The brief glimpse unveiled the surreal architecture of a vertical wall of breasts cacooned within a huge translucent and pulsating seed-womb. New life forms continually shoot out of the nipples and I, with wide-jaw amazement, repeat “this is what she does…she continually creates!” Inside this landscape of deep knowledge the notion of death seemed completely unreal because each old-decaying form was simply broken-down, remolded, and shot out newborn from the generative nipples of this eternal creature. The bliss at having witnessed such an event lingers on long after the vision fades and the entity returns to the imaginal realms. My limber body dances with joy unconstrained by conscious control, and peaks with downloads of energetic bliss as I recall that beautiful encounter.
Ceremony Three: An Eerie Polyphony
The mareacion slowly twists itself into being with the emergence of slithering light rivers that float like lost biblical figures and lillipads above an illusive boundary of skin. Locomoting and dancing, they cue me into the subtle and delicate rise of a diaphonous energy rooted deep in my lowest chakra. This glistening ray bursts through the crown of my head on its upward journey and follows the dome roof toward the central apex where all things seem to lead. I watch in amazement until it becomes a bit more familiar and then look around to notice that everyone’s body is participating in the same process. The sum total is attracting itself into a photonic stream of energetic capital that shines like jungle chandelier at the center of the roof before it descends in coils down the helical wallpaper of this inverted cup.
As the ceremony progresses, sound takes center stage in this otherwordly concert hall. Mimicking the aural designs brought on by a second cup of ayahuasca, K. bellows out an eerie polyphony of improvisational sounds, each unique and each strangely beautiful. Although devoid of a simply understood meaning they seem deeply meaningful nontheless, like hearing a euology in some unknown language. While evoking this gallery of sound, his body transforms into a plant pillar shaped like a Greek Ionic column that sprouts twisted liana’s rising in accordance with the findings of sacred geometry. As the song winds down and the entwined branches fade, Don E.’s wife V. begins her soft tune that hovers barely above a whisper. As an Shipibo artist and vegetalista, she excels at stitching together vivid and colorful designs to encode the fluttering dynamism of icaro woven geometries. The visual animation drawing itself from the high-pitched tones of her voice is that of angelic cloudlike beings swirling off the top of her skull, dancing the rhythmic motif’s of impermanence and beauty.
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