a ramble and a half.

so, i took acid for the first time this weekend. i've kind of gotten away from the psychedelics lately, cos my total lack of a belief system kind of turns on me when reality is falling apart in front of me. but, i'd never done it, so i figured i had to at least once. never would have thought that two little squares of paper could have messed with my brain so much. if i had to describe the experience in a sentence, i'd say that it was 24 hours strapped into the freakiest ride you can imagine with all your existential dilemmas and buried neuroses. and i'm saying literally twenty-four hours. i took the hits at 2pm on saturday, and i was debilitated until well past 2pm on sunday. sleep was a distant memory, as was coherent thought. in any case, i thought i'd write a little bit about some of the thoughts that i had whilst tripping. these are nowhere near as revelatory as they were while tripping, but interesting thoughts in any case.

one of the most comforting things to me whilst freaking out in the face of my metaphysical angst was playing music. which led me to some conclusions about music. one said conclusion was that music's power has to be tied in some way to being and time. i'm not a huge heidegger fan, but i think that music is on a very primordial level tied up with those two concepts. first, it's a means of being. i had the strongest conviction whilst playing this shitty little keyboard that sound truly is a means by which we can be in a different, non-physical dimension. it's a way to escape simple physical being into a more abstract, 'sonic' being. and second, it's fundamentally tied up with time. obviously, rhythm is central to music. music is a reminder of the passage of time, and as it happens, it's eternally past. so is all of our reality, but music works in a way that reality doesn't. the rules of harmony mean that music forms patterns which we can easily feel, hear, and respond to. it's like aristotle's distinction between poetry and history; history, ergo reality is chaotic and seemingly without form. yet by organic development poetry picks out aspects of history in order to show causality, and draws out the form which is inherent in reality.

which got me to thinking about syncopation. said shitty keyboard had this function whereby it would play shitty rhythms and such, which was kind of fun. me and my roommate went off marching into the woods with instruments and playing for the trees and such, and i found out that by pushing a different button, i could make it do a little break-down, or drum fill, or whatever the hell you want to call it. this made me think again of the parallel between music and life. sober life marches along to the beat, but altered states of consciousness are pretty much the equivalent to a drum fill in the beat of life. the whole song can't be syncopated and offbeat, or else it'd just be a mishmash. but a song without the odd fill is boring as fuck. rhythmic variations are the embrace of kairos, whilst steady beats are the slaves of chronos. we can't succeed in life without some obedience to the march of chronos, but without our moments of kairos, we can't truly be alive.

playing music with people got me to thinking about conversation. i commented that "basically, everything that you can say on acid boils down to 'dude, if you were me, just then, it'd be awesome.'" that's really the hopelessness of language, isn't it. it's this effort to convey a state of being to another person, yet it's really only conveying words. the state of being doesnt follow the words, the words can only make a halfhearted stab at evoking that state of being. music, on the other hand, conveys a state of being relatively directly, at least compared to language. music is différance taken to its logical conclusion. while our actual perceptions of tones might differ, that really doesn't matter. as beethoven so aptly noted, it's not the notes that matter, it's the spaces between. a minor third, for example, sounds the same no matter what notes it's being played on. you might not be hearing the exact same sounds when you play music with another person, but you're hearing the same music. when i was really tripping, that realization messed with me to the point that i didn't particularly want to talk at times. but then as i came down, and i had lunch with my family that came to visit the next day (!!!!) i realized that the fallibility of language was no excuse not to try.

um, anyways, that was kind of rambly, cos my thoughts were rather obviously somewhat disjointed. it was some fun times. i had alot more things to say, but i got bored of writing them. so, that's all.