A rebellion against what can be understood

The first memory goes back to a party in San Francisco, an apartment turned into a nest of shy protests, a recording studio, the set of rebellious fantasies. Downtempo beats, shrooms, hair dyed with questionable taste, a hummingbird on the loose, adjoining rooms, small, barely useful. People dancing against themselves, a thin-armed juggler, brief applause. The beginning of a conversation about sound and the way it impacts people, their tissues. "The altered state of space-time is human consciousness", "the Midway is a portal between unknown dimensions", "there's nothing to drink here". New parties, new formats. Pills, plants, fungi, viscous liquids that pull you back to a state of prenatal euphoria and ocular, auditory spasms. The music pumps a tired mid-tempo rhythm, stuck to the nostalgia of having felt something unusually true, almost atrocious. Conversations in micro-genres of few words strung together to be witty or entertaining. A guy in his fifties tries to sell me a bracelet pulsing light in sync with the sound. I ask if he’s got Viagra, an underground sweatshop of Indian seamstresses, a farm of queer chickens. He bolts, terrified. The party keeps stacking up small initiatives and imperfections. The living room holds most of the guests. A woman sings over tribal rhythms, long melismatic wails in a trance everyone seems to get or follow. Her voice clings to the people, the walls, sinking us into an abstract doubt. The night stretches out like an abandoned road. I meet Kiarash. We talk about substances and sounds, the danger of settling into a fixed identity, parked in the garage of your own expectations. Someone offers us powdered ketamine, a sample from their catalog. He smiles, haggard, with few teeth and watery eyes. His hair looks razed by some subcutaneous fire. We pass on the offer and stay lost in hazy meanings. Existing simultaneously in different unconscious stages, the chance of a parallel new world order. I tell him our need to access other worlds unfolds in the stories we tell. Fictions, painted in caves or recited verse by verse in the basement of a smoke-aged bar, are the escape hatches from this delirious highway we call reality, today, civilization. “We need something more”, he says. The ketamine guy overhears and comes back with new offers. G, H, meth, coke, molly, acid. The pharmacy-man smiles with a heart as depopulated as his mouth. I ask him politely to ignore us, to anticipate thoughts of a happy life in the company of someone he has never seen. He looks at me disoriented and shuffles off toward the bracelet guy. We keep talking about the universal needs we pin on human consciousness, careless of our vanity or duty to truth. Fictions with a new voice, the authority of psychedelic trips, the force that could shift the dominant narrative in obedient, prosperous Western societies. The music’s been insufferably the same for three hours. Chris Nolan could shoot a movie in this hovel where, after every party, the guests hit the street before they’ve even arrived. We also talked about the need for a senses tale, about the years that pass strangely, and the urgency for a more intimate, truer life. The conversation gives way to an immediate strategy. We need to meet again and plan a rebellion against what can be understood, chewed, and digested obscenely. We sometimes say it all starts with a conversation, but now I think it begins much earlier, silently, like a faintly sensed omen, the persistent scent of something announcing itself, relentless.