My mother is a classical musician. She once used to play herself, and is now a professor of chamber music at the National Academy of Arts in Kiev. When I was little – no more than four or five years of age – I would lay supine on our living room’s floor next to the piano while she practiced and listen. In case you have never heard a musician practice in the solitude of their home – they never play the whole piece through. Instead, one phrase is repeated over and over with minute variation, until eventually you stop listening for continuity or melody and lose yourself in the chords, in the harmony, in the rocking back-and-forth of sounds, like waves upon a sea. When in doubt, my mom would glance at me, sprawled on the floor, and enlist my help:
“What picture do you see when I play this passage?”
“Ghosts. They are exiting a cave onto a little clearing, and they are dancing in a circle, holding hands. There is one single tree and many rocks. The tree is blooming.”
“If you could paint it, what colors would you choose?”
“Grey. And pink. And light green.”
“Would you use watercolors, or pastels, or pencils, or markers?”
“Watercolors, Momma.”
She would look pensive for a moment, lean into her keyboard, make a note in her sheets, and proceed to play another interpretation – the chords hopping around some more.
That was my practice. I had spent my childhood lying flat on the floor in a state that was half trance, half prostration, dreaming up worlds as colorful and ephemeral as the tunes themselves. Soon, I couldn’t perceive music as anything but visual, and going into an abstract daze didn’t strike me as something unnatural. Life was sometimes a little too fast for me; I didn’t like loud noises; I didn’t like crowds; I didn’t like certain textures and colors; I didn’t like the slippery, pearly taste of semolina porridge I was force-fed every morning; I did like memorizing very long poems by heart. To stay sane, I had to access my trance-like state regularly. It would come about spontaneously, my eyes would glaze over, my body would go a little stiff - and everyone around just learned to let me have my moments.
As a teenager, I learned to induce the state deliberately. I would wait for a student ensemble to stop by our apartment for a lesson; as they entered the living room and my mom closed the door behind them, I would go to the adjoining bedroom down the hall. I would turn off the light, and tie a black velvet band around my eyes, and lie down on a waterbed under a pile of weightless down blankets, and wait for the music to begin. (As I got older, the ritual came to involve actions of a more sexual nature to supplement the basic sensory deprivation). And as the sounds came rushing in, I would concentrate on the timbre, the harmonies, the acoustics, the unexpected dissonances and resolutions – the repetition. The descent into my mind was gradual. There were alternating feelings of being very small and very large. An image of a pin point. An image of a giant rubber ball. Craggy, sulfurous, yellow rocks being washed over by salty ocean water. Whirlpools. My mouth going dry. My eyeballs sinkingin the sockets. My back, my shoulders, my legs going cold – floating. Birds. Passing through the eye of a needle. Squeezing through a very tight space. And then… I was in.
I used to call it “My Other World.” There were visions. Once, it was a giant slab of marble floating on the waves like a hollow bead, somewhere in the middle of a great vastness of the ocean. Atop the rock sat a haggard man, desiccated by the scorching sun. There was no purpose for him being there; there was no destination in mind; he was surely going to die there – and I watched the rock drift aimlessly towards the horizon, the man gazing at me the whole time, utterly lost and helpless. Another time, it was a night somewhere in the Himalayas. The air was crisp with cold, and the stars were bright and sharp and distant, and the darkness was stupefying. I stood by a tiny wooden hut covered with feet of snow, a thin trickle of smoke rising above it. It was the cornermost hut of a village, the last frontier – and beyond it lay a vast nothingness of pure white snow, stretching forever, eternally, to the beginning of time. The stars would start ringing in the metallic unity of octaves and suddenly, at the meeting point of sky and snow, I would spy a figure slouching towards me. The figure would have red eyes.
Sometimes I got to stroll through medieval towns. Sometimes I got to meet people. Sometimes those people spoke. Sometimes their words came true in real life. Sometimes, that was just my memory playing a trick on me.
Did I know back then that what I was doing fell under the umbrella of psychonautics? Did I know that I was taking intentional trips vivid enough to rival a psychedelic experience? No – and I never thought about this until we got to read Lovecraft’s descriptions of the city of R’lyeh in class; until l got to read Huxley and Leary a bit later; and until one of the students asked about the potential ways of inducing a trip. I don’t think I’ve ever gone anywhere beyond the states described at levels 2 and 3 by Leary, but I did experience the state of “oneness” described by Huxley, the “istigkeit” of things, the… well, the harmony. The chords. The sense of everything being in tune with each other, and having its own deserved place.
Cadence. Return to a tonic. Lift your hands. Wake up.