Nomad Codes

challenge this scheme, functioning more like keys that open doors that you walk through. “The psychedelic drug doesn’t do anything,” says Shulgin. “The drug allows you to do something.” At the same time, of course, the drug definitely has its own say in the matter of what gets done. But the act of introducing the thing to your synapses, and hence your life, is more like initiating a relationship than simply jacking into cyberspace through a video-game deck. Many psychedelic users naturally think of drugs as allies—even approaching traditional organic drugs like mushrooms and ayahuasca as if they were ensouled by ancient spirits. Many of these more explicitly “shamanic” trippers in turn denigrate synthetic, lab-produced compounds as soulless industrial chemicals.
    But as the weird scientists point out, this is just mainstream literalism in reverse. The point is not the material; it’s the dialogic relationship, the loop of meaning, that ties together mind and molecule. Indeed, much of the appeal of novel chemicals is that they deliver one to zones that have yet to be mapped by cultural consensus, underground or not. “I start with bottles that have no personality at all,” says Shulgin. “You make a white crystal solid that you don’t know and it doesn’t know you. And so you begin to meet each other.” In some sense, this structure of relationship, which is open to discovery and communication, applies to all psycho actives, even the most mainstream. Like all relationships, they can go terribly, terribly wrong; like most, they are mixed bags. And yet, to experience yourself as a mind arising from a brain means that you are already constantly in relation with neurochemistry. And in the years to come, when the expanding range of molecular modification may wrap our hands ever tighter around the tiller of the self, it might serve us well to keep in touch with the mind that moves through realms far outside that anxious simian serotonin buzz we experience as ordinary reality.
    2000

AYA AVATAR

    In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s dazzling Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines. The paradox, of course, is that an avatar of this technological complex is responsible for delivering Cameron’s visions to us in the first place. To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco, we hapless begoggled ones were barraged with military ads, along with a triumphant techno-fetishist breakdown on the Imax gear that would soon transport us to the planet Pandora almost as thoroughly as the handicapped jarhead Jake jacks into his avatar body—a body that is, in reality, generated by computer, and so not quite reality after all. The message of all these nested media prostheses is clear: we are imaginatively handicapped, and need a commanding apparatus of virtuality to achieve fusion with the bygone but utterly concocted world of wisdom and myth represented by the Na’vi and their world.
    But those are behind-the-scenes ironies, and like most people, I just gave into the ride. With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth about our era’s visionary consciousness: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries. That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded in more than ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest sobriety that afflicts Hollywood Indians everywhere. Their enviable at-oneness with things is also grounded in an actual organic communications network. Those fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to swap data with both ancestors and the Eywa, the biological spirit of the planet Pandora.
    Eywa resonates with Erda, of course; Pandora is a dream of our own