TRUE HALLUCINATIONS
A TREATMENT FOR AN OPERA
By Mark Pesce
CHARACTERS
TERENCE MCKENNA – Psychedelic superstar,
prophet of the Eschaton, voice of the apocalypse. Still trying to come to grips with
revelations in
DENNIS MCKENNA – Pharmaceutical shaman, biologist,
chemist, all of the left-brained actualities his brother never realized have
become concretized in DENNIS. Four years
younger than Terence, and always looked up to him in his younger years. He was the target of The Incident at La Chorrera, and thinks it just “bad craziness”, and doesn’t
pay it much mind. Or rather, he very
conspicuously ignores it, which creates more than a bit of tension between
himself and his brother, who won’t put it down or forget that it ever happened.
MUSHROOM GODDESS / CHRISTY – Apparition who appears to Terence during his first
major mushroom experience using his cultivated spores. Beautiful, alien, aloof in
the first act. In the second act,
she’s the girlfriend of Terence in his last three years, who tends him as he is
dying of brain cancer.
FRIEND – Introduced
Terence/Dennis to DMT while in
DMT ELVES / FANS – A chorus of
angelic/alien/elven beings who appear as teachers,
tutors and – in the opera – a Greek Chorus of sorts. Explaining the unexplainable,
and masters of a meta-reality, which Terence becomes a participant within,
becoming “unstuck” in time (like Billy Pilgrim). Periodically the elves become “Terry’s Kids,”
his loyal and psilocybin-loving fans, who read his books, frequent his
lectures, etc.
SHAMAN – The mirror image of
Terence’s rationality, the Shaman is the gatekeeper of the mysteries, the
mediator between the known and the inchoate.
His appearance at the opening of the opera (“Tuva”) establishes a
magical presence within which the opera is performed.
STAGING
The stage is very simply
designed. There is very little set
furniture, just the bare minimum the characters need to perform their roles. Behind the stage, three video projectors will
be pointed at three scrims, arranged in a roughly equilateral triangle.
During Act 1, the triangle
will be pointing downward, indicating a descent to Earth, and Terence’s receipt
of heavenly revelation; during Act 2, the triangle will be pointing upward,
indicating an ascent from Earth, the departure of the soul from material bonds. Together the two triangles form a “merkaba,” a mystical form of an “escape vehicle” for the
soul – a design which will be revealed in the closing moments of the opera.
Each of the three
projection areas will have separate, but coordinated video sequences playing
across them. There are many archetypal
meanings of trinities, and these will be explored throughout the procession of
the opera. Sometimes they’ll mean ego,
superego, id; other times they’ll be affirming,
denying, resolving; etc.
The first act traces out
the first 30 years of the story, from 1970 to 1999.
Tuva (Invocation)
A lone SHAMAN, shrouded in
the dim light, sits at the center of the stage, and throat-sings a simple,
plaintive tune of longing.
Visually, the triangle
display is introduced as fire fades up on the upper pair of screens and
gradually moves to the lower screen, as the fire of revelation comes down to
Earth.
No words: their meaning is
unheard.
(Sounds like: “Earth to the
Unknown Power” by David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir)
Reference: “For thousands of
years, Shamans have dreamed of this day…”
Visually, this is the place
to present opening credits, introducing the artists who composed & perform
the opera.
As Act 1 opens, TERENCE,
DENNIS and FRIEND walk into Terence’s apartment in
As Act 1 opens, TERENCE is
a wild-eyed LSD-inspired radical in
Terence, in his early 20’s,
is in the end of the 60's, and full of crazy ideas about life, the universe and
everything, very much the intellectual, radical,
immanentizing the culture any way he
can. And so very
young.
Four years younger, his brother
DENNIS hangs on his every word, with even greater intellectual abilities than
Terence, but worshipping him hopelessly.
The two of them enter Terence’s apartment – decorated with appropriately
Marxist paraphernalia – and begin to do bong hits (which are indicated
musically).
Terence begins slowly, but,
as the piece continues, he becomes more excited, more agitated, and the
brothers begin to throw their thoughts back and forth. There’s a sense that they’re intellectual
collaborators as well as brothers – that each knows the other’s thinking very
well.
Visually, we project scenes
of protest, scenes of the horrors of industrialization, the war in Vietnam,
mixed in with the Marxist imagery that might be common to a young radical (Che Guevara,
Marx, etc.)
As the song progresses,
Terence leaves his earthly complaints behind, and we start to see a hint of his
understanding of the broader forces of history – which he came into contact
with as he read Alfred North Whitehead – and images of conflict are replaced
with images of process, of waves of novelty coming together in concrescence. This is portrayed musically when Terence and
Dennis’ lines coming together musically, harmoniously, toward the end of the
song.
Words might go something
like this (2-part harmony lines, where Terence begins some lines and Dennis
finishes them, and vice versa, something that sounds much like “lleno” from notdunjusta)
TERENCE
Why
Would this End be so near?
DENNIS
Why
Should everything come to a
close?
TERENCE & DENNIS
How
Can it be this summing up?
*** assorted other triads
***
TERENCE
Top of the wave
DENNIS (simultaneously)
Tsunami and shore
TERENCE & DENNIS
The beginning of
concrescence…
This goes on for a bit, and
sets up both characters, with their drives and motivations, and gets the main
ideas of concrescence and transcendence clearly established.
The FRIEND who has been
taking all of this in, and probably just doing a few bong hits besides – finally
chimes in:
FRIEND
If -
You could rip back the curtain
See
What lay to the other side
The friend produces a glass
DMT pipe, and offers it to Terence.
TERENCE
What is this?
FRIEND
Emm
Tee
Dimethyltriptamine.
TERENCE
“How
Long does this trip last?”
FRIEND
“Only
As long as you will live…”
Terence smokes the DMT pipe. At first the change is very gradual, just a brightening
of the projections into primary colors, which – much more quickly now – become
a blinding kaleidoscope, a frenzy of colors and shapes.
A musical crescendo, simultaneously,
strangely harmonic, as if a resonance from Pythagoras’ crystalline spheres were
suddenly to come within the range of human hearing. It’s a heavenly sound, an impossible music. The Ain
Soph.
This reaches a peak and
bursts through to a less complex, but more richly textured sound. Terence has “burst through the chrysanthemum,
into the ecology of souls”.
The DMT ELVES reveal
themselves – literally producing themselves from the scenery – and introduce
themselves to the astonished figure of Terence, who thinks, woah, I’ve really lost it
this time. He’s really scared. This is a very strange trip.
TERENCE (slowly, faster
toward the end)
Just a trip
Just a strange trip
Just a very strange trip
Only just
a very strange trip.
ELVES (simultaneously)
Word is will
Will is world
Say -
Sing -
Create -
As much as you decide
That much will be your part
(repeating
in polyphony, etc.)
Terence tries to ignore of
them for a while, but the ELVES never stop singing, creating – as Terence comes
to realize – the fabric of the real, from their haunting song (which is
reminiscent of “Tuva”). They tell him that this is the ultimate
reality, that everything else is, in an illusion of the real, a shadow.
Finally he joins them in
their song, which rises to a resonant crescendo – much like the song’s
beginning, and we cut abruptly to…
This song and “Strophariad” are isolated “Strange Days” from Terence’s
life in the following years. There is no
setup for these scenes, and the transitions between them, though musical, are
very abrupt. Terence is being tossed
around in time (though in a chronologically progressive manner)
In this scene, Terence and
Dennis are in a hut in the small Amazonian
Terence and Dennis drink
cups of ayahuasca, and lean back. Dennis
begins to make a buzzing sound, a resonant tone, which reminds Terence of an
almost insect-like noise that comes from some place no one has ever been
before. The buzz rises, fills the air,
and ends with an abrupt CRACK.
Dennis and Terence flee to
opposite sides of the stage (Dennis STAGE LEFT, Terence, STAGE RIGHT), and
Dennis begins to babble words that make little sense – to anyone other than
Terence, who acts as his translator.
This is a duet, as lines pass back and forth between the brothers:
DENNIS (prophesying)
One
One
One
None
None
None
TERENCE (interpreting)
Something comes from
nothing
Nothing comes from One
The song – beginning with
the buzzing – is in eight separate sections, an octave which takes Dennis from
the outer regions of the universe (really, beyond the universe) back into his
body. As each section ends Dennis and
Terence step closer together. By the
end of the song, they’re at CENTER STAGE, close enough that each can reach out
and embrace the other. Dennis has come
back to Earth, and given Terence the gift of an incredible revelation.
Each of these eight stages
corresponds to a group of eight hexagrams from the King Wen
sequence of the I Ching, which are
projected as the song progresses.
These are divided up
according to the Ray of Creation, as explained by Gurdjieff:
Do – The Absolute
INTERVAL / CRACK!
Ti – All Worlds (Universe)
La – All Suns (Galaxy)
So – The Sun
Fa – All Planets
INTERVAL / CRACK!
Mi – Earth
Re – Moon
Do – The Absolute as
Nothing
Dennis progresses from The
Absolute (beyond everything) to The Absolute as Nothing (Dennis himself, back
in his own flesh), and the libretto explores revelations at every level of this
cosmological hierarchy. The cosmological
hierarchy has an analog in Terence’s growing idea of a temporal hierarchy. He sings about the universal forces which
govern time as Dennis’ speech begins to overflow into glossolalia, speaking in
tongues.
In their embrace, there is
a final CRACK, and Dennis is back to himself.
Terence is enthusiastic, excited.
Dennis is dazed and embarrassed.
Terence believes the Dennis has unearthed the Philosopher’s Stone, but
Dennis refuses to believe any of it.
Disagreement begins, which escalates into argument, and ends with Dennis
storming off stage, decrying Terence’s madness.
Dennis has backed away from the revelation, while Terence comes to
embrace the over-arching sense of it. It
fits his world view, his studies, his experience of
reality.
Terence is left by himself,
alone, and suddenly, the scene changes…
In his
As the light falls on
Terence, the MUSHROOM GODDESS appears onstage, and begins her aria, a song
which explains her origins and purpose.
Here’s the message, as presented in both The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide and True Hallucinations:
“I
am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself
fifty times older than your history.
Though I have been on earth for ages, I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds
scattered through the shining disk of the galaxy have conditions which allow my
spores an opportunity for life. The
mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun
bathing. My true body is a fine network
of fibers growing through the soil.
These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections than
the number in a human brain. My mycelial
network is nearly immortal – only the sudden toxification
of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of
certain misconceptions in your model of reality, all my mycelial networks in
the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across
space and time. The mycelial body I as
fragile as a spider’s web, but the collective hypermind
and memory is a huge historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence
on many worlds in our spiral star swarm.
Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the
ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest
organic substances known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms
in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a
suitable environment. Few such species
are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved
the hypercommunication mode and memory capacity that
make us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication
mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious. It is the occurrence of psilocybin and
psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and
my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and humanity as a
species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my
genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the
galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.
“Since it is not easy for
you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced
theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of
collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of
the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and
even more baroque evolutionary possibilities.
Symbiosis is one of these.
Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for
both the species involved. Symbiotic
relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been
established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my
development. These relationships have
been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight-drive
ships and how to build them. I will
trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken
and nearer the galaxy center. To secure
an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time, I again and again
offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the
galaxy over the long millennia. A
mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals
with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within
me and if they act in good faith can return both themselves and their humble
mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our star swarm are heir
to.”
The aria is accompanied by
visuals which explore the images which the Mushroom Goddess invokes. As she finishes, the scene shifts…
Chrysalis
The light comes up on
Terence again. It is 1999, and he’s relating
the story of the Strophariad for the Nth time to THE FANS.
He imagines that he could seal himself up in an airtight shell,
protected and preserved enough to travel the universe, like the mushroom
spores...a chrysalis of sorts, out in the deep between the stars.
He contextualizes “The
Incident” and “The Strophariad”, spinning a story for
The Fans. But every so often a murmur
erupts from The Fans, an echo of the DMT Elves in “Angels”. This murmuring becomes louder, more
persistent, and something gets weird, as Terence stumbles over his words. There’s a darkness that occasionally sweeps
across the visual field, and as The Fans rise up for a final time – becoming
the DMT Elves in the a crescendo - Terence collapses in a seizure, a riot of
light and sound.
The second act has a
clinical / alien / futuristic feel to it.
Where everything was yage vines and jungle landscapes of
mushrooms in the first act, in the second, we open upon a sterile, white,
radiation chamber, a theme that extends as we grow progressively more
futuristic as the act progresses.
Terence is in the “helmet”
used for the gamma knife therapy, and – as various portions of it “light up” –
he produces another line of song, almost as if he’s a lab rat responding to a
stimulus.
Terence is having his
brain, his pride and joy, cut out from inside of him by the gamma rays, a
decision he found himself forced into, and he wonders if he will know if things
the same way as he used to, wonders if he'll even have the time to know things
as he always has, wonders why he won't be around for the end, and lapses into a
dream...
Video
projections of X-Ray shots of a cranium, with areas highlighted, showing the glial blastoma multiform
cancer. Animation shows rays coming in,
destroying the mass.
This
is the only scene with serious set requirements. We see TERENCE on a slanted board, his head
partially hidden (and restrained by) a huge globe of the gamma ray knife. When the gun fires (as it does, periodically
throughout the song), one branch of it lights up. TERENCE is still coming to consciousness
after the seizure which closed Act One (or a subsequent seizure), so, in his
post-ictal state, he’s not quite clear on what’s
going on…
They
say that: here?
They say that: now?
They
say that: where?
They
say that [ZAP] Wow!
[ TERENCE enters a sort of synesthesia
every time he gets zapped. The melody
changes, gets ambient, tentative, trippy… ]
The cascading
colors
Of saccharine
sheets
The taste of
the music
And
rough-edged heartbeat
It’s
hard to imagine
A
fate worse than this
Determinist
madness
A
gamma ray [ZAP] kiss!
Quasars exploding
The stubborn
sensation
Of drilling
through meat
It’s
hard to imagine
A
treatment less fun
The
machines are avenged
When you’re under the [ZAP] gun.
On that note, Dennis
returns; each brother receives the other warmly. Dennis acknowledges that Terence was right as
he discursively explained the full knowledge of the acceleration of the wheels
of history, and how
this plays into the fractal (a
term then unknown) unfolding of novelty in
the (local) universe.
Everything begins at a
stately 30 bpm, then doubles
to 60 bpm, again to 120 bpm,
and finally climaxes at 240 bpm, ending with a sudden
CRACK.
And now, as in “Chrysalis,”
Terence faces an audience of The Fans.
But this time there’s a humor and humility in his voice. He has an incurable brain cancer, and he’s
conscious that this may well be one of the last times he has an opportunity to
speak his mind – and heart – about what matters.
Terence invokes a future of
the imagination, an aesthetic value
which truly frames what it means
to be human; and here is where he comes to
the truth of Love, all around
him, from every side, and he decides posthumous
radiance is better than none at
all.
When
we depart
When
we leave the room
Only
then
Can
our presence be felt
Love
is the scent
That
lingers in the air
Long
After
we have gone
All
we can hope for
A
shining light
A
flash
Of
sunset unveiling
A
moment shared
Before
darkness
Radiance
Glorious
Impermanent
Radiance
Sunlight
fails
Night
clears the sky
And
we become the stars
Stardust
thou art
To
stars return
Radiance
Glorious
Impermanent
Radiance
No
flesh run wild
No
end to things
The
only measure
Love
Before
we leave
This
world behind
We must reveal
Light
The cause of us
The heart of things
Radiance
Glorious
Impermanent
Radiance
Terence is back in the real,
a few days after the gamma knife, and going into a series of seizures – while CHRISTY
watches on helplessly – where the pieces of the real reconfigure into strange
new combinations – some comic, some tragic, some unutterably bizarre.
Color sharp -
And
blinding height.
Purple taste -
And
touching white.
Singularity / O Nobly Born
“Death is the Singularity
of Biology” That
which can not be seen beyond.
the rising, even as he finally
shuffs off this mortal coil; it it
the death
of t. or simply the general
transcendence into a new form? is it good or
bad? god or devil? human or machine?
Terence is dying, very near
to death. Christy is with him, tending
him. It begins with Terence, singing –
really, to himself – about the impossibility and loneliness of the final
voyage. Christy holds him (an image of
the Pieta) as he sings. Toward the end of the song, his tongue
becomes confused, and as he fades, Christy, in a purposeful redo of Huxley’s
death scene with Laura, begins to sing passages from the Tibetan Book of the
Dead, which enter over Terence’s lines, but then envelop and surround them.
Seeing the Eschaton but
never experiencing it, an act of faith in kingdom
come. The DMT Elves reappear – or are they the wrathful
demons of the Bardo realm?
CHRISTY
O Nobly Born
Consciousness
Unformed
Void
Shining
Blissful
Inseparable
Radiance
Immutable
Earth becomes Water
Water becomes Fire
Fire becomes Air
Air becomes Spirit
No Birth
No Death
Eschaton (Banishing)
The SHAMAN joins us
again. His tune this time is less
plaintive, more cathartic, intent on
transformation. Tasting
of transcendence.
Visually, we begin with the
“holy fire” as drawn out by countless Buddhist and Tibetan mystics – referring
to the fires of the Bardo, which burn away Earthly
attachments. This fire becomes a great
light that slowly floats upward, as the full merkaba
is revealed.