Chayefsky ALTERED STATES (English Edition)

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7554-0578-8
Verlag: BookRix
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 195 Seiten

Edward Jessup, a young psycho-physiologist, experiments with different states of consciousness, obsessed with an addiction to truth and knowledge. He injects himself with psychedelic drugs, lies locked in an isolation tank and experiences all the stages of pre-human consciousness until finally terrible changes take place with him: Jessup also physically transforms into a pre-human being. His thirst for knowledge drives him into ever new, increasingly irreversible transformations. Only the horror when his body begins to dissolve into pure energy brings him back to human bonds...   Paddy Chayefsky (January 29, 1923 - August 1, 1981), one of the most important US dramatists, wrote a breath-taking, equally philosophical shocker with his debut novel. In 1980, British director Ken Russell adapted the novel based on Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay - starring: William Hurt, Blair Brown and Drew Barrymore.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chayefsky, Paddy

Leseproben

  Zapatecus, Mexico: June 1975
    Actually, the Hinchi Indians weren’t in San Luis Potosi but in Zapatecus Province, a tribe of pre-Aztecs living amid the brutal barrancas of central Mexico. They were descendants of the Chichimec Toltecs, but the local brujo turned out to be a Tarahumara Indian who had married into the tribe. That helped because he spoke a little Spanish; the others none at all. Echeverria served as interpreter. He and Jessup joined the Hindus just as they set off on their long trek to the sacred mushroom fields, an expedition lasting three weeks, the whole tribe of some eight hundred, in their loincloths and cotton shirts, loping along through the violently colored valleys and shocking gorges, pausing every other night to get drunk on corn beer. It was fetching country, filled with blue agave and yellow chaparral, and the crags in the unapproachable distances were splashed orange by the relentless summer sun.  The brujo was a good-hearted soul in his late sixties, whose earlier contact with white civilization was affirmed by the shapeless, grey, single-breasted jacket he wore, the white tails of his loincloth hanging down from beneath it like the fringes of a prayer shawl. The Hinchis, he explained to Echeverria and Jessup, retained only a little of their original animistic religion, at most a nodding acknowledgement to the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. They had somehow evolved their own code of beliefs based on spiritual and life-giving forces. Jessup thought that curiously oriental. At any rate, the tribe filled a number of burlap bags with mushrooms, branches of small slender trees, leaves, petals, seed pods, and white, tuberous roots, moving across the sacred plateau like cotton pickers, sometimes going to their knees to scrape out the roots with their hands. Jessup in Levi’s and T-shirt stood on the fringe of the activity with his Sony tape recorder while Echeverria, who was a botanist, explained that the plants were sinicuiche or hema salidfolia, and the mushrooms were almost certainly amanita muscaria, »a very powerful psychedelic, and a little dangerous. It contains some belladonna alkaloids, atropine, scopolamine. The sinicuiche plant is highly regarded among a number of Indian tribes. I’ve seen it as far north as Chihuahua. It should be especially interesting for you. The Indians say it invokes old memories, even ancient ones. The Hinchis call it the First Flower.«  »First in the sense of primordial?«  »Yes, in the sense of the Most Ancient.«  »I’d like to try it,« said Jessup. »Do you think they’ll let me join their smoking ritual?«  »They seem like agreeable people,« said Echeverria.  They all got back to their home valley on the twelfth of July. Most of the tribe went on a tesgiiinada, a two-day binge of corn beer, while a number of chosen women ground the various roots and buds and leaves and petals into varying degrees of fineness. The separate powders and crumbled mushrooms were stored away for a year in sealed gourds to become sufficiently mouldy. Then last year’s gourds were brought out, and the preparations for the smoking ritual begun. Only five men, los escogidos, actually participated. The old brujo was, of course, one. The ceremony took place in front of the brujo’s house, a ramshackle clapboard shanty with a shaky overhang held up by two rotting planks. They got a fire going and sprawled around it. Three large stones formed the hearth. The brujo came out of his shack with a burlap bag, which he emptied item by item. The first was a hunting knife, nearly a foot in length and glistening blue in the late afternoon sunlight. Then a soft brown leather pouch, then a brown leather sheath, pitted and verdigrised with age, from which he extracted the ceremonial pipe, a dark-reddish stem about ten inches long with a blackened bowl. He spaced them carefully on the blanket and bowed to each of the four directions, chanting in a low whine. Then he reached into the bag and removed the last item, a bundle of bound white plant roots, from which he drew one out and split it down the middle with his knife till it formed a Y. He paused in his humming chant to mutter some Spanish to Echeverria, who, in turn, leaned across to Jessup and said, »He wants to know if you still want to participate.«  »Yes, of course,« said Jessup.  The old brujo went back to his soft chant. One of the women brought out a large pot and set it on the stones over the fire. Jessup leaned over to see what was in it. It was a quarter-filled with a sludge-like yellow substance. The brujo explained it was boiled mushroom caps, los honguitos, which had been calcining for two days now, since the return from the sacred fields. He resumed his chanting, all the while binding together the forked ends of the root with what seemed to be the tendrils of a vine. At Jessup’s request, Echeverria asked the old man, »What sort of experience can my friend expect?«  The old man, without pausing in his binding, said, »His soul will return to his First Soul.«  Echeverria translated the answer. Jessup, who had been watching the reels on the tape recorder cassette slowly turn, looked up sharply. »Did he use those words exactly?«  »Yes,« said Echeverria.  »That’s practically Buddhist,« murmured Jessup, and replaced the used cassette in the recording machine with a fresh one. When the machine was started again, he asked Echeverria to ask the old man: »What does the First Soul look like?«  Echeverria translated. The old brujo answered. Echeverria translated. »It is Unborn Stuff.«  Jessup stared at the brujo who now, apparently finished with preparing the root, turned to regard Jessup. The last of the sun had just disappeared behind the distant peaks, and their little valley was abruptly in heavy shadow. Jessup couldn’t make out the old man’s features, not five feet away from him, but he could see the eyes, which seemed to be glowing preternaturally, like those of a jungle cat. The brujo addressed an uncharacteristically long speech to Jessup, six sentences in Spanish, waiting at the end of each for Echeverria to translate.  »You will be sick,« the old man told Jessup. »Then you will shoot into void. You will see a spot. The spot will become a streak. This is the Crack Between the Nothing. Out of this Nothing will come your Unborn Soul.«  Jessup nodded. It was too good to be true. He might have been talking to a Tibetan yogi. The old brujo muttered something in Spanish to Echeverria, who told Jessup: »He wants you to hold the root. Put out your hand palm up.«  Jessup edged closer and stuck out his hand. The brujo carefully placed the root across the flat of his palm, and then, suddenly, he separated Jessup’s third and fourth fingers and deftly slashed the flesh with his hunting knife. Jessup, who had read Castaneda, should have expected something like this, but he didn’t, and he screamed into the gathering stillness of the twilight as he felt the blood stream from the cut. So petrified was he by the suddenness of it that he left his hand outstretched, palm open. The brujo seized his wrist and pulled his bleeding hand over the pot. He twisted Jessup’s wrist so that the stark white root fell into the pot, and he held Jessup’s hand there till a few drops of blood joined the caking calx below. The old man released him, and he fell onto the ground, shocked and utterly spent, sick with a sense of outrage. »Are you all right?« asked Echeverria.  Jessup nodded. The old brujo and one of the other men were now lifting the pot off the hearthstones and moving it to the ritual blanket. To Jessup, lying in the sudden night, they seemed like monstrous shadows. He tried to study his damaged hand in the darkness. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. »Jesus Christ,« he muttered. He was startled by a form looming over him. It was the brujo, holding out the pipe to him expressionlessly. Jessup sat up, accepted the pipe and began to smoke it.  He was immediately seized with nausea and began to vomit onto the ground. None of the other men paid any attention. The old brujo was asking Echeverria if the recording machine was on. When informed that it was, he began to explain in Spanish that the mixture Jessup was smoking contained three parts of the dried mushroom calx in the pot to one part sinicuiche powder and one part the powder of some third plant with a Toltec name which Echeverria tried to repeat but couldn’t. All this Jessup heard clearly as he bent over on one elbow and retched. The nausea disappeared instantly; the retching had been smooth and painless. Then, abruptly, he was propelled upward into instant hallucination. The little clearing in which he had been squatting disappeared beneath him, or rather disappeared to the size of a pinpoint miles below, which slowly attenuated till it took on the form of a slit, a jagged slit, a crack. This...