Posted by PK on August 13, 2005 at 18:21:08:
You are probably wondering what I'm doing here in the branches of a monkey-puzzle tree at three o'clock in the morning. At least, that's what I think it is. It's hard to tell the difference in the dark. I'm somewhere in the Dark Forest of Broceliande - no - I'm not sure I spelled that right.
Somewhere between Old Brodsworth and Hooton Pagnell. I'm fairly sure.
It started with a table football game, I'm fairly sure. Fairily? That, a tab of pink acid and fifteen pints of Guinness.
Maybe it's a horse chestnut. Now I'm away with the faeries. It's a full moon and I see fair - well - reasonably well - in the dark.
I just don't see what everybody else sees. It took a while to realise that. They had to pry my hands off the handles -
Just kidding. Almost.
The loser buys the drinks, you see. When I'm tripped, I get terribly focussed - Pete handled the defense well, but when the ball came anywhere near my little men I just whacked it. My rational mind wasn't watching my fingers. They had their own agenda, let them get on with it.
It didn't matter to me that we beat everybody in the pub, including the national champions. Bowkett and Kropacz...another part of my mind was handling that. When your lizard brain is doing its job, leave it alone.
Difficult to remember spellings when you're up a tree...
The thing is, they had to buy the beer. And when I'm tripped I get terribly focussed - did I just say that? - and beer just keeps me level. So when Pete suggested a walk after they kicked us out - when was that? Well, what's a couple of miles?
I'm going to have a hard time explaining this to Helen. I can see the Moon through the branches. I can hear the voices in the leaves...
Take it back a step. What's a year or two, or two hundred miles? Time and space are only variables.
"That was out-bloody-rageous," I told Tim as the final hallucinogenic fugue faded into the cosmic stratosphere. He just grinned and nodded, muttering 'yeah', his eyes asparkle with the light of the truly tripped.
Which was odd because it was The middle of the night.
No, that's the Lewis Carroll bit, that comes later. It was odd because Tim hadn't taken the acid, I had.
"Soft Machine," I said by way of information.
He just grinned and nodded, muttering 'yeah', his eyes asparkle with the light of the truly tripped. Again. You hear about this stuff, but you don't believe it until it happens to you. When it does, you just take it for granted, at least while it's happening. Afterwards...
Well, that's another story.
As far as I remember, most of the Glebes had gone out. That's what we usually called the residents of the commune at Glebe Road, it made them sound like some kind of shy and exotic bird. Tim and I had been left alone with the stereo system. Maybe the weirdness vibes had awakened some sort of survival instinct in them. I'd been here before, you see. The bit with Phil and the Nepalese.
It started long before that, of course. The thing is, I can't get it in order. I was pointing out to somebody or other that the I Ching can be simulated with seven coins and a copy of 'Alice in Wonderland', an edition with 127 pages, and trying to explain aleatoric divination and binary mathematics to a group of very stoned people. I proved it by tossing the coins of the realm myself. It's not difficult to translate heads and tails into a page number and a lot easier than finding yarrow sticks.
What it said was -
Well, try to guess. If you can, maybe all of this will make some sense, at least to one of us.
First of all, I'm not a guru, though I have had guruness thrust upon me. Please let me introduce myself, I'm a man with a fondness for allusions like that, but primarily I'm a mathematician. The guru thing just happened to be going around at the time, like a sort of mental virus, or one of those pesky memes. You know the term? No? Well, never mind, you'll either get the gist or you shouldn't be reading this.
You could argue that it was Roy's fault, but to explain that I'll have to go back to the bit where Roy, Phil and I were smoking some very nice Afghan black in Roy's room. It had to be Roy's room because he started rolling up the moment he'd finished meticulously transcribing his psychology lecture notes into large, bound notebooks. He applied the same attention to detail - bordering on the obsessive-compulsive - to the joints he rolled. The Rolls-Royce of joints were rolled by Roy.
Music was provided courtesy of me. I had a pretty crummy portable tape player - no hifi here - and some home recorded tapes. Those most frequently played were Led Zeppelin one and four. Yes, the rest of the stoned cognoscenti considered it cooler to groove to the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, Starship and Dugout Canoe but frankly we didn't give a damn.
After a couple of joints of Afghan black, Led Zep on a tinny speaker sounds, well, cosmic. Really. Your mind fills in the quality out of the white noise. It's like 3-D specs for the ears.
Sometimes we talked too. After the Zep. Mostly this was Roy talking to Phil, though Phil never said anything or moved anything other than his eyebrows after the first toke. Roy just filled in his part of the conversation for him. A bit like Skippy the bush kangaroo. Eep. What, little Timmy's fallen down the well?
Phil raises eyebrow slightly, with an effort, while Roy is in mid-exposition.
"Oh, you think I'm overstating the case?" (Interpose long diatribe on the niceties of psychology which, perhaps, I absorbed subliminally while trying to remember where I'd left my Robert Wyatt tape, or if indeed I had one) I usually left when I realised I was stoned enough, as in lighting the joint from the roach end and not realising it until it was half smoked.
No, it's not quite true that Phil never spoke. I do remember a brief exchange on gravimetrics and explaining something about 'The House on the Borderland' by William Hope Hodgson and that Phil had got the willies walking back through the half-lighted corridors of Child's Hall after midnight wondering if the swine-things were going to jump out of the walls. The guru bit came later, when Roy started on about Timothy Leary. The bit about us all being energy. Well, I'm a physicist on my better days and I wasn't going to let that pass.
Of course I've studied the Black Arts a bit, who hasn't? You have to do something to fill up the time when you've run out of problems to solve in double maths library study periods and you've already read all the Anglo-Saxon poetry and the complete works of William Blake. And, yes, okay, I do actually have a book called 'The Black Arts' in my bookcase. It's somewhere in there with Crowley's 'Magick in Theory and Practice' and some others whose titles I probably shouldn't mention, but I acquired those later. Back then, I was something of a sceptic and to some extent still am. I just didn't have much patience with the fluffy-bunny new age acid mysticism that was doing the rounds.
"We're all energy? Well, yes, and so is that table leg. So what? The equivalence of mass and energy is simple physics, it doesn't prove anything about consciousness. What matters is structure and information...."
And I was off. I do this sometimes. Lecture mode on. Exeunt omnes, except Roy took it all in or at least tried to as I deconstructed his delusions with the machete-like attack of a Jimmy Page guitar solo.
Then he told me that Timothy Leary had said "Find your own teacher."
You see where this is going?
Small things like this accumulate. The affair with the bees and the coat....
That was Ade. I'd left my coat in his room one day or night and he made a joke about it later. We were all stoned at Steve's place and he happened to say that he couldn't get back into his room because 'Paul's Coat is in there'. Yes, he said it in capitals.
It was only an RAF overcoat I'd picked up for a fiver at one of those Army Surplus places. Built in 1948, it seemed to be proof against anything but nuclear attack, not that I've tested it in those conditions. It just had that attitude about it. It wasn't really Merlin's cloak. That was before the bees, the squirrels and talking to the birds.
There's nothing unusual about that. In Whiteknight's Park, the ducks will walk all over your feet, the squirrels will talk to anybody and if you sit very still the birds will settle on your shoulders. It may have been the bees that did it, but that's even sillier. Nobody was worried about bees, except Graham, but he was very tripped at the time. It was a bit odd when he started reciting the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech from Julius Caesar while ripping his clothes off, and rather annoying when he punched me on the nose, but what was really disturbing was how he reacted when I floored him. I didn't mean to, it was just a reflex.
He expected me to kill him. Or so he said. On later reflection, I should have seen the significance of lying down with throat bared and paws in the air. Some people just can't take their acid.
Oh, did I mention that I did embroidery? Just chain stitch, nothing clever. My Levis were covered with arcane symbols in various colours but there was nothing unusual about that. Nothing unusual about any of it, taken a piece at a time. It's the pattern, you see. Sometimes you have to step back. Sometimes you step back too far and have retrace....
Blind alleys? How can you know until you've gone down them and looked?
The first time it was just a marker pen. I used that to decorate a T-Shirt with the chaos sigil pinched from a Michael Moorcock book. Yes, I know - hack writer who went mad and nothing genuinely occult about him or the decorated T-Shirt unless you take the theories of Austin Osman Spare seriously. It just happened to be the shirt I was wearing when I travelled to Colchester, the town famous for having been sacked by Boudicca during the Iceni rebellion against the Roman Empire, and for little else except that it's the site of Essex University where I first took Leary's magic remedy. I had friends there. They were having a music festival - well, a general arts festival - at the time. Anybody still remember the Edgar Broughton Band?
Oh, I'd had my bouts with alienation, who hasn't at that age? Shall I inflict a poem on you? Well, you've probably heard of Robert Burns' bit about how you never know how other people see you. Ah, wid som pow'r the giftie gie us or whatever. Can't do the accent. Well, if you can stand that appalling bit of Scottish doggerel you'll probably survive this -
I'd rather see where the moon goes while I sleep Than talk to you.
Better to hear the voices of the others, in the trees and wires than your mundanities.
Though I say nothing, in your mannerisms I hide, in your mirror eyes I see myself distorted and smaller.
And you'll always find me in the kitchen at parties. Pathetic, isn't it? I really hadn't got the idea yet. I didn't know why Mick thought I was a demon sent from Hell to get him when I was only listening to a Jethro Tull album late at night. Benefit, if you must know. I didn't even notice. Blind mower, as Rog would say, ad nauseam. Perhaps it was prophetic. You can read anything into anything if you're stoned enough, or you want to sell a lot of books about Nostradamus to gullible idiots.
Do you have any idea how many monkeys - sorry, proto hominids to be PC - wouldn't want to offend the evolutionarily disadvantaged - dropped out of trees to their deaths before they invented the opposable thumb?
No, neither do I, but this and many other questions preoccupied me the first time I graduated to pure Californian Sunshine. At least, that's what Gypsy called it, and that's what he called himself, though I've no idea where he came from. He just gave me the stuff when we were hitchhiking down the A10. And it really was a dark and stormy night. Sometimes it just is.
If only I were fanous, this would probably be the 'Man from Porlock' incident in reverse. This was the GOOD stuff. Over the next couple of years I'd take acid quite often, but...
I just don't know. Walking up that hill in full daylight, the women's hall of residence seemed to alter in size. It was miles away and enormous, or it could have fitted into my hand. You've seen the Father Ted episode where he's trying to explain perspective to Father Dougal with the toy cows? "These are SMALL. Those out there are FAR AWAY......"
Well, it's like William Blake said. Infinity in a grain of sand and Eternity in an hour. Since he wrote that before lysergic acid was invented, I can only guess at whether he'd been at the mushrooms or he was just naturally strange or, well, a genius. Whatever that means.
The thing about acid is that it's not what you expect, except in the rare cases where it is. Simon, a natural raconteur, told a tale of taking the stuff and spending hours thinking that he was a banana because he'd heard somewhere that it did things like that. You think you're a fruit, you think you can fly. You hallucinate.
I've never hallucinated on acid, I just see things from a different perspective. Of course, Simon was a great kidder and he may have embroidered the truth a bit to make a good tale. I've noticed that people do that. Me? I'm just a lawnmower. See the grass, mow it.
I don't BELIEVE, you see. I don't think the clouds will part and the saucer people will descend and bring an age of enlightenment. Tim, on the other hand...
No, I didn't think I could fly when I stood on the parapet of the Chemistry building. It was a long way down, sure, but I knew I wouldn't fall. I have a very good sense of balance and it works just as well when I'm fifty feet up or whatever. The bit about driving by telepathy...
Well, we were all tired and had eaten a certain amount of cheese. Just because I thought I was directing the car by telekinesis or something and the driver couldn't remember anything about the journey back. I mentioned later that I'd imagined I'd been driving and Pete said "I'm glad somebody was."
We'd been to Uffington Castle. Coming back down the Ridgeway, via Wayland's Forge I had an army of ghosts at my back. Not the unpleasant experience you might imagine. I felt like...
Oh, something like this:
By a Knight of Ghosts and Shadows I summoned am to Tourney Ten Leagues beyond the Wide World's End Methinks it is no Journey
Well, it was very good cheese.
I'm sure you've heard of bad trips, even if you've never actually had one or tripped at all. It's basically just an anxiety attack, amplified by the acid. Well, not amplified exactly...
All the acid does is cut you loose from your preconceptions, the filters that limit your reality. Nothing that happens when you're tripped is unreal. It just doesn't accord with the consensus reality, the mass delusion, that you normally inhabit. I could give any number of examples. The problem is, how much weight do you place on those delusions? How much do they hold up your sense of identity?
What happens when the bottom drops out of your cardboard box? In some people, the reaction is panic. Fear of Pan. Lucky for me that I'd met the Goat-foot God before. Walking through the Darkwood, laughing at thunderstorms. That electricity, the rising of the blood, the energy...
I'm just a little claustrophobic. When the mood is on me I have to get out. Even back then I got the unease at times. It seemed to strike from nowhere at all, even when I'd had nothing more than a small joint of grass at Pete the Leg's place. He wasn't in, I just entered the room and there was a small bag of grass on the table. It didn't say 'Eat me' or 'Drink me' on it, but I took it as read from Alice or the Beanstalk.
You've probably forgotten the monkeys by now, but I hadn't. I went and climbed a tree. Being forty feet above the ground gave me a sense of security and my hands had something to grip. Graham had been wearing platform shoes. That must have been the problem. What sort of city- bred idiot goes for a country walk wearing clobber like that? Bad enough when you're straight...
The Nepalese was different. At this remove in time, I somehow associate it with Roy asking me a question when I was in the bath. We were in a shared hall of residence, you see, and the baths were in cubicles. People could walk in and talk to you over the screens. I mentioned that Roy was a psychology student. Well, the thing is that some aspects of psychology cross over into cybernetics. There's an interface between cognitive psychology and information theory. There's also the fact that the cyb and psych departments shared the TOBs. Temporary Office Buildings constructed in World War II to house government officials - probably having something to with the MoD or whatever it was called then - they were basically bomb shelters. Shabby and decrepit looking, they had probably looked like that from the day they were built and probably still do and will when all the other buildings on campus have collapsed. They stood at the edge of the Wild Woods, on the borderland between two or three worlds. On the one hand, the airy-fairy world of psychology which, I used to tease Roy and Phil, was barely more than witch doctoring; on the other, the Heath Robinson patchwork of primitive digital and analogue computers, electronics labs and lasers that we technomages used.
On the other, other hand the Wild Wood. Originally some sort of conservation project, back in the mists of history, it was supposed to have specimens of all our native trees in it. It didn't take much imagination, at least if you'd had a tab or two, to transform it into Lothlorien or the Old Forest, depending on your mood. Imagine, floating through the endless woodlands of some real or imaginary Britain, or Middle Earth one minute and then coming out to the concrete and weathered brick of the TOBs. Imagine walking through the doors into the sterile, sunless depths where the Morlocks toil at their dark Satanic machines.
Imagine saying hello to dear old Prof Whitfield, your tutor, with faeries still dancing in your head. The weird thing, and mark me well on this, is that I could. I could be away in Elfland, with its horns softly blowing my mind, while my quotidian self exchanged cordial greetings and discussed my academic work, such as it was, and my current project.
But I digress. I should explain that I'd actually met Roy a couple of years before that. Just before the bit with the swine things and the Afghan. It really started when I first went to Reading University and was assigned to a hall or residence - not the one I mentioned previously, that came later - and after finding my room went down to the lobby to read the notices on the message board and try to work out where the dining room was in this maze.
Roy was doing the same thing. We exchanged a few cordial words, as strangers sometimes do. You may or may not have heard of this, but dope fiends can spot each other, as gays are supposed to be able to do. It's not telepathy, really. Intuition? Nobody knows how it works but it does. Within five minutes, Roy said "Let's get stoned."
I know this is a bit circuitous, but I want to explain why Roy asked me the question that he did, and it won't make any sense without context, or explain what happened with the Nepalese. Bear with me. Or just watch Coronation Street. I'm talking to myself, I know that.
Oh, by the way, we did get stoned. Sometimes I dream that I'll wake up with 'Communication Breakdown' just finishing on the tinny tape recorder and the last thirty something years won't have happened. Nothing unusual about that. What's a bit odd is that I sometimes felt that way at the time.
The question Roy asked over the bathroom wall was...
Damn, I need another beer...
Try this. You may still remember Procol Harum.
"At a time like this, which exists maybe only for me, but is nonetheless real, if I can communicate, and in the telling and the bearing of my soul anything is gained, even though the words which I use are pretentious and make you cringe with embarrassment, let me remind you of the pilgrim who asked for an audience with the Dalai Lama.
He was told he must first spend five years in contemplation. After the five years, he was ushered into the Dalai Lama's presence, who said, 'Well, my son, what do you wish to know?' So the pilgrim said, 'I wish to know the meaning of life, father.'
And the Dalai Lama smiled and said, 'Well my son, life is like a beanstalk -
- isn't it?'
And what has that got to do with it, you may ask. The question Roy asked wasn't quite "What's the meaning of life, O Master?" nor am I the Dalai Lama. It was an essay question set by one of Roy's psych tutors. How do the theory of relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem affect the concept of determinism? Obviously the tutor wanted to stretch his students, because not all of them were exactly experts in mathematical physics and some of them may not even have heard of Gödel or Heisenberg nor understood relativity even if they did remember that Einstein had something to do with it. A few of those more clued up on the physical sciences might recall E=MCsquared but only one of them that I knew - Phil - actually knew what it meant. I doubt that more than three people on campus had read Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and actually understood it. Prof Fellgett, possibly. Maybe the tutor who set the essay, but he may have been bluffing. And me.
If I could have written down the conversations I had with Roy over the next couple of days, I'd probably have had the makings of one of those best-selling "Philosophy of Science for Dummies" books. Not that Roy was stupid, far from it. The proofs of the principles in question simply aren't accessible to anyone who doesn't have a very solid maths training, but you can sometimes get the implications across. The thing is, when you try to explain something, you learn about how you understand it yourself. There's a pithy zen saying for this, I'm sure. It'll come to me.
I suppose that was on my mind when I ate the Nepalese. It was my last day of term so, naturally, I decided to get stoned. In lieu of scoring from Pete the Leg, I'd picked something up from a - dare I say it - bootleg dealer. I seem to have a knack for this. I can wander into a totally unfamiliar town and find my way by nose to the only pub selling decent ale, a trick that served me well on the Great Yorkshire Walk, but that's another story. When the campus dealers ran dry, it was I who ventured into shady dives in town and scored off people with colourful sobriquets. When other dope fiends shied away from policemen I would saunter past them nonchalantly with half a pound of Moroccan in my coat pocket and it didn't matter if I had long hair, embroidered Levis and an Afghan. The Plod suss anxiety. I had none.
Well, to cut a long story short, I was going to swallow the stuff, Phil turned up. It didn't look like a lot, but I split it with him. I honestly don't remember what we talked about while we came on. Probably had a cup of tea. Nothing happened for a bit. Then we realised, as you do, that we were just a teeny bit stoned.
It creeps up on you. You start going off on tangents. The conversation gets a bit odd. I don't know why we decided to visit the Glebes. I don't remember how we got there. Walking, presumably, but something odd started happening along the way. We weren't in the real world any more. Or maybe the other way around.
The only odd thing about it was that, as I may have mentioned before, that I don't hallucinate on acid. That's why it took me by surprise, if I'd been in any mental state that would have registered 'surprise' as a meaningful concept. I'd visited Uffington Castle and survived. Back in the Students' Union bar I'd topped off the day by beating the bar champion, Marcus, at electronic football.
Some of you may remember this. Old video computerised game with a little blip on a screen representing the ball. You had a goalie and not much else - it was really more like table tennis. If you didn't score soon, the 'ball' speeded up to the point where no human being could reasonably be expected to stop it until it bounced into one or the other goals. It's not chess, you don't have time to think. When Marcus and I were playing, the blip moved so fast that nobody could see it. He was good. I'd learned the game from Roy about a week previously. I had nothing but good reflexes and focus. I couldn't see that everybody in the bar had gathered around to watch. I could only see the little white blip. Sometimes I couldn't even see that, I just knew where it was. Or my fingers did. I didn't care that I was playing Marcus at all, though I would have if I'd thought about it. He was one of those upper-middle-class radical Marxists who talk bollocks about slitting the throats of the bourgouisie as if they had the faintest idea of what they're talking about. To paraphrase from Casablanca, I might have despised him if I could have been bothered to. I couldn't. I just wanted another pint of Guinness.
I don't suppose that this explains how I ended up with my back to the wall in the kitchen at Glebe Road, or what Tim had to do with it.
Tim was a Cockney, as far as a Yorkshireman like me could tell. He came from London, anyway. Not sure how far from Bow Bells. An ex-skinhead. In his youth - not so long ago - he had been a part of the culture that prescribes big boots, short haircuts, racism, xenophobia and beating up hippies. What we had in common would be hard to explain. He was assigned to me as my partner in practical lab work, which both of us avoided like the plague as an unnecessary distraction from getting stoned. We eventually met up in the Student's Union cafeteria and somehow hit it off while we schemed how to fake our lab results without wasting too much time doing any actual work. I didn't realise at the time just how out of his depth he was.
Did you ever fall over your own assumptions? People live happily with misconceptions every day until they trip over them. There are still people who think that animals - well, the other ones - have better senses than humans. They don't. Dogs have a great sense of smell, sure, but they can hardly see. Cats have a better sense of balance than humans? No. I doubt if any other species on the planet does. We walk and run on two legs and can stand on one. They're just smaller and they use four legs with claws. Fast? Yes. Shorter nerve paths. Spiders and ants have superhuman strength? Nasty beeping noise: Blahh, wrong again. Cube-square law. This is just physics. Elephants can't jump. Psychology took longer to kick in, at least at a conscious level. I didn't see how fragile Tim was until it was too late. You expect a former skinhead to be tough, it's part of the media image. The worst part of this is that I really should have known better. I'd used psychic armour before. Nothing metaphysical implied here, really. Just intuition. I suppose you could call it 'attitude' if you're a denizen of the USA. Brass, whatever. The armour may have been imaginary but it worked and I didn't think much about how it did.
I haven't actually introduced the Glebes. This is remiss of me. If only I could remember their names. Maybe this will help. I recall one stoned afternoon or evening when we all tried to characterise each other as animals. Probably Siberian shamans do the same thing over a bottle of fermented yak's milk. You haven't met Miles yet. Public schoolboy. Tall, handsome and glib, superficially confident and insecure, temporarily mated to the boring and henpecking Audrey. Dave, the vaguely Scottish cynic. Rachel, the French whore. Well, no, she wasn't, she just looked as though she should be. Dave said she'd had more pricks in her than a secondhand dartboard but that's just how Dave talked. Judy.
Well, I said Judy looked like a hamster. Pete the Leg was a tired old lion. Me?
Lone Grey Wolf. Obviously they didn't know about my cat ancestry. I met Judy's mad biker boyfriend Charlie when I was sitting in a tree in the front garden wearing one of Rachel's sweaters, some time after midnight.
The thing about getting supersenses when you're stoned or tripped is easily explained as delusion. It isn't. It isn't true either, but it is real. Blind people don't get sharper hearing. Deaf people don't get a better sense of smell. The organs remain the same, it's the attention that changes.
It was much later, many years later, when I went cat walking home from the pub after midnight. Crossing a piece of wasteground, I couldn't see the way humans usually do. I took on my cat aspect. Moved confidently in the dark, using all my senses, processing information without thinking about it. Feeling the ground with my feet, cross referencing effortlessly with my knowledge of the territory. Perfectly reasonable strategy. Nothing unusual about it, except for the dog. The dog being walked by its master that seemed to see a bipedal 150 pound cat coming at it silently through the dark (dogs don't see well, I told you) and ran away frantically without a bark or a whimper. I didn't scent terror, humans don't scent as well as dogs, but I know it when I see it. What the dog really saw, I don't know, I'm just guessing. That's the problem when you do magic, which is really just stepping out of the box of what you're supposed to be able to do. You see?
Stepping out of the box, Phil and I decided to visit the Glebes. As you do. It wasn't a very big piece of Nepalese we'd eaten but, as with Alice and the mushroom, size didn't matter. It wasn't a long journey, as journeys go, from Sibley Hall to Glebe Road. A mile or so? I don't remember. It just stretched out and twisted around until it was something Dante or Shelley might have seen on opium. That's not quite right, but I don't have any better words to describe it. Everything got very big and very loud. A car passing down the road was something Spielberg or Lucas would have wanted in Star Wars. The little house on Glebe Road became an oasis, something we had to find refuge in before...
Before what? We didn't know. I don't hallucinate, as I said. I don't turn into bananas. I only know that we reached the oasis and there were people I knew there and they didn't object when I slid down the wall in the kitchen and just went somewhere else. The shamans say that's always how it works. You go somewhere else and, when you come back, if you do, you know something. They never tell you what it is that you know, because they can't. You can't describe it to anyone who hasn't been there. I went into my own mind and saw it working. Maybe on a molecular or quantum level. It wasn't any geometry I've seen before, but the nearest I can get to it is seeing where your mind goes while you sleep while you're wake. Watching the boys in the backroom working underneath your mind. The beehive. Or maybe the mad pipers at the centre of infinity that Lovecraft saw in a fever dream. They are real. They are not outside us, they're in there. You just have to look.
Oh, Roy's question? Were you wondering how I answered it? Probably not, if you've lost track. How do Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and Einstein's theory of relativity affect the notion of determinism, remember? It was an essay question from one of Roy's tutors. He must have had a sense of humour, as hardly any of his students had a clue about what any of these were, let alone what they meant. Roy only asked me because I'm a mathematician and was, of course, his guru. Did I mention that before?
What do you say at a time like that? My RAF overcoat had occupied Ade's room some time ago and threatened to take it over. I tended to take refuge in trees when anxious. The squirrels don't mind. What sort of guru do you want?
The divination?
Here is where the runes fell.
`"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied. "There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer is to France-- Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?"'