Broken Music: A Memoir (2 page)

I was finding it difficult to mourn my parents. Their deaths had upset me greatly, but I felt that I was somehow blocking normal emotional responses, that I wasn’t dealing with their loss in a psychologically healthy manner. I hadn’t cried, not even a tear, but had merely felt cold, isolated, and confused. I had no easy faith within which to seek solace.

What I’d read about ayahuasca and its transcendent visionary qualities intrigued me greatly, and in my current frame of
mind I thought if I experienced the miraculous potion in a serious ritual setting, then I might come to some deeper understanding about what had happened to my parents as well as myself

I’d only ever had a passing, superficial interest in recreational drugs, but taking ayahuasca had been described to me as a deeply serious and life-changing experience, and one that I now considered myself ready for. If I was to find myself in any danger from this experience, psychological or otherwise, then I would have to regard myself as having been adult enough to take the risk, in much the same way as I would climb a mountain, or get on a motorcycle. In speaking to experienced ayahuasceros it had been impressed upon me that ayahuasca is not a drug but a medicine. “A drug,” one had told me, “gives you an instant reward, some kind of gratification, whether it’s a cigarette, alcohol, cocaine, or dope, but later you pay with a headache, a hangover the next day, or worse, dependency and addiction. Smoke enough cigarettes and you will die. Traditionally medicine doesn’t give you an instant reward. You may be gratified eventually but you will have to pay first. Ayahuasca is such a medicine.”

I had no idea what he could have meant, but I was about to find out.

Maybe twenty minutes pass. The music continues. The chair of the officiating
mestre
is never unoccupied; if he leaves the room, one of the attendants takes his place until his return. There is a soothing formality about all of this, a sense of order and ritual.

The first indication that the potion is taking effect is the emergence of a high-pitched frequency inside my head like a dog whistle, followed by an increasing numbness in the lips
and a distinct drop in my body temperature. I begin to shiver, gently at first but with increasing intensity, starting at my feet and moving up my legs in wave after wave, until my whole body is shaking violently It is difficult to tell whether the shivering is a psychological reaction due to fear or simply that I’m cold. I am conscious enough to know not to panic and to attempt to steady my breathing, but nausea wells in my throat and then proceeds to grip my stomach with increasing intensity until it feels like a writhing serpent inside of me trying to escape. It is all I can do to prevent myself from projectile vomiting. I grip the arms of the chair and breathe as deeply as I can.

Something powerful and relentless is coursing through my entire body, through every blood vessel and artery, down the length of my legs to my toes, and along the sinews of my arms. My fingers are shot with an alien energy. The foul taste that remains in my mouth seems like a physical analogue of fear itself, and I realize I’m in the grip of some kind of chemical entity that is at this moment vastly more powerful than I am. While the storm rages inside me, the thunder outside begins again, another ominous and rolling threat from the heavens. I turn to Trudie, who looks to be sleeping, but there are rapid eye movements below her lids, and her brows are knitted together in intense concentration. I whisper, “God, please keep us safe.” And this time there is no irony at all.

The entire room seems to be gripped in this same visceral struggle. Some writhe in their seats, others have clearly capitulated, openmouthed and corpselike, while others seem calm and transfixed as if by beatific visions. Then, as a bizarre counterpoint to the call of the thunder, the retching begins.

I had been warned of this, but nothing can quite prepare you for the piteous sound of this woeful, violent music, the
music of abject, physical misery. I am barely able to control my own intestinal tract as I watch others leave their seats to scramble unceremoniously for the door. Some make it, some do not. There are buckets of sawdust on hand to cover the offending pools of bile.

Please, let this pass, I don’t want to throw up, I don’t want to be embarrassed here, let this pass
.

The
mestres
sit impassive and stoic in the center of the room, as if this is the normal run of events. They too have partaken of the brew, and in large doses, but do not seem to be succumbing to the growing nausea and discomfort in the room.

Outside the nearest window, one tortured soul seems to be exorcising a relentless train of hideous demons from the bowels of his personal hell. I try stopping up my ears with my fingers and breathing deeply; I really can’t take much more of this. I am no longer shivering, but the anaconda inside me is furious to leave my body. Beads of sweat begin to form on my face and chest, and my eyes roll back in my head. Did I really elect to do this? I must have been out of my mind. I have never felt this bad in my entire life, nor do I remember having been so afraid. Another peal of thunder compounds the agony, but just when I imagine I am drained of all will to withstand this onslaught, I hear the singing. I hear the beautiful, unearthly voice of the
mestre
from Manaus, unaccompanied and floating on the moist air, filling the room with the sweet fragrance of melody. I close my eyes, the better to drink in the gentle balm of the song, and I find myself in a vast cathedral of light.

The song has become light and color, the fantastical architecture of Dante and Blake, and I am suspended from a roof of souls, a sky-arching dome of seraphic hosts. The visions are transmuting into miraculous spiraling, geometric structures,
towers, tunnels, vortices, chambers. The clarity of the visions and the electricity of the colors are so alien to the experience of waking life as to be of a different order of reality entirely And yet to open one’s eyes is to return to the room as it was. But these are not hallucinations. There is no distortion of visible reality; the colors and the visions are a separate reality projected onto the back of the eyelids. Closing your eyes transports you to this other world, as real as any other, where sound becomes light and light becomes color and color turns into geometry and geometry triggers memory and stories and emotions not only from your own life, but astoundingly from what seems to be the lives of others. I am either dreaming awake or I am dead.

I am in a bomber over a fire-stormed city at night; I am in a longboat under a sail in a gray sea. I am in a battle, and the thunder outside has become the roar of ordnance. I am deep underground in a filthy trench and there is someone at my side in the corner of my vision, almost like a shadow. I shall call him “the companion.” There are others too, the artillery barrage shaking the ground everywhere around us. The others are little more than youths in ill-fitted battle dress and steel helmets flecked with mud, fearful and shivering in the damp tunnel. I too am afraid and shake my head in an attempt to alter the vision.

Suddenly I am in the town of my childhood in the north of England. I am a small boy, gazing at lists of hundreds of names carved into stone, watched over by two soldier-sentinels cast in weathered bronze, their heads lowered solemnly over the stocks of upturned rifles. My child’s hand is touching a cold metallic foot.

The thunder and the barrage continue and here I am, back again underground with the companion, watching as those
with him line up in an anxious file beneath the lip of the trench. Someone is coughing uncontrollably. I have a sense that when the guns stop it is the companion, just out of my line of vision, who will give the order to clamber over the parapet into danger. I can taste the fear again in my mouth, as acrid and bitter as the brown liquid I have ingested. The ordnance suddenly falls silent. Every face is turned toward the companion, but I still can’t see him.

A faraway whistle blows, although it may be the call of a tropical night bird deep in the jungle, and then another, closer and closer all the way down the line. The
mestre
is still singing, beautifully, but with an occasional atonality, a quarter tone that is darkly disturbing and otherworldly. I sense that the companion has become still and rigid like one of the bronze statues, a whistle buried deep in his hand.

“Blow the fuckin’ whistle, Sergeant!” spits a furious and anonymous voice, and I hear more angry shouts along the line.

“Come on, Sergeant, for fucks sake,” they shout, seeming desperate to kill or be killed, and I’m struck by the thought that some of them are too afraid to be thought cowards, too afraid to step out of the lineage of brutality and cruelty that is as old as history.

“Will you blow that fuckin’ whistle?”

But no one moves as the guns begin to rattle aboveground, and I know they are spraying death across the wire. We hear screams of anger and agony. The companion gives no order and no one moves from the relative safety of the trench. The
mestre
holds a long suspended note, hanging like a flare in the sky, as a terrifying battle rages around us.

I too am angry and confused: what the hell does this have to
do with me? I feel as if I’m in some kind of virtual theater, an experiment in reality, or a waking nightmare, but one that I don’t seem able to shake off It is clear that the figures around me are in mortal danger. Their terror is palpable and hideously claustrophobic. Yet at the same time I have the unwelcome impression that I am the cause of this, and am being asked to navigate the realm of my own deepest fears. I sense too that I will not be harmed, but that I am undergoing some kind of test.

My head is spinning with questions, but I am so astounded by the clarity of these visions that I am unable to speak and unable to exit this other reality that is not my own. But there are levels of thought below these visions that observe and comment on them, and farther levels beneath those, commenting in turn to infinity. And where normal objective thought can give comfort, allowing the mind to step outside of an imagined or real danger, here the strategy only compounds the fear that there is no bedrock to reality, that so-called objective reality is only a construct, and this realization I suppose is akin to madness.

In this new context, I’m forced to question the foundations of my rarified and privileged existence, my life in the world of friends, colleagues, and family. Isn’t what we refer to as reality merely a consensus, an agreement between us that certain things are real and others aren’t? I may be at this interface now, shivering in a jungle church with two hundred others but also quaking with fear in a dark and sodden trench. This is how I imagine that those close to death must feel. Confused, disoriented, and afraid.

Our species, like every other, has annihilation written into its DNA, the difference being that we know it. How are we supposed to learn to die without fear, to die with courage, dignity, and acceptance? And why must we live in such paralyzing
terror of what is preordained? How prepared were my parents to face their deaths? For that matter, how prepared am I? Well, the honest answer is, not at all. I think that is why I’m here in this awful trench, because I have something to learn.

I have never had a genuine religious experience. I say this with some regret. I have paid lip service to the idea, certainly, but a devastating, ego-destroying, ontological epiphany I simply have not had. More devout souls than I may have visited this realm through prayer, meditation, fasting, or from undergoing a near-death experience. Religious literature is full of such visionary claims, and while I’ve no reason to doubt their veracity, I would venture to say that such experiences are rare. For every St. Teresa, Ezekiel, or William Blake, there are millions like me with no direct experience of the transcendent, of the eternal, of the fathomless mystery at the root of all religious thought. But the ayahuasca has brought me close to something, something fearful and profound and deadly serious.

I’ve never been able to fully accept the idea of reincarnation—I’ve met too many people who thought they were Cleopatra or Charles the First in some previous life for me ever to take seriously the extension of the ego beyond death. I do believe, though, that a battle, for example, is a massive psychic event that could leave powerful aftershocks in what Carl Jung would call “the collective unconscious.” On July 1, 1916, at the opening of the Battle of the Somme, there were fifty thousand casualties before midday—and that was just the British. But why should an event like this have significance for me? Why this particular scenario? Perhaps I’d taken to heart too many Wilfred Owen poems at school, or was being punished for my morbid fascination with the local war memorial as a
child. I don’t know the answer to these questions, and they keep tumbling into my mind. In a kaleidoscope of color, fractal geometry, and strangeness, the visions continue.

I am now an invisible witness in a military court. The companion is standing between two soldiers as he is cross-examined in precise legal jargon that I may have read at some time or heard in a movie but have no conscious knowledge of He displays no emotion as the sentence is read. I turn my head and we are in a cold gray field emerging in the light of early morning. There is a firing squad arranged in a ragged line in front of us. They look reticent, some of them angry to be out in this cold field shuffling awkwardly like nervous horses, their breath visible in the chill morning air, but when I look closely they have the same faces as the boys in the trench. The rifles are raised to their shoulders as orders to take aim are barked across the empty fields, and I shudder with the certainty that these boys will kill the man who had saved them. The moment is frozen like a tableau, and I am its witness.

The
mestre’s
song is rising to a mournful, keening coda. My eyes are full and I begin to weep, silently at first, and then uncontrollably, with racking sobs. My eyes are streaming bitter salt while all the colors behind them are bleeding to red.

Time passes. I am in my mother’s womb, and the song of the
mestre
has become the voice of my father. Why would I be surprised that such overwhelming sadness, such betrayal, such eerie tragedy should conjure up the memory of my remote and tormented father, and of my mother, my beautiful, sad mother?