In the Garden of Eden (Part 1)

Of Gods and Narcotics

We were lying by the lakeside, languid and glorious, somewhere in Northern Europe. It was a techno festival, and high summer. People were enjoying their bodies howevery which way they felt: in swimwear, carnival costume or naked and free, high on life, on music, on company and neurochemical exotica. Dirty bass lines and sunshine, the joyous eruption of dancing and delight - it felt alive, and eclectic, and thrilling.

A be-dreadlocked gothic starchild of fabulous and fickle fortunes comes up to us and asks if we would like to buy her energy balls. I ask how strong they are, and with airy vagueness she says that it depends. Well, what the hell.

First mistake: I'm not following my own rules. I'm not experienced with cannabinoids, and my rules are that when taking something new

1) You should only take a low dose,
2) Of things you understand,
3) In the company of those who know how they work,
4) In a controlled environment.

(At least until you've got a handle on them.) And everyone says that edibles are stronger, and you can't control the dose, and that THC is balanced by CBD and that these days the ratio is completely imbalanced. In fact there was no CBD in this at all. Right.

Second mistake: Trusting her measure on these things. Whenever I'm approached by a moonpixie with bare shoulders and jangling anklets, my brain shuts down and I start feeling with my dick-chakra instead. I wanted to look like someone who knew what I was doing in front of the pretty lady. Jesus, you'd think I'd have grown up by now. In any similar situation I should have one tenth of whatever the woodelf is having.

Third mistake: I feel a voice in me saying it's not a good idea, and I ignore it. Substance, 'set and setting - if a part of you is worried, listen to that voice, it's there for a reason. But, you know, all my processing is going on below the diaphragm, and it's a festival and you want to go with the flow...

We take the hemp-and-chia-seed-date-based-all-organic-no-additives-nutritional-energy-balls (laced with synthetic pure THC oil) and thank our erstwhile mid-witch-wife. She wishes us well and frolics off into the press, showering glitter like one of Satan's merry tinkerbells. My friend suggests getting some food so we go hunting while waiting for things to kick off.

The carnal clattering, the cheering and whistling and music, the dust, the dust kicked up by passing feet, the dust-hazed sun. It's initially pleasantly overwhelming. We're drawn to the booming bass of a (Kazakhstani?) trans, riot grrrl set with strong police-aesthetics in what I can only presume was a queer-punk political piece about the authoritarian surveillance state we're living in and that gender is our own mental prison.

I'm saying all this like I understood what was going on. I didn't have a clue what was going on. The effects are creeping in, and on the one hand I'm enjoying it: I'm getting that lovely shimmery, muscley feeling where the music is moving through me and I'm dancing with awkward synaesthetic grace, trying to roll with the bizarreness of it all. On the other hand, my head is smoke and it's starting to prang me out. I start to notice that a lot of the stages have riffed on this same vibe as this act: set props look like security cameras, painted black and yellow like police cordons, and neighbouring stages blaring out heavy German industrial hardcore - it's all dark and daunting and ominous. I start feeling like I'm in a bit of an oppressive place, like I'm being monitored. Uh-oh.

We move off and find a stall selling burritos, and I'm realising I'm definitely beyond high now. My friend comes back from the queue. "What do you think love is?" I ask her inbetween voracious chunks of tangy faux-mexican munchiness. "I see you as a lighthouse, beaming out, my attention always drawn to you like a harbour of safety." I turn my back and thumb over my shoulder as if that should explain it. She laughs, stoned, and unable to keep up with me. My mind is flitting-manic like a dog chasing butterflies. Everything is steadily dissolving, crumbling away, matter granulating and then sublimating into whisps and sparks. It's approximately as if God is unmantling the universe out of tetris blocks as my reality slips through my grasp like soup through a collander. I no longer can even make out my friend's body, just staccato rainbow waves of light streaming out from her heartbeat. It's all gotten a bit much. Still, the burrito's good. Really good actually.

In my mind, what happens goes something like this: 'Actually, I'm not sure about this. I feel a bit out of control. *Munch* Oh God, what if I do something stupid?... Mmmm this is tasty... Like climb up one of the stages and try to fly? Man that would be so dumb, and ruin things for everybody. I definitely need to not do that. I should get somewhere safe.' I say to my friend "Hey, do you think you could get me back to the tent site?" *gobble* "I think I need to calm down a bit."

My friend takes my shoulder and we start walking back. I've gone entirely inside myself. 'Hmm, it's funny how you feel all the parts of your body separately, like your feet are here and your hands are here and I'm eating all at once and that's the feeling of trying to swallow... huh... I can't swallow properly. Umm, yep the food is definitely there, at the back of the throat. It's not going down. Huh, what if I can't swallow and I choke and can't breathe and join that list of casualties who got high and choked on their own vomit?'

The 'knowledge' comes to me that people who choke are always people who cannot swallow their own truth... poetic, but rather harsh. Luckily I've never bought that line about truth being beautiful. Still, I'm starting to panic now; I genuinely can't swallow, and I'm realising the fucking pathetic spectacle of choking to death on spicy rice in front of everyone just because I didn't want to heed my own rules on set and setting in the face of being sensible and recognising my own inexperience. That would definitely ruin everyone's festival and I'd be dead, for fucks' sake.

I should say that at this point I've entered into what I characterise as a psychotic mental space: it seems to me that everything means something else - I'm being tested and things are happening for a reason, and whether or not they work out OK depends on passing the test. It feels like I'm choking because I was too arrogant to follow my own advice. Now, you might say that 'post-hoc ergo propter hoc' does not good reasoning make, but I will counter to you that logical fallacies and whacking THC doses are not unknown to occasionally occur together. My usual reality-map has disintegrated and my brain is desperately trying to create a new one, and it does so by dredging ideas up from my collective unconscious and applying them to what appears to be happening around me - filtered of course through a cannabinoid lens. I've been here before through different (non-recreational) means, and I've been here since, but at this festival I didn't understand what was happening. Without putting too fine a point on it, I was way out of my depth and it was not reassuring.

Back at the campsite I'm sat on the grass to try and calm me down, but it's not helping. I really can't shift the food and for a short moment I'm stuck between trying to work out if I'm supposed to get myself out of this mess, cause I got myself into it, or if I'm being tested in a different way. I realise that asking for help is a humbling act, the sort of opposite of arrogance, and so I call to my friends and indicate that I'm choking and with a lot of whooping and gesticulating they get it and start thumping me. Good. I get the beating I need and feel I deserve and cough and splutter and finally clear the rice and breeeeeeeeeeeathe. Phew. Close call. Glad that's over.

Yea, no. That's how it begins.

Notes from 'A People's History of the World' Part 1

Harman C. 2008.

Harman begins with a one page time line that covers the period between 4 Million Years Ago (MYA) and 2,000 years ago. Here is an abreviation of the portion up to 5,000 years ago (YA):

4MYA Australopithecus, First ape to walk on two legs.
1.5-0.5 MYA Human species, Homo Erectus, emerge.
400,000 YA - 30,000 YA: Neanderthals are spread to Europe and Middle East. Culture and Language first emerging.
150,000 YA Homo Sapiens species emerge in Africa. They live in small groups foraging. No class, states or sexual oppression.
80,000 YA Homo Sapiens arrive in Middle East.
40,000 YA arrive in Australia.
30,000 YA arrive in Europe [They make it to Australia before Europe?! Cool].
14,000 YA arrive in Americas.
13,000 YA stable climate. Villages of a few hundred members, still living by foraging.
10,000 YA First agricultural revolution. Pottery, stone tools, domestication of plants and animals. Village living spreads. Evidence of the first wars, but no class society.
7,000 YA use of the plough in Africa and Eurasia. Agriculture reaches Northern Europe.
6-5,000 YA 'Urban revolution' in Middle East and Nile river valleys. Some use of copper.

5,000 YA: Emergence of states in Mesopotamia and Old Kingdom Egypt. Bronze Age. Social classes, gendered division of labour and women tend to be viewed as inferior. Religious hierarchies and temples, alphabet.

The prologue is titled "Before Class" and criticises the charactures of human nature which our society produce. Our society projects warlike tendencies, hierarchy, class and greed into an unchanging history of humanity, and blames our unhappy lot on the tragedy of human nature. But this is a fiction. Instead it is argued that these aspects of human society only become visible around 5,000 years ago with the rise of class societies. Harman quotes the following from anthropologist Richard Lee:

"Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations." pp 3

This is compared to Engels' notion of 'primitive communism'. Human society, such as it existed for over a million years, and 150,000 years as modern humans, never contained class or inequality as we know it, until the last 5,000 years, and even then only in very specific places until these cultures spread across the world. For most of our history the emphasis has been on cooperation, coordination and community. Therefore modern notions of human nature are fictitious accounts of the past used to justify the present order of things.

In fact, the distinctive aspects of the human animal is that we are 1. Flexible and 2. Cooperative. We use our hands to make tools and our voices to communicate, our brains to analyse and empathise and share tasks and fruits. The emergence of consciousness is left as a mystery but linked to the development of language and the analytic ability to conceptualise things in the world. But this means that our very consciousness comes out of the sharing of ideas, of the partaking in society.

We emerge, 150,000 YA as foragers (hunters and gatherers) in Africa with these attributes already. We spread across the world over the next 90,000 years, displacing other human species such as Neanderthals. Although the small bands were fairly isolated and diverged in culture and language, genetic differences remained small and were always greater within groups than between them. Humans have remained entirely one species. Culture varied in response to the every day needs of humans in their different environments. Until about 10,000 YA all human cultures obtained their food, shelter and clothing in roughly the same way - foraging (what is normally called hunting and gathering).

Some of these same societies survive today, but very very few. The expansion of the society in which we live has all but obliterated alternative societies. However, for more than 95% of modern human history, life was the same for most people all over the world.

"People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such 'band societies' was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more 'civilised' agricultural or industrial societies... there were no rulers, bosses or class divisions in these societies. As Turnbull wrote of the Mbuti pygmies of Congo, 'There were no chiefs, no formal councils. In each aspect of... life there might be one or two men or women who were more prominent than others, but usually for good practical reasons... The maintenance of law was a cooperative affair'... Ernstine Friedl reported from her studies, 'Men and women alike are free to decide how they will spend each day: whether to go hunting or gathering, and with whom. Aleanor Leacock told of her findings: 'There was no... private land ownership and no specialisation of labour beyond that of sex... People make decisions baout the activities for which they were responsible. Consensus was reached within whatever group would be carrying out a collective activity." pp9

In these societies there did tend to be a sexual division of labour, but never male supremacy. Men tended to do most of the hunting, and women tended to do most of the gathering, primarily because when pregnant or breast feeding to hunt would expose them or an infant to more danger. But hunting and gathering were equally valued, and decisions were made by all. Additionally there was no private property as such because everything one had had to be carried between one camp and another. There was no accumulation of private wealth.These points are repeated: that everything is shared, that cultural customs prohibit hoarding, greed, selfishness, boasting and arrogance, that there is no one above and no one below.

Such is the structure of society before class, for most of human existence. The developments that take place over the last 10,000 years, fragmented, piecemeal, and made by innumerable men and women forgotten to history, are what we usually call 'history' and the development of civilisation. Two tendencies develop: the increase of humanity's ability to extract what it needs from nature, and eventually to dominate and domesticate it, and

"the rise of successive forms of organisation of society that oppress and exploit the majority of people to the benefit of a small, priviliged minority." pp9

 The development of which will be covered in the next part.