Engravings of the mind of mankind

And other drugs

It was past midnight when we found him, pacing up and down the length of his room, back and forth, again and again and again. He would lie down on his bed for the briefest of moments and then immediately stand back up and resume pacing. He was talking, but it was unclear to whom, or about what. He was agitated and aimless and aggressive, a rabid animal. At intervals, he was literally tearing his hear out.

He didn't notice us at first. When we finally got his attention, he talked to the wall, then to his phone, and then to the hallway, looking over our shoulders. He explained that he was being hunted by the FBI. That they had bugged his phone and his room, and were following him whenever he went outside. Of course, when we disagreed with him, or tried to point out the unlikelihood of that, it only made him more paranoid, convinced that we too were in league with the FBI, all of us conspiring against him. Sometimes his speech decayed into an incoherent succession of disordered statements, what we call word salad. One moment he is speaking to us asking for our help because he is "having a heart attack," the next he is talking on his phone (clearly there is no one at the other end) reporting that we are trying to kill him, the next explaining a complex web of cryptic connections between various government agencies.

We later learned that he was afflicted with schizophrenia— literally "split soul", the Greek roots σχίζω ("schizo") meaning to split or divide, and φρήν ("fren") loosely translated as mind, but more accurately denoting the seat of both wits and emotions, the gestating place of hungers and fears and hopes and desires, located for them in the stomach of all places, not in the head where we do. At baseline, reality was an M.C. Escher painting for him, maddeningly difficult to navigate. Ordinarily, his psychological condition was somewhat under control, especially with the help of his prescribed medications, to be taken thrice daily, and a controlled environment, and a closely regulated schedule filled with both individual and group therapy sessions.

But everything went haywire when he opted to get high on methamphetamine, a drug discovered in 1896, chemical formula C₁₀H₁₅N — a sympathomimetic, activating the body's natural fight-or-flight system, which for him exacerbated his underlying mental health condition, sending him into overdrive, his worst nightmares and secret suspicions turned into grotesque chimeras which he perceived as visual and auditory hallucinations, every bit as real to him as us who were actually in the room— when smoked it has an onset of about 18 minutes, and a half-life of 10 hours, meaning that for him, the current state of psychosis would continue to be a problem for an agonizingly long time, not only putting him at risk of hurting himself, but also endangering the other tenants of the halfway house in which he was staying.

So we had to intervene.

And so, ironically, though we had absolutely no intention of harming him, and our deepest desire was to take him to a safe place (the hospital) where he could gradually return to sanity (relatively speaking) and get the treatment he needed, yet still his worst fears came to life in the most excruciating manner, when we and four firefighters had to physically coerce him onto our cot and inject him with a sedative. I'll never forget his horrific screams as he howled into the night, begging to be set free, pleading for mercy, convinced that we were covert envoys of the federal government, sent to assassinate him in cold blood.

On the streets of Denver, Colorado, where I work, meth is the most commonly abused chemical substance, supplanted only recently by Fentanyl, an opiate derivative, which is closely related to the more commonly known Morphine (itself a word that comes from the Greek Μορφευς "Morpheus", the god of dreams), chemical formula C₂₂H₂₈N₂O, with a mechanism of action almost exactly the opposite, suppressing the central nervous system, producing lethargy, stupor, and — most attractively — euphoria. They say it is like the sweet feeling of a well-earned rest after a month's long hard physical labor, sitting back with your best friends around a table full of your favorite foods, kicking back with a few ice-cold beers (or your drink of choice), full of laughter and merriment, surrounded by loved ones, both friends and also your own personal lover, who will soon take you to bed where you can rest your weary head in a bliss of exhaustion. Take that moment, encapsulated, chemically distilled, and magnified a thousand-fold, available for $1 a pill, accessible within 5 minutes and lasting much longer, with a half-life of roughly 5 hours. Who wouldn't try it?

I have seen a woman who had the excellent idea to take both of these drugs simulatenously, meth and fentanyl, an upper and a downer, which they call reds and blues, a practice commonly called "speedballing;" an experience like when some people combine cocaine and hard liquor, but in this case obviously much more potent. At one moment she was totally unarousable, oblivious to all the world, drooling from her mouth in the most syrupy of sleeps, a dream so deep that she forgot to breathe, until I had to wake her up by pinching her nailbeds (a very sensitive spot— try it on yourself), the next moment she awoke in a furor, angry, vindictive, combative, ready to fight you tooth and nail (literally) for her god-given right to peace and quiet, which would totally be true, except that in this case she was not herself and had lost those rights, else without our intervention she would have fallen asleep forever. And as if to prove this point, after about 30 seconds of frenzied fighting, she promptly crashed and fell back to sleep, and stopped breathing. So we woke her up again. And it was back and forth like this with her, all the way to the hospital, until we could help her safely get sober.

Segue

But I am not telling these stories to talk about drugs; instead I want to talk about something much more powerful, though subtler. I want to suggest a different type of experience, one in which you are unwittingly already engaged. Because while the substances mentioned above are enticing, just by the mere fact of the overpowering influence they can have on a human mind and body, there are also obvious downsides to them, including addiction, which is not uncommon, and which tends to lead to the loss of everything you hold dear, your job and your family and your health and your hygiene and your will, and finally, your life.

The human body is a tremendously complex machine, driven by a multi-industrial complex of several tightly interwoven organ systems— cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, digestive, skeletal, muscular, reproductive, renal, integumentary, and so on— each of them activated and deactivated by electro-chemical signals, a myriad of hormones and neurons and muscles and chemical interactions of elemental potassium and sodium and calcium and oxygen, instructions encoded by strings of twin helix genomic sequences that are millions of characters long, formed on a pattern that is billions of years old, shared by trillions of different species.

All of this is staggeringly beautiful. And there are medicines and drugs with intricate constructions which can interact with the body in baroque patterns, but also just slight variations in the levels of carbon-dioxide in the blood can cause cataclysmic reactions, and any of these can interact with bodily systems in ways that are both euphoric and tyrannical, exhilarating and showstopping, that can accelerate the body with the velocity of a rocket-ship, or decelerate it with the crashing force of the same rocket hitting the earth's crust at terminal velocity. Some of these drugs are even released internally during key moments— sex being one of the most recognizable— but also near-death experiences, or the bonding of mother and baby immediately after childbirth, or the adrenaline dump of fighting for your life— whether chased by a predator or in the ring of a fight— or running a competitive race, or competing in a championship-stakes tournament, or acting the lead part of your favorite play to a sold-out crowd, or approaching someone you deeply admire, or deeply desire, or deeply despise, or strenuously climbing a mountain and reaching the peak, to be rewarded with an unprecedented vista of the earth that stuns you, an landscape carved by the flow of wind and rain and river over hundreds of thousands of years.

Coda

But still there is something else, something more rapturous, more engrossing, more all-consuming, at least for me. For none of these things compare with how it feels to read the written word. Not just any word, in fact not most of them, but a few, a very rare few, at the right place and at the right time, are all it takes to massacre your mind, to send you reeling, to fly you to the moon. If you're still reading at this point, you know what I'm talking about. Not everyone appreciates it, most are oblivious to it, and I don't know how it starts or if it ever leaves you, but I do know this— that I have it, that I've felt it with more certainty that anything else I've ever known; that words are beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and they rock me harder than any punch I've ever taken, they take me higher than any cliff I've ever climbed, they immolate my mind, they make my day, they make me cry.

And it's not just the written word, though that's often how it starts, the spoken word too, especially the lyric, attached to a song, that stirs our hearts. They are merely poems attached to melodies, but at the end of the day, it's still just words. And so are speeches and arguments and whispers and gossip.

Words have the power to inspire revolutions, to ignite people fight for freedom, to struggle for equality, to destroy despotism. Words can kindle love between two strangers, or can burn a marriage to cinders. Words can encourage children to achieve the impossible, or doom them to a life of hopelessness and learned helplessness. Words in a contract or a statute can doom an enterprise, or a prisoner, or set them free, or start them off on a second chance. Words can bring a wave of nostalgia that suffocates us in itswhirlpool, or they can instill a vision that guides a life through all sorts of storms. Yes, words are a drug for the spirit, invigorating not just the body and the brain, but something more sublime, their activation time is instant, their half-life is immeasurable, their effect is incalculable.

It's why I read, but more than that, it's why I write, even when it seems recklessly futile, indulgent and wasteful, unnecessarily stressful and taxing and difficult. Because there are words written on the page which are more valuable than gold, than platinum, than diamonds or rubies or any combination thereof, words are wealthier that uncountable riches. Something basic and primal about mere words, the stuff of cavemen and of babies, yet also something ungraspable, intangible, ever elusive and incomprehensible, something no one can ever master. A voice crying in the wilderness, saying "hear me", and desperately trying to communicate, even though recoding the mind's impressions into words and grammar and syntax and then back is an impossible task, but still we do it, however imperfectly, because our hearts are incessantly begging to express themselves.

Let me be hijacked by words. Not any drug do I need, neither stimulants nor sedatives, nor psychedelics, tonics, elixirs, potions, or pills, no none of those will do for me. My panacea is prose, my medication the music of language, my vice the incising bite of well-articulated argument or a transcendent story, this is intoxicating enough in itself, it is invigorating and animating and tranquilizing and mesmerizing, all at once, I need nothing else to set me free from reality, nor do I wish to escape it, but rather to explore it more deeply through stories sharing of the experiences of others, and to tell some of my own.

And let me be a part of that one interminable tale, every written word from all time, the entire compendium of characters and letters and the words they form, since Babylon til now, and further on into the future, into space, beyond time, beyond our galaxy, beyond our consciousness. Let my words join that ever-flowing stream, seeking to make its mark, to leave a legacy behind, carved into stone, and written upon hearts, and when finally we are all gone, still something remains, the engravings of the mind of mankind in the wonder of our words.