Indeterminacy 97

Certain tribes in Siberia trade several sheep for one Amanita
muscaria and use the mushroom for orgiastic practices. The women
chew the raw mushroom and the chewed pulp is mixed with blueberry
juice. This is drunk by the men and is productive of
hallucinations. It also changes the relation between the ego and
social ideals. Thus, the urine of those who have been affected
by the mushroom is in high demand and is drunk with pleasure,
for it contains a sufficient amount of the drug to continue its
wild effects. The Vikings who went berserk are thought to have
done so by means of this same mushroom. ¶ Nowadays we hear of
biochemical experiments using Amanita muscaria or other
hallucinatory mushrooms or the drugs synthesized in imitation
of them — experiments in which professors, students, or
criminals become temporarily schizophrenic, sometimes for the
novelty of it, other times for purely scientific purposes. Just
as we soon will travel to the moon and other earths, and add to
our telephone conversations the practice of seeing one another
while we speak, so one will do with his mind what he now does
with his hair, not what it wants to do but what he wants it to
do. People in the near future will not suffer from
schizophrenia; they will simply be schizophrenic if and when
they have the desire. ¶ Life is changing. One of the ways I’m
trying to change mine is to get rid of my desires so that I won’t
be deaf and blind to the world around me. When I mention my
interest in mushrooms, most people immediately ask whether I’ve
had any visions. I have to tell them that I’m very old-fashioned,
practically puritanical, that all I do is smoke like a furnace
— now with two filters and a coupon in every pack — and that I
drink coffee morning, noon, and night. I would also drink
alcohol but I made the mistake of going to a doctor who doesn’t
permit it. The visions I hear about don’t interest me. Dick
Higgins said he ate a little muscaria and it made him see some
rabbits. Valentina Wasson ate the divine mushrooms in Mexico
and imagined she was in eighteenth-century Versailles hearing
some Mozart. Without any dope at all other than caffeine and
nicotine, I’ll be in San Francisco tomorrow hearing some of my
own music and on Sunday, God willing, I’ll awake in Hawaii with
papayas and pineapples for breakfast. There’ll be sweet-smelling
flowers, brightly colored birds, people swimming in the surf,
and (I’ll bet you a nickel) a rainbow at some point during the
day in the sky.

- John Cage