"I sat speechless in a hypnogogic state while he seemed to transform, in the shifting firelight and white noise and the reflections of ten thousand fingers of fractal silver waves, into a spectrum of beings. He reaggregated as the alchemist Paracelsus, as the Gnostic wizard Hermes Trismegistus, as an ecclesiastical conspirator in 16th Century Basel, as an itinerant thinker on a Scottish beach. He displayed the Dionysiac intoxication recalled by Euripides in The Bacchae, yet the solemnity of a Delphic priest as clouds of myrrh trailed from his oracular pronouncements. He became robot flesh from synthetic DNA and future avatars penetrating the present for just one encounter, then a Miocene hominid speaking unknown tongues before the advent of fire. He became the angel that St. John saw the in the sun, then all the healers and medicines of the world: the hierarchical anatomy of Galen and Vesalius, the antisepsis of Lister, the anesthesia of Crawford Long. Finally, the dreamlike light slowed, the changes merging into a single, still, perfectly clear prospect. There appeared at last only Crimson himself, simply poking the embers around and placing driftwood, as if nothing at all had occurred except two friends warming themselves beneath the universal canopy. After the psychic conflagrations, I took quite some moments to recover."
'Something more you wished to know?' he said, with gravitas."
I have a sobering obsession with William Leonard Pickard's The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments. I like to revisit the secret, Jorge Luis Borges-inspired literature Pickard penned whilst serving twenty years of two of his life sentences in prison for a conviction of conspiring to manufacture and distribute a massive amount of LSD back in the year 2000. The resulting manuscript evolved into the finished book which transformed my life forever. The psycholinguistic rhythms, hypnotic prose, expansive metaphors and poetic wisdom reinvigorated my perspective of what is possible with language and knowledge. Below is an excerpt from the beginning chapters of what I consider to be a sacred text. This psychedelic excerpt is from William Leonard Pickard's 'The Rose of Paracelsus.' Consider entering that very fine crystalline universe of psychedelic literature. Happy Bicycle Day.
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