Okay, Peyote

It just so happened that that endless summer of my twenty-first year I ate a lot of peyote.  It just happened to be there--several shelffulls in the greenhouse attached to Toni Pugh's rooming house, of pots of--Lophophora Williamsii, that actually belonged to Hugh T., that Toni was sort of keeping for him, but which he had given her leave to pass on to whomsoever might want to try it.  So I did, over the summer, eat about a half dozen good-sized pots of peyote.  It was pleasant, beatific well yes--but the only really extraordinary or notably educative thing that happened to me under its influence was that I found that, when really stoned on Peyote, I could improvise three part canzone in the style of Frescobaldi on the piano with great facility.  Which only Patrick, qui cor meum semper partiebatur, really quite understood the miraculousness of--while all my other friends  at the time thought that I must just be playing stuff from memory.  Which was not unlike, though exactly the reverse experience, of déja vu all over again, of, some five years ago, before the present date, when it came my turn to be dummy at bridge, playing through all the Handel suites on the the grand piano at the Central Union Church, which the ancient ladies, who were my bridge partners, and didn't notice me sight-reading, just assumed I was making up on the spot.

In any case, yes, I ate a lot of peyote in the summer of 1964, and I enjoyed it, and found that it did open a certain channel into the consciousness of 3-part polyphony--but, truthfully, I didn't learn a great deal from it, and honestly there wasn't a lot in the experience to learn from.  But I was scrupulous in regarding it as a sacrament  for spiritual growth, and, come September, I faithfully replaced all the peyote that I had consumed:  It being still legal then, and sold openly in commercial greenhouses, I bought several flats of it from what was then Nansen's Greenhouse and Garden Supply--about twice the quantity that I had consumed--and cooked it all up into a paste, which I dried in the oven, and pulverized it in a mortar  with a pestle, and put the powder in gel caps, about three quarters of a gallon of them, which I then put in a large plastic jar with a screw-on lid and placed it in the back of the cupboard over the sink in Toni Pugh's kitchen.  And in all that exquisite conscientiousness and bee-like scrupulosity, and plain hard work, you can, if you are alive to such things, detect the power and scope of peyote  consciousness, such as it is.