ROBIN MAGOWAN
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have done. More important is that Miss Hearst and I both passed
through Ling's hands and came out different people-politically
and morally. The record of my conversion,
if
that's the word for it,
lies in the documents (printed elsewhere) describing what I experi–
enced under the impact of two seething doses of Mescaline; Miss
Hearst's is on various tapes, widely enough distributed. Purists might
argue that hers has more to do with someone called William Wolfe.
To this all I can say is that Wolfe and Ling went down together, while
the two of us still live.
Like all affairs this had its geography-in this case forest and
desert. The desert was that of Death Valley (natch!) where we spent
a week in early May; the forest that of the coastal redwoods north of
San Francisco. There we would lie, in a drearnflower space sustained
by curtains, sticks of incense, Chinese cooking apparatus, orange–
brown stationery, LeroiJones and
The Serpent and the Rope
and the
I Ching's
twenty-seven yarrow sticks, a space that might seem any–
body's were it not the backroom of a trailer parked in a scabby oak
forest on a hillside somewhere off the Russian River. And the strolls
to such outlying places as Armstrong Grove that accompanied and,
as it were, haloed the sex, suited these meditations on somberness.
Any walk could become the night surreptitiously explored, one foot
after the other inching forward, wake robin (trillium), shooting star,
shy ranunculus . The winter before I had learned these names and
was happy to bestow them, while Ling pointed out the hillside of
waterfalling dragon's teeth, recalled from a childhood book on
Samoa. Being out there blew back images that were of a size with
her tiny feet, her black-jeaned dwarf's body stooped to shatter the
silence with her hand, make me see the two sides of the forest
blade-shadow, soft. This affair with the forest was a resumption
of a hushed, mouth-open wonder I had known as a child looking
for birds. Each bird was a rainbow of beautiful glass, where the glass
meant simply that feather-quick, soft-edged wonder lighting about a
tree.
But wasn't this what writing itself was-automatic writing as I
came later to practice it. All I had to do was locate a similar forest in
my mind, and then, pen in hand, plunge in, staggering and whirling
around and naming as many of the local phenomena as possible as I
took my notes and shot my way to freedom, leaving a trail of blazing
