With drugs it was, in some ways, the same. Getting stoned meant that the confines of awareness (here I am in the pressure chamber of my own body) seemed to loosen, and much of what it meant to be me, in the tired strictures of my own head, seemed to fall away. Something used to grip my temples, squeezing the sides of my skull, a pressure that had become so much a part of daily life that I didn’t even notice it was there until grass or acid gently took the vise grip away, laid it to rest in a grassy field someplace. Awareness seemed to spread horizontally, my eyes opening wider, the membrane of my skin more porous and airy, the tension between my vertebrae released so that spaces opened in my spine and I became taller, longer, open to clouds and rain, to the play of light.

The world one could participate in then was, in a way, an anonymous one, like the world of art—a current into which one might step, and find oneself identifying suddenly not with one’s own body exactly but with the whole: I am that streaming movement, that forward momentum. Or rather my self’s soluble, dissolving in that unbounded.

But there was, of course, a difference. Art had a past, and a future; to dance or paint or write was to enter a tradition, a conversation of human gestures across time. The masters went before, and pointed toward just how far there was to go. And what you made, for better or worse, might be here tomorrow. In the enchantment of intoxication, though, there’s merely now: a grandiose feeling of immersion in what’s larger than oneself, and no history, and nothing to look forward to. One is released from shame for an hour, two hours, eight, but somehow the falling back into limit is that much worse.