L1: LSD, art castle, Elizabeth Bishop’s trip to Brazil
I did LSD for the first time 43 days ago, at an “ecstatic dance” party in Hampstead Heath in London, on a Saturday, with my friend from high school, Tim. Technically I did 1P-LSD, which has an extra molecule that makes it minimally but legally distinct from the criminalized chemical. The bonus molecule, I was told as I walked with Tim to the heath from his “flat” beside George Orwell’s residence from 1935-1942, is catabolized, or like, ‘snapped off’, once you ingest the drug, leaving your body with regular old acid, which then snaps your life in two.
Anyway, hi. I’m not here to tell you about my drug trip, which was a nightmare (although it was briefly fun to dance on a hill to trance music on Bluetooth headphones with the sun sinking through the trees), but to create a pathway into my current mini-era. After heath acid I stayed with Tim for another three and a half weeks, then flew to France, where I have since been. Before heath acid I had already been staying with Tim for two weeks, and before that I was at the wedding of my ex-girlfriend Emma, in Chicago, and before that I was in Toronto for two months, and before that I was in New York for six months, and before that was Christmas day, 2018, which I spent with John and Liz at their house by the lake in Kingston, Ontario.
I used to regularly transcribe my life in great detail, as much as 14,000 words in a day, and for a brief chaotic period when I was 20 and 21, when a few of the people closest to me did the same thing, we sent each other our plaintext ASCII files, which were, in part, about each other. This was so extreme it passed into a kind of world championship of oversharing, and was a mistake, but I do miss the intimacy of that moment, and, I suppose, the harmonization. It feels nice to be the crew on the couches in the back room at the end of the night, analyzing everyone else, and in so doing, sharing your fears.
I think what I want to do with this letter is to create that feeling. I saw someone in my IG stories today go off on this kind of newsletter for being a self-indulgent one-way conversation, which put me on my heels, but then I was like, wait, what does she think writing is? And reading? In this medium there is always only one person talking. But hopefully the writer is trying to give the reader something, and hopefully the reader receives it. Of course I do want to do this for my own reasons—recording my life in writing gives me the best feeling I know of. But I’ll do it with an eye to how I believe I am similar to people I know.
Anyway there’s lots to catch up on, but I’ll cache some content for next week and just say that I’m reading Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art: Selected Letters, which I picked up in the library of the “art castle,” PAF, where I’m currently living (which I’ll get into soon) mostly because when I was in Paris for a weekend on my way to the art castle I was thinking about the family ‘legend’, for lack of a better word, of how my dad’s parents met, which was in Paris and happened because of Elizabeth Bishop, who my grandmother was living with at the time.
In the very long and informative introduction by Bishop’s lifelong editor, Robert Giroux tells us that one day Elizabeth Bishop won a fellowship of $2500 from Bryn Mawr and took a 17-day boat ride to Brazil, where she intended on staying for two weeks, and she met a woman there and ended up staying in fifteen years—until this woman, Lota Costellat de Macedo Soares, who had become her life partner, killed herself. I thought of this last Sunday morning when I was driving to the train station to drop off Anna, a French/Greek musician who was going back to Brussels via Paris. I was in the back seat with Anna, and in the front seat were Frida, a German writer, and Gabriel, an Argentinian philosopher/physicist, who was driving the little PAF car. When we got to the station and Frida had gotten out of the car to hug Anna, I learned from Gabriel, who was fiddling with something I couldn’t see while we were talking, that he and Frida had only been dating for two months (“in fact, tomorrow is our two-month anniversary”), but they had already bought a ticket on a 17-day cruise ship to Argentina, leaving three weeks thence. One-way. Goddamn, I thought. Life can really go in any direction at any time, with anyone.