Eat Prey Drug: Wetiko [NSFW]
Continuing his investigation into alternate perceptions of consciousness, writer/photographer Paul Kwiatkowski confronts a psycho-spiritual disease.
Editor’s Note: This is the second part of Paul Kwiatkowski’s cross-country assignment to investigate alternate perceptions of consciousness. Click here for part one.
EUGENE, OREGON
Another cantankerous motel. Beige curtains, bleached yellow, dotted with fly husks frozen over the air conditioner. Beyond, a diffused light show of corporate signage smeared in a spectral blur. Inside, sunlight barely reaching the floor. My vision never adjusts.
CNN recycled coverage of an 8.7-magnitude earthquake that railed the northern coast of Chile all the way up to Hawaii, where people evacuated in case of a tsunami. The earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010 was only 7.0, and the one that rattled San Francisco in the late ‘80s was a 6.9. The largest recorded earthquake in history was a 9.5 in 1960 that also happened in Chile. Less than 24 hours after it struck, tsunami waves hit Hawaii then Japan, over 10,000 miles away. During the last month since I left Los Angeles, there had been more earthquakes in California than ever before recorded. More than a dozen quakes of 4.5 magnitude or higher had hit the United States that year, and it was only April. Chile was far from Oregon, but given the circumstances, I worried.
Surrounding the hotel parking lot was a dense field of trees — not the kind of forest people strolled through but a wooden rind, the type of semi-secluded area that insulated business centers and office buildings. The only time people saw these woods was on the local nightly news as police and volunteers combed the area for a missing person.
I had nowhere to be, it wasn’t late enough to sleep. Bored and restless with watching a reality show about plastic surgery horror stories, I grabbed a flashlight and entered the woods behind the hotel dumpsters through a trail most likely forged by animals coming out to feast on garbage. I lurched through the low-hanging branches until the forest closed behind me. I headed to where the trail thinned into patchy undergrowth sloping into a ditch. Inside was the wedge-shaped entrance of a cave. At my back, the treetops were back-lit by a twinkling smear of light pollution swelling up from the hotel parking lot. I paused, unsure how far to go before adventure turned into stupidity.
I climbed down, grasping at handfuls of dirt and dangling roots for support. Without layers of gravel and sediment to absorb the rumble of nearby traffic, I felt the Earth shudder. Sans the monstrous drone of cars on the interstate, my circulation slowed to an audible throb.
My shouts into the cave went unanswered. No evidence of anyone else inside. The gravel turned sandy from rainwater, which trickled down from an opening in the cave roof. I prodded the sludge for evidence. Warm bursts of air drifted through porous openings in the wall. It smelt like partially digested grass, the hot breath of livestock. There was a rumbling underfoot. I imagined something massive coiling back into its protective shape. I was certain another earthquake was happening nearby.
Back outside, I retched to clear the smell in my head. All around, the foliage bristled out of focus like low-resolution pixels shuffling. No matter how hard I rubbed my eyes, the forest would not settle.
In my hotel room, I hallucinated tiny evocations hidden inside the book I was reading, Dispelling Wetiko by Paul Levy. I saw letters rearranged into jagged shapes compressed into rows the same size as sentences in a book. I ran my fingers over the page, feeling the tiny monochromatic heaps like the raised mountain ridges on a textured globe. They flattened back into letters and words:
The wetiko virus is the root cause of the unhumanity in human nature. Wetiko represents and inspires the worst a human being can do to another human being and, ultimately, to ourselves. This psychic virus, a ‘bug’ in ‘the system,’ informs and animates the madness of so-called civilization, which, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop, feeds the madness within ourselves.
“One way of understanding wetiko,” Levy explains in an interview, “is to view our life as one mass shared dream that all 7 billion of us are moment by moment co-dreaming up into materialization. When you realize that we’re just characters in each other’s dreams, which is to say we’re embodied reflections of each other, whatever evil or darkness is playing out in the world, whether it be in a particular person or country or group of people is like a dream, because what is a dream? A reflection of one’s own energy. That evil we see out in the world is the same evil within ourselves. It’s an incredible portal into becoming more acquainted with our own darkness.”
PORTLAND, OREGON
Kelly moved to Portland from West Virginia via New York to be with a guy who dumped her for opiates. Kelly was what adults acted like when they played doctor too much as children. Kelly was fun.
She took up dancing at a carpeted strip club called The Magic Garden, also known as The Magic Carpet. Her pole dance routine was coming out on stage dressed in a latex nurse outfit. The Magic Garden proudly served a full menu, but I ordered a club sandwich, the only item Kelly deemed safe. We nodded out to a throng of gyrating strippers. My fillings trembled to dub step farting from the speakers lining the stage.
A fully clothed stripper with teeth too small for her head smiled at me. I gave her a buck for nothing. The DJ wore a plastic Viking’s helmet, marching between tables, yelling into a wireless microphone in his morning zoo radio voice. He urged us to not be shy, to be generous, to clap for Kalea.
In-line for the bathroom I overheard a dancer sharing the results of her pregnancy test with another girl: She was pregnant.
Back at the table Kelly introduced me to the pregnant girl, Brook, who was also her roommate. Up close, Brook’s pale skin liquefied beneath the strobe lights. Unprompted, she waved her pregnancy wand for us to verify. “Are you going to keep it?” Kelly asked. Brook looked like she’d swallowed a burp, shrugged then slid the wand back into her bra. They posed for an Instagram photo. Brook captioned it: 2 for 1 at the Magic Carpet.
I ordered a round of shots and paid Brook for two consecutive lap dances.
