Hence the Feather

I have a hideous tattoo on my left calf. It’s too big, too solidly monochrome, and it’s starting to fade. It’s supposed to be a feather, but sometimes people mistake it for a leaf. And, nine years after it was stenciled into me forever, you can hardly read the words underneath it; lyrics from a song called Feather, by Nujabes. “Hence the feather,” I always tell people when I explain.

The song meant something to me because of the experience that is inexorably tied to it. At the time, the full significance wasn’t clear. And yet, in those early days there was an intuition about the experience that made the defining soundtrack infinitely precious to me. I wanted it with me forever. Hence the tattoo.

I asked my mom to design it, and she did, making it two inches tall. I was too nervous to tell her that I needed this feather – this song – to stand out; to shelter me. Instead, I swaggered into the tattoo shop holding up the two-inch printed design with plans of my own. “Blow it up!” I said, very reasonably, to the artist. The result was a solid, black feather that extends from my ankle all the way to the midline of my calf. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of it in the mirror, I recoil in horror. But who hasn’t made questionable decisions at the age of 21?

My best friend and I were listening to Nujabes in high school when we thought we were ultra-cool. Too cool, in fact, for mainstream music. We listened to old school punk, classic rock, psychedelic rock, and even extended our musical taste further into the past – to the likes of Elvis Presley. And the gem in all of this: underground hip hop – like Nujabes.

When designing the tattoo – all two inches of it - the feather was obvious. But I had such a hard time choosing the right lyrics from the song to brand myself with. The obvious ones would have been the chorus:

So I'm driftin’ away like a feather in air

Lettin’ my words take me away from the hurt and despair

So I'm keepin’ it vertical forever elevator

Ridin’ the escalator to the somethin’ that is greater

As an adolescent, I already felt the poignancy in these words, and I drank them up like medicine. By the time my left calf goes under the needle – at the age of 21 - I’d already experienced the deepest depths of major depression – sometimes sitting on my bed, biting down on a towel to stifle the sobs and wondering at the cost analysis of a broken femur versus a broken psyche. Bones, we know how to mend. But the mind? We’re only scratching the surface. In fact, it was only in 2001* that scientists discovered the physical location of what one might call the ego*, hiding away in one of the human brain’s most accomplished evolutionary feats – the Default Mode Network. Somehow, there is a link between the notion of self and the ability to reason, both of which the DMN plays a large part in*. Where once our ancient hominid ancestors dwelled in the realm of magical thinking – characterized by emotions and belief in the supernatural*, the modern homo sapiens fills his or her world with reason (well, for the most part). When there is a self, there is a separation from other, and there is a someone to experience hurt and despair. But there is also a someone to create, to write a bittersweet song like Feather, and to try to find the somethin’ that is greater – whatever that might be. Then again, too much of this self-reflection, as many of us know, can be destructive.

Anyways, that’s a lot of words to put on a body, especially when you’re pretending to your mother that the design will only be two inches tall. Plus, there was something about the apostrophes - the relaxed grammar - that defied any attempt at design. Neither could I imagine completing the contracted words. So square.

So, what about:

Living this life to the best of my ability

Maybe a little too obvious. In any case, I had no idea how to go about that when I was younger. Too many nights trying to cover the pain and confusion with alcohol, years of reckless behavior, and one three-year period under the thumb of a manipulative boyfriend can attest to that.

Plus, my best friend and I got into plenty of trouble. Sometimes when we get together these days, we look back with a laugh, a shake of the head, and we ask ourselves how we survived it all. The two of us occupied an echo chamber – a place where bad ideas find their final resting place. One of us would voice an idea, the other would repeat it in the form of a question, the question would become a sly nod, and then the idea would expand and unfold until we were inevitably climbing over walls into private pools or blocking neighborhood roads with lifted construction cones.

I remember though, with fondness, when we used to expand the horizons of our consciousness together. Humans, for time immemorial, have been altering their states of consciousness with fermented fruits and strange fungi. Some, like Terrence McKenna, say that mushrooms are the missing link between ape and human. Some eat them to experience the divine. We took them for reasons far more mundane: we were bored and disillusioned; we were two youths becoming familiar with society and finding it somehow lacking. Mostly, we were worried about our futures. It's been said that the rate of technology and innovation is accelerating so fast, young people may have to frequently reinvent themselves to stay relevant. How do you prepare for that?

The two of us didn't try to prepare for our futures so much as we tried to take a break from thinking about it every now and then. But when we tripped together that first time (and all the subsequent times), what we received was not a dumbing down but a waking up. It was a gift. We were met with a guiding presence that said, Hey you knuckleheads, it’s not so bad.

But it would still be a long time until I learned to live my life to the best of my ability. Who am I kidding? I’m still learning.

So, how about:

Never good but rules of paradise are never nice

The best laid plans of mice and men are never right

This is something that resonates more with me today, at the age of 30. Not when I was 15 and feeling the early symptoms of a lifelong depression, nor when I was 21 and trying to figure out how to keep this song with me for eternity. The depression that I felt nesting in 15 years ago could have come from a million different things. I am an over-thinker by nature, and maybe I just allowed too much negativity to wear deep grooves into my brain. Maybe I let the controlling systems in my brain become overbearing. Without the proper training, I have allowed my brain to become – what’s the correct term? Oh yes… a fucking asshole.

Or maybe I am just a human living in a society built by other fallible humans. There was a time in our past, about 10,000 years ago* – a mere blip in the 200,000-odd timeline of the species homo sapiens* – where we made a hard turn onto the path of civilization. We decided that our lives would be easier if instead of going out in search for our food, we tamed it. And, because we have such crazy huge human brains, we succeeded. We took the wild out of our food, and in so doing, we took the wild out of us.

Civilization has been quite the ride. Growing our own food allowed us to settle down and multiply, extending our social circles beyond the 150-person limit that our evolution originally set*, and still silently insists on. Our settled villages grew, we had more food but more mouths to feed, we no longer knew everyone in our communities, we developed currency and taxes to keep the empire going, and writing systems to record the taxes. We created nations and corporations and credit and poetry and art and literature and philosophy and smartphones and Justin Bieber.

The rate of our complexity has been too fast for our poor biology to keep up with. So we sit hunched over computers in bodies meant for nomadic movement; we live in nations filled with millions of anonymous faces when our minds are built to socialize with our close-knit communities of 150 people or less*. We never miss a technological update, but our biology is outdated by at least 10,000 years. It’s possible that all of our best laid plans still leave many of us feeling disoriented, lonely, and sad.

Our brains do try to help, so they deserve some credit. We live in a very complicated world and we are constantly bombarded by sensory stimuli. The crowning glory of our evolution – the Default Mode Network – sorts through the vast quantity of sensory data we receive every day, and tries to make sense of it all*. In order to perform our daily tasks – drive a car, go to work, navigate a marriage – our brains let in only the necessary amount of information needed for us to survive*.

You could say that our normal waking consciousness is only one version of reality, built of the necessity to simply get through the day. Interestingly, both meditation and psychedelics quiet the DMN. They allow more stimuli to pass through unhindered, and they permit more freedom of cognitive movement throughout the brain. In short, we have easy access to far more interesting realities.

After I recoil in horror at the sheer shock of the great, black blob on my left calf, my expression softens, and I remember. I remember the pinky swear between my best friend and I as we split the eighth of mushrooms, and we each stuff a half into our respective bras. While we wait in the security line at the airport to Hawaii, we tell each other that if one of us gets caught, the other will too. We were in this together. In hindsight, not the best idea ever hatched between two sentient beings, but you can’t deny the saccharine naïveté of it either.

This was our graduation-from-high-school gift to ourselves. I felt like I had crawled across the finish line, and now here we were, 18 and on the brink of adulthood. I was going to college at the end of the summer and I was supposed to be deciding what to do with my life. It felt like a step into the abyss.

I remember the taste of the peanut butter we employed – unsuccessfully – to cover up the foul taste of dried fungus. But we get it all down. We’ve planned it all to a T. We have orange juice at the ready because someone told us that it enhances the trip. We put on a playlist with songs carefully curated for just this moment. And then we wait. First comes the floating feeling, like a gentle drop in G-force that upsets the stomach. Then come the giggles.

Chilled out vibes are drifting from the speaker as the two of us explore. The bathroom is painted an orange so bright is strains the eyes. It’s much brighter than the orange of our orange juice. “What kind of orange juice are you?!” We demand. “You’re not even orange. This is orange.” We hold our juice bottles up to the wall for a better view. We see a lizard outside with kaleidoscope scales. We see purple clouds become funnels. Our own hands are a marvel, and I’m amazed at all the wonders I have failed to notice before.

The psilocybin is doing its thing, freeing the brain from its normal waking consciousness, shaking up the deeply grooved patterns of thinking. We see truths that should have been obvious all along; that the world is far more fluid than we think. That the rules we abide by are only constructed by us – by a prediction-making machine in our heads that doesn’t even work with all the facts. Needless to say, the rules of paradise are never nice. And, somehow on the same wavelength, there was also that familiar guiding voice: Hey you hooligans. Things aren’t so bad! On the brink of adulthood, we viewed our options with renewed perspective.

I am at the height of the journey when a hear the bittersweet piano melody of Nujabes’ Feather start. The two of us halt our exploring, our hands fly into the air, and we spin and jump around the room like Wild Woman herself. I feel released, the boa constrictor in my head unwinding at last. I laugh like I haven’t laughed in 10,000 years.

When I remember that moment, I know what my brain is doing. The DMN is lighting up, ruminating and defining me during a time when - ironically - it played no part. It says, Sometimes you are sad, but you have your moments. And this – this was one of the most defining moments of them all, linked inexorably to a song and a chemical expansion that helped shape my world view.

I didn’t know all the things I know now when I was designing my tattoo, but somewhere deep down I must have made a wild guess. Because in hindsight, the phrase I chose to accompany my feather is the most obvious one of all:

Surreal life I paint it vivid

The human condition unravels as the song plays on, and I see it clearly - beauty and pain two sides of the same coin. I look down at my tattoo and recoil at the ugliness, and then I remember the seed that spawned it - the surreal nature of life - and I smile.

I know this now: my happy place is made of sound.

Bibliography

* Pollen, Michael. “Chapter five: The Neuroscience.” How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence Kindle ed., Penguin Books, 2018, pg. 301 - 309

* Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Kindle ed., Harper Perennial, 2011, Loc 1233, 17, 454

* Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Kindle ed., Spiegel & Grau, 2018, Pg. 79-83