Trick of the Light. As anyone with a working knowledge of psilocybin... (Pierre & Friends)
Trick of the Light. As anyone with a working knowledge of psilocybin cubensis, lysergic acid diethylamide or a Businessman’s Trip will understand, as I watched this sunset the other day, I found myself thinking for a while about the late (great) Timothy Leary, the University of Berkeley psychologist the late Richard Nixon once described as “the most dangerous man in America” - an epithet Nixon himself came to embody, albeit for very different reasons, less than a decade later. “Turn on,” I could almost hear the doctor chant, “Tune in. Drop out.” Sunsets in Lebanon lend themselves to the Acid Generation’s mantra. At their worst, they are beautiful. At their best, they are surreal. I’ve often wondered why (perhaps like beauty, it is all about the eye of the beholder?). Perhaps it’s the ever-present layer of dust, whether from the Syrian Desert or the ceaseless construction? Perhaps it’s proximity to the Mediterranean? Whatever the reason, the light in Lebanon is of an almost magical quality and seems to do things with colours that seem impossible. Of course, there are other places in the world where light does incredible things. I remember seeing a twilight sky in Rajasthan once that was not blue, not black but a deep, unmistakable purple and there were moments in Iceland when in the absence of a visible sun, it seemed as though the dark, wintery landscape was lit from within, rather than from above. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a moment when the mountains here turn pink and the air turns to honey. But there is also another moment, brief and infinitely more rare, when if the conditions are right (and the gods smile upon you), the setting sun paints the world in vivid tangerine and when, for a few seconds, it feels like the very air you are breathing is coloured, an orange haze that fills the lungs, radiating tranquillity, altering the mind. Dr. Leary, I believe, would have approved.
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