Melissa Matthewson

a cactus, a moth, and ketamine: a poetic invention

hybrid

You asked me to put the ketamine powder in my nose. You promised I would like it. 

I did. 

I understand what this reveals about me. 

We wanted more joy and pleasure, a state by which we could marvel at our biology, wonder at our sensations as momentary and delicious. Pleasure was our choice experience. Attraction was the foundation. 

I consider this a body practice. 

I mean, I’m wrestling with the indeterminate. A blue poetics. What I can’t name or say or speak or understand. 

Descartes said our thoughts are in us, thus we have consciousness. There is the perception, the form, the object of thought. But what happens when the substance, in this case, ketamine, creates a condition in which thought becomes irrelevant? A disruption of what we know as thought. What then? What great turn could that create? 

We took pills of MDMA too, to bring our hearts into position, and ketamine for the experience of fantasy, a kind of extraction from the sadness we convey and carry. Within this framework, I wanted a kind of cohesion of our bodies. 

The theory behind mutualism is such that two bodies or things or species will benefit from the association. 

There is obligate mutualism and facultative. Obligation or facts. That’s my etymological interpretation. 

For example, gobies and pistol shrimp that pair. Wooly bats and pitcher plants. The barnacle and the whale. The senita cactus and senita moth. 

In the Sonoran Desert, out where the bats strike and the dust settles onto the skin, at night, the cactus blooms, a pinkish flower that opens to the stars. Its tubes reach out to the moon and live for a long time, spiny and heated, waiting for the moth. 

When the moth arrives, it lays its eggs on the night-blooming flower, so that when the buds close, the larvae hatch inside eating the seeds and fruit tissue. It does this for six days without harming the cactus. In fact, the cactus needs the moth to live, to perpetuate for pollination. This is a choice. Maybe biological, but nonetheless, a selection of mutuality. 

Far from the moth and flower, I threw up in the high desert grass, near the empty vacant lots of houses yet to be built, or sold, except for the one with the stone aesthetics I didn’t like, a view for the people who might have the wealth to enjoy it. We had walked through its empty framework months ago kissing in the muted light and touching in between the frames. I may have imagined a life with you in the bedroom. 

At the top of the hill, where the Klamath Valley burned below us waiting for some new arrival or return of cranes and songbirds, we watched the sun come down over the lake, the lights twinkling and glowing like stars with Mt. Shasta there, with snow, but not enough. 

I wanted you to want me, more than my limbs. I wanted to love you like we could be something bright. 

On top of that mountain, we hovered on a rock in the desert scrub, talked of your son, mine, our pain, loneliness. What we can grieve now. I can’t remember what else we uttered, but I recall the radiation of heat between our two bodies, wrapped in sweaters, my head resting on your shoulder and arms around your stomach. We heard gunshots over the hills. They ricocheted and caused the night creatures to hide. I touched your neck with my lips. Held them there. 

All. 

I read later that ketamine increases glutamate in the brain, which bursts and excites, like a celebration of neurotransmitters in your psyche, creating intensified disassociation. 

It also activates a steady cerebral state in which the brain suspends into a space between dream and reality, such as the liminal, a place that feels, to me, intellectual. Like the hypnogogic part of consciousness. 

The in-between—where the most interesting parts of awareness might teach us how to be kinder. 

I’m looking for a way to write about this, of what is love for the place we are now in our lives. Sartre said that every hope lies within us. That this should be our philosophy of experience. 

I don’t want to admit these experimentations or this hope inside me. I feel discomfort in the telling. And so, language fails me, even though, here I am.

We were living in a pandemic. We were falling in love in a pandemic. We were working in jobs we didn’t like. 

I tripped over rocks, thinking I had lost my poetry somewhere over those mountains, embedded now into the sand. That’s why I went looking and I thought, I could benefit from you, and you could benefit from me. We could be the stars together. 

It had been like dying, I said. The beauty was too much. But not too much.

At home, away from the scope of hill and rock, where the stars quieted into an array of spectacle, you rubbed my nipples with coconut oil by the fire. Should we have sex? We should. We did. 

It felt like awe should feel. 

But what does awe feel like? 

Like tips of pleasure in the body, a kind of complex diversity we can’t fully understand except that we seek sovereignty from all negative disturbances and that is pleasure, said Epicurus. 

But now, instead, our lives get mediated by culture and all the pressures of survival and we forget about pleasure. 

I read that ketamine regenerates neuron growth through dendrites, which die when someone is chronically depressed. I think of them as tiny shapes, their name lacking poetry, but in fact, they are beautiful—branching like trees in our mind, spectacular bodies of impulse.  

I wanted to believe the architecture of my life could change from one night with you and these remedies.  

At midnight, there was sensation, yes, but moderated with less of a body to hold me. We lay together, the night outside waiting. I could feel a visual complexity of tones and hues stretch over my eyes, coupled with a flood of serotonin. I didn’t understand what could be happening, though it wasn’t frightening. Instead, I could feel the love that was all the love repeated. And amplified. Swelling as a stamen.

I had forgotten words, couldn’t feel my body certainly, but there was a perception of mutuality, and a deep sense of freedom. I was no longer trapped by my identity, nor fixed by any expectations at all. 

Astral, you could say, a kind of medicine outside of business and company. Absolved of my fear of death, I carry this feeling with me still.

It is later, when the ketamine has worn off, when the lights are low and the night long, that I tell you of mystic experiences, of transference, temporality. After throwing up. After pouring wine. After a sandwich. 

I tell you that the mystic is indefinable. Cannot be replicated. 

You put colors on the ceiling then. Like leaves and circles of greens and maybe yellow.  

So I could watch them.

You said more. 

I said, okay. 

I wanted the night to see itself reflected in my chest.

We talked for hours.

And then we didn’t. 

Imagine our bed that night. 

Imagine the occasion of pollination, of moths beating away in the dark, scrubbing the flowers for their juice and syrup. How the female senita moth uses her pollination brush to wipe the cacti. The male comes too and lands on the spine. That’s where they mate, centered on that thorny substance. Three-thousand flowers in one season and moths dissolving any limitations on the frontiers of interaction.   

Like the women who sang in octaves I couldn’t recognize. They manipulated the sound, resonances, and tempo on a frequency of tonal variation. It was more than one pitch at a time, a sort of overtone singing, like I was in some Tunisian heritage mountain village. 

My hand was in the air—dissolved, weightless, a hand simply orchestrating, composing. The music rose in spectrums and impressions. 

It is this thing we know about music: when it repeats, our pleasure centers are activated, our imagination expanded as our brain focuses on the duplication. We can embrace the moment of experience and be rid of the analysis. Our rational brain stops trying to figure it all out.  

We mean for and yearn toward this kind of pleasure, so we can achieve what the Greeks imagined as ataraxia, or a calm state of being, 

We become imagined participants. There is a kind of semantic satiation in which we stop looking for meaning, and instead, we open to the sound, both the pitch and the tempo. As related to erotics. As open and expansive as erotic can be. 

Things are sweeter as they become familiar, from the mere-exposure effect. 

In music, any number of theories move the repetition. 

The fugue, emerging with successive voices, the imitation of the first.
Of melodic color.
The cante hondo.
Intervals that repeat in the Phrygian mode.

These are the ways we experience music in repetition and on this night, I held my hand in the air, gasped when the voices went deeper, flew through the repeated voices that were all now possibility and chance. 

I could fly now, over electric trees that stretched far below me. We held hands, yet there were no hands. We had butterfly wings, yet no wings at all. My head floated away, cut from my torso, but also streamed away with your body toward some destination that never mattered.  

Thoughts surfaced as insignificant:
What will happen when I die?
Will you be there?
Will it be like this?
Should I mourn?

This was a new way of ordaining desire: as permeable. 

This could be a type of affect. Our suspension. Our only suspension. 

It’s rare to feel this sex. 

It’s rare to forget reason. 

When it was over, the disappointment was loud. I wanted to stay in the dream, though we soon slept, our naked bodies like sheets of heat and desire. That made it okay. 

The next day I lay on the sofa, the winter sun like a canopy of warmth, and on the radio, I listened to blues and jazz and Radiohead. I read a book about a mother who turns into a dog, and an essay about Goodnight, Moon and I would drink a cold cider later, eat a hamburger, drink white wine, and my love, you were sleeping in the other room, and I could hear your breathing, but I didn’t need you to wake, didn’t want for anything, only just for you to be there on the other side of the wall, dreaming. 

It is the cactus nectar that draws the moth back. The sweet reward of mutuality, the exchange of pleasure between two—a temporary kinship under the great stars. 

Melissa Matthewson is the author of a memoir, Tracing the Desire Line, from Split/Lip Press (2019), a finalist for the 2021 Oregon Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, Oregon Humanities, DIAGRAM, Guernica, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, and Longreads, among others. She writes from the Rogue Valley of Oregon and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University.