My Mescalito Trip

Speak, memory. Some peyote plants were big, mature and dark, some were light green and tiny. Some grew from the gray sand, some were implanted in another cactus, forming together with it a strange gibbous monster. I remember the floor of my room, transformed by the twilight and the power of my intent into a barren expanse of the Sonora desert where I had been so many times with Don Juan and Carlos during their promenades. Walking in the desert required your entire attention, as its surface was covered with plastic flowerpots of various forms and colors arranged in an orderly pattern, like an army prepared for a battle. And, as history shows, when there's an army prepared for a battle, it is only a matter of time when this battle starts.

Unfortunately, Mescalito just said no. This plant needs a lot of sun radiation and a special kind of soil to produce the amount of mescaline sufficient to summon his noble spirit. So, despite the fact that the number of buttons I ate would have made Don Juan whistle in respectful disbelief, the result was nil, or very close to it: a kind of perceptual distortion that you might not even notice if you don't expect it to happen, or something that you start to feel only because you wait for it to begin. I walked in the forest, looked at the sunset. There was nothing special apart from the squeaking of sand on my teeth. However, my Mescalito trip had one curious side effect. Two days after it, perestroika began.

WHICH TAKES ME BACK TO CASTANEDA. I KNOW about all the vitriol that his books attracted, and in many cases it was well-grounded. My own problem with Castaneda's metaphysical model is even deeper than all the criticism I heard. It is not only my problem. Talking about Castaneda's books with a Buddhist monk in a Korean monastery once, I said, "There's a concept I can't digest. A place where Castaneda says that awareness is a bluish glow that surrounds the Eagle's emanations." "Absolutely," said the monk. "If this is so, who's aware of this bluish glow then?"

Yet I love him even with the bluish glow. He is much like this gibbous monster cactus, which doesn't have a holographic certificate of being the genuine authentic Peyote™, and doesn't really take you high, and perhaps can't even be called a cactus at all. But it gives you a little side effect that suddenly makes the side center and the center side. With all his tricks and failures, he shines high above the blurred crowd of many a "distinctive voice of his/her own" on the steep road from obscurity to oblivion. No matter what faults his books might have, they possess a very rare quality, the most important in the universe, that is hard to define otherwise but in Castaneda's own terms: They have heart.

Victor Pelevin is the author of the novelsBuddha's Little Finger andHomo Zapiens, both available from Viking. He lives in Moscow.