Through the looking glass

My name is Bartolome de las Casas. In 1484 I was born. More I do not know. I do not know if this place is hell or hallucination or the future.

The stub of candle gutters low – the stone walls closing in. I tap the barometric weatherglass – I know the pressure. But Goethe devised it in 1822 – not long after Lord Nelson raised the glass to his blind eye and announced he did not see the order to retreat. Some people never do.

There are two glasses – one contains ayahuasca: Mama Ayahuasca, brewed from the vine of death, gift of the jungle, who shows us horrors before she shows us: oneness; the sense of life; the feathered mosaic of weeping flowers; the singing, bird-headed women; energy-essence; numinous face of God raging through my electric, crystalline body.

When Cristobal Colon sailed to those forested islands dripping with life and rain, he wrote in his awful log –  ‘made eight miles an hour during eight glasses and three before the watch began …’ Some poor sailor turned the damned glass over every hour for the ten weeks it took.

It was another Italian invented spectacles – in 1286. Google Glass came later I think. The stub of candle gutters low.

Mama Ayahuasca cannot show me horrors. Have you seen a person burnt alive, have you seen three thousand people raped and mutilated and beheaded in a day? When we cut the hands off the children and tied the hands around their necks – you would be surprised how much blood there is, how long the children live … but not by how they scream.

There is always the other glass – the one commander Colon on his damned caravel put his hand out to. That is horrors.

I hear arpeggios – is it Einstein on the Beach?

Barnaby McBryde