I think it was the tasty-sounding “buttery yellow flesh” that did it. This was a trivial, semiconscious event; it never occurred to me that our catalog encounter was of any evolutionary consequence whatsoever. Yet evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events, and in the evolution of the potato my reading of a particular seed catalog on a particular January evening counts as one of them.
Theses species that have spent the last ten thousand or so years figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate, and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature’s greatest success stories.
The surprising thing is, we don’t ordinarily regard species like the cow and the potato, the tulip and the dog, as nature’s more extraordinary creatures. Domesticated species don’t command our respect the way their wild cousins often do. Evolution may reward interdependence, but our thinking selves continue to prize self-reliance. The wolf is somehow more impressive to us than the dog.
Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say that one of us is the more “advanced” really depends on how you define that term, on what “advances” you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some — they’ve just traveled in a different direction.
Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants’ discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astonishing power to alter consciousness — even to plant dreams in the brains of awake humans.
Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste, but it doesn’t end there. Writers used the expression “sweetness and light” to name their highest ideal. The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole. Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Since then sweetness has lost much of its power and become slightly, well, saccharine. Who now would think of sweetness as a “noble” quality?
Between bites Isaac gazed up at me in amazement as if to exclaim, “Your world contains this? From this day forward I shall dedicate my life to it.” And I remember thinking, this is no minor desire, and then wondered: Could it be that sweetness is the prototype of all desire?
Either way, sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth. As a precaution, the plants took certain steps to protect their seeds from the avidity of their partners: they held off on developing sweetness and color until the seeds had matured completely, and in some cases, the plants developed poisons in their seeds to ensure that only the sweet flesh is consumed.
There was an old tradition in northern Europe linking the grape, which flourished all through Latin Christendom, with the corruptions of the Catholic Church, while casting the apple as the wholesome fruit of Protestantism.
Alcohol is, of course, the other great beneficence of sugar: it is made by encouraging certain yeasts to dine on the sugars manufactured in plants. The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink.
I’m sorry to say that the price of hearing this rumor was a promise not to tell.
Beauty in nature often shows up in the vicinity of sex. “Sexual selection” — that is, evolution’s favoring of features that increase a plant’s or animal’s attractiveness and therefore its reproductive success — is the best explanation we have for the otherwise senseless extravagance of feathers and flowers, maybe also sport cars and bikinis. In nature, at least, the expense of beauty is usually paid for by sex.
But what about plants, who don’t get to choose their mates? Why should the bees, who do the choosing for them, care a fig about plant health? They don’t, yet unwittingly they reward it. It’s the healthiest flowers that can afford the most extravagant display and sweetest nectar, thereby ensuring the most visits from bees — and therefore the most sex and most offspring. So in a sense, the flowers do choose their mates on the basis of health, using the bees as their proxies.
Symmetry is an unmistakable sign that there’s relevant information in a place. That’s because symmetry is a property shared by a relatively small number of things in the landscape, all of them of keen interest to us. The shortlist of nature’s symmetricals includes other creatures, other people (most notably the faces), human artifacts, and plants — but especially flowers. Symmetry is also a sign of health in a creature, since mutations and environmental stresses can easily disturb it. So paying attention to symmetrical things makes good sense: symmetry is usually significant.
To lean in and inhale the breath of a rose or peony is momentarily to leave our rational selves behind, to be transported as only a haunting fragrance can transport us. This is what is meant by ecstasy: to be taken out of ourselves. Such flowers propose a dream of abandon instead of form.
The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed an intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. The potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms, and the skins of toads. These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.
Along with the progress in genetics came rapid advances in technique. “Indoors,” as one grower put it, “the gardener is Mother Nature, but even better.”
Nor is the desire limited to adults. Andrew Weil, who has written two valuable books treating consciousness changing “as a basic human activity,” points out that even young children seek out altered states of awareness. They will spin until violently dizzy (thereby producing visual hallucination), deliberately hyperventilate, throttle one another to the point of fainting, inhale any fumes they can find, and, on a daily basis, seek the rush of energy supplied by processed sugar (sugar being the child’s plant drug of choice).
As the examples from childhood suggest, using drugs is not the only way to achieve altered states of consciousness. Activities as different as meditation, fasting, exercise, amusement park rides, horror movies, extreme sports, sensory or sleep deprivation, chanting, music, eating spicy foods, and taking extreme risks of all kinds have the power to change the texture of our mental experience to one degree or another. We may eventually discover that what psychoactive plants do to the brain closely resembles, at a biochemical level, the effects of these other activities.
The Greeks understood that the answer to most either/or questions about intoxicants (and a great many other of life’s mysteries) is “Both.” Used with care and in the proper context, many drug plants do confer advantages on the creatures that consume them — fiddling with one’s brain chemistry can be very useful indeed. The relief of pain, a blessing of many psychoactive plants, is only the most obvious example. Plant stimulants, such as coffee, coca, and khat, help people to concentrate and work. Amazonian tribes take specific drugs to help them hunt, enhancing their endurance, eyesight, and strength. There are psychoactive that uncork inhibitions, quicken the sex drive, muffle or fire aggression, and smooth the waters of social life. Still others relieve stress, help people sleep or stay awake, and allow them to withstand misery or boredom. All these plants are, at least potentially, mental tools; people who know how to use them properly may be able to cope with everyday life better than those who don’t.
These are the easy cases, though, the plants that merely inflect the prose of everyday life without rewriting it. “Transparent” is a term used to characterize drugs whose effects on consciousness are too subtle to interfere with one’s ability to get through the day and fulfill one’s obligations. Drugs such as coffee, tea, and tobacco in our culture, or coca and khat leaves in others, leave the user’s space-time coordinates untouched. But what about the more powerful plants, the one that do alter the experience of space and time in such a way as to take users out of everyday life — out of, even, themselves?
Cultures tend to be more wary of these plants, and for good reason: they pose a threat to the smooth workings of the social order. This may be why most complex, modern, secular societies have seen fit to forbid them. Even the cultures that endorse these plants cloak them in elaborate rules and rituals as a way of containing or disciplining their powers. So what are these powers, and what commends them — not only to adventurous individuals in all societies but, in some cases, to their societies as well? For many cultures have held these plants to be sacred.
When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture — the critical role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs — to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental errors; must such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. The molecules themselves don’t add anything new to the stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively transforming mental and cultural givens — for mutating our inherited memes.
At the top end of the market this has led to a connoisseurship of cannabis — not just of its taste or aroma, but of the specific psychological texture of its high. Some strains (typically those with a higher proportion of indica genes) are narcotic in their effects, tending to stupefy. Others (often the ones with more sativa genes) leave the mind clear and fluent and the body unimpaired. Some of the growers I met spoke in terms of “white-collar” and “blue-collar” pot. The strains I found personally sympathetic were stimulating and, evidently, conducive to mental speculation.
Taking account of this phenomenon, Andrew Weil describes marijuana as an “active placebo.” He contends that cannabis does not create but merely triggers the mental state we identify as “being high.” The very same mental state, minus the “physiological noise” of the drug itself, can be triggered in other ways, such as meditation or breathing exercises. Weil believes it is an error of modern materialistic thinking to believe that the “high” smokers experience is somehow a product of the plant itself (or THC), rather than a creation of the mind — prompted, perhaps, but sui generis.
All of which is exactly what Adam and Eve would want after being thrown out of Eden. You couldn’t design a more perfect drug for getting Eve through the pain of childbirth or helping Adam endure a life of physical toil.
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.
A human being may well ask an animal: “Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” The animal would like to answer, and say, “The reason is I always forget what I was going to say” — but then he forgot this answer too, and stay silent.
“Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future — all of them depend on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember.” He admonishes us to cast off “the great and ever-greater pressure of what is past” and live rather more like the child (or the cow) that “plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.” Nietzsche acknowledges that there are perils to inhabiting the present (one is liable to “falsely suppose all his experiences are original to him”), but any loss in knowingness or sophistication is more than made up for by the gain in vigor.
For Nietzsche the “art and power of forgetting” consist in a kind of radical editing or blocking out of consciousness everything that doesn’t serve the present purpose. A man seized by a “vehement passion” or great idea will be blind and deaf to all except that passion or idea. Everything he perceive, however, he will perceive as he has never perceived anything before: “All is so palpable, close, highly colored, resounding, as though he apprehended it with all his senses at once.”
What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence — a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. Something like it can occur during sex, too, or while under the influence of certain drugs. It is a state that depends for its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing. (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing.) If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything else (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away.
Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel as though we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time — clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality. Not that this state of mind doesn’t have its drawbacks; to name one, other people cease to matter. Yet this thoroughgoing absorption in the present is (as both Eastern and Western religious traditions tell us) as close as we mortals ever get to an experience of eternity. Boethius, the 6th-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving was “to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.” Likewise in the Eastern tradition: “Awakening to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.” Yet we can’t get there from here without first forgetting.
All those who write about cannabis’s effect on consciousness speak of the changes in perception they experience, and specifically of an intensification of all the senses. Common foods taste better, familiar music is suddenly sublime, sexual touch revelatory. Scientists who’ve studied the phenomenon can find no quantifiable change in the visual, auditory, or tactile acuity of subjects high on marijuana, yet these people invariably report seeing, and hearing, and tasting things with a new keenness, as if with fresh eyes and ears and taste buds.
You know how it goes, this italicization of experience, this seemingly virginal noticing of the sensate world. You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in its all soul-piercing beauty, the sweet bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.
Nothing is easier to make fun of than these pot-sponsored perceptions, long the broad butt of jokes about marijuana. But I’m not prepared to concede that these epiphanies are as empty or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day. In fact, I’m tempted to agree with Carl Sagan, who was convinced that marijuana’s morning-after problem is not a question of self-deception so much as a failure to communicate — to put “these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.” We simply don’t have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They may well be banal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also at the same time profound.
Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception of something like ice cream, our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
Even so, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes feels cheap and false. Perhaps it it our work ethic that is offended — you know, no pain, no gain. Or maybe it is the provenance of the chemicals that troubles us, the fact that they come from outside. Especially in the Judeo-Christian West, we tend to define ourselves by the distance we’ve put between ourselves and nature, and we jealously guard the borders between matter and spirit as proof of our ties to the angels. The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.
The challenge these plants posed to monotheism was profound, for they threatened to divert people’s gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force pulling us back to Earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them — dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.
Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come — whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism (and so much else in our civilization) depend.
What, then, was the knowledge that God wanted to keep from Adam and Eve in the Garden? Theologians will debate this question without end, but it seems to me the most important answer is hidden in plain sight. The content of the knowledge Adam and Eve could gain by tasting the fruit does not matter nearly as much as its form — that is, the very fact that there was spiritual knowledge of any kind to be had from a tree: from nature. The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn’t exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.
So unfolds the drug war’s first battle.
If proof were needed that the food chain that begins with seeds and ends on our dinner plates is in the midst of revolutionary change, the small print that accompanied my New Leafs will do. That food chain has been unrivaled for its productivity: on average, an American farmer today grows enough food each year to feed a hundred people. Yet that achievement — that power over nature — has come at a price. The modern industrial farmer cannot grow that much food without large quantities of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and fuel. This expensive set of “inputs,” as they’re called, saddles the farmer with debt, jeopardizes his health, erodes his soil and ruins its fertility, pollutes the groundwater, and compromises the safety of the food we eat. Thus the gain in the farmer’s power has been trailed by a host of new vulnerabilities.
In time, all three nations would grow powerful on potatoes, which put an end to malnutrition and periodic famine in northern Europe and allowed the land to support a much larger population that it ever could have planted in grain. Since fewer hands were needed to farm it, the potato also allowed the countryside to feed northern Europe’s growing and industrializing cities. Europe’s center of political gravity had always been anchored firmly in the hot, sunny south, where wheat grew reliably; without the potato, the balance of European power might never have tilted north.
“Bread root” was what the English sometimes called the potato, and the symbolic contrast between the two foods loomed large in the debate, never to the spud’s advantage. Catherine Gallagher points out that the English usually depicted the potato as mere food, primitive, unreconstructed, and lacking in any cultural resonance. In time, that lack would itself become precisely the potato’s cultural resonance: the potato came to signify the end of food being anything more than food — animal fuel. Bread, on the other hand, was as leavened with meaning as it was with air.
Like the potato, wheat begins in nature, but it is then transformed by culture. While the potato is simply thrown into a pot of fire, wheat must be harvested, threshed, milled, mixed, kneaded, shaped, baked, and then, in a final miracle of transubstantiation, the doughy lump of formless matter rises to become bread. This elaborate process, with its division of labor and suggestion of transcendence, symbolized civilization’s mastery of raw nature. A mere food thus became the substance of human and even spiritual communion, for there was also the old identification of bread with the body of Christ. If the lumpish potato was the base matter, bread in the Christian mind was its very opposite: antimatter, even spirit.
Jumping genes and superweeds point to a new kind of environmental problem: “biological pollution,” which some environmentalists believe will be the unhappy legacy of agriculture’s shift from a chemical to a biological paradigm. Harmful as chemical pollution can be, it eventually disperses and fades, but biological pollution is self-replicating. Think of it as the difference between an oil spill and a disease. Once a transgene introduces a new weed or a resistant pest into the environment, it can’t very well be cleaned up: it will already have become part of nature.
Dave Hjelle is a disarmingly candid man, and before we finished our lunch he uttered two words that I never thought I’d hear from the lips of a corporate executives, except perhaps in a bad movie. I’d assume these two words had been scrupulously expunged from the corporate vocabulary many years ago, during a previous paradigm long since discredited, but Dave Hjelle proved me wrong:
“Trust us.”
“Monitor is a deadly chemical,” Forsyth told me; it is known to damage the human nervous system. “I won’t go into a field for four or five days after it’s been sprayed — not even to fix a broken pivot.” That is, Forsyth would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to this poison.
At lunch I had asked Steve Young what he thought about all this, especially about the contract Monsanto forces him to sign and the prospect of sterile seeds. I wondered how the American farmer, the putative heir to a long tradition of agrarian independence, was adjusting to the idea of field men snooping around his farm and patented seeds he couldn’t replant.
Young told me he’d made his peace with corporate agriculture, and with biotechnology in particular. “It’s here to stay. It’s necessary if we’re going to feed the world, and it’s going to take us forward.”
Oh, there is a cost all right. It gives corporate America one more noose around my neck.