BY LANCE RICHARDSON
Otto Muehl, Material Action no. 26, Nahrungsmitteltest (Food test), 1966. PHOTO/© Karlheinz and Renate Hein
Toward the end of a long fall in New York, I received a note from a friend that mentioned Peter Gorman as my “kind of guy.” I had never heard of Gorman, and an initial Internet search turned up a man who, on the surface of things, seemed an improbable connection. Here was a person who was middle-aged with three kids and a small ranch in Texas; I was younger, single, living in a third-floor walk-up in Harlem. In a headshot, Gorman was holding a cigarette, smiling with his eyes closed, bearded, unkempt, even dubious-looking. But it was not the family or figure of Gorman that had sparked my friend’s interest so much as his particular line of work—“writer, explorer, naturalist”—and a curious thing that had happened to him in the Amazon.
In my years as a travel writer, I have come to empathize with anyone bold enough to step off the map in search of unusual frontiers. The “nature” Gorman explored, being both real and cerebral, fit this bill: there was the physical region around the Peruvian city of Iquitos, so deep in the jungle it can only be reached by air or river boat; and there was the mental terrain of lucid dreams, so deep in the unconscious it can only be accessed by ayahuasca, “vine of the little death,” an infamous narcotic that induces brilliant hallucinations. Gorman wandered both frontiers using local curanderos—shamans in contact with the spirit world—in much the same way that Dante Alighieri used Virgil as his guide through the underworld. Nevertheless, Gorman also struck me as the sort of figure skeptics shrug off as a charlatan, peddling alucino (jungle medicine) to hapless travelers in search of instant enlightenment. Studying his book, Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming, I came across scenes that shoved credulity into tight corners: a Matses Indian burns Gorman’s arm with an ember, wipes away the skin, and smears toad excretion across the wound; Gorman collapses.
Then unexpectedly, I found myself growling and moving around on all fours. I felt as though animals were passing through me, trying to express themselves through my body. It was a fantastic feeling, but a fleeting one. When it passed, I could think of nothing but the rushing of my blood, a sensation so intense that I thought my heart would burst.
Reading further, I discovered that plants like ayahuasca “broaden the bands of our senses so that we see, hear, feel, touch, taste and sense things we can’t under ordinary circumstances.” Starting from the Amazon forest with a curandero spirit guide, Gorman had taken hallucinogens to defamiliarize the world, creating a dazzling newness that he parsed for meaning through visions that were sometimes beautiful and just as often terrifying. Put another way, Gorman was traveling deep into his own unconscious, plumbing its mysteries in search of some ultimate truth.
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