In/toxic/ation

It begins with a tree.

You walk past it without noticing. It doesn’t look particularly old or sacred. The bark is uneven, sometimes flaking, sometimes slick with moisture. The leaves resemble something between pine and mimosa—soft, vaguely feathery. The locals don’t look twice. It grows in parks, near highways, at the edges of things.

When spoken of, it has many names. One name means longing. Another refers only to its scent. A third comes from taxonomic Latin, a name assigned from a distance.

Someone—let’s call him RC—kneels by the tree at dusk. He carries a small knife, a notebook with half-erased measurements, and a plastic container darkened by repeated use. He is not a shaman. He does not say he is a scientist. He calls the process “careful” and speaks of attention more than belief.

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The bark is stripped, soaked, warmed, filtered, acidified, alkalized, and reduced. These terms sound precise, and sometimes they are. But precision, in this context, is not the opposite of mystery.

RC works alone. He does not write everything down. He says it’s not that kind of work. He describes colors—says the saturation tells him when to stop. The smell shifts from astringent to earthy to something indescribable, like wet metal just before it burns.

He places the final substance, an iridescent powder, on a glass plate and waits. It dries. It becomes crystalline, then cloudy. Later, it will be vaporized. It will enter the lungs, bypass the gut, cross membranes. It will introduce a different rhythm. One does not begin with expectation, he says. One begins with breath—then observes what arrives.

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The experience is sudden. It arrives all at once—without buildup, without warning. It is intensely bodily: a flood in the chest, a tightness in the jaw, the sense that the lungs have become too slow for the moment.

But within that flood, something stretches. The world begins to shift. Texture becomes uncertain. Depth flattens. Boundaries lose commitment.

This is not only a somatic event. It touches how one knows, how perception arranges itself. A brief, unstable epistemology.

Most describe it as dissolution. But that may not be the right word. The self does not vanish—it migrates. And that migration can be cognitive, affective, or atmospheric. Sometimes all three. Sometimes just confusion.

Some encounter ancestors. Some encounter nothing but color. Some return saying they met a presence without name or face, and that it said nothing. A few say the presence was the tree itself. Most say little at all.

RC does not press them. He’s come to accept that language frays at certain edges. “I don’t want to explain it,” he says. “I want to remember it—without reducing it.”

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The tree is not a symbol. Or if it becomes one, it resists the role. Its bark contains a compound that alters chemistry. That much is measurable. But the meaning it gathers—that is not guaranteed. Some treat it as a threshold, others as a tool, others still as an irritant.

Intoxication here is not a singular experience. It is a shifting register: chemical, relational, ecological. It does not always clarify. Sometimes it simply alters.

In clinical settings, the compounds from its bark are weighed, purified, placed into capsules, and administered under supervision. Data is gathered. Blood pressure monitored. Scales are filled out. Meaning is translated into outcome measures: mood elevation, reduced rumination, improvement across weeks.

But the tree does not belong to these metrics. Not entirely.

In those spaces where its preparation is informal, often illegal, always improvisational, what emerges is not a controlled variable but a relation. One cannot isolate it. The experience occurs within an entanglement—of memory, atmosphere, breath, intention, heat, silence.

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A man describes the feeling of touching his own hand and not knowing where the touch began—whether he was the one being touched or the one touching. This unsettles him. But then, he says, it becomes a kind of listening. The skin listening to itself.

Another woman says that under the influence of the extract, her dead brother returned. He was neither speaking nor silent. “He was just there,” she says, “like the smell of stone after rain.”

Someone else says he spent two hours walking a single stretch of forest, convinced that every tree was breathing in sync with his body. He wasn’t frightened. He says he didn’t believe it exactly—but he also didn’t not believe it.

These are metaphors— but during the experience, they behave like facts. That, too, is a kind of intoxication: when language stops sorting the symbolic from the real. Sometimes this produces insight. Sometimes it produces only a feeling.

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In the weeks that follow, most describe a residue. Not always pleasant. Not always meaningful. Sometimes it lingers in the bones. Sometimes it evaporates in a day.

This is where intoxication fails to behave like revelation. It leaves behind sensation, but not necessarily understanding.

This residue is not memory in the usual sense. It is not recallable, not repeatable. It exists somewhere between sensation and concept. It influences how they move, what they notice. It cannot be verified, yet it persists.

One describes it as “a shift in how things relate.” Another says, “It’s like my attention got longer.”

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The law, of course, has little space for this. The tree is either legal or not. The compound is either therapeutic or illicit. In the language of the state, there are no categories for relations that are invisible, felt, or partial.

RC works at the edge of this grammar. He avoids attention. He says the law misunderstands what it cannot translate.

But he also admits—translation is never complete, no matter who’s doing it. “We can’t speak the language of the tree,” he says. “But sometimes, if we’re quiet, it speaks anyway.”

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What kind of knowledge is produced here? Not one that settles questions. Not one that builds consensus. Rather, a kind of tuning—a calibration of the self in relation to something that resists consolidation. The knowledge is not in what is known, but in how one is changed by the effort to know.

Whether this change is neurological, spiritual, or something else is not the question. Or it is the question, but not one that has a singular answer. The body becomes the site where competing frameworks meet. Not to be resolved, but to be held in tension.

One might say this is the work: To notice when intoxication enables attention— and when it dulls it.

To stay with the tension between the body and the idea, between chemistry and context, between the hope for transformation and the reality of noise.

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What is offered, then, is not a solution, but a terrain. The tree grows there. The bark flakes. The compound precipitates. A body breathes. Time bends.

And somewhere in that assemblage, knowledge appears—not as answer, but as presence.