Un éléphant, ça trompe énormément
A French Film by Yves Robert 1976
"Une comédie romantique qui a marqué son époque."
No, this won't be a movie review, although it is a very amusing movie indeed, and worth yet another encomium even so many years after the fact. Maybe some other time when "the arts" can once again be a main preoccupation for "intellectuals".
But the title does have much to do with my most recent "transcendental" transidentification incident, which I will analyze in some detail, below. First, I would once again urge my readers to digest my previous article on the subject, "Cornflake". There, you will find out very little about cornflakes, but quite a lot about how we might perceive at least one cornflake that wasn't: An introduction to the phenomenon of transidentification and why I do not call it merely misidentification, or illusion. If some readers might think I'm making a big thing out of something boringly common and not needing any close scrutiny, well... I can only urge some further reflection. It is from apparently simple everyday observation and activities, patiently analyzed, that deep understanding sometimes arises. When asked how to obtain ultimate enlightenment, the Zen master said, "Cut wood and draw water".
But first, a word from my sponsors (viz., the experts)
I believe that these agents have a part to play in our survival as a species, for that survival depends as much on our opinion of our fellows and ourselves as on any other single thing. The psychedelics help us to explore and fathom our own nature.... I believe that the psychedelics provide a chance, perhaps only a slender one, for Homo faber, the cunning, ruthless, foolhardy, pleasure-greedy toolmaker to merge into that other creature whose presence we have so rashly presumed, Homo sapiens, the wise, the understanding, the compassionate, in whose fourfold vision art, politics, science, and religion are one. Surely we must seize that chance.
— Humphrey Osmond, "A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents," Annals N.Y. Acad. Sci., March 14, 1957.
Dr. Osmond was a pioneer in the use of psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy, and guided Aldous Huxley’s first mescaline experiences described in the classic essays The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
It is perpetually astonishing to me, as astonishing as a thing can be when you continue to be astonished for a half-century (at least a little of such astonishment should wane with time, one would think?)
But no, I continue to be astonished and disgusted in equal measure at the encyclopedic ignorance displayed by experts-of-almost-every-flavor and the common man alike, for not recognizing the astonishing significance of mankind's rediscovery of the so-called psychedelic drugs at mid-century, going on 70 years ago. After all, even if LSD merely caused one to go completely nuts for a few hours before returning more or less to normality, it would still be one of the most interesting discoveries of the 20th Century. Imagine! To enter into that mysterious, greatly feared and pitifully misunderstood condition called insanity at the mere ingestion of a tiny amount of white powder! And to (usually) make it back unscathed to tell about it! Wow!
But madness it ain't.
If not madness, then, what is the nature of this psychedelic state of mind that results from ingesting one of these drugs? And what does the psychedelic experience reveal about the state of “normality” we depart from and more or less return to? SubStack writer Caitlin Johnstone recently coined a gem of an observation,
Psychedelics are valuable not for the hallucinations they bring, but for the hallucinations they take away.
Perhaps only the initiated can perceive both the humor and truth of the statement, and its limitations: as you will read in Cornflake, we see "psychedelic hallucinations" frequently, every day, but automatically correct them to accord with what we consider to be "reality". Admittedly, this is a hard-to-accept truth if you do not already have a sneaking suspicion that it might be true. And to say that "a trip" might take away some of the "hallucinations of normality"? My writings here and elsewhere have taken on the daunting task to slowly convince you of the truth of such heresies.
Here is some further background to get you in the mood: "Acid Test"
Is it not a curious thing that the greatest crowd madness of all time, the 500-year-long effort of DRUG PROHIBITION has now been surpassed by the mRNA DRUG PROMOTION, a mania and crowd madness of even greater dimensions?
Now, back to the elephant.
I'm sitting in my easy chair, a few moments of relaxation and day-dreaming the goal. The TV is on (with no sound), as is my music collection, a quarter-million audio files played at random by a dedicated laptop computer connected to my 200W NAD and Cabasse Sloops. Background music, and background visual on the big 1080p LED flatscreen. Just settin', just entertainin' the void for a short relax, when sometimes an interesting train of salient thoughts gets going as if by some external unknown influence, leading usually to not much at all, but sometimes...
Out of the corner of my eye I spy an elephant, several elephants, on the French-German artsy channel ARTE. In 1080p their nature programs are quite a wondrous sight: our first TV, in 1956, resembled a small b&w oscilloscope, so I can still be amazed at the distance between our modern gadgets and their pioneering ancestors.
I sort of let my attention be drawn to a closeup of an elephant that seems to be grazing, swinging its trunk along or near the ground and grasping some grass to eat, or whatever. Not paying real attention here, still just day-dreaming, mostly. But there is something about the majestically beautiful grace of this elephant's trunk (trompe, in French, remember the title above?). It undulates, fascinates, attracts my attention, and is quite obviously one of the most delicately controlled appendages of the animal kingdom. I'm impressed, even though still in daydream mode.
Relax time over, back to the computer, check out the day's RTCSID antics, and perhaps write a bit. The elephant's graceful trunk movement is there in memory somewhere, but I would be unlikely to recall it at will, nor remember when the program aired, probably forget all about it, except that...
A couple of days later I am again in background audio/video mode, and out of the corner of my eye I see, again on ARTE in 1080p, a paysan farmer, perhaps in a wheat field, or some other kind of field, and he seems to be sowing seeds, rhythmically swinging his arm back and forth near the ground. Again, not paying any rapt attention, this is my relaxing moment. But suddenly a vision that for a minisecond snaps me out of my reverie!
The paysan's arm turns into an elephant's trunk! I kid you not! But just for an instant. Nevertheless I'm instantly aroused, here goes another of those transidentifications, I must remember the scene in as much detail as possible.
Now this transidentification incident, unlike the others I have described in Cornflake that are static, i.e., a stationary object becoming another stationary object, is dynamic. It is the similarity of movement of the objects that causes the transidentification. A mere photo of a human arm would be very unlikely to produce perception of a trompe. In this case, I think the explanation must be that the paysan's arm movement was so nearly identical in rhythm and form, and even position on the TV screen, to the image of the undulating trunk I had in memory, that for just the tiniest of moments...
I recall also that the body of the paysan seemed almost not to exist, a vague shape without specific characteristics. It was certainly not the rest of the elephant. Nor was it the paysan, somehow. I was just ignoring it entirely. Only the arm was metamorphosed into a trunk that absolutely dominated my perception. A very curious sensation indeed! The more unusual the transidentification, however, the shorter the duration of perceiving, so the trompe didn't trompe me for long (tromper, v., Fr., to trick, deceive).
Un éléphant, ça trompe énormément.
Photo by Rachel Claire from Pexels
Yeah, the whole idea of mass formation (hypnosis) reminds me of how the default mode network filters and shapes what we perceive continuously, as we hallucinate "normality".
The Caitlin Johnstone quote is great, but I have really stopped reading her when she herself hallucinated that the covid situation is not worth challenging, while she sees authoritarianism in war and economics.
Ironic