Ian Mulder reviews "The Sun Temple"

My thanks to author and blogger Ian Mulder for his review of The Sun Temple on his blog: "A wayfarer's notes". I reprint it here in its entirety. For more of Ian's insightful and entertaining words, please visit him at: http://perpetual-lab.blogspot.co.uk/

Intersecting Worlds:
The Sun Temple by
B.F. Späth
Reality is composed of many interwoven strands and nowhere are these delineated more vividly than in The Sun Temple. What shall I call it? A treatise? A short story? A memoir? A traveller’s tale? It’s all of these and a masterpiece of erudite psychedelia
as well.

Above all it is searingly honest and true, never carried away with the intoxication of drugs consumed, nor even the grammar and vocabulary of poetic licence. Had I walked in Brian’s footsteps and scratched out with my quill an entry in his ship’s log of voyages undertaken, I might have scaled the mountain-tops, plumbed the depths, muddied the waters—losing myself and reader in a maze of mixed metaphor. Brian doesn’t do this, but uses precise language, with footnotes where necessary adducing such authorities as Pliny the Elder, the King James Bible and Dale Pendell’s Pharmako/Poeia*.

His heroes are two: (a) the Sun, and (b) its Temple, which manifests on earth in the form of Battery Park, at the southwest tip of Manhattan Island. The narrator is he who worships at the Sun Temple, by carrying out a series of purifications and rituals.

In the first paragraph we are introduced to the noonday Sun, whose task is to reach down from its zenith position to its indoor worshipper, zig-zagging reflections down the narrow space between old New York tenements to reach his apartment, and writing its message on his kitchen floor: Awake! Come to me and reunite. The Sun’s method is to create a dissatisfaction in his heart, and stimulate action: a pilgrimage to Battery Park, in time for its diurnal blaze of glory in the western sky. Thus Master reaches out to Disciple, in an act of collusion and rescue.

After the poetic intensity of this first paragraph, which in an old-fashioned epic poem, such as Paradise Lost, might be labelled “The Argument”, he goes on to explain how he came to see the ravaged monuments of Battery Park, a traditional tourist destination, as a temple to the Sun, at which he may be the only true worshipper. As in all life, the greatest highs take root in the soil of desperation, and return to it, as a rocket comes back down to earth. Or as Jack Kornfield puts it:“After the ecstasy, the laundry.”†

My life had somehow lost direction, with no plans or goals—that was it, really: I was aimless—that was the root cause of my perhaps unhealthy obsession with the Old Battery....

Part memoir, part travelog: he has me longing to go there myself, to visit New York, his beloved home, and see it for myself, perhaps a little through his enchanted eyes. The magic libation, the mythical soma, is cannabis. He sets out in scientific and historical detail some background to this drug: its usage and effects.‡

His approach to these drugs is reverential, but I doubt the Mayor of New York, even if he happens to be in favour of decriminalization, will promote The Sun Temple in tourist literature. It’s as we used to speculate in 1971 (when I last tried the sacred herb): they don’t want us to use it in case we won’t be worker-ants any more, we won’t go on buying the American Dream.

Be that as it may, his travelog is compelling. It opens our eyes to a different dimension mapped on to the reality that everyone can see. The alignment of decrepit monuments in the Battery, the shadows they cast, the paved sun-trap open spaces, invite comparison with ancient temples such as Stonehenge, with Späth as its learned archaeologist. But then again, it takes nothing more than a new paragraph to swivel the entire landscape around and show us a different perspective: personal nostalgia, confessional memoir or even psychiatric diagnosis. In a swift juxtaposition, he continues with a confident walk on the vertiginous knife-edge between multiple escarpments, using the language of dream. We reach the delightful point of not knowing (till he tells us, and he’s always as honest as he is precise) whether he’s wandering some part of the Battery at midnight, dreaming at home in bed or living the disoriented life of an insomniac, aided by traditional herbal substances:

In the role of trespasser, I enter the ruined and abandoned Observatory, and I imagine that it may have its corollary in the desecration of the shrine at Ashkelon[footnote appended]

I become aware of other figures entering slowly around the periphery of my bed as night-sweats and delirium hold sway in the electro-narcotic mist ... and against the wall on my shelf are a row of long-neglected books: the Cuneiform Library. I select a volume at random and open it to an arbitrary page:

[quote from the book, about the action of priests at a temple to Lord Jagannath, and the historic removal of a sacred image]

With a start, I realized that this ancient tragedy has been re-enacted by the modern-day theft of Ambrose’s head and the burning of the Concession building and its subsequent abandonment. But my concentration wavers—it’s the heat, that heavy blanket that hangs over the park and over my feverish dreams as I float to a more fundamental and exalted midnight ... and soon I couldn’t remember what I had dreamed and what I had consciously invented and both of these tributaries fed into the great body of the park ... the spectral presence of the park after the Sun has gone down.

Not since De Quincey¶, I suspect, can there have been a more candid and convincing account of a psycho-physical journey fuelled by mania, obsession, the highs and lows offered by psychedelic herbs. Read The Sun Temple for a “legal high” wherever you are.
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* Pharmako/Poeia is an epic poem on plant humours, an abstruse alchemic treatise, an experiential narrative jigsaw puzzle, a hip and learned wild-nature reference text, a comic paean to cosmic consciousness, an ecological handbook, a dried-herb pastiche, a counterculture encyclopedia of ancient fact and lore that cuts through the present ‘conservative’ war-on-drugs psychobabble. —Allen Ginsberg

† After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by Jack Kornfield, leading Buddhist teacher: “Our realizations and awakenings show us the reality of the world, and they bring transformations, but they pass.”

‡ Cannabis sativa, best known to Western users; also Cannabis indica whose effects are more sedative than those of sativa which is famous for offering a “cerebral high”. The narrator also suspects that the indica he has purchased may have been cut with Datura, whose effects (per Wikipedia) include “a complete inability to differentiate reality from fantasy”.

¶ Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey, The London Magazine, 1821.

The Sun Temple—Trailer #1

By B.F. Spaeth:

Meet me at "The Sun Temple": where a fever, heat-wave, and cannabis sacrament all lead to a grand hallucinatory vision. This is the first in a series of animated trailers in which I read from my short story, "The Sun Temple".

After you watch this video, download the e-book to continue on this psychedelic journey.

Click here to purchase the e-book:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/337283

/// battery park /// cannabis /// hallucinations /// myths /// nyc /// psychedelic /// sun cult

"The Sun Temple": e-book now available on smashwords

A heat wave, fever, and tainted Cannabis sacrament all combine to create a grand hallucinatory vision in the dreams of the narrator of this short story that borrows from ancient Cannabis history and myths. Through a progressive derangement of the senses, we witness a modern day Battery Park morph into a great brooding, psychedelic theater of the imagination.

"Mind-blowing. Some of the most profound descriptions of the sacramental powers of cannabis ever put to words. Would make a wonderful script for a film."              

—Reviewed by Steven Hager

I am pleased to announce the publication of my first e-book: The Sun Temple, my short story which is now downloadable at smashwords in an electronic version in any of a half-dozen different formats.

 *  *  * 

I would also like to introduce my new pen name: B.F. Spaeth, which is not, as some people might imagine, a literary affectation or conceit, but rather, as something that was a matter of necessity. I was compelled to adopt a new author name  because of the fact that I have a namesake on the West coast, also a writer, and with a number of titles already published. So, in order to avoid confusion (and lawsuits!) I have deferred to him, and adopted this new pen name.

 *  *  * 

The genesis of The Sun Temple goes back a little over 20 years ago. My life at the time had become intolerable and unworkable for me—pressures both internal and external (not always distinguishable) had caused me to leave my job and also retreat from my social circle. I needed to step back and try to see where I was. Above all I needed an escape—from everything, and most of all, from myself. I dug into my meager savings and purchased a bicycle—I hadn't owned one in decades—and started tentatively exploring Manhattan, especially the little-known and out-of-the-way streets and places—the more obscure, the better.

Eventually I found my way down to the Battery, the oldest part of the city. My isolation and estrangement found a kinship with the then decayed and neglected Battery, which at that time had not yet attracted too much attention from the forces of the "developers".

I quickly fell under the spell of the old Battery Park, and began, without even realizing it, to create my own mythology of the place, embellishing it with my own inner thoughts and fantasies. The park became a phantom theater for my loneliness, isolation, and descent into near-psychosis. Is that too strong a word? Perhaps, but to willingly surrender to—and desperately seek—these states of mind can be dangerous and destabilizing.

With the aid of daily cannabis intoxication, combined with a painfully isolated and un-moored psyche, I put myself to the task of constructing a grand and mournful theater—a kind of cenotaph that marked my estrangement from my fellow souls. I strove to blend examples of historical cannabis myth within a modern setting (hopefully with a measure of humor) to create a mind-altering hallucination that gradually overwhelms the narrator, who perhaps achieves more than he bargained for.

The chance occurrence of a fever and a brutal heat wave combined to build the spectral park up to phantasmagorical levels in my dreams and waking life.

I recall my attempt at the time of recording my impressions of this strange phenomenon that had obsessed me. It was a rather tentative and brief sketch—a little over a page in length, and somewhat lacking in structure and development, but nevertheless, contained the basic core of the experience. The original manuscript was lost however, and I would periodically return to the idea over the succeeding years. When I finally started writing in earnest about 8 or 9 years ago, I made an attempt to revisit the story. It proved to be a mammoth undertaking, and beyond my powers to organize and develop. Over the next several years, I would return to it again and again—printing out perhaps half a hundred different drafts, until I was finally able to organize and embellish the story to my satisfaction.

This completion of my story roughly coincided with the emergence of the e-book, and with the concept of self-publishing. I chose smashwords as my platform, and it has proved to be quite easy to format and upload a file of your story and have it published. The formatting and various technical requirements were well within my capabilities. My experience as a graphic designer stood me in good stead and I was able to publish without any trouble.

In addition, I was fortunate to have had the inclination to take a series of photographs of the old Battery—back before its modern transformation—and I recorded most of the old monuments and markers of the Battery, which have been removed and taken away to God knows where. I include some of these photos in the e-book, as smashwords now allows you to utilize photographs and graphics along with your text.

One of the main literary influences on Temple was the writings of Thomas De Quincey, expecially his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which had a profound effect on me when I first discovered it over 40 years ago. I am also indebted to Chris Bennett, and his Cannabis and the Soma Solution, which is a work of staggering scholarship that traces the history and mythology of Cannabis.

Another more modern influence is Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, his 1962 film masterpiece that centers around the great abandoned ruin of the Salt Air Pavilion, a vast and ornate amusement park that had once stood in Salt Lake City.

The myths of the various and historical sun cults that underpin all of our modern religions are also woven into my story, the sun being the catalyst that entices me out of my dark psychological cave.

So The Sun Temple, is for the most part, a true story and a deeply felt experience that I have struggled with for many years to bring to the printed (and electronic) page. I truly hope that others will enjoy it and be brought under its spell as I was.

~B.F. Spaeth

/// cannabis /// myths /// psychedelic ///