Amsterdam Sixty-Two: Inside-Out, Outside-In

Indexing. Morning and afternoon. An email. From Sterre. “Michael, meet me tomorrow at Cameleon Theater at 18:00. It’s at 3E Derde Kostverlorenkade (on the Schinkel) just off Overtoom.” I replied. “Cool. See you there!” I found the location on a map. Easy enough to get there, a bit further than OT301. But that was tomorrow. What about tonight?

I went out—it was cold and damp—and rode my bike to Leidsestraat, checking out a smart shop I had often passed. They had many of the same varieties of the other smart shops. There was a tall, middle-aged Dutchmen, quite amicable, who was talkative and fun-loving. I bought a dose of Hawaiian and one of Colombian. Mixing up the types of doses was a good approach for me.

I rode down Keizersgracht most of the way back home. Such a different feel than the previous night. Not as vibrant, I didn’t become a stately gentleman, but I still noticed how riding along Keizersgracht versus Kerkstraat affected my perception of myself and the city. The two streets were about a block from one another but one ran along a canal with huge mansions and buildings whereas Kerkstraat had no canal, the street was narrower without such a wide-open expanse to view further away, and thus had a cozier feel, the relatively smaller buildings adding to that atmosphere. I couldn’t say one was better than the other; they were just different. I liked each of them in their own way, but I definitely felt differently riding along them. Kerkstraat made me feel more “local” while Keizersgracht made me feel like a traveler passing through a grandness that was definitely not my own, a privileged experience that felt like it couldn’t happen every day—even though it could. Strange.

I had eaten before I went out. I ate both doses of the mushrooms with crackers while drinking a beer. An odd mix of flavors, without question. I went to the living room, turned on a reggae station, and smoked hash. I opened the window and had a cigarette. The cold darkness of early evening seemed to have cleared the street of traffic. More cars passed than pedestrians or cyclists. Disappointing. I closed the window and sat down on the rug to sketch with colored pencils. I had no predetermined intention, as was my way. What developed over fifteen minutes was a cityscape. I didn’t see it while I was creating it, but the vertical and horizontal lines mixed with the curves suggested an urban landscape as seen from above. I teased this out, filling in certain parallels of particular colors as roads and aligned curves of another color as canals; squares, rectangles, rhombuses, circles, ovals, all of different sizes and several different types of colors I shaded as residential buildings, retail shops, cafés, office buildings, government buildings, grand theaters, hotels, music venues, museums, parks, and so on.

I smoked more hash as I pulled back to look at the sketch again. I lost the cityscape; it had somehow disappeared with the applications of shaded and condensed color. It seemed to be simply jumbled chaos, but as I leaned back another foot from it I saw a multitude of compositions. There was a face, neo-Cubist, spectacular in expression, a mixture of horror and confusion; I saw bodies tangled one upon another, limbs unattached to bodies while some bodies were mostly whole, and two bodies, amazingly, were intertwined in an embrace; a landscape also appeared as if seen from a distance but through thickets of tree limbs, rolling hills of green grass, lavender fields, flowing yellow wheat, and a blue-and-red sky, a sky bloody from a distant battle or a splintered sun, the blues harsh, dark, the onset of dusk.

I lost myself looking. More compositions became the longer I looked. I gasped at times when something I hadn’t seen materialized as the whole of the drawing! New compositions appeared again and again, but even the compositions that I had discovered earlier changed as different areas transformed from being one thing to another. A scene of a castle ballroom became a room filled with men and women clawing at one another. Then, surprisingly, the cityscape as seen from above reemerged. Wow. The sketch could become anything at any time even though the drawing no longer changed. At times, though, I saw that a new composition could become if I added a pink or a combination of grey-blue and forest green. I saw those completed works without adding the colors and I chose not to add them because I knew doing so would alter the compositions that currently existed. I also discovered I could block out colors that were present to see what the composition would look like without them. Fascinating.

I realized the shrooms had been active while I was viewing. I didn’t give that realization my attention, though, as I had been wrapped up in the sketch even before the shrooms began affecting me. I continued looking, amazed that I could create drawings that contained so many visions, possibly endless. The number and variety depended on my eyes, on my perception, on my willingness to allow what was there to speak, to change languages, to shift emotionally. As always, the creation of a drawing is only half the art; the other half comes from viewing. In this case, I composed both halves of the artistic process as creator and viewer. Different emotional, intellectual, and sensory qualities accompanied each half. Viewing filled me with awe whereas the drawing was imbued with intensity of movement in relation to decision making. There was decision making in the viewing process as well, but so different I couldn’t compare the two. Both processes required intense attentiveness; however, the attentiveness of drawing was directed from inside-out while the attentiveness of viewing was an allowance of outside-in.

Doing one without the other seemed dangerous, imbalanced. To only allow outside-in without directing inside-out left me at the whim of what was external to me. To only direct inside-out was to be oblivious of how I interacted with the world, of my impact on it, and of ever changing in relation to it. In this sense, the process was related to far more than drawing and viewing sketches or the artistic process itself; this was the process of relating to the world. Individuals in positions of unchecked power might be good examples of more or less exclusively living an inside-out process whereas an elementary school students or drone-like worker bees might be good examples of people forced to become live an outside-in life. Most people were trained to absorb knowledge and understanding through an outside-in process which is likely why they had so little understanding of how they thought, why they followed rules well but didn’t know how to direct their lives outside of highly structured environments.

A person in the practice of living both inside-out and outside-in had a natural advantage in the sense of being able to see the dynamic complexity of self/other relationships and recognize that the relationship between the two constituted a whole. There could be no such thing as “You Are Either With Us Or Against Us.” Self was not more important than other but neither was other more important than self. Symbiosis, synthesis. This practice affected everything: Political persuasion, personal relationships, ethics, aesthetic appreciation, creative thinking, emotional regulation, sensory experience and exploration, sense of self, responsibility to others, and on and on endlessly.

This was not a one plus one or two plus two equation. My quality of living and scope of perception did not merely double; it expanded immeasurably because it was a constant feedback loop. To remain inside-out or outside-in meant remaining relatively static moment to moment, day after day, year after year. Meanwhile, to constantly inhale what was external and exhale what was internal meant a constant flow of exchange, a dynamic and always expanding relationship. Who I might be by the end of a given day could be radically different than who I had been at the beginning of the day.

I needed only to examine the previous week for evidence, from meeting Sterre before the sex party, through the sexual experiences, the last day of cleaning and conversing, the day and night with Daniel and Alex, the return to Bloem in the morning and the night cycling while shrooming the previous day to appreciate how I changed each day and how radically I had changed in less than a week's time. Even a very short period of time, the first fifteen minutes listening to Andy, changed something within me. My perspective of Amsterdam shifted and expanded and my appreciation for his being became. Diversity added to life and by allowing his flow within me I became more diverse as a result. My decision to cycle while shrooming was an act of inside-out direction and the routes I took were as well, but by being open to the environment surrounding me I transitioned from a lover on Reguliersgracht to a regal gentleman on Keizersgracht, in both cases allowing the outside to influence what was inside.

During the course of my visits to Amsterdam, I allowed far more of what was outside to come inside because I needed the nourishment Amsterdam offered. I had been internally malnourished and thus had less within to give out. That was rapidly changing. Busking was an obvious example as was approaching Sterre. There were others even from the first trip: Choosing to meet Vanessa then helping her financially as well as putting myself in a position to meet Daniel, Nina, and Anabel.

I hadn’t fully identified these dynamics, but through sketching then viewing I discovered the process. If this process was like breathing then my breathing had been feverishly irregular and was now becoming more regular. Rolling these thoughts around my head was sort of like holding a toke of hash in my lungs so that the THC could more fully penetrate. These thoughts were marinating and I realized I had periodic marinating periods, times when I held within what I had inhaled from without. I never truly exhaled everything inhaled--how could that lead to expansion?--but what I exhaled became part of the environment through actions, nonverbal expressions, or words (spoken or written then shared).

With that analogy in mind, I reached for my one-hitter and loaded more hash. I inhaled and exhaled, inhaled and exhaled, then moved to the window to have a cigarette. I opened it and, while still cold and damp, there were more pedestrians and cyclists, fewer vehicles. As the hours passed, especially later in the week, the traffic shifted away from cars to human-propelled locomotion. As I watched I thought of how incredibly important the concrete world of sensation was. The thoughts I had were insightful and useful, but without application and practice in relation to the external (other) they were a disease.

This was especially true while shrooming. I was learning more every time I shroomed. It was very easy to get lost in thought, in “otherworldly” manifestations of emotions and ideas and even to interpret sensory experience as superior to “sober” experience. Viewing my sketches allowed a concrete interaction with the world even as the otherworldly experience of seeing so many compositional variations within the same “oneness” occurred. This was another form of synthesis, a relationship between the concrete and the fantastical, the two tethered to one another. Neither extreme existing without relation to the other seemed particularly healthy to me. To become overly fantastical—which had happened on occasion—felt like being completely in another world. My capacity to interact with the “regular” world disintegrated.

Meanwhile, to be too rooted in the concrete world without imagination or surprise was to narrow the scope of what existed to such a degree that narrow-minded and fixated thinking became dominant, diminishing emotional range and limiting sensory experience—existing as "dullness,” far below the experiential capacity of being. This seemed to be how most humans experienced life, though. It partially explained indifference to subtle and sometimes even exaggerated differences in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, feelings, and thoughts. A person who thought little of the difference between a mall parking lot compared to a Japanese garden existing in a space made my head spin. How could anyone find such a difference inconsequential? I was angered by this at times, but increasingly I felt sorrow that the most of the world was made ugly by such mindless insensitivity and for the dullards who were either unwilling or incapable of noticing such differences and, thus, not experiencing the profundity of living.

Then again, I felt sorrow that I had only managed to realize this much. Undoubtedly there were beings living a much fuller actualization of their potential and, thus, I was living less fully than they were, either incapable or unwilling to expand to a greater fullness of my own capacity. That sorrow was muted, though, as I had been willing to live as fully as possible over the past several months. This had not been the first time in my life I had dedicated myself to learning how to live, either. It wasn’t a contest, though; there would be no winning—although there might be losing. Strange how that could be, but there was the possibility.

I watched out the window, looking at a man of indeterminate age wandering toward the Magere Brug. His gait was steady, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, head bowed low. He wore a long black wool coat extending to his knees. The trousers were black, but of a shimmering quality, flapping and splaying, clearly not thick material, extremely free in flow. A scarf covered his neck—and may have made his hunch shoulders appear more pronounced than they were. He wore a black hat with what appeared to be lighter brown hair poking out from the sides. His shoes, too, were black, not shiny, not boots; no, urban walkers.

Watching with attentiveness, observing a person walk to the extent that the rest of the street disappeared and I became oblivious to the lights that made seeing what I had possible, created a certain effect. It drew me out of myself in a way that detached me from my thoughts and emotions. If I had judged the man in any way then that would not have been the case; I would have been using thoughts fueled by expectations and preferences which would have undoubtedly been attached to either favorable or unfavorable emotions. I made no judgments, though. I simply observed, noticing what he was wearing and how he was walking until he was out of my line of sight.

What was gained by doing such a thing? What was lost? Had I learned anything useful? Was I influenced in any way? I merely stopped thinking as I had been and noticed what I saw while looking at him. By not trying to glean a thing I meditated without attempting or meaning to meditate. Observing what is not me is a way of being with the world for no purpose other than to be with something other than me. What was lacking in this observation was imagination. I did not tell a story of the man’s walking. I didn’t speculate about where he had come from nor where he was going, why he dressed the way he did and not another way, or any other imaginative wonderment or analysis. Allowing imagination to go on hiatus and avoid creating a narrative is a good thing now and then. Observation for the sake of observation (rather than for the purpose of discovery) had many unintended side effects, most of them seemingly healthy.

The stereo was still exuding reggae. The volume was so low, though, that it never attracted my conscious attention. If I had been focused on it, the quality of the experience of listening to it would have been enhanced. So? Knowing that seemed to be enough. Nevertheless, it was startling to discover that music was playing. So much happened all at once all the time that it was almost always a surprise to discover anything that had been there all along. I recalled noticing the prints on the walls during the first week of my visit, being shocked that I hadn’t noticed them in the days prior. The same with the plants.

The plants! I needed to water them again. I got off the couch and felt … strange. Moving was decidedly weird. Thinking became much, much more difficult. I had to talk my way through what I was doing so as not to forget. “I am walking to the kitchen to fill a pitcher with water so that I may pour the water into the plant containers … why am I speaking so formally? Seems really weird.” I stopped, took a breath, and started again. “I am at the sink and I am filling the pitcher. Turn off the water. Walk through the kitchen to the living room and water the plant in the corner.” I continued in this fashion, going back and forth to fill the pitcher and water the other plants. I had to reassure myself that every plant had been watered and that it was important not to saturate them with too much water.

I sat down on the couch again. “Fuck, when I’m sitting still I can think coherently, but when I move I can barely think at all.” No wonder the trip had seemed relatively mild and primarily cerebral. I now knew I was tripping hard. It was somewhat disconcerting that I could be fooled so easily into believing I was in control of all of my faculties. Different varieties and different dosages caused different effects, but even then shrooming was unpredictable. On one night, I might have powerfully enhanced sensory experiences and emotional mastery while not really being able to think. On another night, I might think at a high level with a narrow emotional range and a pert-near impossible ability to move functionally. The more I learned the more I realized there was no end to what could be discovered.

I thought about this. Well, I tried to think about what I had just thought, but I couldn’t find my way back to the thought. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking … or if I was thinking. I looked at my hands, but that just confused matters. I made a sound with my voice, a garbled wail. That didn’t clarify anything. I saw the cigarettes on the table and declared, “Aha!” I remembered that when lost doing something, almost anything, was useful to regain some semblance of clarity. I lit the cigarette and inhaled. I tried to blow a smoke ring, but failed. I wasn’t frustrated, though; each failure made me more determined to succeed. When I came down to the butt without success, I put out the cig ... then lost track what I had been doing.

“I was just doing something. What was it? Is it important to know what it was?” Had I asked these questions before? It felt like I had. In some sense, it seemed like I had always been asking these questions, like it was an obsession to always be aware of what had occurred in the moment immediately preceding the next moment. Why would that be important? What a waste of time, a waste of life to attend to such a thing constantly. Was it constant, though?

“Was what constant?” I was thinking about something but I couldn’t remember what it was. It might have been important, but then again it might not have been. If it wasn’t important then I was wasting my time. But if it was important … I still might be wasting my time. What the hell does it mean for something to be important? What could possibly have been important the moment before now? Wouldn’t I be better able to create something really interesting if I always forgot what I had been doing in previous moments? What if I was drawing while somehow being incapable of seeing the markings I had created and thought that I was just starting to draw each moment? What if that happened the entire time I sketched and, then, when the paper was full, I saw it all at once, absolutely awed that a composition had completely formed in the moment after I believed I first started drawing. Wow.

“Man, I feel amazing. What a rush. I figured it all out! The past isn’t necessary. No, that’s not it. It’s not necessary to know or understand what came before. Maybe. What does that mean? What does that mean?” Fuck. “I can’t make sense of anything I’m thinking. I’m not sure what I’m thinking. Is this important? What does ‘importance’ mean, anyway? I think I already thought about that, but I can’t remember what I thought about it. Does that matter? What if I just keep thinking the same things over and over again for the rest of my life? Would that make me the Rain Man? Is that what goes on in the Rain Man’s head? There is no Rain Man. It was a movie. But autism is real. What is autism? Is it thinking the same thing over and over?”

I had no idea. It was all gibberish. Nonsense spewed forth for what may have been a moment or could have been eternity. The curse and blessing of the Rain Man. Maybe this was Alzheimer’s or dementia. No matter what it was it seemed pleasant. Yes, there was confusion, but it was infused with curiosity, a boundless curiosity, relentless. I wanted to know. Would discovering the same thing over and over throughout an entire lifetime be just as fulfilling as discovering something new each moment? How would anyone know? The person who always discovered the same thing over and over wouldn’t be able to tell that he was discovering the same thing over and over while the person discovering something new each moment couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to discover the same thing each moment. If it was merely the experience of discovery that filled one with satisfaction then it wouldn’t matter what a person discovered as long as the person discovered!

Again, I felt majestic. “I have discovered the answer. I am filled with a deep abiding satisfaction.” But how long does the satisfaction of each discovery last? A minute? An hour? Days or weeks? Did what was discovered factor into the length of time one was satisfied by the discovery? I didn’t know. I wondered if trying not to discover anything new after making a discovery could lead to endless fulfillment as long as I reminded myself--whenever my satisfaction waned--that I had discovered something satisfying, even if it had been twenty years earlier. Could curiosity and desire be vanquished? I didn’t know. If I explored the question then I would lose the satisfaction of my previous discovery. If I didn’t, I might lose the rush that comes from acting on curiosity? I needed to make a decision.

I paused and contemplated. The longer I contemplated, the less verbal I became. Eventually, I noticed I was staring at the wall across the room. “Why am I staring at the wall? What was I thinking about? Does it matter? What if it was important? What is ‘importance,’ anyway? Why am I concerned about what happened the previous moment?” I contemplated again, wondering why I was wondering. I couldn't remember.

“What was I just thinking about?”