Erik Davis writes about The Wild Kindness for Burning Shore
Bett Williams’ new book, The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey (Dottir Press), enters this parched desert like a flash flood raging down one of the dusty arroyos that lie near Williams’ home in northern New Mexico. It is hard to lasso this puppy, and that’s a good thing. The book begins as a memoir, with Williams taking up the mushroom while weathering some heavy lesbian drama kicked up by a vindictive ex and false accusations ricocheting through social media and the courts. We get some genteel shroom trips early on, but about a third of the way in, the whole book enters the Zone. The language loosens, and we find Williams wrestling with illuminati octopi and having a conversation with her dog Rosie—rendered in the format of a dramatic script—in which Rosie introduces her to Project Lambchop, a CIA operation that’s been secretly grooming Williams into becoming a trip-guru, which will help the government institute the mass use of psychedelics in controlled clinical settings, delightfully rendered here as “lizard stalls.”
This fantasia not only gives you a sense of Williams’ psychedelic politics—an anti-authoritarian distrust of the “experts” now lining up between us and the mushroom teachers—but also her willingness to go gonzo. Like a trip, the book builds and plateaus but never settles down. Though Williams tells us she doesn’t travel much, we visit Standing Rock, Huatla de Jiminéz, Marfa, and a Black psychedelic conference in Detroit. We jump tracks between blog post, diary, public service announcement, queer social studies, experience reports (the good, the bad, and the wacky), cultural criticism, science fiction, and mushroom chants. This range of scenes and genres is matched by an almost ADD polyphony of voices. Williams can be brainy, funny, wounded, macho, nurturing, self-absorbed, reverent, and absurd. (“They said Grimes needs to come over too,” she blurts out during one trip. “We’ll give her an extension cord and a sandwich.”) It gets murky at times, but just when the prose starts to hit the Botts’ dots, she’ll whip out a phrase of startling clarity, a micro-download like
Human beings are either going to die out or link up with robots.
or
Not knowing what the fuck is going on is the shared purgatory we all now live in.
or
Doing drugs with clowns is never a waste.
The Wild Kindness reminds me that the poison path is not really about pursuing psychedelic experience, or psychedelic healing, but about living a psychedelic life as a psychedelic person. In Williams’ articulation, that person is plural, genderqueer, allied with plants and animals and incense, and avowedly on the spectrum. She is Gen X, but as addicted to the Internet as any millennial. She is a witch and a wit, a roots ceremonialist “allied with the tribe of stoners.” She is 1/8 Cherokee, but that “doesn’t make me not a white person.” She is lesbian and allied with people of color, but her social justice talk is banked on vulnerability, the courage of self-critique, and the not-knowing that is central to any authentic embrace of the Mystery. (When she visits Huatla de Jimenez, Maria Sabina’s village, she does not bemoan the ruin caused by hippie colonialists, but asks: “What do white Westerners gain from promoting the idea they ruined Huatla de Jiménez?”) She trips mystic but distrusts epiphany as an “ecstasy of vertical structure.” She is humble and wise and broken.
For the sake of all those newbies seeking psychedelic transformation out there, I almost hope she becomes a guru. But she’d hate it, and that’s why she’s awesome.