Thursday, February 22, 2007

Terence McKenna's library destroyed in fire

This is very un-wonderful news: the late Terence McKenna's library of rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire started in a Quizno's sandwich shop in Monterey, California.
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3 comments:

mister ecks said...

this is awful:(

in a darkly symbolic way, it kind of figures that the fire came from a Quizno's.

10:24 PM
e said...

We did not invent nor do we own the letters.
We did not create nor do we own the words the letters make.
The sacralized profanity of writing is in how we assemble the letters and words into original syntactical creations.
Call it art, call it literature, if you must.
The best of it can document what science calls the “tertiary” principle of human experience, or what Terence McKenna called “the authentic experience of the body and the mind.” James Joyce called it the “mama matrix most mysterious.”
It is the same with those of us who are, in that great phrase of Mac Tonnies, “unredeemed bibliophiles.”
The books are not ours, we did not create them. We simply bought them over time and built our personal libraries.
But a collection of books on shelves is so much more than hoarding things like fine china. McKenna often spoke about the “visual syntax” he was able to see when taking such compounds as DMT. Language, he said, became a visual topography.
The loss of Terence’s library to fire has forever robbed us of the privilege to scan his shelves and grok the unique topographical map that was the mind of Terence McKenna.
I feel like he has died twice.
Thankfully, we have a list of his books, courtesy of his brother; his own published works and many hours of his recorded “raps.”

6:42 AM
platts42 said...

That is indeed horrible. Year and years of ethnobotanical studies and notes up in flames. My mind is boggling as it sinks in.

Goodbye Library of Alexandria

The brightside is that there is enough material saved and distributed to point the way for the next lucky contestant who carries on the study.

8:01 AM

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