[Painting by BRIAN KIELING]
ASSOCIATED PRESS: When the state of Texas licensed him as a peyote distributor in 1990, Mauro Morales put a sign in his front yard with his name and phone number: “Peyote Dealer. Buy or Sell Peyote.” His neighbors balked, saying calling so much attention to his trade had to be against the law. “So I called Austin and said, ‘I think everything’s legal. I’ve got the paperwork. Can’t I put up a sign?'” Morales recalled. Twenty years later, the sign still stands, but it’s harder than ever for Morales to make a living. The hallucinogenic cactus is more becoming difficult to find because many ranchers have stopped allowing peyote harvesters on their land, preferring to plow the grayish-green plant under so cattle can graze. Others now lease their property to deer hunters or oil and gas companies. The result is over-harvesting of remaining stocks, making peyote even more scarce. “Things are kind of getting slower every year,” said Morales, who is just one of just three Americans currently licensed to sell peyote, which grows wild in four Texas counties along the border with Mexico. MORE
ALAN GINSBERG: By the late ’40s of this memory Century the people I knew best and loved the most had already broken through the crust of old Reason & were dowsing for some Supreme Reality, Christmas on Earth Rimbaud said, Second Religiousness according to Spengler’s outline of civilization declining through proliferation of non-human therefore boring technology; Blake had called “O Earth O Earth return!” centuries before, echoing the ancient gnostic prophecy that Whitman spelled out for America specifically demanding that the Steam-engine “be confronted and met by at least equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for genuine aesthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness –” Ezra Pound’s mind jumped to diagnose the dimming of the world’s third Eye: “With Usura the line grows thick.” MORE