Despite giving up Kanno and home grown dope, Martha is no advocate of a fixed state of consciousness, and uses literature as her main recreational drug. She takes it, along with some mild psychedelics, for medical reasons, too.
Poor Martha is subject to random attacks of double vision, blindness, muscle spasms, cramps. The pain becoming more acute in recent months. She receives a treatment of sorts. The debilitating symptoms slowed (by certain pharmaceutical drugs) but not halted. Like ‘suffering a stroke in slow motion,’ she says. The regular neurological tests she undergoes show nothing untoward. The medical profession unable to match her symptoms to a recognised disorder.
What Martha fears most is that her eye sight will one day fail completely. A loss she cannot bear to contemplate for blindness would evict her from the world of imagination in which she has lived so much of her life. The arduous task of learning braille is not one she is ready to face.
There is no magic antidote.
Doctors say their drugs do not induce stupor in a patient. But after taking their prescribed drugs, Martha’s concentration wavers. Reading becomes effortful, to the point of tarnishing her enjoyment.
Her ‘medication’ will also catalyse, albeit unintentionally, other chemical reactions. It has become unsafe for Martha to take a monthly Kanno hit. The pleasure and merriment may degenerate into unstoppable fits of laughter and even full on psychosis. So words remain very much her drug of choice, upon which she may get safely high. (Pleasures benignly accrued through well formulated sentences.) For the time being Martha is able to sit Buddha still in her yurt, dreadlocks pushed behind her head, avidly devouring the contents of a book, feeling ‘content enough’.