Blue Carnations

by Aldous Huxley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The carnations were blue, a colour no carnation has ever reached without help, and they stood in a glass jar on the low table between the sofa and the speaker. Beside them were a box of tissues and a laminated card that said, in lettering chosen to soothe, Trust. Let go. Be open. Edith Tarrant looked at them for some time before she sat down. She had been looking at plants professionally for sixty-one years, and she knew a dyed flower as a jeweller knows paste. But she was eighty-four, she had been told in August that she would not see eighty-five, and she had lately got into the habit of letting small things go by.

"Aren't they cheerful?" said Tamsin, who had arranged everything.

They were the blue of a swimming pool in a brochure, and Edith had seen them sold in bunches of ten at Fred Meyer, beside the door, among the helium balloons. "Very," she said, and sat.

The service centre occupied what had been, until rather recently, a periodontist's practice in a single-storey block on the west side of Eugene, between a mattress showroom and an office that prepared tax returns. Something of the periodontist lingered: in the acoustic tiles of the ceiling, in a faint sweetish smell that no amount of sage had been able to subdue, and in the fact that one entered through a waiting room with a water cooler and a rack of pamphlets. In 2020 the voters of Oregon had decided that their fellow citizens might eat a certain mushroom. The State had then given three years and a considerable volume of administrative rules to making sure that the experience should resemble, as nearly as human ingenuity allowed, a visit to the dentist. One must be twenty-one. One must attend a preparation session. One must be accompanied, at every moment, by a licensed facilitator. The length of time one must stay in the building was set by the dose, in steps, like postage: so many milligrams, so many hours. There was something touching in it, Edith thought. A legislature had looked into the abyss and asked for the paperwork in triplicate.

The preparation session had been the week before, in this same room. Robert had driven her down from Corvallis and waited in the car. Gwen Ostrander, who was to sit with her, had asked her about her medications, her heart and her history, and whether anyone in her family had suffered from psychosis. Then she had handed her a clipboard. At the top of the form, under the State's seal and the centre's logo, which was a stylised mushroom with something like a sunrise behind it, was printed: My intention for this journey is, followed by four ruled lines.

Edith had regarded the word journey for a long time. She had made a good many journeys in her life: by Greyhound to the Wallowas with a plant press strapped to her suitcase; by mule into the Siskiyous after a Lewisia that turned out to have been eaten; by air, once, to Vienna. None of them had begun on a sofa. Tamsin had read an article, in fact several articles, about the trials in Baltimore and New York in which people with cancer had swallowed psilocybin and come out the other side less afraid. Tamsin had suggested acceptance. Tamsin was a good woman who believed that every difficulty had a correct word, as every lock has a key, and that the word was generally to be found in a magazine.

Edith had written, in the small upright hand that had lettered ten thousand herbarium labels: To look at something properly.

Gwen had read it upside down and said it was beautiful, and that the medicine often had its own ideas. Edith had noted the medicine. She had always been interested in the promotions that words receive, and here was a fungus raised to the rank of physician in a single generation, as a corporal is made general in a revolution.

---

Gwen was in her fifties, broad and quiet, with grey hair cut short and a turquoise ring on the hand with which she now took Edith's blood pressure. She had been a hospice nurse for twenty years before this. It showed in her competence and in the way she did not hurry, and Edith liked her for both. It was only her vocabulary that Edith could not like. She spoke of holding space and of what comes up, and called the drug the medicine and the day the journey. It was the vocabulary of a profession still young enough to be anxious about its vocabulary, like the early botanists who could not name a weed without three Greek roots and an apology to Linnaeus.

"One forty-two over eighty-six," said Gwen. "That's fine. Are you comfortable? Do you want the blanket?"

"Not yet."

On a saucer on the table, beside the carnations, lay two gelatine capsules, each containing a pale-brown powder. The label on the little envelope they had come in gave their content as twenty-five milligrams of psilocybin analyte. Edith thought it was a precision the mushroom itself had never aspired to. It had been Psilocybe cubensis, grown under licence in a warehouse somewhere in Clackamas County, harvested, dried, ground, assayed and sealed. It had been a living thing as recently as the spring, with its own small preferences about dung and humidity. The State permitted only that species. It had passed over all the native psilocybes of the Pacific Northwest, which came up in the wood chips of every municipal flower bed from Ashland to Bellingham. Edith had drawn one of them once, Psilocybe cyanescens, for a field guide, and had admired the way its wavy cap bruised blue where the collector's thumb had pressed it. She had not eaten it. It had not occurred to her to eat it. In 1971 a young man from the forestry school had offered her a share of a bag of them, and she had said she had a plate to finish, which was true.

For a dose of that size the rules required five hours. Edith swallowed the capsules with water from a paper cup, a cup so exactly like the one in which a dentist hands you mouthwash that she half expected to be told to rinse.

Robert was in the waiting room with his laptop. He was fifty-six and an engineer, and he had spent thirty years at the Hewlett-Packard campus in Corvallis making ink go where it was told. He had not been in favour of the plan. Neither had he been against it. He had said, in the car, that it was her body and her money. It was not, in fact, her money: Tamsin had paid the twenty-four hundred dollars, and Edith had calculated without meaning to that the sum would have bought her a good second-hand binocular microscope, or about forty years of drawing paper. Tamsin had gone to the shops. She was to come back at four.

"Most people," said Gwen, "find it helps to lie back and use the eyeshade. And there's music. It's a playlist that was put together for the research. You don't have to, of course. But it can help you go inward."

Edith lay back. The eyeshade was black and contoured and smelled of new foam. Through the speaker came the sound of a great many violins agreeing with each other about something.

For forty minutes nothing happened, except that she became aware of her own pulse in her ears and of a faint chill, which she reported. Gwen put the blanket over her. It was weighted, and lay on her like a large, well-trained dog. Then, behind the eyeshade, the dark began to organise itself. There were lattices, and lattices within the lattices; arabesques of a jewelled and unwearying intricacy; domes that opened into further domes, picked out in garnet and lapis and a green like a beetle's back. It was all perfectly symmetrical and all perfectly impersonal, and it went on and on. Edith watched it with a polite and diminishing interest. It was like the carpet in the lobby of a very good hotel in a very hot country, she thought; or like the screen of Robert's computer when he left it alone too long. It was ornament. She had spent her life among things that were not ornament, and she found that she could not care about it. Meanwhile the violins swelled, and subsided, and swelled again, and she recognised in them the music of a man who knows exactly what you ought to be feeling and intends to see that you feel it.

She took off the eyeshade.

"You might find," said Gwen gently, "that it's more helpful to stay with what's happening inside—"

"I've never found my inside very interesting," said Edith. "I'm a draughtsman, Mrs Ostrander. A botanical draughtsman. My work has always been outside."

"Gwen."

"Gwen. Would you turn off the violins?"

Gwen turned off the violins. In the silence the building was audible: the hum of the water cooler in the next room, the remote complaint of a delivery van reversing behind the mattress showroom, the fluorescent tick of the light in the corridor. Edith sat up, with the blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, and looked at the carnations.

---

It is very difficult to say what happened next. People who say that something cannot be described generally go on to describe it at length, and Edith, who had spent her life making descriptions that a stranger could use to identify a plant in a ditch, despised the formula. Afterwards she would try to put it as she would have put a specimen. There was the habit, the overall form; then the parts, from the base upward; then the diagnostic characters, the things that would tell this plant from its nearest relation.

The habit was simple. There were nine carnations in a jar.

But the jar had stopped being a jar. It was a column of light standing on the table, bent at its edges into silver threads, and in it the stems went down like the legs of wading birds. They were glaucous, a grey-green with a bloom on it like the bloom on a plum, swollen at each node, where the paired leaves clasped them. She had known that for sixty years. Dianthus caryophyllus, the clove pink: stems glabrous and glaucous, nodes swollen, leaves opposite and connate at the base. She had written something of the kind under a plate in 1968. But she had not known it as she knew it now. It was as if a man you had corresponded with all your life walked into the room, and you found that his face was exactly as his handwriting had promised, and yet more so.

And then the flowers. They had been dyed, of course. Somewhere between a greenhouse in Colombia and the bucket by the door at Fred Meyer, somebody had cut the stems and stood them in a solution of blue dye. The dye had been drawn up through the vessels of the stem by the same pull that draws water to the top of a redwood: evaporation at the surface of the petals, and behind it an unbroken column of water hanging from the air. Where the water left the flower, the dye stayed. So it had gathered at the margins of the petals, at the frilled, toothed edges that make a carnation look as though it had been cut out with pinking shears. Each tooth was tipped with a deep marine blue, almost black. From the margins, back to the throat of the flower, ran the veins, threads of the same blue, branching and branching again, paler between, so that every petal had become a diagram of its own plumbing. Somebody had meant to make the thing cheerful, and had made it confess. Edith could not have drawn it better. She had drawn venation all her life, with a 000 pen and a hand lens, and she had never once seen it so plainly. The insult had become a demonstration. The paste had turned out to be a diamond after all.

She had been in Vienna in 1964, twenty-two years old and on a scholarship, and had presented a letter of introduction at the Albertina and been allowed, in the study room, to see the Dürer: the Great Piece of Turf, a square of meadow not much bigger than a sheet of foolscap, with its dandelions, its plantain, its yarrow and its meadow grasses, painted in 1503 by a man who had knelt in a field and looked at a clod of earth until it gave up pretending to be a clod. She had stood in front of it and cried, and had been so ashamed that she went out and walked twice round the Augustinerkirche before she could come back. She had not known what she was crying at. She thought now that she knew. Dürer had not painted a meadow. He had painted this, and she had recognised it, as one recognises a voice in the next room before one can make out the words.

That was the thing about it, the diagnostic character, the one that told it from its nearest relation. It was not new. It had happened before. It had happened to her, perhaps a dozen times in sixty years, at the herbarium in Corvallis in the late afternoon, under the microscope, with the light going yellow in the window and the radiators knocking. She would be drawing the achene of a sedge at twenty diameters, sheet number four thousand and something, Carex this or that, collected by a dead man on a dry hillside in 1911. And quite suddenly the achene would stop being a sheet number and a character in a key, and would simply be there: trigonous, minutely papillose, the colour of a lion, as completely itself as a planet. It never lasted. The telephone would ring, or her eye would water, or she would think how extraordinary, and the thinking would close over it like water over a stone. She had never told anyone. It was not the sort of thing one said at the herbarium. She had supposed that it was a kind of fatigue.

"Oh," she said aloud. "It's you."

Gwen leaned forward. "What's coming up for you, Edith?"

"A carnation."

Gwen nodded seriously, and wrote something on her pad.

---

The clock on the wall said twelve forty. Later it said a quarter past one, and it seemed to Edith both that no time at all had passed and that she had been sitting on this sofa since the Pleistocene. She looked at the clock to settle the question, and found that it would not settle anything. It was a white disc with black numerals and a red second hand going round. It was quite beautiful, in an austere municipal way, like a daisy designed by a committee. But it had stopped telling her anything, as a word repeated forty times stops meaning. She let it be a disc.

She put out her hand to touch the nearest petal, and saw the hand.

It lay on the blanket between her and the flowers, and it was as interesting as they were. It was neither more nor less interesting. That surprised her a little. The skin on the back had gone thin and loose, like the skin on hot milk, and was mottled with the brown spots that dermatologists call by a Greek name and old women call by no name at all. Under the skin the veins stood up blue: the same blue, very nearly, as the veins of the carnations. They branched and joined like a river delta seen from the air. There were the four long tendons fanning to the knuckles; there was the slight bend in the third finger, broken in 1987 when a press strap snapped. There was a callus, still, on the inside of the middle finger, where for sixty years a pen had rested. Somewhere behind all this, a little to the left and some way down, was the thing in her pancreas. It was doing what it did, quite indifferent to her, as the dye in the carnations was indifferent to the florist's intentions. It belonged to the same order of fact as the callus and the bent finger and the flowers.

She waited for the fear that Tamsin's articles had promised would be dissolved. It was not there to be dissolved. It had gone off somewhere with the labels.

She turned the hand over, slowly, as she would turn a leaf to look at the underside: the lines of the palm, the soft pads, the whorls at the fingertips, each one a contour map of a country nobody would ever visit. She turned it back again.

Then she looked up at Gwen, and saw Gwen.

It was a broad, plain, tired face, and it was entirely remarkable. There was a fine white scar through the outer end of the left eyebrow, where the hair had never grown back. There were the two vertical lines between the brows that come from twenty years of listening carefully to people who are dying. There was a looseness under the jaw, a mole by the nostril, and eyes of an indeterminate hazel, flecked like a thrush's egg. They were watching her with a concern that had a little professional anxiety mixed into it, the anxiety of someone whose patient is not following the map. Edith thought she had never seen anything so worth drawing. It was not that the face was beautiful in the sense of the magazines. It was that it was so precisely and inexhaustibly itself.

"You have a very good face," Edith said. "I should like to have drawn it."

Gwen laughed, taken aback. Her hand went up, of its own accord, to the eyebrow.

"Bicycle," she said. "I was nine. I went over the handlebars on a gravel road outside Pendleton." She seemed surprised to have said it.

"Yes," said Edith. "I thought it was something like that."

---

At two o'clock she asked for paper and a pencil. Gwen had only the integration journal, a spiral notebook with the mushroom-and-sunrise on its cover, and a ballpoint pen. Edith opened the journal on her knee and tried to draw the nearest carnation.

It was hopeless. Her hand shook, from the drug or her age or both, and the pen would not do what the eye told it. The line went where the line wanted, like a dog that has slipped its lead. What came out on the page looked like a cabbage that had been in an accident. Edith regarded it and began to laugh. She laughed until she had to wipe her eyes with one of the tissues provided by the State for the purpose, and Gwen, uncertain, laughed a little too.

It did not matter. That was what was so funny. The carnation went on standing in its jar, entirely unaffected by the cabbage.

She slept a little, after that, sitting up, with the blanket around her. When she woke the light in the window had moved, the blue of the carnations had gone a shade deeper, and they were carnations again: very good ones, extraordinarily well made, dyed an absurd colour, standing in a jar. She looked at them with great affection, as one looks at a friend's house after a long visit, from the end of the road.

---

At a quarter past four, when the five hours were up, Gwen took her blood pressure again and asked her a series of questions designed to establish that she knew the date and her own name and was fit to be released into the custody of her son. Then she opened the integration journal, past the ruined cabbage, to a printed page headed Reflections, and handed Edith the pen.

The first question was: What was revealed to you today?

Edith thought about it for some time. Then she wrote, in the small upright hand that had steadied now: Nothing new.

She saw Gwen read it upside down, and saw Gwen's face change. It was the face of a schoolmistress whose best pupil has handed in a sheet with only her name on it. Gwen recovered herself at once, being a professional, and said that very often these things took days, or even weeks, to land, and that there were integration circles on Thursday evenings which many people found helpful, and that Edith could call her at any time.

"It was a very good carnation," said Edith. "Could I take them with me?"

Gwen looked at the jar, and then at her, and something in her face eased. "Of course," she said. "They're yours."

In the waiting room Tamsin had come back, with shopping bags, and stood up as they came in. She had been reading the pamphlets.

"Well?" she said. "How do you feel? Did you—" She hunted for the word. "Did you find it?"

"Find what, dear?"

"I don't know. Peace. Acceptance. Whatever it was."

Edith considered her: the anxious kind face, the good coat, the bags from the shops, the whole elaborate apparatus of a woman who wanted very much for something to have happened. She held up the jar.

"I found the carnations," she said.

Tamsin looked at Robert, and Robert closed his laptop.

---

They drove north on 99W with the last of the light going out of the valley. The grass-seed fields on either side had been cut and baled and stood in long stubbled ranks of tawny gold. The Oregon white oaks were going brown and the bigleaf maples yellow, and the ditches were full of the dry, standing skeletons of the summer's weeds. Tamsin sat in the back, typing a message to her sister. Edith sat in front with the jar of carnations between her knees, holding it steady with both hands.

A little past Monroe she said, "Stop here, Robert."

"Here? Mum, there's nothing here."

"Please."

He pulled onto the gravel shoulder and put the hazards on. Edith opened her door before he could come round, and he came round anyway and took her elbow. Then the two of them stood together in the verge, in the smell of cut stubble and diesel and damp earth, while the traffic went by in a long hissing wash of headlights.

The verge was full of wild carrot. In July it had been Queen Anne's lace, flat white umbels like doilies, each with its single dark purple floret at the centre. Now it was October, and each umbel had died and dried and curled its rays inward. It had closed itself into a cup of brown spokes the size of a child's fist, a little basket full of bristling seeds: what the country people call a bird's nest. There were hundreds of them, standing on their stiff stems in the dusk, all the way along the ditch.

Edith broke one off. She turned it in her fingers. Then she held it out to her son.

"Look," she said.

Robert took it, because she had handed it to him. He held it awkwardly, as men of his kind hold things that have no use, and glanced back at the car, where Tamsin's face was a pale oval behind the glass. Then, because his mother was still waiting, he looked down at it. A truck went by and its lights swept over them, and over the dry cup in his palm, with its hooked seeds and its ribs curved in like the fingers of a closing hand. Edith watched him turn it over, slowly, and bring it a little closer to his face, and go on looking.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Aldō Huxleiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Aldous Huxley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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