A memoir of mushrooms and magic

AFTER a near fatal car accident, Ferguson finds herself shattered by PTSD. The meds she’s prescribed at the “Nervous Breakdown Clinic“don’t work. After reading that her hero Bill W, father of the AA 12-Step programme used psychedelics to heal, she decides to embark on a similar journey to address her extreme anxiety. Despite being terrified that she may relapse, what unfolds is a lifechanging spiritual adventure assisted by psilocybin, a compound in what are commonly known as ”magic mushrooms”. Over the next five years, layers of self-destructive behaviour unravel. Wounds from two decades earlier, when she was a hopeless heroin and crack addict, begin to heal.

Then the world is hit by a global pandemic. To escape the dystopian madness, Ferguson finds her dream house, nestled in the remote Matroosberg mountains. But just as she feels safe, a week before it’s registered, a beautiful woman is brutally murdered two doors away.

What sometimes looks like heaven can transform into hell in an instant. Now she’s forced to ask herself: What is freedom, truth and joy?

Underpinned by a deep quest to travel through the ordinary doors of perception, Bamboozled is a deep exploration of self, set in an age of fear and false prophets. Written in Ferguson’s no-holds barred signature style, her new memoir is about looking for patterns and finding answers in a world that’s crumbling. It’s also about loosening the grip of money and finding magic. Then she rescues a dog, who ends up rescuing her.

Extract

In René Magritte’s iconic painting, The Lovers, a man and a woman are entwined, shrouded in a white cloth. We do not see their faces. Are they in love or are they trapped? Claustrophobic in their embrace?

Created in 1928 by the artist who became famous for his surrealistic style of painting, Magritte’s work often included veiled faces. Many art experts have linked his fascination with shrouds to the death of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 13 years old. Her body was dragged from the Sambre River, close to his birthplace in Lessines, Belgium, with her nightgown wrapped around her face. Magritte would later say that he was never sure whether “she had covered her eyes with it so as not to see the death she had chosen, or whether she had been veiled in that way by the swirling currents”.

When masks are mandated and become a part of our everyday lives at the end of March 2020, I am reminded of The Lovers.

Overnight we become biohazardous, apparently harmful to each other’s existence. Overnight half our faces, which consist of 43 tiny muscles, allowing us to express the emotions of joy, fear, sadness and confusion that make us human, are erased. It becomes impossible to see what people are feeling. It becomes hard to hear what people are saying.

At first, we are told that these face coverings will only be necessary for three weeks. Twenty-one days. That seems doable.

Then we’ll all unmask ourselves and go back to “normal”, to a time when we breathed and heaved and sneezed on each other. When we kissed long and slow and tender. I stare at The Lovers a lot in the first year of The Pandemic. Shrouded. De-expressioned.

Silenced. I fear that when we cannot move our faces, we cease to exist as individuals, as human beings.

During the time of The Plague, millions of souls take leave of this plane alone, without families and friends to hold their departing hands or stroke their brows. Sometimes people are only allowed to observe their suffering loved ones through hospital windows. Others don’t get a chance to see them at all, restricted from travel by Covid lockdown law.

I think often of our mother on the day she left back in 2004, how we gathered around her bed at intervals, held her withered, age-pocked hands, and how I am now grateful that she did not have to live through and die in the isolation of The Pandemic.

Grief takes on a whole new meaning during these strange and unprecedented times. For many, the traditional ways of mourning are arrested. Numbers at funerals are severely restricted, depending on the lockdown level decreed at the time.

“After-tears” gatherings are banned during hardcore levels.

What happens to a world where tears are shed alone? Where touch is outlawed? Where communal mourning is paralysed by isolation? Where virtual funerals and memorials replace the real-life expressions of loss? Where grief becomes disenfranchised?

Long before The Pandemic, in 1993, a group of doctors come up with the term “Prolonged Grief Disorder”, or PGD, which refers to a person who has lost a loved one and experiences intense or pervasive yearning for the departed soul. For the bereaved, struggling to accept the loss, there is an emotional numbness, a sense of being “trapped in grief”.

As days pass, I become increasingly convinced that the world is suffering from chronic PGD.

*

On 31 March, 2021, less than a week after The Woman is murdered, her friends and family hold a livestreamed memorial service. I belong in neither of these groups, but I am curious.

Death can be a magnet for voyeurs. It’s a Wednesday. I log on to the Zoom link from the new cabin. The Woman’s coffin house lurks in the background. It all feels so surreal. I have learned more about her in the last five days than I would probably ever have found out about her if she were still breathing, living her life just across the way. It’s clear from the size of the online crowd of more than 500 that she was loved by many who feel the loss deeply. I sit behind my screen like an unidentified intruder, watching this intimate affair from the outside.

The Husband delivers his tribute to his wife. He appears controlled and unemotional. He does, however, break down at the end, gasping back a sob.

After he speaks, The Husband pulls his mask back on, so it’s hard to tell what he is feeling. He then returns to his place alongside The Woman’s mother. She comforts him in an embrace.

It has become increasingly strange that the three men who killed The Woman found their way onto our secluded estate by pure coincidence … It’s complicated to find the estate; it doesn’t even reliably appear on Google Maps. Did someone tell them how to get here? The details that have emerged tick many boxes that may point to this murder being “a hit”. But “a hit” needs a motive. Who would want to kill The Woman?

I now know that The Woman was dropped off at the couple’s home by The Husband earlier in the week. He had reportedly felt ill and left her there alone without a car. Perhaps I will discover something while watching this digital memorial. I wish the people would take off their masks.