Ergot, like yoga, is natural

“In the clouds of nonsense” was a title of my favorite book as a child. “Clouds” is actually not a good translation: Polish “opary” means a kind of stifling emanation, like steam in a Turkish bath, or the fetor of a sulphuric spring: one that blinds the eyes and offends the nose. The disorienting, mind-boggling power of “opary” is tacitly implicit. Assonance with “opicie” (drunkenness) is also readily apparent.

I am reminded of this title when I talk to my newly met female Moroccan upper-middle class friends. They are all about vegetarianism, feng shui, meditation, yoga, healing through polarization, reiki – precisely the same stuff and nonsense I discovered in some Indian upper middle class females two years ago, German last year, and Polish middle this. This new age ideology is a strange beast: it is not clear why all of its disparate elements should hang together, except their sheer stupidity (and perhaps their slight whiff of dissent), but they do; and they spread together, like a single body; perhaps like a kind of symbiotic conglomerate of fungus, slime, and rot. They spread like ergot through wheat, or mold through bread, through long dark musty crevices of empty minds and crop up unexpectedly in full fledged form, bloom and eject their poisonous spores clear across the globe.

The only way to destroy this thing would be to burn the whole crop.

Our minds have been poisoned.

We are lost.