Deadly Nightshade

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Witches Flight Francisco Goya 1798

I wanted to tell you about how the witches used deadly nightshade on brooms greased with hallucinogens to dream-fly all over the world. I wanted to explain to you all the things I learned about brooms: their kitchen-alchemy, the way they merge female bristles and male wand, the way they find corners, make clean space and move particles around like brushes. I wanted to explain that the nightshade I’ve always called deadly with the bright red berries is a less than deadly variety called climbing nightshade. I wanted to tell you how the vines of nightshade, and wild grapes, and Virginia creeper all share the same chainlink fence along the railpath near to where I live. I wanted to tell you how much I love to watch the slow winding of all of these vines and how Darwin spent a year mostly sick in bed just watching the tendrils of vines and trying to get closer to the intelligence with which they move. And that he even made the vines into a kind of pen that wrote on glass to mark out the movements of vines. I wanted to talk about dosage and my attraction to plants that sit vertiginously between poison and medicine.

Deadly nightshade has black berries and doesn’t have the spear-shaped leaves. The more common and less toxic nightshade with the bright red berries is known as climbing or bittersweet nightshade.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby's 2014 which is still the record for a work by a female artist.

The nightshades are a witchy family. Look closely at the way the sacred datura that grows out of a sidewalk with its strange thorny seedpod and baby-soft velvety skin and dizzying white trumpet flowers that mesmerized me for a whole season last year. And then I saw it again this year standing guard with a pokeberry plant in a crumbling cement planter at the gateway of an old military base in Queens. The seeds from that thorny pod turned Carlos Castaneda into a raven and every year hospitalize or kill a few curious teenagers looking a new kind of high. It’s a powerful drug that no one seems to try twice. That same hallucinogenic nightshade plant is also called jimson weed and its bloom also drew in Georgia O’Keefe who painted a flower portrait that would eventually sell at auction for the highest price ever paid for a a woman artist’s work. I wanted to talk about the sea-sick deliciousness of even Goya’s most horrific images, how his witches seem to tremble with the spirit of the nightshade. I saw the horror and attraction in the huge toddler eyes of my younger brother Judah when he put a whole handful of those red nightshade berries in his mouth. Their tendrils and berries and flowers seem to reach out and dare you. Finally, just this morning I’ve begun to experiment with how nightshade might be made into a kind of poison ink.

poisons, pigments, medicines research. So far the ink is looking a bit grey.

I should also say thankyou to my sister Amy who suggested this topic. But all this is just research what I really wanted to share with you is a story from years ago when I was living in Seattle, a story I hope will one day be the beginning of a YA novel about an old wizard remembering back to a lifetime discovering the magic of colour. For that story you will need a full subscription to the Colour Lab…