How to be psychoactive to each other - by Eirini Malliaraki
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How to be psychoactive to each other<br>On language, attention, and the ways other people enlarge what we can perceive, think, desire, and become.
Eirini Malliaraki<br>Aug 15, 2026
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I’ve been reading Kazantzakis, and somewhere in the middle of The Saviours of God I noticed that what the book was doing to me was not quite what books normally do. “Vivid” wasn’t it, nor moving, exactly. It felt closer to a substance. After 10 pages, I was slightly more alert. I would close the book and remain, for a while, in whatever state it had induced. So I started wondering what the mechanisms for inducing those states with prose were.<br>One thing Kazantzakis does constantly is fuse things before grammar gets the chance to separate them. Take θαλασσοδαρμένος: sea-beaten. I can translate it as “a face beaten by years at sea,” but something is missing. The English version gives me a face, then the sea, then a relation between them. The Greek word gives me all three at once. This means you don’t get sea + beaten. You get some third thing : salt-cured, weathered, endurance-shaped, a person whose body has somehow acquired sea as one of its properties. Maybe this is a useful test for language generally. If I can unpack a word into a sentence and nothing changes, the word was probably just compression. But sometimes something dies in the unpacking in the cases where the relation itself was the thing. Kazantzakis is full of these.<br>And full of bodies . Heat, salt, smell, muscle, stone, blood, hunger. His abstractions never seem to stay abstract for very long; they keep acquiring temperature and texture. There is some neuroscience around this ie sensory language can partially recruit the perceptual and motor systems involved in the thing being described, but I don’t actually think the neuroscience is the interesting part. You can feel the difference yourself between a sentence which asks you to understand something and one which somehow makes your body participate in understanding it.<br>Then there is the problem of habituation. Language goes stale incredibly quickly. A metaphor works, everyone uses it, and eventually we stop having to construct anything at all. “Broken heart” no longer requires anybody to imagine a heart breaking. We jump straight to the abstract category. But a word which has never existed before has no shortcut. You have to build it live. Perhaps this is why Kazantzakis invented so many words. Greek apparently didn’t contain enough distinctions for whatever he wanted to see, so he made more Greek.<br>And somewhere around here I started wondering how psychoactivity is a broader definition than drugs. Something is psychoactive when it changes the distinctions, states or possibilities available to consciousness. If so, people are wildly psychoactive to each other. We just have a terrible vocabulary for it. We say someone has “good energy” or someone else is “draining.” We feel “more ourselves” around one person, and smaller around another.<br>But these seem like very different phenomena collapsed into one vague meter. There are people who increase your conceptual resolution but make you less certain. People who make improbable projects seem executable. People around whom you become funnier. People who make you confessional for reasons you don’t entirely understand. Some people are stimulants. Some anaesthetics. Some solvents. And some seem to enlarge the world.<br>I think this happens in a few different ways.<br>Altering resolution
One of the strongest things another mind can do is give you a distinction you didn’t previously have . A word can do this, but so can a contrast, a question, a strange example, a well-placed disagreement. Couples and old collaborators manufacture private vocabularies constantly: I’ve gone flat, we’re doing the thing again, I’m in the pit. These phrases are useful not because they are especially poetic but because they make something that was previously fuzzy become inspectable.<br>This is why inventing language matters beyond writing . When someone is trying to describe an experience for which the available vocabulary feels slightly wrong, there is something generous in not immediately translating it back into the nearest familiar category. The point isn’t to produce a clever phrase but to help increase resolution and make a distinction together.<br>Altering possibility
There are also people around whom your thoughts behave differently. You offer them something half-formed, and instead of becoming more defensible, it grows larger. They don’t immediately ask whether it is true, fundable, rigorous, feasible, sensible etc. Most people evaluate an idea at exactly the moment it most needs extension. Even praise can close it down: that’s a great idea turns a living thing into an object already finished enough to judge.<br>The more interesting response is often to add limbs to it. What if it were an institution...