Recently we were sitting in a bar occasionally dipping into a bottle of amyl nitrites, when it occurred to us that the experience was/is a lovely adjunct to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception — which we had been fiddling with as of late, and for quite some years. (N.B. we are amateurs to most things so if one hears a qualification in the previous statement, like we are some sort of experts in phenomenological philosophy, please drop the notion.) In any case the experience is really quite interesting. You are in the room. You are not in the room? Then you sort of slowly resurrect back into the room. In Ponty’s book there is a full-width, detailed exposé of the faulty determinism of general perception, of which the amyl nitrite experience illustrates quite nicely — if bombastically. It’s a tear in the gestalt; or a blindspot taken to its apotheosis. It proves something like, you make the room that you are in (like when you are sleeping, you are in your bedroom but also in a different room). A unique situation that is neither wholly rational nor wholly empirical.
        “Once the prejudice of sensation has been banished, a face, a signature, a form of behaviour cease to be mere ‘visual data’ whose psychological meaning is to be sought in our inner experience, and the mental life of others becomes an immediate object, a whole charged with immanent meaning. More generally it is the very notion of the immediate which is transformed: henceforth the immediate is no longer the impression, the object which is one with the subject, but the meaning, the structure, the spontaneous arrangement of parts” (From Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, 1945)