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What does King Mob mean by "Tripping Darlings"?

04:33 / 07.03.03

Towards the end of vol. 3 of The Invisibles, when KM is in the phone booth he mentions things like machine elves and tripping darlings. I know what machine elves are but what is a "tripping darling"?

Jack Denfeld

05:01 / 07.03.03

What the hell are machine elves?

Nietzsch E. Coyote

05:03 / 07.03.03

I had assumed that it was a reference to the people seeing the machine elves. Or maybe a reference to fanny talking about them on the mesa. They're up there tripping, darling.

Machine elves: what you see when you take DMT acording to... someone, I forget.

*tsk tisk, By the way you are bad about the abstracts.

arcboi

09:02 / 07.03.03

That would be Terence McKenna talking about a DMT experience: "a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the bill and then depart....

He also describes them as self-transforming machine elves, tykes and dribbling jeweled basketballs. Reckoned to be the influence for those weird round guys that Helga meets while 'logonauting'.

The Falcon

12:05 / 07.03.03

I thought tripping darlings were just nice people on drugs.

penitentvandal

17:21 / 08.03.03

No, Duncan, remember: there are no nice people on drugs. All people who take drugs are bad people.

God save the Queen.

The Falcon

01:53 / 09.03.03

Oops.

gridley

15:23 / 08.04.03

It's a reference to subterranean fairy folk in Gaelic folklore.

Robert Kirk wrote about them in "The Secret Commonwealth."

In it, he describes the ancient practice of referring to that which is powerful and potentially dangerous by kindly names. Thus, calling them darlings.

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