By Tom Jenks

You’ve waited patiently and now you’re up at bat. You want to take a few practice swings before the real thing right? Here, lie down on this comfy memory foam, inside a chamber fitted with noise canceling material, and wrapped in wire mesh and aluminum foil to block any stray electromagnetic radiation. “Here, put these on and just float on a sea of bliss,” the facilitator says as he hands you a pair of glasses, headphones and GSR meter for your finger. A flicker of doubt crosses your mind. “What the hell, it’s Burning Man, man,” your inner psychonaut reassures you as the lid closes. Inside you hear the GSR on your finger driving the sound in your headphones. You’re agitated and so is the sound. The light from the special glasses also indicates significant stress. “Shit, I’m a mess.” Bhvvvv. More agitated sound. Bhvvv. “Damn it!” Bhvvvvvvvv. “Forget this crap I’m just going to get comfy on this memory foam and float through the clouds.” Beewwwww. The sound is calm, the light is serene. “Wow, that was easy. I just let go of fears and relaxed into the moment.” The lid opens, you step into the hot seat, slide on the GSR meter, and instantly the cymatics projection explodes into the most beautiful shimmering fractal the crowd has ever seen.

This galvanizes the mass of onlookers into a frenzy. You whisper to yourself, “I never thought such beauty was possible!” As you stand there in a state of unrivaled ecstasy, the crowd catches your fire and starts chanting – beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty!!! Bvvvhhaaaaaoo! “What the?” The pyramid of lights whirs to life as the sound amps up and lights go from red to orange to green up towards the top. The crowd is overjoyed! A facilitator notices your perplexed gaze and tells everyone, “Beneath the pyramid is a Random Event Generator and the lights and sound goes up or down depending on the coherence or odds against chance of the outcomes. It has been found that focusing intently on it can raise the coherence and thus elevate the light, pure white light being the highest level of coherence at the top.” The energy is electric. A bolt of lightning blasts through your head and ripples out through the people concentrating on raising the pyramid of light. The words come out of nowhere and past your lips, “We are infinite potential!” The light races through indigo, violet and ultraviolet – a sudden collective gasp – boom. Pure white light blasts out of the top and bathes all in the primordial essence of being. All you can do is wonder. You’ve disregarded Terrence and have given in to astonishment. You think it’ll never end, but something creeps up, like a serpent through your veins, a nagging doubt – “is it real?” Immediately the light is gone, the pyramid plummets to a dull red and blackness envelops all. Guess not. You walk off the stage, kick the dust, and choke down a sugary drink at the nearest bar. A single tear rolls down your cheek and splashes in the playa dust. “For a moment… it was real.”

And it could be. It’s all technically possible – just a matter of connecting a few cords to a few computers and whatnot. I’m not an audiovisual or computer technician by any stretch, but I don’t see why it can’t be done with a little group mind and elbow grease. If this project piques your interest, join up and let’s make it happen!

Some operational thoughts: The above is only one permutation of many amazing possibilities. I’d like your input to improve it! For example:

We could use brainwave entrainment with an audiovisual synthesizer (using specific light and sound frequencies) to drive the brainwaves into say, an Alpha or hypnagogic state, and see how that affects the GSR and cymatic patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
Audiovisual synthesizer: http://www.mindmodulations.com/light-sound-mind-machines.html?TreeId=1

Perhaps a dance floor covered with salt, with a massive transducer underneath, pumping in the vibes from wireless GSR meters on the dancers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

Could the cymatic pattern be projected as a 3d hologram instead of merely on a flat screen? Or we could throw on a mixture of cornstarch and water to create a non-Newtonian fluid and grow some 3d cymatic creatures!
Cymatics in action – video of changing sand patterns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedgubRZva8&feature=related
General Cymatics info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics
http://www.cymatics.org/

We could have 4 participants each with GSR meters hooked up to the original setup, with one side getting as agitated as possible and the other trying to remain calm, and have emotion battles! Perhaps the tones from each side would be averaged together to produce 2 different cymatic patterns, one the product of restlessness, and the other the result of serenity.

Other measures of biofeedback could be used, such as the coherence of heart rhythms, pulse rate, or even an EEG of brainwaves. The raw data from each of these could be displayed on a separate screen, with a high/low record holder list.
Biofeedback devices: http://www.mindmodulations.com/biofeedback-neurofeedback.html?TreeId=1

The Random Event Generator idea could be expanded to have 3 separate towers of lights with three different REGs, with one mega tower in the middle averaging the coherence of all three. We could add some kind of reward, like a beautiful sound when the lights reach certain levels of coherence, with a loud gong at the top. Perhaps integrate specific chakra sounds from the root (red) with a C sound to crown (white) B sound.
Chakra sounds: http://www.cymascope.com/chakrasacredsound.html
REG general info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_event_generator
REG light: http://www.psyleron.com/lamp.aspx
REG capable of linking with computer: http://www.psyleron.com/reg1.aspx

The original color progression was inspired by the levels of consciousness chart here: http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/levels-of-consciousness.jpg

The REG aspect would be interesting to simply record and correlate it with events such as Burning the Man or the Temple, or even with the level of ambient sound or light levels on the playa.

We could strategically place some dream machines around the REG pyramids to help entrain brainwaves to an Alpha or hypnagogic state. These are rotating cylinders with slits cut up the sides, on top of record players with light bulbs inside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Finally a very basic option is to simply have microphones for people to sing, chant or play music into and see what cymatic patterns they produce.

I would also propose we develop a short survey of people’s experiences, to get data on how well it works (how mystical/transpersonal the experiences are) for different people, and particularly of interest would be to record a rough estimate of people’s value structure (developmental stage) and also note any pharmacological agents at work. This data, when correlated with people’s biofeedback record, would be invaluable!

This entire setup may seem like an impossible dream, but so has every idea that ever tested the perceived boundaries of creation. I cannot think of a more empowering or trans-formative technological achievement to devote resources to. Let’s use our ingenuity, our technical expertise, our vision, and our burning passion to do what has never been done, to manifest the mind, and will novelty into being. Let’s go to moon, 21st century style.

Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan.

The eternally feminine leads us forward.

– Goethe

He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

– William Blake

Only connect.

– E. M. Forster

I‘m finally ready to declare myself. I am a ladies’ man. A womanizer. A libertine. A rake. A rogue. A roué. A goddamn running loose dog. I’d admit to being a lecher, but that word implies a solipsistic predation that I hope never applies to any of my relations with the mysterious sex.This

is about something more sacred than anything a drooling wanker could appreciate.

This is about worship. From the time the testosterone kicked in, I have knelt at the altar of that
which is female in this world. I love women. What I love in them is something that moves and must be free to do so. I love their smells, their textures,

their complexities, the inexhaustible variety of their psychic weather patterns. I love to flirt with them, dance with them, and to discourse with them endlessly on the differences between men and women. I love to make love.

The sexual fires have always burned bright in my brainstem. Priapically preoccupied, I’ve written poetry by the ream, stormed police lines, ridden broncs, thrown punches and generally embarrassed myself on countless occasions. (Actually, I suspect that history consists largely of foolish things men have done to show off for women.)

There are probably twenty-five or thirty women — I certainly don’t count them — for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They’re scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities.

I must also admit that for me this gravity generally increases with novelty. The New, the fresh
and unknown expanses of the emotional frontier, hold a fascination for me that I wish they did not. This breeds superficiality and the appearance of a hunger for conquest. But, unfortunately, I love the
voltage, the charged gap between two people that can draw across itself such huge flows of
information from so many parts of us. I love the feel of human bandwidth — intercourse
on all channels — and there is so much more to exchange when nothing is yet known.

Despite many clear and cosmic messages that women (and death) were meant to be the curricula of my life — my dharma — and that practically everything I’ve done has been about trying to understand them, I resisted formal matriculation into this perilous course of study until well past the age when most men have already given up and settled into monogamies as comfortable and unquestioned as their football loyalties.

And now, late in my forties, I doubt I’ll ever be monogamous again. For reasons I’ll explain, I feel strangely exiled into a condition of emotional wandering. I think my heart will travel widely. I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me.

Even so, I also want to go on loving the women I love now — and I do love them — for the rest of
my life. These are relationships that have already lasted much longer than most marriages, even though some of them had to endure the hiatus of my own previous monogamies, one imposed by society, the other by what felt like an act of God.

The Road to Hell

I tried monogamy despite feeling from the get-go that being monogamous made as much sense as declaring that I liked, say, mashed potatoes and gravy so darned much that I would resolve to eat nothing else for the rest of my life.

So I got married and stayed that way for seventeen years, attempting with some grim success to impose fidelity on myself. It was, I figured, the price I had to pay in return for a good place to raise kids. And though I loved my ex-wife, and still do, I wasn’t in love with her. Didn’t believe in it, actually. I thought being in love was a myth people had invented to punish themselves for lacking it.

Fidelity always felt like work: an act of will rather than nature. As time passed, nature gradually
gained the upper hand, as she almost always does. I was never quite able to stop flirting — a form of exchange that has always felt holy to me — nor was I able to disguise from my wife my
undiminished appreciation of other women. This led to sexual distance between us, and I started to get hungry. There began to be incidents of what is called, in rock n roll, “offshore drilling.”

Not realizing that women hate deceit even more than they hate infidelity — and they always
know — I turned into a sneak and a liar. I became someone I couldn’t respect, and so I left my
marriage.

Not long after that, I experienced the miracle of voluntary monogamy for one brief and
blissful period, during which, at the age of forty-six, I did fall in love for the first time in my
life. During the year that followed, it was as though there were no other women except in the most abstract sense. I still delighted in the presence of pulchritude, but it was an appreciation as sublime in its detachment as my enjoyment of nature’s other wonders. I didn’t want to do anything about these beauties, any more than I would want do something about sunsets or Bach fugues. Cynthia
was the only woman. But two days before we were to be married, I put her on a plane in Los Angeles
and somewhere between there and New York the virus that had been secretly consuming her stopped her
heart.

The most important consequence of losing Cynthia is that I now believe in the human soul. I had to see it and, once seen, it became obvious to me. No longer did I dismiss it as a biological
artifact, a kind of software that arises in the electrochemical sputterings of the squishyware and
cannot run otherwise. Rather I can feel the soul as an independent though immaterial identity that wears bodies like a costume.

I finally had the answer to a question I’d been asked shortly before I met her. I’d been speaking to a bunch of kids at the New York University film school about Virtual Reality when I got the usual question about virtual sex. This was such a predictable question that I had a mental tape I always ran in response to it that went something like: “I don’t get the fascination with virtual sex. Sex is about bodies, and being in VR is like having had your body amputated. What could be less sexy?”

At this point, a very embodied young woman in the front row raised her beautiful hand. “But don’t you think,” she asked, “that when it comes to sex, the body is just a prosthesis?”

My tape stopped running. “A prosthesis for what?”

“That’s the interesting question, isn’t it.” she smiled, all sphinxy.

Yeah. That was the interesting question alright, and Cynthia, in both the way she inhabited her body and the way she remained after leaving it, answered it for me. There is indeed a hand that moves the hand, there is a kiss that lives inside both sets of lips.

At that point I decided that, whatever the pressures of society or the propensity of most women to
insist on it, I wouldn’t attempt monogamy again unless and until I encountered someone who induced it in me as naturally as she did. And I like to believe that nothing would make me happier than to have that happen. To fall in love. To be singularly devoted again.

(But I have to confess to aspects of my current behavior pattern that are subconsciously designed to prevent this very thing from happening. If just once in your life you’ve put all of your emotional eggs in one basket, only to have that basket smashed almost immediately, it inclines you toward more distributed systems of emotional support.)

There is a central woman in my life, a luminous Swede who lives in San Francisco. She is the person I always call when I feel bad in the middle of the night. She is beautiful and funny, as game on an adventure as Indiana Jones; she is a sexual poet, and I love her.

That she is not the only woman in my life pains her — as will this piece — and I wish to cause her no pain. But I learned from my marriage what suffering can be inflicted by someone who tries unsuccessfully to contain himself in the service of someone else’s feelings.

And scrupulous honesty, though it requires courage on both sides, is a lot more practical than most men believe it to be. The fact that I don’t lie to her about these other encounters brings us closer rather than separating us. And sin, as Nietzsche said (and I often quote), is that which separates.

A Pariah’s Advantages

While I’ve been honest about all this to my girlfriend and the other objects of my affection, I

haven’t come clean in public until now. It’s an odd omission. I’ve tried to write as candidly as

possible about my other deviations from standard American morality. I’m in the lucky position of being so de-institutionalized that I can

say whatever I like without fear of adverse economic consequences. Indeed, lunatic candor seems to be my primary product these days. Like Hunter S. Thompson, the badder I get, the better I get paid.

A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you’ve already declared yourself to be a

pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits,

rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the

shameless.

In fact, part of what motivates this public revelation is a belief that I am behaving morally,

despite following a course that society would generally condemn. My conscience is clear, a fact that

is not simply due to poor memory or an unwillingness to examine it carefully.

These admissions are also related to the fact that I find myself a few gray hair-breadths away from

turning fifty, an age beyond which surreptitious ladies’ men become pathetic in direct proportion to

the uneasiness they feel with their own lascivious impulses.

The phrase “dirty old man” begins to haunt me, especially as I continue to find my pot-bellied old

self attracted to the same youthful feminine specifications that put steel in my poker when I was

twenty-five.

Yet that’s not all there is to it: for me, it is the combination of these two beauties, the inner and the outer, that draws me most
compellingly. There are plenty of perfectly formed surfaces that have no light within them and they
don’t do much for me. At the same time,
there are beautiful souls within bodies that are the female equivalent of my own, and while some of
these are close friends, they lack the sexual spice that really fuels most discourse between the
sexes.

I thus remain convinced that there is something holy about beauty, whether attached to a woman or a waterfall,
and I have the entire history of art — at least until the Twentieth Century — to back me up on
this. I don’t think of beauty as being something that is part of a woman, but rather something like
a mist that gathers around her that becomes more beautiful if illuminated brightly from within. The
real beauty, the part that lasts, is in the soul and not the skin.

Even when one is seeking sex between souls, the “prostheses” they wear are not irrelevant.

King Dick Meets My Inner Lesbian

But ironically enough, a lot of being sexy means getting past the root-level sex drive. One of the great moments in my sexual education came some years back when Dick Cavett was
interviewing Raquel Welch at the height of her va-va-voomishness. “Tell me, Raquel,” he leered,
“what’s your favorite erogenous zone?”

She paused, gave him a level look that completely revised my opinion of her intelligence, and said
crisply, “My mind, Dick.”

The mind, I have since discovered, is just about every woman’s favorite erogenous zone, but it is

mystical terrain and must be explored with care and time. The dick, in its youthful phase, is not
big on care or time. It is the very definition of urgency. It makes non-negotiable demands of its
bearer that are related to the inner
nature of its target only to the extent that some knowledge of her has strategic value in getting
her into bed.

Now my formerly dictatorial appendage is more like an old sidekick. A fellow veteran. It doesn’t
have the same reload rate of old, but there’s no ejaculatio praecox to worry about either.
The old soldier can pace itself. And if it can’t spit five shots in quick succession, it’s no longer
calling my shots as it once did. Into the vacuum of its diminished authority has risen my heretofore
undiscovered inner lesbian.

My inner lesbian is a wonderful accomplice, since she knows a lot about what turns women on, is more
attuned to sensuality than the old in-out, and believes strongly that the journey is the reward.
This doesn’t mean that she is not interested in orgasms, but she knows that one great thing about
being a woman is that if you can come at all — which a lamentably high percentage cannot — you can
usually come a lot and in a variety of ways. She makes it a lot easier to get away from my own
sexual objectives and into the multifarious delights of the joint critter, the one Shakespeare
called “the beast with two backs.”

And creating that larger organism, making the Other into the Self, merging the Self into the Other
is, after all, what sex is ultimately about. And of course, the point is not to have a self at all.
To be Everything.

The Infinity of Love

All said, you’re probably wondering why any woman would want to become emotionally or physically
involved with a man whose promiscuity is so freely confessed. Of course, many of them don’t. I
eliminate a lot of opportunity by wearing my Don Juan warning placard so visibly (even then, the
hesitant don’t leave me entirely bereft).

But most of the resistance to becoming involved with a self-admitted playboy has to do with that
all-important female perception of being special. It is hard to feel that knowing there are

others out there. But there is an answer to this, and finding it has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection not only with
women but with all the rest of my species.

The answer is that everyone is special. So also is every relationship. The creature that
forms
between any one person and another is like no other creature in the world. It is theirs and theirs alone.
Furthermore,
while time and
space and attention may be painfully finite, love is not. Love has no quantity to exhaust. It is a
quality, a living thing, that grows stronger the more it is felt. The vigorous practice of love
expands the heart and opens its apertures to the world.

In other words, to love a lot of women, you have to love them, without a trace of bullshit, one
woman at a time. You have to bring each of them with you into the perfectly present, creating there
a private zone of space and time that can be filled with that particular love. You won’t have any of
the comforting (though generally broken) social conventions to assure you that your vulnerability is
safe. There are no assurances at all except for those that come directly from the feeling of
connection you can make together. You are, in effect, beating back the darkness with the light you
generate yourselves.

When I judge myself, there is one question I ask: Would I want my daughters to encounter a man like
me? And because I want them to be brave in their love, because I want their faith to be annealed by
experience on the edge, I hope they find a few of my kind. But I hope they don’t bring too many of
us home.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE

By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/

Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street chemists, grocers and general stores. It was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science, a panacea for all manner of minor ailments – but also, increasingly, as a dangerous and addictive novelty, a social menace and even a new ‘scourge of humanity’. During this period of the cocaine boom – in retrospect, the euphoric high before the crash – its impact on the public consciousness is vividly illuminated by the enduring literary character who emerged from its golden age: Sherlock Holmes.

From around 1885 to the beginning of the twentieth century, cocaine was both soft drink and hard drug: mild tonic preparations and strong pharmaceutical solutions coexisted side by side. The most famous and successful of the tonics was the range produced by the Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani, who had begun in the 1860s to produce a stimulant wine for the French market by steeping coca leaves in sweet burgundy. ‘Vin Mariani’ was the first brand to penetrate the new market in Europe and America, and was rapidly accompanied by a wide ancillary range of therapeutic preparations. By the late 1880s these included Pâte Mariani (cocaine lozenges for catarrh), Thé Mariani (a concentrated coca tea recommended for long walks), and Pastilles Mariani (for coughing fits).

But one of Mariani’s lesser-known competitors was to eclipse his fame in the long run. John Pemberton, a small-scale Atlanta druggist, began to supply a ‘Peruvian Coca Wine’ in the mid-1880s; when the city of Atlanta adopted alcohol prohibition in 1886, he removed the alcohol and produced a gloopy syrup masking the bitter active ingredients of coca leaf extract, cocaine and cola nut, a natural caffeine source. He christened it ‘Coca-Cola’, and in 1891 he was bought out by a marketeer called Asa Chandler who set up ‘The Coca-Cola Company’, promoting the ‘nervine tonic’ as a cure for ‘headaches, hysteria and melancholia’ and pushing it with slogans such as ‘the intellectual beverage’ and ‘the Temperance drink’ (which, in a sense, it remains – the bar-room alternative to alcohol). Chandler took Coca-Cola’s sales to over a million dollars a year by the end of the century, and provoked a flurry of copycat products with names like Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Rocco Cola, Wiseola and even Dope Cola.

We might expect the ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical suppliers to have furnished a more sober alternative to this kind of hucksterism, but the promotion of cocaine by the Big Pharma of the day, especially the multinational Parke Davis, made their advertising look bashful by comparison. The 1885 Parke Davis catalogue offered cocaine in powders, solutions, tablets, lozenges, even cigars and cheroots, all accompanied by copy claiming the drug to be ‘the most important therapeutic discovery of the age, the benefits of which to humanity will be simply incalculable’. Their range expanded to include toothache drops, cocaine-impregnated bandages, haemorrhoid remedies and, from the 1890s, asthma and catarrh inhalers which made use of cocaine’s vasoconstrictive properties to dry up the nasal passages by spraying more or less pure cocaine straight up the nose. Statements that cocaine ‘can supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent’ ran alongside ads for hypodermic injection kits – smart pocket-sized steel cases styled like large Zippo lighters and containing cocaine, morphine and miniature needles. What the pharmacists and patent hucksters had both discovered was that you could sell cocaine for almost any treatment which came to mind, and the customer would very likely feel better after using it.

It was against this background of medical hype and shock of the new that Sherlock Holmes, and his distinctive cocaine habit, were first presented to the public – by a doctor who had brushed against the drug repeatedly in the course of his medical career. But although the appeal of Conan Doyle’s detective would endure for generations, the edgy thrill of cocaine was soon to take on a darker image, and Doyle’s later revisions of its role in Holmes’ lifestyle provide a barometer of how the public mood began to turn against the ‘cocaine vice’ during the 1890s and beyond.

As originally conceived by his author, the primary motivation of the world’s most famous fictional detective is cocaine. ‘My mind’, he tells us in the famous passage that opens The Sign of Four, ‘rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram…I can dispense then with artificial stimulants’. Part of Holmes’ enduring appeal is precisely that he’s drawn to his profession not to do good, but to stave off boredom. His few – and mostly late – sententious statements about public service and the common good are substantially outweighted by his expressions of coldness and misanthropy, his rhetorical question that ‘Was there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?’. What distinguishes him from the vast majority of subsequent fictional detectives is that his primary interest is in pleasing himself, and the main reason he bothers to solve crimes at all is to keep his mind active enough to dispense with his ‘seven per cent solution’.

The Sign of Four emerged in 1889, and it’s this first period of Sherlock Holmes stories that is most liberally sprinkled with drug references. In the first published short story, A Scandal in Bohemia, we learn that Holmes ‘had risen out of his drug-created dreams, and was hot on the scent of some new problem’; in The Five Orange Pips, Dr. Watson describes him as a ‘self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco’. But it was the exchange between Holmes and Watson at the beginning of The Sign of Four that established for all time the nature of Holmes’ habit, and Watson’s attitude to it. The story starts in Holmes’ study, with the detective taking a syringe from a ‘neat morocco case’ and injecting it into an arm ‘all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks’. Watson tells us that this has been going on ‘three times a day for many months’, and remonstrates with Holmes about his habit.

Watson’s argument against his friend’s chemical vices reads today like a mischievous pastiche of Victorian medical mumbo-jumbo, but it can be found more or less verbatim in many of the textbooks of the time. ‘It is a pathological and morbid process’, the doctor insists, ‘which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness’. This chilling but nebulous diagnosis is probably very close to what Conan Doyle himself believed (and could have applied with equal conviction to, for example, masturbation). Holmes, however, dismisses it airily, and it prompts him to his famous justification and motive for his career: ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’

Why did Doyle, in 1888, seize on the cocaine habit as a central plank in the character of his new detective? At the time it seemed to reviewers ‘a curious touch’, but it struck an immediate chord with the public and Doyle continued to thread it through the stories as their success built. It was imitated, too, by other writers: M.P.Shiel’s exotic detective Prince Zaleski, who emerged in 1895, sits in his room full of Oriental antiques where the air is heavy with ‘the fumes of the narcotic cannabis sativa - the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans – in which I knew it to be the habit of my friend to assuage himself’.

Doyle’s intention was to create a bohemian character of acquired and exquisite tastes – a character quite unlike the author himself who, as a practising GP in provincial Southsea, was far closer to Dr.Watson. But Doyle had been immersing himself in the ‘yellow’, decadent writings of Bloomsbury, and met Oscar Wilde at the famous dinner at the Langham Hotel in 1890 when The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned: it’s likely that he had Wilde partly in mind while conceiving his ‘pallid’, ‘languid’ detective. Holmes’ distinctive props – the violin, the Meerschaum pipe, the batchelor apartment in the metropolis and the cocaine habit – are all intended to establish him as one of the new bohemians: eccentric, sophisticated, and tantalisingly immune to public opinion. Unlike the masses with their patent coca tonics, Holmes would have taken the trouble to acquire the finest quality of stimulant: his cocaine, we imagine, by mail-order from Merck in Darmstadt and his hypodermic kit not the standard Parke Davis set but the bespoke creation of a chemist in Piccadilly or Mayfair.

The inner Holmes, as well as the outer, was faithfully conceived around the bohemian sterotype. He is solitary, and haunted by an existential darkness: the ‘black moods’ that come over him, his bipolar swings from insomnia or focused, obsessive, day-and-night work to his days and weeks ‘in the dumps’, when he doesn’t ‘open my mouth for days on end’. For a late Victorian doctor like Conan Doyle, this was a familiar medical syndrome associated with the highly-strung, ‘neurasthenic type’, the febrile ‘brain-workers’ who were increasingly identified in the medical literature as a high-risk group for drug abuse. In The Sign of Four, Doyle mirrors these unstable mood-swings by giving Holmes a dual dependence on morphine and cocaine, but morphine is never subsequently mentioned: perhaps he felt that it carried rather too strong a whiff of the pathological drug addict, while cocaine was at most a ‘vice’ or character weakness.

Although in his later autobiography Conan Doyle insists that ‘I had no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession’, he had certainly come across cocaine at some point in his medical career. He went to study medicine at Edinburgh University in 1876, the same year that the Edinburgh medical professor Robert Christison attempted an early coca leaf trial that he published in the Lancet; Christison selected several students to chew the leaf and, although Doyle was not among them, he was probably aware of the experiment. In 1885 the annual conference of the British Dental Association was held in Doyle’s home town of Southsea, and cocaine anaesthesia was the major new development discussed. Most conclusively Doyle, in an abortive attempt to set himself up as a Harley Street specialist, went to Vienna in 1890 to study ophthalmology, where the use of cocaine for local anaesthesia in eye surgery had recently been pioneered in the city’s General Hospital by Freud’s associate Carl Koller. It was the greatest surgical breakthrough in the discipline’s history, and a major focus of study: Doyle may well have administered it himself during his training.

His profession of ignorance seems particularly disingenuous on this point, since Doyle’s earliest professional interest was in drugs and toxicology. He achieved the feat – as remarkable then as now – of getting his first article published in the British Medical Journal while still in his third year at Edinburgh. It was on the action of a poison called gelsenium, an extract from a jasmine root and an ingredient in Gowers’ Mixture, a neuralgia treatment; Doyle’s experiment included self-poisoning with a substantial dose of 200 minims. His passion for toxicology frequently bleeds through into his fiction: there are several exotic poisons in the Holmes stories, all conceived with a relish for scientific detail. One of them, the hallucinogenic ‘Devil’s Foot Root’ in the short story The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, has even made its way into some medical and ethnobotanical literature, planted mischievously by a Sherlock Holmes afficionado and subsequently taken as real. All this suggests that Doyle was well aware of the existence and properties of cocaine, and was using his professional understanding of it to underscore the character of his mysterious detective.

When the crash came, as with all cocaine crashes, you could see it coming. The euphoric overselling by pharmaceutical companies like Parke Davis was inevitably followed by a backlash that began almost immediately: already in 1887 the British Medical Journal was observing that an ‘undeniable reaction against the extravagant pretensions advanced on behalf of this drug has already set in’. It has since been recognised that the most common pattern of cocaine abuse is not, as with opiates, a lifetime of dependence, but a three to five year binge of excessive and increasing use leading to a crisis followed by one of three outcomes: abstenance, a substitute dependence on opiates or sedatives, or a scaling-down of cocaine use to manageable levels. Nineteenth-century Europe and America binged their way to crisis in a few short years and, horrified at their own reflection in the mirror, fled in panic towards the path of abstinence.

Sherlock Holmes’ career, which ran right through to the 1920s, is an eloquent witness to the eclipse of cocaine’s image as a miracle drug. Concern about its associations with delinquency and addiction built throughout the 1890s, and by 1900 the serious lobbying to control and prohibit it had begun. This was mostly taking place in the United States, where by this stage the Sherlock Holmes stories were being serialised to an enthusiastic American audience in Collier’s Weekly, a magazine that was also in the forefront of the campaign against the ‘cocaine menace’. Doyle had been gradually pruning back references to Holmes’ habit throughout the 1890s, limiting them to the occasional dark reference to his hero’s ‘weakness’; but in 1904, in The Missing Three-Quarter, he closed the unsavoury chapter by stating that Holmes had been ‘weaned’ from by Dr.Watson from the ‘drug mania’ that had ‘threatened to check his remarkable career’.

This is a narrative twist that destroys the inner logic of Doyle’s world, requiring his hero to forget why he became a detective in the first place. But it mirrors accurately the changing times: cocaine, which originally boosted Holmes’ popularity, had become a blight that might destroy it. From this point on, Holmes would begin to explain his mission in conventional moral terms, and would disown the hypodermic syringe as an ‘instrument of evil’. Collier’s were satisfied, and so was Doyle, who conquered the magazine market in America as he had in Britain – but the original scenario would never be erased. Cocaine would be prohibited across the globe long before Holmes’ final adventure in 1927, but his cocaine habit remains intact in his early and formative adventures, to be enjoyed and reassessed by successive generations.

This article is adapted from Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century. An extended version, including some thoughts on R. L. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, appeared in Darklore Vol. 3 (2009)

Holmes illustration by Paul M. McCall

By John Hanna for Erowid.org

During his talk “Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History” at a 1983 University of California at Santa Barbara conference, Andrew Weil mentioned in passing, “Dimethyltryptamine [...] is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.” Meanwhile, at U.C. San Diego, Rick Strassman had begun to wonder whether or not the pineal might produce psychedelic compounds. That same year, in his booklet Eros and the Pineal: The Layman’s Guide to Cerebral Solitaire, Albert Most claimed that: “A pair of naturally occurring pineal enzymes [...] is capable of converting serotonin into a number of potent hallucinogens.” Most stated that the pineal could transform serotonin into 5-methoxy-N-methyltryptamine, and then make that into 5-methyoxy-N,N-dimethyltrptamine. Alas, no references were provided to support Most’s description of pineal catabolism. Nevertheless, it seems likely that this general line of thinking–that some psychoactive tryptamine is created in the pineal–was birthed in the early 1980s.1

It took a couple of decades for the meme to spread into the wider drug-geek pop culture, more recently and rapidly due to the Internet, after the 2001 publication of Strassman’s popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Consider the following transcription from a radio rant [audio file online here] given circa 2005/2006 by the actor-comedian Joe Rogan, host of the TV show Fear Factor:

It’s called dimethyltryptamine. It’s produced by your pineal gland. It’s actually a gland [...] that’s in the center of your brain. It’s the craziest drug ever. It’s the most potent psychedelic known to man. Literally. But the craziest thing [about it is that] it’s natural, and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, and right before human death, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine. Nobody knows what sleep is all about. Nobody knows why dreaming is important. But dreaming is hugely important. If you don’t dream, you’ll go fucking crazy and you’ll die. While you’re dreaming, while you’re in heavy R.E.M. sleep, you are going through a psychedelic trip. And very few people know about this. But it’s been documented.

There’s a great book on it called DMT: The Spirit Molecule by a doctor named Dr. Rick Strassman. And he did all of these clinical studies at the University of New Mexico on it. And you take this shit, and literally you are transported into another fucking dimension. I don’t mean like, you feel like you’re in another dimension. I mean you’re in another dimension. [...] There’s fucking complex geometric patterns moving in synchronous order through the air all around you in three-dimensional space; and it’s like they’re arteries, except there’s not blood pumping through them, there’s fucking light–pulsating lights with no boundaries. And you couldn’t really understand it. And there’s an alien communicating with me. There’s a dude who looks like, like sorta like a Thai Buddha, except he’s made entirely of energy and there’s no, there’s no, like, outline to him–he’s just one thing. And he’s concentrating on me, and he’s trying to tell me not to give in to astonishment. Just relax, and try to experience this. And I’m like, ‘You gotta be fucking shittin’ me.’ And I’m a stand up comedian, you know. ‘Cos as a stand up comedian, we pride ourselves in being able to describe things. So I’m like, ‘How the FUCK am I gonna talk about this?!’

Rogan does an excellent job of expressing a number of bullet points from Strassman’s book in a humorous manner. But the problem is that none of these points are known to be true. And although Strassman clearly states that his ideas about DMT and the pineal gland “are not proven”2, many people have accepted them as fact. As of June 2010, there is currently no scientific evidence that the pineal gland produces DMT, much less any evidence for the more far-out speculations that Strassman makes about DMT being a chemical modulator of the human soul. When Strassman examined the pineal glands from “about ten” human corpse brains, there was nary a trace of DMT to be found in them. This doesn’t invalidate his theory, since DMT is metabolized quickly, and none of the corpse brains were fresh-frozen. Further tests on fresh-frozen brains could be done. Someday there may be evidence that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, but that day has not yet arrived.

By the end of his book, Strassman proposes that DMT may provide access to parallel universes (and alien beings) via superconductive quantum computing of the human brain at room temperature, or via interactions with dark matter. Strassman states: “Because I know so little about theoretical physics, there are fewer constraints reining me in regarding such speculations.” And for those who know virtually nothing about any given topic, there appear to be no constraints on speculation. It is for exactly this reason that Strassman’s theories have both been accepted as fact by many people, and then expanded into creative new directions. A few offshoot theories include the idea that ancient prophets produced more DMT, that electro-magnetic fields increase DMT production, that spending a couple of weeks in total darkness increases DMT production, and that fluoridated water suppresses DMT production. An Internet search will turn up a bounty of wacky spin-offs, all of which cite Strassman’s speculations as the facts backing up their further claims.

Is DMT produced by the pineal gland? Maybe…

1. Albert Most is perhaps better-known for his 1984 booklet Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which explains how to collect and smoke the 5-MeO-DMT-containing secretions from this animal. Coincidentally, Most was one of the first two volunteers in Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, which started in 1990 and ended in 1995. And during the period when Strassman was researching DMT, Andrew Weil went on to co-author two journal articles with Wade Davis on the topic of B. alvarius’s psychoactive secretions.
2. Strassman’s DMT: Spirit Molecule on DMT in the Pineal :
   

   These hypotheses are not proven, but they derive from scientifically valid data combined with spiritual and religious observations and teachings. [...]

   The most general hypothesis is that the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in our lives. Pineal DMT production is the physical representation of non-material, or energetic, processes. It provides us with the vehicle to consciously experience the movement of our life-force in its most extreme manifestations. Specific examples of this phenomenon are the following:

   When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT.

   Later, at birth, the pineal releases more DMT.

   In some of us, pineal DMT mediates the pivotal experiences of deep meditation, psychosis, and near-death experiences.

   As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule. (pages 68-69, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001)

Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report.

[Ed. note: There is no abstract, so we're including most of the original article below. It's a bit long, but trust us--it's worth the read!]

“Case report:
The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries.

The girl had some minor lacerations of the left hand and a single stab-wound in the upper abdomen. Under general anaesthesia, laparotomy was performed through an upper midline abdominal incision to reveal two holes in the stomach. These two wounds had resulted from the single stab-wound through the abdominal wall. The two defects were repaired in two layers. The stomach was noted empty at the time of surgery and no gastric contents were seen in the abdomen. Nevertheless, the abdominal cavity was lavaged with normal saline before closure. The condition of the patient improved rapidly following routine postoperative care and she was discharged home after 10 days.

Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born…

…While closing the abdominal wall, curiosity could not be contained any longer and the patient was interviewed with the help of a sympathetic nursing sister. The whole story did not become completely clear during that day but, with some subsequent inquiries, the whole saga emerged.

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant although it had crossed her mind more often as her girth increased and as people around her suggested that she was pregnant. She did recall several episodes of lower abdominal pain during the previous year. The young mother, her family, and the likely father adapted themselves rapidly to the new situation and some cattle changed hands to prove that there were no hard feelings.

Comments
A plausible explanation for this pregnancy is that spermatozoa gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract. It is known that spermatozoa do not survive long in an environment with a low pH (Jeffcoate1975), but it is also known that saliva has a high pH and that a starved person does not produce acid under normal circumstances (Bernards & Bouman 1976). It is likely that the patient became pregnant with her first or nearly first ovulation otherwise one would expect that inspissated blood in the uterus and salpinges would have made fertilization difficult. The fact that the son resembled the father excludes an even more miraculous conception.”

From the Guardian by Jonathan Jones

The Florentine Renaissance weaver of floral fantasies Sandro Botticelli is a magical artist. Just to look at his masterpiece the Primavera is to have your spirits lifted, as if he knows how to release pleasure-giving chemicals in the human brain by particular combinations of colour and form.

The question is, how literal is the magic in Botticelli’s art? Are his paintings allegories, or entertainments, or something more – how shall we say this – practical? A fascinating new idea about Botticelli’s alluring idyll Venus and Mars in London’s National Gallery gives an old debate a contemporary twist. According to art historian David Bellingham, a strange plant pawed by a young satyr who plays about, clad in the discarded cuirass of Mars, at the bottom right of the panel, is a specimen of the hallucinogenic Datura stramonium, also known as “poor man’s acid”. According to this latest theory the pacified and disarmed war god Mars has actually been drugged by Venus, deity of love, who reclines wide awake and clothed beside his slumberous nude form.

This is not the first attempt to interpret Venus and Mars as something more tangible and efficacious than just a visualisation of Greek myth. In the past, the hermetic magical thought of the Florentine intellectual Marsilio Ficino was adduced by the Warburg Institute scholars EH Gombrich and Frances Yates to see Botticelli’s paintings as “talismans”: magical artefacts designed to actually exert benevolent effects on the beholder.

Personally I think both theories are very plausible. Botticelli’s paintings do suggest real magic, real eroticism – they have an occult quality. Nor would it be surprising if the Medici court circles who supported his art at this time (Venus and Mars was painted about 1485) were taking love drugs. Such potions were well-known and were taken seriously in the Renaissance – you can see an aphrodisiac bottle decorated with snogging lovers in the Renaissance galleries at the V&A. Those same galleries boast a Florentine mirror from this period that has a Medici emblem and is emblazoned with Venus and Mars – associating the theme with actual bedrooms, not just classicist studies.

Love is a drug, and Botticelli painted its effects with rare conviction. It would hardly be surprising to find a hallucinogenic on the shelves of his art’s life-giving pharmacy.

LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy Leary

It’s now almost half a century since that day in September 1961 when a mysterious fellow named Michael Hollingshead made an appointment to meet Professor Timothy Leary over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. When they met in the foyer, Hollingshead was carrying with him a quart jar of sugar paste into which he had infused a gram of Sandoz LSD. He had smeared this goo all over his own increasingly abstract consciousness and it still contained, by his own reckoning, 4,975 strong (200 mcg) doses of LSD. The mouth of that jar became perhaps the most significant of the fumaroles from which the ‘60s blew forth.

Everybody who continues to obsess on the hilariously terrifying cultural epoch known as the ‘60s – which is to say, most everybody from “my gege-generation,” the post-War demographic bulge that achieved permanent adolescence during that era – has his or her own sense of when the ‘60s really began. There are a lot of candidates: the blossoming pink cloud in the Zapruder film, Mario Savio’s first speech in Sproul Plaza, the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Beatles’ first appearance on the the Ed Sullivan Show, the first Acid Test, the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the release of the song “Good Vibrations,” the day Jerry Garcia got kicked out of the army. But as often as not, if you are a Boomer, the ‘60s began for surreal on the day you dropped acid. And if that is when the shit hit your personal fan, you may owe a debt of ambiguous gratitude to the appealingly demonic young sociopath who conveyed the Stark Bolt of Chemical Revelation to the nice young gentlemen of the Harvard Psilocybin Project.

The essential tameness of the group that was to become so notorious is only one fascinating feature of discourse to follow between the Project’s second and third most celebrated veterans: Ram Dass ( who as Richard Alpert, PhD, was Tom Sawyer to Tim Leary’s Huckleberry Finn) and Dr. Ralph Metzner (who began as an acolyte and wound up presiding over the remains).

In some of the photographs of members of the Project, taken prior to the arrival of Mr. Hollingshead and his Magic Mayonnaise Jar, the learned investigators are actually whacked on psilocybin and yet, their narrow black ties are still neatly knotted, their horn-rimmed glasses are on straight, their earnest civilization is still visibly intact.

Consider that Dr. Alpert’s first impulse, upon regaining the ability to walk during his first psychedelic experience, was to head off through the snow to his parents’ house and start shoveling their driveway. Upon being discovered, his defiant response was to dance a jig. This is truly a rebel without claws. But a few days after that fateful lunch with Hollingshead, Timothy Leary dropped acid and everything changed. The sober, scientific center of the Harvard Psilocybin Project lost its hold on the centripetal edge. The past started to end and the future started to begin. Their ties loosened and disappeared, along with belief in any such prosaic artifact as objective reality and the social conventions that accompanied it. As Leary later wrote in High Priest ( p. 256-257 ): “From the date of this session it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society and that we would spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently disregarding the parochial social inanities.”

Ram Dass had a somewhat more alarmed reaction. “When Tim first took LSD, he didn’t speak for weeks. I went around saying, ‘We’ve lost Timothy, we’ve lost Timothy.’ I was warning everybody to not take that drug, because Tim wasn’t talking and he was sort of dull … When I took it, I felt it went so far beyond the astral, beyond form, to pure energy. It showed me that in previous psychedelic sessions, I had been screwing around in the astral plane. LSD was no nonsense. If you weren’t grounded somewhere, you’d go out on this drug.”

They were both right, of course. These were by no means unusual responses to the experience. Thanks in very large part to the subsequent exertions of Drs. Leary, Alpert and Metzner, the experience was one shared over the following decade by tens of millions of Americans, the larger part of whom found it difficult ever after to take seriously the verities that few in Eisenhower’s America would have questioned. Our paradigm got fucking well shifted. At least mine certainly did. And so, I would venture, did that of the United States of America, during the trip we took between 1961 and 1972.

One can make a non-ludicrous case that the most important event in the cultural history of America since the 1860s was the introduction of LSD. Before acid hit American culture, even the rebels believed, as Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman implicitly did, in something like God-given authority. Authority, all agreed, derived from a system wherein God or Dad (or, more often, both) was on top and you were on the bottom. And it was no joke. Whatever else one might think of authority, it was not funny. But after one had rewired one’s self with LSD, authority – with its preening pomp, its affection for ridiculous rituals of office, its fulsome grandiloquence, and eventually, and sublimely, its tarantella around Mutually Assured Destruction – became hilarious to us and there wasn’t much we could do about it.

No matter how huge and fearsome the puppets, once one’s perceptions were wiped clean enough by the psychedelic solvent to behold their strings and the mechanical jerkiness of their behavior, it was hard to suppress the giggles. Though our hilarity has since been leavened with tragedy, loss, and a more appropriate sense of our own foolishness, we’re laughing still.

Birth of a Psychedelic Culture is a saga of holy heroism. The people in it were like the Lewis and Clark of the Mind. But it is also a cautionary tale and contained within it is a lot of the real reason that America had such a visceral immune reaction to our sudden, terrifying and transforming “Otherness” in the middle of its consciousness.

Before delightedly steering the train off its rails, we were given a glimpse of grace and infinity. But like all that is utterly true, the lightning was brief and the thunder rolls still. In the beginning for me – and for many of us – there was the realization that religion was mostly the creation of God in man’s own image. Just as Tim Leary became furious at Catholicism shortly after hitting West Point, I bought a little Honda motorcycle and found that my dopily consoling Mormonism couldn’t seem to ride along. Like the maddeningly glib Dick Alpert – and believe me, he was a man of many words in those days – I left monotheism for sex and velocity. But there had been, even in a book as weird as the one the Angel Moroni purportedly gave Joseph Smith ( Mark Twain called it “chloroform in print”), a spark of something. It was not religion, but you could almost see it from there.

I sped around with a longing for the Spirit that seemed inaccessible until sometime in 1964 when I read about the “Good Friday Experiment” in which, on Good Friday of 1962, Walter Pahnke, Tim Leary and the two battle-scarred saints of the Unnamable whose reminiscences you can read in the book (Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner), had given psilocybin to some divinity students in Boston University’s Marsh chapel and – mirabile dictu! — they fucking saw God or something like It. And all because somebody gave them a pill.

Like most people raised by hick kids in the mountains, I was a mystic without ever having heard the word. If I could have a direct experience of The Thing Itself, without all that regulatory obligation wrapped around it, I would become whole again. After that, I read everything I could find about mystico-mimetic chemicals: Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article for Life magazine about magic mushrooms, Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Bill Burroughs’s Yage Letters, etc. I wanted a piece of that communion wafer and so did a lot of other kids raised around the dreary wasteland of American piety.

In the fall of 1965, I entered Wesleyan University where both the man who was to become Ram Dass, as well as the man who sheltered and then spurned the Harvard Psilocybin Project, Dave McClelland, had taught shortly before. I knew about Leary, Alpert and Metzner and had my own copy of The Psychedelic Experience. But I thought they were still at Harvard. I was going to go find them.

Before I could get around to that pilgrimage, I found myself at a Vassar mixer one late night in late 1965 and met a strangely luminous Indian Brahmin fellow who stood apart. He asked me if I could give him a ride to the “religious retreat” where he was staying not far from Poughkeepsie and I agreed. So we wheeled around shiny narrow roads to Millbrook in a truly Biblical downpour and the next thing I knew I was looking at the headquarters of the Castalia Foundation.

He invited me in. I didn’t know who lived there. Now, at that point, my heroes had not only been cast out of Harvard, but paradise as well. Inside the house it was not such a pretty sight. The social order had been whupped upside the head too many times already, but that didn’t bother me. I had Forrest Gumped my way into the Temple of Delphi.

Not long after that, I was fully enrolled in the Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD. A great deal more could be said about my initiation and the adventures that followed, but this is not about my long, strange trip. Besides, there are better stories about the perception of mysterium tremendum and its effect upon mere mortals. (Understanding the legend of Dr. Faustus might not be a bad start either. )

I will say that there was a night in late 1966, I think, when I rode a motorcycle from Millbrook to Middletown during an ice storm and was, because of the acid, convinced that I could no more leave the road than an electron could escape the centerline of a linear accelerator. I will also say that by then I’d switched my academic focus from physics to phenomenology with a particular focus on Medieval Christian mystics like St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart. I had a sign on my dorm room door displaying the following formula: [picture of me] + [skeletal schematic representation of the LSD-25 molecule] = [ picture of the Buddha ].

The acid was working. What I didn’t know then was that my best friend from prep school, a kid named Bob Weir, who had been strangely incommunicado since shortly after he worked on my family’s ranch, had been right next to another great fumarole of pharmaceutical whacketydoodah, the Acid Tests. His little band, the Grateful Dead, had been part of an experiment in mass hallucination which seemed, from our East Coast view, to make Millbrook look like a Trappist monastery. It sounded to me like what these West Coast people were doing was a particularly blasphemous form of drug abuse, the spiritual equivalent of breaking into Chartres Cathedral and getting drunk on the communion wine.

But, while we were looking down our long patrician noses at these barbaric shenanigans, they were apparently producing transformations similar to our own. Five years later, Hunter S. Thompson recalled 1965 and 1966 in San Francisco like this (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pg 68):

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.”

Yes. That seemed right. Even as we were dismantling the monotheistic model of God as Abusive Father, we were assembling another one – in our own image of course – more personally available through mysticism and generally more immanent than the Previous Dude, but still inclined to lend special sanction to the actions of a particular socio-political cohort which, happily, turned out to be ours. God, or Something Like It, was on our side this time. The fact that God might turn up looking like a fat guy with an elephant head or as an aperture into pure, spirit-scalding Light, or even as Michael Hollingshead on a bad day, didn’t matter to us. The Apocalypse was nigh. The Age of Aquarius had dawned, and God was no longer in his Heaven but getting down, right there inside of us and our holy pills.

By spring of 1967, Leary, Alpert, and Metzner had already started to feel the arrogance of this premise. All three had gone to India and two had come limping back. Personally, I was still accelerating into the radiant fog, and so was a large percentage of my swollen generational demographic.

The Gathering of the Tribes had taken place in Golden Gate Park in January of that year. Leary and Allen Ginsberg had turned up there along with the international press, and the coastal schism in the Church of Acid had been officially healed. Somewhere in there, Time magazine ran a cover story on “The Hippies.” A more attentive cultural observer than I would have known by that sign that we’d reached our high-water mark. Whatever my earlier misgivings about the Acid Tests, I had learned by then that my dear Weir had been part of this heresy.

I was tickled to hear that the Grateful Dead were going to play their first New York gig at a Bleecker Street disco called the Cafe Au GoGo in June. Early June 1967 was a mighty time, the reverberations of which are now as ubiquitous in American cultural history as is the Big Bang in the rest of the universe. As I remember it, the Dead played on June 6th. The Six Day war had broken out the day before. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released five days before, as had the Grateful Dead’s eponymous first record. I had helped make arrangements to take the Dead up to Millbrook the day after.

After the show, which was kind of forgettable, Weir and I wandered over to Washington Square Arch and were trying to debrief one another. It was steady work. It wasn’t obvious that he had entirely passed the Acid Test. His eyes were all pupil, it seemed. He had the longest hair I’d ever seen on a human with a penis. And he’d become a fellow of very few words.

While we were struggling with the acquisition of a common language, a pale green Ford Falcon station wagon leapt the curb fifteen feet away and, like evil clowns emerging in platoon strength from a tiny circus car, some ten Long Island toughs poured out of it and headed toward us. You could see with one eye that they weren’t from our side of a culture war that had already gotten ugly in America. Like T cells in jackboots, they took us for antigens and meant us harm. As they were circling, Weir looked up and said mildly, “ You know, I sense violence in you guys, and whenever I feel it in myself, there’s a song I like to sing.” ( And I’m thinking, “??!” ) All of a sudden he’s chanting “Hare Krishna,” and what with my wondering ears should I hear but the toughs singing along. For about fifteen seconds. And then they beat the crap outof us.

So, as I drove my 550 horsepower Chevy Super Sport up the Taconic to Millbrook the next day, both Bobby and I looked like Wiley Coyote after a bad run-in with an Acme product. Also on board was a girl named Bos ( over whom I was totally goofy at the time), Phil Lesh, and Frank Zappa’s star chick singer, a hot number who called herself Uncle Meat. We listened to war news from the Holy Land on the radio and we had on board a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s, which I’d bought on the way out of town and which none of us had heard yet.

I was trying to explain to my inamorata Bos, both of whose parents were Jewish psychiatrists, why I felt so moved by St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. It was a moment in the ‘60s, that day was. When we got to the Hitchcock Mansion, it was pretty clear that whatever else the charming Dr. Leary was trying to tell the world, housekeeping tips were not being integrated into it.

Few of the regulars remained. Ralph, Tim, and even Michael Hollingshead had reached a point the year before when they’d found Dr. Alpert’s manias so alarming that they’d sent him packing off to India. (Where he was, by this time, already in a dhoti and well on his way to becoming Baba Ram Dass. He dropped the Baba as soon as the wisdom actually kicked in.)

That night we all gathered in the second floor library and, with ecclesiastical ceremony, we put on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nobody said a word while the record played. Many of us couldn’t have if we’d wanted to. I was so high I could taste the music and found the purple notes a little hard to chew. When the London Philharmonic’s last cacophonous notes trailed out of “A Day in the Life,” there was a portentous silence and … Timmy intoned solemnly, “My work is complete.”

Little did he know how right and how wrong he was. I say this because while he and the rest of us crazy angels had truly delivered some form of apocalypse, it could not actually take effect in a couple of years or even a couple of generations. No revelation so culturally shattering was going to be universally accepted overnight. No generation that called itself now was going to find lengthy evolution palatable, but that was what was on our plate nonetheless.

Yes, the Beatles had dropped acid and the whole world had noticed, but not everyone was pleased. The Empire was about to strike back. Moreover, we had, with our giddy carnival frenzies and darker madnesses soon to come, sown the seeds of our own disaster. There was a moment in the fall of 1967 that I myself became convinced, with passionate intensity, that we were that “rough beast” Yeats had described. We were leading society into such a quagmire of narcissistic, self-reaffirming subjectivism that if we continued to “Storm Heaven,” as Jay Stevens put it, little of what might be a reasonable basis for polity or even what passes for civilization would survive our selfindulgence.

I went unhinged. I became psychotic and grandiose and decided to become what would have been America’s first suicide bomber. I was prepared to sound a warning with my own spattered flesh and that of innocent others. I would be the admonition on the front page of every paper that would slow the juggernaut of hideous Truth. I had the means and the moment. Fortunately, praise Providence, I was found out and stopped forty-five minutes short of my own vile apocalypse. I lived on Thorazine for a while after that. But my intended mission attracted other willing soldiers. In my stead, we got Charlie Manson and Altamont. We got the behavioral sink of the long autumn that followed the Summer of Love. We got the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Front, the communes that turned into rural slums overnight.

What we got was the Bill. Hunter S. Thompson put it very harshly but with some accuracy a few years later in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (pgs 178-179): “All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody … or at least some force — is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Who can blame the Rotarians of America for being alarmed? We became terrifying enough to scare ourselves. The Babbitry came down with a not ill-considered immune response that, however draconian its methods, was nevertheless their Apollonian duty just as appropriately as the creation of Dionysian chaos had seemed to be ours. But perhaps even more unsettling to the Powers That Had Been was the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, in addition to calling into question their version of God-given authority, we now found them amusing.

Since there is nothing authority hates worse than being laughed at, the authorities resolved to make themselves even less funny. The harder the acid heads laughed, the more bellicose, pig-headed, and, well … authoritarian the Powers became. And thus, instead of a quick abdication by the cultural forces that had been in charge of Western “Civilization” for two thousand years and a peaceful transfer of power to the laughing Aquarians, there commenced the forty year Mexican standoff that I call the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties.

Of course, this conflict had a lot of other names along the way, most of them delicious with the kind of dark irony it takes an acidhead to properly savor. There was the Viet Nam War, the War on Poverty, The War on Terror, both Wars on Iraq, and throughout, interwoven into every inch ofAmerican life, there was the War on ( Some ) Drugs. There was also, implicitly, the War on the Bill of Rights.

Whatever its other depraved social consequences – the millions jailed, the military dead and maimed, the deceit and denial at all levels of American society, particularly within the nuclear family – the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties endowed us with a golden age of irony. If you didn’t have a sense of irony, you were missing most of the fun, and, um, ironically, just about the only Americans who did have one were the acid heads. This created yet another badly hung loop as various iterations of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” concatenated through the culture and, once again, we were the only ones laughing.

And then, lest we forget, throughout much of this period, and scarcely mentioned by anybody, acid head or Republican Whip, was the greatest surreality of all: the almost universal belief that somewhere and some time soon, someone would foul up and launch the nuclear storm thatwould glaze the planet with our elemental constituents. And if you couldn’t laugh at that, what could you laugh at?

Now, it seems many of these horrors may be consigned to the history of a future that never happened. While new horrors surely await us, very few still believe we’re likely to go “toe-to-toe with the Russkies” in nuclear combat as Slim Pickens put it in one of the most immortal lines of the 1960s.

Better still, the worst of the authoritarian prigs have so magnificently shot their wad during eight long years of Cheney/Bush that only those savagely beaten by their own fathers or the clergy support them now.

Aside from the coming kerfuffle over war crimes indictments and ongoing skirmishes along the Mason-Dixon Line, the War Between the Fifties and the Sixties may be finally drawing to an end. Indeed, as I write these words, the President of the United States, in addition to being black and self-admittedly smart and well-educated, strikes me as a fellow who probably dropped acid at some point. At the least, when asked if he “inhaled,” he replied, “I thought that was the point.”

Now that the worst of it may be over, perhaps it may become possible for various members of Congress, federal judges, ranked military officers, prominent clergy, and captains of industry — aside from the peculiarly honest Steve Jobs – to do as most of these, had they been brave enough, ought to have done decades ago and say in public: There was a moment, years ago, when I took LSD. And, whatever the immediate consequences, it made me a different person than I would have been and different in ways I have been grateful for all this time.

That would be a mighty moment. Those who still live are all now older and wiser than we were in those literally heady days, and we may finally be ready to tell such truths without setting off another round of conflict.

Ram Dass has come a long way along the path of the profound since I first met him as the maddeningly manipulative Dick Alpert. Indeed, at one point some years ago, I was having dinner with him and confessed to a moral dilemma that I was having a hard time teasing apart. I can’t even remember what it was now, but he cut through it snickety-snack, like a sword through the Gordian Knot, with a few well chosenwords.“That’s the problem with you, man,” I said, and continued with a concession I would not have made even to Baba Ram Dass, who turned up first at Wesleyan when he returned from India, still pretty full of self-promoting nonsense, “You’re just a lot wiser than I am.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you lay that wisdom shit on me, Barlow,” he retorted, thereby defeating his own argument with its refutation.

But even before then, he had uttered a motto that has been far more important to carrying the essential message of the sixties than “ Turn on. Tune in. Drop out” ( which was actually coined by Marshall McLuhan and given toTim Leary since it didn’t fit McLuhan’s rap). Ram Dass said, “Be here now.” And here we all are. Now. Ready at last with the patience, forgiveness, contrition and self-amusement necessary to continue the work in earnest.

It is a good time to go back to the beginnings of the revolution still under way and take stock. It is a good time to read this book.

John Perry Barlow is a writer, a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist, and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation – an organization dedicated to the defense of freedom of speech.

“A lady once asked me whether I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity: No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.” (1)

© Mike Jay

This exchange, recorded by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1809, was more than just a chance for a pleasing riposte: it demarcated a subject that had haunted the poet since childhood and to which he would return regularly in both his public and private writings. Typically, the definitive tome that he promised never materialised; yet over many years, in fragments and the occasional sustained burst, Coleridge evolved a psychology of ghosts, visions and apparitions that was more ambitious than any previously attempted. His interest was not in proving that the supernatural was ‘real’; rather, he believed that the rational investigation of miraculous events functioned, among other things, as ‘a weapon against superstition’. But he was equally unsatisfied with the debunking spirit that saw all spectral experiences as no more than the errors and weaknesses of the gullible. For him, supernatural-seeming events proved much more: they held the key to understanding the deep mysteries of the imagination, and the powers of the mind to shape reality itself.

His response to the unnamed lady, later published in his journal The Friend, had first appeared in a notebook entry dated precisely to midnight on Sunday 12 May 1805. On this occasion he had been dozing at a table in the vast library-cum-saloon of the Treasury in Valeta, Malta, when he had opened his eyes to see a man who wasn’t there.

Coleridge had exiled himself to Malta the previous year to break the spell of his opium addiction and failed marriage, and his grand surroundings mirrored the fact that, for the only time in his life, he was holding down a steady and important job: public secretary to the Governor of the island, writing strategic reports on the Mediterranean for the British navy. As usual he had passed a sociable evening among diplomats and civil servants, the last of whom, another secretary named Mr. Dennison, had bid him goodnight ten minutes previously. Coleridge had meant to retire too, but instead had nodded off. When he opened his eyes, he saw Mr. Dennison still sitting across the table from him.

His eyes closed once more, puzzlement mingling with sleep, and when he opened them again he realised that he was in the presence of a waking vision. The Mr. Dennison he had just seen, he now realised, had been a wraith-like illusion, a head and shoulders suspended in mid-air like the grin of the Cheshire cat. The one he saw now was a fully-formed simulacrum; yet, as he roused himself to observe it, he became aware that it was somehow less substantial than the man himself. It had a wispy quality, as if seen through thin smoke, or ‘like a face in a clear stream’ (2). As he focused more clearly, the table before it and the library shelves behind became more solidly real, yet the figure maintained a ‘sort of distinct shape and colour’ that gave it a feeling of an illusion superimposed by some kind of optical trickery against its surroundings.

Coleridge reached for his notebook and, ‘not three minutes having intervened’, began to scribble furiously, attempting to record every detail of the apparition while it was still fresh in his mind. As he did so, he began to notice shapes in front of him that were suggestive of the now-vanished illusion. Before him on the table, in the sight-line where the spectral Mr. Dennison had materialised, was a glass flask of port covered in leather; it still had an oddly human shape, and he ‘clearly detected that this high-shouldered hypochondrical bottle-man had a great share in producing the effect’. The chair opposite him, too, was uphosltered in leather, with metal studs around its edges that caught the light, picking out another suggestively human shape that framed that of the bottle. As he focused on these details, the illusion began to reform faintly, though this time ‘I snapped the spell before it had assumed a recognisable form’.

But there was more to this business than mere tricks of light, shade and perspective: Coleridge was keenly aware that a psychological component was also in play. This had been no terrifying spectre or vengeful ghost; it had held no more for him than a kind of curiosity and aesthetic fascination. This was surely a product of his own state of mind as he had observed it: he had been ‘pleased with it as a philosophical case’ rather than frightened by it. How differently might the illusion have developed if the hairs on his neck had decided to rise in involuntary dread? And yet, as he considered his state of mind, it occurred to him that ‘the state of the brain and nerves after distress and agitation’ might have played its part, too. Coleridge rarely had to search far to identify a source of nervous malaise, and the evening of 12 May 1805 was no exception: only the previous day he had been badly shaken when three stray dogs had gone for him in the streets of Valeta, one of them sinking its teeth into his left calf. Might his curiously placid vision have been a mental trick triggered by a temporarily forgotten nervous stress, but enacted when he happened to be in a state of contemplative tranquillity?

The causes and components of the vision, then, could be sought equally in the external stage-settings and in the inner theatre of the observer’s mind. But Coleridge omits another possibility, one which many modern commentators would argue was the most salient of all: opium. Coleridge had not yet reached the point in his life where his narcotic habit was widely known, and it was only when he was posthumously outed by his protégé and fellow-addict Thomas de Quincey that his reputation, and myth, would become inseparable from the drug. But his heavy use of Kendal’s Black Drop, his favoured, super-strength laudanum tincture, had begun in the Lake District in the winter of 1801, and his attempt to shake free of it in the Mediterranean sunshine had been at best a mixed success. The voyage had begun well, with stimulating views and sea air distracting him from his medication, but storms, sea-sickness and his cramped cabin had eventually shredded his nerves and reduced him to almost constant dosing: he had felt himself becoming the nightmare-haunted walking corpse of his signature work thus far, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (3). Arriving in Malta, the change of scene and exotic landscapes had spurred him on to a healthy regime of country walks and clean living; but over the winter he had relapsed once more, alternating days of brisk diplomatic business with nights of furtive indulgence in spirits, narcotics and lurid, luxurious dreams. As he nodded off at the library table at midnight, there is every likelihood that he was dosed to the gills.

Still, the spectral vision of Mr. Dennison before Coleridge’s waking eyes is not entirely typical of opium’s effects, which tend towards dreamy interior reveries rather than the hallucinatory extrusions into waking reality that are more readily achieved by other psychoactive substances. The drug’s psychic hallmarks for Coleridge at this point, to judge by many harrowing notebook entries, were the nightmares that regularly woke him up screaming, sweating and gasping for breath, with skin-crawling recollections of being pursued, buried alive, mutilated or infected with hideous diseases. He did not associate these with his opium use, and in fact tended to increase his dose when they occurred in the hope of a sounder sleep; the side-effect of opium that he consciously dreaded most was constipation, with its wrenching gut spasms and the accompanying agony and shame of the only effective remedy, the enema. Yet his periods of exceptionally high opium dosage did produce crawling visual effects at the periphery of his vision: in the latter stages of the voyage to Malta he records faces leering at him from the cloths in his cabin, and flapping sails appearing to him as fish gasping and floundering on the deck. Opium may not be adequate as the sole explanation of Coleridge’s vision, but it should probably have been included in his otherwise exhaustive list.

The notebook entry that began in the throes of a vision concluded with a resolution: he would make a similar record whenever such events occurred in the future. ‘Often and often I have had similar experiences’ he wrote, ‘and therefore resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur’. He also began to investigate accounts of miracles and other supernatural experiences that he felt might be analogous to his own, and to develop a theory that might account for them.

Then as now, there were essentially two schools of thought, to neither of which he could entirely subscribe. The first was a religious faith that asserted that miracles were the work of God, who permitted the laws of nature to be overridden in special circumstances to contribute to His greater glory. This was a view that had been delicately teased apart by Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume, whose essay On Miracles (4) had argued that since miracles were by definition impossible, there could never be any such thing as sufficient evidence for them. Coleridge had also read the German philosophers such as G.E.Lessing who had gone further, dissecting the transmission of miracles from unknowable first-person testimonies via a process of Chinese whispers to suitably pious and inspirational narratives (5).

Although never without religious convictions, Coleridge had always taken the rationalists’ side against belief in miracles, which represented for him the irrational and obscurantist aspects of a faith that needed to justify its authority to the modern age in rational terms. Yet his debunking zeal was tempered by his voracious curiosity about visionary experience, and perhaps even by a little envy of those who had achieved immortality by bringing their visions into the world. He agreed with the critics who argued that the mystics had mistaken their inner worlds for external divinities, but he did not want to rid the world of miracles: rather, he was searching for ways to include miracles in a novel understanding of it.

For this reason, he was equally dissatisfied with the rational alternative to religious faith. This was the theory, developed by philosophers such as John Locke, that miracles and supernatural experiences were simply errors of cognition, perceptions that had been wrongly associated in the mind and coloured by memories, fables and fancies. For Coleridge this theory gave too little credit to the mind, and too much to a mundane conception of reality. He wanted an explanation that did more than dismiss such experiences as perceptual illusions: one that could explore, as he had with his vision of Mr. Dennison, the active role played by the imagination in their creation. He proceeded, as he often did, to coin a new term to describe such experiences: ‘supersensual’ (6), a rendering perhaps of the German word űbersinnlich, developed by the mystic Jacob Boehme and included by Goethe in his Faust.

‘Supernatural’ was a term that made grand and unjustifiable claims – that we know the laws of nature fully, and that we know the experiences that we designate as miracles and apparitions to be outside their frame. ‘Supersensual’, by contrast, only asserts that these experiences break our laws of perception and consensus reality, without making any judgement about their ultimate status. Some of Coleridge’s similar coinages, such as ‘psychosomatic’, have entered the language and are still with us; ‘supersensual’ is one that has not, but perhaps deserves to have done.

Four years after his notebook entry in Malta, Coleridge made his most sustained attempt to describe this new territory, in a pair of conjoined essays. The first trained his psychological lens on one of the most famous ‘supernatural’ events in the Christian canon; the second, in a classic Coleridgean trajectory, brought the subject back to himself, and his fine-grained self-observation.

The first essay was entitled Luther’s Visions in the Warteburg, and examined in detail one of the founding myths of Protestantism: that Martin Luther, imprisoned in the Warteburg castle in 1521, had been visited by the Devil while translating the New Testament into German, and had banished him by throwing his inkstand at him. Coleridge himself had visited the castle, towering on its cliff above the town of Eisenach, and had been shown the incorruptible black spot where Luther’s ink had hit the wall, and where ‘the said marvellous blot bids defiance to all the toils of the scrubbing brush, and is to remain a sign for ever’ (7). Coleridge was prepared to leave to the reader’s judgement ‘whether the great man did ever throw his inkstand at his Satanic Majesty’; he proposed instead to anatomise Luther’s visions in same way that he had his own.

He began, as his self-investigations so often began, in the stomach. Luther was not starving in a dungeon; on the contrary, he was ‘treated with every kindness’, including a much richer diet than he was accustomed to, which ‘had begun to undermine his former unusually strong health’. He recorded ‘many and most distressing effects of indigestion’, with which Coleridge was quick to identify – ‘the common effect of deranged digestion in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers’ – and to extrapolate from Luther’s unaccustomed luxury to an explanation for him being ‘plagued with temptations both from the flesh and the devil’. The nervous effects of his indigestion would have been most pronounced, as Coleridge’s own were, in his ‘unconscious half-sleeps, or rather those rapid alterations of the sleeping with the half-waking state, which is the true witching time’ – or, in a more expressive phrase, ‘the fruitful matrix of ghosts’. In these Luther might, as the author had done in the saloon in Valeta, ‘have had a full view of the room in which he was sitting’, with walls, floor, writing-table, pen, paper and inkstand all clearly perceived, and ‘at the same time a brain-image of the devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent outness’, superimposed upon the background, its subtly shifting tones and contours suggesting perhaps, to Luther, not illusion but supernatural origin.

This explanation lacks the multifactoral subtlety of Coleridge’s dissection of his own visions, and it seems that some of his readers may have commented as much, as he followed it up with a second piece, apologising that ‘the theory of Luther’s apparitions [was] stated perhaps too briefly in the preceding essay’ – and adding, with a parodic touch of self-pity, that ‘I will endeavour to make my ghost theory more clear to those of my readers, who are fortunate enough to find it obscure in consequence of their own good health and unshattered nerves’. This is the cue for an exquisite description of an optical effect that he used to observe regularly as the winter dusk descended on his study in Keswick, and the fire in his hearth, reflected in his window, began to superimpose itself on the darkening lake and valley outside. The fire emerged as daylight faded, suspended in the distant landscape; as darkness came on, it seemed to grow closer and more dominant, until the arival of night, when ‘the window became a perfect looking-glass; save only that my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars’. Here was an optical mechanism for ‘the phantom from Luther’s brain’ that might have played into the fruitful matrix of ghosts: the inkstand might, like the port decanter in Malta, have been a hitherto unnoticed foreground detail that nevertheless had ‘a considerable influence in the production of the fiend, and of the hostile act by which his obtrusive visit was repelled’.

To this optical effect must, as ever, be added the state of mind of the observer, and the human readiness to craft meaning from the random. ‘If we are in anxious expectation’, for example, ‘the babbling of a brook will appear to be the voice of a friend, for whom we are waiting, calling out our own names’. These are not simply mechanical errors of perception. They are the products of our minds, which are always working subconsciously to shape the reality around us; supersensual visions are the moments when we catch them up to their constant but otherwise unnoticed tricks. By such increments Coleridge works his way towards the beginnings of a unified theory, the ‘great law of the imagination’, that ‘a likeness in part tends to become a likeness of the whole’: the brain is always busy recognising, replicating, expanding, extemporising and filling in the gaps. Under the right circumstances, humble decanters and inkstands can morph into human or demonic entities, at which point they may do anything that such entities might be expected to do: walk, speak, wear evening dress or waggle their pointed tails. Visions are no aberration, but an insight into the ways in which our minds are constantly extrapolating, stitching together a plausible reality from whatever fragments are to hand, in a restless search for patterns that fit the established pigeon-holes of memory and belief.

There is much more that follows from this – nothing less than a new psychology – but, having tantalised himself and the reader, Coleridge announces reluctantly that he is unable to do it justice. ‘I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts and witchcraft’, he insists, and ‘I have indeed a memorandum-book filled with records of these phaenomena, many of them interesting as facts and data for psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of perception and its dependence on memory and the imagination’. But the death of his collaborator on these theories, the gifted and tragic pottery heir Tom Wedgwood (8), makes it too painful to pursue – or, perhaps, Coleridge is aware that his insights amount to no more than flashes and fragments that he can stitch together with greater or lesser conviction in his own head, but which he fears will unravel if he attempts to order them and bring them to the page.

Yet if Coleridge abandoned his direct assault on ghosts and visions, his researches nevertheless fed into the restless stream of his theories of the imagination, and particularly its implications for poetry, literature and drama. ‘In certain sorts of dreams’ he noted, ‘the dullest wight becomes a Shakespeare’: but how can these supersensual effects, created so richly and seamlessly by the mind, be replicated by the writer? He continued to develop the idea that the imagination was not merely a mechanical process, but an organic one, where thoughts and ideas were diffused, recombined and recreated; his favoured analogy became that of a plant, something that develops from a small seed into something far greater than the sum of its parts, transcending the energies that produced it and evolving its own inner life (9).

These investigations led him to one of his most enduring coinages, the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, or ‘suspended state’, that poetry or drama must evoke to allow the reader or viewer to believe in characters and scenes that are ‘supernatural, or at least romantic’ (10). This is an effect that is achieved by a mixture of external scene-setting and careful, often subconscious priming of the audience’s expectations and imaginations: these conditions, like those that precede waking visions, combine to make the observer receptive to supersensual effects that spill out of reality’s habitual confines. Coleridge’s ‘great law of the imagination’ was never codified, but neither was it entirely abandoned: it was merely folded into his literary theories, where it vegetated, hybridised and absorbed new sustenance. It emerged as ‘willing suspension of disbelief’: the subliminal compact between subject and object that allows the observer to engage their own imagination, to finesse a middle ground between scepticism and belief, and thus to transform illusion into reality – whether reading Kubla Khan, watching Hamlet, or calmly observing the apparition of a Mr. Dennison across a library table.

—

This piece first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (2006)

RELATED BOOK: The Atmosphere of Heaven

—

Footnotes:
(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, Vol.1, Essay III (1809)
(2) for this and following quotations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, Vol.II, entry 2583 (ed. Kathleen Coburn, Routledge 2002)
(3) see Alethea Hayter, A Voyage in Vain: Coleridge’s Journey to Malta in 1804 (Faber & Faber 1973)
(4) David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
(5) G.E.Lessing, Űber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (1777)
(6) see Coleridge, Notebooks, Vol. III, 3911
(7) for this and following quotations, Coleridge, The Friend, Vol.I, Essays II and III (1809)
(8) Tom Wedgwood’s writings on the psychology of perception are held in the archives of Keele University; a selection was published as The Value of a Maimed Life: Extracts from the Notes of Thomas Wedgwood (ed. Margaret Olivia Tremayne, W.Daniel 1912)
(9) see M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press 1953)
(10) Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Vol II (Rest Fenner 1817)