On On Drugs (II)

Snakes and ladders

Dear Justin

In my first letter¹ I promised to get back to your fourth philosophical argument that psychedelic experiences offer an analogy of enlightenment. Since I’ve already written plenty about my various chemical romances, permit me to first say a few words about my experience with the practice of philosophy, about the status of my SWIMUD² affliction, and about what happened on the day my gen z boyfriend and I refer to as Mushroom Day, before returning to the question of how to differentiate between an analogy of enlightenment and the real thing.

Jain sculpture of Sarasvati, the goddess of knowledge, Western India, 1050-1100, British Museum.

My philosophical life

My philosophical credentials are sketchy.³ I do not hail from a particularly philosophical milieu. The white tribe or volk⁴ called Afrikaners or Boers (peasants, paysans) had turned their back on Anglo ideas of enlightenment, clinging to their guns and their religion, identifying with the Biblical nation of Israel and the Promised Land of milk and honey.⁵

On the other hand, I am what some might consider a natural philosopher. On the drive back home from the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk every Sunday, my mother would reverently repeat the beautiful words that the dominee⁶ had spoken and I would list the weak points in his arguments. In eighth grade, asked to deliver a speech on the topic of our choosing, my classmates talked about “what I did on my holiday in Durban” and “my favourite rugby player” while I expounded on “the meaning of life” with a nod to some French existentialists I had recently encountered.⁷

That’s why I liked Agnes Callard’s notion in Open Socrates that argumentation is the essence of philosophy, even though I quipped in my review that perhaps the whole of Western philosophy could be termed “conversations on the spectrum.” The theory is not my own. But we don’t have to resort to the language of diagnostic manuals to observe that in cultures everywhere there seems to be certain individuals who are not content with the social conventions that are handed down to them, but who feel compelled to tease apart the concepts underpinning these conventions, asking questions like: “But what do you mean when you say you love me? Five minutes ago you said you loved the new Mario Kart game! Do you love me in the same way you love a toy?” As my example illustrates, philosophers can become annoying pretty quickly, but, under the right circumstances, they can nonetheless be of some use.⁸

The Jain Universe, Gujurat or Rajasthan, India, 1700-1900, The British Museum.

The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983)

Iris Murdoch’s 21st novel (the 11th I’ve read)⁹ is, inter alia, an elaborate self-parody, even by the standards of an Iris Murdoch novel. All the characters are full or partial reincarnations of characters in her previous novels. And why should they not be? The spa town of Ennistone is a send-up not only of Utopianism in general, but of the water-loving Dame’s own moderately socially conservative liberal pluralist individualist utopia with Quakerism as the de facto religion and William Blake’s Jerusalem as the local anthem.

The Serpent worms his way in regardless.¹⁰ I don’t know if she specifically had Le Guin in mind, but Murdoch offers a riposte to the romantic notion that the solution to the horror of the world is to just walk away from Omelas, to simply leave society. She forces us to consider that the problem might not lie with society, but with something closer to home. What if you are the person elected to damage a child, or several children. What do you do? How do you walk away? And what if the deed has already been done? How do you live with yourself? How do you expect anyone else to live with you?

Although it is a much more enjoyable read, The Philosopher’s Pupil dramatises the same truth as Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943). The poet, the philosopher and the priest each has his public persona (social role) and each has his own rich and twisted interior life, of which he will leave barely a trace behind.

“We are all comic characters in novels.”

The day we now refer to as Mushroom Day

On a day in July, my gen z boyfriend and I did some shrooms on a beach in Crete.¹¹ (I had followed the ancient Trojan recipe of grinding dried mushrooms into a fine power, folding the powder into melted chocolate and stowing the chocolates away in a box of Ferro Rochers on the plane over). We acted like little kids. We splashed in the waves. We buried our feet in the sand. My boyfriend tried to describe what he was seeing now that the folds over his third eye had temporarily dissolved: he saw Lakshmi approaching, accompanied by a pink peacock. “That’s the gayest hallucination ever!” I shrieked. My boyfriend felt hurt. I drank in the blue of the ocean and the blue of the sky and the blue of the mountains and I thought of Bloubergstrand and of Ouma D and how she used to love these triple blue days. I thought of Oumagrootjie and the one time I had met her as a frail old woman in her flat in Oranjezicht. I never knew that she was Jewish, not until the other day. I tried to explain to my boyfriend how it sickened me to think about what would have happened had her family not relocated to Cape Town, what did in fact happen to millions. How my European kin, who had supposedly believed that there was neither Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus, had treated people who had been their neighbours for centuries as if they were vermin. My boyfriend muttered something about Smotrich and I snapped: “I’m not defending the Goddamn IDF! I’m telling you how I feel about the fact that we are witnessing horror compounding on horror and there is nothing that we can do about it!” My boyfriend told me to control my emotions. “What is the appropriate level of emotion to feel about the Holocaust?!” I screamed and stormed off into the sea. I couldn’t tell where my personal grief ended and where a deeper collective grief began. All I knew was that I needed space to experience this grief and he wasn’t giving it to me. So I walked off to a quiet part of the beach, sat behind a rock and sobbed for what turned out to be over an hour. It was a relief to just let the tears flow as a natural response to knowing the reality of all the painful twists and turns that had brought me, this queer mammalian being, here, to this rock pool, now, entranced by the movements of this little crab. And it dawned on me, again, that the only thing that I could do was to go on, to keep walking. And do not think of the fruit of action. Fare forward. Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.¹² Meanwhile, my boyfriend had nearly lost his mind thinking that I had gone the way of Ingrid Jonker, either out of spite, or because I got caught by an undercurrent and, being a big stoned poof, I was unable to fend for myself in the most benign of oceanic conditions. We decided to call things even between us and to maybe lay off the mushrooms for a while.

Who’s enlightening whom?

If you’d forgive the impertinent question, when you say psychedelic experience [singular] offers an “analogy of enlightenment” [emphasis in original], which enlightenment are you talking about, exactly? That of Siddhartha, St. Paul or les philosophes? Is it all really one thing? Shanti, shanti, shanti, ॐ!

I was beginning to suspect that some sleight of hand was afoot. After going out on a limb to argue that psychedelic experiences are, in some deep sense, real, you then proceed to tell us that these real experiences represent but only a preliminary reality — a sort of playground version of the real real thing. But aren’t we now off to the Red Queen’s races? It’s easy enough to imagine an even deeper (or higher) reality that would be even realer than realer than real. Such reductio ad absurdum has always been the Achilles’ heel of any ontological proof, as Iris Murdoch writes in ‘On God and Good’:

If considered carefully, however, the ontological proof is seen to be not exactly a proof but rather a clear assertion of faith (it is often admitted to be appropriate only for those already convinced), which could only confidently be made on the basis of a certain amount of experience. This assertion could be put in various ways. The desire for God is certain to receive a response. My conception of God contains the certainty of its own reality. God is an object of love which uniquely excludes doubt and relativism. Such obscure statements would of course receive little sympathy from analytical philosophers, who would divide their content between psychological fact and metaphysical nonsense, and who might remark that one might just as well take 'I know that my Redeemer liveth' , as asserted by Handel, as a philosophical argument.

Ever since Plato’s myth of the cave became common knowledge, there has been no shortage of prophets and shamans promising to lead us out of the cave and into the light of the true sun. But how do we know that we are indeed heading in the right direction?

Gnocchic Apocryphon

and I have discussed the terrifying possibility of a cave below the cave to which weary seekers are led. Alan Watts said a guru is someone who picks your pocket and sells your own watch back to you. Ram Dass always remained devoted to his guru Maharaji, but in talks he would sometimes say that Ram stands for rent-a-mouth: “I’m only telling you what you already know,” he would say. Which is a nice way of saying: I’m only telling you what you want to believe.

You note that Freud mentions the oceanic feeling (a term I’ve used to describe some of my own psychedelic experiences) in Civilisation and its Discontents. But it’s worth keeping in mind that he emphatically rejected this feeling as the real reason for the persistence of religious experience, in favour of his own theory of infantile projection:

To me the derivation of religious needs from the helplessness of the child and a longing for its father seems irrefutable, especially as this feeling is not only prolonged from the days of childhood, but constantly sustained by a fear of the superior power of fate. I cannot cite any childish need that is as strong as the need for paternal protection. The role of the oceanic feeling, which might seek to restore unlimited narcissism, is thus pushed out of the foreground. The origin of the religious temperament can be traced in clear outline to the child’s feeling of helplessness.

Now we could attribute Freud’s depressive realism to his coke comedowns and speculate that if he had opted for laughing gas instead, like the more pragmatic William James, or perhaps mescaline and LSD, like the more open-minded Aldous Huxley, this groovier Siggy might have been less hard on the self, more open to varieties of religious experience and, one could only hope, less sexist to boot! But perhaps the problematic old Doktor offers a useful philosophical challenge to numinous insights precisely because he did not drink the kool-aid (or the communion wine, for that matter).

Next time

What happens when a philosopher melts his mind?

Sincerely,

Mary Jane Eyre

1. I thank

John Encaustum

for the idea of reconceptualising my Substack posts as letters — it never sat right with me to pretend that my amateur art criticism, neomystical musings and personal oversharing constitutes a newsletter.

John is doing great work at The Blackthorn Hedge. I especially appreciated his letter on how different epistemological traditions can become not only indifferent, but actively hostile, towards other ways of knowing.

2. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch Use Disorder.

3. But not totally non-existent. I do in fact hold an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, although none of my examined subjects were strictly speaking philosophical. I did audit a course taught by a philosopher and attend a meeting of a philosophical reading group discussing Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty. I was not a poor student, but a distracted one.

4. The Afrikaans word is the same as the German, but the noun capitalisation, like other extraneities of Western civilisation, had been dropped, somewhere along the way.

5. I know many of my readers appreciate John Ganz’s incessant warnings of incipient fascism, but I find it difficult to forgive him for his (from my perspective) xenophobic insinuations about the South African connection of some of the leading lights of the American Tech Right, invoking the Apartheid concept of baasskap (which he doesn’t even bother spelling correctly) as if America needs to import weird Protestantism and notions of white supremacy! I hold a similar grudge against the psychologically astute writer Damon Galgut, whose Booker Prize winning The Promise (2021) presented the banal iniquities of an ordinary Afrikaner family as some clever metaphor for the broken promises of the no-longer-so-new South Africa. The Guardian-reading class lapped it up, of course, because who would suspect that he was being unfair to those racist Afrikaners?

6. From the Latin dominus, lord or master, adopted during the Reformation to refer to a minister of religion.

7. If I recall correctly, I first read about Albert Camus in Marita van der Vyver’s Griet skryf a sprokie (Griet [Gretchen] writes a fairy tale) (1992):

Griet skryf ’n sprokie is die verhaal van Griet Swart, wat deur die traumas van miskrame, kindersterfte en egskeiding gedryf word tot die punt waar sy een aand haar kop in ’n gasoond druk. ’n Dooie kakkerlak in de oond red haar, want vir die res van die aand maak sy oond skoon. As terapie raai haar shrink haar aan om oor haar ervarings te skryf. En só kry die storie van Griet gestalte, ’n storie van seerkry en woede, maar verlig deur haar onvernietigbare sin vir humor.

Griet skryf ‘n sprokie is the story of Griet Swart, driven by the traumas of miscarriages, child deaths and divorce to the point where one evening she places her head inside a gas oven. She is saved by a dead cockroach that prompts her to spend the rest of the evening cleaning the oven. As therapy, her shrink recommends writing about her experiences. And so the tale of Griet takes shape, a story of hurt and anger, but lightened by her indestructible sense of of humour.

8. More on how I believe philosophers can be useful later.

9. To all those who consider The Sea, The Sea to be the new Middlemarch, please note that I’ve been a devotee of Dame Iris long before it was cool.

The best reason I can offer for my devotion to the Dame, is that when I read what she wrote, I feel, to borrow language from On Drugs, that I am in the presence of truth, a feeling I rarely get in conventionally religious settings.

My philosophical life has not been made any easier by the fact that I tend to get such a feeling when reading thinkers distrusted by today’s bien pensants: Smith, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Hesse, Huxley, Watts, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn... And Weil, of course, but she’s made quite the comeback recently. Her niece, Sylvie Weil, writes in the prologue to Chez les Weils: André et Simon (2009):

Il m'est arrivé plus d'une fois de renier Simone. J'avais honte de cette parenté, comme d'une tare. Certains trouveront cela choquant, ou très bête. Mais c'est ainsi.

It has happened to me more than once to deny Simone. I was ashamed of this relation, as of a disgrace. Some will find this shocking, or very dumb. But it is so.

It’s nice to see Simone smile for a change.

[Mind you, many of these bien pensants (même les bien croyants!) are still in thrall of that other Jewish prophet. I thought the point of Christianity was that the Messiah has already come and that ici-bas we are as saved as we are ever going to get?]

10. My gen z boyfriend and I recently went to have the immersive experience of Ancient India:
living traditions at the British Museum. (RETVRN the Elgin marbles! Dismantle the museum! Imperialism is theft!) The exhibition presented the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions as three sassy sisters begrudgingly tolerating and rather openly copying each other through the ages. The ambience was very Insta-friendly, very white girl goes to India without having to go to India, lots of gentle sitar music and chai latte incense (I kid you not!) My gen z boyfriend loved it.

Anyway, this footnote is supposed to be about snakes and how those who follow the Eastern ways tend to be more tolerant of such creatures, speaking mythopoetically, than Abrahamic sages who too often develop an obsession with defeating the Dragon-Whore of Babylon, or something of the sort.

Most of the images accompanying this letter are from the exhibition.

Stone sculpture for veneration of Divine Snakes, Deccan, India, 1600-1700, British Museum

11. My functional definition of a free country is anywhere my boyfriend and I can hang out in our Speedos and do drugs in a respectful manner without getting harassed.

12. These lines from T.S Elliot’s The Four Quartets, inspired by Krishna’s exhortations to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, came to me via Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, complementing my ruminations on Lot’s stoned wife.

Krishna defeats Kaliya, about 1790-1810, British Museum

From the back of the postcard:

Kaliya was a venomous snake who lived in the river Yamuna, poisoning its waters so other creatures could not live near him. The god Krishna took on the weight of the universe and stamped on Kaliya's many heads, defeating the great snake in battle. Kaliya's wives requested Krishna to spare his life and the god granted their wish.