On On Drugs (IV)

The Myths We Trip By

Dear Justin,

At the end of Part III, I mentioned my unease at your nonchalant use of the expression melting one’s mind as a metaphor for ingesting C₂₀H₂₅N₃O (also known as dropping acid, another peculiar metaphor), especially in conjunction with the image of a melted piece of wax. My unease arises from the thought that, unless we happen to be dreaming or tripping, a melted piece of wax cannot be unmelted. I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that the two cases are exactly analogous: after the mind has been melted by a chemical agent such as LSD and has been blended together with a piece of wax or with a burning fire or with the mind of the cosmos, it springs right back into its usual shape once the subject returns to sober consciousness. Or does it?¹

I’ve never been the same again.

Losing My Mind

It wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid of losing my mind. In fact, I had been afraid of losing my mind, or rather of losing control over my mind and hence over my autonomy ever since I gathered as a teenager that I had, as the eugenicists would say, a genetic predisposition towards certain mental conditions. But I had somehow got it into my mind that the proper use of psychedelic drugs could prevent me from losing my mind. I’ll let others be the judge of that, but I do credit a particular experience on psilocybin for banishing this specific fear of mine.

Almost a decade ago, I was tripping solo in my flat in London (my flatmate was in Prague or Copenhagen or another such picturesque European city for the weekend). After a few anxious weeks, I had received my postal order of the magic truffles I had ordered from Amsterdam (that was before the British Border Force got better at intercepting this particular form of contraband). An hour or two after eating the foul-tasting truffles, I became convinced that, whatever the British equivalent of a SWAT team was, it was on its way to break down the front door and take me away to a mental institution or a prison. At the same time, I knew that this was just some ridiculous drug-induced paranoia and that there was no reason why anyone would come to take me away: nobody even knew I was tripping.

I felt physically afraid, even though I rationally knew it was only a delusion. But something within myself, probably from having read not to resist emotionally challenging experiences on drugs, but to lean into them, told me to accept that someday someone may indeed break down my door and take me away, deserved or not. In fact, this very scenario was probably happening to someone else somewhere in the world at that very moment. If that person can go through it, then so could I, even if I would feel terribly ashamed about losing the battle with my genetically dis-eased mind in such a public manner, after having tried so hard to keep the hundreds of little private defeats hidden from those around me. People get their limbs blown off; I would not literally die of shame. I laughed out loud at the thought of the amount of shame available to me, how I had utterly failed to live up to any of the ideals I could think of. And in this feeling of futility, I found peace.

But the tutorial from my higher self was not over yet. I suddenly became convinced that if I drifted off to sleep, I would never wake up again. This fear felt very real too and I knew that the only way to get rid of it was to accept it as well. So I put on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), a film I love to watch on shrooms, and I thought, if I had to die right here, right now, then that too would be OK.

Almost Like Dying

The one no-regret application of psychedelics is as an optional part of end-of-life care. Like in a Black Mirror episode, the brain appears to have a mysterious tendency to recap the most emotionally salient moments of one’s life just in time for the explosive finale, a mechanism that can also be triggered by chemicals such as psilocybin which seem to fool the brain into believing that it is dying. Since many mushrooms are in fact deadly to humans, this is an easy mistake for the brain to make. But what a felicitous accident! We can practice dying, so to speak. It is better to have a a bad trip now while there is still time to change things, than ending up like Ivan Ilych on his death bed. And since these days most Westerners die after they’ve been medicated halfway to oblivion already, if we don’t take matters into our own hands, we might miss out on our mind’s life’s work altogether. Aldous Huxley took no chances: he had his wife inject him with 100 micrograms of LSD in his dying hours.

But pace Socrates, if I look at Gen Z with their bedrotting and their doomscrolling, they don’t seem to need to prepare for death: they will hardly notice the difference. What they need to be prepared for is living.²

Good and Bad Trips

Rollin' marijuana, that's a cheap vacation, sings Frank Ocean. A trip around the world would probably be more informative and character-building than staying at home and using chemical means to explore different (no longer exactly new) dimensions of my own mind, but in this economy? A return train ticket from London to Manchester costs £80; I bought ten tabs of LSD-25 for £70 the other day. I usually stick to locally sourced organically grown plant and fungal medicine to avoid the bad juju associated with dealers of other kinds of drugs, but I was jonesing for some acid so I asked my friend for his contact and the guy sent me a four-page menu of “Uppers”, “Smokers”, “Trips” and “Pharma”, the latter including Oxempic. The real question is: why isn’t everyone high all the time?

I dropped two tabs on Saturday at the All Points East festival held in London’s oldest public park, named after that most romantic of queens whose long shadow still darkens the once rosy parts of the map where the sun never used to set. Passing a Medecins Sans Frontières jeep, I suddenly saw the festival architecture (fences, gates, tents, toilet facilities, water and food distribution points) as not that different from the infrastructure of a refugee or prisoner-of-war camp. And I saw that I was no better than any of the prisoners begging for food or any of the soldiers turning a deaf ear to their pleas. I knew that I was spared their fate only by the absurd contingency of life that is at the same time the Grace of God. For once, I did not look for answers to Job. I asked myself why I was such an impure vessel for this Grace, such a faulty instrument of His peace.

Man-made famine, I thought with disgust as my fellow revellers gorged themselves on “life-changing 100% plant-based burgers” and dirty fries and pulled-pork sandwiches and loaded mac and cheese and Mexican tacos and Japanese rice bowls and falafel and tikka chicken masala and Afghan street food and doughnuts and churros and ice cream, washing it down with White Claw and Red Bull and tequila and beer. I felt not only sickened by my presence at this frivolous spectacle (if I’ve been questioning whether now is the time to launch a new Romantic literary movement, was now the time to get high and watch Jade from Little Mix sing Just a touch of your love is enough / To knock me off of my feet all week / Just a touch of your lo-ove / Just a touch of your lo-ove?) but nauseated by the whole obscene carnival of Western civilisation after Auschwitz, after Gaza.

This is our famine, I thought, and we can’t wash our hands of it. It was not inevitable, but Weil saw it all coming. What did she see, that literary critics like Harold Bloom, who dismissed her as a dour self-hating Jew, refused to see?

Back to the Garden

I’ve repeatedly made fun at the frequent insinuations in On Drugs that modernity tout court might have been a mistake, based on the deep truths you experienced first on drugs and then (spoiler alert!) in church. So let me level with you, mano a mano, that I grok³ the pull of the deep past. In my case, the pull doesn’t stop in Too Late Antiquity (or whatever we are now supposed to call the Middle Ages), it goes all the way back to pre-history. I’ve never gone hunting, but I have gone cruising in Walthamstow marshes, which I believe comes down to the same thing. I’ve long vibed with certain aspects of John Zerzan’s primitivism, Ivan Illich’s Christian anarchism and Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordian libertarianism. Nevertheless, I’m discomforted by the tendency among those of us who have learned to become aware of our breath and of our embodied being and of our inner child parts and ultimately of ourselves as loving awareness, to concomitantly become aware of how they control the banks and the media and how they are trying to poison us through insecticides and vaccines and 5G. This tendency is not inevitably, but it is common enough to have inspired a term-of-art and a whole podcast series: Conspirituality. Those worried about the neurotoxins in industrial chemicals should perhaps be more concerned about such mind-killing habits of mind. For reasons such as these, although I was permitted to name the Romanticon baby, like an old crone in a fairy tale, I have my reservations about the prophecies, as I have already emoted on Notes:

But to everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven, as The Byrds sang. The psychedelic Sixties offer a rich supply of Romantic anthems, like Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, which Camille Paglia chose to round of her selection of “forty-three of the world’s best poems” in Break, Blow, Burn:

This part of Paglia’s critique is especially à propos:

The song's treatment by a male supergroup automatically altered it. The four musicians, bellying up front and center, are buddies- the merry, nomadic "rock 'n' roll band" whom the lyric's young man yearns to join (6). But Mitchell's radical gender drama is missing. Presented in her voice, the lyric's protagonist is Everywoman. The wayfarers' chance encounter on the road to Woodstock is thus a reunion of Adam and Eve searching for Eden-the "garden" of the song's master metaphor (12). They long to recover their innocence, to restart human history. The song's utopian political project contains a call for reform of sexual relations. Following Walt Whitman or Jack Kerouac, the modern woman writer takes to the road, as cloistered Emily Dickinson could never do. She and her casual companion are peers on life's journey. Free love —"hooking up" in sixties slang — exalts spontaneity over the coercion of contract.

The rambler is "a child of God," like Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, because he desires salvation-but not through organized religion (I). He has shed his old identity and abandoned family, friends, property, and career. Like her, he is a refugee. Indifferent to his social status, she honors him in the moment. And she asks no favors or deference as a woman. Her question-"where are you going"-implies, Where is this generation headed (3)? Is it progressing, or drifting? Does it aim to achieve, or merely to experience? And if the latter, how can raw sensation be bequeathed to posterity without the framing of intellect or art?

Too on the nose?

Down the Rabbit Hole

Despite attempts by the Flower Children to sex it up a little, the image of The Garden in the collective unconscious of the WEIRD⁴ community remains suspiciously Victorian. I don’t want to insinuate foul play, but I find it hard to believe that the knobheads at MK Ultra came up with the idea of a psychological operation. Even conspiracy theories can be enlightening if taken in homeopathic doses. The loving organs of the state were indeed keen to add psychedelics to their arsenal of advanced interrogation and mind-control techniques. But, seeing like a state, the results were disappointing: it is not the most efficient way to extract the code for disarming a ticking time bomb to have the subject undergoing advanced interrogation relive his own birth and come to the realisation that the real reason he joined Al-Qaeda was to make Daddy proud. Likewise, I don’t believe MZ-Ultra created sissy hypo, but I’m sure some goons on the federal payroll are looking into it.

The V&A Museum’s 2022 exhibition on the cultural legacies of Alice in Wonderland featured the following anti-drug film that apparently was soon pulled because it only made kids more curious about drugs:

As a keepsake, I bought a print of Dali’s rendition of the famous white rabbit:

My Gen Z boyfriend hates it.

Through the Looking-Glass Darkly

Thanks to Huxley, the visions of William Blake have become synonymous with the psychedelic experience. But as with most of the observations in The Doors of Perception (1954) and its sequal Heaven and Hell (1956), the association with Blake was merely stating the obvious. Here is that famous line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) and the line that follows:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’narrow chinks of his cavern.

In trying to make sense of his experiences on mescaline, Huxley approvingly quotes the “reducing valve” theory of the brain from “the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr C. D. Broad”:

The suggestion is that the function of the brain nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and is perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

The parapsychological researcher Robert Sheldrake, whose son, Merlin, wrote a fascinating book called Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, believes that consciousness is not something that arises in the brain, but something that the brain picks up, like an antenna. Respectable psychedelic scientists have claimed that these substances deactivate something called the default mode network, muting our usual sense of self and allowing us to experience brain activities of which we are normally unaware. Have we made much progress in understanding these experiences, or are we simply using more scientific-sounding images to describe the ineffable?

I would, however, stop short of the position that many distinguished humanists in our own time like to flirt with, that science is nothing but a set of images, needlessly complicated with numbers and graphs by those incapable of appreciating the deeper meaning of a poem. The good name of the material sciences have been dragged through the mud through association with those purported sciences of the mind (sociology, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, psychopharmacology) which have all turned out to me much less enlightening than their proponents would like to believe. Despite his self-mythologising, J. Robert Oppenheimer did not flatten Hiroshima directly with his mind: there were bits of matter involved in-between, some of them attached to human beings. If panpsychism was straightforwardly true, I see no reason why these bits of matter would be such good little Calvinists obstinately refusing to disobey the laws of nature (as opposed to the so-called natural law formulated by the Angelic Doctor), no matter how groovy it is to be insane. Reading On Drugs made me realise that despite my distrust of Descartian rationalism, I find it harder to dismiss mind/matter dualism than I used to. I don’t think it is the whole picture, but it seems to somehow be part of the picture.

My favourite scientific sounding explanations for these uncanny experiences is to imagine one’s brainwaves on a spectrum akin to that of light. In a way similar to how the human eye can only perceive a narrow strip of lightwaves, the mind’s eye is usually only aware of a narrow band of the mind’s movements. Under the effect of drugs or hypnosis or holotropic breath work or meditation or starvation or lust or rage or religious ecstasy, one can experience parts of the self that one had never conceived could even be part of the self, including some parts that you might have had good reason to keep hidden (once seen, never unseen).

I asked ChatGPT for an illustration. Personally, I agree with Jung that the id extends all the way to hell.

Apocalypse Your Mind!

RETVRNING TO BLAKE, let’s consider the words preceding the famous line:

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

This will come to pass by a improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

It is revealed that the doors of perception are not cleared with a few squirts of Windolene, but with the fire of hell (which earthly eyes can easily mistake for celestial light). In this very Biblical vision, before the world can be revealed as infinite, it first has to burn. So too the soul. Jesus did not shy away from inflammatory language:

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. (Matthew 25:43-44)

The salutary and medicinal potential of infernal corrosives is mostly destructive: Shiva flattening the mind’s previous constructs to lay the ground for Brahman’s new creations. If psychedelics provide a form of chemotherapy for the mind, it is not like penicillin targeting a malignant foreign body, but like the other kind, which feels wrong to use as a causal metaphor after reading Cameron’s Steele’s moving essay about the unmetaphorical experience of cancer. Nevertheless, the analogy is suggestive: if we dissolve all the corruption in our minds, how much of our minds will we have left?

I’ll get to my reservations about Emma Collin’s beautiful essay “The Incarnationals”, but I wanted first to echo this sentiment (feel free to replace “anti-Internet” with “anti-capitalist”, “anti-fascist”, “anti-statist”, “anti-globalist” etc.):

any anti-internet movement of quality will necessitate beginning with grief. Something has been lost. That much is clear. We are not going to go backwards, much as the factories that replaced pastoral fields in the early 19th century — which William Blake called “Satanic mills” — were not going to disappear overnight. We have to mourn what we have lost. Those who are uncomfortable with grief will oppose this.

But I fear we (figuring out who that second person pronoun refers to is part of the problem) can’t handle this grief, because we are asking younger generations to grieve not only a past that they have never experienced but also what should have been their future, which appears to have been cancelled due to a lack of human interest. We all seem so exhausted from having to deal with the moral complexity of history. Since the economies of advanced nations increasingly depend on generating sufficient quantities of bullshit email jobs to provide a functionally illiterate imbecile with enough tokens to pay an OnlyFans model to do the emotional labour of telling him that he is not a worthless sack of shit, it is easy to see the efficiency argument for eliminating the gooner in the middle. It might also be more dignified for all involved, especially if we throw in five free tabs of acid with every Queitus purchased, so that the love-starved functionally illiterate imbecile at least gets one shot at experiencing unio mystica before he voluntarily expires.

Next time

Although I’m not that old (if you think ego death is a self-shattering experience, try twink death), I feel part of the older guard who associates psychedelics with Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S Thompson rather than with Gwyneth Paltrow and Gabor Maté. So to understand what the use of these substances tells us about what it means to be here now, I’ll return to the belly of the beast to reveal more about my experiences with psychedelic therapy culture, if you’d forgive some further mythopoetic digressions from what you actually wrote in On Drugs.

With(out) regret,

Mary Jane Eyre

1. Personally I associate mind-melting less with LSD than with drugs like MDMA, poppers and quaaludes. Whatever happened to quaaludes? I know only the name from vintage gay erotica. What an excellent name for a drug, though: Hey dude, wanna drop some quaaludes?

2. I actually think generational trends are, in the words of Philip Traylen, a “dog-brained nonconcept”, but since Gen Z is still young and beautiful, I consider this to be punching up.

3. The evolving associations with this word, from Heinlein to hippies to hackers to hentai, must surely be symbolic of something.

4. Most of the letters are kept for legacy reasons only.