Challenge: spot the single thematic thread running through these two videos.
By the way, that ant fungus is 100% creepy, man…
Tag: psychedelic
REVIEW: PIHKAL: A CHEMICAL LOVE STORY
Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story by Alexander Shulgin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sometimes you read some books you think everybody should read, if only just so that they can correct their misconceptions on certain things.
Alexander Shulgin was a researcher of psychotropics which he had been inventing in his laboratories and testing on himself for almost half a century. Actually, no; merely calling him that would be like describing J.S. Bach simply as a Baroque musician. If it wasn’t for him, a great many psychoactive compounds, including MDMA, the tremendous potential for psychotherapeutic use of which it was also he who discovered, would have never seen the light of day; people wouldn’t have enjoyed them and found insight in their use… The field as a whole would be much poorer.
In fact, given the prolonged forbidding legal status of the production, distribution and even use for the majority of known psychedelics since the ’60s, without Shulgin there would have hence been next to no research at all in this field of human knowledge and experience we are repeatedly and stubbornly denying ourselves from. He was one of the most important beacons of reason, curiosity and tenderness on this topic, and that is why I wanted to get my hands on PiKHaL: anything written by Sasha is required reading on this subject.
Since it’s a big book and it’s expensive and difficult to get it even used, I tracked it down on .pdf soon after I got my Kindle, which makes it easier to enjoy hard-to-find works like this on digital format. The day after I started reading it, there was news that Shulgin had passed away – at the age of 88 and after inventing and trying hundreds of successful and not-so-successful “drugs”, no less.
Shulgin in this book told his life’s story and how he got interested in the things that made him famous (it has to do with the placebo effect and the power of the mind); how he met his wife, who co-authored this work with him; he described his little psychedelic sessions with friends in a very affectionate and effective way.
In their remote but blessed corner of the universe they tread new ground and wrote all about it. It was epic.
Read this and come back to me mumbling something about wanting to keep it natural and chemicals-free. I dare you.
I’m perfectly aware that I might be getting on your nerves with these Kindle shots. The first two should be easy enough to read if you want to get a feel of what it was like reading these highlight-worthy quotes. But in this last bit the font is too small, and I admit it’s probably way too much effort reading text from those .jpgs. They serve as aesthetic enhancements of the review. Or I could just call them my reviews’ seasonings, like they have in restaurants on every table: complete with salt, pepper, oil, chili perhaps, here in Bulgaria garlic sauce… Optional, but there for you if you’re feeling like it.
I’ll sign off this review with a transcript of the picture above, because I know that sometimes food is best eaten pure.
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Shulgin)
– Your Highlight on page 208 | location 3183-3185 | Added on Wednesday, 11 June 2014 14:20:42I looked up at him and smiled, showing all my teeth, “I learned long ago that the most dangerous opponent is the one who tells you he hasn’t been near the game in years. He’s the one who’ll wipe the board with you, while apologizing for being so terribly rusty.”
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PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Shulgin)
– Your Highlight on page 215 | location 3294-3297 | Added on Wednesday, 11 June 2014 14:34:12“You told me that you invent new psychedelics and that you have a group of people who try them out after you’ve made sure they’re safe and ,/ He interrupted, “Not safe. There is no such thing as safety. Not with drugs and not with anything else. You can only presume relative safety. Too much of anything is unsafe. Too much food, too much drink, too much aspirin, too much anything you can name, is likely to be unsafe.”
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PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Shulgin)
– Your Highlight on page 219 | location 3349-3351 | Added on Wednesday, 11 June 2014 14:39:51“Of course, there are many ways to alter your consciousness and your perceptions; there always have been, and new ways will keep being developed. Drugs are only one way, but I feel they’re the way that brings about the changes most rapidly, and – in some ways – most dependably. Which makes them very valuable when the person using them knows what he’s doing.”
And… sorry, I just couldn’t hold myself. Quotes really do a better job at reviewing themselves than I ever could.
PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Shulgin)
– Your Highlight on page 176 | location 2690-2698 | Added on Sunday, 8 June 2014 04:37:06Sam said, “I don’t know if you realize this, but there are some researchers – doctors – who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they’re doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they’re surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They’ve never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers – they’re called ‘subjects,’ of course – are given mescaline or LSD and they’re all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people’s emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterwards that they’ll never do it again.” “Jesus! Right now, after what I’ve just gone through, that sounds worse than awful.” “Not all of the research is being done that way, thank God, but too much of it is.” “What a shame,” I said, saddened by the picture, “What a shame!”
Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
You ask me what I think. Think. Neurons flashing up, millions, billions, zeros, on an array of pixels my primitive mind is not fully equipped to understand. The bright lights! “Yes! Follow them”, and they did just that, his super-ergo, his ego, the animus, the shadow self and all of the other assorted invisible, conscious, subconscious, unconscious and extended entities, tied together by the zeitgeist of the universal… Now. Nobody was better fit to understand it but him -or is that them– in that room, with that assortment of pages and memories and experiences and images, in that city that they in the South – but it wasn’t just the South – had no idea about, but who does really? And the assortment of pages, which we borrowed from the city library in Sofia, that city known for the cold but living the heat, “great day today, record highs!“- it took some time, some bits of now, of one-ness and possibilities and pages and memories and experiences and all of that, to decode and understand. But how much of it stuck? Does it even matter? And it’s not like I haven’t dipped my toes in this stuff, mind you. Beginning to understand and creating the dots on the screen this 01010010010100010 111011101010101010 in vast, immense, unfathomable bzzzzzzzz, only harnessed by the computer, the ultimate being, the judge, the jury, the executioner, the Wikileaks activist, the troll and the Spyder – it’s a superbeing unleashed by the lowly beings, that’s it. The Computer -it has to be with a capital C now, don’t you see?- will take my decoded neural flashes and make them into this text that, if people watch carefully, will see that it’s not more than it is. Which part exactly? Hah! So many interesting questions. Tell me more about how much you want to learn about the world.
This was my subjective experience of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and beginning to write a review for it. What? You didn’t get it? Tsk. First of all: I didn’t ask you for your opinion, and much less did I write it to suit your needs; what part of “self-expression” do you find so difficult to understand? Figures: you’re one of those square types that can’t appreciate a description of an indescribable experience for what it is, aren’t you? For chrissakes, why do you have to push meaning into everything? Look how much good your meaning has done us!
OK, enough with this. Because I do value meaning, I’ll stop here. I hope, however, that this was enough for you to get the picture. You see, Tom Wolfe did something remarkable, though quite representative of his time (that’s 1968 we’re talking about here): he tried to document and tell a story without caring too much about whether the readers would understand it or whether it would make sense at all, but insisting on a specific style to prove a point. The magic of what really happened, which we’ll get to in a second, apparently gave him the impression that having his story mirror what its main actors must have experienced while actually living it, would make for a breath-taking read…
…no-no-no. Let’s put it this way. Suppose the people you wanted to document the life of, their life as seen through their eyes, were tripping on LSD for most of the duration. Bad idea, right? Well, let’s just say that this is the book that had to be written for people to learn why it’s not a good idea.
Actually, the story itself that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sets out to tell is super-interesting: it’s the documentation of the events that made LSD hit the mainstream, the story of the Merry Pranksters, the absolutely bonkers mix of gang, pilgrims, troupe, nomad tribe and religion led by Ken Kesey and how they took over the US underground in the ’60s. Obnoxious and inspiring in equal measure -okay, maybe slightly more obnoxious- they travelled all over the US in that painted old school bus that turned magic and ended up becoming a symbol of their later activity, the Acid Test parties, underground events that in their own right founded a big part of what we understand today as the recreational drug, clubbing and hippie scenes.
Reading about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the crazy things they did filled me with wonder and amazement: so that’s what happened; that’s what living in those times and following this ground-breaking movement must have felt like, being an acid-head cyberpunk 20 year before anyone had even thought of the word. They thought then, whenever they weren’t “zonked out” of their brains, that they would change the world, only they didn’t, and maybe you can understand why -and where things might have gone different- by reading this story.
It’s not Tom Wolfe’s “subjective” style that gives this effect, though. Reading something that felt like it was written while everyone involved was tripping did not make me have a clearer picture of what really took place. On the contrary: the segments of the book more akin to real journalism, the parts where Wolfe decided he could give us readers a break, were the most interesting by far for me to read. However, I can see what he was trying to do: using this kind of language he only wanted to convey the indescribable that is the altered state, the psychedelic experience. Back then it must have felt like a revolution to put it in this way, the culmination of a million different things guiding your hand and voicing the feelings and memories of an entire generation (it says so in the description of the book anyway: “They say if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”) But now, one or two generations later, it all comes across as rather bad writing. He might as well have invented a new language to try to describe the inexplicable, the “you must live it!” factor. Maybe the new language would have been easier to read through, even.
This is a significant book documenting important and interesting events that distill the countercultural mythology, don’t get me wrong. If you’d like to get a feeling of the psychedelic indescribable by reading it, though, maybe it would be a better idea to watch a recently released cut of The Movie known as Magic Trip – the 16mm film Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters shot during their journeys with Further. I know I will.
Book borrowed from the American Corner of Sofia City Library
Review: The Joyous Cosmology
The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Wilson Watts
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Seldom before have I read 30 pages of printed .pdf so tightly packed with meaning. A lot of it was profound, written in a time when psychedelic substances were a new unexplored area of the human experience. Research was being done on their medical and other properties (with Watts being sceptical about whether the proper environment for relative experimentation really was research laboratories and clinics). It was an innocent time, before the powers that be had really found out about what a gaping hole into their walls of modern vices their initial allowance of the use of LSD and mushrooms had blown.
“The active and the passive are two phases of the same act. A seed, floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch it by one hair between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this little creature actually wriggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get away. Common sense tells me that it is the “intelligence” of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions, it moves itself with the wind. When it comes to it, is there any basic difference between putting up a sail and pulling an oar? If anything, the former is a more intelligent use of effort than the latter. True, the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind, but neither did I intendo to have arms and legs.”
Descriptions of powerful and deep insights only possible during a psychedelic trip are what the meat and potatoes of The Joyous Cosmology is. It’s a journey with the aid of these substances to planes of thought and existence impossible before to reach, far away from the egoistic mind and squarely in the consciousness behind the thinking mind. It’s a story of a temporarily selfless being experiencing the world.
It’s very hard to describe actually. I’m not at all sure if anything from this book stuck with me for good, but I’m not even sure if it’s supposed to, in the same way that powerful psychedelic trips are fleeting and strong cosmological realisations during them feel like dreams after the trip is over. Tim Leary warns in the foreword that this is a difficult book. Perhaps a couple of powerful entheogenic experiences are indeed the correct required “reading” for tackling it. The fact that the substances needed for having these experiences are almost ubiquitously illegal says much more about the laws, the lawmakers behind them and their intentions, than it does about the substances themselves.