Neo-symbolic Communication of Experience
By Timothy Leary, 1966
A note for the modern reader: The Castalia Foundation advises the modern reader that the following article, from 1966, is deeply abstract. It begins coherently, but soon descends into madness. This is by design: In the article, Tim Leary is using a technique ('developed' by some authors of his time) in which random parts of existing narrative storytelling are cut-up and reorganized. The technique has not aged well.
While the following article functions as an artistic curiosity, we feel that — especially in our era — more coherence is needed in writing; not less. The modern reader need only switch on the television news to be subjected to a cut-up mess of images and ideas superimposed to create a bewildering-nonsense, which is then presented as 'information'. For this reason, we advise you to proceed at your own risk. There are plenty of other more interesting articles to read in our archive. For example, here is a nice one about peyote.
Science is the description of the behavior of external processes; movements in space-time. Everyone is a scientist — amateur or professional — when he communicates about external events. The reporter, the gossip, the cop on the corner who gives you directions are, like the nuclear physicist, describing what's happening, out there, when and where.
"Dear, where is my red sweater?"
"It's in the second drawer of the bureau in the guest room." Located in space-time.
The philosophy of science spells out the rules for defining good and bad science and all of us — amateur or professional — would benefit from a more explicit understanding of the rules of external descriptions.
Art is the description of experience; internal reactions; the state of one's consciousness. Everyone is an artist — amateur or professional — when he communicates about his experiences.
"How are you?"
"I feel lousy."
The description of an inner state. A cliche, ineffective description. Bad art, but art. The purpose of science is to locate movements in space-time and to describe them to others. The purpose of art is to describe experience to others, to 'turn on' others, to produce the experience in others.
Our current vocabulary of experience leaves everything to be desired. The subject-predicate, cause-and-effect, linear nature of Indo-European languages is adequate for describing only a narrow, macroscopic, symbolic fragment of external and internal happenings.
The physical and biological sciences have had to develop multi-dimensional-flow languages to describe external energy processes. These scientific languages work because they go beyond the verbal mind to follow the data. An experiential language which aims at communicating experiences beyond the lifeless-static-symbolic must imitate the physical sciences and develop multiplicity-simultaneity-flow. It must break out of the grammatical strait jacket. It is convenient to consider four broad classes of experience. Four levels of consciousness:
- Awareness in terms of conventional symbols; awareness of the game.
- Awareness in terms of new combinations of symbols; the dream, the fantasy.
- Awareness of direct energy as it hits the nervous system; no symbolic or game perceptions; raw sensed mosaics.
- Awareness in which symbolic forms are imposed on patterns of direct energy; hallucinations.
Art has been defined as the communication of experience.
It is useful, therefore, to consider four broad classes of art which are used to communicate the four types of awareness. The Four Fine Arts:
- Communication in terms of symbols which are connected in conventional game relationships. This is reproductive art. Descriptive prose: "Willy Mays ran to second base." Familiar game symbols hooked up according to the accepted rules.
- Neo-symbolic Art. Communication using symbols but in new combinations which shatter the conventional game expect. ations (grammatical, visual, temporal). "Second base to swam Willy Mays."
- Tranart. Communication which bypasses symbols and uses direct energy to 'turn on' the receiver of the message. Here the symbolic mind of the artist is not active. The artist is an energy transformer and his artistic instruments are energy transforming machines, projectors, polarizing and diffracting lenses, sound recorders and transformers.
- Hallucinatory Art. Communication in which symbols are imposed on sensations of direct energy in an idiosyncratic way.
The artist takes a psychedelic drug. He "goes-out-of-his-mind into a kaleidoscopic flow of direct energy — swirling patterns of capillary-coiling. He then tries to interpret this raw energy. He 'sees' multi-colored snakes. He communicates this vision. In
order to communicate his hallucination he must have access to energy-transforming machines which duplicate the capillary flow and he must then have some means of imposing the perceived form on the direct-energy flow.
Hallucinatory art is multiple-exposure art. A highly complicated form of communication. A detailed survey of the types of experience, the four classes-of art and illustrations of the Four Fine Arts forms is presented in a book, Static and Ecstatic Dimensions of Consciousness and Their Communication (to be published by University Books).
This essay presents an example of the Second Fine Art, Neo-Symbolic Communication. The illustration combines familiar symbols, words, in new references. The particular method used here has been used by poets for centuries. It was developed to a unique art-form by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and by two psychedelic poets, William Burroughs and Byron Gysin.
It is called by Burroughs and Gysin "the cut-up."
The redundant sequence of subject-predicate grammar and expected game connections is sliced up and recombined. Experience, we recall, doesn't come in linear sentences. Only the hopeless pedant experiences in terms of subject-predicate prose. Experience must be communicated the way it is registered in the nervous system. Multiple and simultaneous.
The cut-up, as a magic-invoking-visionary-turn-on, has been used for centuries by artists in many media. The Egyptian Sphinx, for example, is an ancient and classically moving 'cut-up.' This giant woman-animal sitting silently in the desert eloquently wrenches us away from our tribal game thoughts and hurtles us hauntingly, eerily, back to evolutionary memories.
The cut-up which follows is a description of a psilocybin experience which occurred, once upon a time, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Several sources of verbal symbols were used to paint this experiential portrait. Each verbal source becomes a paint pot with which the overall design is sketched.
The six sources of the words used are: a newspaper account published in the London Sunday Telegram (March 12, 1961) written by Arthur Koestler and titled Return Trip to Nirvana, a description of a mystic experience by Arthur Koestler, taken from The Invisible Writing, New York, Macmillan Co. (1954); parts of the first and last chapters of The Lotus and the Robot by Arthur Koestler, New York, Macmillan Co., 1961; from the short story Without and Within by Herman Hesse, in Great Short Stories by Nobel Prize Winners, Noonday Press, New York, 1959.
A few weeks ago I received a letter from a friend, an American psychiatrist working at Harvard University:
Things are happening here which I think will interest you. The big, new hot issue these days in many American circles is drugs. We believe that the synthetics of the cactus peyote (mescalin) and the mushroom (psilocybin) offer possibilities for expanding consciousness, changing perceptions, removing abstractions.
We are offering the experience to distinguished creative people. Artists, poets, writers, scholars. We've learned a tremendous amount by listening to them.
If you are interested I'll send some mushrooms over to you . I'd like to hear about your reaction.
Shortly afterwards, I had to go to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I had been invited there for quite different reasons, but on the first morning of my stay the subject of the magic mushroom cropped up.
Drugs on Brain
This, however, was not much of a coincidence as at the present moment a surprising number of Americans from Brass to Beat, seem to have, for different reasons, drugs on the brain; the Brass because they are worried about brainwashing and space-flight training; the Beat because drugs provide a rocket-powered escape from reality; the Organization. Men because tranquilizers are more effective then the homely aspirins and fruit-salts of yore; and the spiritually frustrated on all levels of society because drugs promise a kind of do-it-yourself approach to Salvation.
The psychiatrist in charge of the mushroom was an Englishman of the quiet, gentle and un-American kind. Based on his own experiences and on experiments with 10 test-subjects, he ventured the cautious and tentative opinion that compared with the fashionable wonder-drugs, mescalin and lysergic acid, the effect of the mushroom was relatively harmless and entirely on the pleasant, euphoric side.
It is well known that the mental attitude, the mood in which one enters the gates of mushroomland, plays a decisive part in determining the nature of the experience. Since Dr. P. was such a pleasant person and the atmosphere of Ann Arbor appealed to me, I volunteered as a guinea pig, though I felt a little guilty towards my enthusiastic friend in Harvard.
However, on the day before I took the drug, I had a very unpleasant experience — with the result that I faced the mushrooms in an anxious and depressed state.
They come synthesized, in the shape of little pink pills. I swallowed nine of them (18mg of psilocybin), which is a fair-sized dose for a person of my weight. They were supposed to start acting after 30 minutes.
However, for nearly an hour nothing at all happened. I was chatting with Dr. P. and one of his assistants, first in his office, then in a room which had a comfortable couch in it and a tape recorder; after a while I was left alone in the room, but Dr. P. looked in from time to time. I lay down on the couch, and soon began to experience the kind of phenomena which have been repeatedly described by people who experimented with mescalin.
When I closed my eyes I saw luminous, moving patterns of great beauty, which was highly enjoyable; then the patterns changed into planaria — a kind of flatworm which I had watched under the microscope the previous day in a laboratory; but the worms had a tendency to change into dragons, which was less enjoyable, so I walked out of the show by opening my eyes.
I tried it again, directing the beam of the table-lamp, which had a strong bulb, straight at my closed eyelids, and the effect was quite spectacular—rather like the explosive paintings of schizophrenics, or Walt Disney's Fantasia.
A flaming eddy, the funnel of a tornado, appeared over my head, drawing me upward; with a little auto-suggestion and self-dramatisation I could have called it a vision of myself as the prophet Elijah being taken to Heaven by a whirlwind. But I felt that this was buying one's visions on the cheap ("Carter's mushrooms are the best; mystic experience guaranteed or money refunded"); so I again walked out of the show by forcing my eyes to open. It was as simple as that, and I congratulated myself on my sober self-control, a rational mind not to be fooled by little pills.
Different Look
By now, however, even with open eyes, the room looked different. The colors had become not only more luminous and brilliant, but different in quality from any color previously seen; they were located outside the normally visible spectrum, and to refer to them one would have to invent new words — so I shall say that the walls were breen, the curtain darsh, and the sky outside emerdine. Also, one of the walls had acquired a concave bend like the inside of a barrel, the plaster statue of the Venus of Milo had acquired a grin, and the straight dado-line was pleasantly curved, which struck me as an exceedingly clever joke.
But all this was quite unlike the wobbling world of drunkenness, for the room was plunged into an underwater silence, where the faint hum of the tape recorder became obtrusively loud, and the almost imperceptible undulations of the curtains became the Ballet of the Flowing Folds (the undulations were caused by the warm air ascending from the central-heating body).
A narrow strip of the revolving spool of the tape recorder caught the gleam of the lamp every few seconds; and this faint, intermittent spark, unnoticed before, observed out of the corner of the eye on the visual periphery, became the revolving beam of a miniature lighthouse.
This lowering of the sensory threshold and simultaneous heightening of the intensity and emotional significance of perceptions, is one of the basic phenomena of the mushroom universe. The intermittent light-signal from the slowly revolving spool became important, meaningful and mysterious; it had some secret message. Afterwards I remembered, with sympathetic understanding, the fantasies of paranoiacs about hidden electric machines and other contraptions planted by their enemies to produce evil Rays and Influences.
Sudden Effect
The signaling tape recorder was the first symptom of a chemically-induced state of insanity. The full effect came on with insidious smoothness and suddenness. Dr. P. came into the room, and a minute or two later I saw the light and realised what a fool I had been to let myself be trapped by his cunning machinations. For during that minute or two he had undergone an unbelievable transformation.
It started with the color of his face, which had become a sickly yellow. He stood in a corner of the room with his back to the green wall, and as I stared at him his face split into two, like a cell dividing, then reunited again, but by this time the transformation was complete.
A small scar on the doctor's neck which I had not noticed before, was gaping wide, trying to ingest the flesh of the chin; one ear had shrunk, the other had grown by several inches; the face became a smirking, evil phantasm. Then it changed again, into a different kind of Hogarthian vision, and these transformations went on for what I imagined to be several minutes.
All this time the doctor's body remained unchanged; the hallucinations were confined to the space from the neck upward; and they were strangely two-dimensional, like faces cut out of cardboard. The phenomenon was always strongest in that corner of the room where it had first occurred, and faded into less offensive distorting-mirror effects when we moved elsewhere, although the lighting of the room was uniform.
The same happened when other members of the staff joined us later. One of them, the jovial Dr. F., was transformed into a vision so terrifying a Mongol — with a broken neck hanging from an invisible gallows — that I thought I was going to be sick; yet I could not stop myself staring at him. In the end I said: "For God's sake let's snap out of it," and we moved into another part of die room, where the effect became weaker.
As the last remark indicates I was still in control of my outward behavior, and this remained true throughout the whole three or four hours of the experience. But at the same time I had completely lost control over my perception of the world. I made repeated efforts "to walk out of the show" as I had been able to do during the first stages on the couch, but I was powerless against the delusions.
I kept repeating to myself: "But these are nice, friendly people, they are your friends," and so on. It had no effect whatsoever on the spontaneous and inexorable visual transformations. I have mentioned before that all of Dr. P.'s previous subjects has positive euphoric experiences; 1 "broke the series," as he ruefully remarked over post-mortem drinks.
I had met the mushroom in the wrong state of mind, owing to that incident on the previous day, which had awakened memories of past experiences as a political prisoner, and of past preoccupations with brain-washing, torture and the extraction of confessions. The phantom faces were obvious projections of a deep-seated resentment against being "trapped" in a situation which carried symbolic echoes of the relation between prisoner and inquisitor, of Gestapo and Jew.
Wrong Kind
Poor Dr. P. and his nice colleagues had to endure what they would call a "negative transference," and serve as projection screens for the lantern slides of the past, stored in the mental underground. Thus I was a rather unfortunate choice for a guinea pig — except perhaps to demonstrate what mushroomland can do to the wrong kind of guinea pig; and I suspect that a sizable minority of people who try for a chemical lift to Heaven, will find themselves landed in the other place.
I do not want to exaggerate the small risks involved in properly supervised experiments for legitimate research purposes; and I also believe that every clinical psychiatrist could derive immense benefits from a few experiments in chemically-induced, temporary psychosis, enabling them to see life through their patients' eyes. But I disagree with the enthusiasts' belief that mescalin or psilocybin, even when taken under the most favourable conditions, will provide artists, writers or aspiring mystics with new insights, or revelations of a transcendental nature.
I profoundly admire Aldous Huxley, both for his philosophy and uncompromising sincerity. But I disagree with his belief that drugs can procure "what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace." Chemically-induced raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
No Merit
Some of the reports in the file, written after the experience, are in a more sober vein, but not a single item contains anything of artistic merit or of theoretical value; and the drug-induced productions were all far beneath the writer's normal standards (Huxley's report was not in the file).
I think I understood the reason for this when I took the mushroom the second time, under more happy and relaxed conditions. This was in the apartment of my Harvard friend; there were six of us in a convivial atmosphere. We all took various amounts of the pill, and this time I took a little more (either 22 or 24 mg for I lost count).
Again there were delusions: the room expanded and contracted in the most extraordinary manner, like an accordion played slowly, but the faces around me changed only slightly and in a pleasant way, becoming more beautiful. Then came the Moment of Truth: a piece of chamber music played on a tape recorder. I had never heard music played like that before, I suddenly understood the very essence of music, the secret of its magic.
Unfortunately, I was unable to tell the next day whether it had been a quartet or a quintet or a trio, and whether by Mendelssohn or Bach. I may just as well have listened to Liberace. It had nothing to do with genuine appreciation of music; my soul was steeped in cosmic schmalz.
I sobered up, though, when a fellow mushroom-eater — an American writer whom otherwise I rather liked — began to declaim about Cosmic Awareness; Expanding Consciousness; Zen Enlightenment, and so forth.
This struck me as obscene, more so than four-letter words. This pressure-cooker mysticism seemed the ultimate profanation. But my exaggerated reaction was no doubt also mushroom-conditioned, so I went to bed.
In Heaven and Hell, defending the mescalin ecstasy against the reproach of artificiality. Huxley, the most highly respected exponent of the cult, argues that:
"in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned"; and that the great mystics of the past also "worked systematically to modify their body chemistry... starving themselves into low blood sugar and a vitamin deficiency... They sang interminable psalms, thus increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the lungs and the blood-stream, or, if they were Orientals, they did breathing exercises to accomplish the same purpose."
There is, of course, a certain amount of truth in this on a purely physiological level, but the conclusions which Huxley draws, and the advice he tenders to modern man in search of a soul, are all the more distressing:
"Knowing as he does...what are the chemical conditions of transcendental experience, the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists in pharmacology, in bio-chemistry, in physiology and neurology."
I would like to answer this with a parable. In the beloved Austrian mountains of my school days, it took us about five to six hours to climb a 7,000-foot peak. Today, many of them can be reached in a few minutes by cable-car or ski-lift, or even by motorcar. Yet you still see thousands of schoolboys, middle-aged couples and elderly men puffing and panting up the steep path, groaning under the load of their knapsacks.
When they arrive at the alpine refuge near the summit, streaming with sweat, they shout for their traditional reward — a glass of schnapps and a plate of hot pea-soup. And then they look at the view, and then there is only a man and a mountain and a sky.
My point is not the virtue of sweat and toil. My point is that, although the view is the same, their vision is different from those who arrive by motorcar.
CUT-UP SOURCE NO. 2:
The Invisible Writing
by Arthur Koestler
Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no 'I'. The 'I' had ceased to exist... When I say "the 'I' had ceased to exist", I refer to a concrete experience... The 'I' ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is this process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the 'oceanic' feeling, as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding.
CUT-UP SOURCE NO. 3:
The Lotus and the Robot
by Arthur Koestler
The sewers of Bombay had been opened by mistake, I was told, before the tide had come in. The damp heat, impregnated by their stench, invaded the air-conditioned cabin the moment the door of the Viscount was opened. As we descended the steps I had the sensation that a wet, smelly diaper was being wrapped around my head by some abominable joker. This was December; the previous day I had been slithering over the frozen snow in the mountains of Austria. (page 15)
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds; both India and Japan seem to be spiritually sicker, more estranged from a living faith than the West. They are at opposite ends of the Asiatic spectrum, whose center is occupied by the vastness of China, one of the world's oldest cultures; yet it proved less resistant against the impact of a materialistic ideology.
The nation which had held fast for two and a half millennia to the teaching of Confucius, Lao-Tse and the Buddha, succumbed to the atheistic doctrine formulated by the son of a German lawyer, and has become the most accomplished robot state this side of science fiction. To look to Asia for mystic enlightenment and spiritual guidance has become as much of an anachronism as to think of America as the Wild West. (page 276)
...I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes and came back rather proud of being a European. It may be a somewhat parochial pride, but it is not smug, for, as a Hungarian-born, French-loving, English writer with some experience of prisons and concentration camps, one cannot help being aware of Europe's past sins and present deadly peril. And yet a detached comparison with other continents of the way Europe stood up to its past trials, and of its contribution to man's history, leaves one with a new confidence and affection for that small figure riding on the back of the Asian bull (page 285).
CUT-UP SOURCE NO. 4:
Within and without
By Hermann Hesse
There was once a man by the name of Frederick; he devoted himself to intellectual pursuits and had a wide range of knowledge. But all knowledge was not the same to him, nor was any thought as good as any other: he loved a certain kind of thinking, and disdained and abominated the others. What he loved and revered was logic — that so admirable method — and, in general, what he called "science."
"Twice two is four," he used to say. "This I believe; and man must do his thinking on the basis of this truth." He was not unaware, to be sure, that there were other sorts of thinking and knowledge; but they were
not "science," and he held a low opinion of them... everything he recognized as superstition was profoundly odious and repugnant to him. Alien, uncultured, and retarded people might occupy themselves with it: in remote antiquity there may have been mystical or magical thinking: but since the birth of science and logic there was no longer any sense in making use of these outmoded and dubious tools.
So he said and so he thought; and when traces of superstition came to his attention he became angry and felt as if he had been touched with something hostile.
One day Frederick went to the house of one of his friends with whom he had often studied. It so happened that he had not seen this friend for some time... During a pause in the laborious conversation Frederick looked about the studio he knew so well and saw, pinned loosely on the wall, a sheet of paper... He stood up and went to the wall to read the paper.
There, in Erwin's beautiful script, he read the words: "Nothing is without, nothing is within: for what is without is within." There it was! There he stood face to face with what he feared! What stood written here, as an avowal of his friend's concern at the moment, was mysticism! Erwin was unfaithful! (pages 254-5)
"This is the way," Erwin replied, and perhaps you have already taken the most difficult step. You have found by experience: the without can become the within. You have been beyond the pair of antitheses. It seemed hell to you; learn, it is heaven! For it is heaven that awaits you.
Behold, this is magic; to intercharge the without and the within, not by compulsion, not in anguish, as you have done it, but freely, voluntarily. Summon up the past, summon up the future: both are in you! Until today you have been the slave of the within. Learn to be its master. That is magic. (page 263)
CUT-UP SOURCE NO. 5:
Steppenwolf
by Herman Hesse
We joined him when he beckoned and in the doorway he said to me in a low voice: "Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For madmen only, and one price only—your mind. Are you ready?" Again I nodded.
The dear fellow gave us each an arm with kind solicitude, Hermine his right, me his left, and conducted us upstairs to a small round room that was lit from the ceiling with a bluish light and nearly empty.
Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No, I was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in a stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme.
Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it not my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a lost and frightened bird?
"My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long wished for and of which he has long dreamed. The hour is a little late and we are all slightly fatigued. So, first, we will rest and refresh ourselves a little."
From a recess in the wall he took three glasses and a quaint little bottle, also a small oriental box inlaid with differently colored woods. He filled the three glasses from the bottle and, taking three long thin yellow cigarettes from the box and a box of matches from the pocket of his silk jacket, he gave us a light. And now we all slowly smoked the cigarettes whose smoke was as thick as incense, leaning back in our chairs and slowly sipping the aromatic liquid whose strange taste was so utterly unfamiliar.
Its effect was immeasurably enlivening and delightful—as though one were filled with gas and had no longer any gravity. Thus we sat peacefully exhaling small puffs and taking little sips at our glasses, while every moment we felt ourselves growing lighter and more serene.
From far away came Pablo's warm voice. "It is a pleasure to me, dear Harry, to have the privilege of being your host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but The Second Fine Art 21
A TRIP INTO THE MIND OF ROBORT LOTUS
(The Assembled Cut-Up Portrait)
Once there was a man by the name of Robort Lotus who was painted within and without by Herman Hesse. Whether his manuscript needs any postductory remarks may be open to question. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages, in which I try to record my own recollections of him. What I know of him is little enough, yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.
Robort Lotus devoted himself to intellectual pursuits. He had given up the novel as a medium of teaching, and had a wide range of knowledge. But not all knowledge was the same to him.
Returning to his first profession he said that any thought was not as good as another. He preferred science and reporting. Science-reporting. He loved a certain hind of thinking, confessing to me that psychology was his first love, the 'ology' in which he felt he could make his greatest self-expression.
He was rewriting an earlier book on creative thinking (the mind) and disdained and abominated the mystical experience. Insight and outlook is what he called science once in a Franco prison.
In 1959 he used to say, "twice times two is four," and he finished his autobiography, Robort and the Lotus, not unaware, to be sure, that there were other sorts of thinking about a book which was to become quite relevant to the psychedelic controversy. (But they were not science.) He held a low opinion which explains much about the "set," which, although a free-thinker, he brought to his own psilocybin experiences. He congratulated himself on his rational mind.
He was not intolerant of religion, his paternal name, Lotus, being India, and his given name, Robort, founded on a tacit agreement among scientists Sober self-control was Japan.
Fooled by little pills for several centuries, Robort Lotus disliked what he saw in the east while his science embraced nearly everything that existed on earth. "Lies that fester smell far worse than weeds." That was worth knowing.
With the single exception of one single province he said that "both India and Japan seem to be spiritually sicker, the human soul more estranged, a sort of custom to congratulate myself on this religion from a living faith and to tolerate more speculations on the soul than the west."
Though without them seriously, Robort Lotus was a rational mind, tolerant long before Aldous Huxley found in yoga everything that Robort Lotus recognized as superstition. A remedy for our Brave New World. Without taking seriously what Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the consolation of his life was profoundly odious and repugant to him.
Alien, uncultured, and retarded people of the first generation of the Nuclear Age might occupy themselves with solace in Zen. In remote antiquity the west groaning under the weight of knapsacks and receptivity to the voice of mystical or magical thinking was limited to periods of spiritual emergency.
DRUGS ON THE BRAIN
But since the birth of science to moods of futility and despair there was no longer any sense in making use of such outmoded self-congratulation and dubious tools. So he said and so he thought.
SUDDEN EFFECT
He traveled in India and Japan (in 1958-59) when traces of superstition came to the mood of the pilgrith. He became angry like countless others before and felt that he had been touched. WRONG KIND. Whether the east had any answer to offer—something hostile to our perplexity and deadlocked problems — he was not to be fooled by little pills.
It angered Robort Lotus, striking the olfactory note. He found such traces among his own sort, which guided his reactions among educated men conversant with the culture of Asia.
DIFFERENT LOOK
The principles of scientific thinking. Sober self-control. Self. The sewers of Bombay had been opened by mistake and nothing was more painful and intolerable to him than the damp heat impregnated by the scandalous notion which lately by their stench invaded the air-conditioned cabin. He had sometimes heard expressed and discussed the moment the door of the Viscount was opened by men of great culture. NO MERIT. As we descended the steps that absurd idea that a wet, smelly diaper was scientific thinking around my head was possibly not a supreme, timeless, eternal, foreordained and unassailable mode of thought by some abominable joker.
The second half of the book, but one of many, was a transient way of thinking, permeated with the stink of Zen, not impervious to change and downfall which is not a rude expression. This irreverent, destructive, poisonous note a phrase often used in Zen literature. WRONG KIND.
Even Robort Lotus could not deny it and thus in a sense came back impoverished, cropping up here and there as a result of the distress throughout the world rather than enriched. NO MERIT. A rational mind. Like a warning, like a white hand's ghostly writing that his place was Europe. The more Robort Lotus suffered from looking at this tiny continent, puffing and panting up the steep path. This idea existed from the vastness of Asia and could so deeply distress him, while gaining a fresh impression the more passionately his compactness and coherence assailed it and those he secretly suspected of believing in it.
"I started my journey so far only a very few little pills among the truly educated in sackcloth and ashes." Challenging Aldous Huxley who had openly and frankly defended the cult. He came back rather proud, a rational mind professing belief in this doctrine. Of being a European. It may be parochial pride. AN ANSWER. A doctrine seemed destined, but it is not smug. Should it gain in circulation: DRUGS ON BRAIN. DIFFERENT LOOK. SUDDEN EFFECT. WRONG KIND. NO MERIT. AN ANSWER. Power for a Hungarian-born, French-loving, English writer to destroy all spiritual values on earth with some experience of prison and concentration camps to call forth chaos.
One cannot help being aware. Well, matters had not reached Europe's past sins that point yet of present deadly peril. The scattered individuals who openly embraced a detached comparison with other continents. The idea! NO MERIT. Of the way Europe stood up still so few in number that they could be considered oddities to its past trials and of its contribution to man s history. Sober self-control.
Peculiar fellows. But a drop of the poison leaves one with a new confidence. An emanation of that idea and affection for that small figure, Hungarian-born, could be perceived first on this side, then riding the back of the Asian bull.
Among the half-educated and the people R.L.'s portrait of himself (no end of new doctrines) could be a small figure compact and coherent. DRUGS ON THE BRAIN. Esoteric doctrines, sects, and discipleships sketched with accuracy. The world was full of the struggle of the European mind and the Asian bull. Everywhere one could scent the tormented search for verbal meaning. Superstition. Science. Mysticism. Franco prison. Science. Zionism. Spiritualistic cults. Communism. Insight and Outlook. Other mysterious forces. It was really necessary to combat? But to which science, as if from a private feeling of weakness to which a generation of postwar intellectuals owe their political liberation had for the present given free rein.
I first met Robort Lotus in London in 1959. Always haunted by what he calls monumental feelings he called up my aunt, Whittaker Chambers to inquire for a furnished room. Feelings of inferiority, he went one day to the house of one of his friends. He was, in fact, as he called himself a real wolf of the Steppes. Isplated from life by his categorizing mind it so happened tnat he had not seen the friend for some time. "Hello. Yogi/commissar! Arrival/departure!" Blanching he stood motionless for a moment. "Lotus/Robort! Promise/fulfillment!" There it was! There he stood face to face with what he feared! Endlessly dancing the old Aristoleian two-step. "Certainly!" he cried. "Of course I know it. Age of longing at the twilight bar. Its mysticism, its Gnosticism!"
You look at Robort Lotus and see the face of Europe's history. How deep the — into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny, and how consciously he accepted this — as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him. Rational mind. Congratulations. A new epistemology? Is there such a thing? In the haunting eyes and the furrowed face-skin. This is the way, Erwin replied. On this frail hinge swung the fate of a generation of thought. And perhaps you have already taken the most difficult step.
Oh rational mind of Europe! You have found by experience. Jewish. Hungarian. Austrian. French. German. English. All under one skull. The without can become the within. Great God! What does not stand classified as man or wolf he does not see at all. The noble arrogance of the self-assigned task!
Once you had been beyond the pair of antitheses. In Franco cell he was floating on his back in a river of peace under bridges of silence. It seemed hell to him. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Learn, my friend, it is heaven! There was no river and no I. For it is heaven that awaits you.
The I had ceased to exist. Behold this is magic. But now he puffs and pants up the steep path groaning under the load of mind. To interchange the without and the within, not by compulsion. In this way he was always recognizing and affirming with one-half of himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought and denied. His rational mind need not crouch ready to categorize and evaluate every new event, each new experience. Not in anguish, as he did it, but freely, voluntarily.
Your poor mind need not be the fulcrum upon which galaxies turn. Summon up the past. Your frail cortex need not support the weight of the universe, explaining, ordering, labeling, relating everything that occurs. Summon up the future. Both are in you. You need no longer judge the good and evil of each new flick of cosmic process. Until today you have been the slave of the within. Learn to be its master.
The heavy weight of monotheism.
Cruel doctrine of individual will. I believe in one God the creator of Heaven and Earth. One mind. One judicial authority to make a billion decisions each second that the planet turns. The billion-fold moral judgments. "You favor tolerance toward all religions and all political systems."What about Hitler's gas chambers?" The old Buddhist looks at the tense, alert European visitor and smiles. "When you ask these logical questions we feel embarrassed," said the Zen abbott.
The Aristotelian intellectual! Tell me, Maria, how can you have fondness for him, a tiresome old logican with no looks, who even has grey hair and doesn't play a saxophone and doesn't sing any English love songs, whose only security rests on his ability to rationalize each new experience? Most of that sort instinctively refuse to have anything to do with the psychedelic chemicals.
At times Maria, too, availed herself of Pablo's secret drugs and was forever procuring these delights for me also. A few adventurous or courageous intellectuals have made the psychedelic voyage and struggle throughout the session to impose their minds. Pablo was always most markedly on the alert to be of service to him. Once he said to Robort Lotus without more ado: You always try to keep the experience under mental control. That is bad. One shouldn't be like that. The mind is by definition anti-ecstasy.
Try a mild pipe of opium. The psychedelic session is the final test of rationality. We became friends and he took some of my specifics. The ordeal completed, he wrote his report explaining away what his rebellious cortex tried to do to the symmetry of his verbal mind. Once I gave him a drink from three little bottles, a mysterious and wonderful draught. And then when he had got into a very good humor we proposed to celebrate a love orgy. He declined abruptly.
When we started our research at Harvard we wrote to Robort Lotus telling him about the mystical experiences we were encountering and inviting him to participate in a love orgy. Brother Robort, I invite you to a little entertainment. For madmen only and the price only —your mind. Are you ready? An immediate 'reply.
Robort Lotus was coming to the United States and would like very much to come to Harvard and try the mushrooms.
A few days before his scheduled arrival a phone call came from New York. In somber tones Robort Lotus said that he had already taken psilocybin with a psychiatrist in the mid-west and had a hellish paranoid experience. For God's sake, let's snap out of it. He had no desire whatsoever to make the voyage again transformed into the claws of a predatory bird. Never. No thanks. Wrong kind. No merit. He made repeated efforts to walk out of the show. Drugs on the brain. He was powerless against the delusion.
Well, why not come up to Harvard anyway and look around and see what we were doing? Agreed. Robert Lotus was an object of interest and admiration at Harvard. The top scholars came to the center to pay homage. A list of appointments was quickly set up. It was quite a ball. A skinny Professor Burhus told him that Hindus must be conditioned to give up religion.
He felt in his waistcoat pocket — the number was no longer there! Miss Jerry Burner with her left hand praised him for the limpid ELASSER sparkling in the thick peasant glass. "I'd have loved to have danced with you again," he said, intoxicated by her warmth. (Later he worried that Jerry would steal his numbered ideas. The devil was in it if ever these failed him!) Waltzing masked around the Harvard Yard, watching Robort Lotus' charm and alert mind playing at the intellectual game.
From all ports a dancing girl flung herself into his arms. "Dance with me!" "I can't," he said, "I'm bound for hell." The second afternoon there was an hour free so we phoned over to the Massachusetts Mental Health Institute to see about arranging a dance with one of the world's top neurologists. Of all the surprises I had prepared for him this was to be the most violent. For, have no moment of doubt that it was I, who brought Robort Lotus to this bird of paradise who was delighted to be our host at his special table at the Ritz Bar.
"So far," he said, "I have control." That was fine. The schedule was: drinks at the Ritz, dinner at the Steel Helmet in Boston with the Frank Barrons and then an evening at the Magic Theater for Robort Lotus to observe a psilocybin session run under easy-going, supportive circumstances for madmen only.
To put on a good mushroom ritual we had wired up to Charles Olson, our father who art in Gloucester. The giant Olson, genial guru, father of modern poetry. Unfortunately it is a habit, a vice of his, always to speak his mind, as indeed Goethe did in his better moments.
A few years previous he had retired to a rocky promontory overlooking the harbor from whence he served as guide and friend to our work. Olson dominates any gathering with his size, his wit, his intellect, his noble stature, his wise animal energy. He was striving for redemption but it will take him all his time. He was the person, surely, to introduce Robort Lotus to the open-brain and its ecstatic possibilities.
On the way to the Ritz Robort Lotus told us of two dear friends of his, Moses and Jehovah, who had researched mescaline in Berlin during the twenties. Their psychedelic sessions kept opening up more and more realms of experience and revelation. Dr. Moses climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy wilderness of rocks, and Dr. Jehovah in the midst of storm and thunder and lightning imparting the Ten Commandments, while worthless friends set up the Golden Calf at the foot of the KURFURSTENDAMM. They tried to tell others about their discoveries but no one would listen, neither their colleagues nor their families.
Mighty Dr. Jehovah and Dr. Moses, with a dark and fiery eye and the stride of Wotan, finally got to a point where they could only communicate with each other. I saw them pray at the edge of the Red Sea. Together they had a rapport and high pitch of understanding in Handel's wonderful duet for two basses in which this event is magnificently sung.
To the rest of the world they were hopeless eccentrics. So strange and incredible to be looking on at all this. Robort Lotus' medical friend suddenly seeing sacred peyote writ, with it heroes and its wonders, the source in our childhood of the first dawning suspicion of another world than this, presented before a distasteful public that sat eating the provisions brought with it from home.
Finally the social pressure was too great and they cracked under the strain. A nice picture, indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of culture in these days. Jehovah went to Mexico where he died in short time.
Moses, with dark and fiery eye and a long staff and the stride of Wotan, went to Munich where he was treated by a monster of a psychiatrist who failed to understand him. My God, rather than come to such a pass it would have been better for the Jews and everyone else, let alone the Germans, to have perished in those days, forthwith of a violent and unbecoming death instead of this dismal pretense of dying inch by inch that we go in for today. Quitting treatment, the friend returned to Berlin and killed himself.
At the Ritz the neurologist was waiting at his special table. His secretary was with him and the waitress hovered by solicitously. "So far," he said "I have contented myself with turning the heads of ladies. But now your time has come. First, let's have a glass of champagne."
Robort Lotus made a quip about their mutual European background which the psychiatrist avoided. Robort Lotus' eyes, wolf of the Steppes, narrowed and mild dislike grew quickly to strong distaste. Couldn't stand a person who denies his racial past.
A long anatomical argument began. Like two teletype ma-
chines, the man, chattering neurology tapes, sank slowly down into a soggy whisky swamp of sullen generalization. The neurologist, pressed by Robort's finny logic and data, flopped through the undergrowth of swizzle sticks and olives. Poised on an island of
potato chips he denied there was such a thing as a mid-brain.
Robort Lotus surfaced to lob glances of resignation our way. "Keep quiet with your questions and chatter. I'm a professor of theology if you want to know. But the Lord be praised, there's no occasion for theology now, my boy. It's war. Come on." Then his face grew tense. "What did you say your name was?" he asked the
neurologist. Ah. "And did you ever by chance practice in Munich?" Ah. "Then did you ever have a patient by the name of Dr. Moses?" No.
He remembered no such patient. Moving in like a cross-examiner, Robort Lotus sketched in more details about his friend, about hi problems, his history, his appearance — dark and fiery eye — and a long staff and the stride of Wotan.
Slowly the neurologist remembered. "Oh yes, now that you remind me, I do seem to remember treating the case. I saw him pray to God at the edge of the Red Sea, and I saw the Red Sea parted to give free passage, a deep road between piled-up mountains of water. And by the way, do you have any idea what became of him?" Robort Lotus breathed heavily.
"No said the neurologist. "I saw him climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy wilderness of rocks. I was about to ask you if you knew of the outcome of the case. As a matter of fact he killed himself in Berlin the following year."
A sudden quiet settled down over the table. (The confirmation classes conducted by the clergy to see this religious film could argue without end as to how the film people managed this.) Neurologist puffed quickly at cigar and called the waitress over. A nice picture, indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of culture in these days.
Then the Barrons arrived, Frank poised and cheerful and his new wife, Nancy, radiant and bouncing. On and on went this nuptial dance. God knows where the girl got her voice; it was so deep and good and maternal. Obediently I shut my eyes, leant my head against the wall and heard the roar of a hundred mingled voices surge around me.
After another drink we moved to leave. Outside the air coming off the Boston Common was clear and fresh and we had all escaped from an especially grim mental hospital. Somewhere we heard a door bang, a glass break, a titter of laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of motor cars starting up. We felt close together after the ordeal and drove to the North End for seafood. "You're ready?"
Far up in unhuman space rang out that strange laugh. Robort Lotus, bubbling with spirit, ordered wines and made a gallant scene with Nancy.
When we arrived back at the house Charles Olson was in the kitchen leaning over talking to young Jack Leary, his back to us. We brought Robort Lotus up to Olson. The giant poet turned, looked down at the small figure of the novelist and beamed out of his jolly eyes that really were animal's eyes except that animal's eyes are always serious while his always laughed and turned into human eyes.
Olson was holding a pistol in his hand. Robort Lotus' eyes went up, up, up to look at Olson and then
dropped quickly to the pistol. He paled and pulled back. There he stood face to face with what he feared.
Olson roaring out genial greetings.
"Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For madmen only, and one price only: Your mind. Are you ready?" Coats removed, the group assembled in the study. Why then was Hemline so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? A low built-in couch ran along two sides of the room, intersecting at the corner. A large round table strung people out in the form of a circle. Highballs. After beginning talk subsided we planned the session. My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long worked for and of which he has long dreamed.
Olson and Leary and Barron and a Harvard graduate student named Lynn were to take psilocybin. The hour is late and no doubt we are all fatigued. Nancy Barron and Nunez and Rhona were to act as ground-control. So first we will rest and refresh ourselves a little. Robort Lotus would observe.
From a recess in the wall I took a quaint little bottle, also a small oriental box inlaid with differently colored woods. We were sitting around the table and the pills were counted out for each voyager. Robort Lotus had gotten over the shock of meeting Olson and the toy pistol and was in fine spirits, watching intently. When the last person had taken his potion Robort Lotus reached over and said, let me go along too. He took ten tablets and washed them down with his drink. So he did, perched on his stool, while the dance went on around us to the lively strain of the strings. The ship cast off.
We sat immeasurably listening to the hi-fi. Its effect was enlivening and delightful, making light conversation. Olson was spread out over the couch, center of a giggling admiring group, as though one were filled with gas.
We who had shared the psychotomimetic cocktail session at the Ritz and had no longer any gravity were reviewing the day's events quietly. The soft peace of the mushroom began to descend. Jangled, racing minds began to purr smoothly. Every moment we felt ourselves growing lighter and more serene. The few words spoken were concise Zen Koans, questions answered in the asking.
From far away came Pablo's warm voice. A candle flame on the circular table flickered softly saying, "It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have a Spanish guitar concerto, pure notes of thin steel in the privilege of being your host in a small way on this occasion."
Olson played gestural games with a sofa cushion. A quietly circling thread of closeness wove us together. You have often been sorely weary of your life. When eyes met, they sent rays of amused understanding.
You were striving, were you not. So here we are. Born and dying together. A longing to forsake this world and its reality. The incredible statistical—chance nature of our existence, our sharing this quick intersection in astrophysical space-time to penetrate to a reality more native, to a world beyond time. The glance of recognition. We love, we love, we are all burnished copper-atoms—conductive—on the same humming wire of energy. We know, of course, where this other world lies hidden.
Nancy and Frank Barron were looking into each other's eyes. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. They rose and Nancy giggled and did a swirling dance, radiant, and then they were gone.
Bach's ivory ping-pong ball bouncing precise down steel-wire tympanic membrane. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. Rhona and Lynn giggling fondly at Olson's Mohawk Sachem funny chiefness. Robort Lotus, lost in harmonic nets strung aloft, I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. The room rolling gently to ocean-swells of vibration. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. Look, he is rewriting an earlier book in a river of peace.
We are all burnished copper atoms; your rational mind need not cr-,uch on humming wires of energy. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. Robort Lotus' face was now a rich purple. Moving in like a cross-examiner Robort Lotus, haunting eyes and furrowed face-skin, was supporting the weight of the universe. Bach's ivory ping-pong balls drowning out his lips moving rapidly. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all. He puffs and pants up the steep path groaning. But no one is listening.
Rhona and Lynn giggling fondly at Olson's bridges of silence. Waterfalls of thin steel notes muffling mind words.
Now I will conduct you to my peep-show and show you my little theater. Will you come? PRESSURE-COOKER MYSTICISM Robort Lotus' soundless face began to declaim about the ordeal completed. The mind by definition is anti-ecstasy. This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please. A piece of chamber music played.
He was explaining that two times two is pressure-cooker mysticism but no one listened. Ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. This struck me as obscene, more so than four-letter words. IN THE BELOVED AUSTRIAN MOUNTAINS OF MY SCHOOL DAYS IT IS A PRETTY CABINET OF PICTURES, MY DEAR FRIEND. A small figure, compact and coherent soundlessly lectures astride the Asian bull. It would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. TOOK US FOUR OR FIVE HOURS TO CLIMB TO THE 7000 FOOT PEAK.
Sober self control! You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. A small compact figure, Jewish, Hungarian, Austrian now standing in front of the group, gesticulating earnestly.
You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, words, it seemed hell to you, came from nowhere and flowed nowhere, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing.
PUFFING AND PANTING UP THE STEEP PATH Rhona and Lynn and Olson look up curiously at the frail cortex explaining, ordering, labeling everything. Meaning simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. NO MERIT. There he was, face to face with what he feared, an American writer whom he otherwise liked. That is the prison where you lie. DRUGS ON THE BRAIN.
Robort Lotus breathed heavily. THE VIRTUE OF SWEAT AND TOIL. You are therefore requested to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed personality here where you will find it again. In making use of such outmoded self congratulation and dubious tools my soul was stepped in cosmic schmaltz. Be as jolly as you can WRONG KIND.
The virtue of sweat groans under the load. To teach you to laugh is the whole aim. What is he talking about?
Questioning glances. You feel quite well, I trust? ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT SEEMED THE ULTIMATE PROFANATION. Not afraid? That's good, excellent. Come dear compact figure; join the thread of closeness weaving us together. REPROACH OF ARTIFICIALITY, HUXLEY. Gesticulates, face cut out of cardboard. You will now, without fear and with wonderful pleasure, enter our visionary world. YOU AMERICANS! DRUGS ON THE BRAIN. AMERICAN EFFICIENCY SHORT-CUTS COSMIC AWARENESS. You will introduce yourself to it by means of a trifling suicide.
Their intersection in astrophysical space-time is different from those who arrive by motorcar. WRONG KIND. We are in a magic theater: a world of pictures. So I again walked out of the show by forcing my eyes to open.
I congratulated myself on my sober self-control, a rational mind not to be fooled by a little Moment of Truth. See that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that you really are not in love with your highly questionable personality any longer. Good-night. Robort Lotus waved, face crinkling in parochial pride. He left the room For madmen only.
Long moments followed the departure. Bach's stringed clock ticked song of planetary motion. In dead silence. He was gone.
Fearing a return of Michigan paranoia, I followed after. Knocked softly at his door. Barron's merry voice shouts come in. Barron? In Robort Lotus' room? Entered. I WAS GREATLY CHEERED AT FINDING THAT I COULD ESCAPE FROM THAT CURSED WOLF WORLD AND WENT IN.
Barron jolly. We didn't know this was Lotus' room. We just fell into the first room we saw. Lotus came to go to bed. You should have seen his face when he saw us. I KEPT REPEATING TO MYSELF, "BUT THESE ARE NICE FRIENDLY PEOPLE, THEY ARE YOUR FRIENDS, AND SO FORTH." Was he upset? No. I'd say startled. Very apologetic. Where'd he go? Don't know. Backed out muttering forgiveness.
Checking guest rooms down the hall. Lotus. Lotus. Knocking softly, Lotus.
I still knew him well enough, and he still bore a faint resemblance and yet he had grown a few centuries older. Yes? Is it you, Pablo? Come in. Where are we? Lotus was in bed. Giggling. Radiating pleasure. High. We are in my Magic Theater. Sailing high. But I'm bound to say, Harry, you have disappointed me a little. Life is a song. Life is beautiful. Life is the golden dream of a lotus princess on a bed of lilies. You forget yourself badly.
The next morning when we woke him up to start the round of Harvard appointments, Robort sat up in bed. Those pills last night didn't affect me at all. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it.
The next evening on the way home Robort Lotus bought two bottles of French wine, chosen with care, a flask of scotch, and, gently from behind clenched teeth asked: "And if I do not submit as we sat in the library starting to work on the whisky Lotus held up his glass and shook it with an icy tinkle. And if I deny your right, Mozart, to interfere with the Steppenwolf, and to meddle in his destiny I'll stick to my drug alchol is a social stimulant. It warms you up; brings you closer to people. Mushrooms are nonsocial. They whirl you inside. Bring you closer to yourself. Give me alcohol any day. But I'm bound to say I thought you had learned the game better."
Next day as we walked into the airport building at Logan field to see him off, Robort Lotus made his final comment to us. You must admit that these drugs cause psychosis. A temporary psychosis. I'm bound to say Harry, you broke through the humor of my little theater. A benign and educational psychosis, if you will. Would you say it's therapeutic? Therapeutic. Of course. That's what the effect should be called. TTP. INSTANT MYSTICISM. Temporary therapeutic psychosis.
The metal ramp of the plane was wheeled away and the metal door closed. Four motors roared and the huge metal-magic bird lumbered away down the concrete strip.
There he went in the aluminum box. Did he understand Pablo? Mozart? Had a glimpse of its meaning stirred his reason? Would he sample its tortures once more? Traverse once more the hell of inner being?
Would he one day learn to laugh? Would I? Pablo was waiting for us both. And Mozart too.
1. Reproduced, by permission, from The Sunday Telegraph, London.
Volunteers at The Castalia Foundation transcribed this article from an original copy of The Psychedelic Review from 1966. It has been lightly edited here to improve readability, although in the case of this article, not much could be done to make it coherent.
