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| Still from I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968) |
Sex, Drugs and Magick Interlude: Divorce Psychedelic Style: The Story of Tom & Jerri
Reading this was a reminder of how far we are from the Sixties, which in many ways laid the foundations of today's world, for better or worse. We get to walk down memory lane when Dorothy Day was still influential, there were Fidelistos in the United States and even witness the appearance of an automat. Occasionally you'll see a Dorothy Day quote pop up anymore, but leftist Catholics aren't really something you run into everyday in our brave century. While Che Guevara posters/t-shirts were popular during my youth in the late nineties-early aughts, I doubt even those who knew who Che Guevara was would have said they supported Fidel Castro. And I don't even know if there's an automat left on the face of the earth today. Tom and Jerri's story, more than those of Jane or Leonard, is a story of the progression of the Sixties.
Like Jane and Leonard, Wilson shows occasional glimpses of contempt for his subjects. He doesn't admire their hardline Marxism/Christian radicalism when he meets them and obviously thought that Tom's hardline approach was detrimental to his children. (Like many children of the movers and shakers of that era, I wonder how Tom and Jerri's kids felt about their childhood, spent in unique living situations due to their parents (over?) abundance of belief.) As the chapter approaches the end of Tom's progression towards his "Church of One Flesh," Wilson seems to be raising his eyebrows in bemusement and even includes the incestuous aspect of Tom's acid-enlightenment for the reader to balk or gawk at.
The message from this story seems to be the same as Leonard's, to a different degree- be careful where these chemicals take you. Wilson doesn't object to the use of drugs, and he scrupulously doesn't object to anything directly or to the subjects of the stories during his appearances, but rather seems to be fascinated by how the drugs can "take over" unsuspecting or overly-credulous users. Unlike the end of Leonard's story, neither Tom nor Jerri seem to end up in truly pathetic states at the end of the chapter. Unless you're invested in Tom and Jerri's marriage, which would be an odd choice considering how lackluster their relationship seems to have been, nothing too horrible happens to either. Things "end" a bit bizarrely on Tom's part, but at least he was still visiting his kids.
One things that this interlude contains, and which I feel I should contest, is Wilson's assertion that users cannot take acid more than once a week. Perhaps this was a deliberate blind on Wilson's part, on the naivety of a Wilson who hadn't quite subjected himself to his truly bracing experiences with Hoffman's problem child, but I believe either way the information is simply wrong.
Three bits against Wilson's pronouncement. First, in my personal experience I have tripped multiple times within the span of a few days. This is the easiest piece of evidence to refute as one could assert that because of the day and age we live in, I can't be sure I received true LSD-25. Secondly, Wilson himself later reveals (This is in Cosmic Trigger II, I believe. Tom, can you confirm?) that he censored the truth in the later Cosmic Trigger about his use of acid and seems to have been using it very frequently during that time period. Thirdly, John Higgs' revolutionarily awe-some biography of Timothy Leary, I Have America Surrounded, scrupulously recounts Leary's use of acid which was certainly on a daily basis for many parts of his life.
So what is the explanation? It certainly could have been a deliberate lie as Wilson does seem concerned with what acid can do to the unprepared. We know that the Wilson who wrote Cosmic Trigger seemed concerned that admitting to his own acid-consumption could strip him of credibility. Or was Wilson simply not yet inducted into the frequent use of LSD when he published Sex, Drugs and Magick? I'm genuinely curious as to what the reader thinks about this.
Stray Thoughts
- An amusing part of this chapter is where the Wilson of the Interlude seems to be "weirded out" (peculiared out?) by the acidhead copywriter who claims he was in contact with flying saucers as we all know that Wilson would shortly be experiencing his own extraterrestrial, acid-aided communication with beings from Sirius.
- Wilson also provides us with two explanations for why LSD users adopt counter cultural ideas; is it the milieu of people that use and have access to acid or is it the alienating effect of lysergic acid? This is another bit where I'd be interested in hearing what the reader of this post thinks. For me, I imagine that both theories have some truth to them. I can't say that my psychedelic experiments made me into a crunchy hippie, but I do share many qualities with the counter culture and I know that those substances changed or clarified me.
- Tom's network of sexual partners is laughable to me as I have personally witnessed the incredible animosity that people can have towards a partner or former partner's current or former lovers. (I feel like there is a comma missing in that sentence.) Sex and violence are closely linked in the human mind, I've never bought into the Free Love Movement's ideas that it is a pure expression of community.
- Maybe don't "ball" your sister?
I have read about LSD's diminished effects if taken more than once a week in other places, I think. I googled "How often can you take LSD" and found one answer that said LSD tolerance seems under-researched. It terms of the influence of ideas and/or drugs, they seem to interact synergetically.
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RAW did seem conservative and cautious about advocating acid publicly. In an online course he advised people not to try it until age 40. He said he wouldn't make the same mistake Leary did of suggesting young people take it. Someone else recalled another online interaction with him where he sternly rebuked a poster for putting peer pressure on someone else to use psychedelics. I agree completely with this position because you have to factor in stupidity. I experienced someone tragically die after his friends reminisced about their wonderful LSD college experiences. At a meeting with them, discussing higher states of consciousness, I recall saying that these states can get accessed without psychedelics and literally seeing a wave of relief run down the soon-to-be victim's body. After I left, they went to Washington Square Park to score "acid." Whatever it was, it freaked this fellow out; they almost got him back to the loft, he had already ripped his clothes off, and broke free from them, ran to the top of the building, maybe 3 or 4 stories high, jumped off the roof and died the next day in the hospital. LSD, even the idea of it combined with stupidity, can appear extremely dangerous.
ReplyDeleteIt seems people without a strong sense of the themself, especially those looking for something, will often attempt to imitate those they admire. Hence those responsible individuals that can handle intense work tend not to advertise the full extent of it because it can turn dangerous, psychedelics or not.
I've advised people that LSD can take just as easily as it can give. I've commented earlier about always connecting psychedelic use with a spiritual practice for those who insist on working this way. Always work with a Guide, someone wiser than you that you trust. Get thoroughly educated prior to experimentation beginning and/or ending with an intimate knowledge of Leary's guidelines: set, setting and dosage. The biggest misconception - that LSD or any drug can serve as a "be all, end all" for enlightenment. It can turn out to produce the opposite as RAW's
cat and mouse story of Tom and Jerri seems to illustrate.
Dorothy Day reminded me of Doris Day which recalled Doris Horus from Illuminatus!. Que sera sera.
To answer your question, in "Cosmic Trigger 2" Wilson writes, "Between 1969 and 1973 I was doing a lot more Acid that I admitted in the first Cosmic Trigger." A few sentences later, he writes, "I was doing a lot of Acid." He doesn't get any more specific. This is at the beginning of the "And How Are You Tonight, Mr. Wilson?" chapter.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm a bit like Oz -- I worry that experimenting with LSD is not such a great idea for many people, at least without an experienced guide. Marijuana seems like a safer drug than many other drugs.
The bit in the chapter about Marxists toking on pot to reach out to hippies reminded me of the old joke that libertarians are Republicans who smoke pot.
It seems that acid can definitely be taken effectively more than once a week, but I could believe that a certain tolerance would arise in such cases. The classic protocol for microdosing tends to be a dose every three days, in order to avoid this tolerance issue. That being said, for stronger psychedelic doses, tripping yearly “at most 13 times (the full moons)” seems more than enough to me.
ReplyDeleteI feel like RAW’s assumption on p.135 that some people require a stronger dose of LSD to really ‘get there’ might have “some connection with the chronic muscular tensions holding back emotions that the Reichian and Gestalt psychologists discuss” sounds like a streak of genius to me. I wonder if there has ever been more research in this direction.
I suspect that the question of the acidhead mentality coming from the substance or from the milieu might be a complex one, where both feed into each other.
On p.132, RAW tells us that we “must always remember” a few scientific axioms. I especially like the ones stating that “the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line”, and “some particles get from one place to another place without passing without passing through the places in between.” There might be something to reading this Interlude in the light of these ideas.
Since the advertising copywriter who communicates with flying saucers then took on to directing movies, I cannot help but wonder who that might be.
We are told of “Czechoslovakian psychiatrists who have been using LSD in therapy”. Even though he is not being named, one can assume Stanislav Grof is here being referred to.
Is the expression “to ball someone” still in use in the US, or is that very much out of fashion?
@Spookah, "to ball" is not in the common vernacular in the US anymore.
ReplyDelete@everyone: I really hope I didn't come off as someone who desires people to use more LSD. I guess I was just interested in the purpose of Wilson's misdirection. Everything you have said makes perfectly good sense, I have witnessed people use psychedelics to just keep breaking down instead of building back up in between sessions and it isn't a pretty picture. Personally, I am also very concerned about young people or unprepared people dabbling with psychedelics. While it might not kill the body during a dose, it can open doors that best remained closed for now.