This is KZSU Stanford.
Wernay, the FDA has determined a dysradial program in title opinions,
contains a potent mind alter-a-zoxins.
Its effects include increased awareness, mental zertity, and expansion of consciousness.
The program's exchange of ideas is addictive.
Most worrisome of all, there's no contact has re-absorbed.
In title opinions, it's not the pill your mother gives you.
It's the pill your mother takes when you're not around.
That's right.
This is the show your mother turns to when she wants to turn on,
and rise above the mundane prose of her existence.
Mothers too like to levitate in the rarefied air we breathe on this program.
The ether of ideas.
Up here we are stoned immaculate.
Up here our heads are fed by the bread of angels.
Up here our arrows are made of desire.
Up here is where the gods make love.
[Music]
Did I hear someone mention the gods making love?
[Music]
Since the FDA has now classified entitled opinions as a narcotic,
we decided to honor that label today by doing a show on drugs.
Drugs of the mind altering variety.
Like masculine LSD, opium and hashish.
Drugs that for a brief moment have the power to put you in touch with the divine
before they send you down to the darker angels.
I can't think of a better place to start than with a passage from Bodlez, Le Pachadee,
Azifistiel, or artificial paradises from the mid-19th century.
I quote, "Your innate love of shape and color find an immense pasture in the first developments
of your intoxication.
Colors will take on an unaccustomed vigor and enter your brain with an all-conquering intensity.
The paintings on the ceiling will be endowed with a startling vivacity.
The corsus wallpaper on the walls of inns will gain in depth,
producing splendid dioramas.
Nymphs with dazzling flesh gaze at you with wide eyes,
deeper and more limped than the sky and the water.
Characters from antiquity, a tired in their priestly or military costumes,
exchange solemn confidences with you at a mere glance.
The sinuous curving of outline is a language now finally made clear
in which you can read the agitation and the desires of people's souls.
Fuhrier and Swedenborg, the one with his analogies, the other with his correspondences,
have become embodied in the vegetable or animal forms that your gaze alight on,
and instead of divulging their teachings in words, they indoctrinate you by shape and color.
The totality of beings in the universe rises before you with a new and hitherto
unsuspected glory, grammar.
Arid grammar itself becomes something like an evocative sorcery.
Words rise from the grave, clothed in flesh and bones, the substantive,
in its substantial majesty, the adjective, a transparent garment, which clothes and colors it
like a glaze and the verb, the angel of movement which sets the sentence in motion.
Music speaks to you of yourself and narrates the poem of your life.
It becomes of one body with you and you melt into it.
It expresses your passion, not in a vague and indefinite way as it does on those evenings you
spend lulling at the opera, but in a detailed, positive way, every moment in the rhythm,
indicating a movement familiar to your soul, every note transforming itself into a word,
and the whole poem entering your brain like a dictionary endowed with life.
I have a guest with me in the studio who is eminently entitled to comment on this poem,
entering your brain like a dictionary endowed with life. Her name is Mikaela Holstein.
Mikaela earned her PhD in French literature from Stanford in 2016,
and she's now a lecturer in the structured liberal education program here at Stanford,
otherwise known as SLE. Her dissertation goes by the title "Unselfing Interpreted
Altered States and the Ethics of Insight." Mikaela has published on altered states and
drug experimentation among French writers, among others, and she joins me today to talk about
Charles Bodle, Thomas de Quincy, Oremie Schoe, as well as psychedelic drugs in the
counterculture of the 1960s. Dr. Holstein, Mikaela, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me. Your dissertation, which you're currently revising for publication as a book,
has that word "Unselfing" in the title, and one of the forms of "Unselfing Your Interested in"
is experimentation with mind-altering drugs, right? That's right.
And I've quoted Bodle at length on the effects of Hasheash. So why don't we start with him maybe?
What do you know about Bodle's use of drugs and his attitude towards Hasheash and opium
when it comes to what you call "Unselfing?" Yeah, so I think the difficult thing to understand
with Bodle's air as regards intoxicants or altered states is what he maybe means by
Artificiel. So why are these artificial paradises? And it's hard to understand because he's
speaking in this moralist mode, it's Bodle's speaking as a moralist saying you shouldn't take Hasheash
in parts of the work that you quoted. So the text, the parody Artificiel, was developed from his
1851 text on wine and Hasheash, and he added to it later by 1860 his translation of "decency,
Confessions of an English opium eater." So in that first text from 1851, he was already trying to
distinguish between the drunkenness that comes from wine and it has these social virtues and the
drunkenness or the intoxication that comes from Hasheash, and he talks about it as an anti-social
pleasure. So this has been read in lots of different ways and I think some lean more towards
an aesthetic interpretation of what's wrong with these paradises and other sorts of more
literal examination of what drug he's using. But it does seem strange to us today that he
thinks that Hasheash is more dangerous than opium. And ultimately, he leans towards a religious
explanation. So he thinks that Hasheash falsely satisfies this desire for the infinite lagoop
polemfini and closes the gap between man and Lemal in this problematic way. So it stops man
from questioning, stops man from thinking. He has a section of this work called "God Made Men."
So because of this auto-dividation, he thinks that Hasheash is to be avoided.
Do you take him to be speaking for himself Al-Al-El-Tren in this work or is he highly conscious of
his audience reaction and therefore maybe he's camouflaging a little bit his attitude towards Hasheash?
I'm not sure. I mean, I think one thing that I think is fascinating about this is the distance
between what he's saying as a moralist and the rhapsodic way that he talks about Hasheash. So in the
passage that he read, he talks about the correspondences and the things that are revealed and
this heightened state of awareness. And obviously he's very interested in Sinistasia and
correspondents. So he seems to be writing an "a-luge" of Hasheash. But then it's curious that
then he says, "No, no, no, this is a bad thing." So it would seem like it's all great if it were not
artificial. On the other hand, as you said, this "gudal-en-fini" this tastes for the infinite,
raising of consciousness, this touching of the divine, if only momentarily before your cast down,
when the drug wears off. All that seems to be part of what he calls "e-de-al" in his
poet in Le Flur-umal, which distinguishes from he's "spline" and "e-de-al" and "e-de-al" is that state of
transport, inspiration, perhaps even ecstasy, or certainly intoxication with the infinite.
So you would think that this should be an "e-luge." Do you find that when he's praising the virtues of
wine that he can really stand behind what he says there about the virtues of drunkenness
through alcohol, which of course, you know, but there is well known as being the champion of
dandism and the dandies, the hero of, you know, banal, kind of vulgar bourgeois world. But the dandies
is someone who is in perfect control of himself, herself highly aesthetic. And the kind of
drunkenness that would come from alcohol would seem to be antithetical to the dandies posture
of perfect self-composure. How do you relate to his attempt to champion wine? Is it the
social virtues of wine? Was it something that he means seriously? I think for him it's connected to
the culture and the ritual surrounding these intoxicants. So he was a drinker, he was a moderate user
of his shoes. He didn't really partake as much as others in the club di sashishah, and he was a long
time opium user. So I think his ideas about wine or about opium or about the poetic will are really
fleshed out. And I think he's pretty disdainful of the superficial culture surrounding the usage
of his shishah at the club di sashishah. So I think he's a little bit skeptical of this superficial or
momentary project to reach the the infinite as opposed to the poetic will to get there.
Can you say something more about the club di sashishah and the hotel pimodal where these
experiments were taking place? Yeah, so all of these intellectuals in Paris would get together at the
club di sashishah. So people like Balzac or Nerval, Bodleir was there, would take his shish
together. And it's this was influenced by the history of Orientalism. So Moro wrote a text on
the effects of the alienation effects of his shishah that was pretty influential and widely read.
And these these intellectuals, these writers, these artists would get together and take his shish
usually in the form of what Moro called Daoa masks, this green jelly had was mixed with cinnamon and
they would then recount their experiences or detail their experiences together. So this is different
than a lifetime of addiction to opium that alters the way that Bodleir arguably thinks about things
like analogy or desire or the infinite. This was more of a social gathering. So that's an important
thing that you mentioned that Bodleir had a long addiction to opium which is not the same drug as
hashish. What caused him to get addicted to that drug? I don't think it's entirely clear and he was
suffering from syphilis for a large part of his life. So there's some evidence that he was taking
this as sort of medication, maybe to counteract the negative effects of other medication he was
taking, but he was addicted to laudanum or he was taking opium for long parts of his life.
And this has this affected his aesthetic theories too. Do you think Leffler, Dumad, his great
collection of poems would have been possible had he never attempted the experimentation with drugs?
Would he have been the same poet he was without it? I mean I think he thinks that you can get to
this state of revelation and intoxication without any. He speaks about virtue being an
intoxicant poetry and other things. Yeah so yes, Burt she has an article about this and she
thinks that this is a text about analogies. So ultimately the drugs helped him to flesh out his
theory of of correspondences, the the double-ness of symbols and their reference. And so what the problem
with, Hashiish is that it's ultimately all nature so there's no spiritual in this analogy. You can
see this in the part of the text where he's writing about the poem of Hashiish. So he's talking
about the different dreams that you have and the natural dreams. But those are the ones that are
Hashiish dreams and you don't exceed nature. It's just this false sense of spirit whereas in opium
dreams you can get to this infinite or this spiritual realm. But the way she reads is that these
are ultimately all substitutions and trying to talk about analogy whereas you can find a reading of
Buddha layer that attributes everything that he does including the things that he writes to his
addiction. So I tend to follow more of the former reading that I think that this is for him all about
poetic inspiration. And that distinction you refer to between the effects of Hashiish being confined to
the natural opium actually transcending into the spiritual supernatural if you want to use that term.
He would have to have some sort of measure or criterion in order to come to that conclusion.
And he would have to have had a pre-existing experience of the divine or the infinite lagudalampini,
which I believe goes back to his immersion in the Catholic tradition and its sacraments and so forth.
The idea that he had some kind of mystical experiences in his youth within the purely religious
context of Catholicism that served as his certification from what maybe opium can approximate in terms of
inducing or officially some sort of experience of the divine. Because without it I don't know how
he would be able to say that one is far from the real thing and the other one gets close to the
real thing. Yeah maybe I'll read his this is from a letter that he wrote to Flobaire. So he sent a copy of
Leoparadi Artificia to Flobaire introducing him to D'Quincy. Flobaire has said you insisted too much on
the spirit of evil Catholicism is pushing through. He said this is a great text. Thanks for
introducing me to D'Quincy. He's fascinating but you're insisting too much on Catholicism.
So Flobaire says in response. I realized that I had been continually obsessed by an
inability to accept certain of man's deeds or actions without the hypothesis that malevolent
powers external to himself of themselves intervene. Even were the 19th century in league against me
I would not retract the significant admission. So it's hard to as you said it's hard to imagine
Boiler without the limal. I think so yeah. And Leomile is just the counterpart of Le D'Valle or the
divine. So you mentioned Thomas D'Quincy and he translated parts of the confessions of an English
opium meter which in my view is one of the great prose texts of English literature of the 19th
century it's remarkable. Very strange hybrid genres of there's autobiography, there's the
medical diagnosis, there's also a metaphysical speculation. Can you speak a little bit about
Thomas D'Quincy and his importance for Boiler but also D'Quincy just on his own?
Yeah he so he was born in 1785 in Manchester and the texts that you mentioned,
Confessions of an English opium meter was originally published in 1821 in London magazine
and the year after it appeared in book form. And so the text as you mentioned it's a hybrid genre
it's a confessional of course so it looks back to Rousseau and Augustine and it's filled with
these literary illusions so he was an excellent student of Greek and Latin and he left Oxford during
his exams in 1808 he'd ever received his degree and he was homeless for a long time he was squatting
in a house with another homeless girl and had all these severe pains probably from Mel Nourishment
he had all these toothaches and he had done a lot to try to relieve his chronic pain and at some
point a friend recommended opium and he attaches a mystic importance to this event this friend
recommending opium to help solve his stomach pain is toothaches and after that what comes with
not only the alleviation of pain is this revelation so he writes this work detailing his life's not
only his life story but his relationship to opium and it has this sort of sensational quality because
he claims that he frets about exposing himself and what he calls gratuitous acts of self humiliation
so he's kind of a dig at Rousseau he's saying he doesn't want to do that but he it's clear that he
wants to tell this story as well to see have a budlerian attitude that sometimes opium can lead to this
being in touch with the higher spirit world or is it more that he actually suffered physical
ailments to such a degree that when you try a drug that can relieve you of pain I think we have
to appreciate the degree to which people who are in chronic pain if they can have a drug
administer to them that will relieve them even momentarily of that pain it feels like bliss it feels
like the attitude it feels like paradise yeah artificial but they'll take it and it could be that
dequinci's first experience of opium was that of the alleviation of pain yeah and then subsequently
when you're pain free then you can indulge in the luxury of trying to see how high you can get
in terms of reaching the realm of the gods yeah so what's interesting and what you say is that
there are maybe two altered states here so one is the altered state of being in pain
that opium ends momentarily and the altered state of taking the drug so that's actually what I'm
trying to do in this book is to bring together these diverse narratives about altered states
in in ways that that show how they speak together seemingly unlike experiences can speak to each
other so the the quote there's a quote from confessions of an english opium either
from dequinci where he explains how he felt the first time he took opium he says I took it and in
an hour oh heavens what a revulsion what an up-heaving from its lowest steps of the inner spirit
what an apocalypse of the world within me that my pain said vanished was now a trifle in my eyes
this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had
opened before me in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed so those two things
come together not only the alleviation of pain and suffering but then opening up of this inner
illuminated world yeah that's that's very interesting from many points of view the first is he speaks
about the negative effects versus a positive effects and to speak about alleviation of pain as
negative is interesting it makes me think of Arthur Schopenhauer whose argument is nihilistic
argument for wildlife is this constant state of suffering that can never be equilibrated with the
pleasure is that pleasure he calls pleasure a negative state it's our ordinary state it's what we
the state we're in when we are paying free but we don't notice it because it's common and therefore
doesn't register in in our minds whereas when when we're in pain that is a positive state because it
disrupts the equilibrium the ordinary state and we feel it very intensely and therefore there is always
the necessary outcome of our experience of these things is that the paradise that we inhabit
on an everyday basis in so far as we are relatively healthy and paying free is one that we're denied
because it is the common state and that pain then takes on an inordinate sort of a tragic
tragic aspect because of that the other thing is that you wonder that drug use of that sort of
opium for example so it alleviates the pain it gives you metaphysical insight and so forth but
it the use itself also engenders new levels of pain through the addiction withdrawal and so forth so in
that sense it just reminds us of the fact that we are not gods I suppose you go back to the Greeks
and Romans who had a sense of the gods the difference between gods and mortals is that maybe the
gods can remain in a permanent high and a permanent state of the kind of bliss that we can taste
through drug use but without him but they don't have to pay the price of pain that comes with that
so these are the two things that you're interested I guess yeah and maybe we'll come back to this
when we talk about me show but me showed distinguishes between the overdose experience and the
drug experience and so the overdose experience there's no knowledge that comes back from that
experience and there the self is lost entirely to the overwhelming void of experience whereas in these
altered states there can be some sort of moment of revelation and you see that as you said with with
de Quincy so he thinks like butelaire that opium leads towards these feelings of the divine to
serenity the majestic intellect they have these architectural characters so he was friends with
a coal ridge and words worth and but then the the last section or the the later sections of the
autobiography of the work are about the pains of opium as it were and as you mentioned so in 1813
he writes that that's when he became truly addicted so before he was just using it here and there
and to alleviate his pain but he was distressed by the death of words with young daughter so that's
part of it too is that it was part of the psychological pain that let him to be taking more and
more and more opium and even he so in the beginning he says oh it doesn't affect my ability to be
intellectual to think about German metaphysics and I can still do that but he talks about these four years
of torpor where every any sort of intellectual activity was unsupportable and he lost all of his
sensibilities but without a lingering sense that he was neglecting his responsibilities and
his potential so this is part of the deep pain of addiction that he details later in the book.
That reminds me of something Faulkner said when he was asked why he drinks so much and he answered
for the pain which almost everyone takes to mean that he drank in order to get rid of the pain although
you could look at it differently and say he drank in order to perpetuate the pain because
it was through the pain that he was writing the novels that he wrote and I'm wondering if you
have that experience of bliss in the first moment of the alleviation of pain that continuing to
induce these states of pain that can then be alleviated momentarily is what you're really addicted to
but that's a speculation I'm going to put aside. Mikaela before we move on to me show,
Ani Mikaela, before we move on to me show is an interesting person that you've done a lot of work on.
I'd like to quote something you brought my attention to from De Quincy where he writes I may affirm
that my life has been on the whole the life of a philosopher. From my birth I was made an intellectual
creature and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been. Even from my school
boy days if opium eating be essential pleasure and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged
in it to an excess not yet recorded of any other man it is no less true that I have struggled
against this fascinating enthrallment with religious zeal and have at length accomplished what I
have never yet attributed to any other man have untwisted almost to his final links the
a curse chain which feathered me so two questions he brings in this fact of being a philosopher
and elsewhere in the book he connects the experience of opium to an enhancement of the philosophical
lucidity and metaphysical insight and that it actually helps the philosopher in his vocation
as a philosopher and on the other hand he's also claiming that it's only by being a philosopher that
he could rise above the tremendous difficulty of freeing yourself from your addiction to his
right. Yeah so he he has a quote where he says if it's paraphrasing here but if you're a man
that talks of oxen and you take opium then you'll just dream of oxen but he's a philosopher so
and he takes opium he is is revealed the the nature of reality in the nature of man so he I think
this is a really important piece that for dequeancy and budle air and michow they all see themselves
as a part from the common man so they have this special sensibility whether it be philosophic or
artistic or intellectual that that makes it so that taking these drugs it's not just that anyone
could take them and and have these philosophic revelations but rather they're special training as
intellectuals or as philosophers make it so that the opium dreams have these metaphysical revelations within
them but the other part that you mentioned where he claims that he's accomplished this throwing off
of the chains of addiction it's it's probable that he was still addicted when he finished writing
this text so I think there's this desire to have this narrative of success of accomplishing
intellectual clarity after the the period of addiction but it's likely that he still was taking opium when
you wrote that and also throughout his whole life now right great well can we move on to
Aunri Misho this is someone that many of our artists might not have even heard of and he's also an
important protagonist in the experimentation of mind altering substances so maybe you could tell us
something about who Aunri Misho was and what his relation to to masculine in particular
Sure so Misho was born in in Namer Bellgem in 1899 he traveled a lot he was traveling in
Japan and China and India early in in the 30s but he was he was naturalized French in 1955
and between 1956 and 1966 to this period of 10 years he wrote these experimental texts on
masculine on his use of masculine he was also influenced by the poet Modite so people like
Boiler and Lutre Amol and and Machambo as well as Buddhism and calligraphy the graphic arts so
what I think is is really interesting about Misho is his take on masculine so he is very interested in
this psychedelic that is naturally occurring in the peyote cactus and it's use among native
Americans in these religious ceremonies as an enthigeon so as a drug that would generate the
divine within what Misho wants to do is to take this drug to take masculine but outside of any
religious or cultural context and see what is revealed to him and his texts they're interesting because
they don't just try to put words to a sort of unimaginable experience but they also have this
style of montage where they try to generate the feeling of those experiences for the reader and so
he was interested in writing too so a lot of the masculine texts include his sketches that he
does while he's on these these drugs and he tries to relate the effects on the first person subject
position as it were. So you mentioned that he wanted Misho wanted to take the religious context
out of the experience and just try this masculine on his own and solitary in order to observe
what its effects are on the isolated self and yet in the in an article that you wrote on Misho
that I have in front of me you say that he Misho attempts to track down the metaphysical piece of
personal identity that persists through altered states so it's also me like he might be trying to
get rid of the religious framework but that there is still something religious at work here which is
what you call that metaphysical piece of personal identity that there's something in the self
that is beyond the physical he wouldn't want to call it supernatural necessarily but he's trying
to get in touch with it. Am I getting you right there? Yeah he really wants to try to figure out what
is this witness position like who is still there to witness these experiences and what remains when
you take away all these layers of nationality and personality and you reduce the self down to the bare
bones what still remains there of the subject position and he ultimately thinks that these
musculine experiences mutate the self that's what I argue in the book and in this article that you
quoted he thinks that these musculine experiments are like a lightning that lasts so something that
changes this metaphysical witness position and leads to a different self in the end if only slightly illuminated.
No I get that but if you take the traditional definition of identity as self sameness through time
then he would be looking also for something constant through the successive moments that make up
the chronological unfolding of time and identity has been a mysterious and egmatic phenomenon for
philosophers too how is it that something can remain itself self-same through time even though it
undergoes various modifications through time is that self for me show something that is somehow
beyond the laws of nature does it have a metaphysical or I don't want to call it religious or divine
subjectivity but is there something there that defies chronology or experience of time as
one moment after another after another successfully? Yeah and in some ways those worries and
those questions are not are not new ones so I mean it goes back earlier than this but Locke is
very worried about altered states and to drunkenness is his example so who witnesses the drunken state
and it used to be God that solved that problem so God sees the entirety of your your i your narrative
existence as a self and keeps track of all those moments so even if you aren't fully conscious or
you have an you're in this altered state of consciousness there's somebody with an objective
perspective and that that person is God but what me show does I think is substitutes knowledge for the
divine so he thinks that he can be both observer and observed and he's going to keep track of that
that witness position even during altered states so that's something that's that's new for
for me show and he's different than butle and that he's he writes albeit in a fictional mode
in one of his fictions from from the thirties he says that we're not a we're not an era for paradise
we're not a people for paradise that that paradise isn't what he's after he's after knowledge
rather than pleasure or these paradise is that that would lay up was writing about but can I ask
about Freud's presence or non-presence in me show clearly me shows this we're talking about the
post-war period in the heyday of Freudianism 50 60s so forth and Freud famously you know divides the
psyche between the the ego the super ego the ego in Freud's theory and in certain philosophies
you mentioned john Locke but there are others that it seems if I understand correctly that me show
believe that it was the ego that serves the unifying purposes that which unifies itself as such
and that the process of unselfing I'm quoting you operates as a two-step process and undoes the
ego's unifying power now if and when that is successful that you undo the ego's unifying power
what is there there of the self yeah so me show had read Freud and he was interested in psychiatry
and psychology but he was dubious of of Freud's analyses and he's me show has been since
read as a proto psychoanalyst or read in that mode and he definitely uses the term ego
throughout his work but he he's more influenced by people like Darwin so he thinks that there's this
more primordial self or adivistic in herself and he's interested in getting at that primordial
universal language is it a unconscious self or is it conscious I mean I think he he has a theory of
the unconscious but there's some slippage this is part of the difficulty of the methodology in the
project is that I come to the to the project with my own network of terms around selfhood so I
talk about the experiencing self which you could think of as the synchronic perspective that moment
in time and the remembering self so the self across time or the diacronic perspective on selfhood
and look at look at the the interconnection are these two steps that generate selfhood and obviously
each writer doesn't necessarily talk about selfhood in those terms and and me show has his own
network of terms about selfhood and so he does talk about the unconscious and he has a sort of
problematic he his his work gives credence to theories of hysteria the unconscious might be some sort of
feminine uncanny unconscious so but that's not what's at stake I would argue in the in the
masculine experiment so what he wants to do is to remain conscious of these these experiments and
detail not only experience but what's what's revealed to him and what alters if only slightly this
little piece of the self that lasts right so he's holding tight to the theoretical
at it and he's not from the point of view of the Mary pranksters I hope we get a chance to talk
about that right he's not just letting it happen the way the way the Mary prankster Ken Keezy and
the others thought that even Timothy Leary whom we're going to move to now at that there was
too much observational right clinical gazing at at an experience that was defeating the purpose of
it no yeah so he says those who take drugs in order to surrender themselves to the collective
release an emotional abandon need not read further there's nothing here there that is meant for
them we do not speak in the same language we do not look for the same effects he who is incapable
of keeping his actions under control incapable of confining everything to the mind has missed the
point completely so you see there far from a prankster no no he's far and he might have been Belgian born
but Belgian and then became French but he is fiercely Cartesian in a certain in a certain way because
he it's all about mind and this ego that is not going to dissolve the ego's tomb is not going
to dissolve and just kind of universal oneness of a cosmic order that some not theories of drug use
but some practices even among the native Americans in the shamanism and maybe in the counter culture of the
60s there was a sense that you could actually dissolve the ego and that and allowed this collective
unconscious to be your place of habitation yeah so he is interested in this dissolving of the ego
or dissolving of the self but he wants this to happen outside of culture or he wants this to happen
he wants to try to find out what this non-cultural or non-influenced version of this would be so which
to us might seem a little bit naive so you really in a sense wants to escape culture and have this
all happen in the theater of the mind absolutely yeah no it seems all a little bit anemic to me in
the sense that it's removing community also from the equation and therefore he wants this experience
without Dionysus he wants a polo to explore what happens to a polo under the effects of masculine
but the whole point is that when Dionysus is present either in the drug or in wine that it's the
collective confusion of boundaries that the overcoming of the boundaries of individuation
and this de-individuation that experience of de-individuation he seems not to be particularly interested
right scared of it probably yeah i think the most interesting thing for him is that a new
expanse is opened up a new inner hollow depth and it doesn't really lead to these new
intersubjective experiences so it doesn't really change the way that he approaches others and
others don't really figure in the mess school in text so this leads us to the use of drugs in the
counterculture of in the 60s and especially to you know one of the grooves of the LSD experimentation
of Timothy Leary well known to most people who in many ways i think it's on the same wavelength
with me show to a certain extent no because Timothy Leary's experiment experience with LSD
it was observer and observed maintaining a co-presence in the experience is that
in that way yeah i think he's definitely similar to me show in that way as well as the sort of pseudo
medical language that is used to talk about these altered states that's similar to but what's
different is that me show is still a poet or still a writer and artist and he has that sensibility
whereas leery i think he thinks that there's a there are literal correlates between altered states
and what is revealed so he thinks that the findings of astronomy physics biochemistry neurology
they're all literally revealed by these these drug experiments so and he also wants us to be
happening on a large scale so whereas me show experiments on himself and he remains entrenched and
he's this witness character Leary wants this to be happening on a mass widespread level
right and who knows could be that the wackier aspects of his theory eventually will prove to be
fruitful for some experimentations we did a show on the singularity about the where human
consciousness will meld eventually with artificial intelligence and information technology in
order to give a hugely exponential explosive expansion of consciousness and it could be that
those seven basic spiritual questions that Leary laid down of ultimate power namely what is
the cosmic plan the life question what is life human being question what is man the awareness of
question how do we know the ego question who am I the emotional question what should I feel about
the ultimate escape question how do I get out of it all this can probably be recuperated and
appropriated in some kind of artificial way but as you mentioned the atomic cellular level and so
forth and it's all interesting well it's very neat so you think that there's certain drugs that
will turn on each of these levels that you mentioned so at the the worst would be the escape
question getting out of it so heavy drinking or narcotics and these sort of just anesthetize
the sensibility for these revealed realms but then at the top of the list is the what is the cosmic
plan question can be answered by strong psychedelics or by LSD so it seems like you just pick
the thing that you want revealed to you and then take the pill that's prescribed right and if
the singularity ever comes about it could very well be that you choose your your spiritual question
you take that pill and you got it and then the next day another one right so how how much of the 60s
is actually inextricably inbracated with drug this kind of drug use I mean I think there's this
utopic notion that may be taking these psychedelics could solve a lot of social ills so the
question of community is much stronger in this context so you could read that as a contrast with what we
saw with me show even though his writing is is during the same period that we were he's doing his
LSD experiments but I think this hope in for this radical sense of empathy that might come out of
taking taking these drugs might have been a little bit over overblown or overstated especially given
the the worries that come out of these earlier accounts so the worries about addiction or the worries about
pain or the pain of others so I'm I think that there's the all these hopes for maybe the uses of
psychedelics in in terms of social ills or social problems but leery himself found himself on the wrong
side of history so he thought that LSD cured Ginsburg of his homosexuality for example so I think
he thought that this could solve anything and he wasn't really sure what he was even applying it to
he got a lot into a lot of trouble also career wise he got fired from Harvard I believe
right yeah so he was fired from his lecture position in clinical psychology his colleague Richard
Alpert was fired in 63 for giving LSD to an undergraduate outside of class so after his
after he loses this university affiliation the experiments change and they become more of what we would
think of as a party or they lose this worry about the observational right yeah I think it becomes
more fun in that sense and maybe we should mention two things that have to do with where we're
speaking from which is Stanford University and Palo Alto Menlo Park one and the Bay Area in general
one is at 1967 it's the 50th anniversary of the so-called human being that where Timothy Leary famously
told this crowd in Golden Gate Park I believe it was Golden Gate Park turn on in dropout dropout
yeah that's right famous motto now yeah the other thing is that there was a very distinctive
California kind of drug culture different from the brainy Harvard you know almost clinical theorizing
sort and right here at Stanford where Ken Keezy was a stegner fellow in the early 60s
he and his famous acid tests and the Kool-Aid where they would spike the Kool-Aid with acid and
Thomas Wolf wrote that famous novel about the the electric Kool-Aid test and the grateful dead another
very local band listen people don't know this but the grateful dead had their first real
performance right here in KZSU they were they were Menlo Park band I think a
Jerry Garcia with one or two of the other future members of the grateful dead actually came here
and did some kind of performance that was aired back in the early 60s Ken Keezy was there in on
Perry Lane with the other fellows experimentation and and then moved to La Honda and these
Mary pranksters as they were known with their psychodelically painted bus come further they were very
untheoretical about it they just thought is something that you let happen without either over theorizing
or or over idealizing what you were doing because that was the whole point is to be in an altered state of
mind and to hell with the bridges between the altered and the unaltered sea line which is very much
like a grateful dead concert the grateful dead continued to perform at Stanford year after year
because it was one of their first venues and I've never been a deadhead myself but you go to one of
those and you and you see that it's an experience a mind altering experience not everyone necessarily
having spoken spoke potter or taken LSD it could just be the music that gets you into this kind of
dream state for two to three hours that is on a completely different plane and when it's over it's over
and it's just something that happened with a very different sort of ambition and when the
Mary pranksters got in their bus with great enthusiasm to go and visit Timothy Leary and Timothy Leary
when he saw these crazy California arrive at his house he forbade them any entry they had to
wait you know they didn't get to see him because I think that you know we Californians forget
the degree to which we are viewed somewhat as outlaws on the other coast despite you know all the
political sympathies we might share in common there's a very different kind of ammo yeah the emphasis on
trance or the emphasis on this group altered state seems pretty foreign from Leary's strict
experimentation at least in the early days definitely and there's a there's also so you have the great
you know psychedelic bands of the Jefferson airplane grateful dead in love there was a velvet
underground from New York up you can't not include them and you know in that list but good is there
or anything that you you want to add to this California chapter are you going to go that far in your
book I think I will just reference maybe the the contemporaries to me show the book is all on
French language writers French and francophone authors from diverse context so I mean
let me show head red some of what leery was doing and so this is an important context to consider but
I think you're right I think there are very different cultural contexts that make it so that these
these two groups were very it was very difficult for them to even speak to each other even though
they had what we see as similar aims and I think now when we when we think about something like a
human being or turn on tune in and drop out I think the the level of engagement of of young people
is is something that people worry about so I don't think the question is do we need more people to
to drop out I think it's trying to get people to wake up so it seems like we're up against
something different today and that's what this show is all about right wake us up that's right
well that's great so thanks a lot mikailah will look forward to continuing this conversation when
you get further along in publication of the book remind our listeners we've been speaking with
mikailah Holstein from Stanford I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions thanks for tuning in
we'll be with you again next week yeah bye bye
one here makes you more true and one girl makes you more and the ones that mother gives you
don't do anything at all go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall
and maybe you're chasing rabbits and you know you're going to fall tell them all who love so happy for us to be you for us
she's just
And all you just hold can't ever tell you where to go
And you just have something that matters wrong
And your mind is ruined all of the injustice
As they wish you more
When a logic kind of goes you have all of us all we've been
And like night is talking back words and your friends are in the way
We are on the dark side
We are on the dark
(dramatic music)