Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Right.  Well, I don't think change is possible without humility. 
That's certainly been true in my life.  And humility is a thing with
feathers.
  

    
Re: Bill W., and Dr. Bob, his partner in founding AA... both were avid
spiritual seekers and belladonna was sometimes used as a "cure" for
alcoholism. Didn't work, but neither did the sauerkraut, tomato, and
Kayro Syrup goo that the Dr. used to give to his poor patients as they
dried out in hospital.Ah, it was a simpler time.

Fwiw, somewhere out there are transcripts of Wilson's trips undertaken
near his home town of Katonah, NY.

<fatal overdose on psilocybin> !?! Um, how did that get by an editor,
never mind the author. There is no known fatal dose level of
psyloscibin, according to a toxicologist friend of mine.
  

    
Yeah, but that kind of report was fairly routine in those days.

Treatment for alcohol withdrawal is still pretty awful and
unscientific.
  

    
Yes... the main goal is preventing a patient having a seizure (and
resulting liability for the care-giver). Consequently, whether it's
needed or not, the hapless alcoholic is dosed with oodles of librium
for a few days. "Hey, let's give the drunk a fist full of benzos!"

That's not to say that alcohol withdrawal isn't potentially lethal,
but the boiler-plate approach to detox that is common is also pretty
ruthless.
  

    
I of course have never done anything illegal, and that's the truth,
occifer:-), but my close informant tells me he's in fact had more
trouble coping on mushrooms than on acid, possibly because there are
somewhat more physical effects? "More" is a relative term, not like any
major problems. Totally unlike the one time he tried salvia, which is
actually legal. 
  

    
Sorry, where was the reference to a fatal overdose of psilocybin?
The thing about mushrooms is, they're not just psilocybin. There are many 
other alkaloids in there.
  

    
I spotted that, but it was just a reference to a press report of the
day.  I'm sure they did report fatal overdoses of psilocybin.  
  

    
Wanted to circle back to the Playboy comments. In that interview Leary
says LSD is a "cure" for homosexuality and that it's a "sexual
perversion." So there's the "1950s square Leary" that Steve mentions.
But the Ginsberg reference is more nuanced. 

After his first trip with Leary, Ginsberg did indeed claim that
psilocybin (not LSD; Leary hadn't taken LSD at that point) had turned
him straight. Right after that trip, he wrote a letter to the Cassadys
saying, in part: “I will have babies instead of jacking off into
limbo.” This is not unusual for Ginsberg, he spent much of his young
adulthood struggling with his orientation and claiming to his friends
that he had found a "cure" etc. By 1969, he had a better grasp of
things. In his own Playboy interview (published in 1969, 3 years after
Leary's), he was specifically asked about renouncing homosexuality
after taking psychedelics. “Well, I get those feelings every time I
take acid. On a trip, you enter corridors inside, and into the heart.
Naturally, you come upon old feelings you didn’t know were there and
were ashamed of…In much the same way, the heterosexual man may discover
during a trip the natural homosexual identity in himself—and identity
suppressed by our culture but not by many others. As Whitman observed,
if the natural love of man for man is suppressed, men won’t be good
citizens and democracy will be enfeebled. What Whitman prophesied was
an adhesive element between comrades—the ‘sane, healthy love of man for
man.’ But because of suppression of feelings in America, the
overemphasis on competition and rivalry—a tough guy, macho, hard,
sadistic police-state mentality—American men are afraid of
relationships with each other.”  

So while Leary's comments were definitely demonstrating his own staid
hangups, he was also talking about a situation which Ginsberg himself
endorsed and talked to Leary about. 


 
  

    
>>Sorry, where was the reference to a fatal overdose of psilocybin?

In that review of Stewart Tendler's Brotherhood of Eternal Love, you
linked to above they mention it. Anyhow the John Grigg's overdose is
attributed to psilocybin crystal in Tendler and Mays book. 

Doesn't Huxley in Island mention liver testing being a pre-requisite
to mushroom use? It may be a myth that mushrooms being natural are less
toxic. 

Per Leary didn't he say in the same interview he would rather have his
7 year old child on heroin than going to public school? 

Anyhow heady times.
  

    
When I lived in the Bay Area, I knew some people who were involved in
a Christian church offshoot called Santo Daime where they took ayuhusca
as part of the religious ceremony..
  

    <scribbled by jonsson Tue 20 Apr 10 13:22>
  

    <scribbled by jonsson Tue 20 Apr 10 13:37>
  

    
Thanks for that fascinating background on Ginsberg's gay "cure," Peter.   
That makes sense.  For what it's worth, I read that Playboy interview with
Ginsberg when it first came out, and it had a huge effect on me.  It's one
of the best interviews with Ginsberg ever conducted, along with a famous  
interview in a publication called "Gay Sunshine" in the early '70s. 
  

    
That Times piece on Bill W. is interesting. I've been  thinking about
the role that belladonna played in  Bill W. vision for a couple of
months now. It most certainly played a role in AA's founding
revelation. Equally important is the fact that Ebby Thatcher (who would
be the AA co-founder if he hadn't relapsed) gave Bill a copy of
William James "Varieties of Religious Experience" the day before he had
his sobering vision. That was the book Wilson was reading right after
his revelation. Thank God for that because it made AA much more
interesting than if they'd stuck solely to the conservative
evangelicalism of the Oxford group, which was the model for the 12
steps. Wilson did quite a bit of LSD "research" in the 1950s with some
very interesting cats, including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. It was
part of the reason that he separated himself for the AA governing
body. They were not pleased with Bill's enthusiasm for LSD, psychic
research and vitamin therapies -- not to mention his infamous
womanizing. 
  

    
Don, simple question for a man who's been writing about spirituality for 
decades.

Is there a God?
  

    
That's fascinating history, Don.
  

    
Steve. I know a little more about Peter, Ram Dass' partner, but I
think there are (or at least were) some privacy promises made  so I
better not get into it here. 
  

    
There appear to be many Gods, Steve. Which one are we talking about? 
  

    
Speaking of Playboy, they have a very good article on the new wave of
psychedelic research in the April issue. Being a religion writer, I
only buy it for the articles, of course. 
  

    
Regarding the sexuality angle: at one point in the mid '90s, i took
a... big hike with a friend (a partner on many such hikes with me and
my then-wife in previous years) who had moved away from the Bay Area,
was visiting. Due to all sorts of reasons, we ended up doing it at
Lands End, wound up on a tiny beach which was/is frequented primarily
by gay men. I noticed a whole bunch of guys who were handsome-looking
but did nothing to me re arousal, didn't look twice. Then i noticed a
woman, and actually looked a second time, decided she wasn't very
attractive. Then i saw an attractive woman, and i found myself fighting
to not keep looking at her (didn't want to out of politeness and the
fact she was with a guy:-)) Under such circumstances, any inner
feelings you have will come out, regardless of what you do. 

And, http://www.serendipity.li/dmt/crick_lsd.htm 
Sir Francis Crick was high on LSD when he came up with the concept of
the double helix. Interesting connection to the spiritual realm. 
  

    <hidden>
  

    

Thomson explores a similar question in Fear and Loathing, the above
quote gives more context. 

"...the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the
desperate assumption that somebody...or at least some force
 -- is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
  

    
    >a publication called "Gay Sunshine" in the early '70s

Steve, you should look up the old issues of Gay Sunshine (might involve a 
trip to the library) and read them -- I think they would make you happy. 
  

    
Huh, now I have an actual reason to buy Playboy.  I don't think I've
seen a copy since about 1980.
  

    
I'm of two minds about that HST quote.  But that has more to do with
the exploration of inner and outer space than the subject at hand.

I do think, and this does relate to the book, that the amount of
totally insanely irresponsible behavior among nominally normal humans
during the 60s was rather stunning - I'm thinking of things like Leary
taking off for weeks or months at a time and leaving his kids behind. 
As someone who lived through that time, that was one of my least
favorite things about the 60s.  I was basically middle and high school
aged at the high water mark.  Thinking back, most of the young hippie
types I hung out with had parents who were white collar professionals. 
We lived in an industrial city that was then thriving.  All of us
expected that we had certain responsibilities to society and to each
other, even though we had long hair and smoked dope.  We strongly
disliked people who took a cavalier attitude towards personal
responsibility and avoided them at all costs.

Maybe that represents another piece of the puzzle in the Sixties. 
Born in the 1950s, none of us had ever personally experienced the
stifling conformist society Leary was rebelling against.  Which to
circle back to Playboy, was also part of what motivated Hefner.  

There was something really frozen in time about that attitude of
rebellion certainly in Hefner, and perhaps to a lesser extent in Leary
as well.  Interestingly, the major Beat generation figures (excepting
Kerouac) moved past all that.  I think because they were tapped into
something much deeper than mere rebellion.