There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them.
Right after Christmas of 1963, leaving Sally at her parents' house in Manhasset on Long Island, I made my first trip to Millbrook, up the gentle curves of the lovely Taconic Parkway, through Westchester and past my childhood village of Crestwood, amidst a snowy landscape, in my topaz convertible, with a bottle of blackberry brandy at my side.
Millbrook was a pretty, bright, white, small town with lots of big trees, the slushy central street of which I hissed through in a matter of seconds. The three-story, stone-walled Gatehouse was about a mile north of town. There was a massive portcullis in its arched entry and a fairy-tale kind of tower at the east end of the building. The whole thing was roofed with gently curved, light red, terra cotta tiles. It was lovely. As Tim had instructed, I didn't stop to announce myself at this structure, but entered the grounds by way of an open drive a few dozen yards up the road, drove over a stone bridge, and found myself in Wonderland.
From the moment of my first view of the Gatehouse, my critical faculties rapidly washed away under an overwhelming flood of approval and appreciation.
It all seemed perfect, all the way up to the Big House, potholes and broken branches included: the winding roads, the little lakes and streams, the fields, woods, and mysterious stone structures covered with snow. Everything was exactly as it should have been, beyond critique or analysis, as in a vision or a dream.
I drove through the Big House porte cochere and parked in a courtyard formed by the main building and a wing which contained the kitchen and laundry rooms, and upstairs, the former ``perfect servant'' quarters.
Inside, in the main hall in front of Maynard's mirror, which the plate-throwing Buddha of the Future would rip off five years later, I found teenage Jackie and Susan Leary, Kim Ferguson, and a bunch of younger kids taking off skates, galoshes, coats and mittens. Beautiful children with intelligent faces and happy eyes. I was expected. Tim was upstairs. Why didn't I just go right up and introduce myself?
As I climbed the red-carpeted stairs of the Big House for the first time, I felt a sense of place again, of ``eternal'' place, as in a dream.
By the time I found Tim's room I was awash with emotion, as well as blackberry brandy, and not in ideal condition to impress my host. Tim was seated at a desk, writing. We exchanged pleasantries, and Tim launched into a description of some recent discoveries in sub-atomic physics which had caught his interest. It was Bronowskian stuff, which is OK in its place. He was trying to play the two-intellectuals-meet game, which normally would have been fine with me, but I was ... stoned. I could feel tears forming. This is insane, I thought to myself. It was the first this is insane thought of a long series to come.
``I think you've forgotten how bad it is out there,'' I said.
Tim looked perplexed and apprehensive. He suggested I go downstairs and meet the other members of the household and the current visitors. He would see me at dinner.
In the next few hours I met, and without exception instantly approved, in a casting director's sense, everyone then resident in the Big House. I will list and briefly describe them, and the visitors then present as well:
Tim; without a consort at the time, an unusual circumstance.
I was somewhat surprised to learn that Lisa Bieberman, who was then managing the IFIF (International Federation for Internal Freedom) office in Cambridge, wasn't present and was not expected to become a resident. I was told that during her one and only visit to Millbrook she had insisted on a right to move in on grounds of her seniority in devotion to the cause, indefatigable diligence, unimpeachable righteousness and so forth, but had left in a highly disillusioned condition. While she was sitting in the kitchen one early morning (musing, perhaps, on the pronounced similarities between her adored Harvard lecturer and Jesus of Nazareth), the Holy One himself appeared, tousled and bleary-eyed, drew a coffee, and inquired of the assembled breakfasters, ``Jesus Christ! Do I have to fuck every girl who comes into this place?''
That did it for Lisa. She retreated to Cambridge and, and as far as I know, never returned. Soon, IFIF became her baby and hers alone. Millbrook, she often said thereafter, was ``a human zoo.''
Tim had probably been as satisfied as he ever was with his latest free hump, and only said what he said because he wanted Lisa to hear it and abandon any hope of intimidating him into conformance with her middle-class standards of ``morality.'' I have made some pretty outrageous remarks myself over the years, for the same reason, to people of Lisa's type. Why argue? It's much easier, and more fun, to demonstrate that you are a ``hopeless case'' instead.
Tim's charm, as friend and foe alike admitted, was awesome. As is often the case, I think much of it was due to his voice, which trilled and tinkled, caressing the ear with gentle melodies and punctuations, vulgarizing by comparison every competing instrument. He almost never raised it. Even when angry or malicious, the voice stayed within the limits of its charm. One might hear a hard rain of sleet or the light clash of cymbals, but never squawks, mumbles, whines or any other kind of ugly noise.
Furthermore, his voice, as if it had some separate spirit or function of its own, did not, like most voices, simply carry Tim's thoughts like a load in a cart; it often spoofed and laughed at what it was required to support, thereby anticipating and disarming the critical reactions of his audience. Much of Tim's wit relied on these disarming vocal nuances; it does not come through as well in his written words.
Many thought Tim was spoofing when he wasn't, or thought he wasn't when he was. Tim's playfulness had no consistency, no foundation in logical analysis or a stable set of values. It was simply employed to take the edge off, to provide an escape hatch, to disarm. When the natives looked restless, the master musician would shake his jingle bells, perhaps indulge in a some goofy histrionics, even take a pratfall. Everyone would smile, and write off their former doubts as ``paranoia.''
Dick Alpert; Tim's closest associate at the time, a Ph.D. in psychology like his transformed buddy, but with superior professional and social credentials. Dick had been on the faculty at Harvard, where Tim had been a visiting lecturer, renowned only as the inventor of an ingenious and novel paper-pencil test of personality factors then in use by the California penal system. Dick was the son of a bloated plutocrat who had been the president of the New Haven Railroad while Dick was at Harvard. The tedium of academic life had been greatly relieved, Dick gleefully told me, by his living in a private railroad car with a teenage brother and sister team who provided both service and recreation, day and night. ``Art,'' Dick said, a look of bemused delight suffusing his open and jovial countenance as he reminisced about the wonders of his fortunate life, ``I didn't know what to do to whom first.''
Dick didn't have an official companion at the time either.
Ralph Metzner, Ph.D.; a psychologist and biochemist in his late twenties. A neat, dry, scholarly man who made neat, dry, scholarly comments but rarely spoke at length. Ralph was married at the time to
Susan; a classic, pretty, blond American Girl who seemed soft and childlike in contrast to Ralph's Germanic seriousness. Somehow, Ralph projected an aura of conventionality and conformity no matter how unconventional, and even illegal, the activities in which he was engaged. He had the makings of a ``master criminal'' in this respect. Every time I talked to Ralph I was acutely reminded of the dutiful grinds who had made up my circle of friends at Concordia, my Lutheran prep school in Bronxville. Cynical to a fault in private, they had all behaved like perfect robots in public and had routinely collected A's in every subject while I flunked, or barely passed, everything in sight.
Jackie and Susan Leary; both cute kids: 16 and 15 or 15 and 14 or somewhere in that happy bracket. They were happy then, and I don't think their father's oddities, our internal community conflicts or their experience with psychedelics made them unhappy in the days to come. To the extent that they did become screwed up later, the terrorism of their religious community by the American mind police and the relentless persecution and vilification of their father and their way of life by the Sado-Judeo-Paulinian scum of the earth are entirely to blame.
Maynard Ferguson; a famous band leader whom I had never heard of, which astonished him. Perhaps the sanest guy in the place. Charming wife, Flo; extremely super-charming daughter Kim, 13; son, 6; baby, 2.
The visitors were:
An aging, blond blues singer, said to be even more famous than Maynard, but whose name I didn't recognize and can't remember. She looked sad, wore beautiful clothes, and said little. I think she was even drunker than I was, which was pretty far gone as the evening advanced. Not only was there an open bar (a year later, every bottle would have disappeared in fifteen minutes, to be guzzled at once or hidden in self defense) but I also had my usual pint of brandy stashed in the john under the stairs on the first floor.
The aforementioned
Lisa Bieberman; Lisa, it turned out later, had been having exclusively ``Christian'' trips on LSD, or so she interpreted them. In 1971 she had one of the regular kind, and promptly wrote a bulletin to her subscribers in which she renounced acid for Jesus. Lisa, dark of eye and hair, was intense, persistent, and just as impervious to popular opinion as she was to logic. A born slave, she worked her hairy little ass off for whatever she believed in.
Allen Atwell; a professor of art at Cornell. He was preparing for his first ``session,'' as trips were called in those days, to be held in the tower room, the highest room in the house, that very evening. Allen, who looked like Abraham Lincoln after a hard night anyway, appeared particularly resigned at the time.
I went to take a look at the tower room (we will get back to the other visitors) and after many a twist and turn through dark corridors carpeted in worn red plush, I found it at the top of a small spiral staircase. There were windows all around and I could see the lights of Millbrook twinkling in the distance over a landscape of moonlit snow and dark masses of fir and pine. Two fat candles were burning, and some incense, and a cheery fire in a cheery fireplace. Oriental rugs. A low bed. A statuette of Buddha. A statuette of Shiva dancing on Yama, as usual. Trays of candy and nuts and fruit. A copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. A copy of the I Ching. From a speaker in the corner came the drone of a Zen chant, not too loud, and quite pleasant, it seemed to me.
Tim's basic method in those days, I later found out, was to attempt to structure other people's LSD experience in terms of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the most paranoid and supernaturalist version of the most degenerate form of ``Buddhism'' known to mankind, namely, Tibetan Lamaism.
It's great stuff for the social control of an ignorant peasantry, and that's about it. A first-class horror show to terrify the kiddies into mindless obedience. An infallible Priest-King. Ruthless taxation to build gigantic edifices for the religious bureaucracy. Institutionalized buggery (``celibacy''). Why go so far afield when we have so much of that so much closer to home, like in Massachusetts?
Many people who never have visionary experience on LSD learn just as much as those who do, if not more. Elaborate embellishments, crazy or not, tend to distract attention from the present and stagnate thought in a morass of enigmatic imagery.
A succession of fantastic spectacles is all well and good, but people must learn to ask the right questions before they can get the right answers. Preposterous stories and garish interior decorations never sent any steamboats up the Ganges.
As decor, I like first-class Oriental art and, as metaphor, it's often instructive also, but you don't need metaphors if you have the thing itself, and the thing itself is psychedelic experience.
Novice trippers were heavily ``guided'' in those days, or, to be more accurate, people, me included, thought they could and should be. It seems reasonable but it isn't. Ralph Metzner was to ``guide'' Allen Atwell.
Jack Spratt; (I can't remember his name). Jack was a ``rich drunk from Syracuse'' as Tim put it. My university town. Fat, intelligent, about 45, the only person present wearing a tie. He was there to be ``cured,'' and was waiting for his second trip. On his first, he had by no means surrendered his bad habit as a result of meeting the Lord of Death face-to-face. On the contrary, perhaps.
Albert Mole; can't remember his name either. A large, flabby and fuzzy clinical psychologist from Buffalo, who was my first introduction to the foil or scapegoat archetype usually present in every Psychedelian community. Would that every one of them were as bumbling, foolish, and harmless as Mole. As Ramakrishna said of his nasty cousin, who was always hanging around, when his disciples would ask him why he patiently endured such an obnoxious presence, such characters ``thicken the plot,'' and it is usually a good idea to leave well enough alone. As often as not, the replacement, and a replacement seems to be inevitable, will be twice as bad as the original. Don't put too much pressure on your casting system.
Mole's specialty was ferreting out the presumably diseased and clandestine psychological forces at work in the place. I don't think he knew how to do anything else.
At one point I mentioned to him that I was having the most fantastic and delightful experience of my life, although I hadn't taken any drugs. He replied that he thought everyone was certainly very friendly, but he couldn't approve, for example, the obvious seduction of a teenage boy, glancing suggestively towards Dick and Jackie who were sprawled out in earnest converse under the soft and twinkling radiance of a magnificent demonstration that a gentle joy can be found in the Gothic and grotesque (a 12-footer). Mole never relaxed, and finally fled. It's impossible for a psychologist or psychiatrist to hang on to his usual role in an intelligent Psychedelian community unless he is very good at it, which is just as rare as being very good at tennis or piano playing, and has had a major experience himself.
Straight newspaper reporters and such are usually disabled for the similar reasons. Both cynical and inquisitive, they are fixated on discovering what is ``really happening,'' but no matter how ingenious the questions or ingratiating the style, no cross examination will ever reveal anything that will satisfactorily explain, in the terms with which they are familiar, all of the puzzling talk and nuances of feeling and conduct they witness.
The hardest part to swallow, often as not, for a professional shrink, is the general high spirits and good-natured camaraderie which prevail. The jokes, frequently self-deflationary, conflict with his most cherished categorizations of human nature. There is so much honesty and spontaneity that he begins to think the whole thing is a put-on. It's like Henry Miller's judgment on his clique of Jewish admirers, so unlike him in their personal preoccupations and literary styles: ``They just can't believe it, A HAPPY GENTILE!''
I think Mole was deeply offended by Dick's blithe spirits and unabashedness. Where was all the tortured self-analysis and morbid speculation one Jewish psychologist had every right to expect from another?
It came out later.
Mole could usually be found in the kitchen, nursing a drink, where he brought up, one after another, every historical and theoretical model and just plain silly notion he could think of in the hope one of them would be accepted by the rest of us as the way to understand psychedelic experience, so he could then dismiss the whole thing as an imitation, probably shoddy, of something else, or not worth bothering about for some other reason.
He seemed to wither visibly every time someone insisted, as they invariably did, that although there were parallels, the experience was really incapable of being understood or appreciated by the uninitiated. The terrible burden which this truth, combined with demonstrations of non-harmfulness, places on the flattened and homogenized products of America's psychiatrist and psychologist mills cannot be overestimated. I think most of the anti-Psychedelian academic cant, and the slovenly ``research'' designed to support such cant, is prompted by the terror which grips these wimps at the thought of being expected to take the stuff themselves. I think Mole, maintaining his defenses against this dreadful possibility, quickly dismissed me as a credulous fool. (Either you are a credulous fool or I am a coward, therefore you must be a credulous fool.) I was left mostly in the company of my natural ally, Jack Spratt, the only other heavy boozer present.
On the late return of Ralph, Susan, Dick, Jackie and Kim, all in a cheery mood with skates slung over their shoulders after a long game of hockey on one of the ponds, Mole shrank once again. ``Are they pretending to be normal?'' he probably asked himself.
To my expressions of appreciation of the healthy-minded, happy atmosphere which prevailed, Jack Spratt replied, ``I've got to admit these people know how to make a person feel at home, but I don't go in for all this Boy Scout stuff. Make my own bed and help with the dishes? I have always been happy to pay for that kind of service.'' It was clear that Jack regarded me as a fellow patient in a strange and very badly managed psychiatric hospital, so I told him about my mescaline trip.
``I guess I want to see the Clear Light or achieve Enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it,'' I said, capitalizing those nouns and tossing down another belt.
``I don't go along with all that stuff,'' Jack replied, and refilled my glass and his own.
Later, Maynard told me that during one of his all-night parties in the large room below the tower, during which it was not unknown for a certain carefree abandon to overtake the participants, who might then, as like as not, disport themselves, whatever their age or sex, in a manner inconsistent with prevailing middle-class American mores, Jack Spratt had briefly appeared at the open door, having descended from the tower, where he was having his first trip.
``He just stood there gaping at us like he couldn't believe his eyes,'' Maynard chortled. ``Then he said, `Christ, it's crazy enough up there but down here it's completely insane' and went back up to the tower.''
Susan Leary showed me to my room, one of eight or nine in the servants' wing over the kitchen and laundry. Everything was neat and clean. I unpacked and took a bath across the hall in a deep, enameled-iron, old-fashioned tub.
Conversation at dinner, which was served at a long table (with legs) with everyone seated on chairs (rather than on the rug), was as animated, natural, amusing and educational as anything in my experience with dinner table conversations. Mole wearily punched away at Tim but, after days of failing to connect, it was pretty clear that he no longer had much heart for it. Tim would laugh at Mole's comments and dryly and slyly make a remark which would not directly answer what Mole had said but instead undercut him somehow, sometimes in two or three different ways, making whatever Mole had said seem ridiculous and unworthy of serious consideration. I was impressed by Tim's display of rhetorical skill, and did not think Mole deserved any better treatment than he got.
Tim was never reluctant to deliver snap judgments, like an undergraduate psychology student, when he thought the occasion and the person seemed to call for it. It was a habit I shared. When not being paid for my professional services, I see no reason to deny myself the same liberty to bandy ideas around which everyone else enjoys. ``Judicious'' or even ``sober'' discourse did not prevail. One might shoot the shit with carefree abandon and not be held to account for every minor error or self-contradiction.
Everyone (except Mole) was making the standard upper-class assumption about one another's morals and mores: you are an honorable and well-intentioned person until proven otherwise.
As (in the best of times) in the House of Commons, so long as this assumption is maintained, people may flatly contradict each other as to fact or theory, argue endlessly about what is logical and what isn't, call an opponent's motives, or even his sanity, into question, and even express moral disapproval, in the sense of differing moral interpretation, without anyone's essential dignity being threatened in the slightest. Even one stupid and/or ignorant and/or deranged person in such a group drastically degrades its quality, like a fly in one's soup. Being an intellectual isn't necessary, but being intelligent certainly helps a lot.
I didn't know it but this delightful scene was already doomed, because Tim had decided to play it as a politician rather than as a scientist or philosopher. Charming, modest IFIF was to be crushed beneath the iron heel and the grand and mysterious Castalia Foundation erected in its place. Metzner was pushing the books of Herman Hesse, a virtually humorless fantast of hermetic mysteries and grandiose hierarchical societies, who was not well known in America at the time, as a source of wisdom for us all. (Some of Hesse's books are worth reading, I must add.) Soon, almost all Psychedelians would be oriented towards appealing to popular tastes, ``reaching'' the public, ``molding'' opinion, and changing, or preventing change in, the laws.
The headquarters of a popular revolutionary movement cannot be run according to upper-class social standards because it is not a good image for the troops. The politics of the Psychedelian revolution, as Tim saw clearly and early, would be like selling beer, not champagne. Support would come from many odd quarters but the objective, as in all great revolutions, would be to ``capture the hearts and minds'' of the only class with hearts and minds as yet uncaptured; the young.
The point of view expressed in my Neo-Psychopathic Character Test was something of a novelty then and it may have had some effect on Tim, confirming opinions he already held about the desperate condition of the old culture and the direction in which one ought to look for help.
Allowing visitors to drop in and out at all hours of the day and night was a pain in the ass, but Tim could not, as a good politician, prevent it. Towards the end, he withdrew to the third floor and had a private kitchen installed but the public image he projected was usually one of utter accessibility.
In the beginning, though, it was a high-class show and the memories I retain of Millbrook as it was then, although many satisfactory things happened later, are lit by a special and magical light, like the memories of the Christmases of childhood, or scenes intensely imagined in one's most cherished works of fiction.
Tim, Ralph and I went for a walk late in the evening.
Late in our conversation, which was pretty philosophical, I asked, ``Tim, is anything more important than anything else?''
Tim said nothing for a moment and then pointed to a snow-laden branch hanging down in the roadway.
``Look at the way the snow shines in the moonlight. Beautiful, isn't it?''
Evasive, yes, but wrong, no, since whatever is right in front of your nose, so to speak, is always the most important thing. But it wasn't the branch that was occupying my attention at the moment I asked the question. It was Tim, and it was Tim who was the most important thing in my world at the time, and he should have said so.
But that is a hard thing to say to anyone.
I was put in charge of Allen Atwell's music program that night, which amounted to no more than taking records from an approved collection and putting them on the turntable, in a room below the tower. Every now and then Ralph would pop in and ask that something be changed, or to turn the volume up or down. We started off with ragas and Zen chants and such and followed with Beethoven. After an hour or so, Ralph announced Allen didn't want any music at all, so I split for the kitchen.
Musical tastes tend to go through some radical changes as people get higher and higher. Indian music seems to help stabilize a high because it in no way encourages you to notice the passage of time, or better, to notice time has stopped passing and instead is sort of loitering around shooting the shit with space.
``That time which we improve, or which is improvable,'' as Thoreau said, ``is neither past, present, nor future.''
When seriality re-establishes itself, as it were, taste seems to depend on what kind of trip you're on, and music problems, if any, are usually the result of idiots controlling what is being played, a role often conceded to them by deaf custom.
When some kid puts on the latest rock star, a record he and his friends have been listening to raptly and repetitiously on the lesser sacrament, the room will often empty in minutes. The early Dylan pieces and almost all of the Beatles hold up well (what more can I say?) but rare indeed is the devotee of screaming adolescent anguish who can tolerate his favorites when he is on the Supreme Sacrament, which doesn't mean he isn't willing to put this garbage on for everyone else's elucidation while he himself departs, perhaps to listen to the Music of the Spheres in some quiet nook.
Bad music doesn't just cause people to scatter. It is also one of the few things, aside from active malice, which can directly and reliably cause bad trips. When someone flips, check out the music being played or what has just been played. Often it will be an exhibitionist simpleton making millions from his contemporaries by moaning, groaning, and shrieking about how fucked-up he is. This may be reassuring when you are straight, but on acid, oddly enough, it tends to put you on a bummer. Similarly, older people frequently like sad, romantic songs involving wails from jails by down-hearted quails, and the like, when they are straight, but if they are allowed to play such stuff on a trip either everyone will scatter or gloom will prevail.
Haines, who was patient with kid music under ordinary circumstances, smashed quite a few records on trips during the years I knew him. He would point out that the person who put the record on was no longer present, and since he apparently didn't like the record any more than Haines did, he felt justified in disposing of it as he pleased.
Good point.
Late that night, as I was sitting around the kitchen mulling things over with Spratt, Atwell drifted in like a ghost, his big brown eyes shining and dilated.
``How did it go?'' I asked.
``Beautiful, beautiful ...'' Allan said, putting some coffee on. ``But I seem to have switched sides. My left side is now my right side and my right side is my left side.''
We didn't know what to say to that.
``As a matter of fact, I think I left part of myself up in the tower. I have to go back and get it.'' He drifted out of the room.
I got up and turned off the burner under the coffee pot. Although still determined to do it, I was becoming seriously apprehensive about taking acid. Strange visions were OK, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to know which side is which. And, if at all possible, I like to have all of myself in one place at the same time. I went to bed.
The next morning I went to Manhasset to pick up Sally, and returned. What the hell. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And the whole business seemed saner, somehow, with my better half at my side.
Sally's one and only visit to Millbrook was not a success. She was terrified, not by the presence of acid and marijuana, but by the people and the setting, and she stayed in our room almost all of the day and evening. It was ``just too much.'' Her first words in the car the next morning when we drove away were, ``Did you see the dresses on those girls?''
Sally's father was Conservator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and she was descended on both sides, Peases and Jewetts, from the owning and ruling classes of colonial New England. We later sold some documents with Paul Revere's and Daniel Webster's signatures on them. I wouldn't say her parents were rich, exactly, although their friends certainly were, but Sally either ignored or was aversive to distinctions of money, power, intellect and even taste. She liked ordinary things to the point of being virtually ambitionless, an appealing trait in some ways, but exasperating in other ways.
Billy's sister, Peggy, and a friend had come over for drinks and dinner in $1,000 designer evening dresses or whatever and that was ``too much.'' Dick Alpert wandering around the house looking through ``psychedelic spectacles,'' a tiny strobe just then invented (whatever happened to it?) was ``too much.'' Almost everything she saw at Millbrook seemed to be ``too much,'' which was Sally's favorite superlative phrase anyway, and I later managed to decipher what she meant by it. By ``too much'' she meant too much. This did not bode well.
Susan, our 3-year-old, complicated matters also. If we moved in, and I had no paying job, Sally would have to get one, and all kinds of complications would arise.
Very cautiously, Tim, Dick and Ralph and I had circled around the subject. Assuming I could find a way to support myself and my family, and started gobbling the stuff the way they did, and if Sally decided that it wasn't ``too much'' after all, well, it looked like a cinch, sort of.
The most essential requirement, congeniality, was certainly present to an astonishing extent and everyone seemed to recognize it. I just fit in somehow and that was all there was to it. It seemed inevitable the relationship would persist and deepen. Do not, and should not, birds of a feather flock together? Of course we should, if only to squawk among ourselves in a language we can all understand and to scare off birds of other feathers who seek to invade our nests and devour our children.
``When,'' it seemed, was the question and I had resigned myself to the possibility that it might be the question for a long time. But, who was to say? Maybe some hospital or ``school'' for retardates in the area was looking for a clinical psychologist who would work for peanuts. Maybe this, maybe that.
We went back to our rented house in the tiny Adirondack community of Star Lake, where we had moved from Edwards, and I immediately started writing a fantastic novel about the adventures of one Christian H. Christian, who visits the headquarters of ``The Flower Fiends'' and is transported into other realms. I sent a few pages to Tim at Millbrook every other day. It was pretty good in spots (I have since destroyed it) but didn't really make it. But neither did Tim, Dick and Ralph's conversion of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a copy of which Tim sent me a month or two later.
According to Tim, this bowdlerized ``translation'' of the Lamaist scripture was to be the first of a series which would include Alice in Wonderland and Dante's Inferno. The latter, Tim thought, would particularly please me, although why he thought so he didn't say.
The fact is that I had then and have now a low opinion of Dante. I can say with Blake: ``Dante saw devils where I saw none.''
And even leaving content aside, I just can't find any evidence of literary genius. I see it in Poe and Baudelaire without any trouble, however alien their ways of looking at things are from my ways. If Dante's supposed genius is for real, it can't all be all lost in translation. So where in hell is it?
This may have been the first instance of Tim projecting his neuroses on me, a Freudian mechanism which would balloon to gigantic proportions in times to come.
I knew nothing of the ``infernal aspects'' of psychedelic experience which are so garishly depicted in The Tibetan Book of the Dead but, I thought at the time, since my full-scale visionary productions amounted to a measly 15 hours or so, a trifle compared to the hours logged by the mighty of Millbrook, I felt that I could only politely question, not assault, as I have since, this barbaric, stupid, ignorant, crazy and evil book.
On the evidence of my experience and the experience reported to me by a sample I think highly representative, I can now say that truly menacing visions almost never occur on acid trips, and the unpleasant spectacles which are sometimes seen, the ``cartoon freakies'' and such, amount to less than two percent of overall viewing time and have much less emotional weight than the standard entertainments for children shown every day on television in the great American Insane Asylum.
On the other hand, if you insist on listening to A Night on Bald Mountain in a rat-infested cellar with crazed and crooked companions recently recruited from 42nd Street bistros, all bets are off, and all bets are off if you prepare for your trip by reading ``that stupid book of Leary's,'' as John Lennon called it.
Why did Tim go out of his way to evoke these images at the beginning of his Psychedelian career? Ralph and Dick, I was told by Ralph, had merely ``signed off'' on the thing, because Tim asked them to do it to maintain an appearance of collegiality.
The more I learned, the more inexplicable Tim's pushing of the TBD at the very start of things appeared. It was as if he deliberately and with malice aforethought polluted the Psychedelian cultural stream at its source and gave half the people in Psychedelian society (John Lennon being a notable example of a good recovery) a bad set to start out with.
For years afterwards, kids told me they had, as novices, attempted to use the TBD as a ``guide,'' and every one of them reported unnecessary anxiety, disillusionment and eventual frustration and exasperation, for which, in most cases, at least at first, they had blamed themselves, not Tim or the book.
It's true Tim had been brought up as a Sado-Judeo-Catholic, with the usual consequences, and for a short time early in his Psychedelian career had imagined his ``head was melting and running down'' over his shoulders (personal communication) so I don't accuse him of projecting darkness when all was sweetness and light within. Even so, why push it?
Lamaism bears about the same relation to genuine Buddhism that the Book of Revelations bears to the genuine Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and The Gospel According to Thomas, that is to say, almost no relation whatever.
I bought a pound of ``Heavenly Blue'' morning glory seeds, which were becoming popular because they were legal. Baby Hawaiian woodrose seeds are much easier to prepare, having about 25 micrograms of lysergic acid per seed compared to one or two mics in Ipomoea seeds, but neither is as good as the New Reliable. Both nice plants for the porch, though, and if you want to experiment with these sacraments, remove the shells! As in the case of the humble peanut, it's the seeds inside you're after. The human gut is not designed to digest shells. On seeds one night, I had another visionary trip. In contrast to the mescaline blast, it was ``dreamy'' in the sense which implies vagueness or abstraction, although I wasn't asleep or sleepy at the time it was happening.
There were three distinct worlds, but all I retained were fragmented memories (I remembered more the first few days following): a scene in which, on a beam of light, I entered the kitchen of a sort of tower dormitory in a world-of-the-future to remove a hammer from an ice tray; and a fantastic curtain that fell during what was clearly an intermission, depicting thousands of birds in flight in a sky of brightest blue.
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