It is, of course, a thing which ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular to do next winter anyway.
22 October, 1990
My Fine-Feathered Friends:
The style of the chief boo hoo is, if not his highest, perhaps his most peculiar excellence. I know nothing with which it can be compared. The noblest models of Greek composition must yield to it. His words are the fewest and the best which it is possible to use. The first expression in which he clothes his thoughts is always so energetic and comprehensive that amplification would only injure the effect.
In Millbrook all the peculiarities of his extraordinary mind are found in the highest perfection. The aphorisms show a nicety of observation that has never been surpassed. Every part of the book blazes with wit, but with wit which is employed only to illustrate and decorate truth.
No book ever made so great a revolution in the mode of thinking, overthrew so many prejudices, introduced so many new philosophic concepts. Yet no book was ever written in a more amiable spirit. It truly conquers with chalk, and not with steel. Proposition after proposition enters into the mind, is received not as an invader, but as a welcome friend, and, though previously unknown, becomes at once domesticated. What we most admire is the vast capacity of that intellect which, without effort, takes in at once all the domains of philosophy, all the past, the present, and the future, all the errors of two thousand years, all the encouraging signs of the passing times, all the bright hopes of the coming age.
The Boo Hoo Bible, also, is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than his highness is the first of religious philosophers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worthwhile to place them. His highness is first, and the rest nowhere.
Yet, men judge by comparison. They are unable to estimate the grandeur of an object when there is no standard by which they can measure it. One of the French philosophers who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, tells us that, when he first visited the Great Pyramid, he was surprised to see it so diminutive. It stood alone in a boundless plain. There was nothing near it from which he could calculate its magnitude. But when the camp was pitched beside it, and the tents appeared like diminutive specks around its base, he then perceived the immensity of this mightiest work of man. In the same manner, it is not till a crowd of petty imitators had sprung up that the merit of the great Psychedelian genius, the chief boo hoo, is understood.
His highness adventured first. He detected the rich treasures of thought and diction which still lay latent in their ore. He refined the ancient doctrine of solipsistic nihilism into purity. He burnished it into splendor and fitted it, through the method of synchronistical analysis, for every purpose of use and magnificence. He thus acquired the glory, not only of producing the finest philosophic and mythic construction of modern times, but also of creating a language, distinguished by unrivaled melody, and capable of furnishing to lofty and passionate thoughts their appropriate garb of severe and concise expression.
Although Dr. Leary deserves condemnation when considered as a philosopher, when considered as a propagandist, he is discriminated from the likes of Houston, Grinspoon, Masters, Bakalar, Ram Dass, Hollingshead, Grof, Castaneda and Shirley McLaine by all the strong lineaments which distinguish the men who produce revolutions from the men whom revolutions produce. The leader in a great change, the man who stirs up a reposing community, and overthrows a deeply-rooted system, may be a very depraved man; but he can scarcely be destitute of some moral qualities which extort even from his enemies a reluctant admiration.
In a way, it may be said of Dr. Leary what Martin Luther said of himself, ``I am like a ripe shit and the world is a gigantic ass-hole.'' (Tisch Rede V. No. 5537.) What better metaphor, everything considered, could be extruded in either case?
The character of the men whose minds are formed in the midst of the confusion which follows a great revolution, is generally very different. They are merely, one might say, little shits.
Heat, the natural philosophers tell us, produces rarefaction of the air, a rarefaction of the air produces cold. So zeal makes revolutions and revolutions make men zealous for nothing. The little shits of whom we speak, whatever may be their natural capacity or courage, are almost always characterized by a peculiar inconstancy, an easy, apathetic way of looking at the most solemn questions, a willingness to leave the direction of their course to fortune and public opinion; a notion that one public cause is nearly as good as another, and a firm conviction that it is much better to be the hirelings of the worst cause than to suffer any inconvenience in the service of the best.
At the time when his highness first visited Millbrook, Dr. Leary had already distinguished himself in the Psychedelian movement. An engaging natural eloquence, set off by the sweetest and most exquisitely modulated of human voices, caressing manners, and brilliant wit made him the most delightful of companions. But, as a philosopher, he did not deserve the adoration which he received from those who, bewitched by his fascinating society, and indebted for all the comforts of life to his favor, revered him as the conduit for Mellon money and LSD at the Hitchcock Cattle Company at Millbrook, New York between 1963 and 1968.
In the mind of Dr. Leary, unfortunately, reason has no place at all, as either leader or follower, as either sovereign or slave. He does not seem to know what an argument is. He never uses arguments himself. He never troubles himself to answer the arguments of his opponents. It has never occurred to him, that a man ought to be able to give some better account of the way in which he has arrived at his opinions, than merely that it is his will and pleasure to hold them, that there is a difference between assertion and demonstration, that a rumor does not always prove a fact, that a fact does not always prove a theory, that two contradictory propositions cannot be undeniable truths, that to beg the question is not the way to settle it.
It is only in novels and on tombstones, that we meet with people who are indulgent to the faults of others and unmerciful to their own; and Leary, at all events, is not one of these paragons. His charity is extended most liberally to others but it certainly begins at home. In taste he is by no means deficient, but he perpetually acts against his better knowledge and often attempts to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely deceive himself.
His sins are sins against light. He trusts that what is bad will be pardoned for the sake of what is good. What is good, he takes no pains to make better. He is not disgusted by the negligence of others, and he extends the same toleration to himself. His mind is of a slovenly characterfond of splendor, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble, all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables.
It would be absurd to read the works of Leary for philosophical instruction. The utmost that may be expected from any system promulgated by him is, that it may be splendid and affecting, that it may suggest sublime and pleasing images. His scheme of philosophy is a mere daydream, a poetical creation, like the Domdanial caverns, the Swerga, or Padalon; and, indeed, it bears no inconsiderable resemblance to those gorgeous visions. Like them, it has something of invention, grandeur, and brilliancy. But, like them, it is grotesque and extravagant.
The chief boo hoo, on the other hand, is an almost solitary instance of a great man who has neither sought nor shunned greatness; who has found glory only because glory lay in the plain path of duty.
A great and terrible crisis came. A direct attack was made by a bloody tyranny on a sacred right of all men, on a right which was the chief security for all their other rights. The Psychedelians looked around for a defender.
Calmly and unostentatiously, the former psychologist placed himself at the head of his religion, and right before the face, and across the path of tyranny.
The times grew darker and more troubled. Public service, perilous, arduous, delicate, was required; and to every service, the intellect and the courage of this wonderful man were found equal. He became a debater of the first order, and fearlessly and dexterously defended his religion and the rights of all before every audience, including the Sado-Judeo-Paulinian mass murderers and serial killers of the United States Senate, who dared to hear him.
The skills which he displayed are yet to be surpassed. Sudden bursts, which come like lightning, dazzling, burning, striking down everything before them; sentences which, spoken at critical moments, decide the fate of great questions; sentences which at once become proverbs; in these chiefly lies the rhetorical power of his highness.
He governs a fierce and turbulent church, abounding in able men, as easily as he governs his own family; and the hardy sect has grown up and flourished, in spite of everything that seemed likely to stunt it, has struck its roots deep into a barren soil, and spread its branches wide to an inclement sky.
The history of the Neo-American Church is emphatically the history of progress. It is a history of constant movement of the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great religion. We see that religion, just a few years ago, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded religions of the East, such as Tibetan Lamaism, now are. We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of power-crazed Sado-Judeo-Paulinian Republicans. We see the great body of the population in a state of intellectual slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge.
In the course of 25 years, this wretched and degraded sect has become the greatest and most highly civilized church that the world ever saw; has spread her fragrance over every quarter of the country; has scattered the seeds of mighty orders and fellowships over a vast continent. There is much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action.
The entire history of the Neo-American Church is an illustration of that great truth, that it is not prudent to oppose perfidy to perfidy, and that the most efficient weapon with which men can counter falsehood is truth.
During a long course of years, the chief boo hoo, surrounded by allies and enemies whom no engagement could bind, has acted always with sincerity and uprightness; and the event has proved that sincerity and uprightness are wisdom. Kleptonian valor and Kleptonian intelligence have done less to preserve our religious empire than Kleptonian veracity.
All that we could have gained by imitating the doublings, the evasions, the fictions, the perjuries which have been employed against us is as nothing when compared to what we have gained by being the one power in the Psychedelian world on whose word reliance can be placed.
No oath which superstition can devise, no hostage however precious inspires a hundredth part of the confidence which is produced by the ``yeah, sure'' and the ``no way'' of a Neo-American clergyperson.
A people whose education and habits are such, that, in every quarter of the world, they rise above the mass of those with whom they mix, as surely as oil rises to the top of water; a people whose high and fierce spirit, so forcibly described in the haughty motto of the Church, have preserved their religious rights, during a struggle of decades, from the encroachments of wealthier and more powerful neighbors; such a people cannot be long oppressed.
Faint glimpses of truth begin to appear, and shine more and more unto the perfect day. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn. They are bright, while the level below is still in darkness. But soon the light, which at first illuminated only the loftiest eminences, descends on the plain, and penetrates to the deepest valley.
First come hints, then fragments of systems, then defective systems, then complete and harmonious systems. The sound opinion, held for a time by one bold speculator, becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority; of mankind. Thus, the great process goes on, till schoolboys laugh at both Sado-Judeo-Paulinian and Psychedelian supernaturalism and occultism, till good old country boys vote for the seizure of the property of the entire ruling class and the delivery thereof to the eternal safekeeping of the only church which represents their perpetual interest.
This great and ever-memorable struggle, between stoned and unstoned consciousness, is a struggle on the result of which are staked the dearest interests of the human race; and every man who, in the contest which in this time divides our country, distinguishes himself on the right side is entitled to our gratitude and respect.
Such a man is the sublime and incomparable chief boo hoo of the Neo-American Church!
(Prolonged and tumultuous applause. Cries of ``victory over horseshit!'' and ``tetrahydrocannabinol genes into the deoxyribonucleic acid molecules of all fruits and vegetables, with the possible exception of turnips, parsnips and persimmons, now!'')