HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/kesey.interview

Internet Message Format | 1996-05-06 | 6KB

Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Newsgroups: alt.drugs,alt.drugs.culture,alt.psychoactives
From: [e-mail]
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 1995 22:50:26 UTC
Subject: One Crying in the Wilderness



What follows is an excerpt from  Robert Faggen's interview of Ken Kesey
published in The Paris Review, Spring 1994.  I feel that it aptly conveys
the positive power of a terrifying entheogenic experience, or what's good
about a really, really, wicked bad trip.

      ROBERT FAGGEN: After you wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, you set out
    on the bus. What did you want to explore?
      KEN KESEY: What I explore in all my work: wilderness. Settlers on this
    continent from the beginning have been seeking wilderness and its
    wildness. The explorers and pioneers sought that wildness because they
    could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight. Things
    were all owned by the same people, and all of the roads went in the same
    direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and
    new direction, and it had to do with wildness. Throughout the work of
    James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American terror. It's
    very important to our literature, and it's important to who we are: the
    terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche,
    the tornado--whatever may be over the next horizon.
      As we came to the end of the continent, we manufactured our terror. We
    put together the bomb. Now we don't even have the bomb hanging over our
    heads to terrify us and give us reason to dress up in manly deerskin and
    go forth to battle it. There's something we're afraid of, but it doesn't
    have the clarity of the terror of the Hurons or the hydrogen bomb during
    the Cold War. Now it's fuzzy, and it's fuzzy because the people who are
    in control don't want you to draw a bead on the real danger, the real
    terror in this country.
      FAGGEN: What is the "real terror" in America?
      KESEY: When people ask me about LSD, I always make a point of telling
    them you can have the shit scared out of you with LSD because it exposes
    something, something hollow. Let's say you have been getting on your
    knees and bowing and worshiping; suddenly you take LSD, and you look,
    and there's just a hole, there's nothing there. The Catholic Church
    fills this hole with candles and flowers and litanies and opulence. The
    Protestant Church fills it with hand-wringing and pumped-up squeezing
    emotions because they can't afford the flowers and the candles. The Jews
    fill this hole with weeping and browbeating and beseeching of the sky:
    "How long, how long are you gonna treat us like this?" The Muslims fill
    it with rigidity and guns and a militant ethos. But all of us know that
    that's not what is supposed to be in that hole.
      After I had been at Stanford for two years, I got into LSD. I began to
    see that the books I thought were the true accounting books--my grades,
    how I'd done in other schools, how I'd performed at jobs, whether I had
    paid off my car or not--were not at all the true books. There were other
    books that were being kept, real books. In those books is the real
    accounting of your life. And the mind says, "Oh, this is titillating."
    So you want to take some more LSD and see what else is there. And soon I
    had the experience that everyone who's ever dabbled in psychedelics has.
    A big hand grabs you by the back of the neck, and you hear a voice
    saying, "You want to see the books? Okay, here are the books." And it
    pushes your face right down into all of your cruelties and all of your
    meanness, all the times that you have been insensitive, intolerant,
    racist, sexist. It's all there, and you read it. You can't take your
    nose up off the books. You hate them. You hate who you are. You hate the
    fact that somebody has been keeping track, just as you feared. You hate
    it, but you can't move your arms for eight hours. Before you take any
    acid again you start trying to juggle the books. You start trying to be
    a little better person. Then you get the surprise. The next thing that
    happens is that you're leaning over looking at the books, and you feel
    the lack of the hand at the back of your neck. The thing that was
    forcing you to look at the books is no longer there. There's only a big
    hollow, the great American wild hollow, which is scarier than hell,
    scarier than purgatory or Satan. It's the fact that there isn't any hell
    and there isn't any purgatory, there isn't any Satan. And all you've got
    is Sartre sitting there with his momma--harsh, bleak, worse than guilt.
    And if you've got courage, you go ahead and examine that hollow.
      FAGGEN: And that hollow is, for you, the new wilderness?
      KESEY: That's the new wilderness. It's the same old wilderness, just
    no longer up on that hill or around that bend, or in that gully. It's
    because there are no more hills and gullies that the hollow is there,
    and you've got to explore the hollow with faith. If you don't have faith
    that there is something down there, pretty soon when you're in the
    hollow, you begin to get scared and start shaking. That's when you stop
    taking acid and start taking coke and drinking booze and start trying to
    fill the hollow with depressants and Valium. Real warriors like William
    Burroughs or Leonard Cohen or Wallace Stevens examine the hollow as well
    as anybody; they get in there, look far into the dark, and yet come out
    with poetry.

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