Via Prism of Threads
An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drugstore safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Another Gem from the Archives: The Legendary 1973 BBC Hell's Angels Documentary.
While we're in reposting mode, it's surely time to revisit this all-time gem of almost too good to be true unintentional comedy. It first surfaced on Adam Curtis' excellent blog about two years ago, and that was the only place you could watch it for a while. Then an upload appeared on youtube and did the rounds (I think it was on Dangerous Minds at any rate.) It's still one of the funniest damn things I've ever seen on the internet:
The Blues Accordin' to Lightin' Hopkins (Les Blank, 1968.)
I'm re-posting this movie for a couple of reasons. First of all, the upload I posted before was in two parts, and is now defunct. Secondly, the director Les Blank passed away earlier this year. Mainly, though, because it's a really great little film, and well worth your time if you haven't stumbled on it before:
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Religion Was Being Born/Down in Monterey: DA Pennebaker's Monterey Pop (1968)
The Monterey International Pop Music Festival of June 1967 has been somewhat eclipsed in the collective memory banks by the other big rock festivals of that decade: the "biblical, epical" scene of Woodstock so thoroughly documented in Michael Wadleigh's brilliant movie of the same name, the apocalyptically grim vibes and tragedy of the Altamont Free Concert, and so on. But Monterey was the precursor of all the big rock festivals, a truly seminal event that captured the countercultural wave in it's first full, giddy ascent. Monterey introduced Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Ravi Shankar, Laura Nyro, and Janis Joplin to a wider US audience for the first time. Hendrix' set famously culminated in the destruction of his guitar by fire, in a performance at first blatantly sexualized and then solemnly religious; Columbia Records immediately signed Janis Joplin on the basis of her performance with Big Brother and the Holding Company. At the behest of George Harrison, Ravi Shankar played before a western audience for the first time, and Hugh Masekela and Otis Redding also got to do their thing before a larger, whiter crowd than ever before. Woodstock was on a much larger and more confrontational scale, but for many, Monterey easily trumps its iconic bigger brother in terms of music and performance.
A movie of the Monterey festival was shot by verite wizard DA Pennebaker. Pennebaker had already impressed Jean-Luc Godard with his documentary of the 1960 Wisconsin Primary between John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, and created an intimate and surreal portrait of Bob Dylan in the maelstrom of his growing fame and lionization in Dont Look Back. Pennebaker described his approach towards filmaking as "records of moments", "half soap operas", and "semi-musical reality things". It hardly needs to be said that Pennebaker could shot the shit out of a concert, and that's exactly what he did here. I recently discovered a full upload of Monterey Pop on youtube, and was knocked out by almost all the performances. I'm going to link to the film on youtube below, but as a teaser, here's Eric Burdon and the Animals' propulsive and catchy celebration of the event in song:
You can watch Monterey Pop on youtube here. Get it while it's hot - it mightn't be there forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monterey_Pop
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Only God Forgives.
It
would probably be understating the case to say that Only God Forgives hasn’t been as warmly received as its predecessor
Drive. In 2011, everybody seemed to love Drive, or at least love its soundtrack,
or love Ryan Gosling, then in the pre-backlash stage of his burgeoning stardom. A lot of critics admired the movie for
bringing a kind of realism back to the American crime/action genre – which must
say something about how untethered from reality that genre had become, since Drive was a weird kind of cinephilic
fairy-tale/fever dream that seemed to exist as much in the mind of its autistic
protagonist as anywhere else. Only God Forgives, in contrast, after a
boisterous premier at Cannes, hasn’t reviewed nearly as well, with its detractors
evincing a sense more of offence than
simple dislike. (The Vulture’s David Edelstein thought it was
“about the worst fucking thing I’ve ever seen”, for whatever that’s worth.) Most reviewers have granted the film some
stylistic props, but lamented its perceived hollowness, lack of narrative
sophistication, and sparse character development. This critical consensus, as far as I can see
it, is wrong and wrong-headed. Only God Forgives is one of the most
immersive and hypnotic theatre experiences since Gasper Noe’s similarly
beautiful and harrowing odyssey Enter the Void – a work of magnificent formalism that evokes memories of David Lynch,
Dario Argento, John Pierre Melville, and some of the screen’s most wilful and
hermetic dreamers.
Only God Forgives is a pulpishly brutal
revenge tale, comically unsubtle Oedipal psychodrama, and oddly straight-faced
parable about submission to the will of God, all rolled into a beautiful and
repulsive cinematic tone poem. The
revenge plot hinges around the death of Billy Thompson, a loathsome US
expatriate drug dealer in Bangkok. Billy is killed by the father of an underage
prostitute he has brutalized and murdered – a revenge killing facilitated by
the imposing and stony-faced Lieutenant Chang.
Gosling plays his brother Julian, who runs a kick-boxing club in the
city largely as a front for the family’s narcotics trade. Gosling, as widely reported, plays the part
as a study in astringent minimalism and outward imperturbability. (In the snippets I saw in trailers, I thought
Gosling’s minimalism looked overcooked and overfamiliar, but in the context of
the whole film, it was perfectly appropriate and effective.) Though practically mute, a great deal is
conveyed about Julian’s character in the early part of the movie. He is in an unorthodox relationship with a
beatifically gorgeous prostitute (played by Rhatha Phongam), in which his role
is strictly passive and voyeuristic.
Julian is haunted by a prophetic vision of Lieutenant Chang, and by
nightmares of wondering through fluorescent corridors to darkened doorways
which threaten dismemberment and castration.
Not in great mental shape, all in all.
The
film’s gargantuan Oedipal “subtext” then arrives in the form of Julian’s mother
Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas, gleefully subjecting the middle-class propriety
of her image to raw alcohol and a zippo lighter.) Sigmund Freud’s theory of the primordial
sexual psychodrama does not enjoy much respectability in psychiatric or
philosophical circles today – but the cinema has always taken to it with a
peculiarly riotous abandon. One of the
most memorable non-characters in the history of cinema is of course Norman
Bates’ deceased mother. Psycho captured America’s post-war
Freudian boom at the height of its mesmeric power, and the movie’s final
sequence consecrated the psychoanalyst as its true hero and oracle. Two years later, John Frankenheimer produced
the Cold War classic The Manchurian
Candidate, which turns out to be at heart another torrid Oedipal
hothouse. Laurence Harvey’s brainwashed
assassin is mind-controlled both by his Communist handlers AND his domineering
mother, played by Angela Lansbury.
(Remarkably, Lansbury was only THREE years older than Harvey at the
time.) The film deftly interweaves the
ideas of familial and ideological control.
Harvey’s character is unable to have a normal sexual relationship due to
his mother; finally the spell is broken when his love interest arrives at a
costume party dressed as the Queen of
Diamonds, inadvertently the same image which his mother uses to hypnotise
and control him. His sexual liberation
is the beginnings of his ideological rebellion, which culminates in the
assassination of his mother instead of the proposed target. The cinema’s fascination with the Oedipal
complex continued into the 70s and beyond, finding a particularly lively
expression in the films of the Italian horror auteur and Hitchcock devotee
Dario Argento, particularly his 1975 classic Profondo Rosso. There are
two 80s Oedipal movies which warrant mention, since they come from directors
with a particular significance to Refn.
In 1986, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet
turned the coming of age story into a veritable Oedipal onslaught, and
introduced us to Frank Booth, a character few would relish celebrating Mother’s
Day with. Finally, in 1989, Alejandro
Jodorowsky turned the Oedipal nightmare into a literal three-ring circus in the
bloody brilliant Santa Sangre. (Sangre’s
monstrous, vengeful mother and preoccupation with hands are distinctly echoed
in Only God Forgives.)
Julian,
then, is the latest in a long cinematic tradition of Oedipal train wrecks going
all the way back to Bates’ Motel.
(Whether this speaks to some inherent cinematic appeal in the trope, or
to the preponderance of psychologically maladroit males among our great
directors is open to debate. One
suspects a little of both.) Like
Harvey’s mind- and matriarchally controlled character in The Manchurian Candidate, Gosling’s Julian is unable to develop a
normal relationship with a woman; hence his passive, unconsummated dalliance
with the prostitute Mai. We learn
indirectly that Crystal coerced Julian into murdering his father with his bare
hands back in America, resulting in Julian’s suffocating sense of guilt, and
the film’s persistent association of hands and arms with guilt and sexual
anxiety. Julian, then, is an innately
good character who has been warped and corrupted by his past and upbringing,
and the film charts his struggle to break away from his mother’s domineering
and toxic influence, and act instead autonomously and according to his
conscience. (Oddly, this redemptive
aspect of the movie was widely ignored by the many commentators who stressed
instead its supposed amorality and nihilism.)
In order to break free from his mother’s influence, however, Julian must
cultivate a different kind of passivity; he must acquiesce to a higher
order. This is where, in a film not
averse to big, blunt symbols, God enters the picture.
The
hellish world of Only God Forgives
has a moral order, but it is not a modern, societal kind of legalistic
morality. Instead, the movie’s
heightened, operatic universe harks back to the God of the Old Testament, to
the implacable retribution of the Greek Furies,
and to an idea of moral order as a kind of natural force. This natural force is embodied in the movie
by the figure of Lieutenant Chang. Chang, it is constantly suggested, is no
ordinary man. For some reason, it took
me a second viewing to notice that he produces his sword of justice virtually
out of thin air. Chang cannot be evaded
and he cannot be defeated. If you are to
be judged by him, the movie stresses, the only power you possess lies in the
ability to accept that judgement with equanimity and dignity. Only through this lies the possibility of
forgiveness and redemption. Julian shows
his better, god-like instincts early on in the film when he “forgives” his
brother’s killer, but when Crystal arrives, she pushes him into a conflict with
Chang which he knows is unjust and unwinnable.
In this sense, Only God Forgives
resembles the old allegorical device of the
psychomachia, or conflict of the soul in which the warring elements of the
psyche are given an external form. The
movie’s conflict and tension derives from placing Gosling’s passive “hero”
between the yin and yang of Chang and Crystal.
Julian breaks free from his mother by sparing Chang’s child; the actual
physical defeat is left to Chang. Refin
seems to relish subverting and skewering the traditional role of the leading
man and hero. In Drive, he gave us a childlike, romantic psychopath; in Only God Forgives, a man whose physical
strength hides his inner passivity and impotence, and who must break away from
the Mother only in order to make abeyance to the Father. In the concluding sequence, Julian offers his
hands – the symbols of his outward strength and interior shame – willingly to
Chang’s sword.
The
narrative of Only God Forgives is
thus simple but hardly simplistic. As to
the complaint regarding lack of depth in characterisation, Refn’s minimalism clearly
follows after the late style of the great French noir master John Pierre Melville.
In Le Samourai, Le Circle Rouge, and Un Flic, Melville developed an abstract
genre style in which characterisation was pared down to an absolute minimum,
and characters express themselves solely through action and nuances of body
language and facial expression. Refn
also follows after Melville in recognising cinematic genre as a form of coded
and structured dreaming; genre becomes a deterministic world in which the characters
are trapped, and to whose always pre-ordained conclusion they must march like
sleep-walkers in a dream. Another of
Refn’s stylistic models clearly comes from David Lynch. Refn strikes me as one of Lynch’s more successful
imitators, largely because he borrows from Lynch’s formal technique rather than
attempting to ape the content of his films.
Refn’s biggest debt to Lynch is in terms of sound-design: both directors
use sound to create a pervasive sense of menace, of extraordinary weight and
portentousness; they are more interested in the cultivation of an atmosphere,
in the creation of an immersive experience,
than in necessarily following the conventions of coherent, realistic
narrative. The movie’s visual sense is
equally meticulous and painstakingly crafted; working with Larry Smith (Kubrick’s
collaborator on Eyes Wide Shut) Refn
has created a kind of psychedelic expressionism that recalls the gaudy and
baroque creations of Dario Argento and Mario Bava.
Regarding the Refn/Melville connection, I notice that someone has awesomely put Nightcall over Le Samourai on youtube:
Previously reviewed: Spring Breakers.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Doctor Ilusion and Contact the Star People: Two Films by Larry Carlson.
Larry Carlson is a very eclectically talented multi-media artist who produces DEEPLY trippy audiovisual collages. His best work fuses cartoons, found ephemera, washes of psychedelia, and metaphysical schlock into what feels like a full-on deep-sea dive into the collective unconscious. Here are two video art pieces to give a you a taste of his work; the second, Contact the Star People, is probably my favorite.
Visit THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF LARRY CARLSON HERE.
The Wormwood Star: A Portrait of Marjorie Cameron and her Art by Curtis Harrington, 1956.
I've been looking looking for this on the web for ages (thanks Pedro!). Marjorie Cameron is a figure of considerable mystique and fascination to devotees of the avant garde and occult in post-war America. In the 40s, she was the lover, muse, and magickal partner of rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parson, a association made notorious by her involvement along with L Ron Hubbard in the Babalon Working; subsequent to the death of Parsons, Cameron was part of a fascinating nexus of lesser known bohemians and occultists who preempted the alternative lifestyle explosion of the Beats and hippies (see Spenser Kansa's bio Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron for a breakdown of this poorly documented scene); in 1954, Cameron's presence dominated Kenneth Anger's underground classic The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. (I've blogged quite a bit about Cameron, the Babalon Working, and related scenes in the past - for example here, here, and here.)
In the whirling intrigue of all these associations, it's easy to forget that Cameron was a brilliant artist in her own right. In 1956, Curtis Harrington produced a short 16 mm portrait of Cameron. (Another of her many fascinating associates, Harrington was a protegee of the great Maya Deren, often remembered for his Val Lewton-esque feature Night Tide.) Primarily showcasing her artwork, and scored by Cameron reading her own poetry, Wormwood Star is a slight enough thing in a sense; but it is also an atmospheric, must-see glimpse of a true icon of the underground, in all her mesmeric and ever so slightly scary glory:
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Mort Garson - Big Sur
A nude silhouette, temporally unemployed between James Bond title credit sequences, cavorts in the Fourth Dimension:
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Towards the Visionary Antipodes of the Human Psyche Part 2: H.P. Lovecraft and the Door in the Wall.
The Man with Microscophical Eyes: Lovecraft, Psychedelia, and (pardon
the cliché)BEYOND.
What happens
when the spirit molecule pulls and pushes us beyond the physical and emotional
levels of awareness? We enter into
invisible realms, ones we cannot normally sense and whose presence we can
scarcely imagine. Even more surprising,
these realms appear to be inhabited.
Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
In the
previous instalment of this essay, I looked at Clarke Ashton Smith’s City of the Singing Flame as an example
of proto-psychedelic weird fiction; I argued that the details of the story strongly
suggested that the author had direct experience with a hallucinogenic drug,
most likely peyote. In this instalment,
I’m looking at H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction as a precursor to the psychedelic
experience. This is in some respects a
more challenging and interesting proposition, because while we can speculate
that Smith may have tripped, Lovecraft almost certainly didn’t experiment with mind-altering drugs of any
kind. We know this because it would
first of all have been extremely out of character, and secondly it’s pretty
hard to imagine Lovecraft, runner-up only after Kafka in the literary Olympics
of morose alienation, having anything but an apocalyptically bad experience with
mind-altering drugs. So if his work is
strongly psychedelic in character, then it must be via his dreams and
imagination alone that Lovecraft opened the Door in the Wall, and attained
visions characteristic of chemically altered states of consciousness. When people are inebriated with alcohol,
although certain predicable behavioural patterns do emerge, their thoughts
nevertheless turn around subjects individual and idiosyncratic to
themselves. What makes psychedelics more
interesting is their tendency towards a greater universality in terms of the
kinds of complex imagery, experiences, and ideas which they engender; they give
us a sense of exploring the deep structures of the human mind, where the
contingences of our personal histories and consequent personality traits tend
to evaporate. Something of this sense must also be true in
the case of the visionary artists, who, as we argued in the previous
instalment, seem to describe rather
than create the forms summoned by
their peculiarly sensitive or receptive imaginations. This idea of the visionary is evoked by the
occultist and Lovecraft-admirer Kenneth Grant in the following terms:
But there is another
faculty of human consciousness, the intuitive or “inseeing” faculty; one might
almost describe it as the fourth dimensional faculty. It is a faculty that appears sometimes in the
artist, the poet, the occultist, and in a certain kind of scientist, and it
functions also, though rarely, in almost everybody. It is epitomized on the Tree of Life by the
third sephira, Binah, the Sphere of Understanding. Not the understanding
of empirical things, but the insight into the hidden side of things made
possible by a sudden total identity of the mind with its substratum, pure
consciousness, wherein all ideas are stored and which under stands, or stands under, the mechanism of
mentation.
Also in the
previous chapter, we looked at an idea which would assume a particular
resonance to theorists of psychedelic states of mind: the suggestion that human
consciousness, instead of being a privileged observer of a single, objective
reality, may in fact in its customary operations act rather as a kind of
reducing valve. William James argued that
our regular mode of consciousness was “but one special kind of consciousness”
which was separated from other alien modes of awareness by the “filmiest of
screens.” In The Doors of Perception, Huxley stressed the idea of the reducing
valve as a kind of utilitarian adaption: our customary mode of consciousness
has evolved simply to facilitate our capacity to survive and reproduce under
the specific conditions of mammalian space-time here on planet earth. For Huxley, however, this survival mode was
merely a trickle of awareness coming down from the true source of
consciousness, which he labelled Mind at
Large. Recently, I discovered an
earlier (perhaps the earliest) expression of the basic reducing valve idea in
an unexpected source: John Locke’s 1690 empiricist treatise An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
The infinite wise
Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our senses, faculties,
and organs, to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do
here. We are able, by our senses, to
know and distinguish things; and to examine them so far as to apply them to our
uses, and several ways to accommodate the exigencies of this life. But it appears not that God intended us to
have a perfect, clear, and adequate knowledge of them; and perhaps it is not in
the comprehension of any finite being. Were
our senses altered, and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and
outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us; and, I am apt to
think, would be inconsistent with our being, or at least well-being, in this part
of the universe which we inhabit.
So, while we
can hazard an even greater certainty that Locke never Turned On, it is
interesting to note how his idea agrees almost in every particular with
Huxley’s. The world we perceive is not
the world, per se, but simply enough
of the world, and no more, to facilitate our survival and basic physical
flourishing within it. Merely alter the
senses or medium of awareness, Locke argues, and you alter the reality; the
person with the altered senses comes to inhabit an altogether different world. Locke imagines a kind of mutant with
“microscophical” eyes which are a “thousand or a hundred thousand times more
acute” than the best current microscope.
The person with such a vision has a massively increased knowledge of the
internal constitution of corporeal objects, but he or she has become marooned
in a world utterly separate from that of the rest of humanity: “nothing would
appear the same to him and others; the visible ideas of everything would be
different. So that I doubt whether he
and the rest of men could discourse concerning the objects of sight, or have
any communication about colours, their appearances being so wholly different”. Locke pre-empts what the mutants of the
psychedelic era often called the problem of re-entry; having gazed into the
mental and psychological microscope of LSD, it became difficult and sometimes
impossible to re-orient one’s self to the world of competitive and commercial
mammalian politics. The man with the
microscophical eyes cannot conduct himself, Locke tells us, to the “market and
exchange.”
The distinctly
psychedelic idea that the world we take for granted is only one particular mode
among a variety of alternative realties seems then somehow encoded in the DNA
of the whole modern empiricist project.
The empiricist philosophy has produced two primary ways of conceiving
the efficacy of human knowledge. The
more popular conception is positivistic; it asserts that by pursuing empirical
modes of inquiry, we acquire an ever more detailed and accurate picture of the
world as it really is, carefully
divested of all our merely subjective projections upon it. The popularity of this view of empiricism
derives from the undeniable successes of the empirical sciences in increasing
our understanding of the universe.
However, a contrary strain of empirical thought has always focused on
the potential limitations of human
perception over its strengths. If there
are no transcendent means of acquiring knowledge, no conceivable outside
revelation of any kind, then our perceptual apparatus becomes the sole measure
of reality; and if our capacity to know is merely a contingent by-product of a
physical process which never had acquiring abstract knowledge of the world as
its goal or endpoint in the first place, then we begin to acquire the suspicion
that the world we can know is wholly
circumscribed by the contingent circumstances of our own biological evolution. Just as our knowledge of the world begins to
swell in complexity and accuracy, so too emerges the dim suspicion that it is no
longer the world, per se, but only a
certain narrowly fixed subset of it, which our senses allow us access to. The universe itself might be utterly alien,
unknowable, and unthinkable, to our specific frame of reference; it might be,
as J.B.S. Haldane famously and brilliantly put it, not only queerer than we
suppose, but queerer than we can
suppose.
One of H.P.
Lovecraft’s great strengths as a writer is that he developed a poetic pulp
shorthand for evoking this sense of the unthinkable, unknowable Otherness that
haunts the modern conception of the universe.
In Morning of the Magicians,
Pauwels and Bergier called him “the greatest poet and champion of the theory of
parallel universes”, and in a sense the “forces from Outside” which constantly
threaten ingress into the Lovecraftian cosmos represent the queerness of the
universe which is beyond our capacity to adequately conceptualize; they
represent the multidimensional hidden order of the world which we can only
perceive where its outer edges intersect with our limited three dimensional
reality. “What do we know,” asks Lovecraft’s mad scientist Crawford
Tillinghast in From Beyond,
“of the world and the
universe about us? Our means of
receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects
infinitely narrow. We see things only as
we are constituted to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute
nature. With five feeble senses we
pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a
wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very different
the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy and
life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange,
inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers.
It is
Lovecraft’s attempts to imaginatively break through the barriers of the five
senses, aided by his intuitive use of materials culled from his hyper-vivid
dream-life, which makes his work weirdly – at times even startlingly -
prescient of the psychedelic experience.
I’m going to look first at two stories – Celephais and From Beyond,
cited above – both of which Lovecraft wrote in November of 1920.
Evidence From Beyond: DMT and the “great sense organ of sense organs.”
Celephais is a typical example of
Lovecraft’s Dunsany-influenced Dream Cycle stories. In brief, these stories posit that dreams
offer a gateway to an alternative dimension of fixed geography called the Dreamlands. There remains, of course, the fleeting world
of everyday dreams, culled from the disparate elements of the dreamer’s daylight
existence. However, anybody who is
sufficiently versed in the lore and practise of lucid dreaming can find their
way to the Steps of Deeper Slumber, which lead into the permanent, freestanding
reality of the Dreamlands. This idea
reminds us a little of the occult notion of the astral plane, or
inter-subjective mental landscape which can be navigated by the trained mental
traveller, or of Rick Strassman and Graham Hancock’s theories regarding the
freestanding, mind-independent reality of ayahuasca visions, of which more
shortly. In a sense, Lovecraft’s
Dreamlands echo one of the central ideas of this essay – that the upper tiers
of the mind are dominated by the personal history of the individual self, but
the deeper you dig, the more uniform, permanent, and universal things become. You leave behind the fleeting dreams of mere
individuals and begin to experience the archetypal dreams of whole species as
you enter what Huxley called “the visionary antipodes of the human
psyche.” (This is, of course, creative
interpretation, and the dream stories of both Dunsany and Lovecraft are also
meditations on the conflict between the imperfections of the real world and the
sometimes ambiguous attractions of the idealistic imagination.)
In Celephais, the narrator (known in the
dream world as Kuranes) wanders through the Dreamlands attempting to find again
the city of Celephais, which has become for him a kind of idyllic vision of
final happiness and repose. (This quest
for a remembered and idealized landscape is the central narrative template of
the Dream Cycle, and Lovecraft would extend the motif to novella length in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath). Following after Dunsany, the ambience of
Lovecraft’s Dreamland is predominantly in the antique pastoral mode, but things
get weird when Kuranes starts using drugs to enhance his dream questing:
In time he grew so
impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to
increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh
helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not
exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this
part of space was outside what he called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and
organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from infinity where
matter, energy, and gravitation exist.
This strange
interdimensional encounter might remind some readers – well, it reminded this
reader at any rate – of the many accounts of encounters with otherworldly
entities which have been recorded by smokers of DMT. DMT (Dimethyltryptamine)
is a powerful psychedelic compound of the tryptamine family which is found in
various plants and in trace amounts in mammals.
Indigenous shamanic cultures throughout history have extracted DMT from
plants for the purpose of ritual trance and healing, most notably in the form
of the ayahuasca brew by the natives of Amazonian Peru and elsewhere. Although most of the heavy cats tried it at
some point or another, DMT was not a significant player in the Western psychedelic
explosion of the 60s. It’s incursion
into the popular consciousness really gathered steam in the 90s, due in large
part to the influence of Terence McKenna and the small but burgeoning cyberdelic culture of the period. According to McKenna, smoking DMT ushered the
user’s consciousness into hyperspatial dimensions where contact with bizarre entities
– which he memorably labelled “the self-transforming machine elves of
hyperspace” – was commonplace.
Between 1990
and ’95, Rick Strassman conducted DEA-approved clinical research into the
effects of DMT in the University of New Mexico.
Strassman injected some 60 volunteers with DMT during that period, and
was also struck by the prevalence of contact experiences:
When reviewing my
bedside notes, I continually feel surprize in seeing how many of our volunteers
“made contact” with “them,” or other beings.
At least half did so in one form or another. Research subjects used expressions like
“entities,” “beings”, “aliens”, “guides”, and “helpers” to describe them. The “life-forms” looked like clowns,
reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures. It is still startling to see my written
records for comments like “There were these beings,” “I was being led,” “They
were on to me fast.” (DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman.)
During the
course of his study, Strassman developed several speculative and controversial
theories regarding DMT which are relevant to our continuing exegesis of
Lovecraft. First of all, Strassman
suggested that some DMT visions may not be hallucinatory, but might rather
represent an interaction of the user’s consciousness with fee-standing,
mind-independent realities of some indeterminate nature. Influenced by a mixture of modern
neurochemistry and Tibetan Buddhist doctrine, Strassman further speculated that
endogenous DMT might potentially be produced by the pineal gland, and released
into the bloodstream during deep sleep, or during traumatic near death
experiences. In doing so, Strassman had
revived Rene Descartes’ assertion that the pineal gland was the “Seat of the
Soul”, or the channel through which the immaterial consciousness communicates its
will and volition to the merely mechanical meat of the body.
The relevance
of this to Lovecraft may seem strained.
The use of drugs to enter other dimensions was a common enough motif in
weird fiction (also occurring in Frank Belknap Long’s The Hounds of Tindalos and several of Clark Ashton Smith’s
stories), and it was more a derivative from Decadent fiction and earlier works
like Thomas de Quincy’s Confession of an
English Opium Eater than a reflection of any direct experience of
narcotics. Nevertheless, it is
interesting to note that in the same month that Lovecraft wrote Celephais, he also wrote another story
with a much stronger resonance to Strassman’s theories about DMT. In From
Beyond, the narrator is called to the home of his friend Crawford
Tillinghast, an unbalanced scientist who has achieved a major breakthrough at
the cost of his sanity. Tillinghast has
developed an electronic device which emits a specific resonance wave which
allows those in its vicinity to perceive a reality undiluted by the limitations
of the five human senses. Resembling a
cross between Timothy Leary and Doctor Frankenstein, Tillinghast promises his
alarmed yet intrigued friend that the device will allow them to “see that at
which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick their ears after
midnight. We shall see these things, and
other things that no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and
dimensions, and without bodily motion peer into the bottom of creation.”
The device, we
discover, achieves its effects by stimulating the pineal gland:
“Your existing sense organs – ears first, I
think – will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected
with the dormant organs. Then there will
be others. You have heard of the pineal
gland? I laugh at the shallow
endocrinologist, fellow-parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of sense
organs – I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits
visual pictures to the brain. If you are
normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it…I mean get most of the
evidence from beyond.”
Lovecraft
scholar S.T. Joshi suggested that From
Beyond’s use of the pineal gland was probably a sardonic reference to Descartes;
wherever it ultimately derives from, the conjunction with Strassman’s theory is
doubtless wholly coincidental.
Nevertheless, for those of us who enjoy such coincidences, the
similarities do not end there. The onset
of a DMT trip is often accompanied by a deep, resonant buzzing sound, followed
by a sense of being catapulted out of ordinary reality. Note, for example, the following from
Strassman’s volunteers in DMT: The Spirit
Molecule:
There is nothing to prepare you for this. There is a sound, a bzzzz. It started off and got louder and louder and
faster and faster. I was coming on and
coming on and then POW!
It was wild. There were no
colours. There was the usual sound:
pleasant, a roar, a sort of internal hum.
Then there were these three beings, three physical forms.
These make for
an interesting comparison with the From
Beyond narrator’s description of the onset of his trip with Tillinghast’s resonator:
Then, from the furthermost regions of
remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and
unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness which made its
impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when
accidentally scratching glass.
Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught, which
apparently swept past me from the direction of the sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that
both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me an odd notion
of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of gigantic approaching
locomotive.
There’s no way
around it, Lovecraft’s attempts to imagine
what it would be like to gaze beyond the ordinary limits of the human sensorium
sound at times almost indistinguishable from a post-war flower child’s account
of a psychedelic experience. This feels
like an impressive, if incongruous achievement for a wound-up and repressed
atheist Puritan wizard writing in the 1920s:
I was now in a vortex
of sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of the room, but
from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of
unrecognisable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead
and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed
the temple-like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an
aerial ocean of light, which sent down one blinding beam along the path of the
cloudy column I had seen before. After
that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights,
sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve
or in some way lose the solid form.
Needless to
say, Tillinghast’s resonator reveals a considerable ecology of weird entities swirling
about beneath the threshold of human awareness.
Lovecraft, ever the xenophobe, evinces considerable disgust in his
description of these beings, although one suspects that they may have been here
before us:
Indescribable shapes
both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close by every
known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown, entities.
Foremost among the
living objects were great inky, jellyish monstrosities which flabbily quivered
in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and
I noted to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and
capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids.
Continued shortly.
Books cited: The Complete Fiction by HP Lovecraft, Outside the Circles of Time by Kenneth Grant, An Essay concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, and DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman M.D.
The From Beyond/DMT/Pineal Gland connection has been previously noted by Matt Cardin at Teeming Brains here.
I got the Lovecraft covers from Too Much Horror Fiction here.