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.
No comments:
Post a Comment