Dropping Acid
Sunday, October 14, 2007
By John Bruce
Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Those who want to read previous installments will find them on this newspaper’s web site. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.
The history of LSD as a driving force in American culture is brief. The novelist Ken Kesey, then a graduate student at Stanford, and the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary separately began to experiment with it around 1960. By 1963, Leary and a colleague had been dismissed from Harvard due to controversy over their research; Leary then began to proselytize on campuses and in the media. However, drug arrests in 1965 and 1968, and a prison sentence that began in 1970, seriously cramped his style. Kesey, suddenly rich with royalties from his novels, toured the country in 1964 with a contingent of hippies in a bizarrely decorated school bus, also proselytizing.
The indispensable book about this period, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, centers on this tour, but it also chronicles Kesey’s second thoughts about LSD, which began to emerge around the time of his own drug arrests and jail sentence in the mid-1960s. In 1968, Kesey withdrew to a ranch in Oregon and had little more to say about acid or hippie culture. The hippies of San Francisco had already held a funeral for the movement, although the bear-hug embrace of hippiedom by the media had only started.
Beyond that, the mid-1960s message, from people like Kesey, Leary, and a defrocked Episcopal priest named Alan Watts, that LSD had beneficial effects would be radically contradicted by the Tate-LaBianca “helter skelter” murders committed in Los Angeles by Charles Manson and his followers in the summer of 1969. The Manson family, by the admissions of many of its members, regularly took LSD, as many as 50 or 100 times. Anyone who subsequently claimed LSD had good effects would need to deal with the Manson family example, and such claims quickly petered out after the murders.
But the hippie-LSD branch of the counterculture suffered a continuing series of disasters, including the Rolling Stones’ 1970 “Gimme Shelter” concert in Livermore, California, which resulted in a riot, a murder, and several other deaths. Jimi Hendrix, a musician who celebrated LSD use, died of his lifestyle also in 1970. Jim Morrison, burned out anyhow, died from the same cause a year later. In 1971 as well, Timothy Leary escaped from federal prison and eventually wound up in Algeria, no longer a remotely credible figure.
The foregoing is a roundabout way of saying, “don’t try this at home.” There was only a brief window when anyone took LSD seriously before it became plain to all but the lunatic fringe that its use tended to kill people, put them in prison, burn them out, or trivialize them. I had the good or bad fortune, whichever it was, to come of age in that brief period, and I got the opportunity to evaluate its efficacy myself. I want to say, before I say anything more, that for many years I’ve regarded taking LSD and other things I did at the time as among the sins of my youth, and especially in light of much experience since that time, I don’t think it’s a good idea for anyone to try it now.
My decision to take it, in fact, was based principally on the trust I had in Bill McMann (who, however, never did take it) and the confidence he seemed to place in Larry. Beyond that, it was simply the unmediated balderdash of Kesey, Leary, and Alan Watts. The only excuse I can offer is that I was 19 years old, and Dartmouth, after a year in which I’d looked into academics, athletics, the ROTC, and more conventional social life, had been an utter disappointment.
So what was I trying to accomplish by taking LSD? If I was trying to cure what ailed me, could I then, or can I now, explain more clearly what that implied? The answer to those questions was, in fact, changing frequently, in part because my understanding of what ailed me was also changing. During my freshman year, I was influenced most heavily by Bill McMann, and at best under his influence I thought I should be aiming at a certain maturity mixed with stoicism. If he’d stayed around, I probably would have followed a different course. Now Bill was gone, and Larry Burlingame had effectively appointed himself my mentor on the question of what ailed me. I wasn’t completely happy about this, but I did have enough respect for him to listen to what he said. I didn’t hold anyone else in that kind of regard
On top of that, I was suffering from what William James calls a “heterogeneous temperament.” In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he quotes Alphonse Daudet to illustrate what he calls “an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution”:
“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” writes Alphonse Daudet. “The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, ‘He is dead, he is dead!’ While my first self wept, my second self thought, ‘How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.’ I was then fourteen years old.
“This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!”
In my case, it would take its most irritating form when I was out on a date. “Here I am, making out with this good-looking chick,” I would say to myself, or indeed, “Here I am, making out with this not so good-looking chick, having compromised my standards,” and my tendency to stand back and watch myself, rather than simply surrender to the moment, was something I hated. As James points out:
“Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations . . . does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us- they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.”
I took LSD for the first time in the winter of 1967 with Larry and Randy Simpson, who was one of the openly gay guys who were part of the drug scene. The two of them were going to stay sober and watch me to be sure I didn’t go jumping off roofs. As I review some of the situations I lived through in order to write this story, I realize that both genders apparently found me attractive—I was too preoccupied with feeling rotten about myself to be fully aware of it at the time. I had blue eyes, regular features, and light brown hair, when I washed it. So right around the start of the trip, Randy said to me, “Well, now that you’re going to take acid, maybe you’ll want to make love to me.” Wasn’t going to happen, of course. When the orientations were handed out, I got a straight one, and nothing was going to change that.
The first part of it I spent simply getting used to what the senses became under LSD, sounds, sights, tastes, smells, and touch, and the greatly slowed perception of time. I won’t belabor what the experience is like beyond that. Then we went outside. It was well below freezing, because the snow crunched under our feet. There was a full moon.
I’d bundled up to go outside, just like the other two, but once I got out I realized I wasn’t feeling the cold. I would guess it’s how some animals manage to handle winter; the cold-perception just wasn’t there. So I took off my gloves, scarf, and coat. It was like a spring day. I was fascinated. I started to take off my sweater, and I would likely have kept going if Larry and Randy hadn’t stopped me. They were probably less worried about the effect of the cold on me than they were about what the campus police might do if they saw me walking around that way. They were pretty cold themselves, too, and they finally took me back inside.
The trip proceeded through the normal phases of eager chatter and quiet introspection. Actually, I think the effect of LSD goes some way to proving theories of perception by philosophers like Hume, Berkeley, and Kant. I saw myself receiving sensory input via what were in effect pixels—but I could never see anything beyond those pixels. Neither, of course, did the philosophers. I never felt that the experience threatened dissolution of my self, and as far as I’m aware, I didn’t dissolve. But at some point, I could hear Randy whispering to Larry. “Hasn’t happened,” Randy said. He shook his head.
“No,” replied Larry. “It hasn’t.” He shook his head, too.
“He can’t let go,” said Randy. I heard the conversation and remembered it, but at the time didn’t have an inkling of what it was about. In fact, they were expecting some sort of dramatic event where my ego would dissolve, or perhaps I would cringe in fear resisting the prospect, and they’d get the chance to mess with my mind as they explained I was supposed to merge with the universe. Instead, I probably said some more or less coherent things about Hume and Berkeley. I couldn’t let go. Poor Randy, I guess he’d kept on hoping.
Agendas, I thought, were things my parents, my guidance counselors, my teachers, the clergy at my church, my scout leaders, even the women I met at Mount Holyoke mixers, had for me. I hadn’t considered that agendas extended beyond the world of ostensibly responsible adults. n
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