Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (25 page)

A cartoon that whipped around the Internet in 2011 seems to have originated, proximately at least, in Japan. It shows Kermit, the famous Sesame Street Muppet and bright green frog, known for his bulging bug eyes and Robin Hood demeanor, replete with swashbuckling throat kerchief and ability to look dead serious despite the fingers that form his forehead and the thumb that articulates his lower jaw.

Kermit is consulting with a doctor. He is attentive and looks as if he could be worried. The doctor is looking at an X-ray that, because it is in the picture’s foreground (we look over the doctor’s shoulder), is almost as big as live Kermit on the other side of the desk, the white sheets hanging on the aluminum rod behind him suggesting that he may just have dressed or undressed.

“Sit down,” says the Doctor. “What I’m about to tell you may change your life.”

But there is not a seat for Kermit to sit on, and, since it is a still cartoon, no movement of any kind.

The X-ray looks accurate: It depicts the amphibian’s bones, and there does seem to be a kind of problem. Instead of a normal frog skull, we see an ulna and radius, carpals and metacarpals and phalanges. That is, we see the bones of a human hand.

If Kermit were to find out, he might be quite upset.

There is not much more of an insult to one’s feeling of independence to find out that one is, literally, a Muppet.

And that is the kermitronic predicament. Can we handle the letdown of not being in control? After losing the center of the universe, and having our obvious position as the mightiest, most intelligent, and attractive of species impugned by deluded biologists?

Hell, we’ve come this far, why not. It is not true that we are not in control, that we are being played. We are playing. We are playing ourselves in that we think we are in control. Kermitronics—or “kerm” as you might call it—is the notion that even if we do not control the stochastic-deterministic universe, we can enjoy the post-Uexküllian Spinozistic ride. It is the notion that everything is connected, so volition truly makes sense only at the level of the whole. But since this universe is infinite in extension and consciousness, as well, possibly as time, there is neither planning for the future nor the sort of feeling of free will that accompanies a human creature constrained by linear time. Call it God or the Universe, there is no free will (or purpose) at the level of the whole. At that level there is no possibility of local freedom. Everything is already always geometrically and eternally articulated. And at our level, there is no fully separable agency, so we are part of this whole.

It has yet to be proved that anything could have possibly been done different.

Got kerm?

CHAPTER 14

ON DOYLE ON DRUGS

I GREW UP
in Timothy Leary’s old neighborhood. Newton Center in the mid-1970s was past the glory days of Orange Sunshine, but a few kids knew about it. We did all right though, with our Blotter, Microdot, and Windowpane, which catapulted me, one fine afternoon, after a whole hit and an emergency purchase with shaky fingers (I was not a smoker) of a pack of Marlboros, and a harrowing walk that turned into a run, from Murray Road, the oldest alternative high school east of the Mississippi, a converted elementary school with a Ping-Pong table in the front entrance across the street from which in a swampy outback where we had tried unsuccessfully with our thumbnails to slice the tiny cellophane-like tab, I ran from the newly iridescent white ball and my friends, the older one of whom had told us to just take a whole one and, smoking with us, that marijuana always helped him come down and that no one was going to die or anything, with that word
die
in my mind, newly transfixed and pointing toward me, I ran from them (who would later come to my house looking for me and hear blaring what they thought was my stepfather yelling at me), miles along Commonwealth Avenue, wild-eyed thinking about how I could understand how Art Linkletter’s daughter committed suicide, seeing now a street sign called HOMER, which took on a veneer of cosmic significance, the inside becoming the outside as it renewed me in my efforts to get back, home I must get home, until a cab driver friend of the older boy who told us it was a good idea to take a whole square of eight-way Windowpane, recognizing me and asking me if I needed a ride where was I going and I said Home, 106 Gibbs Street, inside the green house on top of which I now found myself blasting the television and being freaked out by an ad with a female model with nail polish on her claws, that not helping I fixed myself some chocolate milk, spilling it on the counter beneath the blaring radio I had turned on with my shaky hand, another misguided attempt at comfort, to run to my room. Hours later, after shaking on my single bed near the multicolored peace and love logos I’d affixed to the black-painted wall of my teenage attic room, unable to distinguish among my senses, unable to tell if my eyes were open or closed, looking through the ceiling directly into a cosmic abyss that I would later describe as eternally recurring metaphysical evil, I found myself on our front porch asking my brother for a cigarette. Calm now from all the shaking, not having expected to ever return, the experience of being outside of time so unlike any other, I now, incredibly, believed myself when I told my brother that I had not taken anything, explaining I had just taken a nap! It took me days to piece together my whereabouts during the trip and, despite all the running I’m not sure I ever did arrive there, that house where we had earlier watched the moon landing in the dining room, not quite, not as I left it.

IF YOU BELIEVE in the genius loci, the spirit of the place, then you could make the case that my friends and I were raised in the bosom of psychedelia, or in one of its other erogenous zones, in suburban Boston across the Charles River from the university, Harvard, where the West Point military academy graduate Leary had gone from straight-laced psych professor to free-love guru and self-described high priest teaching the gospel of turning on, focusing on the inner world, which can be infinite compared with the limited past and future, and dropping out of school.

But while Leary found it necessary, or at least easy, to cut his ties with repressed academia, basking in the cult of personality and the women and freedom his counterculture fame afforded, others did not sever their ties with academia and its more rigorous if conservative protocols. They pushed forward with the goals of showing the value—medicinal, cultural, and biological—of “psychedelic” drugs. One of these is Rich Doyle, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania, who does an Aztec two-step, performing the seemingly impossible feat of keeping one foot in academia’s ivory tower and the other in the jungle. Doyle’s investigations chronicle experimenters while relaying his own experiences and what they mean, or don’t. This drop of the academic pose of objectivity paradoxically makes him more trustworthy, a better guide to this rugged psychic terrain than those who cling to the conceit of being credible tour guides of a country they claim never to have visited.

Doyle follows in the tradition of the early Leary before he went off into the hinterlands of the counterculture, and of Ralph Metzner, Leary’s sometime coauthor, who wrote, “Those who are ideologically committed to the still-prevailing Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm will at best consider the statements and descriptions of the ayahuasceros as drug-induced ‘hallucinations,’ incapable of being scientifically evaluated or verified. From the perspective of a Jamesian radical empiricism however, the phenomenological descriptions of consciousness explorers must be accorded the same reality status as observations through a microscope or a telescope.”
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Are you experienced? an older kid had asked me even in the playground of our elementary school while I idled on a swing. What do you mean, I asked. Hendrix, he explained.

One thing about psychedelic drugs is that they bracket the usually ironclad difference between inside and outside. Under the influence, you can be in a roomful of people and feel you are directly connected to them, a single being distributed through separate bodies. Place and time can be upset, deconstructed as they also are in postmodern prose and the hypertexts of technology.

Reading Doyle on Charles Darwin, drugs, and the evolution of the
noösphere,
this complication of place and time was forcibly brought home to me. In that green house on top of Gibbs Street where I grew up, we had a music room, a little ethnomusicological enclave with banjos and kalimbas and African talking drums. Neatly arranged on its bookshelf were iterations of a journal, the
Psychedelic Review,
whose back issues contained scholarly contributions by the likes of Leary, Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. I had occasion to gaze on them with curiosity, pulling them out and browsing a bit and taking them en masse as tacit approval of the more-than-street-worthiness of the substances they discussed and were. I did not read them then, but reading Doyle I found that my mother had contributed to one. It must have been there all along. All I knew about her and drugs was that once, when we were teens and her Colombian friend bragged about marijuana, she condescended to smoke a hit in front of me and my teenage brother. I think it was just to impress her friend, and her heart wasn’t in it. In the dining room where my stepfather hosted poker games with lawyers, doctors, and academics, she took a little puff, spilling some in the sour cream. “Look,” she pointed. “Chives.” It seemed to be a joke to cover the fact that she really wasn’t interested in getting high on pot, and in fact I’m not sure she ever did. She did tell us later that she had tried LSD under clinical conditions when it was still legal. This was done under the direction of Gene Sagan, an older cousin on my father’s side. She said that in the lab setting the men in their white coats looked to her like overgrown babies. She also found she could adjust ambient volume by touching her ears. Gene Sagan, whose wife, Arlene, was a big help to my mother around the time of my brother’s birth, later committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Not an auspicious start to the scientific investigation of this subject. My mother later visited Leary in his farm in Millbrook, New York. She was not impressed by the sight of him being surrounded by half-naked women, but what really disturbed her was his treatment of his own daughter, who at the time was in a sort of LSD Skinner box Leary had organized so that enclosed subjects could push keys to quantify and record their psychological state. But if she became disillusioned, she was initially excited about the potential for psychoactive drugs to be a phenomenological tool.

As Doyle made me aware, my mother submitted an “open letter” to the
Psychedelic Review.
It reads, in part, “Mescaline is related to adrenaline, a known neurosecretatory hormone; and caffeine is a purine similar to the nitrogenous bases in DNA (the genetic material). If these facts do not, at best, point to physiological mechanisms, they at least attest to the knowability of consciousness, psychosis and mystical experience. The chemistry eloquently testifies to the amenability of man’s soul to his own researches.”
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Writing under her first married name of Lynn Sagan, my mother relates the revelation of the chemical infrastructure of the mysterious substances to the chemical breakthroughs that laid bare the molecular basis of heredity. She argues that, instead of obscuring reality, so-called hallucinogens seemed to reveal it. “The drug attacks defense mechanisms built up carefully to conceal the truth of our direct sensory perceptions. One would
a priori
imagine, however, that a drug which forced us to see the world as it is would be welcomed.”
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As Doyle points out, “Psychedelics, for Sagan and others, represented a scientific enhancement of human perception akin to the electron microscope, and the early data gathered by this new mode of scientific observation suggested that the separation between the self and the cosmos was an illusion, an artifact of egoic consciousness correctable, reflectable, by a continuously tuning . . . analog consciousness.”
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Although I did not come across her letter (or if I did, in my cursory browse, I did not understand it) in that attractive set of back issues of the
Psychedelic Review
in that Newton Center music room, Doyle’s book gave me the chance, transporting me back in space and time, as it were, to my early adolescence.

IN THE THOTH DECK, a version of the Tarot designed by Aleister Crowley, the Magus is depicted with “a naked golden body, smiling, with winged feet standing in front of a large caduceus. In his right hand he holds a style and in his left hand, a papyrus.”
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Crowley, a shadowy figure associated with Satanism and the counterculture introduction of black magick, held that drugs were among the magician’s most powerful tools, but he fills the hands of his magician archetype not with pills but the tools to write. Crowley, a mountain climber and expert chess player who disavowed chess when he saw the miserable comportment of the masters, moved on to a nonacademic investigation of the arcane. Although decidedly less on the dark side, my father also related writing to magic:

Writing is also a psychedelic. If I say behold the sweet-smelling pink magnolia, or cheap whipped cream, or unseen birds in the spring mist, your mind fills with sensations. You begin to see things that aren’t there. It’s a powerful drug, all right.

DOYLE’S
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
is a book that, like some of the drugs it describes, is hard to put down—and keep down.
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It comes up, it lingers like a sharp coffee or pungent sprig of rosemary, it catches in the back of the throat and tightens the jaw like some strange hallucinogen that evolved with mammals by intoxicating them, protecting its genetic endowment while attracting the bug-eyed critters just enough to enhance its own distribution across the forest floor and grassy planes.

In mythology both Hermes, the Greek messenger god, and Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god, are said to have brought our ancestors the potent mind-altering substance writers and publishers push. Like its more properly pharmacological psychoactive cousins, writing can produce or break through the screenlike phenomenal layer called
maya
in Hinduism, the layer of ordinary everyday life we take to be real. The Pythagoreans and Platonists and Neoplatonists may have been inspired while on psychedelic drugs to pronounce ordinary reality, after they came down, a charade. Botanically and mycologically altered states may have helped foment the important protoscientific realization that all is not as it seems, that there is more to reality than our waking consensus reality.

The ethnomycologist, and one-time vice president of J. P. Morgan, Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) argued that
Amanita muscaria,
the famous psychedelic and poisonous red toadstool with white spots familiar from pictures of the hookah-smoking caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland,
was the sacred “god of the gods” (soma) that informed the mystical insights of the Sanskrit Vedanta. Wasson argued that ergoline alkaloids from the ergot fungus, which grow on rye, were taken during the Eleusinian mysteries devoted to the agricultural goddess Demeter or Persephone. Wasson was inspired by his young Russian bride, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, who surprised him, an Englishman averse to toadstools, by avidly collected edible wild mushrooms. After inciting his interest, the couple made an epic trip to Mexico, collecting psilocybin mushrooms and
Salvia divinorum.
In May 1957 they published “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in
Life
magazine. The widely read article helped set the stage for the sixties. Today two species of mushroom,
Psilocybe wassonii heim
and
Psilocybe wassonorum guzman,
include Wasson in their names.

I SAY that Doyle’s book is hard to keep down because it acts like a drug. By that I mean not only that it makes us hallucinate by conveying the visions that it recounts, which all books with scenic or fictional elements do, but that it partakes of the logic that Jacques Derrida shows at work in Plato when Plato, in his dialogue the
Phaedrus,
writes that Socrates refers to writing as a “drug.”
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