Thursday, January 13 2005, 09:49 PM -- the Few Chores
The first time I took LSD I was very confused. Conversation was difficult. I "didn't expect it to be so amnesic". My girlfriend (the Jackanape), also tripping, had vivid hallucinations such as letters, numbers and symbols texturing the television indoors, and roving searchlights from hovering UFO's when outdoors. I hallucinated very little but saw a great deal of interest and depth in all my surroundings, an effect I recognized from mushrooms but the feeling was significantly different. I was tripped out, certainly, but was I tripping?
I took 2.6 hits of fairly weak blotter that night, me and two others. It was fun! But I didn't take LSD again for a while after that, and I still said without hesitation that mushrooms were my favourite psychedelic, because I hadn't gone far with LSD. I knew it lacked an intuitiveness and intelligence that lurks in my psilocybin experiences... shrooms have a sense of home-coming and recognition and a feeling of dialogue which LSD seemed to have none of. LSD was, as I confirmed with my experiences that eventually followed, more like having my entire perceptual set at all levels including sense of self and rules of reality poured through a grand cosmic blender that turned everything to novel noise and left nothing as it should be. The result is a ten-hour assault on the self, a drifting voyage through self-creating cosmic non-space, throwing you adrift into spaces and spectra of mind which are not human nor indeed precedented at all, modes of existence so thoroughly new to the universe that the entire thing shudders as it beholds and accepts it.
A waitress approaches a table where everybody is struggling to stay on top of a moderate dose of LSD. As a result, minutes are passed in social chaos which our patient waitress, as a sober member of a social routine she is well into, is slowly becoming aware of the horrible implications of, for everybody. Are we contagious? She can't afford for this to happen to her. When she leaves nobody has placed an order nor bid her farewell, and the waitress for her part doesn't say goodbye nor make an excuse as she turns. She simply cuts and runs as was the only thing she could do. God, what if she had become conversationally involved with us? To what extent could honest dialogue with us have disrupted her duties? I'm serious, you understand. You wouldn't catch me taking LSD at work, and that's for a reason: you can't trip on acid without your function as a personality and societal node becoming vastly, visibly upset. You will leak impossible fault lines into the social network you're immersed in that are pernicious and distracting and disturbing. When one is at work one is responsible for maintaining a standard of focus and cohesion and continuity that is extremely difficult and unrewarding to maintain during an LSD experience.
And that'd be all there was to it, really, if people knew an acid maniac like they know a drunk -- automatically, by swagger 'n stink. When a professional member of the service industry like our aforementioned waitress comes across a reeking, reeling three hundred-pound trucker, she is going to throw certain switches in her head based on her understanding of the habits and behaviours of Homo sapiens intoxicated with oral ethanol. These certain switches will for one thing make her likely to treat the man in a more soothing manner than she would use on a man equally as visibly excited but clearly sober. She would do this so as not to provoke him to violence or other responses of unconsidered excess as are known to be provoked by alcohol. The aforementioned certain switches will make her likely to ignore entirely a sexual or romantic advance from the drunk, as if he had not made it, or at least to have no visible response, whereas if a sober customer had made the similar advance in a clear voice with unwavering eye contact, she'd have felt the social compulsion to make some verbal reply even if only to escape.
Please understand that this is not an article about hitting on waitresses. The point I am trying to make is that if the four acidheads holding menus had been drunks, our beleaguered waitress would have knowledgably adjusted her behaviour to compensate for our intoxication, for the duration of the limited scope of our exchange and no longer. She would have left with a verbal parting barked and our orders noted, thus completing the process which, after all, she clearly intended to initiate when she approached our table with her pen out. Call this process "Taking Our Orders".
The reason the waitress failed in the execution of Taking Our Orders was because we were intoxicated in a mode she could not recognize or compensate for. She knew we were shaking with silent laughter -- our faces were red with it -- whenever we weren't speaking, that we were on the edge of self-control from second to second. There was no way not to know. But what could make four people like this? Is there some secret they're keeping? What's the joke?
We asked questions about items and barely parsed her replies. We spoke out of turn and at random, with eye contact and without, to her and to each other and in general. We tried, we really did, to take the exercise seriously, but there were times that it was too much. Her last and only composed response to us, to reiterate, was to break the connection -- to flee. This was obviously the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to sit down with us and discuss what's so funny; this would be a naive mistake like going home, flattered, with an ass-grabbing drunk. In both cases the interaction that followed could obviously be for better or for worse and my words aren't meant to condemn ass-grabbing drunks nor to equate tax-paying law-abiding imbibers of ethanol with base criminals like users of LSD. But in both cases the maker of the mistake is probably unaware in intellectual terms of what he or she is getting into.
But being aware in intellectual terms, at least in theory, of the behaviour of drunks protects our womenry from fleeing to them in droves. (The alpha-male behaviour of the drunk man [or woman] is after all a behaviour which, emulated by a balanced and sober individual, is quite attractive to potential partners. The go-get-em attitude of the drunk is a powerful mode in business, society and seduction, and the only thing keeping the world from making way for a yelling drunk is the recognition of his slur and the intuitive understanding that drunks are statistically more likely to yell loudly while running somewhere for unimportant reasons than are sober, reasoned men. People do not make considerations for the drunk because he is slurring, thinking him handicapped -- they know he's handicapped by his own hand and for the short term, and they don't pity him. When juxtaposed with the image of armchair beer-swilling and unhygienic belly-scratching and yelling stuff while running around in the rain clothed badly or not at all, the drunk's brute charisma is easy to resist!) Thus being aware of the behaviour of acidheads would have given our hapless serveress a set of safe protocols within which to interact with us. It would include the understanding that we may find such interest in any aspect of any subject that we could go on about it as seriously and intensely as if the conclusion were one that affected all of our personal safety, so she would know she didn't always have to let us finish our sentences. That's rude, taking control of the conversation again and again, but these are LSD people who want to make their order, and they need help, see? It's what we call tough love.
She would use extra and expanded techniques for getting the attention of each member of the party, perhaps generally asking the one whose attention she has to get the attention of the next one for her. She would find their giggles and guffaws and their random comments on animations of the scenery which are not objectively occurring only annoying, not eery and random and disturbing. She would know how to and why to forget all of what comes out of our mouths. We're no longer scary people: we're just tripped out!
Had our long-suffering wench recognized our intoxication and used special social protocols in response, she would have succeeded in the "Taking Our Order process" with confidence. And she could have told the rest of the staff what was up with us. This is pure speculation on my part because of course what actually happened was that the "Taking Our Order process" broke down completely, was aborted and cut in two and left flapping and steaming, half in our laps and half on the spot she'd run from. This was nobody's fault, and no insult was intended or taken by any of the confused social computers involved. She attempted to build a short-term social network with any or all of four other computers who were deep in another experiential and functional space, and having gone so far as to try the water with her toe she shivered and ran for land. Point being she wouldn't've had to go to the water if she recognized the lake, stood safely a hundred paces from its edge and yelled through cupped hands, "lake Acidhead! What'll you all be having today?" It'd be rude to yell to normal person-lakes (what a strange accidental analogy) from so far away, I suppose it's normal to run up and wade in a bit or something, right? Or at least get close to the edge and speak in a normal voice, politely seeking voluntary attention. Such means have no effect on thick, oily Lake Acidhead. Stand way back and yell easy words clear and loud, that's the way! Then it'll grumble back to you, in due time, a fractured list of items, though of course you may have to come back a few times to get them all.
What the hell is my god damn point, for god's sake? I'll tell you. I've illustrated one way in which the social network could be seen to shudder its way around compromise and communication with an extremely alien node. Any time you go shopping on acid this same thing happens. You have to volunteer your attention proactively and prolifically, and be clear and deliberate. Eye contact and little words. It's up to you to count your money and receive your change and perform all the minute worlds of action involved without harming the normality of the consensus by making the people around you wonder what's wrong with him? It's a job, social interaction on acid, the Job of Seemin' Normal... and it sucks! But if you let the acid state show through to the people around you who don't recognize it, what happens? You can't make an order, you can't get any service, you get thrown out of places who know you're messed up but don't know how or how much. The social network, organism-like, bunches up around the foreign body of the acidhead's persona, not recognizing it, scared and revulsed even to look, and squeezes it out, like a splinter from its skin. The waitress cuts and runs.
This doesn't mean some sober people won't probe. (Employees and other shoppers caught up in deep conversations about toys enjoyed as children.) It happens plenty, but it seems to me that sober folk often leave such interactions feeling unusual about them. I suspect they wonder: Why did that just happen? How did I end up talking to them about that? Why were they so interested in my mother's job? What did they want? Am I in trouble?
So suppose LSD was so ubiquitous and well-known, so researched and discussed and marketed and consumed that it became as cheap and common and revered and decried and loved and hated as our old refined gentleman chap ethyl alcohol. What interesting data we'd have in that strange future, about at what ages people most took to LSD, at what ages folks tended to slow down use and/or to cease it entirely... we'd have charts illustrating the integration of a new chemical into the processes of human metabolism and development on individual and social scales, over the course of decades. I'd like to see this data, myself, to see how human interest in freely-available LSD fluctuates with development both social and biological! How early would the growing human be interested in LSD? Surely some crazy churches and traditions would feed their children LSD from conception or birth or their first teeth or first word, and what would happen to those children? Would such a child's parents buy it enough LSD to trip regularly/constantly (depending on crazy church) or would they at some point make the child get LSD with its own allowance? Would many raised with LSD from very early life lose interest in it completely at some age, simply refusing to take it anymore or not pursuing it from the day their parents stop paying for it for them? I know I never bought any Fluoride tablets after my mom stopped making me eat 'em as a kid. Never wanted to, either.
But to be fair I'm talking about the scary and controversial side of LSD Society at the moment. It should be clear the the average family would likely follow a tacit social understanding (it could even be legislature -- who knows?) which, in a nod of the head to the past, states that children should not generally be fed the stuff, for fear of confounding the normal developmental process and its goal of producing a well-adjusted, adaptive member of the social and cultural tissue. Or is this just a distant echo of the Puritanical ethic which I can hear but which the people of centuries worth of an LSD-soaked future would have dismissed ages ago? "Normal" development? The view of the population that has integrated LSD and its influence into man's collective processes of thought and philosophy and worship; will it be republican or democrat? Er, I mean, conservative or liberal? Will it value tradition (encampment against progress) and venerability (time-testedness) in its ideas, decisions and image? Many models of Heaven certainly seem to be operated this way -- not democratic states, but a system that is unchanging. Will the enlightened view be the declaration of a state of life as divine, one considered and manufactured with intelligence and foresight, perhaps, or maybe one arrived at through chance and selection like the one we have now, and the expense of all energy on its maintenance and honourable defense? That would make me and all other indignant, intellectual left-wingers truly look the fools, for if I am not missing something important then it seems to me that the only thing assuring the left-wing intellectual elite that their (sorry, our) left-wing attitude and habit of intellectualizing actually qualifies them as "the elite" is the disastrous morality of the behaviour and attitudes of the right! What pompous fools, we, truly!
But surely the enlightened society will only get to there from here by embracing for long spans a visionary attitude of upward, onward... the liberal, creative mindset and all its goddamn pansy manifestations will clearly be a large aspect of future LSD-society thought.
Who makes conservatism evil? To evaluate if the conservative view could ever reign in an enlightened age, we must first decide if the maintenance and defense of a single sacred state is inextricably linked to attitudes which restrict personal freedoms unnecessarily by conjuring moral tenets and edicts from criteria which can not, in my opinion, be found from first principles to be linked to any universal scale of the desirability of outcomes. A long and pointless thesis, agreed, but bear with me. Some such scales may be said to exist, and the laws which people find most intuitive and agreeable seem to be mainly based on them. One such scale might be human suffering, or damage to any kind of life. Pain, whether human or animal, can be used defensibly to enact laws... can't it?
But when the scientific state of the art told us that semen was filled with tiny perfect people then the Catholic church, which we shall lump in with the Religious Right for the sake of argument, knew for sure it was very serious that good Catholics not masturbate (anyone know what other denominations couldn't masturbate? Still can't? Anyone? What about mormons?). Ejaculation of any form became recast as mass murder, and ejaculation not in the service of the proliferation of Homo sapiens as unjustifiable mass murder... and isn't unjustifiable mass murder one thing we can all agree on? If there's something we could do to cause it, then I think you'll concede, we'd better not.
But the state of the art changed and as always so did common sense. Sperm turned out not to be people, in fact not to be anything whose personal experience and perception we can meaningfully empathize with. Their death became, as before, one of the many billions of necessary and dutiful deaths undergone in silence by the multifarious cells of all human bodies in the ecstatic, sticky process of metabolizing and existing.
The Religious Right has in the past and tends on occasion to endorse behaviour I simply do not -- punishing folks for joyful fornication, solemn masturbation, using the name of the Lord "in vain", et cetera -- for reasons of "morals", of "values". However, banishment of birth protection or masturbation on moral grounds due to scientific evidence which has since changed is clearly flawed -- from a left-wing point of view. From a conservative point of view it could easily be the new evidence which is flawed -- and why risk God's wrath? What a quandary! Are we wrong about God's will now, or the first time we guessed about it? What about when "morality" refers to social or genetic taboos? Which are universal? Which are well-founded? These are disturbing questions, to be sure, but that is obviously kind of the point!
Let it be said then that while I think it is clear that the conservative mindset is the basis of many necessary attitudes for the growth of a culture such as caution, skepticism and hindsight, and that a prosperous future society could without a doubt include it in in their thought and philosophy and policy in many forms, I do not think it would be seen as sensible to continue to expend real money, energy and bloodshed on the enforcement of laws resulting from morality based on assumptions which new evidence contraverts, or laws made for reasons that are arbitrary, discriminatory, or historical. I think a liberal mindset would move cultural values ahead very quickly and so I think perhaps children might get fed LSD, or they might not, but in either case the reasons will be very different from what they are today. They will be based on a more refined and cogent model for how LSD affects the developing human.
What if there could be found a Spiritual Puberty (ha!), or three or four of them? Would there be one mean age at which a spiritual and/or intellectual process of opening, development or change, without physical symptoms, can be said to occur? Could charting the interest of humans at various ages and stages of growth in freely-available psychedelic materials reveal such stages to us, if they exist? I think so! I suspect such a stage does exist and is undergone at varying times of life and under varying conditions by everybody. Perhaps the quote-unquote male menopause or mid-life crisis is one. Maybe there are a series of such events unfolding on a schedule which is affected by subtler means than the physical stages, which can be catalyzed or staved off through chemical means, through eagerness or fear for instance -- respectively.
If a Puberty of the Mind (snigger) exists then integrating it into our collective knowledge of human development and the stages of growth would be completely desirable in my opinion, rounding out a model (birth and baby-hood, childhood, puberty, teenagehood, then darkening shades of adult to death) which is the only one many of us have on which to locate our personal growth and contrast it with the growth of those around us who have matured more slowly or more quickly in spite of being the same age. It's a little sad, then, that this one and main model for the stages of human growth mainly includes only visible physical and detectable personality changes caused by anatomical means such as hormones and telemeres. What stages of human growth, natural and shared by everyone but physically and socially invisible, haven't made it into the model? I suspect they're there for us to find, not just to come up with by splitting hairs but for us to be glad to recognize immediately.
Development is a delicate process and science always finds ways that we can "stunt our growth" or for that matter to give a nine-year-old her period (you hear these things about milk or pork or something, don't you?). Certainly dietary and lifestyle factors as well as acute events will be found to impact the actual delay between and duration of any new stages of change a spiritually-sensitive future society might agree on. Perhaps psychedelics will be found to undesirably upset certain parts of the processes of human growth, and their use will be precluded by circumstance for people of certain ages and certain developmental progress, who would refuse unsuitable experiences with a sensible and common personal decision, the way an eight-year-old may neither want nor seek out alcohol, as he's been taught that it's only suitable for adults and, depending on local legislation, those in their late teens.
Or maybe it'll turn out there's a Spiritual Puberty around age seven that the introduction of LSD into a certain stage of invariably catalyzes the musical talent of a prodigy in the adult, you see? This specific scenario is certainly wild fiction that is predictive of nothing, a crazy and random speculation. But what I am speculating on is the possibilities inherent in the spectrum of What May Become that is availed to us by our friend technology. Technology is a function of science and desire. More research will lead to more science. More science will lead to more psychedelics, see? For us all to eat and eat. Having eaten and eaten them, our desires will turn to sensible things -- not screwing each other over, but cavorting from task to task among our duties as self-reflecting diving-bells of the cosmic self to create and create forever out from the edges of what exists, and to bring forth something from nothing until no nothing is left! Peacefully dammit! And our technology will address that desire, and we will be psychic supermen! Forever!
At least from our point of view the average enlightened twenty-sixth-century global citizen would be a psychic superman for certain, but to himself he would be an ordinary guy, with little to no interest in LSD use beyond a monthly church meeting, who does his best to be balanced, adaptive and cheerful. It would be the incredibly enlightened, detailed, and progressive system of understanding and education which has been pieced together by focused creative intent for centuries which makes the man practically a Buddha, the first truly civilized man you or me have ever met. One of billions, naturally.
And the crazy hold-outs in this shining world who take it upon themselves to hate and shout and go against everything will find the social organism not responding with shock, pain and anger, but with whimsy and love, with curiousity and transparency and depth. The LSD'd society would never break and run from a table of acidheads, nor of rowdy drunks nor of babbling foreigners. Communication at all costs is paramount. Those who need to be stopped will be stopped by the nature of the thing because it will be working perfectly. What we'd call terrorists will be a sort of dangerous clown, performing a rare spectacle for your amusement and at your peril, so stop him! The social organism won't have a need for specialized super-soldier cells -- police and military -- when each citizen shares the same straightforward and open-hearted concern for the welfare of the individual and social organisms around him as as he has for his own.
None of this means people will be taking LSD at work. It's just what I feel would happen if people thought of taking LSD like they think of brushing their teeth: a way of getting the gunk out and keeping it out, an action that you have to do every so often -- or your teeth get gross.
Once a month you spend an evening at your chosen psychedelic church with a familiar group of people. Everyone does, unless he's doing something really important, and then, well, he can always get a dose at the drugstore and take it at home in the next few weeks. But going off the LSD entirely would be a pretty big decision -- who wants to go psycho, after all?
"I hear animals only evolved minds as complicated servants, a way of having something intelligent in a cage that had to figure out what to do when things happen." She whispered conspiratorially. "The body's too stupid on its own," she hissed, narrowing her eyes. "That's why you still gotta dress yourself in the morning, why you don't trip and work, right? Lots of things are too god damn hard for us to do automatically so it ropes in the mind and starts making it do stuff. It gets our attention."
She punched me in the side, suddenly. I wheezed, and covered my ribs with my hand. I tried to smile but it throbbed hard where she'd hit me. She laughed. I stared. "Right," I said, trying to take a full breath. "You hit me with less than all your strength in a part of my body shielded by bone and it upset me badly enough to stop our conversation completely for several seconds. Because my body wanted my attention, and it wanted me to tell it what to do -- right?" She nodded seriously, and leaned back, speaking more loudly. She gestured expansively. "But for what? You couldn't make the spot stop hurting, you couldn't fix the punch. Your body just thought you should know about it, and started hurting to make sure. But you knew right away you couldn't un-bruise yourself. So why'd it hurt so long?"
I thought. "To give me time to come up with the hard questions it can't think of itself," I said cheerfully. "Because my body's too damn stupid to even think of what the proper questions would be."
"It wants you to think for it!" She said furiously.
"So because it hurts too much to get back to the conversation right away, I have time to wonder: why'd she punch me? I have time to realize you did it to make a point about attention, or something, and that you aren't dangerous or going nuts. But there's no way to tell my body this stuff because it doesn't understand, does it -- it's too stupid. My brain is the only part of me that can do things like causally correlate a physical blow with a conversational point. My body just tries to hold my mind's attention long and hard enough to make sure certain things get thought of and tried!" I stopped and looked at her and she continued smoothly to my slight surprise, since I'd thought I was doing well:
"Obviously an antagonistic relationship," with a flourish. "Cooperative, but antagonistic. The mind and the body, they don't understand each other, they don't like each other, because they can't talk -- they can only signal each other crudely." She placed her hands around her throat. "If you'd decided I was dangerous, a spy or something, and started to fight and kill me, your body would have noticed the new activity in a crude, stupid mammal sense and you'd get a shot of adrenaline, and probably testosterone too for that matter. I don't know what else," she said dismissively, placing her hands in her lap. "But you just stayed chill, you even tried to smile, I noticed, and that let your body know quick that nothing was going on so you were lucky enough for it to stop fucking with your chemistry fast."
She had conjured a vague image in my head of a pair of roommates each dependent on the other for rent but speaking only through the walls in shouted German, which both of them must use a translation dictionary to understand. The obvious result would be both ceasing to speak to the other at all, annoyed at the limitation in communication that exists for some reason. Technically because one roommate was so stupid, I suppose, that he refused to use anything but German which he has not learned.
Except the communication the body uses has real motivational power. "Pain has power," I said. "Why didn't the body ever learn to ask politely? Why does it control us with pain and discomfort?"
She smiled. "It never had to ask politely," she said. "It's got a soul in a cage and the soul can't get out of the cage -- can't get out and be itself in a meaningful sense, that is. Everything the soul's got invested in its own existence is invested in the very bars and contents of that cage. Not very relaxing, for the soul." She shook her head sadly.
"That's what drove people nuts during prohibition," she declared, eyes wide. "That's why we have church meetings. They take LSD or whatever it is, and it sort of gives the mind some pride, reminds it that though it may be taking orders from a taskmaster for its survival, that survival contains an enormous number of possibilities to explore and tasks to complete! That and all the other stuff they tell you in school that seems like a cliche when you've been taking it and hearing about it your whole life, well, it's all true isn't it, or we wouldn't keep going to church, would we? We'd all switch back to placebo sacraments if psychedelic ones were hurting us."
"Like biscuits and wine," I volunteered, after racking my brain quickly.
"Right." She scowled, and I was scared. "Because if you do that you can lose sight of truisms, of guidelines like 'I am Everything'. Of morals, you understand? Values we find to be self-evident during the deepest and most meaningful trips. Not dogmas but truths that are evident to the clear and questing mind," she took a breath, "but totally obscured to the clouded and sitting mind, obscured intentionally by a selfish master who twists all morals to its own service -- obscured by the body and its many impregnable mechanisms of control over us!"
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
"So we take LSD," she said happily, spreading her hands, "once a month, and it messes up the body's hold on the mind. The clouds part and we get off our laurels and go quest in a space the body is too stupid to understand. Out there, we find and reaffirm the unwavering first principles of morality. If we never venture there, then the word of our body becomes truth, and we'll do anything, based on no better morality than service to ourselves." She paused for effect. "That's what makes men nuts -- the body is difficult to please. At church meetings we get to tell the body to take a hike for a while. We can get LSD or psilocybin or anything any time and do it whenever we want. The power is shared, now, because the mind can push back, and that gives it the power to go about its own business, to have its own life that the body can't understand or affect! Take the power to trip away from us and the mind is back where it started, a disempowered savant in despairing servitude to a greedy master who can make it believe anything and who only wants more, more, more!" She shook a fist.
"Because we're still basically animals?" I reasoned.
"Yes," she said.
