“The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion's chemical surrogates-alcohol and "goof pills" in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954, p. 20
When John Lennon sings, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” I think he refers to the pain of duality and the constant sense of being a particulate separate “self” in a world of other particulate “selves.” Alan Watts called this feeling of identity as a sense of entrapment in a “skin-encapsulated ego.” My whole life has been a series of attempted ego-prison breaks and a quest for permanent reunion with the indivisible consciousness known as “God,” or, more accurately, “god-head.” I know it is a reality because I experienced being in God’s head on LSD. And my sense of the world on psychotropics matched the natural state of being Sufis and Zen Masters describe when they sing and sermonize about “ultimate reality.”
A Frank O’Hara fragment comes to mind in which he describes a state in which “there was very little difference / in what was good / and what would happen.” Now that’s a pause in the pandemonium that truly refreshes.
I have long believed in “better living through chemistry.” Like one of the many wounded in a senseless war, I am rescued by a medic(ine), then taken by helicopter and dusted off somewhere between the heavens and a safe landing back on earth. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” Yes, when your own body is the fountain of that blood. “Hey, Jesus, you paid for lunch. This feast’s on me.”
THE GREAT DIVIDE: POETRY VS. PROSE
I remember one snowy night in Pittsburgh, late January 1966, on acid and the world being divided into a sparse poetry of necessary things and a pent-up prose of unnecessary ones. We asked the circumambient (meta)physical world for some objective correlatives. Suddenly we heard the chinka-chinka of tire chains on the street outside. “What’s he doing driving around on a night like this?” I asked. “He thinks he will die if he doesn’t get laid,” my tripmate answered. “Doesn’t he know that even the whore houses must close this holy night?” We both agreed that attending to any daily, obsessive need constituted prose on a night when the world was supposed to be dedicated solely to poetry.
“But what is poetry?” I asked.
The clanging bell of a trolley car took me and my tripmate to a window to see it glide through the street-light lit tundra of Forbes Avenue with no occupants but the driver. “Anybody who boards this trolley tonight will have the uncommon and divine duty of saving the world,” I proclaimed with an indoor certainty born of and borne by his witnessing. We both looked outdoors and vowed to write poems as urgent and solitary as any rider called to board a trolley in a snowstorm. The world seemed to be waiting and willing to read the poetry of actions, deeds or words that would be asked of him on this squall-stricken, blizzard-blanketed night.
That night 53 years ago remains vivid, begging for sustainability I have yet to find.
I refuse to forget that night or give up hope of its permanent recurrence. Like Wordsworth, I live in a remembrance that will not renew its origins or release me from the exile of nostalgia for them.
That night 53 years ago remains vivid, begging for sustainability I have yet to find.
I refuse to forget that night or give up hope of its permanent recurrence. Like Wordsworth, I live in a remembrance that will not renew its origins or release me from the exile of nostalgia.
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