Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (26 page)

The word Plato writes down to describe the description by Socrates, who never writes, of writing is
φάρμακον
, pharmakon.

Pharmakon, meaning drug. Much as in modern English, the pharmakon, the root word of pharmacology, can be a poison or a remedy, or neither or both. In ancient Greek it can also mean sacrament, talisman, cosmetic, or perfume. In the
Phaedrus
Socrates criticizes writing as a crutch because it weakens our memory, oratory, and culture by making us dependent on the prosthesis of an external substance. His precipitous judgment was to be turned humorously on its head two thousand years later by the 1960s bumper sticker claiming, “Reality is a crutch for those who can’t handle drugs.”

As a kind of hallucinatory drug or magic, writing allows us to speak to ghosts, not only nonpresent friends and family members but intellectual influences long since dead. Writing extends, with precise iterability, the ghostly transmissions of language. In what he would eventually call the “stoned ape theory of human evolution,” described in the book
Food of the Gods,
Terrence McKenna argued that modern humans evolved some one hundred thousand years ago, potentiated by
Psilocybe cubensis,
the most common form of Wasson’s “magic mushrooms.”
9
Increases in visual acuity (possibly associated with dilated pupils), aphrodisiac effects (aiding procreation), and, at higher doses, dissolution of ego (enabling socioreligious binding) jump-started human evolution according to McKenna. He further proposes that tripping apes, already grunting and hallucinating, would be perfectly predisposed to start using language, which is, after all, a form of consensual hallucination. Ingestion of hallucinogens would have provided the original natural technology that prepared our ancestors to use sounds and, later, written symbols to communicate, triggering specific images in one another’s heads. McKenna’s theory is reminiscent of another counterculture motto, “Reality is a shared hallucination.”

Whether or not McKenna—or for that matter, the biologist E. O. Wilson, who implicates hallucinogens (and group selection) in the start of human culture
10
—is even partly right, note that writing reworks plants and fungi: Papyrus is the pithy stem of a water plant, and books still depend on fungi-dependent forests whose trees provide the paper on which we write. Recycling and feeding animals, which help propagate and fertilize them, fungi and plants have a long history of evolving enticing compounds that attract our kind even as we help grow them and tend them and spread their seed.

In his book, which triggered these memories and this analysis, Doyle combines scholarly attention to some of the great chroniclers of hallucinogenic and psychedelic experiences—McKenna, Leary, Huxley, and William S. Burroughs—with a recounting of the role ayahuasca played in his own life. It is performative in that, instead of just making an argument, it also seems to aim to create an experience. For Doyle, the terms
hallucinogen
and
psychedelic
are ultimately inadequate. He introduces the term
ecodelic.
As psychedelic comes from roots meaning “mind-expanding,” ecodelic comes from roots meaning “home-” (eco is from
oikos,
home) “expanding.”

And that is how I felt reading this book—as if our planetary home, to which we owe so much, especially perhaps to plants and fungi that combined to make the ancestral arboreal environment in which humans evolved, were expanding. As if a shroud were being whisked away, scholarship being applied to an absolutely central aspect of human ontology—one that has been unfairly, unsuccessfully, and symptomatically “ritually excluded.” Perhaps we have been so blindsided, so preoccupied, so myopic for so long that we first must hallucinate reality before we can see it. What resists persists, and what we cannot digest continues to perplex.

Applying ecological thinking to multicultural use, including Western use, of drugs gives us a new appreciation of and connection to the environment in which we find ourselves. Doyle says he used to be an ontological materialist, taking antidepressants, until he got tenure and, rather triumphantly, because he was going to be paid to do it, traveled to the jungle to take ayahuasca. He had been a great fan of
The Yage Letters,
the correspondence between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and was planning on making a film that went beyond David Cronenberg’s movie about Burroughs,
Naked Lunch.
As he researched psychedelics (or ecodelics), he discovered that often people would mention DNA in describing their experiences. This intrigued him, but what really hooked him was when he found out that Francis Crick himself was on a low level of LSD when he discovered DNA’s linked spiral staircase structure. Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for modernizing PCR, the polymerase chain reaction that copies DNA in the lab, reported in the September 1994 issue of
California Monthly
that he doubted he would have done so if it were not for LSD. Steve Jobs reportedly said that his use of LSD in the 1960s was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. Richard Feynman tried it with John Lilly. My father didn’t, although I advocated that he should try it and that I would do it with him.

Rather surprisingly, considering their reputation for making people “out of it,” ecodelics often reveal hidden depths of our connections to the environment, making us realize we are part of what we observe. Perhaps it is not surprising that Doyle’s e-mail moniker is Möbius, the mathematical plane that, given a felicitous twist, has only one side—meaning its inside
is
its outside, quite literally. In “The Wall of Darkness,” Arthur C. Clarke describes Trilorne, a world where explorers meet the ultimate snag: an impenetrable black wall extends from the planet’s equator indefinitely up. The wall turns out to be a Möbius strip, a surface with only one side, so that all exploration leads to the beginning.

An illustration by the quantum physicist and Albert Einstein colleague John Wheeler (1911–2008) vividly reveals what our truncated, anecodelic objectivity conceals: a giant U with an eye, representing the observing ego, on one stalk. It looks out and sees the serif atop the black pole of the letter’s eyeless stalk. The line of sight creates the illusion that the eye is observing something else, rather than an extension of itself.

It is thus as if drugs don’t just produce illusions but clear the clutter, removing the artificial feeling of separation between inside and outside, between oneself and others, between life and the environment. In this way they reveal rather than hide, showing us how we are all part of the same thing; rather than simulate or distract, ecodelics can dissimulate and focus: this is perhaps one reason Doyle prefers to call them ecodelics rather than hallucinogens or psychedelics or, worse, psychotropics or psychotomimetics.

I had not met Doyle until he came in October 2011 to Kitchener, Ontario, to be present at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Society of Literature Science and Art (SLSA), devoted to “PHARMAKON: That which can both kill and cure.” The year before, his plane was delayed to New Orleans, so he missed his place on a panel on plants at the American Anthropology Association. I was happy to give his paper on plant agency, talking about how plants “outsourced” their sexuality to animals, and mentioned how Duke University, the site of one of his recent talks, owed its existence to tobacco plants. It occurred to me that it was a very plantlike thing for him to have missed his plane and be at home in Pennsylvania while I, a kind of ambulatory animal he outsourced, read his words. Not coming allied him to the plants he was representing. It was an Ovidian move.

In Kitchener I gave a reader response to
Darwin’s Pharmacy.
I had already been exposed to Derrida’s analysis of Socrates’s description of writing as a drug. Since Doyle was talking about drugs proper, and the conference was about the pharmakon, I thought it would be fun to investigate the relationship of Darwin’s pharmacy to Plato’s, to see what might arise from such an alchemical mixture.

As I developed my talk, I was drawn to the subtle changes that occur as we move from speech to handwritten to typed text. In the first part of my response, I read my own handwritten comments:

Encouraged to continue, I read my typed comments, commenting that I’d probably read faster, in part because I wouldn’t have to try to figure out my handwriting.

TOWARD AN ANAXAGORAN ECODELIC PHARMOTOPIA

If writing is a drug, as Derrida emphasizes—and bear with me, this may be as convoluted as your brain—if writing is a drug, as Derrida emphasizes, perhaps I should say
pushes
on us in “Plato’s Pharmacy” in his explication of Socrates’s take on manuscripture’s dual form as remedy and cure, mnemonic and crutch, Doyle’s
Darwin’s Pharmacy
is a trip. It is a rhetorical explosion. The Christian evolutionist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said infamously that the world is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose. But Doyle helps us, with some help from
ayahuasca
and his anthrobotanical, biospheric, and historical friends, to imagine this unimaginable. This is literally trippy, less in the 1960s cliché sense of
far-out
than in, to use a phrase from another sixties figure, Alan Watts, far-
in.

It is a trip but, as the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson points out, “There is no place to go.” Doyle’s electropaper hybrid text is neobombastic—in a good way. Remember Bombastus was the name—one of them—of Paracelsus (born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), the alchemist physician par excellence who emphasized the notion that “the poison is the dose.”

In trying to place the perplexing neobombastic difficulty and transpharmaceutical euphony of Doyle’s text, I am reminded of his own elucidation of the notion of a hyperbolic plane, a geometric surface that is the opposite of a sphere, in which every curve, instead of folding into itself, moves away from itself, infinitely.

This impossible figure that is the opposite of the sphere seems the perfect complementary trope, or perhaps antitrope, to match or complement the very striking and real phenomenology of noös, of consciousness, of spirit versus matter, the mind we live versus the flesh we have: what could be a more perfect complement to the absurd physical reality of all of us eensy-weensy beings, us Lilliputian, Horton-hears-a-who, antlike nanoprimates sniffing technological pheromones on the surface of this tiny blue sphere in the depths of unimaginably vast and indeed perhaps infinite space, than the equally, and oppositely, grandiose figure of our spirit—our spirit on the drugs of writing—as a hyperbolic plane?