Herself (44 page)

As I sit here, what am I trying to do? As usual with humans, I am trying to assess the “new” reality, more than likely either by refusing it or asserting mine. Dr. Johnson, confronted by such Berkeleyan conundrums as where the room went when the observer was out of it, was able to prove the existence of matter, and of himself, by kicking a stone. But he was a lexicographer, and a critic, too. Being what I am, I might do it better via art itself. But art is long. So as I sit here in the pot-clouded room, with the cubes of “acid” scattered delicate as sesame on the table, and the needle-and-spoon in its ready little box, stashed say at the bottom of the baby’s bassinet (all of which, for the sake of the Feds, shall we say is imaginary, excluding only the baby?)—I shall settle for one or two insights which anybody might have, on reflection. How did I get here, for instance, in this peculiar position, refusing the glorious sense-data of the unknown, standing on the mere equipment which nature has given me—and will shortly take away—as on a beleaguered isle? Is nature still the newest, freshest thing around—or a has-been? In the role of artist alone, am I at worst a coward before experience, at best a fool, at likeliest a conservative? Or is it still possible that I can get as much out of my five senses and brain as anyone who gives up his autonomy over them, such at least as he was born to have? Will it one day be seen that this room—like vomitoriums, saunas, the baths of Caracalla, the chapels of the flagellites, the massage-room at the New York Athletic Club, or you name it—is only modish in its turn? Or only valuable when it is not communal but tragically personal—as, say, the bedroom of Thomas De Quincey? Am I really, in my isolation, gloriously reasonable—an angel who refuses to be confined to the pinpoint of a needle, or a pill? Stop the questions. Let us see how I got here.

Take a look at historical reality, which, whether you consider it most influenced by the battle, the plough, the apse, or the monumental person, is ever in a state of change. Alongside its panorama goes that other, more single-file drama, preoccupation of the philosophers—the problem of the observer versus the observed. Like the question of the existence of God, the problem is pitiful in that it is unsolvable, wonderful in that the mind subject to its condition can still conceive of it. Meanwhile, man, who has to live under the assumption that reality is fairly stable, has always had spiritual-physical ways of relieving himself of the dailiness of his own psyche. These vary from time to time, in means, method, and popularity. But that we should want to escape from our self, or to enlarge it, is eternal. This particular room, in its clouds of acrid smoke and sweet illusion, its pleasure in the possible company of the foul angels or lucky devils we are sure to have within us, is nothing new. Nor is art’s specious presence here new, nor youth’s. Like so much in life, it is merely new to us.

In the youth of many who are now middle-aged, Sex was the respectable way to be revolutionary. This was especially so for those not involved in “pink” politics, but often was a sideline or indulgence for those, too. For some of the literati, both practicing and fringe, assertive Sex was a way of proclaiming that literature
was
life—or that one had found this out. Or that one was a member of the literati. In the other arts, and gradually for much of the populace, the mystique went much the same: sexual conduct, though still pretty much a private flight of the psyche, was publicly meaningful, and in certain places an avowed synonym for poetic pioneering into both Eleutheria and
la boue
—into both the mysteries and the mud-slush of life. A current mystique always is. (Just as it is always a sign that mystique and mysticism have once more been confused.)

Nowadays, of course, sex is for everybody—either everybody’s Eden or everybody’s duty, seems to be the line—and to capitalize the word, as was then often done, seems scarcely amusing. But to do so is owed to history, and helps to note that Sex, to those pioneers (and for that reality), had in the main a holy, male-female connotation. Not to say that other forms of love or orgy were unknown or not busy at their mystiques; at any time in the world all of the latter somewhere coexist. But one may always recognize the fashionable, the Mother Mystique, by the difficulty of slanging it without being thought “not with it”—as is the case today. Youth particularly tends to revere the connection between the orgiastic and the serious. Innocent as we might be of sexual orgy in the old days, we were chary of kidding it. But only yesterday I heard a young “swinger,” to whom “turning on,” whether or not she does it, is still the sacred key to Eleusis, say laughingly of the other, “Oh yes, that. Group-grope.”

In the ’40s, alcoholism was particularly fashionable for writers, and some of them made art of it. Other writers tried to inherit these men and women’s demons intact. But men’s personal demons, or the art that may go with these, are never heritable in a straight line. A writer-cum-bottle is now old hat, as “out of it” as any member of Rotary. Those demons are the property of any club car, now. The furies don’t come in a bottle any more, or in the pure-and-simple bed. Sex as revolution, alcohol as the black-mass acolyte of the soul are both supremely out of style.

Looking back on our era, it may one day be said of us that
travel
, both literal and poetic, was our major attempt at once to extend bodily sensation and to relieve ourselves of the pains or burdens of the inner dialogue. New estimates of the nature of time and space, new powers over distance, have been with us scientifically for more than a generation, and the “new” time-space metaphors engendered by this have all but been exhausted in the arts. However, it takes a while for metaphor to seep into the general populace, and this, of course, includes the non-artistic side of the artists and scientists as well. Just at about the time the early intellectual intuitions of an era are codified and on the way to senescence, they become part of generally accepted reality. Like any other discoveries, once implemented or open to all, they are regarded as commonplace. Travel to the moon may remain poetic for a time, the moon being what it has been to humans, but it can scarcely remain mysterious.

Once upon a time, the tour—the literal kind, on land, by sea or by air—was for fun, education, or rest. Now, even in this mode, it often has another aim. People go touring for the significant experience, as to the
kibbutz
; the idea is not to escape from responsibility but to find it. Or one vicariously follows the bloodbaths of the world as some follow sporting events, to be where the action is; yesterday’s papers report that voyeur tourism in Vietnam is on the rise. Voyeurism is of course deeply connected with the “real” experience that one dare not have oneself, or with the lost innocence of the real emotion that one cannot have any more. There are so few unspoiled private places any more—as the travel-agents used to say—short of other people’s graves.

But there is one. The psychedelic “trip,” being limited to the self, must remain more arcane even than moon-going—until, at least, we perfect even other ways of self-peeking than those electronic buggeries we now have. As a testimony that travel in perception is as possible as travel by miles, the drug-trip has its dignity—though one not unique to it, surely. It is versatile, since the individual can travel either alone, or alone in a group. One advantage of the group is that it has a special attraction for those who have trouble with such relationships, or are limitedly seeking them. Philosophically, the drug trip has deeply seductive roots in the experimental psychology of us all, as drug-taking has had down the ages. For what could be closer, more clairaudient to that classic dialogue of the observer and the observed? Finally, the drug-traveller can give the white feather at once to those who stand and wait for experience to happen; he coins it, courts it by a process for which the word “happening” is so apt, advancing like Stanley into the inner darkness of himself. And, so doing—at once actor and audience, novel and writer, poet and poem (like Swinburne, like Coleridge, see?)—whether or not he already is an artist, or wants to join up, he has imposed an extra handspring on the processes of art. Hasn’t he? For he has used the very stuff of himself creatively. And that’s new, isn’t it?

Having listed all the virtues of psychedelia, except the obvious one of escape, it now occurs to me that the process of ordinary thinking has most of these, and indeed travels by the very same routes and means. But it
is
so ordinary. As for Coleridge and Swinburne, one can no more measure what portion of an artist’s imagination is under stimulus, rather than native to it, than one can weigh the contribution of Dostoevski’s epilepsy to his. Except perhaps to remark that when a poet is also avowedly his poem, he is often at his worst. As an abstainer, it is even possible that I need feel no guilt at all.

For those who hope to make, psychedelic connection with the arts, where other means have failed, the estimate is more certain, and has nothing to do either with moral wrong or with health. Great artists have been thieves and drugtakers, have starved or grown rich, but neither thievery nor poverty, wealth nor poppyseed, makes artists—or any coterie of circumstance or even intellect, or other laying-on of hands. As a fashionable mystique among artists themselves, psychedelia is as phony and temporary—and as ancient—as any other. There is nothing more innately artistic about drug-taking, solo or in soiree, than any number of modes of conduct, given the proper aura and spice. Naked communal birdwatching, say—in front of the Plaza. So many delightful ways of enlarging the perceptions are possible. But no more artistic because artists may be doing them. For the artist, once delivered of his insight or apart from it, is vulnerable to the reality of the day, like any other man.

It has taken me a long time of sitting here in this room to see this. And it now occurs to me that I have been in such rooms, or ones very similar, before—often on greater occasion. I was here in the ’40s, when it proved guiltily impossible for me to transmute my young ache to help the needy into Communism’s doctrinaire. I was here once as a Jew, when, for all my will to build Zion in the name of the martyrs, I could not manage to see Zion as merely and only Israel: Every time I am tempted, either from ambition or solitude, to join a sympathetic or powerful coterie of artistic conviction, I am here—innumerable times. I am here every time I am tempted to give up my absurd autonomy, which any man may have: his reserved right to go on seeing the
differences
in the world, and to see it differently from the rest.

This can be saddening for both sides, joiners and non-, as it has been since the beginning of the world. Moreover, that sort of dissidence can come, not worthily, from intellectual choice, but merely from a nasty sense of one’s own boundaries—as any yearner who sees the front lines of so many fracases dissolve into the
arrière-garde
before he can get there, well knows. Ours, however is a generation trained to fear a mysticism which thinks democratically, in groups—which is what Fascism was. From there, we have gone on to mistrust group thinking altogether; at least some of us have. Often, the mysticisms of ordinary people
are
frightening, precisely because they have little or no spiritual or intellectual content. The psychedelic movement is unlikely to shake governments or affect too many more than those engaged in its tarantella. But mass-moods toward mindlessness are scary, at least in the Western world.

There is a certain snobbery, though, in insisting on the antennae of one’s own senses only. They afford no surety. After a certain age, surely, mayn’t the data of one’s senses be as decadent as any provided by C17H12N04—old-fashioned cocaine, once thought the height of psychedelic sophistication? And even when one is young these days, the hillside is no longer that dew-pearled; what does all that cleareyed gandering bring one except the stench of other peoples’ blood, or at best food already corrupted at the chemical root, desensitized sex, and bad air? To all this kind of argument there is no answer, not even to remark perhaps that nature corrupts and purifies itself faster than we can ever—for we are back at the duet of the observer and observed. It is a matter of temperament.

A charming couple had lunch with me yesterday. Just out of grad school, they are as conventional for the breed of the times as any I ever saw. Husband is a physicist, where the best butter is, but is also a fiend at the guitar. They speak proudly of a working-class background, but find the actual Czech parental pad in Yorkville as stifling for a really groovy home-visit to New York as any rebels fleeing Scarsdale. (They have made the ritual visit to Paris and are now perhaps a little more European than their parents—in the way of food. He loves it, better than haircuts, and she, neat as a phoebe, is already watching his weight.) They adore each other, obviously. They are wise enough to sense that “folkies”—the “life-pattern” they have somewhat subscribed to—are on the way out, but their alert sense of style will keep them “with it,” totally unaware that this merely means being one’s age, at
that
age. She has a degree in home economics, but need not be ashamed of it. For, of course (not too often, as a matter of modernation and economy), they are in the habit of turning on, and that one symbol makes everything right. In ten years I see them, succumbed, as they already have, to that greatest of drugs—convention. There’ll be another name for what they’ll be, and no opprobrium for it from me. But they’ll be what they are now. Squares.

They in turn are clearly disappointed in me. Introduced by a friend, they know better than to expect antics of all writers. They don’t mind the lunch being good. But they are astounded at my attitudes as expounded above, and coming from someone who has published in their Koran—a magazine so hip that they don’t have to read it. They have listened politely. They speak of the material that turning on might bring me. I agree that bizarre thoughts and perceptions, which thank God I have constantly, are a fine matrix for creation, but useless when the controls are absent. “I like to be
there
, you see. When I have them.” But their eyes are onyx; in fact, orthodox. They’re in that room. And, as usual, I’m outside the church. Later, our mutual friend reports their puzzlement. “You wore an apron, you dog.” I can play roles as well as any—and I did cook lunch. “They can’t understand it. You were a
sweet lady
, they said.”