Good drugs/Bad drugs?

[Andrew Dinn]

Gillies, Lindsay writes:

> Yeah, there's definitely a distinction drawn between organically-induced 
> trancendence and synthetic/material-induced.  At the beginning of GR, the 
> monkeys come down out of their trees and guzzle their communal meal of 
> bananas (right from their own local jungle) and Osbie's mushrooms.  Benny 
> Profane, on the other hand, can't connect with or avoid objects, even back 
> in V there's a sense of some possibly malevolent will on the part of 
> objects, and their potential for moving us elsewhere (if not up at least 
> around).  This reaches apotheosis in the (pseudo?) mystical launch of the 
> human rocket near the end of GR.

> What connects these two, I guess, and what relates LSD to mescaline is 
> Structure.  Even among the bananas and mushrooms, it is the intricate 
> Structure of the olefactory agent that (as never so clearly before) tells 
> Death to fuck off.  Natch, a huge subject for denizens here, this Structure. 
>  But perhaps it's the connection between the "natural" and the synthetic 
> that moves TRP's discourse beyond a simple dichotomy...

I have recently been reading Paul Harrison's `The Third Revolution', a
great ecology primer. Throughout the book he repeatedly shows how the
same pressures have transformed animistic worshippers of their
environment into exploiters and manipulators. His last chapter
attempts to be fairly upbeat in the face of the ecological mess we are
facing. He refers to early animistic societies' respect for nature and
then speculates how finally on the brink of catastrophe people at last
come to recognise the abuse they are perpetrating and revive this
original respect for their environment. I couldn't help think of the
end of GR where the preterite are finally annihilated from the zone
and we return to `a face on every mountainside and a soul in every
stone'. Then I thought back to Thomas Hooker who had had enough of
wild plants, wild love and wanted a `garden love of God's own
planting', a synthetic garden for a God of Newtonian space. This is
where the seed of the synthetic/natural distinction is planted, the
replacement of the American wilderness with a synthetic enclosure. The
banana fragrance is merely an overture to this theme. Perhaps
Slothrop's crossroads is its flowering.


Andrew Dinn
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How do you know but every bird which cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of pleasure closed by your senses five