GRGR(12) LSD, for good and evil

[Doug Millison]

>Doug Millison wrote:
>> LSD:  life- or death-affirming?  Maybe both -- we've got evidence to
>> support that in GR (and certainly in the sources to which the both leads us
>> rather pointedly), I think.
>>
>> Terrance reminds us that "Weisenburger notes that LSD is linked in GR with
>> the North, the color White (death), IG Farben."   This would be, I suppose,
>> in the passage on page 261, the "indole crowd [...] at the end of a long
>> European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on
>> broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain
>> that havne't known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years--keepers of
>> a tradition, aristocrats". This would seem to say that the "aristocrats"
>> have co-opted what sounds like a rather fun, perhaps even orgiastic folk
>> tradition -- TRP himself seems to undercut the rather rigid reading
>> Weisenburger provides here of LSD's role in GR.
>>
>
At 5:33 PM -0400 10/20/99, Terrance F. Flaherty wrote:
>Undercuts it how? I don't understand?

Undercuts Wiesenburg's rather rigid assertion that LSD is linked in GR with
the North, the color White (death), IG Farben. My reading is that Pynchon
in GR has underscored the appropriation of LSD by "aristocrats" who take it
in the direction of death but only at the end of a long history of rather
more life-affirming use of LSD and its sister substances.

TRP mentions "witches on broomsticks" as part of the tradition co-opted by
the aristocrats, for example. Is that a death-affirming use of
psychedelics? Only from the point of view of the powers-that-be, the Church
and other establishment institutions that benefit from keeping "witches"
and their practices (involving the use of psychedelic substances, some
researchers believe) on the margin, and who have rewritten history or
suppressed history that would show it otherwise; from the point of view of
the pre-Christian tradition (see Graves on this), these practices would
hardly be seen the way the Catholic Church sees them, instead they would be
seen as an integral part of a spiritual practice as valid as any that came
along later. "Community orgies" sounds pretty life-affirming to me, too.

But in the same series, TRP includes "blighted grain". Others with a better
grasp of drug and European history will correct me I hope, but I seem to
recall reading that the sort of mass hallucinations that stem from
"blighted grain" may have lead to some  excesses that would probably
wouldn't merit "life-affirming".


So, I don't think Pynchon comes down unequivocably with LSD on the side of
death and the pornographies which assist the forces of death in their
battle against life and love. In this  passage on p. 261, TRP points to
both life-affirming and death-affirming consequences of psychedelic
substances, even before he lands on "aristocrats". It's not hard to draw a
line from these German industrial "aristrocrats" who put "indoles" at the
service of death in the Nazi project to Dulles and the CIA, who put LSD in
the service of fascist mind control as a Cold War weapon in the armory of
"spies and business".   At the same time, following TRP's references, that
line also leads through the OSS, which, in LSD history, leads to Hubbard,
and the life-affirming use of LSD espoused by Hubbard and  those he turned
on,  to LSD's role in the 60's revolution against fascist culture and
corporate control.  (Whether that's a failed project is a question that TRP
takes up in Vineland, where he treats it seriously and in some detail.)

Why does TRP make this LSD "detour" at this point in the first place?

In a way, it seems to pop up almost by "accident", merely incidental to
Slothrop's obsession with Imipolex-G, but as you dig deeper into it, the
LSD reference begins to take on more significance, especially in the way it
leads us to the CIA, the Cold War, the '60s culture wars and anti-War
movement. "Incidental" in the way, perhaps, that we "accidentally"
encounter John F. Kennedy and Malcom X and future establishment folk like
Dumpster Villard (who also pops up in this chapter with Dulles and the
other Harvard Square types) in Slothrop's toilet trip (induced and
controlled, it seems, by forces very similar to the MK-ULTRA LSD
experimenters) -- Slothrop's WWII journey seems to recede in significance
in the presence of these powerful references to '50s and '60s culture and
politics. That's why I read GR, as I've said before, to be as much about
the '50s and '60s as it is about WWII, if not more so.

Terrance:
>Yes, the aristocrats,
>the elite, the white, indole crowd, has, with chemistry, its
>cannon being that man is no longer at the mercy of nature,
>co-opted something. What do you think they have co-opted?
>You describe it as fun, folk, yes, but there is more, much
>more here, isn't there? And if we consider the traditional,
>use of naturally produced (say, blighted grain, mushrooms)
>substances used in religious ceremony, it seems to me that
>LSD, at this juncture, in this context is not life
>affirming, but another pornography.

LSD has long been seen as part of a family of substances that humans have
used over the course of recorded history (and, presumably, in the
prehistorical period) for spiritual development, and with the help of which
they have felt at one with themselves, their fellows, nature, the universe,
God.  There is a well-researched and strongly argued school of thought that
puts psychedelics in the same category as fasting, meditation, and other
spiritual practices that lead to personal transformation and ecstatic
vision. In that sense, I don't think use of LSD or other psychedelics in
the sort of searching or spiritual mode favored by so many of TRP's
contemporaries would put it in the category of "pornography", not as TRP
defines various pornographies in GR. "Pornography" connotes a false vision,
where a facsimile stands in for the real thing (a porno film depicts and
thus replaces the reality of two people in the physical act of love). I
realize that some people might argue that, following such a definition, LSD
is no more than a facsimile of a "real" spiritual breakthrough. But many
researchers and others who continue to work with LSD and other
psychedelics, especially in psychotherapeutic and sacred settings (see the
Council on Spiritual Practices, on the Web at http://www.csp.org, for a
window into this fascinating world) would disagree, and would validate the
essential "reality" of psychedelic experience.

Does Pynchon come down on one side or another of the LSD as life-affirming
or LSD as death-affirming equation? Tough question. Some readers argue that
TRP winds up undercutting everything and privileging nothing. I don't put
myself in that camp, however. As a whole, despite its darker themes and
apocalyptic vision, GR has always seemed to me to embrace, and indeed to
have been shaped by, a sensibility that might easily be described as
"psychedelic":  loving attention to the details -- viewed in an
ever-more-inclusive, -penetrating, -sharpening series of pictures that zoom
out wide and up close, not unlike psychedelic visions that shift from
telescope to microscope then boundless --  of the miracle of life in all
its intricacies that we see in the "living genetic chains" that so clearly
tell Death to fuck off back on page 10; tracing things back to their roots
(the road that leads back from the toothpaste tube in the Advent section,
for example) in TRP's "everything is connected" vision of politics and
personal relationships; in GR's embrace of humankind in all its tainted
glory that can, I think, be described as "cosmic"; surreal hallucinations;
etc. (I'm not arguing that TRP took acid and so he wrote GR this way, by
the way -- it's conceivable that he could have stayed away from the drug
entirely --  and still have been influenced by the psychedelic culture that
swept through his demographic cohort, borrowed its tropes for his art;
indeed, some of what he does comes out of earlier artistic traditions that
themselves fed into psychedelic culture -- surrealism, Dada, etc.)

I think this LSD question takes us back, too, to the consideration of
"mindless pleasures" and what they are. If it's the Tube entrancing people
so they can't pay attention to the way Reagan and his fascist buddies are
taking over, well that's no good in the universe of Pynchon's writing. But
if it's the effect of a substance like LSD that has the power to cut
through the masks and the bullshit that blinds us to the way "spies and
business" are making the world a graveyard, that seems  a good thing in the
universe of Pynchon's writing.

That's the way I read it, anyhow, and this is all more or less off the top
of my head; your mileage may vary.

P.S. I've just received Terrance's most recent post, about drugs in
Vineland. My first reaction is, that the betrayal of the psychedelic vision
and its being coopted by dark forces doesn't necessarily undercut it's
inherent life-affirming nature. But I'll read what Terrance has to say and
see if I want to add anything to that.

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
http://www.dougmillison.com
http://www.online-journalist.com