GRGR(12) LSD in the formula

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> "Terrance F. Flaherty" wrote:
> 
> > How life affirming is LSD in VL? It's not. It's death
> > affirming. For example, when Frenesi is discovered to be
> > with child(our dear Prairie), her friends suggest that she
> > bring up a child, rather than have an abortion, and include
> > "LSD in the formula." VL.42
> 
> Do you think Frenesi's friends were suggesting an alternate way to kill
> the child? I think that is a misreading; if that is what you make of the
> passage I'd like to know how you support it.
> 
> Jeremy

No, I'm suggesting that putting LSD in baby formula is not
life affirming. Her friends say, "what a groovy chance to
bring up a child in a politically correct way, though
definitions of this varied from reading Trotsky to her at
bedtime to including LSD in the formula." Now why do the
kids suggest this to Frenesi? This is   ridiculous, 
extreme, and to my experience with damaged children, of drug
mothers, dark, but it is funny. Pynchon here, is the "black
humorist," though I think that term too stretched, and too
limited, clearly Pynchon has what has been called "humorous
apocalypse," a term I think better suited to his treatment
of LSD, in VL, and certainly in CL, where  Mucho, on LSD,
goes groping "like a child further and further into the
rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of
himself." 

The ergotism and witches. 

The medicinal properties and effects of ergot, tend to
emphasize its toxicity and its destructive effects,
including hallucinations, gangrene, even death. There is
another side to it, though: derivatives of ergot were used
to induce labor in human beings and animals, to stop uterine
bleeding, even to treat migraines. Traditional use, and of
course the Greeks used the substances for ritual purposes.
Ergot was the source of a widespread and very painfully
fatal disease called St. Anthony's Fire which hit northern
France during the famines of the 970s--c.1000. Ergot is
caused when rye grain or flour gets wet. It has been
suggested, that an outbreak of ergot led to the Salem witch
trials since the symptoms of witchcraft described by the
girls are very similar to the symptoms of ergot poisoning. 

That moderate doses of ergot can be hallucinogenic has, I
think, been proven in the
pharmacological literature.

I think LSD in GR is another matter, chemical, a tool of the
scientific/political establishment, the white elite, and not
the traditional less technological discovery and use by
peoples ancient and modern-the Greeks, for example, used
ergot, although it is easy to underestimate the
observational powers of people in less technologically
advanced societies. Claude Lévi-Strauss marshals evidence
against this prejudice in The Savage Mind, emphasizing that
much or most of the store of knowledge that individuals in
``primitive'' societies have is not practical, contrary to
stereotype, since humans always study their surroundings and
collect information that is not of obvious immediate
utility, the traditional story of the discovery of coffee
says that someone noticed the horses were especially lively,
investigated, and learned they'd been foraging in the coffee
plants, but LSD is a highly concentrated, potent, substance,
chemically manufactured, it was feared, and I don't think
this was all CIA propaganda, that LSD might be used by
terrorists.  

I think Pynchon contrasts LSD in GR with other more
traditional substances, that under the right conditions,
lead to divine rapture, profound, intimate contact with
transcendent Mysteries, and I think Pynchon's windowpane
nostalgia needs to be grouped as ritual of this sort, and I
think he is also aware that, as Wasson put it in his seminal
paper, "Two psychiatrists who have taken the mushroom and
known the experience in its full dimension have been
criticized in professional circles as no longer being
"objective." Thus it comes about that we are divided into
two classes: those who have taken the mushroom and are
disqualified by our subjective experience, and those who
have not taken the mushroom and are disqualified by their
total ignorance of the subject!" So, again it seems that the
innocent, the kids that suggest LSD for Frenesi's baby, and
the guilty, the CIA, seem to be on the same side of
Pynchon's dark jokes, but of course, as Doug points out,
Dulles tells us a lot.  

It is ancient belief that certain substances, in ritualistic
celebration may expands our view of human nature, and may
help reduce the devastating alienation from nature that is
so common to cultural change, the technological one,  that
right now profoundly threatens our very survival, is not as
unique as we might think, although in literature, the post
Hiroshima novelists, have brought a new apocalyptic
perspective, though the use of substances (ergotism) was
also part of the ancient Eleusinian mystery. 

Perhaps, Pynchon seems to suggest, another unfortunate
aspect of LSD, is that it has become identified with Timothy
Leary and the anti-establishment youth  protest he
championed. Leary's style was so grandiose that it has
eclipsed the far more significant mystical religious
dimensions that LSD occasion, while the work of Stanislav
Grof, for example, who administered LSD to thousands of
subjects in carefully controlled clinical environments go
largely unacknowledged by mass media and so on. 

In any event, there is probably no substance more
concentratedly potent than
LSD; the CIA was afraid that terrorists could pollute an
entire reservoir. But we know the BS of the CIA's claim, and
in fact the problem of supply, however, would be real if the
entheogen were almost anything else, like a mushroom or
opium, etc. So I think we can take each case in context, but
I think Pynchon's fiction demonstrates a mistrust, and a
disdain for the use of drugs outside of its more
traditional, magical, "religious" pow-wow type uses. 

Tf