R: TRP on Ecstasy

[Doug Millison]

I don't know Bruce Eisner personally, but I know people who do, here in the
San Francisco Bay Area.  I suspect -- of course *I can't know for sure*,
and here seek to put this as tentatively as possible -- that Eisner *may*
have had a chance to talk with Pynchon during one of P's stays in the Santa
Cruz area, down on the Monterey Bay about 60 miles or so south of SF.
Internal evidence from his novels *suggests* to me that P has personal
experience with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, *but of course I have no
way of knowing whether that's true*; if he didn't take acid, he took good
notes in conversations with somebody very articulate who did, I *suspect*.
There have been disagreements on Pynchon-L about whether or not LSD is
viewed as something good or something bad or somewhere in between in GR,
Vineland, etc. I'm not in the rave scene myself, but I do know people who
use MDMA in spiritual or therapeutic settings, and they report interesting
results. If the quote that Eisner published is authentic, it *seems to me*
of a piece with the rest of Pynchon's counter-culture politics, which is
not to say his view of the counter-culture is monolithic and all approving,
he is sometimes quite harsh on the failures of '60s rebels. What he wrote
about LSD in Vineland *seems* to ring most authentically for me, where he
discusses LSD as a substance that lets people see that they won't die (and
there's another instance of existence on the other side of the life-death
interface that you find throughout his works) and which the State seeks to
suppress.  But he writes other things about LSD and other drugs in other
places, *not at all a monolithic or simplistic treatment*. At any rate,
drugs come up again in M&D, the topic clearly *seems* to interest him,
another one of the threads that weave throughout his work.