It was 70 years ago this month ... LSD in literature

[Jeff Sunbury]

Not prior to 1952 but Criterion Collection's April 2013 release of David
Cronenberg's 1991 film Naked Lunch prompted me to revisit the book with
restored text by Barry Miles and James Grauerholz and also the excellent
audiobook narrated by Mark Bramhall. One of the DVD extras was a clip of
William Burroughs expounding from personal experience on the use of drugs
he had used and the effects on writing while under the influence. He highly
praised the use of the full array of hallucinogenics including LSD for
stimulating the imagination. He probably used LSD as early as the mid
1950s. Speculatively, it's possible that pharmacodynamic effects on
dopamine receptor, adrenoreceptor and serotonin receptor subtypes might be
present organically in some types of mental illness such as bipolar
disorder (formerly known as manic depression) in many writers e.g. Lord
Byron and possibly Robert Walser. Is alcoholism commonly associated with
crative an attempt to self-medicate for the same mental disorder? "One
never knows. DO one?" - Fats Waller


On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 11:15 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
>
> http://carlabrahamsson.blogspot.se/2013/01/ernst-junger-master-in-making.html
>
>  "I can here be a bit shameless in announcing that they’re not alone in
> this noble pursuit. Edda Publishing <http://www.edda.se/> will release an
> edition of Jünger’s strange and superb *Besuch auf Godenholm* (1952),
> translated into English by Annabel Moynihan-Lee and illustrated by Fredrik
> Söderberg <http://www.fredriksoderberg.org/>, in the spring/summer of
> 2013. That, my friends, will be an edition to savour!"****
>
>
> On 19.04.2013 15:49, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>
>
> http://www.titanic-magazin.de/postkarten/karte/drogengott-ernst-juenger-feiert-100-jahre-ecstasy-495-2048/
>
> This is satire on occasion of Jünger's 100th birthday, --- but then again
> Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) used a lot of drugs. Opium, cocaine and cannabis
> in the 1920s, psychedelics after WW II. He was a close friend of Albert
> Hofmann, and the two were tripping together several times. Jünger's short
> novel (or: long story) *Besuch auf Godenholm* from 1952 is, as far as I
> know, the first Acid story in fictional literature. Like most of Jünger's
> work not translated into English. But of his large essay *Annährungen.
> Drogen und Rausch* (1970), in which EJ minted the term "Psychonautik", a
> small sample was published under the title  'Drugs and Ecstasy' in: Myths
> and Symbols. Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade. Edited by Joseph M.
> Kitagawa and Charles H. Long. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
> Press (1969), pp. 327-42. Both, the narration and the essay, I can
> wholeheartedly recommend. In Hofmann's* LSD --- mein Sorgenkind* there's
> a chapter on Jünger:
>
> http://www.psychedelic-library.org/child7.htm
>
> Here's the sample from *Besuch auf Godenholm*, giving a fine description
> how things start to get weird:
>
> "Schwarzenberg burned an incense stick, as he sometimes did, to clear the
> air. A blue plume ascended from the tip of the stick. Moltner looked at it
> first with astonishment, then with delight, as if a new power of the eyes
> had come to him. It revealed itself in the play of this fragrant smoke,
> which ascended from the slender stick and then branched out into a delicate
> crown. It was as if his imagination had created it-a pallid web of sea
> lilies in the depths, that scarcely trembled from the beat of the surf.
> Time was active in this creation-it had circled it, whirled about it,
> wreathed it, as if imaginary coins rapidly piled up one on top of another.
> The abundance of space revealed itself in the fiber work, the nerves, which
> stretched and unfolded in the height, in a vast number of filaments.
>     Now a breath of air affected the vision, and softly twisted it about
> the shaft like a dancer. Moltner uttered a shout of surprise. The beams and
> lattices of the wondrous flower wheeled around in new planes, in new
> fields. Myriads of molecules observed the harmony. Here the laws no longer
> acted under the veil of appearance; matter was so delicate and weightless
> that it clearly reflected them. How simple and cogent everything was. The
> numbers, masses and weights stood out from matter. They cast off the
> raiments. No goddess could inform the initiates more boldly and freely. The
> pyramids with their weight did not reach up to this revelation. That was
> Pythagorean luster. No spectacle had ever affected him with such a magic
> spell."
>
> Does anybody know a fictional text about (or inspired by) Acid prior to
> 1952?
>
>
> http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Love-The-Works-Of-Ernst-Junger/2889672
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besuch_auf_Godenholm
> http://www.mj67.de/ej/ej1970cm.jpg
>
>
>
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