17 Disparate Riffs on Science Fiction

Disparate in the book-drunk weed-sodden time-jog of my mind, at least...

My blogging colleague Tom Jackson has posted on the Prometheus Awards finalists, with nice summaries of all kinds of books that sound fascinating, none of which I've gotten around to reading yet. The last post the OG received comments about science fiction fans and conventions and how SF writers tend to be - some - more open to meeting their fans. Sooo...

1. I recently read about Hong Kong roboticist Ricky Ma making his first prototype robot that looks very very much like Unistatian bombshell actress Scarlett Johansson. He used 3-D printing and it cost about $50,000. He'll no doubt make "better" versions. Aside from what we think about his project (I wonder what "Scarjo" makes of it?), it reminded me of SF writer Ray Faraday Nelson's 1978 book Revolt of the Unemployables, which pointed out that his collaborator and friend Philip K. Dick was the first SF writer to realize the purpose of making robots look like people. Eventually we meatware beings will have an ontological problem distinguishing what it means to be human. And these robots are going to get better and better, obviously...and the aesthetic behind the assertion of "better" of course means: "more like us." In a book of interviews with Philip K. Dick, What If Our World Is Their Heaven? PKD asserts that the android that thinks it's human idea is his own unique contribution to SF, since 1953's "Imposter."

2. William Gibson said that "What interested me most in the sci-fi of The Sixties was the investigation of the politics of perception, some of which, I imagine, could now be seen in retrospect as having been approached through various and variously evolving ideas of the cyborg." - Distrust That Particular Flavor, p. 248 (Maybe worthsomewhiles: Do yourself a favor and nonchalantly drop "the politics of perception" into your next dinner-party conversation. Note any and all reactions. I've noticed the phrase has legs: watch it be interpreted in many different ways. "Is" perception "political"? My gawd, how can it not be? And yet this topic only seems to get discussed among weirdos like us. - OG)

3. Thomas Pynchon has influenced many SF writers, but had the idea, in his introductory piece to his old essays in Slow Learner that SF evades the issue of mortality. Or it had as of the writing of that Intro, c.1984. It's an interesting idea...and ideas are, it seems to me, what make SF cool. It's as if Pynchon went looking for a possible Achilles Heel of SF and came up with the riff on mortality. Is it true? I don't know. Pynchon for me belongs along with SF books in the Novels of Ideas.

4. In Dennis McKenna's memoir Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss he writes about how he and his famous brother Terence loved SF - especially Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Sturgeon, and Arthur C. Clarke. Later: PKD. As I read Dennis's book I made notes on all the sources he cited that he and Terence filled their imaginations and knowledge banks with, because I knew Dennis's account of the Experiment at La Chorrera was coming up. At one point he reproduces his own field notes, written while he was in a monthlong quasi-para-schizophrenic break from "reality" due to constant heroic doses of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT and incessant pot smoking, add to that being with three other people, in the Amazon, missing sleep for days, and doing ceremonial magic on top of this. It's one of the great insane travelogue accounts. 41 years later Dennis says his alchemical science-y sounding "attempt" to "trigger an end to history, throw open the gates of a paradise out of time and invite humanity to walk in," was acting "on our obsessions to an appalling degree." (p.285) Of the science fiction books that possibly subconsciously framed the McKenna Brothers' experience, Dennis admits of a "mash-up" of Arthur C. Clarke and PKD. (p.286) I'll say! I'd say add heaps of Jung, alchemy, cosmology, their own rejected Catholic upbringing in a stultifying small town, and a high school music teacher who taught Dennis about sympathetic vibrations of strings. At minimum.

5. Writing about the time before La Chorrera (reading about or listening to Terence recount this epically gonzo drug experiment always gives me a major contact high), Dennis writes, "Science fiction is good for the mind. It keeps one open to possibilities and, more than any other fictional genre, helps one to anticipate and prepare for the future. In fact, science fiction creates the future, by articulating a vision of what we as a culture imagine for ourselves." (p.119, op.cit) He then goes on to list a handful of SF predictions that came true, some that didn't, and some science fiction-y things that did come true, although maybe never predicted in SF, coming to the conclusion that "reality" is stranger than fiction.

In John Higgs's recent history of the 20th century, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, he traces science fiction as a clue to individual, then collective longing for something fantastic. SF is an "early warning system" and points to collective minds in our future. How can this not be? (see op cit, pp. 129-143)

6. My favorite writer about drugs is Dale Pendell. In his Pharmako Gnosis he has an entire chapter on DMT, "The Topology of the Between: DMT," pp. 227-240. Along with Dr. Rick Strassman and the greatest 20th century alchemist, Sasha Shulgin, DMT is still probably most associated with the McKennas, and probably Terence more than Dennis, probably owing to Terence's legendary poetic gifts and mesmerizing idiolect. Pendell spends four pages comparing written accounts of various truly otherworldly DMT trips, and notes how science fiction and DMT trip reports seem quite similar. The "contact" with machine-like alien beings who want to teach the tripper something very important is a very common part of the DMT experience. Of DMT-inspired art, Pendell writes, "There are transparent bubbles and pods and extraterrestrial landscapes. Dendritic forms are common, as is x-ray vision. Crystals are also frequent. Much of the art is illustrative, has a commercial feel to it, and finds its way onto book and album covers. And, of course, movies - DMT can have a cartoon quality. Science fiction themes are common. Sometimes visionary artists are able to capture the movement and churning of DMT experience." Here's a choice quote from Terence McKenna, about DMT:

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with an alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon. - from Food of the Gods (Pendell: p. 232; Food of the Gods p.258)

7. I was introduced to the idea of the history of cultural anthropology and "first contact" by a great Anthropology professor named Sam Sandt. Some of us had our imaginations captured by the idea that there really were "first contacts" between European and American "first world" people and people still living in rain forests or deserts or other marginalized areas of the Earth. And once you read about one, you want to read others. Professor Sandt told me there's a cross-over between Cultural Anthropology and ethnographies and science fiction, which often features human contact with peoples or other humanoids who seem Wholly Other. So I guess what I'm saying is you DMT smokers might enjoy reading Anthropology, and those Anthropology majors who still haven't tried DMT...read science fiction to prepare? What am I saying? I see from my diffuse notes on this topic that Harlan Ellison once placed Carlos Castaneda's books "among the preeminent in the genre," of SF. - Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, p.226

See also, maybe?:
First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World (thrilling)
Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology and Popular Culture

8. In 1948 a writer sometimes considered to "be" SF wrote about a future dystopia in which there was "Thoughtcrime." Only eight years later, PKD coined "pre-crime" and it's been with us now for at least 10 years in "reality." One of the main problems with the urgent need for police reform in Unistat is to keep the police from surveilling the poor - especially African-Americans - in anticipation of crime. PKD minted "pre-crime" in 1956's relatively short piece "Minority Report." I recall telling a friend who didn't like SF that it was an important genre that is all about ideas. Then we went to see Spielberg's 2002 film of PKD's Minority Report. I thought the "pre-crime" aspect was probably just around the corner as something we'd actually have to contend with; my friend thought it far-fetched. I think this speaks to Dennis McKenna's argument that SF helps us prepare for the future.

9. Science fiction has a relationship with new religions that's obvious, and we can go down any number of tributaries here. Writing in the neo-pagan magazine Green Egg on April 4, 1975, Robert Anton Wilson (influential in more new religions than perhaps anyone else in the Roaring 20th century) argued that all new religions need to be science fiction-y. Earlier he'd given talks in which he deliberately provoked old New York-type intellectuals by asserting that the only literature that's current is James Joyce and science fiction. (At the time, SF was still part of what William Gibson called the "Golden Ghetto": it made money for its publishers and writers, but wasn't taken seriously at all by mainstream intellectuals.) A scholar of new religions, Prof. Carolyn Cusack, notes, "Both Aiden Kelly and Isaac Bonewits, key figures in the Pagan revival, attribute their personal wholeness to the reading of science fiction. They view it as a moral literature and argue that 'the only authors who are coping with the complexity of modern reality are those who are changing the way people perceive reality, and these are authors who are tied in with science fiction.'" (Cusack, Invented Religions, pp.78-79; quote about Kelly/Bonewits from Margot Adler, Drawing Down The Moon)

10. The pessimistic intellectual Morris Berman has been writing books about how Western civilization is entering a "new dark age" and he's got hundreds of reality sandwich reasons why. It's dark stuff, and horribly compelling to me. Those of us who love reading books and making things? We need to do things like the Irish monks did in the Dark Ages: preserve our cultural heritage until a new dawn, which we will not be there to see. We are like intellectual "preppers" it seems, with none of the Mad Max struggle to survive visions. Berman would call us New Monastics. He thinks SF is valuable preparation from the new dark ages to come, and cites as preparatory texts A Canticle For Liebowitz, Fahrenheit 451, and This Perfect Day. I was surprised at first to see that Berman liked SF. He values its counterfactual speculation and alternative histories, like PKD's The Man In The High Castle. Here's a line from Berman's Twilight of American Culture: "The 'mind' of the 21st century, for most people, will be a weird hybrid of Bill Gates and Walt Disney, as so-called cyberpunk novelists such as William Gibson [Neuromancer] or Neal Stephenson [Snow Crash] have already recognized." (p.54)

11. It's been clear to me for around 20 years now - maybe 23 to be precise - that the acceleration of technology and its dizzyingly diverse effects on human nervous systems, the biosphere and the world economy - that we inhabit a science fiction world, right where you are sitting now. If you don't often frame it this way for yourself - especially if you've never looked at your current "reality" this way - I urge you to do an experiment and "see" your world this way for seven days. I now teach guitar to some young people who know it's true but think it's sorta weird that people my age once lived in a world in which you couldn't carry the Internet around in your back pocket. Frankly, this fact staggers me every single day. I'm getting a chill right now, just watching what I'm writing...

12. If you read widely, you will note some people like to claim a very ancient history for science fiction. I remember having a nasty flu, with a temperature high enough to give me "fever dreams." Once I started to recover, I had my girlfriend take a trip to the library for me to pick up a bunch of classic literature for my recovery. One thing was Voltaire's short piece from 1752, Micromegas, and it was asserted in an introduction by a 20th century person that this was a science fiction piece. At the time, I thought SF came in with Jules Verne, maybe Mary Shelley. But yea: a 23 mile high being from one of the planets that orbited Sirius? Pretty wild stuff. "Sirius" and "23" meant nothing to me as reference at the time; I was too young. Later...

13. Marshall McLuhan looked at his fellow Wild Catholic, the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and saw him as a science fiction thinker. Teilhard (d.1955) had a theory about our electrical technology, which was destined to envelop the Earth (it did, he died long before the World Wide Web was a glimmer in Berners-Lee's eye). This envelopment was an aspect of the "Christic force" and would lead to parousia, the Second Coming of Christ. McLuhan's media theories have much ado about how we are externalizing our nervous system in electricity and electrical gadgets, and this was leading to a re-tribalization of humans, away from codex-reading, solitary, Gutenbergian individuals. Away from people like myself, it seems. (O, I have a SmartPhone: you have to in Unistat, April, 2016!) Around 1968 McLuhan was talking of the computerized Logos, and seemed for awhile perpelexed about how to "probe" this new idea. Eventually he saw Teilhard as "science fiction" but he didn't mean this in a positive sense; for McLuhan a science fiction writer was probably a futurist with little insight, or as one of his biographers, Philip Marchand wrote, "devoid of genuine perception." How odd that McLuhan survives as a SF thinker himself, on the cover of the first copy of Wired, Terence McKenna constantly riffing off McLuhan's insights, etc. I see this as "odd" in an ironic sort of science fiction-like narrative sense. (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, pp.216-217)

14. Regarding SF as the epicenter of the Novel of Ideas since around the end of WWII, and as propaedeutic for our living in the future (or now): around 1980 Robert Anton Wilson was asked by Dr. Jeffrey Eliot, "Are you concerned that your work have didactic value, that people learn from it?"

Here's RAW's answer:
Absolutely! Didactic literature is very much out of style these days; if one is suspected of having a message, it's almost regarded as some kind of secret vice. I think, however, that all first-rate literature leans toward  the didactic. The classic Greeks regarded Homer as didactic and allegorical to boot. Dante seems didactic. Shakespeare seems didactic. Melville seems didactic. Science fiction is the most didactic literature around; that's why I enjoy it so much. 

All writers function as teachers, whether they're conscious of it or not, or whether they'll admit it or not. For example, take Mickey Spillane. He used to give interviews in which he said he only wrote books for money. However, if you look at his work, he has strong beliefs. He's always pitching them to the reader. They're rather fascist beliefs, but they're beliefs nonetheless, and he's a teacher, just like every other writer. Unfortunately, he's only teaching a violent, fascist morality. - collected in Email To The Universe, p.217

Were there ever more thrilling teachers for young introverts in the 20th century than people like Asimov or HG Wells?

15. Revisiting Voltaire and Father Teilhard de Chardin: in John Glassie's book on the 17th century Jesuit weirdo intellectual Athanasius Kircher, Man of Misconceptions, the last man to Know Everything, Kircher, is placed by Glassie as a writer of proto-science fiction with his book Ecstatic Journey. Johannes Kepler wrote an SF-like book, Somnium/The Dream, and Glassie even says Cicero's The Dream of Scipio qualifies here. Meanwhile, when I read the Bible's book Revelation it seems like proto-HP Lovecraft, or a really bad mushroom trip. In Jennifer Hecht's book Doubt: A History SF is traced back to rhetorician/satirist/Syrian Lucian, who died around 180 CE. Hecht links Lucian to the agnosticism/skepticism/atheism/doubt of the whole (well, most?) history of science fiction. Of course, if we allow Cicero in here, he wins as oldest SF by dying in 43BCE. And what a death. Bernard Field, in his History of Science Fiction, agrees that Cicero wrote a forerunner to SF. (Yea, but what about Plato's conjuring Atlantis?)

16. I don't see much mention of Olaf Stapledon these days. Here's a science fiction writer of enormous erudition, who combined aspects of the historical novel approach to the novel of ideas with science. In 1989 Robert Anton Wilson told Rebecca McClen and David Jay Brown, "I'm a mystical agnostic, or an agnostic mystic. That phrase was coined by Olaf Stapledon, my favorite science fiction writer. When I first read it, it didn't mean anything to me, but over the years I've gradually realized that "agnostic mystic" describes me better than any words I've found anywhere else." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.114) In piece collected in The Next 50 Years, Sir Martin Rees says that "Many Worlds Hypothesis" in quantum mechanics originated with Stapledon. Wikipedia credits Stapledon with the idea of "swarm intelligence," which now resonates with "crowdsourcing."

17. Dr. John Lilly, one of the 20th century's great multidisciplinarians, who wrote an essay at age 16 about how the human mind can be rendered sufficiently objective in order to study itself, studied neurophysiology at CalTech, trained as a medical doctor, studied aeronautics and cybernetics in the Air Force, became a cetologist, and became known as a dolphin expert. He was also one of the great self-experimenters in history, including psychedelic research. So he may have some insight into the McKenna Brothers' experiences. He refused to accept science as "better" than religion, because they pertain to different domains of human thought. Religion has to do with out greatest desires, as Lilly saw it. Both science and religion were "meta-theoretical" positions on knowledge. However, if we were to encounter "real organisms with greater wisdom, greater intellect, greater minds than any single man..." we must be "open, unbiased, sensitive, general purpose, and dispassionate. Our needs for fantasies must be analyzed and seen for what they are and are not or we will be in even graver troubles than we are today." (Programming The Human Biocomputer, pp. 74-75.) Superior beings encountered are usually written off by scientists as, as best religious weirdness, at worst, as "superstitions" or "psychotic beliefs." "Other persons present these beliefs in the writings called 'science fiction.'" Lilly says most scientists will say the human biocomputer generates these visions - all the phenomena - by itself. Having had experiences like the McKennas, Lilly seeks to remain agnostic. This is eventually what Robert Anton Wilson did after having numerous bizarre contact-experiences with superintelligences from Sirius, or...something like that. Philip K. Dick had overwhelmingly strange experience with Something Other too, and tried to be agnostic, but it seems he mostly gave over to this experience's an ontological status close to "real." Possibly more real than "real." I don't know what "really" happened at La Chorrera, but tens of thousands of other humans have had similar experiences. I wonder how I'd react if I had a similar experience. I simply don't know. And I'm not ready to debunk anyone else's wild phenomenological experience.

The Drug Report: "Morality" Pills

Going through some odd drug articles I stopped and re-read two from 2012, both addressing the idea of improving ourselves morally via neuropharmacology.

The first one was by Peter Singer (who in 2014 was the Swiss think tank Gottlieb Duttweller Institute's 3rd most important thinker in the world), and Agata Sagan, an independent researcher living in Warsaw, last I checked. She is very concerned about victims of repression and the idea of affective altruism. (See the article here, so you know I'm on the level.)

They address public acts of massive indifference to human suffering and why some people risk their lives to save strangers from things like burning buildings. The 1970s studies by Milgram and Zimbardo get mentioned, as do the seminary student experiments: on the way to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan, if the student was feeling rushed for time, they didn't stop to help a person lying on the ground, moaning. Demonstrations of empathy in rats? Yes. Then it gets good.

Singer and Sagan think we're getting to know about the brain to such a critical point that we might come up with a pill that will make us act with the better angels of our inner beings. We'd care more about others with this posited drug. We might not even have "free will" - they actually say this at the end of the piece - but we do need to think about the ethics of such a posited wonder drug: do we give violent criminals a chance to take it before locking them up? Do we - presumably the Police State apparatus now ready to lock in to pedal-to-the-metal Delirium Mode - monitor "pre-crime"? Do we go all out Gitmo-Dick Cheney-Clockwork Orange with those who some law and order types deem "potentially dangerous"? Would we implant a time-release device in the brains of psychopaths (like Dick Cheney?) to keep them from burning down the village for kicks? And if this miracle drug were good enough, would we still need religion?

Okay, here's the thing with great thinkers like Singer and Sagan: they're often far too straight. I mean, haven't they heard of Ecstasy? When the cops in Murrka found out about it, they made it a Schedule I drug (no known effective use, no known legitimate positive use, no research allowed without kissing our ass first). This despite a welter of scientific gnostics like Alexander Shulgin, Thomas and June Riedlinger, and Dave Nichols, testifying to its human benefit. The DEA's Administrative Law judge, Francis Young, agreed that it wasn't all that dangerous and in a 90 page decision, recommended Schedule III for MDMA/Ecstasy/Adam/E, etc. The DEA itself said "Fuck that shit: we're shutting it down: Schedule I." So much for sanity...

In my worst moments I fantasize about registered supporters of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump being forced to take an Ecstasy suppository, but then I'm just weird. Poetry made me that way. Blame it on, uhh...poetry. Yea.

To quote the great scholar of drugs, Dale Pendell, on this issue of outlawing Ecstasy due to bad information and scare tactics:

The clear message from the Drug Warriors is that they are not interested in peace, citizenship, or even tolerance. - PharmakoDynamis, p.216

Side Note: Israel and Palestine issues make me meshugenah and majnoon, respectively. It looks like there's no hope for a two-state solution, and the Israelis keep building the settlements. There seems enough people on both sides who want peace, but all it takes is some small percentage of bad actors. Or...what happened in Ireland between the Protestants in No. Ireland and the IRA? From Dale Pendell: "Ecstasy clubs in Northern Ireland were the first venue where Protestant and Catholic youths danced together. When footballers in England began taking ecstasy, violence plummeted. Everywhere it has gone ecstasy has been a catalyst for peace."

And no one was forcing it on 'em. Just let nature take its course. But first: get it out of the hands of the cops, and into the hands of researchers.

With the cannabis wars turning to the side of human decency (finally!), some of us might start reading up and getting in gear to re-legalize MDMA.

Now, also in 2012, I read this article from J. Hughes, the Executive Director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Not nearly the luminary that Singer the Utilitarian is, but this article from later the same year seems more down-to-earth. Hughes - a bioethicist and sociologist - knows how oxytocin and testosterone and dopamine and serotonin work in studies having to do with antisocial behavior, crime, empathy, and religious ideation. It's a tad longer than Singer-Sagan, but well worth the read.

My favorite part was when he took on Jonathan Haidt's sociobiological intuitive morality ideas. Haidt claims to have been a liberal but now he's not, because of his research, which yield five human instinctual moral behaviors:

1. Don't hurt people
2. Don't cheat
3. Defer to authority
4. Favor your family/tribe over the Others
5. Stay sacred, avoid that which spiritually pollutes

I read Haidt's book The Righteous Mind and he's way up there on my list of the most overrated thinkers today. PBS did a documentary of Edward O. Wilson not long ago, and they repeatedly used Haidt to sing EOW's greatness, which I found nauseating. I think of Haidt as the real-life proponent of the mind behind the situation in Shirley Jackson's great and horrifying short story, "The Lottery." Haidt says fear unites us. Built into Haidt's bullshit evolutionary psychology of "morality" is this: well of course I don't like what he's saying; that's because I'm a liberal and liberals are blind to the last three of those five listed above. Not blind. We just don't place those values very highly at all. So: damn straight we seem "blind" to the natural goodness of racism, nationalism, deference to authority figures simply because of their authority, and we think homosexuals deserve equal rights, and women should be able to control their own bodies. If that's blindness so be it. I'm not having any of Haidt's crap.

(I've blogged on Haidt before, for instance HERE and HERE.)

And neither is J. Hughes, who sees "defer to authority" as anathema to progressive thought. Favoring your family/tribe can be re-worded as "racism, nationalism and nepotism are true, good and natural!" I take the avoidance of "spiritual pollution" to be akin to having a stick up your ass over other people's weird (and therefore "wrong") sexual proclivities.

For Hughes, any drug (or practice) that would improve our abilities to feel empathy/see ourselves in others and let go of the need to control others: liberal and voluntary. Why? Because the liberal approach to moral enhancement seems inherently minimal compared to the Haidt-people. Think of a politically powerful group who adhered quite strictly to Haidt's five above: do you think they'd endorse anything like Ecstasy?

That's a trick question, of course: we've obviously had those people in power, for a long time. Especially in the DEA. And look at how great we're doing!

Improvisations off Leary and Wilson's 5th Circuit

A couple of years ago I read Harvard History professor Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History and the Brain. Smail is interested in pre-history of humans, so he has a tough row to hoe, since by definition there are no written documents. Still, I thought he did a hell of a job. What a terrific read. And what's stuck with me ever since was his notion that, very early in our development as hominids, we began to develop techniques to alter our own consciousness ("autotropic") and the neurochemistry of others, from a distance ("teletropic"). Smail notes that we haven't stopped since we began this and have developed an extraordinary "array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers."

This resonated with me in a number of ways. Books on the cognitive science of pleasure have been proliferating over the past ten to 13 years, and some of them seem quite good. I also read about pleasure with an eye toward Timothy Leary's and especially Robert Anton Wilson's posits regarding their Eight Circuit Brain model and metaphor, and pleasure seems to have most to do with their 5th Circuit. For those new to this Model, who are interested in finding out more, both thinkers wrote quite a lot about the Eight Circuit Brain (8CB) model, and much of it is diffused throughout their texts; for starters I would look at Leary's Info-Psychology, section 11, "A Neurosomatic Aesthetic: Beauty is Natural, Art is Artificial," pp.27-31. Very late in Leary's life he told his colleague R.U. Sirius (AKA Ken Goffman) that Wilson had developed Leary's 8CB model to such a degree that he knew it better than Leary himself did. (I'm paraphrasing from a passage in Design For Dying that I don't have on hand at the moment.)

From Wilson there is much writing on this 5th Circuit all-over-body pleasure/rapture, but if I had to pick one section of one book, read chapter 11 of Prometheus Rising: "The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit," pp. 177-194, which is replete with ideas about the evolution of this circuit in humanity, quotes from Adepts, a discussion that intertwines history, class, yoga, cannabis, sex, comparative religious aspects, fear of these states of pleasure by Priests and Kings, its relationship with hypnosis and brainwashing, exercises for the reader to experience this "circuit," and the idea that this circuit might be involved in some sort of teleological movement in human evolution toward space travel. Most of the time, in any of Wilson's books, when he's discussing tantric sex or cannabis use he's also writing about some aspect of this "circuit."

For both Leary and Wilson this metaphorical "circuit" is associated with healing, floating, bliss, aesthetics, deep enjoyment in the whole body, flexibility in mind and body, "glowing" sexual and sensual beauty, and tolerance of difference.

Both thinkers employed various nomenclature regarding this "circuit": hedonic, neurosomatic, cybersomatic intelligence, psychosomatic synergy, and many others. You get the picture. They guessed that this circuit was relatively recent historically, and was indeed historical: there was writing and surplus and a relatively wealthy caste that had the time to pursue methods of whole-body bliss. The first articulators of this circuit may have been Hindus, but Smail's book and others suggest the picture may be more complex than this.

Some Recent Riffs on Pleasure
First off, I'm struck by the proliferation of books and research on the subject while the very cultures that support the research and readership seem to be undergoing crises of mistrust between governments and the governed (see "NSA and Snowden"), and rapidly accelerating inequality in income. One wonders about the semantic unconscious and this development, which might require a better mind than mine for a satisfying analysis.

1.) Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus (last seen at NYU) wondered about our appreciation of cave paintings versus the latest 3-D, audio-sensurround extravaganza. He thinks artists become savvier and savvier over time about what makes humans tick, and takes a page from Stephen Jay Gould, who in his 1980 collection The Panda's Thumb described how Disney had, over decades, retooled Mickey Mouse's image, so slowly that no one noticed. But Mickey has become "cuter and cuter: less adult, less threatening, more juvenile, more adorable." (Marcus) In describing the "evolution" of music, Marcus writes, "My contention is that music is like Mickey: not the direct product of evolution at all, but the product of artists evolving their craft in order to tickle the brain in particular ways. Music, art, and iPhones spread not because we have innate circuitry for funky dance beats or electronic toys, but because musicians, artists, and inventors are often uncommonly talented at reverse-engineering the human psyche." (see Guitar Zero, p.113)

Here we would be talking about Smail's teletropic aspect of brain-state modulation. For autotropic developments, pay attention to whatever you and your friends are doing that gets you high or makes you feel a deep pleasure.

2.) Two "field reports" on cannabis use from Dale Pendell's marvelous Pharmako/Poeia:

I used it to learn organic chemistry. If I memorized the reactions both straight and high, they stuck and I never forgot them. - "a student"

Sex is affected also: other worldly, this worldly, her worldly, his worldly, one-worldly. Two voices singing one aria, creation and improvisation in one long, stretching, eternal now. Tactile sensations exist in their own space: accessible to both but owned by neither. Genitals and other bodily parts expand, become the whole body, the two of you climbing over them like Lilliputians. - Pendell himself, see p. 202

If ya ain't got the gnosis...We're making it more available all the time. Step right up! (And board a trip to Colorado?) Or just go get your Card?

[Side note: for all those who see the reading of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and...poetry in general as unpleasantly effortful or just too goddamned difficult, I report very good results from using a method much like the organic chemistry student, above. And aye: deeply pleasurable.]

Talk about pre-history: how does the Cambrian explosion hit ya? 600 million years ago, the fossil record shows that, for some "reason" Life decided to go nuts with just the most psychedelic expansion of new forms of critters. This seemingly overnight copious display of creativity by Nature was one argument, Darwin thought, against his idea of relatively slow evolution by means of natural selection. It led Gould and Eldredge to invent the evolutionary of idea of "punctuated equilibrium."

What does this have to do with pleasure? Stick with me here for a sec or two.

The US government, for near 100 years, has been at war with cannabis. Agents for the government still claim that we don't know enough about cannabis to declare its safety. Being morally and intellectually bankrupt themselves, they ought have no say in the matter. But they're wrong anyway: despite the prohibition against doing scientific research into cannabis, there's now an overwhelming body of evidence to make Obama look like a damned fool (again?) when he recently said - probably thinking himself charitable? - that pot is no more dangerous than alcohol. In fact, it's far, far more healthy. Ironically, the Unistat government funded a study of the human immune system, giving funds to researchers at the St. Louis University School of Medicine. In 1988 the researchers showed that a major component of the immune system is the endocannabinoid system: these are receptor sites all over the body (recall Wilson's term "psychosomatic synergy") that regulate immune function, body temperature, blood pressure, hunger, relaxation, sleep cycles, bone density, inflammation, and fertility.

And when did the endocannabinoid system arise, evolutionarily? In the Cambrian explosion, with tunicates. Sea-squirts! They had elementary backbones and a cannabinoid system 600 million years ago. (We share 80% of our DNA with them, as Ripley would say: believe it or not!) Today, all animals except insects have this system.

But wither pleasure here? Just this:

Smoking cannabis docks one of around 100 phytocannabinoids (plant-based cannabinoids) in receptor sites that we have endogenously. One of the psychoactive effects of cannabinoids is the ability to cause us to "break set": we become temporarily more amenable to new ideas, new approaches to things that we previously reacted habitually to. Speculating from there: Darwinian survival is all about fitness over changing environments. When the environment changes, time for new ideas. And for new ideas to come into play, there should be some alteration of memory, which plays a big part in habits. Endocannabinoids such as Anandamide help us to forget things that we don't need to clutter our minds with, which is easily seen as adaptive. Cannabis has been shown to encourage neurogenesis in the hippocampus: new neurons, new neural-circuits, novel connections. Cannabis seems to have played a big part in adaptation over the Longue Duree. When the "normal" environment threw us for a loop, it may have been a very good idea to just, like...hold on, man. Let's sit down and have a smoke or ingest this godstuff and talk this out. There's gotta be some way we can deal with this. Let's chill. Memory seems thus psycho-somatic, all over the body. The cannabinoid system CB2 has receptor sites distributed throughout the body and internal organs. There is no mind-body duality...

Pot does more
Than Newton can
To justify
Goddess's ways to man.
-paraphrase from a classic poem

A cannabis high feels so good maybe because we co-evolved with the endocannabinoid system, which probably got going with the Cambrian Explosion. Nature threw in this Gift, and we ought never let any cops keep us from it, for any reason. (Still have some ways to go...)

Summary of this section: I posit the development of the endocannabinoid system as at least the scaffolding for very much of what we consider "pleasurable" today.

3.) In a recent book by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works, he notes early on his colleague Paul Rozin's observation that, "(I)f you look at a psychology textbook, you will find little or nothing about sports, art, music, drama, literature, play, and religion. Bloom says that these are "central to what makes us human, and we won't understand any of them until we understand pleasure." (p.xiv)

A most fascinating aspect of Bloom's book, for me, has been his very-convincing argument that humans are essentialists: they/we perceive/imagine a "real" essence "in" objects and people. This essentialism was something that Korzybski (not mentioned in Bloom's book) thought was a mistake that led us to act irrationally and non-adaptively, and should be overcome if we are to survive as a species. Bloom shows that rationality and looking into things - say, scientifically - was essentialist and yet led many humans to reject essentialism for a nascent body of mathematical and scientific "facts" about the physical world. I now see essentialism in a new light, and I do think these relatively new insights can be read as making Korzybski's thought even more robust...even if we must accept essentialism as something that absolutely will NOT go away any time soon.

In a chapter on how religion gives pleasure by firing our imaginations about "deeper realities," Bloom discusses some of the so-called New Atheists:

They are not blind to the attraction of a deeper reality; they just resonate to this attraction outside the bounds of organized religion. As an illustration, consider the view of some prominent modern-day atheists. I have already discussed how Richard Dawkins wrote a book about the transcendent appeal of scientific inquiry. Sam Harris is well known for his attack on the monotheistic faiths, but he is strongly enthusiastic about Buddhism, describing it as "the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." And Christopher Hitchens, author of  God Is Not Great, has spoken about the importance of the "numinous" - which usually refers to the experience of contact with the divine - and has argued that one can experience it without religious or supernatural belief. He suggests that humans rely on the numinous and transcendent, and says that personally he wouldn't trust anyone who lacked such feelings.
-p.215

4.) Because I've gone on too long, I take leave here by linking to a popular listicle-article about why sex is good for us, trusting the links within my link will lead to something moderately illuminating, or at least for laffs. What interests me here is how much of what sex does that's healthy intersects and intermingles and even seems to have intercourse with what cannabis does.

I take hashish with some followers of the eighteenth-century mystic Saint-Martin. At one in the morning, while we were talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of letters...caught in our dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to all codes, but we smile at her benevolently and laugh. - William Butler Yeats, Autobiography

a prominent 20th century science writer and thinker and public intellectual, on cannabis:
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad. - Carl Sagan, in 1969, on his experiences smoking cannabis, which he did to the end of his life. See HERE.

Some Sources
"The Marijuana Miracle: Why a Single Compound in Cannabis May Revolutionize Modern Medicine," by Martin Lee
"The Lie That Won't Die: 'We Don't Know Enough About Marijuana'," by Paul Armentano
"High on Health: CBD in the Food Supply," by Allen Badiner
"Science For Potheads: Why People Love To Get High," by K.M. Cholewa
"Sea Squirt, Heal Thyself: Scientists Make Major Breakthrough in Regenerative Medicine"
"Introduction To The Endocannabinoid System," by Dustin Sulak
"The Endocannabinoid System"
"How Sex Affects Intelligence, and Vice-Versa," by Dan Hurley
The Eight-Circuit Brain, by Antero Alli (I don't know what happened with this book, which I find to be a very unique take on Leary's and Wilson's ideas. Antero diverges from both significantly, but he's never boring. He knew RAW in Berkeley and writes about him in this book. Why is this book only available for $1500? I have a pristine, signed copy I'd be willing to part with for a mere $800. Contact me at that address ----->)


A 3 min, 30-second film that addresses tunicates (sea squirts) and the endocannabinoid system in all of us:

The Drug Report: July, 2012: Coffee and Velocity

"Betty: Dear father, don't be so strict! If I can't have my little demitasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just like a dried-up piece of roast goat!" - from J.S. Bach's Coffee Cantata

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Of surpassing fascination to me is the overwhelming ubiquity of drugs in our culture - both legal and illegal - and (here's where my wonderment comes in) how relatively ignorant we make ourselves about these drugs. Name the drug, and you will have zero problems finding a widespread un-knowing about some aspects of the drug, even though the information is easy to find. Is knowing the truth about psychoactive drugs culturally taboo?

Now, now, coffee lovers (Pssst: I'm one too), don't fear: we have our ignorances about our drug, but they seem less serious than that for other drugs. I've tried to find some good studies that show how coffee is dangerous, but there doesn't seem to be much there. Au contraire, as a matter of fact. More below. 

But first, another drug as a diversion:
"Imagine if the Japanese had won World War II and had introduced into American life a drug so insidious that thirty years later the average American would spend five hours a day 'loaded' on this drug. People would just view it as an outrageous atrocity. And yet, we in America do this to ourselves. And the horrifying thing that the 'trip' that television gives you is that it's not your trip. It is a trip that comes down through the values systems of a society whose greatest god is the almighty dollar. So television is the opiate of the people. I think that the tremendous governmental resistance to the psychedelic issue is not because psychedelics are multi-million dollar criminal enterprises - they are trivial on that level. However, they inspire examination of values, and that is the most corrosive thing that can happen." - Terence McKenna, in an interview with Neville Drury from 1990, found pp.245-246, The Archaic Revival.

I like the TV as quasi-psychedelic opiate trip drug that's very addictive line here. I like the questioning of "whose trip do you want to be in: theirs or yours?" line from Terence here. I'm afraid not much thinking about TV has taken place. I've seen a few studies that show that university kids don't understand how those commercials got there. They don't know that the TV people tell the beer or toilet paper people, "We have a show that will deliver your desired demographic to you, and all it'll cost you is X." I also like the implication that, though it's almost totally not spoken about, drugs are programming devices that are seen as very powerful by different factions of powerful people. Terence thought the real reason psychedelics were illegal was that they threatened the paideuma.

[Sorry but I need to make a further foray away from our topic of the day, coffee. I'll get back in a moment.]

I wonder if this is the main reason Obama went back on his word and began harassing the medical pot places in a way that would have Bush43 proud? HERE is an article that posits the other main reasons why did this. The irony of paideuma! According to this article, it's either 1.)He didn't want to appear soft on crime; 2.) He thinks stoners don't vote; or 3.) The states appeared to be going too far, allowing things to become too lax. I think all of these could be "true" in some sense, but we ought to consider the unspoken "corrosive" "examination of values" that McKenna talked about.

Sooo: coffee.

                    I had no idea that coffee art was a...thingy. Check out
                     THIS blog for more coffee-art

"Coffee falls into the stomach and there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the Republic on the battlefield...The light cavalry of comparisons delivers charges, the artillery of logic hurries up with trains and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle begins and is concluded with torrents of black water, just like a battle with powder." - Honore de Balzac, who supposedly drank 80-100 cups of coffee a day, and wrote over 100 novels. He'd get paid for a novel and go out and spend it on whores and other interesting people in all-night carousing with alcohol and who knows what else. When his money was gone, he'd get back in his room with coffee and crank out another novel. Balzac was what we once called a "Romantic."

Speaking of similes, I was reading a cracking good book by a journalist very much interested in the botany of great cannabis. The book's called The Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race For the Cannabis Cup, by Mark Haskell Smith. Maybe I'll review it here when I'm done reading it, but anyway, similes:

Smith is wearing out shoe leather in LA, trying to understand the medical pot and politics current, and finds himself in a...consortium where there's some really good strains of cannabis being sampled, and a large-screen HD TV on, showing the Oscars. He's asking questions, getting stoned, writing notes, every now and then diverted by the TV:

"Demi Moore strutted her cougar stroll on the red carpet dressed in ruffled salmon-colored freak-out. The dress looked like a cake you'd order from an insane asylum." (p.22)

Oh yea: I was supposed to be writing something about coffee. Sorry!

Get a load of this, a coffee ad from the 1650s.

If you had been worrying about adverse health effects from drinking coffee, a recent article from The Atlantic attempts to put us at ease. Leg muscles and the diaphragm were strengthened in older mice! A decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma in humans! A decreased risk of death, especially if you quit smoking while you drink coffee! Coffee seems to have heart-protecting aspects. It reduces the risk of breast and prostate cancer and curbs risk of fibrosis among those with fatty liver disease. Even the moderate noise of a coffee shop was shown to enhance creativity!

Jeez, speaking of creativity, did you see where one of my favorite young hotshot science writers, Jonah Lehrer, was forced to quit The New Yorker when another magazine caught him making up fake Bob Dylan quotes for Lehrer's book, Imagine? HERE's a story on the temporarily-fallen Lehrer, a brilliant young guy, who, I "imagine" (HA!), got caught up in the dog-eat-dog welt of competitive "smart guy" writing in New York. I also imagine he was drinking too much coffee and maybe not thinking straight when he started piling up the prevarications to the writer from Tablet. Hey, wait: isn't Tablet a pro-Israel magazine? Has Jonah not been sufficiently supportive of Israel? Were they out to "get" Jonah? Naw, probably not. That's just my over-caffeinated mind making too many connections, and now I've noticed I've once again crazily strayed from the topic at hand.

But the infamous Jayson Blair has stepped into the Jonah Lehrer story and has hitched his junk-bond status as writer to former Golden Boy Jonah's...I'm guessing as a way to alleviate his own rep?

                               Right about now I know exactly what this guy means

"The perfect drug for capitalism. Is there an office anywhere that does not have its shrine to the coffee gods?" 

"On the other hand, it's not a bad beverage for anarchists. Or for town meetings."
-both above quotes from Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants, Potions and Herbcraft, by Dale Pendell, to my mind the greatest writer in the world on drugs. If you're interested in any drugs of any kind, and you haven't settled down to dwell within one or more of Pendell's Pharmako trilogy, you're committing some sort of sloth, or violating the Drug Scholar's Code. Something like that...

Pendell taxonomically calls coffee part of the poison-world of excitantia. He gives very good reasons why.

Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson considered coffee a 3rd circuit drug. What that means is that, in the evolution of humans, we inherited a newborn's approach/avoidance circuit that relates to the amniotic world of mom, and its analog drug is opiates. As we become toddlers and start to command space in the local household, becoming political as Terrible Two-sters, making demands, attempting to manipulate others via emotional games, we imprinted a 2nd circuit, and its analog drug is alcohol. (Look at adults shit-faced drunk for the utmost clarity here.) Our species began to manipulate tools and language a long time ago, and this laid down the DNA-culture template for taking on a circuit about manipulating tools and symbols. Both Leary and Wilson saw coffee as the ultimate symbol of this symbol-manipulating drug. 

There are five more circuits, but I will exercise some control over my symbol-manipulating impulses, wildly charged on too much coffee for this blog post (as if you couldn't already tell!), and say that if you want to know more about the Leary/Wilson very elaborate hyper-multidisciplinary, generalist model of human consciousness, you'll have to read their books...

Olfactory Hallucinations
Weird coffee/caffeine item: some psychologists were wondering if, when people have panic attacks, how much of it is the brain doing something subconscious and how much has to do with thinking about - anxiety-provoking things? They injected sleeping subjects with fairly high doses of caffeine. A 38 year old man with no previous history of psychiatric problems awoke 14 minutes after the injection, reporting an odd taste, but more like an odor. A 34 year old woman with generalized anxiety disorder awoke after her injection and said she smelled plastic or "burnt coffee." These are called "olfactory hallucinations." The caffeine injected had no known odor. Olfactory hallucinations are related to seizures, but neither subject was having a seizure when they woke and reported the odors. 

Two hypotheses here:
1.) Caffeine is widely known as a taste enhancer, so maybe the injections of caffeine caused the subjects to pick up smells and tastes that are normally undetectable?
2.) The caffeine prompted sensory systems to "trick" themselves?
Who knows? Anyway, hat-tip to the wonderful Maggie Koeth-Baker of Boing Boing for this odd item.

The Turks: Two Items
Much has been written about the coffee houses of London and the flowering of (3rd-circuit) print culture, explosion of writing and printing. But HERE's an article from Science Daily about coffee and its environment and its stimulus to the socially-aggregated 3rd circuit, in the Turkish 1550s!

Sorry, but back to Obama and his war on pot: check out the Young Turks and their analysis. I currently (get it? they're on the Current network? <cough>) think they're more accurate than anyone else in the TV-world in their analysis of the Barackstar and his quasi-fascistic, retrograde actions against the dispensaries. Note that here is a fifth reason: Big Pharma's non-conspiracy (?):

Note to OG readers: sorry I hardly wrote anything of interest about coffee, but my excuse is: I was WASTED on too much coffee. Maybe I'll try again in August? Mea culpa!

The Drug Report For April, 2012

Good Friday: 50 Years Ago
Today marks the (give or take a few days) the 50th anniversary of the Miracle at Marsh Chapel, on Good Friday, 1962, near Harvard University. Among psychonauts this "miracle" is usually thought of as an "experiment" and we call it "The Good Friday Experiment."

In order to get his doctorate in religion and society from Harvard, Walter Pahnke, quite cognizant of a group of renegade psychologists among the faculty at Harvard, decided to test some of their claims about psychedelic drugs and mystical experience.

                                           Stained glass window inside Marsh Chapel

Here's the basic experiment: 20 divinity students took part in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, in which half were given a very large dose of psilocybin (the trippy active substance in magic mushrooms) of 30mgs. The other half received a pill that contained nicotinic acid (which gives you a red-faced, sweaty, flushing feeling), with some Benzedrine (garden variety speed). The administers of the experiment didn't know who got what (hence, double-blind). All of them were in the basement of Marsh Chapel while the live Good Friday sermon was being piped in from above. After 45 minutes, it was obvious who had gotten the Real Stuff; there was absolutely no need to to look at the coded data.

Pahnke, in order to "measure" mystical experience, used criteria formulated by a philosopher of religion, W.T. Stace, who said there were seven aspects of mystical experience:

1.) unitary consciousness
2.) non-spatial and non-temporal awareness
3.) a sense of objective reality about the experience
4.) a feeling of "blessedness"
5.) a feeling of "sacredness"
6.) a strong experience of paradoxicality about the experience
7.) inability to put the experience adequately into words: ineffability

Pahnke added two more of his own: "transiency" and subsequent improvement in one's life.

Of the ten who got the Real Stuff, five were positive on ALL NINE of the criteria. Nine of ten said they thought it was a "true religious experience."

Pahnke followed up the study 25 years later, and found seven of the ten who got the Real Stuff and nine of the ten who got the active placebo. All recalled the Good Friday Experiment as a positive time, and all said they preferred non-drug routes to mysticism. One of the trippers actually had a Bad Trip: seeing Christ on the cross and freaking out, so that Thorazine had to be administered, a piece of data that Timothy Leary often omitted when talking about this particular experiment

If you've never heard of the Good Friday Experiment, Google it!

Arachnid and Non-Arachnid Art on LSD
Artists' drawings done on LSD.

Spider's webs, spun on a variety of drugs, including LSD.

Opening Day For Baseball in Unistat, 2012: An LSD Story
Here's a picture of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis:

On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. There are entire seasons that go by and no pitcher ever throws a no-hitter (not allowing a single base-hit over at least 9 innings.) Other years it's done five times. At any rate, given the number of games played, it's one of baseball's rare events. A pitcher has to be very good and very lucky (hard-hit balls going straight at fielders for outs and not hits, for example).

The Pirates flew into San Diego on a Thursday, an off-day. The next day they would play two games - a "doubleheader" - against the Padres. Ellis rented a car and drove north to Los Angeles to see a girlfriend.  They dropped acid and listened to Jimi Hendrix, stayed up all night. Ellis woke up at 10AM, saying he probably only got an hour of sleep. He dropped another half of a tab of LSD, then his girlfriend, reading the newspaper, said something like, "I don't know if you forgot or whatever, but you're pitching game one of the doubleheader today."

Here's how cool Ellis was: he realized he could still make it if he caught a plane to San Diego, so he did, and missed the National Anthem, which is played just before the game begins. But he made it. He was tripping and sleepy, so he popped some benzedrine to get "up" for the game. Rare for San Diego in June, it was drizzling and misty, but the game would not be rained out. Dock had to pitch.

Standing on the mound, tripping, Dock realized the ball felt big, odd. His ordinary feeling of distance and perspective was screwed up. (Anyone who has been high on acid knows EXACTLY what this is like.)

His first pitch went 58 feet. The mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate. Not good. But Dock's a cool cat, remember? One time Dock dove out of the way of a very sharply hit "line drive," but the "line drive" never made it back to the mound. Dock was at time "wild": he hit one batter and walked eight. But his fastball was humming. As Unistat Poet Laureate (2006) Donald Hall described how Dock described it to him:

Number one fastball was quick, and dropped off the table as it crossed the plate. Number two fastball rode up and in, disconcertingly chinwards. - from Dock Ellis In The Country of Baseball


Ellis said at times he thought he and his catcher had telepathy, or that the batter could read his thoughts, so he'd shake his catcher's signs off and choose a different pitch. His catcher (Jerry May) seemed to have a glove that acted like a powerful magnet at times; other times Dock couldn't even see it. Dock recalls staring at a batter, which some pitchers like to do to try to intimidate the batter, but Dock said there were times he'd deliver a pitch while he was still staring the batter down.


He struck out the last batter of the game on a curveball, which delighted him. Game over: Dock Ellis had pitched a rare no-hitter. Sometimes being "wild" throws the batters off, but Dock also had outstanding control of the location of his pitches when he needed it.

Over the years, many people have doubted this story. Snopes has it as TRUE.

Here's a wonderful animated version of this wonderful, weird incident, one that, for deep and fascinating reasons, people inside major league baseball would rather not even admit REALLY HAPPENED...although it's legendary among me and my friends. 4 minutes, 32 seconds:

A gonzo-ish journalist tries to replicate Ellis's mystical game on X-Box.

My favorite account of the wonderful Ellis game from 1970 is from Dale Pendell's indescribably wonderfully poetic and encyclopedic book on entheogens, Pharmako Gnosis. After his narrative about Ellis's exploits, Pendell, ends with this sentence: "Aren't steroids boring?"


From LSD to Neuroscientist
If you look for schematic images of serotonin, psilocybin, and LSD you'll see they all look quite alike, with slight differences. In fact, the two psychedelics are taken up by serotonin receptors after they cross the synaptic clef, blocking the normally "dampening" serotonin, in favor of information flow. Here's a blog post by a neuroscientist who, before he became a scientist, had quite a life as a drug user, including LSD. Innarestin' chap, eh?

Prattle on Books

A year and a half or so I read a wonderful book called Walking With Nobby, by Dale Pendell, which recounted long conversations Pendell had had while taking extended hikes with the legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown through the hills and meadows and forests in the general area of University of California at Santa Cruz, where Brown had taught since its inception. Pendell had studied under Brown, and there are some golden passages about book-talk, but what made me laugh was Pendell's idea of "biblio-osmosis": when you obtain a book and seem to think that simply having it on your shelf is good enough for you. Some part of your mind thinks somehow that you will absorb its vibrations at night in your sleep! I don't think I've ever consciously thought this, but I do catch myself feeling more secure when I have copies of books I want to "know" or know better, on the table next to my bed.
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Speaking of Dale Pendell, I read something in his marvelous book on drugs, Pharmako/Gnosis, that bothered me, because it's apparently a precedent in law: "One's personal library could be used as evidence in court." This set my mind to imagining all sorts of scenarios (this is all part of the reason the "Circe" episode in Ulysses resonates for me?) where I'd have to answer to just "why" I had in my possession some books on anarchy, or Mein Kampf, or my at least 50 books on drugs, or maybe even something that was deemed "pornographic." My basic answer would be on First Amendment grounds, but the deeper reason is that I'm one of those Walter Mitty types who loves to have "forbidden" or "dangerous" books around; I want to read books by crazy people, people whose ideas I find abhorrent, or people whose lives or advocations are thought so out-of-bounds that I catch a bit of their aura just having their books on my shelves, much less paging through them. I love crazy ideas; I want to know what it's possible for others to believe. I actually read something like The Turner Diaries (which I own; it's on my shelves next to Hitler), None Dare Call It Conspiracy - a John Birch Society favorite - something called How To Start Your Own Country, Trilaterals Over Washington, The Occult Technology of Power, a copy of the Koran and The New Revised edition of The Bible (my own little personal in-joke: juxtaposing the Holy Book with Hitler, et.al), and something called The Malleus Maleficarum, or "hammer of witches;" this book was used as a how-to for Inquisitors. I read things like The Turner Diaries and try to get into that "reality tunnel."...Even though the characters - and the militias that love that book and use it as a sort of roadmap or Bible - would want to kill me; I'm every thing they hate. (And boy! Do they ever hate!)


I confess to feeling evermore paranoid about this possible scenario, of being hauled in for questioning and my books piled up at a government prosecutor-inquisitor's table, given the cascade of Patriot Acts since 9/11. But that's probably just the Kafka in me.
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"A scholar is a library's way of making another library." - philosopher Daniel Dennett
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There are some hilarious exchanges related about the weird things people say in bookshops, in this case in, if I recall correctly, North London at this blog. If you don't laugh at her collection of odd exchanges, you've probably never worked in a library or bookshop. But I bet you'll find her stuff amusing even if you haven't worked around stacks of books.
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There are many books for which I am covetous, but my impecuniousness makes their prospects for acquisition a pipe dream. If I somehow come into a cash windfall, the first one I'll go after is the Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini. When in Tokyo in late 2000 I was visiting a friend of a friend and he had this book, which I'd never heard of. He took it off the shelf and said, "Check this out." And I was transfixed. It's a modern book, and we know about its author and provenance, but as I paged through it, marveling at its gorgeous weirdness, I thought of my readings of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.
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Here is a recent photo of my little library room, taken from the POV in which I write all these blathering blog-posts on my MacBook:

Note Mr. Jinx, my 16 year-old black cat, sleeping in the foreground.
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There are two kinds of responses I get when a visitor enters my modest library, and they precisely match the ones that Nassim Nicholas Taleb relates about the visitors to Umberto Eco's massive personal library.  Eco has around 30,000 books in his home library, and guests, upon seeing the books, either say something like this: "Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?" Others, "a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool..." - see Taleb's The Black Swan, pp.1-2.


Taleb, who seems to me of the intellectual firepower-calibre of Eco, says "The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."


So, I have something of an antilibrary going, and it is intertwixted and intertwingled with books I'm very familiar with. Most of my books were bought used, because, as I said, I'm in a chronic penury. But I hope things will start to pick up. But since reading Taleb on Eco, I feel less guilty about those unread volumes on my shelves, and more like they are a "research tool."
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Speaking of hope, Woody Allen tells us:

"How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not 'the thing with feathers.' The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich." - from "Sketches From the Allen Notebooks," Without Feathers.