On Psychedelic Frames and Peter Bebergal

I've just finished Peter Bebergal's 2011 memoir, Too Much To Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and found it gripping because much of it seemed to speak directly to my own boyhood. Bebergal grew up in a suburb of Boston around the same time I was "growing up" (for some reason that term suddenly felt alien to me, ergo the quotation marks) in the sprawling 'burbs of Los Angeles.

A huge difference between Bebergal and me: here, in Bebergal, is once again a subspecies of character structure that I'm fascinated in and love to read about, but which seems alien to me: Bebergal is a "god intoxicated" person. All his forays into dropout punk culture (hilariously, he gets into 1960s-70s "psychedelic rock" after his punk phase), hanging out with street people and smoking pot, doing LSD (a couple of bad trips are rendered very well here), alcohol, cocaine, etc. Trying to "know" god or the Ultimate Transcendent Whatsit and chasing it with drugs and a fierce autodidacticism. Bebergal grew up in what looks like a non-observant rationalist Jewish home; I grew up in a non-theist, broken home. From the most rudimentary ideas in world religion, I had to teach myself what all the fuss was about. It wasn't discussed and my parents didn't bring my brothers and I up in any faith and we never went to church. I asked my father about this many years later and he said that he and mom had a talk about this: they'd seen far too much damage done to their friends and families in the name of religion than anything that might be considered uplifting. I was most decidedly not god-intoxicated, but I did want the gnosis, although it would be many years before I ever encountered the term.

                                  Peter Bebergal (photo: Andrea Shea/WBUR)

Throughout, Bebergal wants that gnosis, he wants direct experience of life-shattering knowledge of The Transcendent. I think I was looking for whatever blew my mind and made me think. I confess I seem to have not changed much since then, which may explain the quotation marks used above under "growing up."

Eventually, Bebergal crashes hard, gets into AA, and realizes he's an addict. He's been "clean" for 20+ years now, has a family, works at M.I.T., and also wrote a wonderful book on the underrated influence of occult ideas on the history of rock and roll, briefly reviewed by my colleague Tom Jackson.

Here's a short passage that gives us the tone of yearning in Bebergal's late adolescence:

Staying connected to even an idea of some transcendent reality without devolving into the psychedelic dreamspace was a challenge, and one I was not convinced I had to let go of. How to make it work without being lured back to the drugs themselves? Could I have a psychedelic experience - or even a shadow one - sober from my head to my toes, in my brain and in my blood?
-pp.160-161

In the final quarter of the book, Bebergal shifts his tone. He's straight but still wanting to unite with the transcendent. His tone turns scholarly, he goes to Divinity School, he reads like mad about magic, mysticism and illumination. After a marvelous observance about Hermes in his own life, he writes, "The difference between ecstasy and illumination is the same as that difference between magic and mysticism. Magic is often about instant results. Mysticism, while often characterized by dramatic singular moments, is about the long haul. In the same way I mistook magic for mysticism, I mistook ecstasy for illumination." (pp.191-192)

Problem With The Psychedelic Frame
Bebergal begins following the work of Strassman with DMT and other (resurgent) experiments done by academics and doctors with psychedelics and healing. After most of the book's peripatetic and picaresque episodes of a bright young god-seeking loveable fuckup, we see Bebergal, sober, as the thoughtful intellectual who knows his stuff. I did not know that, in 2000, two guys named Pickard and Apperson got busted for making probably 70% of the LSD used at raves in Unistat. Pickard got two concurrent life sentences. Bebergal discusses Rick Doblin, Dr. Strassman, Leary, William James, Aldous Huxley. He addresses why psychedelic researchers started using the term "entheogen" over "psychedelic" (too much cultural baggage) and "hallucinogen" (too misleading).

Then, the famous Johns Hopkins double-blind, active-placebo-controlled psilocybin experiments done under Dr. Roland Griffiths. (The active placebo here was Ritalin.) In effect, this was a chance to confirm the Harvard "Good Friday"experiment done at Marsh Chapel by Walter Pahnke under the auspices of Timothy Leary, in which divinity school students who did receive the psychedelic said many years later it was one of, if not the most important experiences in their lives. The same thing happened under Griffiths and Robert Jesse. One of those who received the psilocybin was a Psychologist and self-described "Zen Catholic" named John Hayes, who had never taken a psychedelic drug but who said he had had mystical experiences:

"It was like, 'Alright, what's the big deal?' Then, ba-boom!" he says. "There was a sense of moving in some sort of astral space with stars whizzing by me. It was like getting the big picture."

Hayes tried to describe his psilocybin trip, using "elusive" and "dream" and like he'd experienced something from another space-time dimension. Then, he fell back on his religious vocabulary. Here's where it got really interesting to me, and the book is worth reading if only for this final stretch: the problem of psychedelic experience and inadequate language. Culture - especially religious culture and its terminology - will lead to a sort of Heisenbergian Uncertainty Principle: there is no unmediated mystical or psychedelic experience. Our culture flows through us. Metaphors and framing are in the very air we breathe. And we don't know - can't know?, objectively? - if your experience is the same as mine when we walk through the forest on that Perfect Day, or ingest 2 1/2 grams of psilocybe cubensis. It's in the realm of qualia, no?

At Johns Hopkins the researchers took great care to prevent "expectancy": when someone doesn't know a thing about psychedelics, they tried to keep others who did know from using language or metaphors that might subconsciously alter the expectations of a subject who might not get the placebo. But Bebergal says there's nothing to do about the "deep pop-cultural language or preconceptions that most of us share. It is easy to imagine someone signing up to be a participant in the research and then immediately going home and googling all the associated terms, reading about Marsh Chapel and the studies of the past, even watching movies on YouTube of Timothy Leary describing his psychedelic breakthroughs." (p.179)

The language used in the questionnaires furthered this contamination of expectancy. Internal unity, God, transcendence of time and space, ineffability, awe, noetic qualities: from which area of world culture do these terms seem to emanate? Berkeley professor of East Asian languages and culture Robert Sharf had a problem with the language in the experiment, saying religious experiences can't be reduced to a "supposedly value-neutral, empirical, scientific kind of domain." Bebergal reminds us the late great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, said there was no such thing as a generic mystical experience, there is only Hindu mysticism, Jewish mysticism and Christian mysticism. (Bebergal studied the Sufis too, so probably would have wanted to argue with Scholem there was an Islamic mysticism, or so I'd guess he would've.)

It seems that Dennis McKenna - whose framing about psychedelic experiences seems quite different from his more famous brother Terence - had the most articulate arguments for Bebergal about why psychedelics have too much religious language baggage around them. Foremost these substances are "tools to explain consciousness" and that when the experience is described in spiritual terms this is merely an interpretation. (My emphasis...to draw us back to Bebergal's most active god, Hermes, who gave us Hermeneutics.) Dennis McKenna also thinks we give too much power to shamanic experts and other guides, because "Ultimately, the experience is yours." McKenna says that for people without a grounding in a spiritual tradition (this was me in my late adolescence), psychedelics can be used to solve problems, gain insight into natural phenomena, "or simply explore what human consciousness is capable of." It was with that last one that I received the message, and have since hung up. (For now.) McKenna says the experience can be so mindblowing that people want to share it through language and they create a context and try to get others to buy into that context.

Do we have a non-religious vocabulary to describe non-church-related ineffable experience? Is it in poetry? Blake? Ginsberg? Wordsworth? Rumi? Pound?

Talk About Cultural Baggage!
This week, meditating and reading, I happened upon a news story: one of our best writers on the War On Certain People Who Use The Wrong Drugs, Dan Baum, had interviewed John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's right-hand men. Ehrlichman told Baum in an interview that the advent of the all-out War on Drugs (1971) began as a way to marginalize and imprison Nixon's enemies: hippies and blacks. ("Oh you're such a conspiracy monger, OG!") This way, every night on the TV news, Nixon's "silent majority" would see what scum all those weirded-out blacks and hippies were, with their pot and their LSD, etc. It worked. Enough of our fellow citizens bought it. It seems to me profoundly criminal that this was done. Also, I bet few reading this blog think this is all that "newsworthy" because of course this was how it was done. And furthermore, we've been trying to call attention to it for 40 years. Talk about cultural baggage and imagery that infects minds about certain drugs Control doesn't want used in the population...

Too Much To Dream was put out by one of my favorite publishing houses, Soft Skull Press, and I have not done the book justice. Bebergal has some terrific insights on music and psychedelic phenomenology, among other things. Read it!

Translations? A Mid-Sized Armful of Disparate Riffs OR: Does Any Of This Make Sense?

"Many addicts HP basic entry in the work that the reader can't help noting that the formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if they were linked to related/human skin. -Michael Chabon (Chinese) (Arabic) (English) (Ukrainian) (Dutch) (English)"

               Novelist Michael Chabon, who just happens to live in Berkeley too


In my previous blogspewage, Prof. Eric Wagner responded in the comments section with a quote from Michael Chabon, which related Joyce's Finnegans Wake to something almost sinister or evil or menacing, as HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon was meant to make us feel. The latter book, while fictional, "is" real on some ontological level - it has some ontological status, I will argue. But this isn't my point, of course. You're reading the OG and you know he digresses like Laurence Sterne on bad acid.


What "is" the first paragraph, above? "Many addicts..."?


It was an experiment in machine translation using Babel Fish. Here's how the first paragraph was derived: I cut Prof. Wagner's quote from Michael Chabon, pasted it into Babel Fish's box, and translated it into Chinese, with a nod to Prof. Searle. I then cut/pasted the Chinese (which I understood exactly zero of, looking at it) into the original translation box, chose the Chinese to be translated into Arabic (more weird characters I didn't have a clue about), and then repeated these iterations, from Arabic to Spanish, Spanish to Ukrainian, Ukrainian to Dutch, and finally, Dutch back into English.


The original quote from Chabon, as given by Wagner, was this:

"A reader steeped in the work of H.P. Lovecraft could not help observing that, to many educated people, there was something unmistakably loathsome about the Wake, a touch of Necronomicon, as though it had been bound in human hide. - Michael Chabon"

                                                       H.P. Lovecraft (d.1937)


I'm guessing the Machine thought "Lovecraft" - at some point - was really "basic entry." Anyway, the translation by Babel Fish was, I thought, ironic, in that, the original subject matter had to do with a novelist's take on Joyce's novel, which most people find the most difficult book to "translate" from Joyce's own Dream-Wake-Language (at times I've called it "Wicklang," for reasons readers of the book might understand) into their own understandings. Chabon further related Joyce's book to Lovecraft, whose profoundly extra-terrestrial, transdimensional forces of appalling indifference to human understanding or suffering suffuse his books. It's as if the Transhumanist's Artificial Intelligence Machines, from the year 2030, combined with Genetics and Nanotechnology, had reached their "singularity," and come back to haunt us with a stark omen for us all: "formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if there were linked to/related human skin." But then my ma always said I had a very active inventive complex...

                             Supposedly the small print is the first page?


For the translation going on in my own nervous system (i.e, "speaking for myself"), Chabon's observation has, via an iterated polyglot Babel Fish peregrination, been made far more..."eldritch," to use a word Lovecraft himself used often. And thus, what I see as ironic. 


The Reader (translation: you) may see it differently. If we keep looking at the translated passages, back and forth, we can see where the Machine got its ideas. "Bound in human hide," via its commodius vicus of recirculation via Babel Fish becomes "linked to related/human skin." Readers steeped in HPL's work became "addicts" at some point. Where the Machine got "formation of the people at the end of the road" seems somewhat less clear to me, and therefore qualifies as my favorite part of the translation.


I was actuated to think/write about translation by Prof. Wagner's answer to my question.

                               Russian structuralist linguist semiotician
                               Roman Jakobson (1886-1982) I interpret
                               his expression here as something like:
                              "Wait a minute...did I forget to turn off the 
                               stove before I drove to the library?"


Moving On
Professor Roman Jakobson, the great, great structuralist, said there were three basic types of translation, and I'll give my riffs on each, after you look at Dr. Timothy Leary for a second:

1. Intralingual: This looks like re-wording. Hope I'm not giving Dr. Jakobson short shrift here. I would give many examples I've gleaned from academics, but I'd rather sit here and wonder about the scads of translations of the Tao Te Ching, supposedly by the Chinese person who history has (at times) named as "Lao-Tzu"...how much has THAT book changed via translation down through the years, travels, languages, changes in semantic understandings, writing systems, etc? To go back to Prof. Wagner's answer: How can I not agree? Let me give perhaps an extreme example, but I think it nevertheless fits my purposes here: Timothy Leary wrote a book called Psychedelic Prayers and Other Meditations. In some definite ways, it's a "loose" (what the hell does that mean?) translation of other previous English translations ("intralingual") of "Lao-Tzu," who was known to have been translated very early on circa 300BCE by syncretists who wished to lessen political factionalism among warring Chinese states. Leary didn't know Chinese. And furthermore, he's using his own syncretistic ideas derived from ethology, psychedelic drug experimentation, diverse religious knowledge and metaphors derived from them, and his PhD in Psychology to concoct a "guidebook" for people in the late 20th century English speaking world...to prepare for psychedelic drug trips. Leary re-worded much of prior English translations of the Tao Te Ching and translated/interpreted for an assumed audience. I think if Jakobson were in my room right now he'd be screaming at me for mis-interpreting what he meant by "intralingual," but then Roman would've been missing the point, my point. I'm a hermeticist anyway! This is what we do...<cue: canned laughter from 1960s TV sitcoms>
2. Interlingual: I think Jakobson means "translation proper" here. Sorta like what you non-native English speakers are doing right now, as you read this blog. If you were to look at my text here and re-write it "in your own words," - in whatever language - without trying to do "damage" to what you think the OG means, I think you're having at Interlinguality. But then, as Professor Carlin said, when he noted that often in the court of law, a lawyer will tell someone on the witness stand to "tell the court...in your own words..."...this is absurd! No one has their own words! We're all using the same ones everyone else is using! But if you must use "your own words," just go ahead and say them: "Fringly cragit ponchee flooo!" (I suspect Roman would again be all frowny were he here.)
3. Intersemiotic: As I understand it, Roman Jakobson meant "an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems." Hell, that's the interpretation by one of his colleagues that I copied into my notes from some highfalutin' book on Semiotics. I'm not sure and don't remember, but Jakobson may have been able to speak English, and may have actually written those words himself. I don't know. Do you know? Anyway I think he meant something like reading a book of poetry (in translation?) and then doing something like making a painting out of how the poetry made you feel. I'm not entirely sure. You come up with a better interpretation!

Ending The Blog Post
I harken back to one of my favorite living writers, Tom Robbins. In an essay collected in his book, Wild Ducks Flying Backward he writes about how his novels have been translated.  Now, most writers tend to assert something substantial got lost in the translation from their native tongue to the translated one, but Robbins goes on (see pp.209-211) about how he thinks that, sometimes, "literal back-translation" into English has improved his work. Say what you will, but I must applaud Robbins here for his cosmic sense of humor and overall non-graspingness. 


Q: Can loose translations of texts give rise to edifying misreadings? And if so, why? (You may choose to take this course for non-credit.)

                               Tom Robbins, one of my favorite 
                               living prose stylists. Born: 1936. Died: NEVER