Tag: Island

Maximus at the Edge of the Labyrinth

What does it mean that Charles Olson took psilocybin with Leary and Ginsberg — yet never joined the merry caravan of the acid gospel? That his turn toward altered consciousness took the form not of dropout spectacle, but of withdrawal to granite?

Dogtown is not Millbrook. It is not Esalen. It is not Island.

And yet.

In “Maximus, from Dogtown—IV”, Olson walks the stone trails of a post-collapse landscape, beside the ocean, listening for voices in the wind. His poem does not offer transcendence. It grounds. It builds breath into structure. It makes the ruin speak again.

What he found on those walks was not utopia, but continuity — a thread connecting him to the first people of the land, the women who lived alone in Dogtown’s final decades, the dead who still speak in lichen and stone. His poem remembers, not to recover what was lost, but to carry forward the field in which spirit and matter still cohabit.

Like McKenna’s “transcendental object,” Olson’s field is a site of imaginal access. But its mode is not visionary spectacle — it is attunement. A slowing. An entering-into-breath.

In that sense, Olson’s poem is perhaps more kin to Ujjayi than to LSD. Not a peak, but a wave. Not revelation, but reverberation.

To read “Dogtown—IV” in light of the Harvard Psilocybin Project is not to say Olson was “on drugs” when he wrote it. Rather, it is to recognize that he, too, was seeking access. Not through sacrament alone, but through poetics: a method for tracking the world’s subtle frequencies. Breath-based cognition. Projective presence.

His use of the page — spatial, disjunctive, physical — is not an aesthetic choice but a spiritual orientation. It is the line as line of sight. The poem as map of mind in space.

And perhaps, too, as portal.

We often think of psychedelia in terms of color and collapse — visions, melting, revelation. But what if Olson’s Dogtown poems reveal a minor key to the psychedelic tradition — one where the real trip is learning how to stay, how to listen, how to walk the world as though every stone were speaking?

Olson was not a utopian in the manner of Huxley or Leary. But he may have known, better than most, how to breathe a world into being.

The Mushroom People

In the mid-twentieth century, two groups with competing agendas worked to introduce psychedelics into American society: the CIA, with its MK-Ultra program, on the one hand, and countercultural intellectuals, including famous authors like Aldous Huxley, on the other. Among this latter group of “psychedelic utopians,” we can include Huxley’s friend and fellow émigré Gerald Heard, as well as related figures like Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. By now, histories have been written about the efforts of both of these groups; but in accounts of the latter group in particular, what sometimes goes unmentioned or unrecognized was its explicitly utopian intent. After their first encounters with substances like mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, many of the above-mentioned early users of these drugs felt compelled not just to pen statements of advocacy, as Huxley did in books like The Doors of Perception (1954) and his final novel Island (1962); most of them also rushed to form communes and related kinds of alternative, experimental foundations, schools, organizations, and institutions—among which we can include Esalen Institute, the White Hand Society, the Zihuatanejo Project, Millbrook, the Merry Pranksters, the League for Spiritual Discovery, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and others. However, unlike prior utopian projects that emphasized modifications either to property relations or to modes of governance, most of the organizations and communities mentioned above instead prioritized psychosexual deprogramming and the so-called “raising of consciousness” through mass ingestion of psychoactive substances as techniques essential to their goal of changing society for the good.

Although not as active as some of the figures I’ve mentioned above, Black Mountain poet Charles Olson was nevertheless an early, enthusiastic participant in one of these organizations in particular: namely, Leary and Ginsberg’s group, the White Hand Society. Poet Peter Conners tells the story of Leary and Ginsberg’s partnership in his book White Hand Society. The story begins, of all places, at Harvard. Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (who later took the name “Ram Dass”) launched the series of experiments known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project beginning in 1960. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was one of the first individuals to participate in this project. British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond — known both for coining the term “psychedelic” and for administering the famed mescaline trip described by Huxley in The Doors of Perception — placed Ginsberg in contact with Leary after hearing the poet deliver a talk about his experiences with mescaline at a conference hosted by a Boston-based professional organization known as the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (Conners 62). After an initial exchange of letters and a visit by Leary to the poet’s East Village apartment in Manhattan, Ginsberg agreed to participate in a psilocybin session hosted at Leary’s home in Boston in November 1960.

Needless to say, Ginsberg reacted positively to the experience. He declared himself “the Messiah…come down to preach love to the world” (as quoted in Conners 84). “We’re going down to the city streets to tell the people about peace and love,” he proclaimed, trying to convince Leary and others to join him. “And then,” he added, “we’ll get lots of great people onto a big telephone network to settle all this warfare bit” (85). We may feel ourselves tempted to laugh at Ginsberg’s pronouncements, jaded as we are by the decades that followed — but these pronouncements were indeed prophetic. Ginsberg’s words made things happen. For telling people about peace and love was exactly what he and Leary went on to do in the years that followed. The two men bonded over the experience, and agreed afterwards to conspire together to turn on other creative types and thus aid in the dissemination of the psychedelic sacrament to others. Poring over the poet’s address book, Leary and Ginsberg chose individuals they thought might be open to participation in future experiments.

Among these contacts was Charles Olson.

Tuesday February 18, 2020

Back to Aldous Huxley’s Island, with its Pacific island utopia, the society of Pala, intact despite the “conspiracy” narrative that weaves through it like Muchalinda, the King of Snakes, whose tree the Buddha is said to have sat under. The lesson, we might say, is that “People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten” (239). For Muchalinda cares for the Buddha, shelters the Tathagatha “from the wind and the rain” (238) for the duration of his sitting. Huxley offers the story as a eupsychian alternative to the West’s Eden narrative. Each of us is an island and a world — like Turtle Island — and our time here can be blissful, saved by the Third Noble Truth if we so allow that there is a cure. The prescription for this easing of suffering is laid out in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Each of us has within our grasp the power to live as do the Palanese — because each of us is the Shipwrecked Westerner washed up on Pala’s shores like Island‘s protagonist Will Farnaby. If Will can be educated and changed by his encounter with Pala, then so can we. So can all of us. Microcosmic resistance can have observable macrocosmic effects. Millennials outnumber boomers. Go, Bernie, go! Let us put our educations to practice and change the world. “War is over, if you want it,” as John and Yoko sang, with backing vocals by the Harlem Community Choir. No more war on Natives, migrants, women, children, workers, planet. No more war on ourselves.

Wednesday February 12, 2020

Huxley is a prophet, and with his final novel Island, he offers us a vision of redemption. Each of us is the island of Pala. Let us work together as allies. Youth for Bernie! There it is: let’s do this! “Uncover honey / where maggots are,” as Charles Olson prompted at the end of his poem “The Kingfishers.” We determine with the genres we teach different kinds of subjects. By assigning utopias rather than dystopias, we arrange for students to confront within themselves stirrings of hope rather than fear.

Sunday February 17, 2019

The Revolution proceeds in each of our lives, in the smallest of acts, scaling outward and upward, each act its own reward. Take it into the kitchen, I tell myself. Make it personal. Sometimes, as the people of Pala realize, the Revolution is as simple as following a recipe for bread. “It’s all a question,” as Huxley writes, “of being shown what to do and then practicing” (Island, p. 277). This simple technique, like a seed, contains within itself an entire method of liberation. “Not complete liberation, of course,” notes Huxley. “But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread” (277). By these means, we begin to slip free of money’s grip.

Saturday February 16, 2019

If I were an animal among animals, I imagine I’d be a seagull. But alas, I’m not. Instead, I’m the landlocked proprietor of a botched life, hours passing unheeded. What dreams I once had of rising from this wretched state! Of course, it isn’t always wretched. I text with friends and find a book on Tai Chi in the Goodwill bins. I meet the day’s paper-grading quota and go for a run midafternoon. Alan Watts coaches me in the Taoist principle of wu-wei, which he defines as acting without forcing, “in accordance with the flow of nature’s course which is signified by the word Tao, and is best understood from watching the dynamics of water” (Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain, p. 2). My reading for class teaches a similar lesson. We act, say the Palanese of Huxley’s Island, “to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to” (243). The day ends with a minor life achievement: I prepare a biga so that tomorrow I can bake my first loaf of Italian bread.

Wednesday February 13, 2019

Friends, allow me to report on my second pass through Aldous Huxley’s Island. The book assembles for us an elaborate alternative culture, by which I mean (in Raymond Williams’s sense) a “whole way of life,” from the perspective of which we might imagine ourselves anew. What might we do after reading this book? How might we live our lives differently?

Monday February 11, 2019

Like Aldous Huxley’s character Robert MacPhail, I am a proponent of “poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science” (Island, p. 136). By which I mean poetry as liberated ground, liberated domain of being. Time and space set aside for breathing, listening, mulling anxiously, retraining awareness (birds in trees: over there! can you hear them?), so as to allow the totality to grow anew.

Wednesday February 6, 2019

A tall amaryllis sits beside me, both of us seeking light. Subjects must act: punch and kneed dough. As Sarah says, “Something doubles in an hour — it’s exciting!” Imagine change and witness it. Invent a good wizard, in the tradition more of Yoda than of Gandalf. I worry, though, about the prevalence of battle in the myths that house these characters. I suppose one enters the role, as Huxley says, “by knowing what had to be done — what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what’s what” (Island, p. 40). In my case, it begins with a shift from soda to fruit juice. One has to live out total acceptance, even of conflict. We proceed by acquiring knowledge of what we think we are, but are not. The knowledge we imagine we lack we in fact possess. Trust the mind to furnish images to guide us. Move into a non-dual perspective, subjects and objects released from use. Dream now of pyramids lifting from a base: “Whitey on the Moon.” The whole face of the world down to details as small as Cleopatra’s nose, as seen from above.

Tuesday October 2, 2018

The “Murugan” character in Huxley’s Island is far more a dramatis persona (literally, a “mask for drama”) than the student interlocutors who engage with Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Murugan is willful and petty, his every statement an outburst of bitterness and longing. But it would be wrong to read him as an imp borne of Freud’s unconscious. The would-be tyrant — whose wish is to dominate and rule — appears in Huxley’s narration as an identity captured or possessed, rather, by Ego. Or as Huxley says: “an all too familiar kind of psychological ugliness” (Island, p. 48). “A spirit of delinquency” against the Good, or against collective well-being, waging war against traditional wisdom. In the particulars of Murugan’s case, this means hoping to “modernize” Pala through international sale of oil. Modernization means cities, mass media, confiscation and expenditure of social wealth by the false Son, or by all who would imagine themselves above the Given State. Why is this personality structure present as an irritant within Huxley’s vision? Let speak that which profiteth not, a spilling forth, a babbling brook, buzz, chatter, flight, passage, awareness settling experimentally into a great listening to surroundings or environment, other beings. Wim Hof is another of these false Sons. He interpolates and interpellates through application of a method to breathing, converting those who use his method into “alchemists” of their own chemistry. Part of me fears what he might signify. A dangerous fantasy, perhaps — like Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Perhaps this danger lurks in all attempts to modify consciousness.