Psychedelic
A strange, and yet fascinating, word. One that conjures up images within the mind (appropriately!!) of altered states of consciousness, of music in which notation is not fixed and in which the move from one note to the next is almost imperceptible until you find you're there. Of pictures in which colours swirl and seem to move and blend, again imperceptibly, until you suddenly realise that what you were looking at has changed into something else. Of letters drawn in such a way that you have to deliberately un-focus your eyes in order to make out what words are made out of those letters. Letters that march or stride across the page in Crumb-like arrogance, challenging the watcher to 'ankle along with me, man'. The essence in all this seems to be impreciseness and the ability to fool the mind in order, even if only in the short term, to change the way reality is perceived and understood.
All of the above is true, but more perceptive readers will have noticed that this is all about the visual and the aural. There is nothing here about the meanings of the words, whether there is a body of writing, not ABOUT psychedelics or the psychedelic experience, but a body of writing that truly IS psychedelic in itself.
This is a thought that has exercised me to an increasing extent over the last few weeks, so I went to that fount of all knowledge, Google, and searched for (what else?) 'psychedelic writing' and came back with - zilch.... Does this mean that, despite the well-known phrase lost in a book (and who hasn't been?), there is no such thing as psychedelic writing (that is, the words and their meanings themselves irrespective of their design), - that it is an impossibility?
Is Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland psychedelic? I'm not sure. It seems to be but, on reflection (please excuse the pun), is very precisely written (Carroll was, after all, a logician) and doesn't really change the way the world is perceived (as does, for example, its derivative White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane). Is Tolkein psychedelic? Probably not. He is a great story-teller and his characters and plots have fuelled many a psychedelic experience, song or picture but. by and in themselves. they probably do not qualify as psychedelic.
Psychedelic Possibilities
If we start from the key characteristics identified above, impreciseness, ability to fool the mind, and changes in the way reality is perceived, then many genres have aspects of these characteristics to a greater or less extent. Much fiction tries and succeeds in doing this. Take Crime Fiction. The work of Elmore Leonard springs to mind as a good example. But I've never heard his work described as psychedelic. (I'm not sure he would appreciate it, but that's a topic for another day!!!) Neither have I heard of Science Fiction being described thus, despite some of its better exponents succeeding in meeting the above characteristics.
The two types of writing that best exemplify the characteristics of psychedelic are probably mystical spiritual writings and poetry. (Forgive me if I have missed something here. Please leave a note to that effect so that I can develop these thoughts.) In the case of the first, they certainly exhibit an impreciseness which stems (usually) from an attempt to relate everything to everything else (another psychedelic tendency incidentally). Additionally, they certainly have the ability to fool the mind, and change the way reality is perceived, and the many converts that these writings have made over the centuries attest to that.
Poetry
Poetry, and particularly some schools of modern poetry, have similar characteristics. If we take this example of Adrian Clarke's work as an example:
Language in pieces grasps
Particulars as spectral hues
Stake out a fundamental
Site diminishing traffic suburbanised
That certainly has the impreciseness common to all psychedelia (this is not to say that the impreciseness is not very precisely planned and executed, merely that the final artefact has the appearance of impreciseness). It is designed (and works) as a mind-altering collection of words that can leave the reader with a (slightly) different sense of reality for at least a short time.
Music Lyrics
A similar conclusion can be drawn from the words of some of our better exponents of psychedelic music. Music is often associated with words, but the words are rarely seen on their own as stand-alone artefacts. (And when we do see them on their own, we add the soundtrack that goes with them in our heads. This is certainly the case for this writer with the next selection of words which comes from Lordly Nightshade a song from the Incredible String Band's album The Big Huge.
"Down Main Street I go on a duffel-coat hoping instead
For a little room, yawn, I'm so tired with this big bag of coal on my head
It's a top hat I'm trying to sell or a lesson to learn
Vaguely seeking some fire to burn
While a group of middle-aged persons with dwarfish expressions and tinned conversations in Sunday blessed blue
Standing around for a photograph, watch the cuckoo
Do you need any coal?
But it doesn't appear that they do
Then I offered my throat to the wolf but I just can't die
All I can do is fly
Safe and secure in the skirts of the midsummer wood
Cooking soup with stale words and fresh meanings it tastes so good
The green wolf with his bunch of red roses is slinking away
All on a summer's day."
For the writer, this is psychedelic writing. It fits the characteristics.
Concluding Thoughts
The conclusion I draw from this short excursion is that there is no reason why there should not be an identified body of psychedelic writing. However, if we accept that mystical spiritual writing and poetry are the two genres most obviously falling into the category, then we may have a clue as to why this body of work has not developed. Reading either of these genres is hard work!!! It is hard in a way that neither listening nor looking/watching are difficult. (Unless, that is, it is to the more extreme examples of modern music whether classical or jazz. Now there is another body of work that could lay claim to the epithet psychedelic, but to which it is never applied.)
I am drawn to the conclusion (which was not there when this piece began to be written), that the reason that we do not have a psychedelic writing is that we do not like the hard work involved in trying to understand it and that we have failed to extend our intellectual capabilities to the extent necessary for us to engage with it, in the way we are able naturally to engage with psychedelic art and music. (The same applies to modern classical music and jazz.) Perhaps this is why the example of Lordly Nightshade works for me. It will forever be associated with a beautiful tune that helps me engage with the words and which did not require the kind of mental training or experience that engaging only with words would have required. (It is, of course, possible that the true psychedelic experience requires at least two of the sense to be stimulated, e.g. sight and sound, touch and sight, mind and imagination, but that's another matter for debate and thought.) It would be interesting to hear what those of you not familiar with String Band's music (I suspect that may be the majority) think about the psychedelic nature of their words on their own without the music.
Petrhaps I could suggest that what we all need is a concerted intellectual effort to truly expand our minds in order to let us take on the glorious possibilities of words in themselves.... Perhaps, after all, there is a little truth in what the White Rabbit said (at least in the Jefferson Airplane version)...'Feed your head'.
Alistair McCulloch - Alistair McCulloch has been listening to good music since his early teenage years in the 1960s. It is his genuine belief that music ...
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