One of Ram Dass' teachers, as Alpert was transitioning into his new name, said something to the effect, 'The west is materialist. Therefore God appeared to the west in the form of a material.' He was referring to LSD and the other psychedelics and the effect they had, in the sixties, of bringing 'the hippies' into the frame of experiential religions. But, in fact, the psychedelics did not connect us to 'God' necessarily, although more than one or two of the 'trippers' managed to get knocked down by the 'white light', the epitome moment of psychedelic adventure according to Leary and Alpert, as well as Ken Kesey. What the drug did was reconnect us with our history. But, since it came to us 'in the form of a material', and since the experience was not only the immediate consequence of an ingested substance, but was also peculiarly, if not uniquely, immediate in itself, it would appear that very few of us found the long thread and managed to follow it back to its source.
            One of the aetiologies for Dionysus presupposes the identity of the god and alcohol. If that be true, then, apparently, the first appearance of alcohol in the ancient Greek or proto-Greek culture was essentially psychedelic. Tom Wolfe, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, if I remember correctly, draws the distinction between how the East Coast and the West Coast differed in their responses to the drug. Now that I think about it, it was perhaps an essential theme of the book, since the grand journey of the bus Furthur finds a certain turning point in the excursion of the West Coasters to Millbrook. No doubt I read the book in the waning shadow of my own white light moment, so not only the details, but perhaps the whole theme has suffered that transmutation, 'rich and strange'. In any case, the premise of the 'test', the chaos factor of the acid tests pitted against the innately chaotic psychic states induced by the drug, on the West Coast, as opposed to the meditative and relatively controlled introspection with the drug on the East was not simply accidental or a function of the particular charismatic figures at the center of the two poles. The difference was legitimately cultural.

            In my last post, I argued against the assumption that the sixties were essentially political, a proposition which has gained credence simply by the preponderation of dense and discursive texts focused on this topic alone, as if it were the legitimate narrative of the sixties. After thinking about it for the last few days, I believe I am prepared to assert that the psychedelic experience is the veritable core of the sixties. The sixties were 'happening' before the psychedelics became prevalent, although the preceding bohemian culture had been at least partially identified with cannabis and hashish and quasi-psychedelic adventures before LSD became a common street drug.
            But, precisely because we were essentially unaware of the basic history that I outlined in my last post, and because, intellectually, we had intentionally been directed away from the philosophical 'experiments' which produced that history, we had no basis for connecting what was happening to us - the 'spontaneous' awakening to a profoundly 'counter-culture' conviction - to any historical ground which might have given it a cultural breadth beyond the recent political insurgencies of which we were aware.
            But, if I have been a student of culture more or less from my first intellectual awakenings - stirrings perhaps not precocious, but certainly premature for one still engaged in the standard public education - one of the themes that rolls in iterative cycles through my studies and experience is the persistence of 'cultural genetics', the hereditary replication of cultural achievements, even when the culture itself seems to bear no overt threads of memory or continuity.
            We not only knew that something was wrong, but could not name it; we knew that something was missing, but could not find it. What the psychedelics did for us was awaken us to the whole of our heritage - the missing 'piece': in actuality a global reality - that had been misdirected out of our history, both personal and learned, but could not be eradicated from our immediate cultural heritage.

            I can define the psychedelic experience explicitly in terms of the philosophy of reflection. What the psychedelics did was momentarily remove the underpinnings of the reflective construct. But, for most of you, gentle readers, the statement is largely meaningless. While I have spoken at some length here about the nature of reflective awareness, I find that few indeed are the loyal citizens of the blogosphere who are committed to more than the instant sneeze or whine of such self-idolizing scriptors as the master of these words. So let me lead you, beloved, into the strange and wonderful world that our lapsarian ancestors have generated for us. You have not forgotten your childhood. You did not have the conceptual armature upon which to posit the 'conscious' knowledge of the immediate world in which you moved and breathed. Quite literally, you had no sense of self.
            A moment arose when the peculiar behavior of the large people around you suddenly awakened you to what they were pointing at: namely, yourself. In that moment, you awakened to the 'self'. Now this moment is very strange, because it is a moment in which your awareness stood outside your awareness and noticed your awareness. You looked into your navel, and your navel grew eyes and looked back. And at that moment, you could not tell whether you were you, or only your navel.
            But if the big people did not have an extensive construct, a way of looking at everything in the world in terms of this peculiarity that we have first of all here assigned to your navel, you would not have been able to sustain the peculiar view of 'self-awareness'. And, in fact, if you can remember this 'first moment', you will discover, finally, that it was not a 'moment', but a series of moments. A series of moments in which the world appeared to you as a more or less complete 'something' and then disintegrated, only to 'reappear' again at another moment in terms of another 'complete something', and so on and so forth until you were at last able to sustain a continuous view grounded in this peculiar state of 'self-awareness'.
            But now a funny thing happens. The state of self-awareness is eminently seductive. It gives us a sense of power - a power over both the world and the self - a conscious power. And it is so seductive that we become addicted to it and forget that we were ever in any other state. And so we forget, not our childhood, but the fact that our childhood began in an altogether different mode of awareness.

            What the psychedelics did, for the duration of the 'trip', was open the door back into this primal or pre-reflective state. Sometimes we fell into it completely, into a truly 'timeless' state. But this 'timelessness' is not the idea or even the feeling of timelessness that we sometimes have in our 'normal' awareness, whether an absorptive or ecstatic timelessness or the timelessness of sheer boredom. This was a state in which time had altogether ceased to exist. There was only immediacy. Everything was here present in its fulness, and nothing was outside it. This was the next-door experience to the white light, in which not only time, but form itself seemed to cease, apart from the pure flux or pulse of the light. Some of us were totally lost in the light. And some of us could still 'see' the world, but found the world engulfed in the white light, as if floating on the very nature of creation.
            But more often, the psychedelics took us back to that empirical place in which experience is constructed in consciousness. Here, we confronted the philosophical issue of solipsism directly in terms of experience. All experience is a function of consciousness. What we experience as substance is, in fact, the 'substance' of consciousness itself. Since it is a representation, what we are experiencing, in our 'everyday' self-awareness, is a simulacrum which may or may not correspond with what is actually 'out there'. In the psychedelic state, the substantive world began to respond to our desires. I remember one time drinking a bottle of beer. And every time I tipped the bottle up toward my lips, the neck of the bottle visibly leaned toward me, visually bending in response to my actions. The world might swim or pulse, as if it were alive in itself, but its life seemed intimate.

            This is not to discount the horrendous experiences that were also a necessary part of the process for most of us. Some few of us seemed to be able to sustain the positive response to the drug indefinitely, trip after trip. But most of us not only had occasional 'bad trips', we also seemed to move from the more generally positive experiences toward gradually darker and darker events. I think this may account in large measure for the general abandonment of psychedelics by participants in that generation. And then, too, the younger travelers seemed to be doing it more and more 'just for kicks'. In other words, not only the moment, but also the substance of our adventure seemed to have been acculturated and a function of the time

            As I have said repeatedly here, this is a manifestation of our actual heritage. Would it have been possible for us to have experienced the psychedelics in this way if the Idealists had not gone up face-to-face with the question of reflective awareness, even if they could not formally break through? They could not break through in formal philosophy, since their addiction to logic, as philosophers, prevented them from leaping over into purely experiential or empirical analysis of what they had seen. But they had seen the 'promised land' that emerges when we can 'break open' the reflective construct.
            We look at a Shelley, and see a dancer on the cusp of madness. He looks into this world. And he looks into a world in which time itself shifts without perceivable sequence. And, if we are sensitive, we know that he was seeing the same 'reality' that we saw on LSD, psilocybin or mescaline. But it was not simply a function of madness, although madness, in its way, is as acculturated as the response to a mind-altering drug.
            Something changes with the Idealists and the Romantics. I have spoken of it here. There is no equivalent in history for the Byronic assertion of the self. Byron treats the self as if it were a new and novel discovery. And, in a sense, it was. The empiricism of Locke had pointed to the self in a way that was equally novel in history. But the Idealists not only located the self in its own context, they pointed to its core mystery: that the self emerges out of undifferentiated awareness in a way that cannot be assigned to cause, or, at least, not to cause as we generally understand it. Here is Fichte's 'self-positing of the self'.
            If we have the eye and follow Cézanne, accepting that his mode of draughtsmanship is not an arbitrary abstraction to 'alter the plane of the painting' or 'confront the arbitrary boundaries of the frame', but an organic reorganization of space according to the principles, not only of painting, but of vision itself, we will witness a unique exploration of consciousness in terms of color and form, an exploration that literally verges on the psychedelic, if not actually entering into it. The extraordinary visual discipline of Monet, even the brushwork of Manet, verge on the same moment in which the visual motif dissolves back into the functional boundaries of what Emerson called 'the double nature of consciousness'.
            When we have acquired this eye, we go back and look at Titian, at Michelangelo, at Rembrandt, and we see the same visual doorway. We in fact see the same self-exploration. But somehow, it is also radically different in the post-Romantic, post-Idealist painters. In a sense, the self is no longer a hidden motif.

            This is our history, a history that has been foreclosed to us by the development of analytical philosophy and its pervasive acceptance in the intellectual community. By this term, I intend the array of 'isms' in which we view the last century of academic philosophy, since, in their named proliferation, they strike me as the tweedle-dum tweedle-dee of the usual desperate decadence. When creativity dies, create labels.
            What analytical philosophy has determined, first of all, is that pure critical philosophy, when applied to pure logic, reduces logic to a 'meta-grammar', a presumptive set of empirical rules 'behind' grammar - that logic itself, as such, has no necessary power with respect to 'empirical reality' or 'empirical fact'. But, at the same time, the philosophy continues in the presupposition that logic is the sole parameter for analysis, and that empirical analyses on the grounds of logic are somehow still the essential basis of philosophy.
            As a result, philosophy has become criticism and the criticism itself has largely self-destructed, as the Marxists would say, from its own internal contradictions. But, as a consequence of the collapse of criticism, or rather, as a cause of the collapse of criticism, we have lost the basis of cultural value. And this moment had arrived by mid-century in the 1900s.

            So we had these two pieces, we had the cultural void created by the collapse of the dominant philosophy. And we had a cultural heritage, now as an explicitly disarrayed set of threads, but immediate in our self-understanding as something fully present and, at the same time, almost altogether absent.
            And the psychedelics suddenly filled that void and seemed to validate our experience.

            But, at this point, both the problem and the solution pivoted on the question of immediacy. The immediacy of the drug, its power to bring us into a 'present' which exploded time itself, appeared as the direct answer to our unspoken question.
            But immediacy is only immediacy.

            If we have the eye, and we look at much of the 'art' of the sixties, what we see is not the immediacy, but an idea of the immediacy. The psychedelic posters are often extraordinary works of graphic art, but they are also clearly derivative. (I know that, in the contemporary maelstrom of void value, graphic work is considered art, but there is a qualitative difference between the Family Dog and Paul Cézanne. And I will insist on it until the culture once again follows suit. If we are going to continue to espouse an idiot 'democracy', then undoubtedly nuclear holocaust is the ultimate democratic ideal. Certainly, it will make us all absolutely equal.) The immediacy of Cézanne, paradoxically, is not only his discipline, but his discipline as an extension of tradition.
            The late 19th century painters in France did not see themselves as 'revolutionaries', until the final rising generation in the last decade. And they were quite literally fulfilling the tradition in terms of the cultural fruition of the philosophical work of the Idealists, which was a natural extension of all the philosophy that had gone before.

            In a sense, the 'immediacy' that we experienced in the psychedelics was a cultural culmination, since it involved a direct expression and conclusion of what the Idealists and their cultural successors had pointed to - a time when immediacy itself became the object of our aesthetic understanding.
            But immediacy for the sake of immediacy is also a false aesthetic, as well as a false philosophy.

            This reaching for immediacy was undoubtedly part of the cultural force behind the success of analytic philosophy in dominating the present intellectual culture.

            My medium, oddly perhaps, is poetry. And when I came into awareness of my vocation, the beatniks were doing their thing; their thing, at that point, being generally represented as 'being in the moment' in terms of their literary personae. The idea was to discard all literary pretensions and forms, and 'just write the moment'. What a great load of precious, hyper-literary trash this theory has produced. But the real irony, I suppose, is that the people held most representative of this creed were in fact among the most educated in terms of the cultural heritage of English language poetry. I have long since stopped reading secondary sources - particularly contemporary secondary sources - about poetry, but I have heard a few vagrant phrases in the offing which suggest that perhaps someone has finally noticed that the howl in 'howl' came from Hailey, Idaho, via Main Line Philadelphia, London, Paris and Rapallo, although the eminent Dr. G. seems to have studiously avoided mentioning the fact in the majority of his interviews. The other 'just now' poet of rank, Frank O'Hara, was also profoundly educated in the history of poetry. Again, if one 'has an ear', one can also hear the fact.
            They were apparently both taken by the handful of poems in which Carlos Williams was able to establish a kind of absolute immediacy of apparently uninflected poetry - not the weird drab about a cutesy wheelbarrow in the rain - but generally poems about cats or plums. In three or four, he gains this pure, unassertive but absolute presence.
            While they were apparently and probably legitimately are alla prima poems, one must understand that they come from the same place as Ben Jonson's 'effortless' lyrics.

            The difference, of course, is that Carlos Williams stands at the end of a tradition, while O'Hara, at least, probably stands at the beginning of another.
            To write non-rhetorical poetry is a contradiction in terms. But certainly, the terms of rhetoric have changed. O'Hara, finally, is not fully successful. But the new prosody begins to emerge in his poems. And, as I say, this happens because he is the epitome of the tradition, not because he has dismissed it.
            The transitional 'immediacy' is a legitimate ideal. But it only becomes accessible in the context of its history.