by Rick Gekoski
The new literature was as good as the music, and explained it to those of us too remote to understand, quite, what was going on. There was a crazy new spirit in the air, and we learned about it through a remarkable series of books written in the style called ‘new journalism’, in which the writer becomes a participant in the pageant, observing both it and himself as the story. I adored Hunter S. Thompson’s creepily fascinated book on the ‘strange and terrible saga’ of The Hell’s Angels, and the equally chilling In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s novelized version of the murder of a family of mid-Westerners, both of which came out in 1966. Then there was Norman Mailer, whose evocation of the march on the Pentagon in The Armies of the Night caught the wild energy of the time.
Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a dry-eyed account of hippy California, served as a useful antidote to Mailer’s enthusiasm for the encroaching new forms of life. Less forensically, and with more verve, Tom Wolfe’s take on the same place and period focused on Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Entitled The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I first heard of it in the New York Times Magazine in August of 1968, in which Wolfe described his experience writing the piece on which the book was based: ‘I had a terrible time writing the article... the weird fourth dimension I kept sensing in the Prankster adventure. I wrote most of it at such a burst that to this day I have no perspective on the book.’
I’d read Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – who hadn’t? – but these Pranksters were new to me. Contemporary incarnations of the archetypes of the Trickster and the Fool, they had traversed America in 1964 in a psychedelically enhanced, Day-Glo school bus, blaring music, totally spaced out on hallucinogens, doing their thing, blowing people’s minds. It was sheer mania, there were no rules. It made On the Road seem as exciting as a picnic at the local Elks Club, though synchronistically, at the controls – no, call it at the wheel – of the bus was Kerouac’s old muse and travelling companion Neal Cassady. And who should show up at Kesey’s house in the woods but Neal’s old friend Allen Ginsberg, and his new pals, the Hell’s Angels. Everything seemed to be coming together, though the principles of connection were obscure. Jung was cited: synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle. That was it!
I rolled my joints, and read and read, putting the book down only to change LPs, have a beer and a sandwich, substitute a pipe full of Balkan Sobranie for the dope. Wolfe was a revelation. The book was captivatingly fresh, like hearing Bob Dylan for the first time: totally authentic, creating a new sound, making you wish you could think and talk – sing! – like that. Form, sound and content in perfect harmony. Finding the right language to convey this curious new form of life was a problem that exercised Kesey too. The acknowledged guru of the group, he denied that he was in any way the ‘Chief’, and in so doing confirmed that he was. He was uncertain about how to convey the being-experiment of the Pranksters, with their crazed bus-ride across America, their clanging devotion to the machinery of sound, their incessant desire to – as the Doors put it – ‘break on through to the other side’. How could you make the Acid experience more widely available, convey its visionary and spiritual nature?
Christ! How many movements before them had run into this self same problem. Every vision, every insight of the . . . original . . . circle always came out of the new experience . . . the kairos . . . and how to tell it! How to get it across to the multitudes who have never had the experience themselves? You couldn’t put it into words.
Kesey had stopped writing. Though acknowledged as one of America’s great young novelists, what he was now experiencing was so powerful that it seemed to leave language behind. He had no further desire, he said, to be ‘trapped by artificial rules . . . trapped in syntax . . . ruled by an imaginary teacher with a red ball-point pen who will brand us with an A-minus for the slightest infraction of the rules’.
But if Kesey couldn’t or wouldn’t find a new way of writing, and keeping his finger on the pulse, Tom Wolfe could. To do so he had to reanimate the available language: he practically reinvents the exclamation mark, uses extended runs of full stops . . . not to indicate some omission from the text... not that . . . but to enact the rhythms of the mind, thinking and experiencing, pausing as it reflects . . . moving forwards in staccato movements of perception . . . repeating itself. And how frequently such perception seems to demand italics, or CAPITALS! He invents a line through which the apprehensions buzz across neural synapses – electric prose, you can hear the hum! – and the staccato rhythms seem to re-enact the activities of the stoned mind as it goes about its business of apprehending, and making, the world.
Just as Kesey was bent on extending the range of how we can think and feel, so too Wolfe had to find a language that not merely conveyed this, but caused an analogous excitement and dislocation, leaving the reader feeling exhilarated, even transported.
You had to put them into ecstasy . . . Buddhist monks immersing themselves in cosmic love through fasting and contemplation. Hindus zonked out in Bhakti, which is fervent love in the possession of God, ecstatic flooding themselves with Krishna through sexual orgies or plunging into the dinners of the Bacchanalia, Christians off in Edge City through Gnostic onanism or the Heart of Jesus or the Child Jesus with its running sore, – or – THE ACID TESTS.
This was way further out than Dylan’s recommendation that ‘everybody must get stoned’. That was easy, we were all doing that. But dropping acid? Or, as happened in the first Acid Test – a large public party with strobe lights, thumping music, Pranksters galore, everyone zonked – having it dropped on you, unawares. The freely available, apparently harmless, Kool-Aid was spiked with LSD – that was why they called it electric – and a lot of unsuspecting people had their first trip, some of them damagingly. It created a terrifying precedent: these Pranksters were capable of anything! No one was safe! The anxiously privileged citizens of Piedmont, California, just next to Berkeley, were so alarmed that they built a cover for the town reservoir, at enormous cost, lest some crazed freak put LSD in their drinking water.
Tripping was scary, even if one chose to do it with that nice intellectual Professor Timothy Leary, and a lot more so if you gave yourself to the Keseyan way, abandoned what you knew and had been: gave up the sanctuary of your inner Piedmont, opened the doors of perception. How do you know, asked William Blake – in a line much quoted at the time – ‘but every bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five’? How do you know?
I thought I knew quite a lot about that. I’d read about it, thought and written about it, followed my Blake through Whitman, Yeats and Ginsberg, but I found it difficult to understand what Kesey was up to. Lots of people did. A film editor called Norman Hartweg drove up from LA to see if he might help the Pranksters edit the monumentally confused film that they had made of their journey on the bus, some forty-five hours of psychedelically mashed material. In Wolfe’s account:
Then he realizes that what it really is is that they are interested in none of the common intellectual currency . . . the standard topics, books, movies, new political movements – For years he and all his friends had been talking about nothing but intellectual products, ideas, concoctions, brain candy, shadows of life, as a substitute for living: yes. They don’t even use the intellectual words here – mostly it is just thing.
We were a long way from Merton College, Oxford, from college scarves and tutorials with sherry, from Matthew Arnold. In only a few months I’d smoked a tub of dope, changed into jeans and work shirts, begun growing the Ginsberg-like beard that was to flourish in the next few months. I soon looked the part, almost. But I was just following a half-apprehended fashion, like so many straight middle-class kids who dressed a little like hippies, but palpably were not. They – we – I – were unprepared to take the risks, to turn on and drop out. To take the ACID TEST. To find a new form of life, a new language.
It was so beguiling, this new psychedelic utopia, partly because spending that summer
at my mother’s was so stressful, and I was so grateful to find a way to avoid the daily conflict. My parents had separated, and dad was now to be found in a modest apartment block a mile from the family home, where he professed himself ‘content’, and had donned a beret, love beads, and a new, strikingly contemporary, set of attitudes. My mother seethed in our old house, ill with cancer, frightened, brittle, and increasingly irrational. She maintained she’d had ‘a royal screwing’, by my father, a phrase that she insisted that Ruthie and I not merely acknowledge, but parrot: a royal screwing! When we refused, she attacked us venomously, claiming that our professed neutrality sanctioned our father’s abandonment of her, and insisting desperately that we make him come back.
It was hard for me, but it was murder for Ruthie. I was only an occasional visitor to America, and honoured accordingly, whereas my sister bore the full force of my mother’s cancer and post-separation distress. She insisted that her daughter ought to relieve her unhappiness, ameliorating her sufferings through the balm of constant unconditional love and support, which was cruel and unrealistic to ask of a young woman of nineteen, and impossible to deliver. Ruthie had transformed from the gawky girl called Tarzan by her sixth grade classmates into a considerable beauty, often compared to the actress Natalie Wood, but not a confident one. Her mother’s incessant hysterical demands undermined her self-confidence, and she had retreated into a quietude which was regarded by strangers, particularly male ones, as pleasingly enigmatic.
Ruthie and I trooped to our father’s apartment, and put our mother’s case, however half-heartedly. He looked pained, took care not to criticize us for the weaklings that we were, and said that he was sorry we had to go through this. Of course he was not going back. We knew that, we believed he was right not to, we’d done our duty, and could again enjoy our visits with him.
We’d put on some music – he loved ‘Sergeant Pepper’ – and one night he, Ruthie and her boyfriend Bobby dropped acid together while I smoked some dope. I didn’t want my mind blown, just fuzzed about a little. My dad showed me the notes he’d taken during his last trip – he was always very well organized – and they were total gibberish.
‘You have to be tripping to understand,’ he said.
I didn’t. I’d sectioned off the new alternative lifestyle, the music, the language, the drugs, and turned them into leisure pursuits. You could put on your hippy gear, as well as your Commoner’s Gown. You could turn on, sure, but you could also turn off: partake, or not. In short, I was tempted, I had fun, and I hardly learned a thing.
Not then, anyway. What Tom Wolfe eventually taught me was something about Ludwig Wittgenstein, when I came to read him ten years later. And Wittgenstein helped me, retrospectively, to grasp why Tom Wolfe wrote as he did. This instance of the Law of Unexpected Consequences may strike you as no big deal, but at the time, and even in retrospect, I am as grateful to both of them as I am to, well, the Grateful Dead. This insight gleaned from my days as a pseudo-hippy is confirmation, no doubt, of the fact that I am not – and never was, even in those heady days – much of a psychotropic risk-taker. I had no real desire for a new kind of life, nor to talk and think like one of the Haight-Ashbury types. I just about managed to incorporate ‘cool’ into my vocabulary (it’s still there) but as for ‘groovy’, ‘far-out’, ‘good vibrations’, the many variations of having one’s mind ‘blown’, none of these stuck. I just don’t talk like that, and I don’t live the sort of life that makes it necessary to do so.
That kind of language was largely reserved for teenage wannabes and their (uncomprehending) parents, bad pop songs (as well as a few good ones), and crappy journalists – it was the homogenized and commercial form of the real thing. The new language was used – all those groovies and far-outs – by the characters satirized in the ‘head comics’ of the time, by Mr Natural and Flakey Foont, Honeybunch Kaminsky (who wanted some more orgasms), and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. No, to hear the language that was really generated by the psychedelic experience, you had to have been there, and done that. Failing that, you needed a good journalist. You needed Tom Wolfe. ‘I have tried,’ Wolfe tells us, ‘not only to tell what the Pranksters did, but to recreate the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that.’ That is, starkly: you can only understand the inner reality of people who are zonked out of their minds on LSD if you find the right language to convey it. Because what you experience determines what you can say, and likewise what you can say determines what you may experience.
In The Philosophical Investigations, a work filled with memorable poetic perception, Wittgenstein remarks that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’. It is never entirely clear what this means: like most poetic language it both demands and resists explication, and is diminished by commentary that makes this wonderfully suggestive metaphor into some prosaic paraphrase. Wittgenstein made his intentions clear: ‘philosophy,’ he says, ‘ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.’ He means exactly what he says: ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him,’ but not only what he says.
Imagine, if you will, a talking lion. Try to have a conversation with him. Where and how might such a conversation occur? What might you have in common? What sort of experiences might a lion have, what sort of life might he lead, what might he wish or need to say? What might you wish to say to him? Would he understand?
It doesn’t matter how hard you try. You cannot understand him: he’s a lion and you’re not. (Or, as the Pranksters put it: ‘either you’re on the bus or you’re not on the bus.’) We might be reading a poem by Blake, or a story by Oscar Wilde, or Richard Brautigan Or . . . perhaps . . . a song by Jefferson Airplane? Peter, Paul and Mary? The Incredible String Band? Far out.
But I can imagine a talking lion: he would talk like any of the myriad creatures who ‘people’ children’s literature, and speak to us in the language we use and understand ourselves. The tortoise, the hare, the White Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Pooh. Who couldn’t understand them? They convey their animalness by denying it through the very language that is imposed upon them. If a lion were to sidle up to me and say, ‘I say, old bean, you’re looking rather delicious today,’ I would certainly understand him. At the same time, I would presume that I was not about to be eaten, because no lion could talk like that. That’s why children aren’t terrified by their talking animals, no matter how gruff. They’re people, really, in animal drag.
So Wittgenstein’s lion must talk real lion-language, call it Lionish, which is not like, say, Latvian, which is incomprehensible to most of us until a translator helps us, and then we can understand. When a lion says growl! we may assume his appetite and infer his intention – I say it too when offered a hamburger – but the ancillary meanings would be entirely lost on us.
Lionish is an example of what Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game’, which ‘is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life’. What is a lion’s form of life? Does he have any ethical problems with killing a helpless animal? Why does he choose one rather than another? When he kills, does he take pleasure in it? Is the new meal delicious, even better than the last? Does he feel he should share? Is he scared of elephants? When he says growl! or roar! it would be inappropriate for us to claim that we know what he means. We can’t empathize with a lion, we have too little in common. You can’t understand Lionish unless you have lion-experience: forms of language, Wittgenstein insists, are inextricable from forms of life. Meaning is a matter of context.
I don’t wish to suggest that Pranksters and other acid heads were lions, and thus incomprehensible, though they sometimes insisted that their experience was not shareable unless one dropped acid as well: as if, to understand a lion, you had to join the pack, drink from a watering hole, stalk wildebeest, and roar in the night. You can just about imagine that, even if you can’t do it. Kesey eventually came to feel that ecstatic and boun
dary-breaking experience was possible without the drugs, and that this should be the goal. And though he was not interested in conveying the experience in words – ‘I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph’ – he never quite denied that this was possible. It just didn’t interest him. Like Neal Cassady, he didn’t want to think anymore.
It was Wolfe’s task to find ‘the right language to convey this curious new form of life’. The line of thought is derived entirely from Wittgenstein. When puzzling over my first reading of The Philosophical Investigations, trying to find examples of what Wittgenstein was driving at, my mind went back to Tom Wolfe, and the solution he had found to making us understand the apparently foreign, distant and incomprehensible. That is the job of the writer, of course, and I wonder if Wittgenstein underestimated somewhat what great writing is and can do? We can’t understand what a lion might say because we do not know how and what he feels. Read D.H. Lawrence’s animal poems, or Ted Hughes’, and you get at least the impression of some vivid understanding of what a cow might feel and be, or a bear, or a crow.
That’s what writers try to do. Not tell us how animals feel, but how other people do. After all, what is claimed about the lion – that he has a form of life too foreign for us to understand what he might have to say – was being claimed also, in 1968, by women, say, and blacks, anxious to reclaim their own territory, power and language. How could a white male begin to understand the experience of someone with a womb and menstrual cycle, or with dark skin? Both groups have been discriminated against. What effrontery, even to try to understand. Leave that to women writers, and to black ones.