Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  As Doyle made me aware, my mother submitted an “open letter” to the Psychedelic Review. It reads, in part, “Mescaline is related to adrenaline, a known neurosecretatory hormone; and caffeine is a purine similar to the nitrogenous bases in DNA (the genetic material). If these facts do not, at best, point to physiological mechanisms, they at least attest to the knowability of consciousness, psychosis and mystical experience. The chemistry eloquently testifies to the amenability of man’s soul to his own researches.”2

  Writing under her first married name of Lynn Sagan, my mother relates the revelation of the chemical infrastructure of the mysterious substances to the chemical breakthroughs that laid bare the molecular basis of heredity. She argues that, instead of obscuring reality, so-called hallucinogens seemed to reveal it. “The drug attacks defense mechanisms built up carefully to conceal the truth of our direct sensory perceptions. One would a priori imagine, however, that a drug which forced us to see the world as it is would be welcomed.”3

  As Doyle points out, “Psychedelics, for Sagan and others, represented a scientific enhancement of human perception akin to the electron microscope, and the early data gathered by this new mode of scientific observation suggested that the separation between the self and the cosmos was an illusion, an artifact of egoic consciousness correctable, reflectable, by a continuously tuning . . . analog consciousness.”4 Although I did not come across her letter (or if I did, in my cursory browse, I did not understand it) in that attractive set of back issues of the Psychedelic Review in that Newton Center music room, Doyle’s book gave me the chance, transporting me back in space and time, as it were, to my early adolescence.

  IN THE THOTH DECK, a version of the Tarot designed by Aleister Crowley, the Magus is depicted with “a naked golden body, smiling, with winged feet standing in front of a large caduceus. In his right hand he holds a style and in his left hand, a papyrus.”5 Crowley, a shadowy figure associated with Satanism and the counterculture introduction of black magick, held that drugs were among the magician’s most powerful tools, but he fills the hands of his magician archetype not with pills but the tools to write. Crowley, a mountain climber and expert chess player who disavowed chess when he saw the miserable comportment of the masters, moved on to a nonacademic investigation of the arcane. Although decidedly less on the dark side, my father also related writing to magic:

  What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.6

  Writing is also a psychedelic. If I say behold the sweet-smelling pink magnolia, or cheap whipped cream, or unseen birds in the spring mist, your mind fills with sensations. You begin to see things that aren’t there. It’s a powerful drug, all right.

  DOYLE’S Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere is a book that, like some of the drugs it describes, is hard to put down—and keep down.7 It comes up, it lingers like a sharp coffee or pungent sprig of rosemary, it catches in the back of the throat and tightens the jaw like some strange hallucinogen that evolved with mammals by intoxicating them, protecting its genetic endowment while attracting the bug-eyed critters just enough to enhance its own distribution across the forest floor and grassy planes.

  In mythology both Hermes, the Greek messenger god, and Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god, are said to have brought our ancestors the potent mind-altering substance writers and publishers push. Like its more properly pharmacological psychoactive cousins, writing can produce or break through the screenlike phenomenal layer called maya in Hinduism, the layer of ordinary everyday life we take to be real. The Pythagoreans and Platonists and Neoplatonists may have been inspired while on psychedelic drugs to pronounce ordinary reality, after they came down, a charade. Botanically and mycologically altered states may have helped foment the important protoscientific realization that all is not as it seems, that there is more to reality than our waking consensus reality.

  The ethnomycologist, and one-time vice president of J. P. Morgan, Gordon Wasson (1898–1986) argued that Amanita muscaria, the famous psychedelic and poisonous red toadstool with white spots familiar from pictures of the hookah-smoking caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, was the sacred “god of the gods” (soma) that informed the mystical insights of the Sanskrit Vedanta. Wasson argued that ergoline alkaloids from the ergot fungus, which grow on rye, were taken during the Eleusinian mysteries devoted to the agricultural goddess Demeter or Persephone. Wasson was inspired by his young Russian bride, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, who surprised him, an Englishman averse to toadstools, by avidly collected edible wild mushrooms. After inciting his interest, the couple made an epic trip to Mexico, collecting psilocybin mushrooms and Salvia divinorum. In May 1957 they published “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life magazine. The widely read article helped set the stage for the sixties. Today two species of mushroom, Psilocybe wassonii heim and Psilocybe wassonorum guzman, include Wasson in their names.

  I SAY that Doyle’s book is hard to keep down because it acts like a drug. By that I mean not only that it makes us hallucinate by conveying the visions that it recounts, which all books with scenic or fictional elements do, but that it partakes of the logic that Jacques Derrida shows at work in Plato when Plato, in his dialogue the Phaedrus, writes that Socrates refers to writing as a “drug.”8

  The word Plato writes down to describe the description by Socrates, who never writes, of writing is φάρμακον, pharmakon.

  Pharmakon, meaning drug. Much as in modern English, the pharmakon, the root word of pharmacology, can be a poison or a remedy, or neither or both. In ancient Greek it can also mean sacrament, talisman, cosmetic, or perfume. In the Phaedrus Socrates criticizes writing as a crutch because it weakens our memory, oratory, and culture by making us dependent on the prosthesis of an external substance. His precipitous judgment was to be turned humorously on its head two thousand years later by the 1960s bumper sticker claiming, “Reality is a crutch for those who can’t handle drugs.”

  As a kind of hallucinatory drug or magic, writing allows us to speak to ghosts, not only nonpresent friends and family members but intellectual influences long since dead. Writing extends, with precise iterability, the ghostly transmissions of language. In what he would eventually call the “stoned ape theory of human evolution,” described in the book Food of the Gods, Terrence McKenna argued that modern humans evolved some one hundred thousand years ago, potentiated by Psilocybe cubensis, the most common form of Wasson’s “magic mushrooms.”9 Increases in visual acuity (possibly associated with dilated pupils), aphrodisiac effects (aiding procreation), and, at higher doses, dissolution of ego (enabling socioreligious binding) jump-started human evolution according to McKenna. He further proposes that tripping apes, already grunting and hallucinating, would be perfectly predisposed to start using language, which is, after all, a form of consensual hallucination. Ingestion of hallucinogens would have provided the original natural technology that prepared our ancestors to use sounds and, later, written symbols to communicate, triggering specific images in one another’s heads. McKenna’s theory is reminiscent of another counterculture motto, “Reality is a shared hallucination.”

  Whether or not McKenna—or for that matter, the biologist E. O. Wilson, who implicates hallucinogens (and group selection) in the start of human culture10—is even partly right, note that writing reworks plants and fungi: Papyrus is the pithy stem of a water plant, and books still depend on fungi-dependent forests whose trees provide the paper on which we write. Recycling and feeding animals, which help propagate and fertilize them, fungi
and plants have a long history of evolving enticing compounds that attract our kind even as we help grow them and tend them and spread their seed.

  In his book, which triggered these memories and this analysis, Doyle combines scholarly attention to some of the great chroniclers of hallucinogenic and psychedelic experiences—McKenna, Leary, Huxley, and William S. Burroughs—with a recounting of the role ayahuasca played in his own life. It is performative in that, instead of just making an argument, it also seems to aim to create an experience. For Doyle, the terms hallucinogen and psychedelic are ultimately inadequate. He introduces the term ecodelic. As psychedelic comes from roots meaning “mind-expanding,” ecodelic comes from roots meaning “home-” (eco is from oikos, home) “expanding.”

  And that is how I felt reading this book—as if our planetary home, to which we owe so much, especially perhaps to plants and fungi that combined to make the ancestral arboreal environment in which humans evolved, were expanding. As if a shroud were being whisked away, scholarship being applied to an absolutely central aspect of human ontology—one that has been unfairly, unsuccessfully, and symptomatically “ritually excluded.” Perhaps we have been so blindsided, so preoccupied, so myopic for so long that we first must hallucinate reality before we can see it. What resists persists, and what we cannot digest continues to perplex.

  Applying ecological thinking to multicultural use, including Western use, of drugs gives us a new appreciation of and connection to the environment in which we find ourselves. Doyle says he used to be an ontological materialist, taking antidepressants, until he got tenure and, rather triumphantly, because he was going to be paid to do it, traveled to the jungle to take ayahuasca. He had been a great fan of The Yage Letters, the correspondence between Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and was planning on making a film that went beyond David Cronenberg’s movie about Burroughs, Naked Lunch. As he researched psychedelics (or ecodelics), he discovered that often people would mention DNA in describing their experiences. This intrigued him, but what really hooked him was when he found out that Francis Crick himself was on a low level of LSD when he discovered DNA’s linked spiral staircase structure. Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for modernizing PCR, the polymerase chain reaction that copies DNA in the lab, reported in the September 1994 issue of California Monthly that he doubted he would have done so if it were not for LSD. Steve Jobs reportedly said that his use of LSD in the 1960s was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. Richard Feynman tried it with John Lilly. My father didn’t, although I advocated that he should try it and that I would do it with him.

  Rather surprisingly, considering their reputation for making people “out of it,” ecodelics often reveal hidden depths of our connections to the environment, making us realize we are part of what we observe. Perhaps it is not surprising that Doyle’s e-mail moniker is Möbius, the mathematical plane that, given a felicitous twist, has only one side—meaning its inside is its outside, quite literally. In “The Wall of Darkness,” Arthur C. Clarke describes Trilorne, a world where explorers meet the ultimate snag: an impenetrable black wall extends from the planet’s equator indefinitely up. The wall turns out to be a Möbius strip, a surface with only one side, so that all exploration leads to the beginning.

  An illustration by the quantum physicist and Albert Einstein colleague John Wheeler (1911–2008) vividly reveals what our truncated, anecodelic objectivity conceals: a giant U with an eye, representing the observing ego, on one stalk. It looks out and sees the serif atop the black pole of the letter’s eyeless stalk. The line of sight creates the illusion that the eye is observing something else, rather than an extension of itself.

  It is thus as if drugs don’t just produce illusions but clear the clutter, removing the artificial feeling of separation between inside and outside, between oneself and others, between life and the environment. In this way they reveal rather than hide, showing us how we are all part of the same thing; rather than simulate or distract, ecodelics can dissimulate and focus: this is perhaps one reason Doyle prefers to call them ecodelics rather than hallucinogens or psychedelics or, worse, psychotropics or psychotomimetics.

  I had not met Doyle until he came in October 2011 to Kitchener, Ontario, to be present at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Society of Literature Science and Art (SLSA), devoted to “PHARMAKON: That which can both kill and cure.” The year before, his plane was delayed to New Orleans, so he missed his place on a panel on plants at the American Anthropology Association. I was happy to give his paper on plant agency, talking about how plants “outsourced” their sexuality to animals, and mentioned how Duke University, the site of one of his recent talks, owed its existence to tobacco plants. It occurred to me that it was a very plantlike thing for him to have missed his plane and be at home in Pennsylvania while I, a kind of ambulatory animal he outsourced, read his words. Not coming allied him to the plants he was representing. It was an Ovidian move.

  In Kitchener I gave a reader response to Darwin’s Pharmacy. I had already been exposed to Derrida’s analysis of Socrates’s description of writing as a drug. Since Doyle was talking about drugs proper, and the conference was about the pharmakon, I thought it would be fun to investigate the relationship of Darwin’s pharmacy to Plato’s, to see what might arise from such an alchemical mixture.

  As I developed my talk, I was drawn to the subtle changes that occur as we move from speech to handwritten to typed text. In the first part of my response, I read my own handwritten comments:

  This was a great Book—it was hard to put down—keep down—like ayahuasca! Now I shouldn’t probably criticize because my objectivity is impaired by contact high—plus drug interaction problem—I’m also a mycelial thinker!

  But really, Doyle’s book is an important contribution to an important, marginalized discourse. It’s really about ecology and psychedelia. It’s serious and playful at the same time.

  What are these drugs that you talk about? What are they saying, to us and through us?

  Now this is how I talk, not how I write.

  Writing, remember, is a drug—according to Derrida, according to Plato, and maybe Freud—and according to me. And that’s a good thing—maybe!

  We eat plants to live and fungi recycle our bodies, preferably after we’re dead. But sometimes we don’t digest them; we throw them up. They don’t sit well; they intoxicate, entheogenate, neologize us.

  McKenna, hyperbolically—and one of the great things I loved about Doyle’s book is that he’s read so much McKenna and so much Philip K. Dick, people I’m really interested in, that it’s a great way to get a distilled dose. It is kind of like whiskey or cognac. I admit I’m a card-carrying literary heterotroph, by which I mean I like to go to the top of the literary food chain and feed on it. That’s good and bad because the mistakes are multiplied and magnified; at the same time, you don’t have to do as much research, which is very important to some people—McKenna, hyperbolically, but with clarity brought on by pupil-dilating psilocybin, says language itself is a shared hallucination jump-started by monkeys on mushrooms. You know, the kind that grow out of bullshit, literally.

  And when we don’t digest them, they can entheogenize us, take us on a trip. Doyle shows us where—right here! But in his book he is on drugs—on the ur-drug of writing.

  I read it on a Kindle so I’m safe, but it’s still writing and I still shared Doyle’s trip—going everywhere and nowhere. Now, according to Derrida’s theory of a general writing, we’ve always been on drugs. And note that writing in its original form is on paper, undigested or technologically partly digested vegetable matter outside our bodies. The very cellulosic and lignin strength that allowed algae to stand straight, cyanobacteria to erect monuments that allowed their fragile, wet bodies to survive the dry earth, like pharaohs reborn in a solid realm, allows us to preserve and repeat traces and trails.

  Biblion in Greek “names the internal bark of the papyrus and thus of . . . paper” and is “like the L
atin word liber which first designated the living part of the book before it meant ‘book.’ But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance”11—and this was written before the iPad, which I don’t have. Like I say, I have a Kindle. I’m a Luddite, a late adopter.

  But we are all using drugs here, Gaia-given mind-altering ecodelics. And if the government were consistent, as Doyle suggests, it should put itself in jail for possession of a dangerous mind-altering substance.

  Despite his playfulness, Doyle’s message is, “Let’s take drugs seriously, they have an ecological message.”

  So I also have some typewritten comments, but this is handwriting so I’m considering this like a gateway drug to typewritten drugs. I don’t know if we want me stop there, or if you want me to talk about thermodynamics, or read my—it’s funny because when you talk, and when you write with your hand, and when you write with a typewriter it seems to actually affect your communication, right? I mean, we don’t talk like we write; it’s an amazing thing.