by Jenny Diski
It was easy to be seduced away from a politics which had palpably failed – even a just war had failed to provide peace, and those who had saved the world from Hitler had not prevented the next horror signalled by the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. In 1967, if you looked around, you saw the continuing confrontation of East and West, the Berlin Wall still standing, mass starvation in Biafra, race riots in the States, the war in Vietnam. Fear, hunger, deprivation, the oppression by the strong of the weak. Nothing had changed, for all that we were told how a generation had sacrificed its youth in order to make a decent world for us. And even if that were true, how could that generation sit back with a sense of a job well done when terrible things were happening to people all over the planet? In any case, it is not the job of the young to be grateful, it is their job to tear up the world and start again.
What happened when you smoked a joint and to a far greater extent when you dropped acid was that the world outside your head was utterly changed. It looked, I and others would say over and over again as we tripped, so real. By which, I suppose, we must have meant unreal, except that is not how it seemed. We watched reality become a conundrum as the chemicals we ingested altered the chemicals in our brains. Change and reality were as easy to make and unmake as swallowing a pill or drawing smoke into our lungs. The ‘one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small’ of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was a perfect description of the astonishment at the changes we made happen inside our own heads. We had a childlike wonder that we could produce such weirdness from ourselves – that our own familiar minds had the latent capacity to see the world entirely anew. Drugs were also an unfathomable, fascinating, magical toy – it wasn’t coincidental that we took to blowing bubbles though plastic hoops and making morphing patterns in bright colours with oil and heat. And notice how taking acid dripped on to sugar cubes or blotting paper combined the magical contraption with the favoured, forbidden foodstuffs of our childhoods.
There were still books to read, but now they were the Vedas, Gita, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, books on Buddhism by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, novels and essays informed by Eastern philosophy or drug use by Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Carlos Casteneda, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as John Lilly, writing from his sensory deprivation tanks, and Dr Leary, the professor of psychedelia. This reality game, we discovered, had been played for millennia by other cultures with and without the use of drugs. We read up on oriental religions and philosophies and discovered how the West had got it so wrong, and that ‘Oh, wow, it’s so real’ was not a brand new vision brought about by brand new chemicals at all. All along Buddhism had been saying that reality was not what it seemed, and the tribal societies had chewed and smoked natural substances that took them into the dream country and gave them stories and visions with which to blur the edges of reality and shift gear out of the mundane. It turned out we hadn’t discovered the fast route to re-visioning the world, but we freely partook of its current availability. We had rediscovered it for ourselves, reinvented the point of the prayer wheel and the joint, and were bringing it home. We were investigating and disturbing the self in order to dismiss self. Transformation was our task, change outside from alteration inside. We did it from books: Teach Yourself Altered Consciousness was our generation’s virtual addition to that series of practical self-education books we’d grown up with. We knew the worth of self-education. To start with we eschewed the shaman, the guide, the guru – though soon there would be a great flocking to the East in search of teachers and a stream of teachers heading in the other direction towards these willing students. We just took the drugs and read books. There was a feeling that we could, that we had to do it ourselves. Gurus and guides were just another form of parent. We could take the ancient wisdom in its raw form, mix it with lysergic acid diethylamide, and make it work for ourselves. Like those Victorian, Edwardian and post-war children our parents had thought quaint and safe for bedtime reading, we took ourselves off, made our own way, like Alice, Dorothy, the Pevensies and Peter Pan, to different realities, and assumed with the bravado of youth that we’d make it back to Kansas to tell of what we saw and be able to implement the, by definition valuable, new connections and disconnections our changed minds had made.
It’s very hard to look at the drug culture here and in the States today from the point of view of those who lived through the Sixties, and understand it as anything other than negative and destructive. The supply and demand has become a template for capitalism. It was always the case that drugs were brought in from somewhere else by entrepreneurs and were divided up to be sold by individuals, and some of those individuals were certainly businessmen. But the grimness and the profiteering have become universal. Watch The Wire and you are confronted by the parodic vision of capitalism working perfectly in the projects and high rises. We bequeathed heroin and cocaine to the miserable masses, not any kind of psychedelic solution to poverty and injustice. Luckier kids take Es and party, dance in a trance, and it must be fun – they even call it being ‘loved up’, but it doesn’t seem to have any other cultural aspect attached to it. No books or art, and the music is too mechanical for the likes of my generation to get. The punks were the last comprehensible youth movement, and were a genuine phenomenon for only a flash. And of course, the Sixties drug generation had to watch Thatcher’s babies, the thirty-somethings who dealt in fantasy money, hoovering up cocaine just to keep them on a money-making high. It feels to me, although I know that plenty of people were fucked up by drugs back then, that the party has turned spectacularly nasty and pointless.
We were also a bunch of dissolute, hedonistic druggies. We lay around and got stoned, had sex, listened to music that exalted lying around, getting stoned, having sex, and hymned our good times. Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, Love, Hendrix, Country Joe and the Fish, Frank Zappa all played our tune from far away on the West Coast of the United States. Their albums arrived in British shops, we bought them, put the records on our turntables, rolled our joints on the covers. We even had some of our own, though it was a little softer, lacking the desperate edge of the Americans. Pink Floyd, the Who, the Stones, the Beatles, the Incredible String Band, the Small Faces, the Animals. The music knew where we were going in our heads and wrote the score. We partied. Perhaps the music was too good, enabling us to stay indoors and just watch and listen. We altered the world hardly at all because, whatever we told each other, and however connected we might have felt sitting in the same room, the search we were on was for the singular, individual experience. To be sure, it was of the interior kind, the kind you can keep still and have, rather than the current much-desired extreme sports, falling-fast-out-of-the-sky sort. But we had about as much effect on the world as someone jumping from a plane does. The straight world wondered what we were up to. They disapproved, they feared, they sent the cops round, and that was all grist to our other sense that we were doing something. But our interiority, our single focus on our inner selves did not achieve anything very much. No new ideas, no great books or paintings or poetry come to mind from those late Sixties days – just an album cover or two. And though the music was remarkable, and much of it was recorded in a haze of cannabis smoke, it was usually mixed by sober technicians and distributed by multinational companies.
‘That’s your problem, man...’ This telling phrase was used to resolve disputes that arose when love and harmony and the new reality failed to get the washing-up done, or the bath cleaned. It was spoken in a tone of voice that meant something like: each of us has to take responsibility for our own soul’s contentment and not impose our constraints on others – man. In the quotidian event it meant that those who wanted a bit of order in the kitchen had to do the washing-up for those who left their dirty plates in the sink. The day-to-day-ness never once looked like another way of being, except, of course, that we didn’t go regularly to work or to war. In America at this time, matters were more serious. The music and th
e drugs were made for and taken into the war zone in order to make the insufferable tolerable, or to remind combatants that their intolerable existence was someone else’s fault. In the United Kingdom, however much we tried to empathise, and this is the vital difference between our experience and theirs, our memories of that time and theirs, we had only a generational war to fight.
Like children we played cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians in Covent Garden. It involved a lot of cleaning. It may have been my most domesticated period. Whenever there was a rumour of a drugs bust – which was several times a week – floors had to be hurriedly but very thoroughly vacuumed, and surfaces wiped down to catch the bits of hash and grass that had dropped while we made the joints or our friendly dealer cut an ounce from his block. I knew people who had been busted for a speck of hash that the vacuum cleaner had missed. For those who actually went to prison – one twenty-five-year-old I knew for two years for having a couple of grams – playtime stopped. But for most of us, we acted out our underground lives, developed paranoia and outlaw slang with all the solemn delight of Peter Pan’s lost boys. It was a dangerous game. There were people who didn’t stop injecting Methedrine when it started to go bad. Drug doctors did the rounds of certain flats and wrote out private prescriptions for whole cartons of Burroughs Wellcome’s blue and white 12-ampoule boxes. People went crazy, got very ill. There is no describing the come-down from a long weekend on Methedrine. I stopped it when I started to see bugs crawling about all over me and couldn’t catch them. But for a few weeks I lived with a much healthier, more disciplined heroin addict. We shared the kitchen of the flat in Covent Garden. A mattress on the floor, covered with a gold candlewick bedspread to make it more homely. In that period addicts were registered with a licensed general practitioner or clinic, and received from them controlled amounts of heroin. It meant that they could be physically and mentally monitored and, although there was some over-prescription, there wasn’t a great surplus of heroin on the market. This policy was stopped in 1975. In 1971 there were between 6,000 and 15,000 drug users; by 2002 the number had risen to between 161,000 and 266,000. In 1968 the great days of the entrepreneurial drug industry were yet to come, and there was also no organised crime involvement; the black market was mostly from over-prescription by doctors. If you needed heroin you got it for nothing. My boyfriend made his daily rounds, visiting the doctor, the chemist, shooting up regularly, and felt vastly superior to us outlaws. He disapproved of doing drugs. He was sick, he told us when we rolled a joint or dropped acid. We were just messing about. He dressed neatly and with care, washed his hair daily, made sure he ate nourishing food regularly, and kept his equipment tidy in a black leather zip-up case which he carried with him everywhere. He went out each morning and did who knew what, wheeling and dealing, bartering and selling things and sometimes part of his prescription, but not breaking into houses or mugging people on the street for a fix.
When he left for the day, I tidied up, returning our private bedroom to the kitchen everyone in the flat used. I made the bed and put away the apple box we had as a bedside table. When he came home, the morning syringe he had left by the bed was clean. I washed out the drops of blood and drug residue every morning at the sink after I’d washed up the teacups, sluiced it thoroughly with boiled water, taking it apart and leaving it on the drainer to dry. It wasn’t until some weeks into my daily morning routine that I noticed any similarity between my domestic activities and the suburban pill-popping housewives I was never going to become like. Of course, this was a panto version. We played our serious mind-enhancing games, and we played pirates, but like children everywhere we also played house.
3
BODY WORK
We had these appetites that we understood and it was wonderful that they were taken care of. It was a moment where everybody was giving to the other person what they wanted. The women knew that’s what the men wanted.
Interview with Leonard Cohen
in the Globe and Mail, Weekend Review, Canada, 26 May 2007
People fucked back then just as much as they do now. We just didn’t talk about it as much.
Henry Miller in the film Reds, 1981
In 1973 I was teaching at a girls’ state comprehensive school in Hackney, East London. One day after an English lesson with a class of fourteen-year-olds, a girl stayed behind to speak to me. She looked very awkward, near to tears, surprising because she was an outspoken, knowing young woman.
‘What’s up?’
It took her a while to explain, or for me to understand exactly what the problem was. She didn’t know what to do, she said. What about? Well, she’d put a Tampax in, you know, inside her, when she got her period last week. And? The string, she didn’t know how, but the string sort of went up, too. She forgot to pull it out first, she supposed. And? Well, what should she do? About what?
Finally, it dawned on me.
‘You mean it’s still in there? After a week?’
‘Yes, Miss. I don’t know what to do. Should I go to the doctor?’
I still hadn’t got the problem.
‘Just take it out.’
‘But I can’t. The string’s not there.’
‘Put your fingers into your vagina and take it out.’
Her face changed from worry to pure disgust.
‘What, put my fingers up inside me? I’m not touching myself there. Miss!’
The next day I brought my copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective into school and left it in an unlocked cupboard in my room. It described women’s and men’s bodies, how they worked, what they did, how they did it, in straightforward language with simple drawings and photographs. The coffee-table-sized paperback, a US import, became so dog-eared and smudged with page-turning and fingermarks I had to replace it every couple of terms with a new copy. I’d arrive in my classroom after break and lunch to see knots of girls already there, crowded round one of the tables and the book open in front of them.
This, as I say, was in 1973. Long after the Lady Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. People may well have fucked freely back in the early twentieth century, and even for Philip Larkin sexual intercourse had started ten years previously, as indeed it probably had already for many of the girls poring over the book, but in 1973 in Hoxton, London, a fourteen-year-old young woman who used the word ‘fuck’ like a comma, told smutty jokes and almost certainly knew what a penis looked and felt like had been walking around with a week-old tampon inside her because it was ‘dirty’ to put her fingers into her vagina.
The year before I had helped to set up a free school for some local hardcore truants, which was eventually funded by Camden Council and sited in one of several sheds in an old soon-to-be-built-on freightliner depot, along with a youth club, an old people’s lunch club and a women’s centre. After a few weeks, there were complaints from the women’s centre that the free school kids were breaking in to their shed at night. Nothing was taken, nothing damaged, apart from the door lock and the light left on all night. We asked the kids about it. Yeah, they said, the boys, anyway. There was this poster stuck on the wall of the women’s centre. They’d broken in to look at it. What was it? Shrugs. Y’know. Nope, don’t know. What was it? No one would say. We went to look, and saw on the wall, opposite a window, a two foot by two foot colour poster, all pinks, reds and purples, of a vulva, spread wide open, showing the labia and entrance to the vagina. At the time, women’s groups were keen on investigating their own bodies. They examined their sexual parts with the aid of speculums, mirrors and their friends, familiarising themselves with what was felt to have been appropriated by men for their own private gaze. The free school boys, children and young adolescents, wanted to see as well.
‘What did you do?’
‘Looked at it.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Well, we jerked off. Obviously.’
It did seem obvious, speaking to them. The women were furious. They were being violated, they said. We
explained this to the free school kids.
‘Well,’ one of them said. ‘I’d never seen one just there on a wall like that before. What else you supposed to do with it? What do they expect?’
It was an interesting point, and quite a fruitful discussion began about the nature of different points of view of a single subject. The boys went to the woman in charge and apologised for breaking in. They weren’t well received. If it happened again, she was going to call the police. The women’s centre and the free school kids never did see eye to eye.
Taking off our clothes was an important part of the project of undoing the constraints we perceived our elders to have been immobilised by. We stripped conscientiously in front of each other and made nothing of it. Sex was written about and acted out in private and public with enthusiasm in the name of the sexual revolution. The idea was to have fun, because having fun with our bodies was a completely new way of being with our peers. Of course we were young and therefore taking our clothes off was relatively unproblematic, because what we saw was on the whole easy to look at. We scorned covering ourselves up for any other reason than aesthetics – and warmth. Clothes (except the beautiful, floaty, diaphanous kind that invited the slightest zephyr to puff them away) were an obstacle to the freedom of bodies, and also signified the draping of the mind. In 1973 – the early Seventies, a seminal period it seems for discovering that not so much had changed – Erica Jong’s heroine Isadora Wing4 had finally defined what it was the Sixties generation were in search of, and evidently still hadn’t found. It was ‘the zipless fuck’. It seemed to be several things all at once, not all of them compatible: it was wildly romantic, a teen dream of you didn’t quite know what glimpsed frustratingly in vague erotic prose and on movie screens: