FLOATING
Little by little, hearing became my favorite sense; for just as it is the voice that reveals the inwardness which is incommensurable with the outer, so the ear is the instrument whereby that inwardness is grasped, hearing the sense by which it is appropriated.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD,Either/Or
One of the more memorable things my father ever told me when I was young was that he had taken mescaline. I was fifteen years old at the time, and we were sitting in the living room watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I don’t know why he told me. Perhaps he recognized in me a need for proof that one could make it to adulthood in spite of a tendency toward dissipation. Perhaps he was indulging a moment of nostalgia. Whatever the case, as the credits rolled, my father told me that when the movie was first released, twenty-five years earlier, he had swallowed several hundred milligrams of mescaline and watched it four consecutive times from the front row of a Manhattan movie theater.
“By the last time,” he concluded wistfully, “I was more or less straight.”
To a teenager with $50 of pot hidden in his underwear drawer, this announcement was welcome news—insurance for the inevitable day when I would be caught. But I attribute the memory’s strength and longevity to the secret that was revealed to me the following year, for since that time it has been impossible not to question the prudence of a man who, though he had since childhood suffered from unwanted voices, would willingly ingest a sizable amount of a potent hallucinogen and spend eight straight hours watching Keir Dullea hurtle through the Day-Glo vortex of the space-time continuum.
When my stash was found, that very year, this was my parents’ position as well. Looming over a mess of pipes, bags, and screens laid out like police evidence on the kitchen table, they dismissed my plea of precedent with the claim that my father’s experimentation had been self-destructive. Not only was it not an invitation to me, they said, it was a cautionary tale. Using drugs had exacerbated my father’s emotional instability and worsened his voices, and it had helped cause his breakdown and hospitalization. If I wasn’t careful, I could suffer the same fate.
Their claim was not without scientific merit. Recreational drugs work by affecting the distribution and levels of neurotransmitters in the brain, and they appear to do so in a way that mimics the neurological changes caused by psychiatric illnesses. Recently, researchers in New York announced evidence that marijuana use in adolescence causes defects in the developing brain that are identical to defects found in the brains of those diagnosed with schizophrenia. Through a technique known as diffusion tensor imaging, they examined the brains of four groups: adolescents with schizophrenia who did and did not use marijuana, and adolescents without schizophrenia who did and did not use marijuana. In all but the last, the researchers detected abnormalities in an area of the brain known as the arcuate fasciculus, a central language and auditory pathway that may play a role in producing auditory hallucinations.1
Mescaline also produces a neurological portrait similar to that found in those diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1992, German researchers gave the drug to twelve physically and mentally fit men. About three and a half hours after ingesting half a gram of mescaline powder, the subjects experienced the equivalent of an “acute psychotic state,” including cognitive dysfunction, anxiety, and delusions. More notably, the drug produced psychosis-like neurological changes. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia often show a decrease of functioning in the right hemisphere of the brain. The mescaline subjects showed the same deficiency.2
The relationship between drug use and mental illness isn’t completely clear, however. The causal route may not be from drugs to pathology but from pathology to drugs. In 1996, another German study examined 232 men and women hospitalized for schizophrenia for the first time. Of those who had used recreational drugs, usually marijuana, only 27 percent did so prior to the onset of their symptoms. The remaining 73 percent began to take drugs either in the same month or at least one month after their symptoms had started. These findings confirm what many psychiatrists have observed in practice: Patients often use drugs as a form of self-medication or as a more acceptable explanation for a frightening and sudden alteration in their mental lives.3
Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that for people predisposed to mental illness, the use of psychedelic drugs comes with a higher risk. This doesn’t mean that it is necessarily ill-advised. In my father’s case, in fact, the use of drugs may have been therapeutic. Self-experimentation is inherently willful, and for a person whose days are marred by frequent incursions against the conscious will, using drugs can be considered a form of proactive defense. My father had perceptions that altered themselves without warning, and so, aware or unaware of the risks but one hopes aware of the irony, he chose to alter his perceptions voluntarily. He chose to engage in an act that can be interpreted as a thumbed nose at the hijacked will that most of us have the luxury to avoid confronting.
For a while now, I have been looking for a drug that would let me hear voices. There aren’t many choices. Plenty of drugs available to the partygoer of my generation alter perception—LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, ecstasy, heroin. But most act on the sense of sight. There is a neurochemical reason for this, but there is probably also an economic one. Sight is a more marketable sense than hearing. People don’t want to hear voices. They want to see things. They want to experience everything, as one textbook on hallucination puts it, from the “distortions of colour, shape and size of objects” to “Walt Disney characters in action.”4
There is one substance that’s known to cause voice-hearing, but it has to be taken in massively prohibitive quantities to achieve the effect. Also, one would have to endure a period of psychotic paranoia along with the voices. A description of just what this would be like was published in 1970 by two psychiatrists at New York University. The researchers somehow gained permission to give large hourly doses of amphetamines to a group of normal volunteers. One subject was given nearly 500 milligrams over the course of a day. (A conventional daily dose of Dexedrine prescribed for narcolepsy is anywhere from 5 to 60 milligrams.) This resulted in an experience that they kindly referred to as “florid paranoid psychosis”:
Before the experiment [the subject] had made a “deal” with an attendant on the ward, to whom he owed several dollars. As he became psychotic, he “heard” a gang coming on the ward to kill him (sent by the attendant). His paranoid feelings included the experimenter who he assumed had “set up” the “trap.” He was at times quite hostile. Explanations that his feelings were amphetamine-induced were rejected with sardonic mock agreement, i.e. “Oh, sure, ha! Is that the way it’s going to be?” etc. At other times he would become panicky and tearful and beg the experimenter to explain what was “really going on.”5
My psyche could not possibly endure this. Luckily, it didn’t have to. There was an alternative, even a better one. In theory, the most reliable and time-tested way to cause your mind to produce voices is also the subtlest and safest. It was the way of Hesiod and Muhammad and Shackleton. When modern pharmacology failed me, I turned to silence.
But silence posed its own problem, namely, where to find it? In the last hour my apartment has echoed with the noise of a truck belching diesel fumes, a sports car with a spine-rattling bass booster, a motorcycle that set off numerous alarms in its wake, police sirens, a construction crew drilling into stone, a crowd of teenagers on their way to school, and a stroller bearing a colicky infant. A trip to the country wouldn’t solve this problem. The sounds from cars, trains, and airplanes echo into the recesses of even the remotest areas of the country, so that even the shrillest and most histrionic of complaints about the modern world’s self-pollution now seem to be based in cold logic. There is no place today to escape from sound and its insidious ability to bully the ear into observation.
In a way, however, this problem has created its own solution by fostering a cadre of dissenters dedicated to establishing islands of silence in a sea of noise. Several months ago I was lucky enough to find one in Manhattan in the person of Sam Zeiger, the owner and operator of Blue Light Floatation, an organization run out of his loft apartment on West Twenty-third Street. For $60 an hour Zeiger offers the use of a state-of-the-art flotation chamber in his apartment. The chamber is a large bath sealed off as much as possible from light and sound and filled with water and enough Epsom salts to create complete buoyancy—approximately one thousand pounds.6
Zeiger advertises Blue Light as a place for “anybody of any age who wants to release themselves from excess mental and physical stress caused by an overload of day-to-day external stimuli.” It is something of a rarity, especially in New York: There is only one other flotation chamber available for public use in the city. This hasn’t always been the case. In the 1970s and ’80s, sensory deprivation, as it is often called, enjoyed something of a vogue. Its P. T. Barnum was a government neurophysiologist named John C. Lilly. He invented the flotation tank in 1954 as a way to study how the brain reacted when it was cut off from external stimuli, and in 1977, after much self-experimentation, he published a best-selling book on the subject called The Deep Self. Consequently, flotation centers began to pop up across North America. The fad was fueled by the 1980 movie Altered States, in which (to distill a complicated plot) William Hurt, through a combination of sensory deprivation and a Native American hallucinogen, turns into an ape. In the past two decades, the technique has dwindled in popularity, retreating to New Age bastions such as California and Arizona, and into academia, where it is used to study the therapeutic effects of sensory deprivation on a number of medical and psychiatric conditions. In the research literature, the use of flotation chambers is referred to as REST, for Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique.
Zeiger is among those who still consider flotation a means of self-exploration. His dedication to the procedure is discernible in his appearance. A bushy-haired man with glasses, a soft unlined face, and a gentle demeanor, he looks in the best possible way like an aging hippie. The decorative scheme of his apartment mirrors this impression. Displayed on the walls are both artwork produced by Zeiger—portraits carefully done in pencil of shamans and other spiritual figures—and native prints of geometric shapes painted in earth tones. His bookshelves, which occupy one wall of a high-ceilinged living room, contain Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, and Timothy Leary’s Flashbacks. Overall, the effect is an endorsement of experimentation over order, the spirit over the intellect.
But then Zeiger is also a businessman who believes deeply in his product, which he maintains with a sense of propriety and hygiene that he made clear to me on my visit. I had taken the subway to Manhattan feeling nervous; the prospect of lying naked and wet in the apartment of a man I didn’t know, even one whose facilities Esquire had reviewed favorably, was discomfiting. But Zeiger had a disarming professionalism. After a brief introduction, delivered in a calm, almost anesthetizing voice, he laid out the rules that govern what he calls “the tank.”
The first and most important rule was that all guests had to take a shower first. This, Zeiger explained, was intended to minimize the amount of bodily oils and bacteria that enter the tank, which is heated to a tropical 94.5 degrees. Zeiger had taken other sanitizing measures. Just before I arrived, he told me, he had “ozinated” the tank, pumping it full of O3, which is a natural water purifier. “The weather sometimes makes ozination difficult,” he said. “With the air conditioner on, the ozone can shoot out of the room very quickly.”
Zeiger set up a Japanese screen at the end of the vestibule, which houses both the tank and the bathroom, and, after inviting me to share a cup of herbal tea with him after my float, left me to shower. After doing so, I tiptoed across the hallway to where the tank’s entrance stood—a sturdy wood-paneled door of the sort that leads to steam baths and saunas. Inside was a chamber that resembled a small locker room; it had a blue mat on the floor, a pair of pegs for towels, and off in the corner what looked like a small private generator—the tank’s filtration system. The entranceway to the tank was a thin brown sliding door. I had paid for an hour.
The first problem with floating in a pitch-black tank of body-temperature saltwater for the first time is that the medium is so viscous that the slightest movement creates undulations on the surface that rush to the four walls of the tank, ricochet off, and perpetuate themselves endlessly, producing a sort of miniature wave pool on which one floats helplessly like a leaf in a puddle. This tends to ruin the desired effect of total sensory deprivation by causing one to drift away from the open water and to the sides. Zeiger had given me a tip on how to combat this. I was to place my hands on either end of the tank, hold myself motionless until the water’s movement subsided, and then, very gently and very slowly, let myself go. The method worked well enough, but I was fidgety and a novice, so my concentration was often interrupted by the feel of warm fiberglass on my skin.
The second problem was my own fault. When I had called to make my appointment, Zeiger told me not to have any caffeine beforehand. Given that his Web site markets the tank as a pathway to “deep inner peace,” the reason for this should have been obvious. But I had an addiction to placate. And so, after three cups of strongly brewed black coffee, my mind rushed with thoughts—about the day behind me, about the evening in front of me, and, in possible confirmation of the claim that sensory deprivation expands the bounds of consciousness, about the hidden or typically ignored subjects on the periphery of my mind. My thoughts were constant.
The hyperactive thought problem was exacerbated by a choice I made five or so minutes in (time was naturally hard to measure) to close my eyes. Open, they had produced the flashing patterns of ghostly light that are caused by sudden entry into a dark room or by pushing against the eyelids. The gradual focusing of these images into discernible shapes, a sort of Rorschach test in motion, was actually quite pleasant—the fluttering lights looked like birds’ wings approaching from a distance—but it distracted me from the task at hand. But there was also a drawback to closing my eyes. Without the diversion of the light before my eyes, I had to contend with the diversion of my thoughts, which soon revved themselves into a frenzy. They were of all sorts: philosophic (to what extent was the detachment from the senses possible?), pragmatic (I needed a new keychain), and, oddly, pornographic. Something about the fact of midday nudity and the titillating sensation of weightlessness encouraged an almost clinical sexuality, and I spent long minutes inventing and mentally diagramming new positions for intercourse.
My only tool in prying myself from these thoughts was some training I had received some years before after enrolling in a series of classes in Buddhist meditation. The classes were based on the teachings of a Tibetan monk, a videotaped greeting from whom inaugurated the course. According to the monk, who wore a Rolex watch and suffered from a visibly runny nose, the breath is the body’s metronome. It centers and orders the mind. Every time we found our thoughts wandering from our attendance to the breath, we were calmly and without judgment to nudge ourselves back. I left the class after only three sessions, but over the years I’d practiced the little I’d learned and became proficient enough to be able to apply the methods in the flotation tank. Whenever distracting thoughts entered my mind, I reminded myself that my job was to listen for a voice. Over time I achieved a measure of victory. Gradually, I was able to perceive sounds in the tank. I was first able to detect the noises produced by my own body, muffled then increasingly clear. I heard my heart beating, my stomach acids churning, my lungs compressing and expanding, the blood rushing past my ears. Soon even the stray drop of condensation striking the surface of the tank and the sloshing of the thick water weren’t able to distract me from attending to these sounds.
Success breeds success. My ability to hear the subtle noises of my body became a push toward the auditory, and as it did, I progressed. Before long, my mind was manufacturing its own sounds. Bells struck, bullets whizzed, horns sounded. These sounds increased in vividness the more that I concentrated, and they consumed more and more of my attention. I was suddenly reminded of a passage I had read in a book by Emil Kraepelin, who originated the concept of schizophrenia. At the beginning of a course of the illness, Kraepelin wrote,
there are usually simple noises, rustling, buzzing, ringing in the ears, tolling of bells (“death-knell”), knocking, moving of tables, cracking of whips, trumpets, yodel, singing, weeping of children, whistling, blowing, chirping, “shooting and death rattle”; the bed echoes with shots; the “Wild Hunt” makes an uproar; Satan roars under the bed.7
As the disease progresses, Kraepelin wrote, these noises are transformed into voices. One of his patients heard an unknown secret language. Another heard children. Another heard gnats. Some heard voices coming from their own bodies: “[T]he spirits scream in the belly, in the feet, and possibly also wander about; a patient heard them speaking in his purse.” I both hoped and dreaded, based on Kraepelin’s authority, that the sounds in my head would develop into full-blown voices. Hearing my own chirps and buzzes, I expected them to up and announce themselves, like houseguests. But my mind was stubborn. No matter how hard I tried, sound would not morph into sense.
Time passed imperceptibly in the dark as I clenched my eyelids in a ridiculously unnecessary pose of concentration. Only one thing staved off complete frustration: a deeper, more abiding frustration at my own idiocy. By definition, an expedition has a goal. Mine was to hear a voice, to ascend or descend—the answer would come with the achievement—to the experience that had marked my father’s life. But the more I tried and failed, the closer I came to the realization that even success would be pointless. My father once said to me that the subject of all art can be boiled down to sex and death, and even sex can be boiled down to death. The epiphany I had as I hovered forty feet above Chelsea was that I chose the wrong goal. I had paid for silence so that I could hear a voice, but what I really wanted was to hear my father’s voice.
When you are naked and alone and in the dark, there is nothing to do with epiphany other than accept it. Once I had decided to listen for my father’s voice, I concentrated my attention on a platitude he had expounded as a panacea against angst, disappointment, depression, even his own impending death. That platitude, which seems more like wisdom the older I get, was “It’s only life. Don’t take it too seriously.” I made this my mantra. I pulled it to the center of my attention, returning to it again and again as if it were my breath. But I could not seem to set it in my father’s voice. I couldn’t remember my father’s voice. What had it sounded like? Had it been gruff? Gentle? Feminine? Masculine? Had he spoken quickly or slowly? Had he retained an accent, a New York brogue? It had been too long. I had waited too many years. It was too late.
Then, as if to mock my failures, the world returned. The sound of birds chirping softly above a foundation of gentle piano chords came over a speaker embedded in the roof of the tank, alerting me that my time was coming to a close. The music jolted me. I felt for the rubber button at my side that controlled the light, squinted at the image of my shriveled body soaking in a pool of water, and crawled out into the bright, harsh day.