I won’t pay for the trip: no chemical routes to paradise

Vogue, 1 September 1967⁹³

The first time I ever took a drug was when I had my tonsils out. I was 12 at the time, but I can still remember the mortal chill of the gas, and the way the voices of the staff became very loud, over-meaningful, and then vanished altogether. It’s one of my strongest memories, but the wooziness and falling asleep seem now to be no more than corollaries of the main attraction. It’s the smell of the ether which I recall more than anything else. Not that you could properly call it a smell – there’s not enough body in it for that. That’s why the name is so perfect: ether! The cold vapour has such an empty keenness that it rocks the mind long before it actually stuns the brain. It smells like nothing on earth, except a threat. It’s a smell which glitters, like a blade perfectly sharpened to slit the throat of consciousness.

The actual process of going under has never appealed to me much. The singing in the ears, the loss of grip and so on are empty by comparison with the retrospective knowledge of the blackout which follows. It’s only the oblivion, or rather the threat of it, which I find exciting. I am just the same with sleep. I am a sleep junkie, hopelessly addicted to long dreamless draughts of the stuff. It has nothing to do with dozing, or any of the hallucinating reveries that go before. The trip to unconsciousness can’t be too short for me. I do not enjoy the deliquescent imagery you get halfway between full awareness and actual coma. I like oblivion, but I like to contemplate it with every faculty intact. The thought of unconsciousness, the view from the brink, is perhaps the most psychedelic experience there is. But it can only be got by paying minute attention to the details of what’s involved. The kick comes from grasping the intellectual contradictions – from knowing that as you get snuffed, only a thin trickle of personal experience vanishes at that moment from the grand stream of the world’s onward motion. It comes from knowing that for some time at least your body stays just as it was, preserved in every detail, just as the owner left it.

I just love the way one leaves the body there – like a bag left on a seat, reserving a place in the world, awaiting the owner’s return. It’s one of the oddest experiences to watch one of these slow-breathing proxies waiting for its owner to slip back into the place kept warm for him by that provisional presence, snoring away on the pillow. Just thinking about this can drive away sleep altogether, as one imagines one’s forthcoming absence. After a while the mind reels with the metaphysical implications of it all.

I am not denying there are thrills to be had from alterations of consciousness a long way short of complete oblivion; it is nice to jar the appearance of things and feel for a moment the primeval oddness of simply being-in-the-world. In the normal way, everything around us becomes more or less invisible through habit; but that is just as it should be, of course. We could never get on with life if we were pulled up short by everything that touched our senses. We could never find our way about if we had to attend to the tickle of the clothes on our back or listen to every one of the million sounds which did not have immediate importance. We seal ourselves off from most of what the world has to offer, in order to make the best of the few things we can set our minds to.

But every now and then the mental insulation breaks down, and the world floods in to overwhelm us with its raw, complicated foreignness. In these rare flashes there is no focus and no perspective. Everything seems to bear down with equal importance, and the will is paralyzed with an embarras de richesses. Nothing seems quite as it should be; everything goes topsy-turvy. Familiar sights glow with unjustified novelty, and new experiences are greeted as déjà vu. Luckily for us these episodes only last for a minute or two, but in that moment the world seems to gleam with high romantic value, and our spirit is renovated as it is brought face to face with the vast unmanned enormity of the physical creation.

Paralyzing and impractical though these moments are, they are so disturbing and so beautiful that it is not surprising if people seem to spend so much time trying to improvise the condition at will. At one time or another there is always a recipe going the rounds for a sure-fire milk-of-paradise: alcohol, laughing gas, breath-holding, mushroom juice, morning-glory seeds, or hard drugs. But I have always been completely cut off from any of the chemical routes to paradise. Alcohol gives me scalding heartburn, and ‘pot’ gets me no further than vertigo followed by a fitful sleep. I daren’t try any of the more powerful agents, as I know they would unhinge my mind forever, or hustle me into an eternity of hellish vomiting. It’s no good saying that this is not what such drugs do – they would with me. I have never even got a glimpse of Xanadu through the thick poison clouds of nausea. There must be thousands of people like me, pharmacologically underprivileged, who will never know the delights of chemical psychedelia; but all of us want a share of the transcendental cake. What hope is there for us?

Let me say for a start what I don’t need. I am not really interested in hallucinations. Nor do I really want to see colours brighter than I do already. In fact, I can do without any of the optical displays. To judge from the reports, these retinal shows are as brilliantly monotonous as the best Op art, and they wouldn’t hold me for more than a minute or two. In fact, I don’t really want any improvement in my powers of peripheral sensation.

What I really want, if it can be arranged, is simply a sharper sense of how odd it is to be here at all. Therefore, I insist on preserving the full power of my critical and intellectual faculties. So far as I am concerned, there is no point in having one of the varieties of religious experience unless I am in a position to describe and amplify what I have known in words. Half the pleasure in any new or extravagant experience lies in being able to fix the whole thing. Most of the reports brought back from drug trips have a gaudy mediocrity. They are affirmative without being descriptive, and I am just not interested in an experience which slithers out of the bottom end of the mind, leaving nothing more than a sense of conviction behind.

There are said to be good substitutes for drugs. These usually take the form of violent assaults on the senses: flashing lights or unbearable noise. Well, that won’t do either. I resent the idea that I can be raped into the higher sensitivity. Anyway, it doesn’t work. Shows of this sort simply drum me into a state of mindless idiocy.

That leaves hard work as the only effective road to paradise. Not common-or-garden hard work but the sort of hard work which takes everyday experience and, by paying careful attention to it and rubbing its tarnished surfaces, brings the whole thing up with a supernatural glow. Chesterton says somewhere that it is only after seeing something for the thousandth time one can suddenly see it again for the first.94 But it doesn’t come easy. One has to use all sorts of mental tricks in order to achieve this sense of freshly-peeled newness. It’s no good looking at the world straight on. You have to get at a peculiar angle to it before it will show its secret. It is rather like a gardener who improves his sense of colour by occasionally looking at the landscape upside down between his legs.

One method, which I find works like a charm, is to take a trip to a foreign city. Any old city will do, since the actual scenery has nothing to do with the strange psychological effect of arriving. The place can be as dull as dishwater and without a single tourist attraction. In fact, glamour of any sort would get in the way of what I am after. The dizzying, ecstatic mystery of the experience comes from simply dislocating one’s self from the familiar stream of life and from arriving in a place which was there long before one arrived, unaware of one’s existence. No drug on earth can produce such a cataclysmic heightening of consciousness. I got the feeling for the first time many years ago when I went to Paris. I arrived late one afternoon at the Gare du Nord. As I stepped out into the golden railway sunlight of that Parisian five o’clock, I was overwhelmed at once, not by the Gallic charm of it all, not by the boulevards, the smell of Gauloises, or any of the usual tourist clichés, but simply by the sense of civic otherness.

I had stepped out of the London timestream, where I had an unquestioned existence and some sort of quotidian pedigree, and had stepped into a Parisian sequence where I had no past whatsoever. All around, Parisians were scurrying backwards and forwards, trailing an invisible string of Parisian encounters and incidents, and on their way to more of the same. I, on the other hand, stood on the steps of the station without a single fragment of Parisian past. I felt that it would be almost indecent to walk off into the hurrying crowds and join them without a past like theirs – I must have been as conspicuous as if I had had no clothes on. Free from the weight of shared memory, I felt as if the Parisian gravity just didn’t apply to my body, and that if I took a single step, I would float off into the evening air like a whiff of transparent gas.

It was only years later that I realized how unnecessary it was to go so far as to cross the channel in order to get this feeling. Any city would do, so long as it was the same sort of size as London. So long as it was big, black and busy. So long as it had rush-hour crowds hurrying to buses and subways, just as I would have been doing if I had been at home. The important thing was to arrive in a place similar in almost every respect to the city I had just left. In fact, the only feature it would not have to have was my previous presence in it. For against this plain backcloth of civic similarity, one’s lack of past and future stands out in brilliant contrast. At one simple manoeuvre I am turned into a creature with instantaneous existence; a point in time whose feelings are therefore concentrated to infinity.

All this scores over drugs in achieving its effect by the unaided activity of the mind alone. There is no sharing the credit with chemicals, and since the intellect is intact, you get none of that blooming euphoric confidence which goes with drugs. The descriptions do not decay as normality returns, and unlike drugs, the dosage works in reverse. Simply with practice, you can get the same effects with smaller and smaller bits of travel. I don’t even have to travel outside London now. I can get the effect by moving from one part of town to another, at an unusual time of day, or by taking a new bus route and by coming on familiar places from a strange new angle.

There is a weird railway line, for example, which runs around the back side of London, above ground and yet hidden from the streets by hoardings and factories.95 As soon as you move out of the station, you are knocked out by a sense of jamais vu. Landmarks which seemed perfectly familiar now stand out as if seen for the first time, and with the train’s eccentric course they change positions in all sorts of remarkable ways, and take up places that they couldn’t possibly occupy according to the rules of common sense. And for some unaccountable reason, this backstage railway land is bathed in a sulphurous nineteenth-century light, so that nothing seems quite real; and, as the train rattles on towards Kew and Richmond, you seem at last to be on a celestial railroad bound for Avalon.

The point is that ordinary reality is always on the edge of hatching apocalypses like this. The world is a miraculous chrysalis which cracks open under the heat of attention, yielding angels which whir about your head like dragonflies. It doesn’t need any drugs to bring on the transformation – attention is enough.

You can sometimes get the effect in the middle of the English countryside, on a hot, silent summer afternoon. Three o’clock seems about to go on forever, and the heat-stunned stillness seems like the edge of doomsday. All around, the trees stand ankle-deep in the lifeblood of their own shadow; birdsong stops for a moment, the insect machinery switches off. The whole of creation sweats with expectation. There is no knowing what the scene is about to deliver. In one sense it is irrelevant. The expectation is all; fulfilment can only be an anti-climax.

And yet, these sacred instants can pass by without ever being felt. Drugs would simply blur the experience or reproduce it best in a chaotic form, so that its sacred precision would be lost.

All I want is some device which keeps me constantly in touch with the bizarre ‘there-ness’ of the world in which I have been formed.

Fortunately, the world itself comes up with stimuli which jolt the mind in this direction. Once you are in practice, small changes of climate even will do the trick. There is nothing like a sudden wind, for example, to switch the mind into high gear. Or a sousing, catastrophic downpour of rain. Or a snowstorm when the whole city seems suddenly to have been seriously burned, then bandaged and consigned to a darkened invalid silence. The point is, once the muscles of the mind are in tune, very small changes of sensation, mood, climate or interest can produce quite startling alterations in consciousness.

The world is always tugging at one’s sleeve in order to impart its secrets. It’s just a question of being on the qui vive. Judging from the traveller’s tales, psychedelia would be too vague a place for me, a vivid but somehow smudged version of the world at large. Most of it seems spectacularly vapid. Convincing, but thin. The fact is that it always seems to border on the exotic, when what I’m after is the apotheosis of the humdrum.

It’s significant, I think, that psychedelic trips are spoken of in terms of inner space. I am sure that the pharmaconauts journey to the same sort of dizzy emptiness as travellers in outer space. In both places, physical substance thins out and finally vanishes, giving way to a mindless region filled with methane and stardust. It’s not for me.