Michael Horowitz in Switzerland, February 1972
Prophet on the Lam
Timothy Leary in Exile
MICHAEL HOROWITZ
I met Timothy in person for the first time in the summer of 1970, visiting him at California Men’s Colony-West in San Luis Obispo, where a few months earlier he had begun serving a ten-year prison sentence for possession of two marijuana roaches planted in the ashtray of his car by an ambitious Laguna Beach cop who had been following him around town for weeks. The amount was .0025 grams. The judge who revoked Timothy’s bail and ordered this draconian sentence had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, whom Leary had announced he was challenging in the forthcoming California gubernatorial race.
His daring escape a few months later utterly floored me and everyone else. It was not expected of a doctor of philosophy, a renowned clinical psychologist, an ex-Harvard professor, a martyr of consciousness-expanding drugs. But we cheered him, we exulted not only in the act itself, but the symbolic gesture: Timothy had given the bird to Nixon’s Amerika.
More shocks were to come. The Weather Underground took credit for engineering the escape. The exiled Black Panther Party, led by Eldridge Cleaver under the protection of the Algerian government, gave Tim and his wife Rosemary refuge there. Tim was writing letters and giving interviews in the underground press in which he aligned himself with the revolutionary forces calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government. Suddenly it was a long way from the peace-and-love, the live-and-let-live, the whole antiviolence stance the man had taken through years of relentless harassment by the authorities. Now we were reading “Smoke it . . . and blow it up!”
Rosemary had turned over Tim’s archives—which contained in particular the history of Tim’s seminal role in the psychedelic movement—to my colleague Robert Barker and me a few months before the escape, for they anticipated government agencies would seize the archives whether the escape was successful or not. (This did indeed happen, but not until 1975, and under rather different circumstances—a story too long to be told here.) From a post office box in Berkeley registered under the name Bodhisattva, we corresponded with these internationally famous fugitives, known under their false passport name McNellis and then, in their Algerian incarnations, as Nino and Maia Baraka. Always looking over our shoulder as we picked up their letters at the Sather Gate Station, we served as the Learys’ primary contacts in the United States. We acted as editors and literary agents for their smuggled manuscripts, sent them press clippings and dental floss, and assisted Allen Ginsberg in circulating a “Declaration of Independence” designed to get Timothy out of a Lausanne prison—which it did, with the aid of the American PEN Club.
Timothy kept urging us to come over and join the revolution against the imperialist pigs. It did not seem particularly prudent—we were, after all, scholarly revolutionaries—what with Tim and Rosemary being under house arrest by the Black Panthers, and Tim later landing in a Swiss prison, and the Nixon Gang constantly seeking to extradite him. But in February 1972, some sixteen months after that daring prison escape, Barker and I traveled to Basel where LSD—the reason for all of this—had been discovered nearly thirty years earlier.
What follows are my journal notes of this visit.
Traveling statesmen were in the habit of introducing themselves to local princes with the gift of their clear light.
I Ching (“clear light” was also the brand name of LSD in gel form, a process invented at the time of these events)
Success in any line is a question of being on set.
William S. Burroughs
The Faster You Move, the More Control You Have
The set keeps changing. A new house every few days . . . each week another city and every couple of months another country or continent. Whole new casts of characters keep appearing, disappearing, reappearing. The free electron transits the proton; it magnetizes, collides, polarizes and seizes the center . . . then spins away. New entities appear wearing old faces. The karass is a constellation of once and future archangels. Wearing masks, they make a movie of the process—at the same time critiquing it and planning a sequel. The first thing you look for when you walk onto the set is the location of the concession stand, and whether the kool-aid is electrified.
Michael Horowitz in Switzerland, February 1972
Allen Ginsberg called Leary “a solitary splendid example of a Man Without a Country,” yet at fifty-one he has achieved the status of a country. He’s had to have diplomatic relations with every country he’s ever entered. In one he enjoys the role of scientist-showman and runs for governor before he’s set up for a marijuana bust (ten years for two roaches), from which he escapes to another country where he experiences a “revolutionary bust” at the hands of another revolutionary who accuses him of being “brain-fried”; once again he flees. The next nation provides excellent wine and the best prison food he’s ever had before he wins his freedom after the international community of writers convinces the Swiss he’s a political prisoner, while back in his homeland the president fumes.
Lawyers, literary agents, publishers, media types, and Switzerland’s one hundred hippies constantly chase after him (where once cops and prison guards did) and he welcomes them all, keeping an eye out for new incarnations constantly appearing on his radar screen. Living out a time-traveler’s life on the public stage, he discovers that the appropriate yoga is timing. The faster you move, the more control you have. Have to have. The model is flowing with acid. The present guides are Hermann Hesse, who found exile here, and Paracelsus, who was thrown out of Basel into exile.
Timothy Leary—who was recently called “the most dangerous man alive” by the leader of the “Free World”—laughs, and puts his usual positive spin on his situation. “You know, dealing with different cultures, different time periods and space zones—it’s still easier than crossing the Bay Bridge in rush hour traffic.”
Dope Is To Time As Machines Are To Space
The time keys are pharmacological, biochemical. He explains: whereas most previous sacred plants evolved through the natural history and geography of a particular area, LSD was a laboratory-created synthesis of this time and this place, discovered by accident on April 16, 1943, just around the corner from where we’re sitting. It is a man-created archetype, and thus a rare privilege is ours: to witness the evolution of a sacred drug discovered in our lifetime.
The Basel chemist who served as the medium for that particular cosmic rush attended the Swiss Mardi Gras—the festival of Fassnacht. Unknown to each other, Albert Hofmann and Timothy Leary cavorted all night in the crowded streets wearing costumes and masks. Next day they spent the afternoon together in the alchemist’s magnificent house on the Swiss-French border.
Dope is to time as machines are to space, they agreed, enjoying a swim in Hofmann’s indoor pool, while ancient stone carvings of Aztec mushroom deities regarded them with endless amusement. The High Priest’s archivist made a home movie for the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library back in San Francisco.
“You know,” said the Hedonic Fugitive to the Respected Sandoz Chemist as they splashed in the pool, speaking of a mutual deceased friend, “I was one of Aldous Huxley’s favorite acts.”
Making Yourself Survivally Inevitable
Aldous Huxley’s “favorite act” (and whose favorite act was Aldous? Why, D. H. Lawrence, of course!) explained how mutants have to learn to make themselves survivally inevitable. Survival is the test for any new mutant species; the pressure comes from “normal” species members who are threatened because they haven’t made the evolutionary jump.
What began as neurological liberation with psilocybin and LSD a decade earlier has moved on through six other levels. Liberation on the planes of the spiritual, sexual, cultural, economic, political, and existential was classically impelled to follow. The blown mind knew the choice is always oppression versus liberation. . . . Flashback to the prisoner’s body struggling along the forty-foot cable wire above the prison yard at night, while thirty feet below a gun truck made its rounds. The prisoner reached the fence and jumped to freedom, beginning an odyssey as “William McNellis” which he continued as “Nino Baraka.”
Survival, sex, and synthesized bliss are the laser beams of his celebrated, denounced, censored, mutilated, oft-revised, ripped off, and still unpublished manuscript (Confessions of a Hope Fiend, the seventeenth version of which was published in 1973) that Timothy is writing to pay for his upper-class lawyer, his shady “protector,” and his Swiss chocolate habit. It is the story of his prison escape, flight to exile, “revolutionary bust” by the Black Panther Party leader after he either won or lost the debate on the role of psychedelic drugs in the revolution, and the superiority of Swiss versus American jail food. The outlawed exiles Timothy and Rosemary discovered that, whereas the space games are survival, power, and control, the corresponding time games are sex, dope, and magic.
So they created a board game for all their parole officers, present and future. The board has rows of seven spaces across and seven spaces down. Each board position represents an intersection in the space-time dance. There are forty-nine spaces, or roles—not unlike the lesser arcana of the tarot. The four basic roles are Warrior, Warlock, Inquisitor, Alchemist. The board is bisected by the Tribal Cross. Space and time meet in the Tribe, which provides space to protect the time-traveling fugitives. In Algeria, the role of Hassani-Sabbah—the founder of the hashishin and first recorded person to brainwash with euphoric drugs—was not necessarily up for grabs. The Aleister Crowley persona emerged during an acid trip in the Sahara. But survival dictated another space-time coordinate, and the Learys slipped into Switzerland.
In the Land of Delysid
Timothy was quickly imprisoned in Lausanne, awaiting extradition to the United States at the personal request of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, when he received a surprise visit from a young Swiss who was a distant relative of Hermann Hesse, “poet of the interior journey.” Christoph Wenger presented Tim with a beautiful oval watercolor landscape painting by the creator of Steppenwolf (of which a film version starring Tim as Harry Haller is reported to be in the works). It was a good sign. Back in Babylon the San Francisco Bay Area Prose Poets’ Phalanx, created deus ex machina by Allen Ginsberg, mobilized an international array of poets, essayists, and novelists to petition the Swiss government “to accept Dr. Leary as an archetype of the traditional political, cultural, literary, or philosophic refugee and grant him personal asylum.”
Which they did. “How magically it all works out,” Timothy said upon his release, as he smiled for a photo op with his brave, beautiful, and much relieved wife. Switzerland’s biggest antidope lawyer, the father of three hippie sons, had taken the case. Albert Hofmann and Dutch writer-activist Simon Vinkenoog had thrown in their support. William S. Burroughs made a brief appearance on the set, leaving Leary with a copy of his latest work, Ali’s Smile. The asylum-seekers were liberated once more, this time in the Land of Delysid. “Will Switzerland never learn?” muttered the CIA, while Ali smiled.
How Much Pleasure Can You Stand?
A giant map of the country is pinned to the wall of this charming lakefront house. Swans glide on the water, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance. The fugitive is tracing the route of their recent travels with a red magic marker. Zurich Airport, where they sneaked past customs . . . a chalet in Villars . . . Lausanne prison . . . the resort village of Crans where he learned to ski but was eighty-sixed for “having too good a time in public.” Timothy pondered his next move on the space board.
Earlier that day, he drove a funky VW van with a Black Panther painted on the front end to the Immensee train station to meet his archivists from San Francisco. There they purchased a copy of Sonntags Journal, the Swiss Time, where Leary’s picture was on the cover above the words “Prophet auf der Flucht” (Prophet on the Lam). This is William Tell country, and we are guests at the home of Bobby Dreyfus, great-grandson of the famous Alfred Dreyfus, set up as a traitor in a celebrated trial of the 1890s. On the way a stop is made at a television studio where Timothy makes a hit-and-run appearance on Swiss national television, asserting the basic question is: “How much pleasure can you stand?”
Day in the Life of an Exile
At the house he speaks on the phone with his attorney in Bern; he changes a diaper for granddaughter Dieadra; he smokes hash with some Swiss hippies who fall by to check him out; he puts an eighth level into his prison escape narrative; he agrees to be godfather to a baby girl named Winona recently born in Minnesota; he fields a call from a mysterious international literary agent who tells him of an offer of a quarter-million-dollar advance on this very narrative. (The money is paid, though not to Timothy but to the swindler who acts as his protector. Timothy does get a yellow Porsche for his literary efforts, a cool replacement for the VW bus.)
Each Level of Consciousness Requires Its Own Art Form
The Clifford Irving–Howard Hughes plagiarism case greatly interests him because “plagiarism is the literary form of the future. A man writing his own book is an absurdity. What an ego trip. Whew!”
He explains that the visionary experience no longer need be ineffable, indescribable. Consciousness is based on physical and physiological structure. Each level of consciousness requires its own art form. The seven fine arts of the future will be:
Leaving Space for Time
“To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid,” says Don Juan. “And never refuse an opportunity to turn on,” adds McNellis-Baraka-Leary. While the assembled archivists furiously took notes, the two sorcerers clasped hands and the Yaqui Indian vanished into thin air. “Press conferences are something of a drag for him,” laughed the Asylum Laureate to the television cameras and tape recorders.
“Run it down!” shouts the reporter from Marijuana Review.
“Travel light. Travel far. Learn a space skill which is not bound to any space. Never forget you belong in time and are an alien in space. Always remain close to the supply of time keys. The key to time travel is pharmacological. Never refuse an opportunity to travel in time.
“Any questions?”