The Unreachable Stars
ROBERT ANTON WILSON
Ezra Pound, when asked to contribute to a Festschrift for T. S. Eliot, sent in a typically terse response: “I can only repeat with the urgency of sixty years ago: READ HIM!” I lack Ez’s capacity for concentration and brevity; and anyway I have expressed my opinion of the value of Dr. Timothy Leary’s published works in a wide variety of books and articles, but I can repeat once more for this Festschrift: READ HIM! You will learn more from Dr. Leary’s psychological and philosophical books than you can ever possibly learn from any other living author.
Of course, people who get their opinions from the major media “know” that Leary’s works have nothing of value in them. In contrast to that conditioned (mechanical) reaction, I suggest:
1. Some of Dr. Leary’s work has achieved general recognition throughout the psychological community. Specifically, the Leary Interpersonal Test ranked as the number one (most used) psychological test in the country a few years ago. I do not know if it still ranks that highly, but it still continues in wide usage; I frequently meet young people who have taken it at university or job applications, and it still routinely gets administered to all convicts in the California penal system.
2. The work on Behavior Modification with LSD for which Dr. Leary has received unanimous condemnation among nonpsychologists and especially among the pundits of the mass media has not suffered universal criticism from those best qualified to judge—other psychologists. Many of them have said, off the record, that they suspect Leary will achieve vindication in a less hysterical age. On the record, when Dr. Leary got out of prison, he immediately received an invitation to give the keynote speech at the Association for Humanistic Psychology, strongly suggesting that those in his own area of psychology did not consider him in the same ballpark with Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove, but rather saw him as a gifted researcher condemned by irrational prejudice. Like Galileo. Like Pasteur. Like Ben Franklin, whose lightning rods were once universally condemned as an insult to God.
3. The controversy about Dr. Leary’s Behavior Mod work continues and will continue because no more recent research has either totally confirmed or totally refuted him. This point I consider most important of all, and I will enlarge upon it. I may even relapse into boldface and capital letters. . . .
None of Dr. Leary’s most important studies have either suffered refutation or enjoyed confirmation, because enacted law—statutes enacted after and because of Dr. Leary’s research—makes it a crime for any other psychologists or psychiatrists to replicate such research. I know you’ve heard that the Inquisition ended in 1819, but in many areas of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology the U.S. government has taken up where the Vatican left off. Maybe you didn’t get that. I feel sure, somehow, that Newt Gingrich didn’t get it and doesn’t want to get it. Let me say it again, in leaner English. ANY PSYCHOLOGIST OR PSYCHIATRIST WHO TRIES TO REPEAT DR. LEARY’S EXPERIMENTS WILL GET THROWN IN JAIL.
Dig? When postmodernists speak of “social forces shaping the scientific models” of a decade, of a generation or even of a longer time period, this does not merely refer to vague “prejudices” or “vested interests” or the notorious “conservatism of the head of the department”—although all of these play a role as social forces shaping scientific models. In some cases, “social forces” means something less diffuse and more Inquisitorial: the very terrifying threat of imprisonment in a prison system where mayhem, murder, rape, and corruption play a larger role than in any slum on the outside. Now I would say that counts as a quite concrete and clearcut example of how “social forces” have shaped the psychology of the past three decades.
Researchers don’t do certain kinds of research because they don’t want to get thrown in San Quentin, as happened to Dr. Leary.
Of course, a great deal of research relevant to Dr. Leary’s work does exist, lost in the backward abyss of time like fossil bones—hundreds and hundreds of scientific papers. All these studies by other researchers appeared before the Holy Inquisition—pardon, the U.S. government—forbade such investigation. I have read most of it; I read it as it appeared in the 1950s and 1960s, because the subject fascinated me then as it does now. I assert that over 90 percent of these published papers tend to support Leary’s basic ideas. Sometimes they disagree on details; sometimes they use their own jargon instead of his jargon; but they all tend to confirm his views on LSD as a very powerful behavior-changing agent with immense potential for therapy if used properly. Many also support his view that LSD used improperly, as in the infamous CIA experiments, can sabotage the brain so totally that “mind murder” seems the best word for such unethical experiments.
Do you think I exaggerate the degree of support for Leary (in research papers, not in theory or polemic)? Investigate the subject on your own; computers make such hunting for old articles easier than ever before. Find out what the evidence shows, as distinct from what “popular opinion” claims. Then see what you think of accepted opinions in general and the media that create and manipulate them.
As for my personal memories of Tim Leary, the man . . . So many years, so many memories . . .
1964: I came to Millbrook to interview Dr. Leary for a virtually unknown little magazine called The Realist, which has since become both famous and infamous. I found not the Harvard professor I expected but a youngish middle-aged man playing baseball on the lawn. When we sat down at the kitchen table to do the interview, I found the Harvard professor, the author of The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, one of my favorite books on psychology, the man I expected. Later, when I asked a question about LSD, he replied, “Every trip has a point where the space game comes to an end, the time game comes to an end, and the Timothy Leary game comes to an end.” I had had LSD maybe four score and seven times by then, but I had never found words to describe the peak as well as that sentence does.
1967, Chicago: I had a job with another famous/infamous magazine, Playboy, and Tim dropped by the office, and memory has so many tricks that I can’t recall if his visit concerned an article by him or an interview with him. I remember telling him that I had found the letters LSD repeated several times in Finnegans Wake and asked what he thought of that. He replied that to Joyce LSD meant “pounds, shillings, pence,” and this began my years of research of the duodecimal system in the Wake, culminating in my book Coincidance and my video “12 Eggs in a Box,” finding Paleolithic origins for the zodiac, the twelve apostles, the twelve labors of Hercules, the l-s-d coinage that lasted from Babylon to the 1970s, and our system of trial by jury. Joyce had supplied the psychoarchaeological evidence, but Tim gave me the key to understand it.
1968, still Chicago: I turned on the TV news and there stood Tim in front of a cow. I soon identified the scene as the “farm” section of the Lincoln Park Zoo. Tim talked about the upcoming Democratic Convention and made some Pythonesque jokes about Leary’s cow and the famous Chicago fire. I laughed like a loon, but the city authorities didn’t have that kind of sense of humor. When the convention rolled around, the city had such heavy security (tanks, even!) that you could hardly tell it from Prague, under siege the very same week, as two corrupt governments—in communist Czechoslovakia and in capitalist USA—used excessive force to prevent their peoples from meddling in politics.
Tim’s 1970 imprisonment for poor usage of the first amendment and his swashbuckling escape (which will someday make a great movie—what other great philosopher-rebel, except Bakunin, has broken out of jail so colorfully?) occurred far from me in space, but I followed the whole saga closely in the media.
In 1973, when they caught up with him and brought him back, I also had returned to These States and found a copy of his pamphlet Neurologic in a bookstore somewhere. I can’t quite describe how that little book hit me, although I think of Cortez on that famous peak (in Darien?). I no longer consider Neurologic Dr. Leary’s greatest work, because he has developed its thesis into several larger, more detailed and specific books. Nonetheless, in 1973 that small pamphlet came to me as the kind of Great Light that Copernicus represented to Giordano Bruno: what had previously seemed vague, even chaotic, suddenly fell into place as part of an organized system that made sense. Athough Leary did not mention all his sources, I saw that he had synthesized everything of value in most of the major psychological systems of our century with everything I had ever heard about the current research on brain function, and he made it all suddenly, beautifully, coherent.
If I had known at once what I learned later—that Tim had written this brilliant essay in pencil on the floor of a solitary confinement cell—I would have felt even more stunned. I felt stunned enough, anyway. I began a letter-writing campaign, informing all and sundry that we had our greatest scientist-philosopher locked up in a cage and would look like ignorant barbarians in a more civilized future. I accomplished nothing, of course. The United States that year did not want to hear a defense of the Mad Scientist of Millbrook. I did, however, hear from several of Tim’s other friends and, eventually, I got his prison address. I started writing fan letters to him in prison. Soon I received an invitation to visit him.
My very first visit to Tim in Vacaville (I rememer mentally translating that as cow-town and feeling bemused) stands out in the halls of memory as the most intense learning experience of my life. I had expected to find a suffering martyr and to do my best to cheer him up. Instead, I found a buoyant and glowing young man (younger than when I first met him nine years before) who had transcended the prison experience so totally that he cheered me up.
I returned home thinking of Hamlet’s “Nothing is but thinking makes it so,” and Buddha’s “All that we are is the result of all that we have thought,” and all sorts of Christian Science and idealistic ideas that I had never taken seriously. Now I had to take them seriously—although I did not take them literally. Translating them into Dr. Leary’s language, I realized that, whatever energies and signals get into our brain, we organize them, orchestrate them, and edit them in accord with a personal reality-tunnel. This framing of naked experience into customized, individualized reality-tunnels happens either unconsciously/mechanically, as in normal consciousness, or consciously/creatively, as in the Timothy Leary I met in my visits to Vacaville prison.
Before Tim got out of prison, he had written Terra II and Exo-Psychology (now rewritten as Info-Psychology) and expressed the future scenario, which he abbreviated as SMI2LE: Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension. I had read a lot of futurist scenarios by then, and some (by Bucky Fuller and associates) I liked about as much as this, but absolutely none of them seemed more worthy of enthusiastic attention. We have the technology for space colonization already; if Tim’s views on neurochemistry stand up, we have the technology for intelligence and consciousness-expansion; the technology for life extension has appeared more rapidly every year since Tim wrote those pioneering works. The ultimate consequence of Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension = our evolution from neurotic terrestrial mortals to enlightened cosmic immortals. Does any rival scenario offer more than that? The fact that Tim devised all this while locked up as a felon never ceased to astound and confound me. The notion that we live in a rational, secularist time seemed more and more unbelievable. We live in the late Dark Ages, my friends, and Tim seems more than our Galileo. I regard him as our Leonardo. In those years, while they still had him caged, I thought often of the famous lines from Man of La Mancha:
And the world shall be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable stars.
When Tim finally got out of prison, we appeared several times on panels together, both of us preaching the gospel of SMI2LE. In more recent years he has moved on, and mentions outer space less often, pushing cyberspace instead. It took me a while to catch up with him on this. I now see that if a large part of human neurological liberation awaits us in outer space, the part that we can get our hands on right now exists (and continues to grow rapidly) in cyberspace. I have found communities in cyberspace that have more freedom and more hope for us alive today than can possibly appear in space colonies in the next fifty years. (Speaking of the information ocean: only one computer game does not bore me quickly and continues to entertain and instruct me—Dr. Leary’s “Mind Mirror.” I cordially recommend it to all.)
I seem to have said little about Tim’s wonderful humor here. I recall one incident that I think I remember in full. In Durango, where both of us spoke on future evolution a year or so ago, Tim lost his thread in midsentence—something that happens to all of us who lecture frequently. He stopped and said, “You know, I’ve found a new way to get high and stay spaced out for hours, and the government can’t stop me. It’s called senility. It has four major effects. First, increase in long-term memory—I can recall all of evolution. Second, decrease in short-term memory—when I get to the kitchen, I can’t remember what I was going there for. I forget what the third is. And the fourth is—I don’t give a fuck anymore.” (In this humorless puritanical society, reports of that joke got around and some pundits declared triumphantly that LSD had made Dr. Leary senile in his seventies—as if many men who never tried acid didn’t get Alzheimer’s as early as their forties. And Tim does not show any symptoms of senility, in the judgment of those who know him. He only made a joke about senility. Oh, well . . . trying to correct the media about Leary reminds me of trying to correct them about Vietnam: every time a lie seems dead, they wait five years and recirculate it.)
Now, as everybody knows, Tim has prostate cancer. Some pundits will blame that on LSD, too, I suppose. As usual, Tim himself continues to astonish me; the last time we spoke on the phone he once again cheered me up. As you have heard, Dr. Leary intends to have his head cryonically frozen, gambling on the very good odds that future science will eventually reanimate him from the neural and genetic information there stored. He also intends to exit on the day he chooses, not on the day when medical science decides they can’t drain any more money out of him by keeping him in misery in a hospital. So he will leave us—for a while—showing his usual trust in his own mind and his utter refusal to submit to any authority in which he does not believe, whether it call itself the State, the Church, the AMA, or that most terrifying of all deities, Public Opinion. He said recently that he will drop two hits of acid the day he goes into cryonic suspension. And out of a thousand people, roughly 999 will howl and scream that he shouldn’t and he mustn’t and it’s all ungodly and un-American and blah-blah-blah. The one in a thousand who understands not just the courage of Tim’s decision but its total radiant sanity represents the part of humanity upon whom all future evolution depends.1