Authors: Oliver Sacks
H
umans share much with other animals—the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example—but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.
We may search, too, for a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with one another, or for transports that make
our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
William James was deeply interested, throughout his life, in the mystagogic powers of alcohol and other intoxicants, and he wrote about this in his 1902 book
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. He described, too, his own transcendent experiences with nitrous oxide:
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.… Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some mystical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.… To me [this sense] only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.
Many of us find the reconciliation that James speaks of and even Wordsworthian “intimations of immortality” in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions.
Every culture has found chemical means of transcendence, and at some point the use of such intoxicants becomes institutionalized at a magical or sacramental level; the sacramental use of psychoactive plant substances has a long history and continues to the present day in various shamanic and religious rites around the world.
At a humbler level, drugs are used not so much to illuminate or expand or concentrate the mind, to “cleanse the doors of perception,” but for the sense of pleasure and euphoria they can provide.
All of these cravings, high or low, are nicely met by the plant kingdom, which has various psychoactive agents that seem almost tailored to the neurotransmitter systems and receptor sites in our brains. (They are not, of course; they have evolved to deter predators or sometimes to attract other animals to eat a plant’s fruit and disseminate its seeds. Nevertheless, one cannot repress a feeling of wonder that there should be so many plants capable of inducing hallucinations or altered brain states of many kinds.)
1
Richard Evans Schultes, an ethnobotanist, devoted much of his life to the discovery and description of these plants and their uses, and Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25 in a Sandoz lab in 1938. Together
Schultes and Hofmann described nearly a hundred plants containing psychoactive substances in their
Plants of the Gods
, and new ones continue to be discovered (to say nothing of new compounds synthesized in the lab).
2
M
any people experiment with drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, in their teenage or college years. I did not try them myself until I was thirty and a neurology resident. This long virginity was not due to lack of interest.
I had read the great classics—De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
and Baudelaire’s
Artificial Paradises
, among others—at school. I had read about the French novelist Théophile Gautier, who in 1844 paid a visit to the recently founded Club des Hashischins, in a quiet corner of the Île Saint-Louis. Hashish, in the form of a greenish paste,
had recently been introduced from Algeria and was all the rage in Paris. At the salon, Gautier consumed a substantial piece of hash (“about as large as a thumb”). At first he felt nothing out of the ordinary, but soon, he wrote, “everything seemed larger, richer, more splendid,” and then more specific changes occurred:
An enigmatic personage suddenly appeared before me … his nose was bent like the beak of a bird, his green eyes, which he wiped frequently with a large handkerchief, were encircled with three brown rings, and caught in the knot of a high white starched collar was a visiting card which read:
Daucus-Carota, du Pot d’or
.… Little by little the salon was filled with extraordinary figures, such as are found only in the etchings of Callot or the aquatints of Goya; a
pêle-mêle
of rags and tatters, bestial and human shapes.… Singularly intrigued, I went straightaway to the mirror.… One would have taken me for a Javanese or Hindu idol: my forehead was high, my nose, lengthened into a trunk, curved onto my chest, my ears brushed my shoulders, and to make matters more discomforting still, I was the color of indigo, like Shiva, the blue deity.
3
By the 1890s, Westerners were also beginning to sample mescal, or peyote, previously used only as a sacrament in certain Native American traditions.
4
As a freshman at Oxford, free to roam the shelves and stacks of the Radcliffe Science Library, I read the first published accounts of mescal, including ones by Havelock Ellis and Silas Weir Mitchell. They were primarily medical men, not just literary ones, and this seemed to lend an extra weight and credibility to their descriptions. I was captivated by Weir Mitchell’s dry tone and his nonchalance about taking what was then an unknown drug with unknown effects.
At one point, Mitchell wrote in an 1896 article for the
British Medical Journal
, he took a fair portion of an extract made from mescal buttons and followed this up with four further doses. Although he noted that his face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, and he had “a tendency to talk, and now and then … misplaced a word,” he nevertheless went out on house calls and saw several patients. Afterward, he sat down quietly in a dark room and closed his eyes, whereupon he experienced “an enchanted two hours,” full of chromatic effects:
Delicate floating films of colour—usually delightful neutral purples and pinks. These came and went—now here, now there. Then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow a sparkling river before the eye. In a minute this was over and the field was dark. Then I began to see zigzag lines of very bright colours, like those seen in some megrims [migraines]…. It was in rapid, what I might call
minute, motion.… A white spear of grey stone grew up to huge height, and became a tall, richly finished Gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design.… As I gazed every projecting angle, cornice, and even the face of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut, some being more like masses of transparent fruit. These were green, purple, red, and orange.… All seemed to possess an interior light, and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colour-fruits is quite beyond my power. All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.
He found he had no power to influence his visions voluntarily; they seemed to come at random or to follow some logic of their own.
Just as the introduction of hashish in the 1840s had led to a vogue for it, so these first descriptions of mescal’s effects by Weir Mitchell and others in the 1890s and the ready availability of mescaline led to another vogue—for mescal promised an experience not only richer, longer-lasting, and more coherent than that induced by hashish, but one with the added promise of transporting one to mystical realms of unearthly beauty and significance.
Unlike Mitchell, who had focused on the colored, mostly geometric hallucinations that he compared in part to those of migraine, Aldous Huxley, writing of mescaline in the 1950s, focused on the transfiguration of the visual world, its investment with luminous, divine beauty and significance. He compared such drug experiences to those of great visionaries and artists, though also to the psychotic experiences of some
schizophrenics. Both genius and madness, Huxley hinted, lay in these extreme states of mind—a thought not so different from those expressed by De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Poe in relation to their own ambiguous experiences with opium and hashish (and explored at length in Jacques Joseph Moreau’s 1845 book
Hashish and Mental Illness
). I read Huxley’s
Doors of Perception
and
Heaven and Hell
when they came out in the 1950s, and I was especially excited by his speaking of the “geography” of the imagination and its ultimate realm—the “Antipodes of the mind.”
5
Around the same time, I came across a pair of books by the physiologist and psychologist Heinrich Klüver. In the first one,
Mescal
, he reviewed the world literature on the effects of mescal and described his own experiences with it. Keeping his eyes closed, as Weir Mitchell had done, he saw complex geometrical patterns:
Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small … plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria … wallpaper
designs … cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares … architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.
For Klüver these hallucinations represented an abnormal activation in the visual system, and he observed that similar hallucinations could occur in a variety of other conditions—migraine, sensory deprivation, hypoglycemia, fever, delirium, or the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states that come immediately before and after sleep. In
Mechanisms of Hallucination
, published in 1942, Klüver spoke of the tendency to “geometrization” in the brain’s visual system, and he regarded all such geometrical hallucinations as permutations of four fundamental “form constants” (he identified these as lattices, spirals, cobwebs, and tunnels). He implied that such constants must reflect something about the organization, the functional architecture, of the visual cortex—but there was little more to be said about this in the 1940s.
It might be said that both approaches—the “high,” mystical approach of Huxley and the “low,” neurophysiological approach of Klüver—were too narrowly focused and failed to do justice to the range and complexity of the phenomena that mescaline could induce. This became clearer in the late 1950s, when LSD, as well as psilocybin mushrooms and morning glory seeds (both of which contain LSD-like compounds), became widely available, ushering in a new hallucinogenic drug age and a new word to go with it: “psychedelic.”
Daniel Breslaw, a young man just out of college in the 1960s, was one of the subjects in a study of LSD at Columbia University, and he gave a vivid description of the effects of psilocybin, which he took under supervision, so that his reactions could
be observed.
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His first visions, like Weir Mitchell’s, were of stars and colors:
I closed my eyes. “I see stars!” I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe.… The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colors are entirely new—areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction; my field of vision is a mosaic of unbelievable complexity. To reproduce an instant of it would involve years of labor, that is, if one were able to reproduce colors of equivalent brilliance and intensity.
Then Breslaw opened his eyes. “With the eyes closed,” he noted, “one is
not here
, but inhabits a distant world of abstractions. But with eyes open, one glances around the physical universe with curiosity.” Curiosity—and amazement, for the visual world he saw was bizarrely changed and continually changing, as Gautier had found with hashish. Breslaw wrote:
The room is fifty feet tall. Now it is two feet tall. A strange disparity here. Whatever comes into the focus of my eyes dissolves into whorls, patterns, arrangements. There is The Doctor. His face is crawling with lice. His glasses are the size
of pressure cookers, and his eyes are those of some mammoth fish. He is beyond doubt the funniest sight I have ever seen, and I insist upon this point by laughing.… A footstool in the corner shrinks to a mushroom in jerky spasms, braces—and springs to the ceiling. Amazing!… In the elevator, the face of the operator grows hair, becomes an affably growing gorilla.
Time was immensely distended. The elevator descended, “passing a floor every hundred years. Back in the room, I swim through the remaining centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure.”
Animation and intentionality appeared everywhere, as did relationship and meaning:
Here is a fire extinguisher in a glass case, evidently an exhibit of some sort. A bit of staring reveals that the beast is alive: it coils its rubber hose around its prey and sucks flesh through the nozzle. The beast and I exchange glares, and then the nurse drags me away. I wave goodbye.
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees
every relationship it has to the rest of the universe
; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it.