Timothy
Leary
Warts and All
by Astraeu Chakar
Martin Luther (wherever he is) must be thanking his
stars that he didn't live in the 21st century. No doubt a number of other of
history's more or less revered movers and shakers are also offering up prayers of
gratitude that they lived and did their wondrous deeds in ages and eras before, well, us
and our compulsive need 1) to have and revere celebrities, and 2) to know every last,
sorry detail about their lives.
Even Mr. Luther, though already 400 years in the past, has not escaped our media
magnifying glass. Luther left behind enough records of, and witnesses to, his words and
actions that at least some of his warts are plain to see for anyone who wants to look
closely (take a look, for example, at the chapter called "The Excremental
Vision" in Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death).
Other--how to call them?--"reformers" and allegedly enlightened beings
have got off more or less scot-free. If you lived, say, 1,000--or 1,500, or
2,000, or 2,500--years ago and caused a ruckus among the ruling classes by trying to
inject a bit of political or metaphysical equality and hope into the great unwashed, your
image today is pretty much as pure as, well, the pre-pollution driven snow.
But: troublemakers we shall always have with us. So you get people like Dan Brown
casting stones at Jesus and finding millions of paying customers to watch the spectacle.
Still, however many Canadian forests have been felled to spread Dan's calumny, he's hardly
phased the billion or so true believers who remain wholly convinced of the accuracy of
ancient narratives about J.C. set down and edited and re-edited by countless persons who
had a considerable vested interest in seeing that the story was told just so.
Which, believe it or not, brings us to the strange case of Timothy Leary.
Leary was certainly no Jesus Christ. But he may have been a weird kind of
latter-day Martin Luther. Instead of nailing 95 theses pointing out certain
hypocrisies and failings in the received Christianity of his day to the door of the church
in Wittenburg, Leary famously dropped acid and then spent the rest of his serpentine life
trying to convince others to do the same.
Leary's warts were evident to many during his life: blatant showmanship, unrestrained
opportunism, marital and ethical infidelity, etc. Now (2006) the first full-scale study of
his life has appeared, Timothy Leary: A Biography, by Robert Greenfield. Which is
a book of warts, bigtime.
Leary comes off sort of the way you'd expect him to if the Washington Times had assigned
the project to one of their Moonie reporters: by turns a lothario, an unprincipled
Pied Piper, corrupter of youthful minds, and a plain old-fashioned quack.
The hard, negative facts about Leary's life and many misdeeds are incontrovertible.
Together they make for an astounding story, which Greenfield tells well and in gripping
detail. In many ways, Timothy Leary was a scoundrel, albeit often a brilliant, highly
entertaining one. And no doubt it's important to get the basics of the story set in place
now, when so many people who knew Leary are still alive.
In the longer view, it's the old forest-and-trees problem. Greenfield gives us the trees
but misses the forest.
Re Leary, the simple cultural reality is that all cultures are drug cultures and,
apparently, have been from the earliest times. The only difference from one
culture to the next, from one era to the next, is, which drugs are in and which drugs are
out?
America now? For starters, of course, there's alcohol. And caffeine.
(And even, still, in spite of the rampant Puritans, nicotine.)
Furthermore, turn on the TV in these days of Late Capitalism and start counting how
many drug advertisements from pharmaceutical companies you see in one day (or one
hour, for that matter). While you're counting, you might also keep track of the
"anti-drug" spots, where "anti-drug" is defined as being against those
drugs that are out of favor at this time in this culture.
By common (often unexamined) consent, some drug-use is good and some drug-use is so bad
that if you indulge in it and get caught you go to prison.
Leary of course knew this. He also knew from first-hand experience that some of the
"bad" drugs are powerful, positive, and life-enhancing. Dangerous? Yes. But
Leary was also very clear about this. He wrote and spoke repeatedly about the
importance of set, setting, and dosage in the use of LSD.
"Set" refers to mind-set. You don't just take acid for
"fun". You carefully prepare your mind for a profound experience. "Setting"
refers to the environment in which you take the drug--a concert with the Rolling Stones at
Altamont is not a supportive environment; a forest glade is. And dose,
well, who knows these days how much of the drug you're taking if you do street acid?
Like it or not, we live in a drug culture. Also--and here is the hard part--like
it or not, we live in a culture that has been profoundly, positively changed and shaped
already by the very drugs that this scoundrel and quack was pushing.
Greenfield's book is important and well worth reading. Sadly, as one reviewer pointed out,
those who love Leary will hate the book and those who hate Leary won't read it.
What's revealing of the pervasive, confused drug attitudes in this culture is the
cheer-leading reviews from the American intellectual establishment, filled with praise
for Greenfield's muckraking and scorn for the fallen Harvard prof who, we're now
all to believe, was a charltan through and through (google the book title and, from the
New York Times to The Nation, you'll see what I mean).
The reviews together embody a kind of massive sigh of pseudo-intelligent relief, as if the
intellectuals as a group are saying, Thank God, somebody's put this quack in his place and
now we can get on with our good old traditional verbal manipulations without having to
worry about such nonsense as "mind expansion" or "other dimensions."
Yes, read Greenfield. But to balance things out, two other books are essential.
Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, published in 1954, long
before Leary's explosion onto the scene, is still a key report from one of the great minds
of the 20th century on the potential beneficial effects of psychedelic drugs (in this
case, mescaline).
John Markoff's What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the
Personal Computer Industry (2005) is itself a mind-bending (and -expanding)
work, exploring the ways in which the brave new world we now inhabit is very much a
product of people in Silicon Valley who were doing a lot less Valium and a lot more LSD.
Timothy Leary, warts and all, changed the world. We may be trying to kill the
messenger even after he's safely gone, but the message is still very much with us. Whether
we admit it or not, we are Leary's children.
END
Back to Magellan's
Log 104
Magellan's
Log front page
Send this page to a friend.
|
