The follow clip is a video taken of an experiment done in 1956 in which a woman, who seems on all levels to be a completely normal 1950’s housewife, volunteered to take a dose of LSD in a glass of water, and the experimenter, Doctor Sidney Cohen, interviews her while the dose is in full effect.
She’s not necessarily stoned, but…. beautiful.
Oh wait, my mistake, she’s definitely stoned. Really, really stoned.
I find this video riveting. The look of wonder and transcendent delight on her face is pure magic. Being such a regular, normal gal, her reactions are unfiltered and simply amazing to behold.
Suddenly, a lot of what Leary and company have been saying about LSD makes more sense to me. I have always been a little dubious about the whole hallucinogenic trip. I have always thought, perhaps uncharitably, that people who needed to mess with their brains in such a radical way just to make what seems to me to arrive fairly basic philosophical conclusions must have been pretty dull to start with.
Or perhaps they are just normal, as opposed to being a freaky way-out head case who lives outside Plato’s cave and gets only occasional postcards from reality like myself.
Some of us don’t need any chemical assistance to get into a transcendental frame of mind. Rather the opposite, actually. We need chemicals to deal with that bad trip called reality.
I say that tongue in cheek, but I mean it as well. I’m very odd, mentally speaking. I don’t think like other people do. I move perpendicular to all the usual axes. I’m right here…. but I’m somewhere else as well. I’m right in front of you but I’m also millions of miles away, and a lot of places in between. I have a level of detachment and perspective that others sometimes find uncanny.
I’m a kind of freaky guy.
And it’s not without cost. Not being like the other beach apes has alienated me my whole life. And being a beach ape myself, that makes me sad. I long to connect with others, but find it hard to really relate. the world of normal people just seems so strange to me. Such a tiny, limited place compared to the wide open (cold, lonely) spaces I inhabit.
Of course, on the other side of the coin, I have always been afraid to try LSD because I figure I am not that firmly attached to reality anyhow so I am not going to go cutting myself loose any time soon.
That kind of thing is for people who have a “normal” to come back to after the trip.
Still, watching our volunteer trip balls kind of makes me want to try it. She seems like she’s in such a groovy state of mind, deep within the harmonic unity of the universe, and seeing all those cosmic colors.
Could be fun!
And speaking of colors, is it trippy or what when this typical housewife of the fifties says, in a black and white movie, “Everything’s in color!”. That blew my mind, it’s so marvelously surreal. The LSD had made her see her bland black and white fifties world in full color!
Reminds me strongly of one of my fave Paul Simon tunes.
I can kind of see why people thought that song was about drugs now.
As an aside : according to the YouTube description, that song is from an album called “Here Comes Rhymin’ Simon”. That is the most hilariously bad album title EVER. Hey Paul, don’t name your albums when you’re stoned! I’m sure it seemed REALLY FUNNY at the time….
I do wonder and worry about our volunteer in this video clip. The trip itself seems to have been entirely pleasant for her, but she has been scooped up out of her fish bowl and shown the ocean… how can she go back to life in her bowl again now? She knows THERE IS MORE.
The experiment might have been crueler than anyone could have foreseen or intended.
I’m probably worrying over nothing, though. She probably just shrugged, said “Well, that was sure weird”, and went back to her life.
Perhaps the real problem is that if you have never personally experienced the stifling conformism and enforced optimism and blinkered Republicanism of the fifties, you can’t really get how it took LSD to take people up and out of all that and let them see just how small their lives were. After all, as a Gen X type, I inherited a zeitgeist that had already made that transition. The work had already been done. So to me, it seems obvious how tiny their lives were. But what the fuck do I know? I wasn’t there.
I can only imagine the vast sea of unfocused dissatisfaction with life that the fifties must have accumulated, with so many people experiencing a material standard of living unprecedented in history, people healthier and life easier than it had ever been, and everything around you saying “This is the best time to be alive ever! How can you not be happy? There must be something wrong with YOU!”.
And yet, happy they were not.
LSD helped people get to that next level, where they could see their spiritual needs were unmet and could imagine going in search of that as well.
I can see why the forces of the Establishment and conformity thought LSD and the counterculture were such a threat to civilization. Here they had created what was arguably paradise on Earth for their kids, compared to all of what came before, and these hippies dared to say that wasn’t enough?
Madness. Anarchy. This must be the work of international communism, and their implacable need to destroy all that we’ve worked for since the War. We have to put a stop to this!
But people had to free their minds. I’m all for that. Whatever it takes to get you to that next level where you can see not just the game but the players.
I just don’t need drugs to get there, personally.
You have what I call the “philosophical mindset”. That is, you think about the world around you, and you think about thinking.
Most people go about their daily lives, embedded in the world, seeing it as a system to use to get what they want… but they don’t
ask themselves how it works, or how it could be different. They just accept it as the way things are. The philosophical mindset, on the other hand, leads one to question the unquestionable, even the basis of reality. I’m sure you’ve read enough philosophy to understand.
Now, enter the psychedelic experience. The brain’s chemistry is altered for a while, altering the subject’s experience of the external world and their internal world, their thoughts and emotions. It makes the brain more plastic, unlearning some
old things but also allowing it to accept new things. It broadens the subject’s perspective, like adding an additional basis vector to a vector space, which often leads to adopting the philosophical mindset.
The effect in the late 1960’s was a generation of young people believing that rapid social and political change was possible, and demanding it through protests — about the worst nightmare for any established government. So, seeing that the drugs had been the catalyst for change, the USA tried to systematically smear and suppress them throughout the 70’s and 80’s especially.
[You seem to have posted the same link to YouTube for the LSD subject interviews twice in your article, instead of to “Kodachome”. I see many people have set a slideshow of their pictures to “Kodachrome”, for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SExsuRIGAlg
Or from The Concert in the Park, with both Simon and Garfunkel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXZTBu_3ioI .]
What a thoughtful and interesting comment!
I definitely have a philosophical mindset. I always want to know more, to understand more, to understand everything. I often wonder at some people’s lack of curiosity about how things really work and what is really going on, but then again, they know as much as they need to know to deal with their daily lives, so who am I to judge?
I think the psychedelic experience might be likened to that moment when the two dimensional protagonist of Flatland is introduced to the third dimension. Or when we gazed upon the first full satellite pictures of Earth and realized, fully and truly, that we lived on a planet. A finite planet, something you could see all of at the same time, just one rock in an incomprehensibly larger universe.
The fish have seen the stream and know, for the first time, that they live in water, and the water ends.
Of course, us freaky deaky philosophers types then say “See? I told you!”
I would definitely separate “wondering how things work” from
“wondering if they could be different.” Engineers have the luxury wondering how things work; they have systematizing intelligence. Those of us not blessed with systematizing intelligence can still share the “wondering if they could be different” part.
I don’t consider myself unconnected to reality; if I were, it wouldn’t hurt so much. But I have been told that I shouldn’t try acid because with all of my depression and self-loathing it could be a very scary, damaging trip.
I remember in one of the Illuminatus books the characters went around secretly giving small doses of acid to the general public to get them to start thinking.
Ironically, in They Live, the world becomes black and white once you open your eyes to the bigger picture. (I think this was partly so John Carpenter could make fun of Ted Turner’s colourization.)
Oh, and I second what Spuug said about the second video being the same as the first. Also, it gets way louder at the end when the 1950s footage ends and the sitar music starts.