Psychedelics, Hallucinations, and Learning to See

Psychedelics teach you to see what's there — materially and affectively. To see intensity. To see intensely. Which it to say, to hallucinate is not to see what's not there (an absurdity): it's to see what is in fact always there.

One night in the Fall of 1989, I found myself alone on my college campus in lovely, apocalyptic West Philadelphia tripping on LSD. I sat on a bench that, oddly, faced away from the parodical Ivy League campus behind it. With nowhere else to look, I cocked my head upwards and could suddenly see with utter clarity that the Earth was moving, fast. I could see it. And, more importantly, I could feel it. There I sat in my makeshift cosmic cockpit, steering the entire blue planet through the ether. Wooooosh! I was giddy.

Yes, I knew I wasn't actually steering the Earth. That was just a goof. But I did see, and feel, the planet's movement. The giddiness was different in kind and degree from any giddiness I'd known before from, say, laughing with my brother or seeing Jethro Tull live for the first time. This giddiness vibrated with the rhythm and intensity of the spinning Earth. It's a giddiness I would come to know more intimately, a giddiness that persists to this day — not as a recollection but as a live experience when I'm seeing as I've been taught to see by LSD. This giddiness is still happening to me, in me, with me, as me. (Ah, prepositions: they locate us, position us, in the universe and can therefore be tricky as all get out: how do you stand towards, in, with the world? This remains my dominant line of inquiry as I consider the world; it's not a philosophical query per se as it is, finally, the question of rhetoric: a question of position and perspective.)

Hallucinations have a bad rap. Or, rather, a wrong rap. I mean, just think about it: How can you see what's not there? That's as absurd as it is impossible. So what are these so-called hallucinations we experience with psychedelics? (I can't, so won't, speak for hallucinations experienced by the psycho-divergent, a word I prefer to "mentally ill" or any other such pathologizing of psychic states. But I am curious if the things I say here resonate with such states; I welcome input from those with more experience and insight.)

Let me tell you about an experience from a few years ago. I was sitting in my apartment, on my shaggy red rug, with an old friend. It was night and we'd turned the lights off as we smoked Changa — a mix of herbs and DMT. Unlike the usual DMT experience, smoking this Changa was more relaxed, allowing us to interact with each other and the world around us. Which is to say, we were relatively lucid. At one point, I saw these swimming strings, for lack of a better word, of light. Which was kind of funny as it was dark. Still, I could see quite well thanks to, among other things, dilated pupils and ubiquitous urban lights; the room glowed with the red of my rug. And, sure enough, I could see these strands or strings just sort of wafting through the ether. I put my hand out to touch one and, yes, I could hold it in my fingers, stretch it, let it drape and twitch in the air. I turned to my friend and asked if he saw them. Without hesitation, he said yes and then we proceeded to pass these strands back and forth. 

We were not seeing things that weren't there — which, again, is an absurdity. We were seeing what was there, presumably, all the time but which we normally can't — or won't — see. In this sense, to hallucinate is to see what is there: to see the becoming of the universe, to see the stuffs that flourish between, among, and with the stuff we're trained to see, all the knickknacks of consumer life, objects in space, egos and identities. But, with psychedelics, we see other stuff, what we imagine to be negative space, the flesh of the universe, the plenum of cosmic becoming, this teem of energy, light, affect. And process: we see the how of life happening, the manner and mechanisms by which the world constitutes itself out of itself.

Psychedelics amplify what we take to be our senses and/or they introduce us to senses we're not used to using. This is not just about seeing the strands of light but seeing the things we usually see but seeing them anew, in a more robust sense — in their milieu of becoming. We participate in the affective swirls and eddies that are always streaming about. I want to call this empathy in that we feel with the things we see. 

Anyone who's smoked or eaten marijuana knows this well. What we call being high is the freshly introduced perception of affect — the moods of a room, of music, of your roommate, a glance, a TV show. We listen to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" and are astounded as we utter a most emphatic Whoa! Movies and media casually mock this whoa as stoner vapidity. But what is that whoa other than a reaction to affective intensity, that is, a greater, richer perceptive processing? What is it other than the perception of what's always there but which we habitually ignore? This life of ours with all its distractions, stresses, and burdens of work, relationships, traffic, and the so-called news has little space for the affect of Joni Mitchell — not to mention of our rooms, bodies, clouds, food, people. But we smoke a spleef — or, these days, hit a vape or eat a gummy — which opens our senses and allows us to reckon what is already there. Getting high is not a false or silly reality as the media would have it. It's in fact a most empirical and amplified reckoning of life, of all the invisible stuffs of the everyday. The stoned sees more, processes more, reckons more.

The psychedelic experience — of LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), MDA and MDMA (ecstasy), DMT, marijuana — is not an alternate reality. It allows us — it teaches us — to perceive the fullness of information that's always happening. In fact, we might say that the sobriety of the working man is the hallucination! He doesn't see what's in fact happening all around him! In this sense, hallucination is a less rather than a more — a not seeing rather than a seeing-plus.

What I'm going to call the square is the person who sees objects independently occupying and moving through space and nothing else — not the strands of light, the flesh of the air, the affect of all things, the ways in which everything informs and inflects everything else. The tree stands, the dog runs, the kids play but the square doesn't see all the information that pervades those objects, that surrounds and creates these bodies.

The square is reasonable. And such is the terrible tyranny of reason: it smugly dismisses everything outside its purview. Reason is, alas, not reasonable. In fact, nothing is more insane — and insidious — than reason. It's insane in that it demands the world align with its rigid quantities and isolated bodies despite relentless evidence to the contrary! And it's insidious as it claims the mantle of reason which, alas, needs no other justification. There are no swirls of affect, you damn hippy! There's no empathy. We're all independent bodies drifting alone in space. Be reasonable! And yet this same person disintegrates, falling into pits of existential despair when their love goes unrequited. (I love the new use of "them"; yes, I moved from the singular "same person" to  the plural "their" love. I'm unreasonable, I suppose.)

With psychedelics, we don't just see objects as distinct bodies moving through space: we feel — we perceive — things making their way in the world. We experience the grace of that tree's branches winding and twisting; we feel the dissipation of clouds; we swell with the ocean. After tripping, you learn that to see will never have been about locating objects in space from a remove. To see is to participate in the becoming of things. To feel, and know, their modes of self-constitution. This is what I want to call scientific seeing, empirical perception, processing all the information available, not just what's readily quantified.

Psychedelics teach us that to see is to participate in the becoming of the universe.

In his book, "Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants and the Evolution of The Noösphere," the philosopher and psychedelic theorist, Richard Doyle (aka mobius), refers to psychedelic plants as ecodelic in that they allow us to perceive the cooperative system that is the universe — the flow of processes and information between and among different life forms. Which is to say, ecodelics don't just reveal more information about what's there; they reveal the modes of world formation, the how as well as the what. Ecodelic plants have us participate in the ecology of being — or, rather, the ecology of becoming. We experience the collective nature of nature, the ecological basis of form and identity (although what we call identity becomes something else entirely after ecodelic perception).

The great French philosopher and phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argues that sight is a mode of palpation: to see is to touch. This goes against the reasonable (square) model of vision that has us view the world from the safety of our bodies and egos: I'm here, that smelly dog is over there. But for Merleau-Ponty, seeing is touching — which means the things we see touch us back, including the smelly dog. He refers to the act of seeing as a chiasmus, an intertwining of bodies that effaces the subject-object dichotomy. In this chiasmatic perception, seer and seen swap positions at infinite speed. In our very act of seeing, then, we are seen: we are touched by the world. Perception is an inherently cooperative event.

Psychedelics open up and operate in this middle voice, this in-between in which the ego and its objects will never have been discrete. When we trip, we become empathetic. What I mean by empathy is not that we feel what others feel. It's that we feel with these bodies as we are participating in a common universe of energetic, material, and affective flows. When we're high or tripping, we process more information with senses we don't usually use or foreground. We feel with the tree's every twist and turn; we feel the drift of the clouds as they arc, bend, gather, and dissipate; we feel the swells of the ocean, the joyous flight of the pelican, the frantic speed of the snowy plover. How? Not because we become those things — that would be silly — but because we are all always becoming together, inflecting each other, touching each other in the intertwining that is perception, that is identity, that is the world. Psychedelics teach us to see, to perceive, to enjoy the ecological autopoiesis of forms both visible and invisible. We see, we experience, the world forming itself from itself as itself. 

How do you see the snowy plover and not feel with it? Such reasonable seeing misses so much information the world proffers.

This education persists after the drug presumably "wears off." Which is to say, the drug never really wears off. It teaches us to see, to process, the massive amounts of information that surround us. So now, thanks to my psychedelic experiences, when I leave my house and gaze at the sky, I continue to feel with those clouds, feel the stretching of the universe into the curved infinite. I feel the flowers bloom and die, the trees wind and shed — not as them but as me-with-them. 

And this transforms me, makes me different than I was, as in the very act of perception, I take on plover-becoming, cloud-becoming, ocean-becoming, Brian-becoming (thanks, Deleuze and Guattari). In this sense, perception is no longer about gathering information from a safe distance so as to confirm my place in it. Perception becomes a going-with that inflects and transforms the perceiver — me!

“I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.”  

— Aldous Huxley

This is no doubt what scares people about psychedelics: perception, which is unavoidable, suddenly becomes an agent of personal change. To see is to be transformed. And so much of what we call knowledge and pedagogy is predicated on staying the same, on forging mastery over the world to make certain we remain who and what we are. The psychedelic experience puts you into the great stew of the universe, into a state of becoming with the world — with the hawks, rocks, moods, mosquitoes, and kiwis.

All too often, however, I forget or suppress this way of seeing. I find myself focused once again on my isolated ego — as if I wasn't sitting in a soup of cosmic energies and affect that are flowing through me, around me, around the birds, trees, rocks, neighbors, dogs, and clouds. As I think and see as my so-called reasonable ego — Does she love me? Is that a swallow? Should I punish my son for not doing his homework? (of course not!) — the wealth of information that surrounds me is ignored, forgotten, repressed. I forget how to see.

But, thanks to psychedelics, all I have to do is remember to use my neglected senses. This may or may not involve ingesting a drug. Sometimes, I'm so out of practice that I can't just recall what I've been taught: I need another lesson! Other times, all I have to do is lean into that practice of seeing and, voilà, there I am: suddenly, the world is brimming with all this exquisite information as I begin to participate in the great cosmic becoming.

Are there ways other than psychedelics to see? No doubt. Deep, prolonged meditation; extended silence; starvation; heightened states of fear; even love: these can all teach us to use senses we don't normally use. 

But I never want to suggest that something is wrong about using psychedelics, that they're some kind of cheating or crutch. I am saying quite the opposite: psychedelics are crucial aspects of human consciousness (pace Terence McKenna). They might not be the only teachers but they are great, highly effective teachers.

And the teachers matter. It's not that there are different paths to the same mode of seeing. The different paths — the different drugs — teach specific aspects of seeing, amplifying this or that aspect of ecological (non)ontology. DMT reveals the moving geometric structures of matter (among other things); psilocybin (magic mushrooms) instructs us on the pulsing, undulating flows of everything; LSD highlights the temperature and intensity of matter, visible and invisible; marijuana, the micro pleats and mechanics of affect between all things, especially social encounters; MD(M)A — which I believe is often mistakenly not considered a psychedelic — teaches us to feel the ecology of identity, the fundamental interconnection of all things, that is intensely peaceful (ecology can often be chaotic but, with ecstasy, it's all good. I believe this positivity is why many don't recognize it as psychedelic but, I have to say, learning the positivity of cosmic becoming is not to be underestimated).

Psychedelics don't make us see what's not there. We don't hallucinate phantom fables. On the contrary, psychedelics — each in its own way — teach us to see what is in fact always there: to see with, and as, the intertwined becoming of the world.

The Peculiar Nihilism of the Scientific Will to Abstraction, or Towards a Knowledge of What's There

Just look at tea and coffee in situ. Smell it, too. Are we sure can extract one element, caffeine, and draw conclusions about the drinks and their caffeine? They look so different, taste so different, feel so different. Aren't such things constitutive of knowledge, too? Whence this will to abstraction?

Tea, they tell us, has less caffeine than coffee. I have no reason to doubt this. The presumption of this fact is that if I want to feel the effects of caffeine less adamantly, I should drink tea. This makes perfect sense: have less of the thing. At the risk of articulating the painfully obvious, this assumes that it's the quantity of this one element — in this case, caffeine — that matters.

But when I, a coffee drinker, opt for black tea, I get jittery. My hands shake just a bit as I lean forward in my chair, tap my foot, get a bit nervous — all signs of too much caffeine. And yet when I drink a cup of coffee that has twice as much caffeine, I feel fine. No, I take that back: I feel good.

It's not just the caffeine, then, that's affecting me. It's this caffeine, not that caffeine. Which suggests that there is not just one caffeine. That caffeine, in fact, is an element within a calculus. That perhaps, just perhaps, there really is no such thing as caffeine per se. That caffeine is a form within a form — there's coffee-caffeine, tea-caffeine, NoDoz-caffeine. And it's its place, function, behavior within that form that matters.

Science is funny. We believe it heeds what's there. But its definition of what's there involves effacing and ignoring what is, in fact, there. Science is not empirical. It is not based in experience, in the actual doings of this life. It's dedicated to not heeding experience, to not heeding what's there, so that it can discover abstract truths that exceed and determine experience. To wit, it finds this certain shape and behavior of some form that's in tea, coffee, chocolate and declares it one thing — caffeine.

Such is the basis of its methodology. It creates a lab removed from experience, removed from the conditions of life, so as to discover the presumed truths of life. Science, I have to say, is nihilistic: it thinks truth is what happens in a vacuum, in a place that can't possibly exist anywhere in the world. To it, truth is the state of things stripped of life.

How did we ever come to believe that this is the place where we learn the truth of things? Where we learn about the respective experiences of coffee and tea?

This seems more like the proper place to understand coffee and tea.

What's particularly odd is that after establishing knowledge outside of life, we then draw conclusions about how we should behave in this life. Get jitters from coffee? Try tea instead; it's got less caffeine. But this advice about our worldly experience is based on an abstraction from the world, from behavior, based on a fact derived from a no place, a vacuum, from plants and beans sans their worldly accoutrements.

How could any empirical scientist make judgements about tea and coffee without talking about tea and coffee? Tea is so thin, astringent; coffee, so viscous, dark, and luscious. One comes from these impossibly delicate, tiny leaves; the other, from a hearty bean. But to the scientist, these facts are not facts that matter; they're in fact obstacles to knowledge. For science, to know the world is to remove the world from the equation as much as possible. That's an odd will — and even odder method to derive knowledge!

Just look! They're so different. How could any knowledge of these things ignore these differences?

Is there really such as a thing as caffeine? Sure, there seems to be something there; scientists didn't just make it up. And when I drink tea and coffee, I note a similar effect. But similarity isn't equivalence. It's a note within a symphony. Or, even more, the very way of caffeine is determined by its environments as much that environment is determined by caffeine. Which is to say, it's not just a note — A major — that can be plopped down in any song (of course, my A major, Miles Davis' A major, and Michael Stipe's A major are all different, as well — so perhaps there's no such thing per se as a note, either: every note is always expressed and, as such, is never an abstraction). Its very constitution, its very way of going, is how it goes here, now, in this way, with these things, in this situation, this environment.

And this difference, these differences, are constitutive of knowledge. The shape of the leaves, the texture of the beverage, the smell, intensity, feel: these are not ornaments. They're not clothes added to bodies nor bodies added to souls. They are constitutive of the experience, inflecting everything around them — and vice versa. They are the stuff of knowledge.

What makes them tricky is that they can't be so readily quantified. They are qualities, as sensuous as they are affective. And the reigning scientific method disdains the body, disdains experience, disdains quality. Bodies just get in the way.

Science, then, is not opposed to religion. On the contrary, as Nietzsche argues, science and religion share a certain ressentiment, a nihilist will to efface the flesh in order to reveal  truth. Science finds bodily experience icky. It wants elements it can measure and weigh. Once quality enters the equation, it's no longer a matter for science. It becomes the stuff of art, of poetry, of private reverie. And, just like that, droves of essential data are brushed aside as extraneous. Our systems of knowledge, like our religions, leave life out of their equations.

Of course, when we're talking about coffee and tea, such a will to abstraction seems relatively innocuous, a matter of a few jitters here and there. But unfortunately this will to abstraction has strange and unsettling effects that pervade our pedagogy and policy. One conspicuous area affected that I've written much about is the pedagogy of writing. Students learn the definitions of words and the rules of grammar but never the sense of either. Like scientists in their labs studying tea and coffee, writing teachers too often brush aside the affective particularity of words, grammatical structures, and punctuation. As Lohren Green, writer of Poetical Dictionary, writes: 

Rather than parsing sense from the word and uniformly imposing accuracy, clarity, concision, and simplicity, we sought to express each word’s unique sense, and to do so we relied on a different, more protean standard. Of course, here too (even especially here) there is room for error. Perhaps foreplay doesn’t go far enough; perhaps clumsy is too intentional, and poise leans, just slightly, forward. These are the things that keep the Editor of a Poetical Dictionary up at night. There is, after all, no privileged access to the being of words, but only sometimes a happy moment in which they can be found to declare themselves a very particular (or very universal) this.

As I write in my book, Reading the Way of Things, what's so powerful about Green's approach is that this sense is not an abandonment of knowing but, on the contrary, marks it embracing: But this is not an abandonment of knowledge claims, as if poetry were ornament that came after the fact, a trope upon the foundation of literal language. Green’s claim is at once supremely bold and absolutely humble. His book supersedes the traditional dictionary, tending to meaning but including the affect of the word. Affect, for Green, is knowledge that neither impedes nor adorns meaning. A word has a way of going that is simultaneously conceptual and affective. As Green embraces affect as knowledge, knowledge becomes uncertain, unprovable: there is room for error here. But this does not make it any less knowledge.

And then there's medicine. I've never had a doctor — an MD, that is — who heeded my symptoms as part and parcel of this body living this life. Any symptom I have is isolated from my living body and assessed next to other symptoms gathered from other people — which, as our data sets grow to include billions of people, makes the experience of this skinny hebe less and less relevant.

And so when I get the blood test results from my yearly physical, the software system of my health care provider — I use the term "health care" generously — automatically generates an email. Some number enters its system and I get: You are pre-diabetic. Read this PDF. Your have Stage 1 Chronic Kidney Disease. Read about ways you can change your behavior. You're due for an HIV test.

No doubt, a certain number on a blood test result may very well mean I have these diseases. And it may be time for an HIV test. Or it may just be some numbers on a screen and the better way to assess me is to put those numbers into a living system, namely, me-in-the-world. This guy, right here. See? 

My doctor never even touches me. I am a series of numbers on a screen to her; each number inaugurates a fork in a decision tree. This decision tree is on WebMD. So why am I paying $700 a month for health insurance? What does this doctor actually do? When medicine stops reading this body here, it ceases to be of much value to this body here. Sure, it has some value. But to understand that abstraction in relationship to this body here and now demands a skill that is simply not taught, is not privileged, is not even considered within the practice of medicine.

What do I want from doctor? I want the methodology Green deploys in his Poetical Dictionary: a reckoning of what's there — a there that's at once particular and general, affective and conceptual. I am not suggesting that knowledge only heed the moment as the moment, the body as a unique site from which all knowledge should be garnered. That'd be absurd. What I am saying is that each body is a particular way of metabolizing the world, a how and not just a what. And while this how can't be quantified, it does not mean it shouldn't be included in our knowledge base. 

I am not suggesting that knowledge of caffiene needs to begin with every cup of coffee or tea. I am suggesting, however, that the respective bodies of coffee  and tea — bean, leaf,  hue, texture, tone, taste, and tenor — are constitutive of the knowledge of caffeine. That, in fact, to ignore such things is bad science, bad knowledge, as it ignores what's there! And so it is with my body in the doctor's office.

Or take the THC in sativa and indica buds. The scientific community poo poos the anecdotal distinction — sativa is heady and up; indica is body and down — based on the fact that in the lab it all looks the same. And yet the plants grow differently, look different, taste different. Why is that not relevant? Why is the experience of millions of consumers not constitutive of knowledge? Why is what's there not considered?

Scientific abstraction, like the religious asceticism it echoes, wreaks havoc — on my nerves, my health, and my high, not to mention on the education, health, and high of the planet. This is all to say, that I'd like to imagine a different mode of scientific knowledge which involves different modes of knowing — poetic, shamanistic, gonzo — that reckon all that's there — the touch, tone, taste, tenor, timbre of things both visible and not.

Plugged, Unplugged: Conflicting Mythoi

When my son was around 10 (he's now 16), he started a YouTube channel dedicated to aliens and the ensuing cover up(s) by various governments. I like that he had this concerted focus, all these folders which he labeled, all these diagrams (at 16, he knows no such order, or focus, any more). But I was confused by his desire to have a YouTube channel. Where'd he even come up with such a thing?

At the time, he was watching lots of YouTube videos, sure, but it was one that seized his imagination: PewDiePie. I have no desire to get into the saga around this guy. My point is: my son was attracted to the number of followers and views this channel had. And, of course, by the money this PewDiePie earned from Google. Both views and money were staggering. Frankly, while I was a bit intrigued, I was mostly confused — and bored by it all. And so I didn't think about my boy's desire again.

And then he and I both started using Spotify. We have vastly different tastes in music but we still swap songs, trying to impress or engage the other, to read the other's taste (a great exercise in reading another's way in the world). One thing my son often comments on is the number of streams a given song has. 27 million streams, Dad? That's the real thing.

These comments threw me off. I come from a culture where it was cool to find and be obsessed with the band that had, like, seven listeners. If something was popular, it became hard to like — and it surely meant you had to defend it. Oh, I liked Dire Straits way before "Brothers in Arms." The drive of my cultural cohorts was to be plugged into an alternate world, one where capitalism and suburban bourgeois bullshit was not the dominant force. I can still picture driving across the country and continuously turning that radio dial ever so finely down the left side, seeking out those obscure college stations that played the songs no one knew. We were literally trying to tune into an obscure cultural flow.

That's just not the case with the kids today. They're all about plugging into the vast interconnected engine of commerce, taste, and collective discourse. To wit, my kid recently decided he wanted a polo shirt. This struck me as funny as that's what preppies wore when I was in middle school in the early 80s, collar up. So I bought him one — sans logo. He thanked me, of course, then went out and bought one with the Polo logo on it. Silly dad.

At first, I was deeply dismayed by all this. Here's this cool kid — quirky, funny, interesting — trying to plug into what I've always deemed the wasteland of culture, its vapid tastse, its mindless consumption, its utter banality. Don't you want the band no one has heard? I'd ask. He'd just look at me blankly across a vast generational chasm.

But then I realized that it's me who's lost his way as I find myself adrift in a mythos that's become obsolete. I come from a world that believes in an outside — outside the humdrum of bourgeois life, of capitalist drive, of the steady machinic drone. I am perhaps the last vestige of a world that can still imagine being unplugged, that aspires to be unplugged. When I close my eyes and picture peace come at least, I am Neo waking up in his pod, all those wires flying from his flesh in a great violent release.

 

I still revere Terence McKenna who wants nothing more than to break the reigns of culture with psychedelics. I still revere William Burroughs and the Beats who set up camp in North Africa to escape the madness of America. I still dream of Ginsberg and Kerouac careening through the same America in search of sex and drugs and near-God experiences, free of any tethers. I still love Jean-Luc Godard who never caved to any studio and David Lynch who tried but, alas, gave up to do his own thing. None of my close friends have any online presence. I alone remain the idiot in the crew who tweets and blogs, much to my embarrassment. Here's McKenna summarizing this world view:

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."

But that world is gone. There is no longer any outside. There's nowhere to go. Everything is plugged into one big matrix, the singularity, the heaving hive of human consciousness in which thought is controlled and surveilled at all times. Yes, psychedelics are back in vogue but they serve a vastly different function, a different imagination. If for Mckenna (and me) psychedelics are a radical break with the culture machine, today they're viewed as a means to "boost" creativity, focus, and that horror of the contemporary moment, productivity. Rather than being a way to untether, psychedelics have become a way to jack in all the better, all the more efficiently — to be an engineer of the culture machine just like Steve Jobs.

The kids these days never even consider an outside, never dream of being unplugged. On the contrary, they want their own YouTube channel! They want to wear the clothes, photograph themselves, then post it so everyone can see how plugged in they are. Browse Tinder and a shocking number of young people just want you to follow them on Instagram. They're not looking for dates, for company, or even for money: they want those likes and followers to quantify how plugged in they are.

If it were all about getting paid, I'd readily understand. I've never been part of a cultural imagination free of monetary concerns. No, I understand wanting to get paid — but so that I can unplug! So that I can stop interacting with all this nonsense, this noise, these screens, these ads, all this inanity, all this bile, all these great TV shows, all these decisions, all these frets and pleasures and pains. I don't want to browse Netflix, Hulu, and Prime for another fucking second. I don't want the relative sanity of Kanopy or the Criterion Channel which just add to the mayhem. I want to be free of it all! I want quiet! I want never to see that glow of blue light again!

I grew up with Timothy Leary in my ear telling me to turn on, tune in, drop out. That falls on deaf ears today. In Williamsburg, there's a billboard declaring the new triple dictum: Live. Work. Create. The youth today yearn for participation in the engine — to work for the big brands or start their own. But it never occurs to them to drop out. Drop out from what? To where? This is an image that they can't imagine. They want to work.

I remember when Burning Man was all the buzz with my San Francisco friends. It was early internet days, maybe 1999. And while I had no interest in going — I'm a bit agoraphobic and misanthropic — I loved that it existed. Here, it seemed to me, was an extension of the mythos I'd grown up with, the myth of the outside.

Watching its growth over the years, I have a different take on it now. It was always a bit of the Carnivalesque in the Mikhail Bakhtin's sense of the word. Burning Man was a temporary overthrow of the reigning order, the introduction of play and chaos into the normal run of things. And like the Carnival of old, this was never intended to be revolutionary per se. Rather, Carnival functions as a temporary respite from the everyday not so as to overturn it but to restore it: we'll break the rules today so we can go back to the order of things.

Today, Burning Man is not about an outside and less about Carnival's temporary reversal of order than it is about the techno-colonization of the planet. If at one point Black Rock City was an outside, a remote place of freedom, today it's proof that we can wire anything anywhere, turn it into a gridded city, light it up, plug it into the internetworked matrix. Just look.

The mesh network of of Burning Man, proof that we can techno-colonize anywhere and everywhere — even this remote, unlivable part of the desert. If people like me and my contemporaries want to imagine Burning Man as outside the machine, the reality is it's just the opposite: it's the plugging in of every last square inch.

Mind you, despite my tone of anger and despair, I am not criticizing this new will to be plugged in. In fact, I'm more prone to critique my own imagination which is premised on a faulty, if seductive, metaphysics. Like McKenna and Leary, I imagine a place free of the bullshit. But we are of bullshit. There is no outside, no Garden of Eden, no unsullied place. The planet has been colonized, everyone jacked in thanks to the ubiquity of the smart phone.

There is no outside anymore. The ubiquity of smart phones has ensured we're all "connected."

The fact is my mythology of an outside has the whiff of nihilism — a will to the deep sleep. This desire to stop playing the game is actually a bit adolescent, a kind of tantrum in the face of reality. And while there is something depressing to me about these kids — about my kid — who want nothing more than to be jacked in, they live in the world as it is. The trick, for them, is not to escape the hegemony of the techno-global culture machine but to game it, to find their way in it, through it, to maximize their pleasure and reward (even if many of their attempts at pleasure are ill conceived).

In any case, once I recognized this dramatic shift in cultural mythos, in generational imaginations, it helped me understand my son and his cultural taste. Which made me realize how much of our conversations — political, economic, existential — are premised on how we imagine the world, what our mythos of the good life is, what challenges we believe exist.

As parents hailing from Gen X, we crave unplugging. But our kids live in a different world, a different imagination, in which our admonishments are, well, demented. Our kids are trying to create a good life within the machine precisely because there is no such thing as being unplugged. Think of what we tell our kids: Stop looking at your screens and go outside! But, for them, there is no outside.

The Violence of Taking Sides, or Become the Nuance You Want to See in the World

This is an excerpt from a book I'm writing about arguments. Which feels like cheating posting it here....

 

This episode eloquently articulates the violence — the fascism — at the heart of "sides."

Which side are you on? It seems like a fair question. There are arguments and battles everywhere. So, c’mon, which side you are on? Pick one!

But that’s one of those insidious questions that behooves us to interrogate it. Most conspicuously, the question can only come after the terms of the discussion have been established and sides drawn; otherwise, there’d be no sides to choose from. To ask the question, then, is to assume that we all agree to the establishment of a) the terms of the issue; and b) that there are these sides from which to choose. It’s a question that acts like it’s asking for your free choice but is, in fact, determining your thoughts before you’ve even had a chance to think.

Let’s look at an example: In the abortion issue, which side are you on? It seems innocuous, if poignant, as presumably you’re other pro-choice or pro-life. But what if you don’t agree to any of these terms? As I’ve argued elsewhere, by calling it “abortion,” we’ve already put focus on the fetus, not the woman. And then we ask: Do you think it’s a woman’s right to choose to end the life of the fetus? This is a loaded question! And terribly unfair to the woman. And, from a certain perspective, it’s an insane question to ask: as a society, we generally don’t leave the act of determining whether someone should live or not to the individual person. In such matters, “choice” doesn’t enter into the equation (of course, we could interrogate these assumptions; for instance, it seems odd that suicide is illegal, a crime against the state; but let’s put that aside for now). By calling it abortion, we’ve already decided that it’s a question of the progress — perhaps not a life, yet — of a fetus. But then saying that it’s a woman’s choice to decide what counts as life is, well, difficult to defend as a general law for a society.

What if we put the focus on the woman and her menstrual cycle and say: Should a woman have the right to regulate her own menstrual cycle? Well, that’s an absurd question that doesn’t even need to be asked because of course she does. Which is to say, if we change the terms of the question, eliminating the very concept of abortion, the issue vanishes just like that. Poof!

And yet people like to be on a side. It makes them feel less alone. How do I know this? Because it’s what we’ve doing for eons: creating, then choosing, sides. We side with these or those folks who look and talk like us. In a world of relentless argumentation, it’s nice to have sides to choose. You’re most likely not going to find someone with a MAGA hat at a pro-choice rally just as you won’t find a someone wearing tie dye and kicking a hacky sack at a MAGA rally. Sides are really more about a culture than a position, about belonging to a group. They share a vocabulary, a sense of humor, and places they shop. Sides are territories with rules and attire. The pussy hat, made popular during the Women’s March on DC, is a kind of flag staking its territory. And like any police state, sides have their modes of policing. Think about “Seinfeld’s” Kramer when he participates in the AIDS walk: he refuses to wear the ribbon and is beaten up for it. This is a common event at any march — someone wears the “wrong” thing and a hullaballoo breaks out.

Sides are fashion communities, the pussy hat a flag colonizing a certain vocabulary and territory.

But in the age of the argument, there are no longer two or even three sides to any position. As arguments proliferate, positions begin overlapping at funny angles, making it even more complex to figure out what to believe. For instance, there are proponents of psychedelics who want to medicalize it, turn these drugs into products for health and profit. And there are proponents of psychedelics who loathe the pharmaceutical companies, believing mushrooms, LSD, and DMT are paths to a cosmic consciousness — a health, for sure, but not in the way the medical industry defines it. I ask you: Are these two groups fighting for the same thing? I don’t think so. And yet they surely overlap at certain junctures. What’s true for psychedelics is true for so many so-called big issues such as gun control which is opposed by both racist separatists and by certain people in the black community who understandably feel under siege from those racist separatists as well as from our heavily armed police state. Are these two groups on the same side?

There’s a keenly hilarious scene in the Tina Fey TV show, “The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt.” Kimmie comes upon a protest, or multiple protests, around a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt asking for the statue to be taken down. One protest sign reads, “You belong in a statue of a kitchen” as another protester yells, “Eleanor Roosevelt gave us unrealistic expectations of cousins” (s4 e10). Meanwhile, a group of lesbians demand the statue come down because Eleanor never came out of the closet. Are these groups on the same side?

Are there even sides to begin with? To choose a side, to be on a side, is to assume that positions are already determined and beliefs are a matter of multiple choice rather than a matter of crafting questions and creating new ways of thinking. By assuming there are sides, we reinforce a territorial approach to belief, an approach we inherit from religions and the nation-state: Here, we believe this, not that! It's the gesture of conformity and colonization.

And we thereby eliminate the act of individual critical thinking. No need to ponder the issues. We’ve done that for you. Either you watch “Fox News” or “The Daily Show." No need to think for yourself. This is how those with power perpetuate their power: by determining the playing field. And, for the most part, people feel involved when they’re invited to play — to vote or tweet on a matter — without ever questioning the field of play or the rules of the game. We’ve come to believe that our freedom lies in choosing rather than creating the very playing field itself. The media, in particular, work hard to reinforce these reductions as it makes headlines much easier to write. It gets a whole lot messier if, every time a newspaper wanted to say something, it had to let you know what it considers the field and the rules of the game. No, it’s much easier — more lucrative — to regurgitate the given terms of a discussion.

Meanwhile, the very idea of sides perpetuates conflict and drama. Sides are thought of in geometric terms, stable spaces: on one side, there’s those kooks; and on the other side, those nutjobs. Perhaps there is some insignificant territory down in the corner, what the media like to call “independents.” But the architecture of sides is never questioned: there are sides, always pre-defined, to which are you invited. Of course, once there, you’re obliged to don the appropriate attire. Can’t watch Fox News with a pussy hat on. The very notion of a side is detrimental to our civility, eliminating independent thought while fostering oppositional aggression.

So what if we got rid of the very notion of sides and instead privileged nuance and difference, quirk and creativity? What if rather than taking sides and perpetuating them through institutions such as debate and conflict-driven media stories, we encouraged people to create their own territories, to craft their own questions. By always asking what side you’re on, we’re telling people that it’s not their job to think for themselves. The world of thought and belief, we tell them, is handed down to you by others. Your job is simply to pick a side (which, in some demented Orwellian turn, is then framed as freedom). It fosters what Nietzsche calls the herd mentality rather than critical, creative thinking that is particular, individual, novel.

Being on a side is to participate in a pre-established sets of beliefs, words, and customs. As Burroughs would say, I’m never on a side, I’m with it. He may be with a side — but only because he’s constitutive of it. He is the side. Which is a version of a great bumper sticker I once saw. You are not in traffic. You are traffic.

I want to proffer a different image for the public space of beliefs, one not premised on taking sides: a public discourse in which there will never have been sides. Rather, there will be nuance, idiosyncrasy, creativity, fresh perspectives. Instead of planting flags and shouting, there will be positions that take time to explain and time to understand — a slow belief movement, if you will. In the place of reductive headlines, there will be nuanced positions that have different modes of thought, that create new playing fields, that invent new rules. I imagine a public discourse premised on difference, not opposition.

My Course on Nietzsche for Renegade University

This is the free intro to what is a 2 hours course that covers what I feel are the main aspects of Nietzsche's thinking, writing, and approach. See here >

I broke the course into six sections:

1. Affirmation
2. On Truth and the Creative Instinct
3. On Morality, Slave and Noble
4. The World Reveals Itself
5. Living Beyond Good and Evil
6. Nietzsche, Postmodernism, and the Political

I think it's pretty good. And my beard was something to behold. It's since been groomed. 

And there are office hours you can sign up for (for a modest fee) and do one-on-one video calls with me. Lucky you! Lucky me!

Conversing with Trees

 

Look at these two trees. They're the same species, whatever that means, living yards from each other. 

Isn't it obvious that they're living different lives having having made different decisions along the way? 

Don't they exude distinctive style, each taking on the world in its own way?

Don't they communicate with the world quite differently?

I grew up for the most part just north of Manhattan in a tiny town along the Hudson River replete with big bold trees — old massive oaks and maples, some weeping willows, perhaps a Japanese maple or two and, well, that's all the tree names I know. I never took particular notice of said trees. They were always just there, a leafy green background. Mostly, I was wary of the poison ivy that plagued my young summers.

Then, in the early Fall of my junior year of high school, that all changed. One particular night, infused with sudden sensitivity, I could hear the trees. They weren't speaking words we know. This was not some magical world of lore where the trees whisper secrets to me about my life: Seek the love of the dark haired yogi, Vaguely Rabbinical One. Oy, that would be depressing. Can you imagine being a tree and caring whether I date someone or not? To imagine that trees care much about this human nonsense is absurd, limiting, and dangerous. Humans are one relatively minor part of an elaborate ecological symphony. Whether the trees reveal heretofore unknown truths to me is incidental rather than necessary. Like any communication, it can fall on deaf ears, be read this way or that, or just be plain old banal.

These trees weren't communicating in some arborescent semiotic system. This was not "Arrival" — no linguists were needed to parse this root grammar and decode verdant symbols. I'm sure trees have some sort of linguistic structures but I didn't need to know those to hear what these trees, mostly oaks, were saying.

And yet trees of course communicate as trees communicate. How could it be otherwise? A tree speaks a tree perspective, necessarily, just as I speak mine, the gnat its, bovine theirs, cars theirs, and so on. The language of the cosmos is babble and includes the organic and inorganic alike.

And yet we're not bound solely by our local linguistic structures. That would be a dramatically bad reading of what's come to be known as postmodern social constructivism which believes we write our own stories as we see fit. No one I have ever read has ever said such a thing. All arguments, all communication, happen within a milieu of bodies and forces that language inflects, hedges, and distributes. And vice-versa: forces and bodies inflect, hedge, and distribute language.

Communication is not something added to the world. Communication — whether linguistic, terrestrial, affective — is constitutive of the very fabric of the world. The universe communicates. Suns and planets flirt and fight, nudging, enticing, seducing each other. A galaxy is a conversation.

We speak to each other all the time across languages, time periods, geographies, and species. Some of this communication takes place within the linguistic economies of meaning — grammar, signs, inflection. These economies are themselves fundamentally cooperative: language, after all, doesn't belong to anyone. We share these words and these grammars. We operate together in this space of communication, in this in-between where meaning, affect, and bodies are proffered and metabolized — even when speaking in the traditional sense of words.

So when we talk about communication, let's not keep our focus restricted to the ways we learn languages in schools — memorizing conjugations, inflections, vocabulary. Those are just tools. Communication happens between bodies of every sort along multiple registers at once — conceptual, affective, desirous. And while we don't all technically speak the same language, we do all communicate in some form.

Why wouldn't we communicate with trees? Trees are so verbose, so expressive, always and necessarily — almost aggressively so. If you start paying attention, the din of it all can be deafening. But I only took notice, at 16 and suddenly sensitive, when the trees had shed their leaves. All these branches stopping, starting, shifting size and direction. In fact, we call this kind of inflection articulation as in these branches are so articulated and, well, so articulate. They gesture so much and so explicitly. Look. As the great poet, writer, and theorist Kat Mandeville wrote me, "the breeze in the leaves & branches is as emotion & thought is through a face."

Trees have so much to say. Don't you hear all that articulation. What's your reply?

To be clear, it was not a matter of the trees bestowing their ancient natural wisdom upon my foolish human ears. I never want to suggest that humans and our language are somehow lesser than any other language or life — of birds, buffalo, trees, gods. We speak our languages amid the great chorus of languages we call life. Everything speaks its tongue — rocks, doors, ants, kittens, children, plants, machines. And we can understand each other! Just as English speakers can make sense of other people while traveling through Asia, Africa, South America, we can make sense of other forms, living and not. How else could we function with the world if we weren't communicating with it? If linguistic structures were the sole mode of discursive engagement? There are other registers of meaning beyond, within, below our local dialects.

One of those books that pervades my thinking.

This is the premise of Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics in which understanding is a necessary component of communication. This position stands it stark contrast to Jacques Derrida's deconstruction where understanding is perpetually deferred — we look up a word in the dictionary, then all the words in that definition, then all the words in that definition, ad infinitum so meaning never arrives (for those interested, Derrida calls this différance; to read for this deferral in any text is what he calls deconstruction.) For Gadamer, understanding doesn't come from linguistic signification but from co-habitation of a space-time continuum or what he calls history. We are of this time and place, however linguistically or experientially different; our communication is hence necessarily of the same stuff. His Truth and Method is one of the books that pervades me to this day. (Gadamer and Derrida actually had a public debate about precisely this).

The trees, then, were speaking with me — not to me, with me. All communication, linguistic or otherwise, is multi-directional. It's never a true hermetic soliloquy. I was active in this conversation even if I had little of substance to add. I was only 16, after all. I think one reason I like talking with trees is what they have to say is usually more interesting than what I have to say. It's such a luxury to shut up and listen without being bored or annoyed. Trees are not inherently more interesting than people; they just happen to usually be as they've lived such different lives than I have and usually care about things more interesting than Trump, their job, their romantic lives, or their precious kids. But of course there are boring trees, too.

I say I could hear the trees but that isn't quite right. In fact, I'd say there was nothing to hear per se but that wouldn't be correct, either. I was certainly hearing them — only it wasn't just my ears in play. There was a murmuring, albeit incredibly articulate, that I could see and feel, both sensually and affectively. My senses, my body, and my feelings were being palpated by these trees. As in any rhetorical exchange, I was literally moved. These trees, like all things, were making an impression on me. Such is the way of all communication: when we see, hear, feel, smell, taste things, said things press upon us leaving their mark. All sensing is palpation of a sort.

Keeping senses distinct never suffices. Experience is necessarily synesthetic. How weird would it be if communication occurred through the silos of the senses? My ears hear but I don't sense you in any other way? Feel your presence? How could that be possible? We all know that the encounters we remember are communications that register at different registers at once — the conceptual to the erotic to the physical to the affective. Earthquakes are the earth communicating. All communication is vibratory, more or less intensive, more or less conceptual, more or less moving. We feel it as much as we understand it.

So when I found myself conversing with the trees, all of me was in play, not just my ears. Much of hearing a tree demands seeing. When you look at a tree, you see all these gestures, all these decisions: you see time. You see style. When I gesture, which I do often, said gesture comes and goes and my body goes on as it was before. But the gesture of a tree — the way a branch twists and turns and reaches for the sky — takes time. Trees wear and bear their decisions in their very fabric. We see these gestures happening sprawled over decades, over centuries, playing out before us. The rings of a tree are the most famous way trees wear their time. But it happens elsewhere as in the winding of a branch, the undulations of bark, in the reach of roots' reckoning.

And, sure, were I an arborist or botanist, I'd be able to decode much of a tree's communication. But that language never suffices for surely trees communicate more than what particular climate or animal phenomena shaped their bark or whether they're sick. In fact, I'm tempted to say that being privy to that knowledge can impede your communication with trees as all you're looking for are signs — and signs are necessarily backwards looking, pointing to pre-established meanings. Communication, however, happens now. Yes, it's always historical but it's also part of a moving, living body expressing itself — its mood, desires, its longing — in the moment. Much of what we say lurks in the how.

A tree's gestures are slow, taking decades, even centuries. Look at how this tree dances. Such style! We see its gestures emerging, a dance in achingly patient slow-mo. 

Look at a tree. Look how it winds, twists, and turns. It doesn't grow with maximum efficiency. Its growth is not a matter of instinct, at least not as we imagine instinct. You can see the decisions of the tree, how it bends and bows just so, spreads its branches and leaves. Trees grow for fun; they grow for love, with love, in love. They play just as all living things play. How do I know this? They tell me.

When I left my home town for college in Philly, I thought I'd lost the thread of my conversations with trees. It was as if all I could speak was oak and maple. But then one day as I was traipsing down one of the the utterly depressing streets of West Philadelphia — much of West Philly is actually quite gorgeous — I was stopped in my tracks by this wise cracking ginkgo. It had its leaves. And it wasn't offering anything that seemed of cosmic import. It was just a particularly witty tree. Every time I'd see it, I'd crack up. And, no, I wasn't laughing at this tree; it was not funny looking. I was laughing with this tree because it was just so dry and funny.

This surprised me. I think I always imagined that trees could only be serious. Wit seemed so, well, human. But I was wrong: wit and humor are constitutive of the cosmos. We know this from watching animals play; they can often be tricky, clever, and silly with each other. The same is true of foliage: it can be clever, witty, playful, funny.

Since that one night in 1986, I've been able to speak with trees. For a while, this communication came readily and was in fact so loud, their bellowing often drowned out everything else. I had to hush them. Over time, this conversational ease with the trees faded. It became more difficult to hear them. These days, I have to stop and listen, open myself up, as if recalling those fragments of French I heard as a child.

Such is the way of all hearing, all communication: it takes an opening up with all one's senses. Amid the din of the everyday, we tend to fall into the habit of only hearing the strictly linguistic, the things people say, the what and not the how. But such words are only one aspect of any communication, of any conversation, of any event. The world speaks to us if we know how to listen. The world speaks with us if we know how to converse.