On Flashbacks, or, On Going Back In

Music: Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon/Division Bell

O (name of voyager) The time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the (name) game are about to cease. You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light. You are about to experience it in its reality. In the ego-free state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum; At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state. O (name of voyager, that which is called ego-death is coming to you. --Timothy Leary, "Instructions for Use During a Psychedelic Session"

There is a curious point in the psychedelic experience when a "voyager" (to use Leary's terminology) recognizes simultaneously the call of a familiar stranger (Alpert/Ram Das' "Be Here Now") and familiar feeling of "place." The call is usually in the form of a voice, either of a fellow voyager or of one's self (the sudden recognition of self-moaning). Listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon this morning as a read the paper reminded me of the call; the album opens with the gradually audible sound of a heart beat, and when the first vocals come calling, they say: "Breathe, breathe, in the air, don't be afraid to care/Leave but don't leave me/Look around and choose your own ground." It's obviously the call of mother, the welcoming and horrifying experience of what David Schwarz terms a "threshold crossing." This call of both comfort and responsibility ("welcome back" and "don't leave me" or "don't hurt anybody") is inextricably related to place or a familiar feeling of place: here I am, again. Later in the Pink Floyd album, when the opening song reprises after a tutorial on "time," Gilmour sings: "Home, home again/I like to be here when I can . . . . " Over a decade ago, when I was still experimenting with lysergic acid on a routine basis, I remember when my fellow voyagers and I dosed we tended to find this place of recognition at the same time and one of us would provide the maternal voice with a grin and moan, or by saying something like, "here we are again."

Homologous feelings in more mundane reality are not difficult to pin-point: aside from the obvious experience of sexual intercourse (much less so self-love), I sometimes sense the pleasure of threshold crossings when I return to the classroom at the beginning of a new semester, or when I'm (unusually) aware of falling asleep, or when resting my head in the lap of a good listener, or when I'm suddenly brought to an exciting memory, like this morning, when on a whim I decided to listen to Dark Side of the Moon. Such crossings are not always pleasant ones, of course: newborns do not seem particularly happy whey they are greeted for the first time.

Isn't Ziggy the perfect illustration of the psychedelic threshold crossing? Or the newest news of the weird, a toddler who so strongly desired a stuffed animal within a toy machine at the local Wal-Mart that he crawled back into the lost and desired familiar place? We are told by reporters that, rather than shame or blame the child, the parents were so bemused by the incident they bought a disposable camera to capture images of the seemingly impossible. We can probably assume the child was greeted with laughter and soothing voices, confirmation of his sojourn back to that familiar place . The story reminds me of an anecdote Freud tells in The Interpretation of Dreams about his famous daughter: little Anna dreams of eating lots of strawberries. If I remember correctly, Freud says such a dream doesn't need too much interpretation. Similarly, we need not belabor the point that our would-be Houdini has crawled back into the womb.

I suppose the problem of this fantasy, like all fantasy, is that too easily tempts the sloth of Love, or mistaking the familiar place and voice with self-transparency (one's own voice as the core seat of consciousness; Derrida's early career compellingly details why this is a huge problem). The trouble with Leary, I realize only having come down from my drug use many, many years ago, is that this feeling is mistaken for a loss of "ego." He also ignored the evil that people do protecting or returning to their lost familiar places, and even that sometimes you need to force people from their "ego-less-ness" to keep the lost alive. I think the concept of utopia is much more worthy of defense than (re)birthing metaphor (e.g., being "born again" in that cheerful, Christian fundamentalist sense) because utopia is from the onset impossible. Zion is a much better surrogate for the womb precisely because you really cannot go back; fucking your way up the chain of being is really a euphemism for fucking people over, however funny or cute they may think you are.

Perhaps this is why some of us fear having children.