I often wonder if, in my dotage, I have lived a full enough
life – so many activities in which I have not participated, so many sensations
untasted, so many ideas undeveloped, so many places unvisited, so much
knowledge untouched. Yet very few of us are polymaths, avid researchers or men
of action or are even in the slightest degree adventurous. I have settled into a
comfortable, privileged married life as a member of the British middle classes,
rational, Tory-voting, Brexit-supporting, after a solid career in finance, now holding
mainly conservative opinions with a slight dash of liberalism, leading a calmly
conventional life-style, enjoying classic books and music. Oh my God, how
paralyzingly boring, I hear my critics groan!
I guess in some respects my critics are right. It was our old
friend Nietzsche who described the twin natures of Man, the famed dichotomy, as
consisting of the Apollinarian and the Dionysian. The Apollinarian “plays a
straight bat to life” – I have those “qualities” in spades – while the
Dionysian is passionate, thinks outside the box, is self-indulgent or even
orgiastic, and surrounds himself with the enchanting and the magical. I am
sadly deficient in these qualities. We all have a tincture of both sets of
characteristics but clearly the Dionysian has most of the fun, damn him!
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| Apollo Dionysos |
I wonder about what I have missed. There were plenty of
influences in my youth which could have led me down more esoteric by-ways but somehow,
I flunked my chances. I read intellectually curious Aldous Huxley and he had
published his The Doors of Perception
in 1954 recording his experimental use of the drug mescaline in 1953 in his
West Hollywood house. The psychedelic and hallucinatory effect of the mushroom-derived
drug became well-known and its use was encouraged by “Beat” writers like Jack Kerouac
and William Burroughs (whom I also read) and the poet Allen Ginsberg (whom I
never did). A more immediate influence was the poet, writer and classical
interpreter Robert Graves, a leonine and eccentric figure, who became professor
of poetry at Oxford in 1961. I attended a lecture he gave at the Oxford Union
when he too described taking the hallucinogenic mushroom substance psilocybin
in a Mexican ritual and his subsequent visions. Graves did not recommend the
use of the drug and in time stopped his experiments. Graves was particularly
interested in the alleged use of “magic mushrooms” in ancient religions and
speculated that the prophet Ezekiel and the writer of the wildly apocalyptic Revelation of St John had swallowed a
similar drug.
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| Robert Graves |
Both Huxley and Graves were Dionysian characters. Their
examples coincided with an unleashing of a psychedelic LSD flood and an orgy of
drug-taking and pill-popping in the Western world. Pop musicians led the charge
– Elvis, the Beatles and a host of others. Pot-smoking became endemic in US
campuses and cities, criminal gangs developed the trade and much human misery
ensued amid some transient pleasure. All this passed me by and so square am I
that I admit I have never smoked a joint or “spliff,” as the lingo has it.
Huxley and Graves were Englishmen but they lived principally in California or
Majorca, where the sun beats down addling the brain. A few months in rainy
Huddersfield would have washed some sense through them and put their hats
straight!
The mystical or hallucinatory are not my thing. Such
experiences are private and attempts to describe them are often unhelpful. A
recent Telegraph reviewer, Steven
Poole, cites gibberish like “I was turned
into a sheaf of little papers and they were being scattered in the wind…. I was
paint!” or the lady who exulted she was “literally holding the face of Osama bin Laden” or the American
academic who “felt as though he had been repeatedly
sucked into the asshole of God”. Enough said.
No, on reflection I am content that my life has been
straight-forward and uncomplicated. We have quite enough excitement with
meteorological events, earthquakes and the daily tweets of Donald Trump. Let
accessible Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde carry the modest burden of our split personalities.
SMD
30.10.18
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2018
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