The Psychedelic Savior Part III: The Children of the Clayburners

The story of this extended blog so far: the idea of “mental health” falls short because it focuses on a disease model for individuals to the exclusion of social realities and ancestral traumas. This medical approach patches up flagging individuals so they can get back on the hamster wheel of life and continue producing and consuming. A more viable description of the human condition comes from William Blake and his famous saying that if the doors of perception were cleansed we would see everything as it is – infinite. This blog is a meditation on that thought. Aldous Huxley, who used Blake’s quote for the title of his book on psychedelics, points out that the human mind acts as a reducing valve, rendering the feast of sensory information into a measly trickle that serves our evolutionary but not our spiritual purposes. And so the task is to clean up our doors of perception so we can live more fulfilling and compellingly happy lives. 

 Who then, is out there to serve as a good model for uncluttered doors of perception? There is of course the temporary person equipped with a tripping brain, but that person comes back to earth rather quickly, and anyway we shall look at them later. Outside of that I see three firm candidates: mystics, some indigenous peoples (the ones who don’t have their own empires and hierarchies) and children. We will start with the people we know best because we have all been one: children.

Children are annoying. When you have to wipe someone’s ass or grab hold of their hand in case they impulsively dart out into the traffic, it’s hard to think of them as your superior. On the other hand, it stands to reason that on Day One each person comes into the world with clear doors of perception and it is the burden of experience and acculturation (i.e. contact with you, me and the rest of us adults) that clogs things up. Babies, for instance, are enormously entertaining because they find everything around them enormously entertaining. To the infant, ogling away at what you and I might call an empty room, a paper tissue sticking out of a tissue box and waving in the wind is just as incredible as a shooting star, or the greatest piece of artwork in the world, or a pink sparkly unicorn telling a joke to a traffic cop, for that matter. They don’t have to work to find the extraordinary in what we have deemed ordinary.

The job of a culture is to acculturate of course, and our culture is far from alone in making the acculturation process one of limiting the growing infant mind. Despite the lip service to individualism, we are not encouraged, each one of us, to walk to the beat of our own personal drummer. At some point we have to go to school, learn stuff and get with the programme. And when it comes to remembering what it was like to have uncluttered doors of perception, biology is against us too. Starting around the age of five and going through to about ten, a “synaptic pruning” happens, where the brain dumps its less-travelled neural pathways and gets on with the business of becoming a coherent social person. Pathways of thinking and feeling that don’t get used so much are pruned away, and so are do most of our early memories.

Those pre-pruning years from infancy through toddlerhood are like one long psychedelic trip, with a couple big grown-ups on hand as your personal trip sitters. Then for the next few years you are still tripping pretty hard, except as you start to come down you notice how annoying and bossy your trip sitters can be. It’s then, before we have properly learned to sit still, behave, be nice, learn numbers and learn shame, that the doors of perception are still swinging wide open. That’s when food tastes stunning or outright disgusting, and scary things like darkened bedrooms become a sheer terror filled with ghosts, burglars and monsters, while fun is just so much fun. Maybe the most spiritual thing about childhood is that the distance between us and the world is pretty much zero.

This is one of the most easily forgotten facts of childhood, and Phillip Pullman, in his fantasy novel The Amber Spyglass, captures its pure unalloyed joy. The child hero of the book, Lyra Belacqua, goes down into the land of the dead in hopes to rescue her best friend Roger. The ghosts of the dead children have been down there so long they have almost forgotten the world of sense impressions, and they crave it more than anything else. Lyra tells them about Oxford, where she grew up, and where the children of the town are in a constant state of war with the children of the clayburners, who live outside of town by the river. The main weapons of this war are huge great lumps of clay from the river bank:

“Please!” they were whispering, “You’ve just come from the world! Tell us, tell us! Tell us about the world!”

…And Lyra began to talk about the world she knew…she told them about the great battle between the Oxford townies and the clayburners. First she described the claybeds, making sure she got in everything she could remember, the wide ocher-colored washing pits, the dragline, the kilns like great brick bee hives. She told them about the willow trees along the river’s edge, with their leaves all silvery underneath; and she told them how when the sun shone for more than a couple of days, the clay began to split up into great handsome plates, with deep cracks between, and how it felt to squish your fingers into the cracks and slowly lever up a dried plate of mud, trying to keep it as big as you could without breaking it. Underneath it was still wet, ideal for throwing at people…As she spoke, playing on all their senses, the ghosts crowded closer, feeding on her words, remembering the time when they had flesh and skin and nerves and senses, and willing her never to stop.

Then Lyra describes the final battle, where the different factions of townie children gang up together to attack the children of the clayburners and all the kids were:

…hurling handfuls and handfuls of heavy, claggy clay at one another, rushing their muddy castle and tearing it down, turning the fortification into missiles until the air and the ground and the water were all mixed inextricably together, and every child looked exactly the same, mud from scalp to sole, and none of them had had a better day in all their lives.

But it is not only the children who are entranced by Lyra’s description, even the harpies, the malign and bitter guardians of the underworld, come up and listen with secret longing to her simple tales:

As well as the ghosts, silent all around her and her companions, close and living, there was another audience too: the branches of the trees were clustered with those dark bird forms, their women’s faces gazing down at her solemn and spellbound.

The harpies will tear you limb from limb if you veer from the truth, but because Lyra stays away from her normal fantasies and tall tales, and sticks only to tangible sense impressions, they will eventually release her from the underworld and allow her go on to the next step in her adventures. Not only that, the power of her truth-telling leads the harpies to eventually agree to change their role from tormentors of the dead to conducting them through the underworld and out to freedom, where they can finally dissolve back among the elements of the physical world. The spell of the everyday is a special magic, or as William Blake said, “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

This recognition of the tangible as the spiritual is often the lesson of psychedelic experiences too.  Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, describes how in his mescaline trip he encountered colour, form, and texture entirely anew:

The vase contained only three flowers – a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose.. a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold, heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the traditional rules of good taste. At breakfast I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

 …what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were – a transience, that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing, that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute , unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of existence…At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I – or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace – cared to look at.

This is the state that W.B. Yeats described in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul:”

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

And everything we look upon is blest.

It is not just the great artists and thinkers who have access to this, but all of us everyday people, since as far as the universe is concerned, we are all members of the same club. The first experience of it for me did not involve flowers, but Lyra-like mud, mud, glorious mud. It was in my college days, just as my first ever acid was coming on, and I stood with two friends on a bridge overlooking the very unimpressive river of our college town. It was low tide, and as I looked out over the lack of river and abundance of mud, old tyres and tin cans, I realised I had never come even remotely close to seeing mud before. I was, like Huxley, released from my own throttling grip, and there before me was an extraordinary and enchanting richness almost pulsing with joy and life, endless details and landscapes beckoning at my attention, while a totally unforeseen variety of colour, from burnished bronze to thick, rich browns and decadent yellows melted me. We stood on that bridge for I don’t know how long, taking in the banquet of impressions. It was a brief lesson in infinity, showing that you never need grand vistas or complex art to become awestruck by beauty. Leonard Cohen said as much in a song that came out in those same days:  

Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river,

She is wearing rags and feathers from salvation army counters

And the sun pours down like honey on Our Lady of the Harbour

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,

There are heroes in the seaweed there are children in the morning

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds the mirror.