The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
The journalistic book about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters that helped catapult the whole psychedelic movement of the 1960s by the great author of Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff influenced my thought patterns recently while re-reading it in the Southern California sun. It’s a great read and an accurate account of The History of the Sixties and Wolf’s style mimics a psychedelic experience and mirrors the crazy sequences in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
In other words, it’s a manual for liberation.
The style in my Journal has been forever influenced. Here is a small excerpt:
I took a break for a little while and went out on the front grass with my new Christmas mug of white tea, sat in the green cracked Adirondack and continued my re-read of Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that I “borrowed” from the cafe up in Fair Oaks. Been wanting to work today, but the baby and all the kids make it impossible and this was my one little respite.
Well, it will probably end up being a very long respite because I see the whole Orphic tradition laid out before me, as I’ve done so often, from Dionysus and the yogis and the swamis and the phenomenologists and the rebel priests like Thomas Aquinas, and the slave owning American Elite wine drinking founders and through to the beats and now these hippies and my days in the Haight and wandering around Europe and North Africa on the heels of all of ‘em. And Burroughs and Kerouac and Even Lewis and Clarke and now Kesey is explaining it again, through Wolfe, and Huxley opens our eyes and the Pranksters and reminds me of my times at Burning Man, all that Day-Glo continuity vs. the White Smocks and the owners of large art cars and money and my “Company” and all my many left brained endeavors that don’t go anywhere, but Melissa, bless her sweet wonderful soul, when I tell her this story of my capitulations and see-saw going nowhere reminds me that the left brain goes on a binge and when the whole person rebels it is an integration, the right brain never “Games the Throne” like the left, never competes for dominance, it has compassion for the left and brings it in closer, learning from it’s sorrowful filtering, integrating and coming out grander in the end.
The sun is setting in the glorious Southern California golden stillness. A toy freeway far away with tires the sound of the ocean. Light in my eye, filtered by the fruitless avocado. Reading of the lime neon dust light of the Santa Cruz Redwoods. Ken Kesey trying to graduate. Moving on. You can’t keep going through the door of perception forever. You have to move on and he wants to be that catalyst. Most of the people just want to get high. So he’s shunned the intellectuals and now he shuns the heads. Utopia is crumbling, but something else will accommodate and integrate. Meanwhile people paint on their bodies and connect – I’ve already used the term intersubjectivity – so I’ll stop right there.
Keep reading my Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test with much interest and intrigue. This is going to either save me or take me further off the rails. It keeps happening, I have to acknowledge these things. The tradition I keep coming back to is Mysticism. Orpheus, Dionysus, Plotinus, Spinoza, Aquinas. LSD. Freud’s “Oceanic feeling”. Syncretism. The “union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God” (wiki). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism#cite_note-EB-Mysticism-2. Burning Man. Coming back from San Francisco and feeling free, Jungian synchronisticism, Weberly cult-like-heroism. One with the ball. Attuned to Nature. The One and the Many.
But for me it’s never been divine or magical. It’s always been an integration of an “experience” with the “experienced.” In other words, I’ve always looked at the Oceanic Feeling and found reasons, causes, grounds, words. And these words have always confused me because they annihilate the experience and nullify it. “You can’t put it into words,” is expressed by the Pranksters and experientialists of every stripe. But now Melissa gives me another way to treat it. I’ve integrated a left brained thought with a right brained connection, or vice versa.
So it’s a big continuum that links the Orphic and Mystic and Ascetic with the Paleolithic, the shamans, the Greeks and the Hindus and the Christians and the early gnostics, and the jazz musicians and the boojjers and the bohos and the acid heads and the stoners and the opium eaters and the blissed out in general and the long road trippers and the Mexicans and the Garcias and hand drummers and sunshine lovers and lovers in general and fathers and mothers of all kinds and specifically the father of beautiful babies and toddlers, beating psychedelic pollies on living room tables with egg beaters, whisks of all kinds filling my earholes with glorious PsychoSyncretic ™ thought – the kind of thought that is thunk with both hemispheres at once, with both hear holes, with all perspectives, with compassionate and empathetic narratives, associative and disassociative, with cheese AND crackers – and not to mention the beats and the pranksters and the club scene and the burners and the fugitives of all kinds.
YouSeeWhatI’mSayin’?