Outside of a Dog (15 page)

I didn’t. I’d sectioned off the new alternative lifestyle, the music, the language, the drugs, and turned them into leisure pursuits. You could put on your hippy gear, as well as
your Commoner’s Gown. You could turn on, sure, but you could also turn off: partake, or not. In short, I was tempted, I had fun, and I hardly learned a thing.

Not then, anyway. What Tom Wolfe eventually taught me was something about Ludwig Wittgenstein, when I came to read him ten years later. And Wittgenstein helped me, retrospectively, to grasp why
Tom Wolfe wrote as he did. This instance of the Law of Unexpected Consequences may strike you as no big deal, but at the time, and even in retrospect, I am as grateful to both of them as I am to,
well, the Grateful Dead. This insight gleaned from my days as a pseudo-hippy is confirmation, no doubt, of the fact that I am not – and never was, even in those heady days – much of a
psychotropic risk-taker. I had no real desire for a new kind of life, nor to talk and think like one of the Haight-Ashbury types. I just about managed to incorporate ‘cool’ into my
vocabulary (it’s still there) but as for ‘groovy’, ‘far-out’, ‘good vibrations’, the many variations of having one’s mind ‘blown’, none
of these stuck. I just don’t talk like that, and I don’t live the sort of life that makes it necessary to do so.

That kind of language was largely reserved for teenage wannabes and their (uncomprehending) parents, bad pop songs (as well as a few good ones), and crappy journalists – it was the
homogenized and commercial form of the real thing. The new language was used – all those groovies and far-outs – by the characters satirized in the ‘head comics’ of the
time, by Mr Natural and Flakey Foont, Honeybunch Kaminsky (who wanted some more orgasms), and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. No, to hear the language that was really generated by the
psychedelic experience, you had to have been there, and done that. Failing that, you needed a good journalist. You needed Tom Wolfe. ‘I have tried,’ Wolfe tells us, ‘not only to
tell what the Pranksters did, but to recreate the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don’t think their adventure can be understood without that.’ That is, starkly: you can
only understand the inner reality of people who are zonked out of their minds on LSD if you find the right language to convey it. Because what you experience determines what you can say, and
likewise what you can say determines what you may experience.

In
The Philosophical Investigations
, a work filled with memorable poetic perception, Wittgenstein remarks that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’. It is never
entirely clear what this means: like most poetic language it both demands and resists explication, and is diminished by commentary that makes this wonderfully suggestive metaphor into some prosaic
paraphrase. Wittgenstein made his intentions clear: ‘philosophy,’ he says, ‘ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.’ He means
exactly
what he says:
‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him,’ but not
only
what he says.

Imagine, if you will, a talking lion. Try to have a conversation with him. Where and how might such a conversation occur? What might you have in common? What sort of experiences might a lion
have, what sort of life might he lead, what might he wish or need to say? What might you wish to say to him? Would he understand?

It doesn’t matter how hard you try. You
cannot
understand him: he’s a lion and you’re not. (Or, as the Pranksters put it: ‘either you’re on the bus or
you’re not on the bus.’) We might be reading a poem by Blake, or a story by Oscar Wilde, or Richard Brautigan Or . . . perhaps . . . a song by Jefferson Airplane? Peter, Paul and Mary?
The Incredible String Band? Far out.

But I
can
imagine a talking lion: he would talk like any of the myriad creatures who ‘people’ children’s literature, and speak to us in the language we use and
understand ourselves. The tortoise, the hare, the White Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Pooh. Who couldn’t understand them? They convey their animalness by denying it through the very language that is
imposed upon them. If a lion were to sidle up to me and say, ‘I say, old bean, you’re looking rather delicious today,’ I would certainly understand him. At the same time, I would
presume that I was not about to be eaten, because no
lion
could talk like that. That’s why children aren’t terrified by their talking animals, no matter how gruff. They’re
people, really, in animal drag.

So Wittgenstein’s lion must talk real lion-language, call it Lionish, which is not like, say, Latvian, which is incomprehensible to most of us until a translator helps us, and then we can
understand. When a lion says
growl!
we may assume his appetite and infer his intention – I say it too when offered a hamburger – but the ancillary meanings would be entirely lost
on us.

Lionish is an example of what Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game’, which ‘is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the
speaking
of language is part of an
activity, or of a form of life’. What is a lion’s form of life? Does he have any ethical problems with killing a helpless animal? Why does he choose one rather than another? When he
kills, does he take pleasure in it? Is the new meal delicious, even better than the last? Does he feel he should share? Is he scared of elephants? When he says
growl!
or
roar!
it
would be inappropriate for us to claim that we know what he means. We can’t empathize with a lion, we have too little in common. You can’t understand Lionish unless you have
lion-experience: forms of language, Wittgenstein insists, are inextricable from forms of life. Meaning is a matter of context.

I don’t wish to suggest that Pranksters and other acid heads were lions, and thus incomprehensible, though they sometimes insisted that their experience was not shareable unless one
dropped acid as well: as if, to understand a lion, you had to join the pack, drink from a watering hole, stalk wildebeest, and roar in the night. You
can
just about imagine that, even if you
can’t do it. Kesey eventually came to feel that ecstatic and boundary-breaking experience was possible without the drugs, and that this should be the goal. And though he was not interested in
conveying the experience in words – ‘I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph’ – he never quite denied that this was possible. It just didn’t interest
him. Like Neal Cassady, he didn’t want to
think
anymore.

It was Wolfe’s task to find ‘the right language to convey this curious new form of life’. The line of thought is derived entirely from Wittgenstein. When puzzling over my first
reading of
The Philosophical Investigations
, trying to find examples of what Wittgenstein was driving at, my mind went back to Tom Wolfe, and the solution he had found to making us
understand the apparently foreign, distant and incomprehensible. That is the job of the writer, of course, and I wonder if Wittgenstein underestimated somewhat what great writing is and can do? We
can’t understand what a lion might say because we do not know how and what he feels. Read D.H. Lawrence’s animal poems, or Ted Hughes’, and you get at least the impression of some
vivid understanding of what a cow might feel and be, or a bear, or a crow.

That’s what writers try to do. Not tell us how animals feel, but how other people do. After all, what is claimed about the lion – that he has a form of life too foreign for us to
understand what he might have to say – was being claimed also, in 1968, by women, say, and blacks, anxious to reclaim their own territory, power and language. How could a white male begin to
understand the experience of someone with a womb and menstrual cycle, or with dark skin? Both groups have been discriminated against. What effrontery, even to try to understand. Leave that to women
writers, and to black ones.

This is neither a sympathetic position nor a defensible one, but it has some truth in it. Did Freud not admit that women were lions to him, that he could not understand, after years of
observation, what it was that they wanted? There is some general truth lurking here. If lions, women and blacks cannot be understood from outside the group, why is it not also true of men, or
whites? After all, what woman could fully comprehend the gloopy mixture of aggression, competitiveness, insecurity and lust that drives most men?

The implications are clear: how do I understand you? Or you, me? We all roam our internal savannahs, bask in our own sun, hunt our own zebra. Even in our most intimate relationships we are
frequently struck by the sheer distance that separates one mind – one person – from another. In those days we would say, exasperatedly, ‘you don’t know where I’m
coming from,’ as if by an effort of will our partner or friend might be able to bridge the chasm between one mind and another. If a
person
could talk, we could not understand them?

Unless, perhaps, we were reading a novel. What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in – fully understand –
the inward world of another person. To get the connection between the form of life they are placed in, and the language that they speak. In this sense – a limited one, but satisfying –
I know Leopold Bloom better than I know my wife. There is nothing unknown about him, his motives are revealed to the extent that he has them, everything that he feels is displayed. This is
satisfying, but it’s not enough. That is of course why one prefers life to literature: because knowing is less exciting and less satisfying than
not
knowing.

The implication is ironic and amusing. Wolfe invents his electric prose to deal with the extremities of a form of life – the acid experience – that is so foreign that we can’t
seem to apprehend it. Yet in so doing, he stumbles across a general truth. Acid heads are alien to us, and seem to operate from a lion-like distance from ordinary life,
but there is no ordinary
life
. We are all irremediably foreign and separate. And so you can write like that, you need to write like that, not merely about Pranksters, but about anyone and everybody. Wolfe’s later
books use similar prose to describe much less outrageous characters, to describe ‘ordinary’ people who, once you start to get them, are almost as zappy, as other, as those Pranksters
were.

So vivid was the experience of reading Tom Wolfe, that his readers wanted to become Pranksters:
to be on the bus
. To hop on to what the Beatles were to call, in their derivative and
commercially watered-down version, the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’. Great writing does that to and for you. It was a terrific fantasy, to use one of Kesey’s favourite words. To be that
free
, to push all boundaries, demand the ecstatic rather than the everyday, to do one’s own thing entirely, pass that acid test.

But all these reasons for disapproving were, finally, persuasive, though I indulged my fascination. I knew my inner Prankster was purely a fantasy figure, not something to live by, but something
to contemplate, and perhaps to learn from. Learn about what I could and could not do, who I was, and wasn’t.

No, what I really wished, wished fervently but without hope of success (as one would wish to play golf like Tiger Woods) was to write like Tom Wolfe. To give myself fully to experience, and to
learn from it. To empathize without losing separateness of judgement: if there is plenty of the enthusiasm of Allen Ginsberg in his project, Holden Caulfield is there as well, as evidenced by the
occasional fastidious use of the term
phoney
. Though I realized perfectly clearly that I would never be able to write like
that
, even so there was plenty to learn from Tom Wolfe:
participate – give yourself to – what you see and write about. Be both in and out of it. Find the right language, the inevitable language, to capture the form of life you are observing
and participating in. Take some risks. Listen to the lions. And above all:
Make it fun
.

It was a great lesson, and I forgot it almost immediately. Indeed, I have had to continually remind myself of it for the rest of my life, for the pressure to regard reading and writing as forms
of work – which is endemic to the form of life, and its associated language, that academics have chosen – is inexorable. I went back to Oxford at the end of the summer of 1968, grew my
beard, and began work on a DPhil on Joseph Conrad’s moral vision. There’s nothing obviously playful about such a project. If there was fun to be had in it – and there might well
be, to someone more free-spirited than I was then – I never found it, never established any synergy between being serious and having fun. You had to choose. Oxford is the setting, after all,
for the mournful poetry of Matthew Arnold, not the electric effusiveness of Tom Wolfe.

9

The Abysmal
(
Water
). It was apparently an uncommon reading, and potentially a disastrous one. Barbara and I had thrown the
I Ching
sticks, seeking guidance
as to whether we should get married.
We
couldn’t decide, perhaps the ancient wisdom of the Orient might point us in the right direction? The text seemed to issue a clear warning to us,
and particularly to me: