The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (20 page)

In the early sixties, the sci-fi authors we loved were the old-school giants: Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, James Blish, and especially Arthur C. Clarke. Jules Verne was an early favorite, as was H.G. Wells, whose novel
The Time Machine
had a big impact on me in my preteen years. The notion of time travel fascinated me then (and does now) and fed a preoccupation with the future and the nature of time that Terence and I shared. But it was Clarke who had the greatest impact on our thinking, thanks largely to his novels
Childhood’s End
(1953) and
The City and the Star
s (1956). Those two early books strike me as more inspired than much of his later work, even
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), although that comes close.

The City and the Stars
begins in Diaspar, a super-technological city a billion years in Earth’s future whose inhabitants maintain their longevity through what Clarke termed the Eternity Circuits, an early anticipation of nanotechnology. Only a fraction of the populace is incarnate at a given time; the rest are stored as solid-state templates in the Central Computer. (Clarke’s notion of uploaded consciousness is yet another of his glimpses of the eventually possible, though in this case not one in the foreseeable future). The novel takes the form of a hero’s journey, a classic shamanic tale. Its main figure, Alvin, is a “Unique” who, unlike his fellow inhabitants, has an irresistible compulsion to leave Diaspar, though no one has ventured out for more than a hundred million years.
The City and the Stars
is actually a revision of Clarke’s first novel,
Against the Fall of Night
(1948). The result is an incredible work—ahead of its time then, and ahead of ours now.

Childhood’s End,
a “first contact” story, is another classic. It begins in what for Clarke was still the near future. Just as the Soviets and Americans near the furious end of their race to launch the first space probe, mile-wide starships appear, poised over every major city in the world. And there they remain, or seem to, asserting their presence but otherwise hardly communicating. Decades pass; eventually the population becomes so accustomed to the vessels they are all but ignored. It is then that the visitors send an emissary to the surface, a figure whose shocking appearance activates a number of archetypes long buried in the human psyche. Several movies have addressed the first-contact theme, including
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) and
Independence Day
(1996). All of them, even a classic like the 1951 version of
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, are rather lame compared to
Childhood’s End,
and it puzzles me that no one has brought the book to the screen. Its themes are even timelier today than when it was published many decades ago.

Terence and I were also drawn to H. P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth-century writer who captivated many of our peers. Lovecraft’s work is not exactly science fiction, but rather belongs, in my view, to a sub-genre, science-fiction horror. His work is suffused with various horrors originating beyond the stars, from the depths of the oceans, or in the remote past. These things are non-human, alien,
eldritch
—Lovecraft’s favored word for the uncanny or strange—that may lie undisturbed for millennia, known only to a few cognoscenti. Inevitably, these horrors erupt into the comfortable, familiar world, usually due to some character’s foolish curiosity and inability to resist meddling in matters best left to rest. For us, these themes were far more compelling than those of Edgar Allan Poe, for example. Poe and others tended to write about “ghosties and ghoulies,” a more pedestrian brand of horror with origins in the repressed dark side of the Judeo-Christian mindset. Lovecraft went beyond that, hinting at horrors far more ancient than civilization, humanity, or even earth itself. A recurring theme is that scientific curiosity, our pursuit of forbidden knowledge, and our reckless flirtation with malevolent cosmic forces carry the potential to undermine the very foundations of reality.

For whatever reason, we loved these ideas, or at least we loved scaring ourselves with the notion that just beyond the veil of the mundane world were multiple realities that could manifest themselves at any time. Lovecraft made his tales all the more effective by not over-describing his malevolent entities, leaving the details to the reader’s imagination. I suspect the movie
Alien
(1979) was influenced by Lovecraft; the creature is certainly an unspeakable horror from “somewhere else” in the universe (we never do learn where), and “alien” to everything human; but one never gets a complete view of it until the climactic moment when Ripley blasts him (her? it?) out the airlock. Until then, one sees fleeting glimpses that evoke our nightmares of things insectile, spidery, reptilian, octopoid, crab-like, slimy, shiny, machine-like, shark-like—but never a full picture. The viewer must fill in the details, to far more terrifying effect.

Another writer we admired was Philip K. Dick, although we didn’t read him until the late sixties. If Lovecraft was the master of trans-dimensional horror, Dick might be called the master of the “paranoid” genre of science fiction. His fiction often centers on themes of alternate realities, or on characters that discover they are victims of massive political conspiracies, or that their reality is an illusion or a drug-induced hallucination. More than any other sci-fi author at the time, Dick, who died in 1982 at age fifty-three, explored plot devices related to psychoactive drugs and altered states. Amphetamine was his drug of choice, and much of his early fiction was apparently written under its influence. Dick published
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch—
there’s the Lovecraftian influence again—in 1965. Though
Rolling Stone
declared it the “classic LSD novel of all time,” according to Wikipedia, Dick evidently wrote it before any personal encounters with the drug. Set in the twenty-first century at a time when the solar system has been widely colonized, people use an hallucinogen called CAN-D to enter a dreamlike state that allows them to project their shared experiences onto actual props, or “layouts,” rendering their fantasies all the more real.

Dick’s novels are permeated with themes related to the nature of reality, the fragility of personal identity, drug use, and mental illness. In fact, some of Dick’s later novels—especially
VALIS
,
The Divine Invasion
, and the
Transmigration of Timothy Archer
—are centered on characters confronted with continuum-disrupting events that teeter on the thin edge between psychotic breakdown and mystical revelation. These tales bear uncanny similarities to our own experiences at La Chorrera to the extent that they seemed like a validation when they came to our attention in the mid-seventies. Dick was heavily influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, as were we. Much of Dick’s work has been translated into movies, with varying degrees of success.
Blade Runner
(1982), arguably one of the best science-fiction films of all time, was based on his short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Others include
Total Recall
(1990)
,
Minority Report
(2002
),
A Scanner Darkly
(2006), and
The Adjustment Bureau
(2011). I suspect that many of the filmmakers who are inspired by his work grew up, as we did, in the same milieu as Dick. In fact, certain shared influences—Clarke, Dick, Lovecraft, and others—have become such pervasive elements of contemporary culture because they are echoes of our generation’s adolescent experiences, including psychedelic experiences.

If science-fiction books influenced our worldview, so did mass-market movies and television. While there may have been something unique in how we interpreted all that, our exposure was not unique. Millions shared the experience of watching
The Twilight Zone
, for example, or any number of popular films.

One movie that influenced me was
Charly
(1968), adapted from the 1966 novel
Flowers for Algernon
by Daniel Keyes. As many know, it’s the story of a mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental treatment that dramatically increases his IQ. The movie chronicles the mental, emotional, and social problems he endures as his relationships with family and friends change, only to see his new capabilities slowly fade. This idea of being radically transformed into a superhuman had great appeal for me, probably because I was shy and identified with someone who suddenly found himself attractive to a woman he had secretly loved. The film must have struck some deep chord in my subconscious, because its themes emerged years later during our experiment at La Chorrera, as did aspects of
Planet of the Apes
(1968) and the novels I mentioned by Arthur C. Clarke. Though I’d read those books years earlier, their tropes were still in the archives of my memory, ready to be activated by the right trigger.

Of all of the movies that figured in the zeitgeist back then, none had a more profound impact than Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). Kubrick and Clarke had written the screenplay while the latter was writing his novel of the same name. Their collaboration is still quite possibly the greatest sci-fi film ever made. The film is about humanity’s ultimate encounter with a superior yet benevolent alien intelligence that has long been guiding the species’ destiny. With its themes of evolutionary transformation, alien contact, and a greater fate awaiting us among the stars,
2001
defined the aspirations of our generation. Though it didn’t directly deal with psychedelics, the “light show” at the climax, as David Bowman’s module is sucked into the hyperspatial portal, is close enough to the DMT “light show” that many of us assumed the film sequence had been modeled after it. Dimethyltryptamine, a powerful psychedelic, was rare and hard to get at the time, and thus all the more mysterious and fascinating. Like Bowman’s hyperspatial plunge into the monolith/portal, DMT brings with it a sense of rapid acceleration, of diving headlong into an overwhelmingly bizarre abyss, freighted with portentousness and hints of insect-like metamorphosis.

Kubrick’s
2001
was literally about pushing the envelope, including the biggest, the one that limits human experience to the here and now. The film spoke strongly to our generation, because we were involved in pushing all kinds of envelopes, testing the limits of conventional morality, politics, academics, and, ultimately, conscious experience. And psychedelics provided the tools. Many of us thought then, and still do, that the consumption of psychedelics, either accidental or deliberate, may have spurred on cognitive evolution, the explosive increase in the size and complexity of the hominid brain between two million and 100,000 years ago. This idea fit the intuition of many psychedelic enthusiasts that these substances were not only transformative for the individual, but for the species as a whole.

No wonder we were so ready to interpret
2001
as a hopeful manifesto for our transcendent future. Now more than a decade past the actual 2001, we remember that year not as we had hoped to—as the moment when humanity joined the galactic community—but for the tragic events of 9/11. That trauma has left deep scars on the nation, if not much of the world, and has apparently precipitated a long descent into a very dark age, indeed.

Among the things that Terence turned me onto, along with lot of edgy ideas and controlled substances, were folk music and rock and roll. I mentioned that in my preteen years I was a musical snob and dreamt of being a classical guitarist or a conductor. My indifference to pop music began to change when Terence came home for Christmas after his first semester at Berkeley with the latest album by the Beatles,
Rubber Soul.
The following summer he arrived with Bob Dylan’s
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited
, both also from 1965. With his cryptic lyrics, gravelly voice, and message of impending change, Dylan especially seemed to speak to the yearnings of our generation. I was soon drawn to others like Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and Woody Guthrie. On the rock side, in addition to the Beatles, were the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, and some other psychedelic bands. As all good music should, theirs expressed the mood of the times. My parents didn’t get that, as suggested by my father’s nickname for Dylan: “Gravel Gertie.” He’d grown up listening to Frank Sinatra’s silken voice and couldn’t appreciate how Dylan’s could be considered music. As a result he never actually listened to Dylan’s message, which I suspect he didn’t want to hear. We appreciated Dylan partly because we understood something about his ties to black music, especially the blues, where a gruff voice was a mark of authenticity. But that my parents didn’t embrace such music made it better. We didn’t want to identify with anything that was theirs, and we knew this music was
ours
.

By then I’d begun giving up on my musical ambitions. Besides pop and classical, I loved jazz, and in high school I half-heartedly played the double bass. I fantasized about being one of those cool improvisational jazz guys who played with the likes of Dave Brubeck and John Coltrane, but I had no talent whatsoever. The band director, Mr. Den Beste, was a bit of a stuffed shirt but also a gifted educator. When even he couldn’t make a good musician out of me, perhaps I realized my efforts to master the instrument would be in vain. He once used my bass to illustrate the principle of sympathetic resonance. If one plucks an A note, for example, another string tuned to A will also begin to vibrate. And if one then damps off the original string, the sympathetic string continues to resonate. His vivid illustration was an interesting bit of physics trivia at the time, but later became very important at La Chorrera, which is why I mention it here.

While I didn’t have much musical talent, I knew others who did. A few of my close friends were pretty good guitar players, thanks in part to growing up with music-loving fathers and brothers. As I noted, their guitars became a big part of our hanging out. Renditions of Dylan were a favorite; nothing could beat hearing my friend Gary angrily rap out “Masters of War” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in his own rough voice. Those songs reflected our anxieties and our determination never to give in, to fight what we saw as the corruptness of our parent’s generation, whose legacy to the world was the specter of nuclear annihilation.