The Spirit of Immaculate Prose

I’m stuck. I go to the texts. I certainly wasn’t the first kid to eat a handful of mushrooms and crank out a pile of pages, the first was a fella named Huxley whose Doors of Perception, as well as being a singular seminal moment in the crossroads of drug culture and literati in this country, is also in the pile of books I brought along as potential resource: The First Perennial Library paperback edition, published 1970, of Aldus Huxley’s 1954 classic trip. Also in the stack are HST’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, The Great Shark Hunt, The Curse of Lono, and Hey Rube, as well as Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, John C. Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, George Orwell’s 1984, Gore Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, and E.R. Bloomquist’s notorious paperback, Marijuana. 

I took from the pile the Huxley book and opened it at random to a page and I read Huxley telling how he took down his copy of Evans-Wentz’s edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opened it at random to a page and read this line: “O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.” The line is in reference to what the Book of the Dead calls the Clear Light. Huxley noted that this was the problem, to remain undistracted. What was so important about Huxley was that he had already been a man of legitimate literary import (since he wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931) when he decided to ingest four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in a half a glass of water, and subject himself to observation and questioning, and then write a book about it. But Huxley was a hell of lot nobler than I, and amongst my other distractions of Tibetan proportions was the sight of my Therapist returning again, wet from the pool, and sunning in front of the cabana. Distractions indeed. Every paragraph, every phrase, every word, every pained longing glance are streaked the with the distractions of fear and humiliation and regret and poolside chili-cheese-dogs and love and loss and remorse and judgment and rejection and bullshit fatalism. Huxley further notes that what those Buddhist monks did for the dying- helped the mind to be undistracted from the intended meditation- was similar to the services rendered by modern shrinks to the insane. But I was never medically certified and Huxley never saw my Therapist in that mismatched bikini. A one of kind porcelain doll, imperfect and disarming, to which the Franklin Mint would never hold the patent, impossible to replicate for mass production.