High Weirdness (2019)

Erik Davis, former rock critic and now full-time seeker, offers up a meditation with densely sourced notes on Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, as the subtitle of High Weirdness charts the path. Davis focuses, after a lengthy scene-setting introduction, on the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. I barely knew of the first two, and Dick I knew primarily for his work before 1974. High Weirdness focuses on Dick’s work after 1974, when a religious experience produced a frenzy that lasted the rest of his life, sprawling across some 8,000 handwritten pages known as The Exegesis. Extractions from it contributed heavily to his last and most difficult novels. As it turned out, I was more interested in the McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, who retreated to South American jungles in 1971 to experiment with very strong hallucinogens and contemplate the results, which are worth reading up on. Robert Anton Wilson, for his part, experimented with hallucinogens too but, under the influence of William Burroughs, seemed more interested in the pursuit of paranoid weird experience as such, recorded in unlikely places like the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, UFO reports, and Trilateral Commission discussions. The affectionately labeled RAW contributed to the prankster spirit of the ‘60s and ‘70s—the Yippies, the Fugs, the Church of the Subgenius, and like that. Dick had his brush with deep Christianity in 1974 and never stopped trying to figure it out. He did a moderate share of hallucinogens in the ‘60s but his drug of choice over time was amphetamines, which among other things gave him the stamina to write a huge number of revelatory science fiction novels and stories and arguably the psychosis to make them mind-bendingly weird. For better or worse, I remain suspicious of anything too connected to his Christian leanings—Episcopalian, to be specific. I’m not always sure what Davis is after in High Weirdness. It’s not the drugs and esoterica seemingly as much as the visionary experiences themselves, which leaves him a tricky balance between objectivity and credulity. He manages it well. If I wished for more on the drugs and esoterica, I was happy enough to settle for the visions. Davis cuts a wide swath of strange post-‘60s experience. I learned about a lot of things I didn’t know before—and I thought I was a pretty good student of the ‘60s—but there were many places Davis rushes through where I wish he would have lingered. With Dick’s Christian experience as a chief example, on the other hand, the places he did linger were those I was less interested in. Still, overall, a pretty interesting survey of bizarre ‘60s psychic fallout.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.