flash glimpse

"You are never the same after you've had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel"

-Timothy Leary, High Priest

Slightly unnerved to discover that Google's first result for "cellular time tunnel" is not the Leary quote but an essay I archived over at The Museum* about Narnia (really about time and perception but anyway).

I've never read Leary's book, in fact, or anything of substance by him.  I'm aware of Leary purely as part of a cultural milieu I was once deeply fascinated by but which seems increasingly irrelevant as the years go by.  What remains of note to me are a few of the mordant fragments of post-mortem that doomed culture produced, somewhere around the beginning of my life - Hunter Thompson's Wave soliloquy, of course, and also this insightful passage from Adam Smith's Powers of Mind** where I first encountered said Leary quote:

"Aldous Huxley, the novelist, had written of psychedelics in Heaven and Hell and The Doors of Perception, which described his own experience in the early 1950's with mescaline.  Huxley brought great cultural depth to the experience, and Leary went to see him, since Huxley was the Respectable Intellectual of the Further Reaches.  Leary's visit in 1962 brought forebodings to Huxley. "He talked such nonsense," Huxley wrote to Humphrey Osmond. "...this nonsense talking is just another device for annoying people in authority, the reaction of a mischievous Irish boy to the headmaster of the school.  One of these days the headmaster will lose patience - and then good-bye to the research. I am fond of [him], but why, oh why, does he have to be such an ass? I have told him repeatedly that the only attitude for a researcher in this ticklish field is that of an anthropologist living in the midst of a tribe of potentially dangerous savages.  Go about your business quietly, don't break the taboos or criticize the locally accepted dogmas.  Be polite and friendly - and get on with the job. If you leave them alone, they will probably leave you alone."

But Leary thought he was on the edge of a revolution, and did not heed the advice.  "You are never the same after you've had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel," he said.  "Turn on."  The savages did not like having their customs taunted, and they put the anthropologist into a big iron pot and boiled him for supper."

It is many years after I first read that (in a period of my life relevant in all sorts of ways I'll tell you about sometime if you take me out for a cup of coffee or a decent beer) and I think maybe this casting is a little hard on Leary.  Society's Hammer was coming down on any socially active outcropping of the New Age regardless.  Leary just got to be the poster boy for the rise and fall.  Even Thompson had some pointed words for Leary, though he ultimately cut him more slack (in a nearby passage to The Wave in the same book):

"This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously.  After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.

Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them.  All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.

But their loss and failure is ours, too."

In any event, that one little phrase apparently put some sort of hook in me, as it turns out this is not the first time it crops up in the songs.  I wouldn't be surprised to find it wasn't the last, for that matter.

Turn on.

*I note as I compose this that while I changed the title of The Museum to something a little more genteel, its URL (which was created by Blogger's automated protocols and is thus based on the original title) still communicates the original title in all its profane glory.  I take this as a not altogether comfortable indication that my fundamental nature is probably not subject to rehabilitation.

**Adam Smith as in the finance author and onetime PBS anchor and editor George Goodman's author's alias, as opposed to the 18th Century philosopher - and in reference to the long out-of-print and increasingly obscure mid-seventies tome on the New Age movement (more or less).  Which growing obscurity is a shame, in my opinion.