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High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness , Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.
545 pages, Hardcover
Published June 11, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 76 reviews
March 12, 2024
I wanted to see what happened when I brought rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches to bear on some seriously weird shit.
Which is just what Erik Davis has done in High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoteric, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. He has written a serious, scholarly study about the Outsider, Countercultural weirdness that was going on in California in the 1970s — what some have described as America’s Third Great Awaking. Davis writes that he sometimes thinks of himself as a “Counter-Public Intellectual,” that he identifies with the undergrounds he writes about, and that:
I was committed, in a sometimes defensive way, to affirming the value of fringe scenes whose distance from highbrow norms and other indexes of “seriousness” I was defiantly and proudly aware of.
He does a deep delve into his subject by focusing through the lens of three of the era’s psychonauts: Terence McKenna, modern shaman, Robert Anton Wilson, esoteric trickster, and Philip K. Dick, holy madman.
Before Davis began his study of his featured subjects, he spent chapters setting up the common ground where their weirdness was going down — the much-maligned decade of the ‘70s. He quotes Stephen Paul Miller, calling it the “uncanny decade” or the un-decade.” He writes:
It is a chestnut of ‘70s studies to mock the “me decade” for its shallow narcissism. But few recall how weird and difficult the “me” in question had become. Shorn of its traditional supports, the new me was not so much a triumphal exclamation point as a question mark, an existential conundrum.
The flip side of self realization was the somewhat disturbing possibility…that there is no solid or real me at all. The existential vertigo catalyzed by this suspicion is the dark secret of ‘70s narcissism — the Munch-like scream of the smiley face.
After setting up the complexities of the decade, Davis dives deep into chewy analysis of his three subjects in order, noting what influenced them, their similarities, and differences. He treats their most far out experiences and claims about them with scholarly seriousness, but no gullibility. Indeed, all three subjects seriously questioned their own work without rejecting it, part of what sets them apart:
In all cases, however, the beliefs of our subjects took the form, not of metaphysical assertions, but of hypothesis to be tested. Rather than prophetic revelations or dogmatic presuppositions, the hypothetical “what if?” came to shape both their experiments and their experiences.
I’m not going to go into details of Davis’s analysis — you’ll have to read the book for that. But I will say that as someone who has read all three (deeply studied both Wilson and PKD) that the dive Davis takes into their works and experiences is thoughtful, on point, and adds value. If you are interested in any or all of these figures, or the general weirdness —what Davis writes is “ a path of radical empiricism,…what I will be calling Weird Naturalism.”, then you should appreciate this book.
Which is just what Erik Davis has done in High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoteric, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. He has written a serious, scholarly study about the Outsider, Countercultural weirdness that was going on in California in the 1970s — what some have described as America’s Third Great Awaking. Davis writes that he sometimes thinks of himself as a “Counter-Public Intellectual,” that he identifies with the undergrounds he writes about, and that:
I was committed, in a sometimes defensive way, to affirming the value of fringe scenes whose distance from highbrow norms and other indexes of “seriousness” I was defiantly and proudly aware of.
He does a deep delve into his subject by focusing through the lens of three of the era’s psychonauts: Terence McKenna, modern shaman, Robert Anton Wilson, esoteric trickster, and Philip K. Dick, holy madman.
Before Davis began his study of his featured subjects, he spent chapters setting up the common ground where their weirdness was going down — the much-maligned decade of the ‘70s. He quotes Stephen Paul Miller, calling it the “uncanny decade” or the un-decade.” He writes:
It is a chestnut of ‘70s studies to mock the “me decade” for its shallow narcissism. But few recall how weird and difficult the “me” in question had become. Shorn of its traditional supports, the new me was not so much a triumphal exclamation point as a question mark, an existential conundrum.
The flip side of self realization was the somewhat disturbing possibility…that there is no solid or real me at all. The existential vertigo catalyzed by this suspicion is the dark secret of ‘70s narcissism — the Munch-like scream of the smiley face.
After setting up the complexities of the decade, Davis dives deep into chewy analysis of his three subjects in order, noting what influenced them, their similarities, and differences. He treats their most far out experiences and claims about them with scholarly seriousness, but no gullibility. Indeed, all three subjects seriously questioned their own work without rejecting it, part of what sets them apart:
In all cases, however, the beliefs of our subjects took the form, not of metaphysical assertions, but of hypothesis to be tested. Rather than prophetic revelations or dogmatic presuppositions, the hypothetical “what if?” came to shape both their experiments and their experiences.
I’m not going to go into details of Davis’s analysis — you’ll have to read the book for that. But I will say that as someone who has read all three (deeply studied both Wilson and PKD) that the dive Davis takes into their works and experiences is thoughtful, on point, and adds value. If you are interested in any or all of these figures, or the general weirdness —what Davis writes is “ a path of radical empiricism,…what I will be calling Weird Naturalism.”, then you should appreciate this book.
November 26, 2019
Rob Latham over at LARB has the definitive review of Davis' crackerjack book, I think -- I will defer to him and second his opinion that the portion dealing with Terrence McKenna is the least compelling.
The book broke my heart, I have to say. I lived through the 70s, 80s, 90s and the turn-of-the-Mil, and McKenna, RAW and Dick were a source of fascination for me these last 30 years. The further I followed Davis on his deep dive, the more deeply I realized that "weird" is no longer a fringe concern, an indulgent bourgeois exercise in consciousness-fiddlin' -- it's the new normal.
Davis delivers the money-quote as he wraps up thoughts on Robert Anton Wilson:
"Wilson’s largely optimistic visions are still going concerns for transhumanists, as well as some of our Silicon Valley overlords. For most of us, however, such talk has become about as inspiring as a styrofoam cup of Soylent. These days it is Wilson’s earlier portraits of warring conspiracies, memetic mind control, and chaotic reality breakdown that are proving, if anything, more prophetic. The sort of hard pranking represented by Operation Mindfuck has now become an ordinary tool of politics, publicity, and self-promotion. With their deployment of Pepe the Frog in the run-up to the 2016 election, the alt.right promulgated 'meme magick' with a familiar Discordian mix of tactical nonsense, anonymous authorship, politicized media, and arcane esotericism.
Today, as memetic noise eats consensus reality, and conspiracy thinking is weaponized by parties across the political spectrum, a sort of existential vertigo has opened up beneath our feet. What once felt like 'the world' has shattered into an incompatible chaos of contradictory, engineered, and disturbing reality tunnels. Ontological anarchism increasingly seems like a pragmatic response, weird realism that keeps you on your toes."
It seems fitting to conclude this with a line from Talking Heads' "Swamp": Where we going? Who knows?
The book broke my heart, I have to say. I lived through the 70s, 80s, 90s and the turn-of-the-Mil, and McKenna, RAW and Dick were a source of fascination for me these last 30 years. The further I followed Davis on his deep dive, the more deeply I realized that "weird" is no longer a fringe concern, an indulgent bourgeois exercise in consciousness-fiddlin' -- it's the new normal.
Davis delivers the money-quote as he wraps up thoughts on Robert Anton Wilson:
"Wilson’s largely optimistic visions are still going concerns for transhumanists, as well as some of our Silicon Valley overlords. For most of us, however, such talk has become about as inspiring as a styrofoam cup of Soylent. These days it is Wilson’s earlier portraits of warring conspiracies, memetic mind control, and chaotic reality breakdown that are proving, if anything, more prophetic. The sort of hard pranking represented by Operation Mindfuck has now become an ordinary tool of politics, publicity, and self-promotion. With their deployment of Pepe the Frog in the run-up to the 2016 election, the alt.right promulgated 'meme magick' with a familiar Discordian mix of tactical nonsense, anonymous authorship, politicized media, and arcane esotericism.
Today, as memetic noise eats consensus reality, and conspiracy thinking is weaponized by parties across the political spectrum, a sort of existential vertigo has opened up beneath our feet. What once felt like 'the world' has shattered into an incompatible chaos of contradictory, engineered, and disturbing reality tunnels. Ontological anarchism increasingly seems like a pragmatic response, weird realism that keeps you on your toes."
It seems fitting to conclude this with a line from Talking Heads' "Swamp": Where we going? Who knows?
December 25, 2020
If you favor any of the three main authors being discussed you will most likely love this work. Davis's clear sighted yet non-judgemental survey of the authors' books and thoughts reminds you of all the reasons you loved them on first read and might point out some things you didn't notice before. The web of writers and thinkers he uses to discuss these authors is quite wide-ranging and added to my tbr list (as well as including one of my professors from grad school as a reference). Definitely fun and worth reading if you were ever into these weird corners of early 70s culture.
April 21, 2020
Get the audiobook, Erik Davis does a great job.
March 4, 2020
This book basically lights up all my circuits: PKD, RAW, and the McKennas, all run through the academic machine of deconstructionism, systems theory, and religious studies. Davis is clearly simpatico with the subculture of high weirdness, but he does an admirable job of balancing keen personal interest and disinterested and cool-headed critical analysis.
It's clear that his primary focus is PKD, and his best work lies in close textual readings of Dick's published works read in the light of the Exegesis. Davis is well-situated to shed light on this subject, as he served as an editor for the published edition of that wild welter of pages. He also admirably acquits himself in sketching the ideas and fixations of the McKenna brothers and RAW, although in a more straightforward way.
My only real ding to this fascinating book is that Davis advances only modest claims in his thesis, declining to take a strong stance in integrating these thinkers or adopting strong metaphysical claims. I understand the latter choice, as he's trying to hold open an aperture of weird Pyrrhonistic skepticism wholly in keeping with the projects of his subjects (especially Wilson). However, it leaves the book more descriptive than explanatory, where I think he has the chops to do more. There's some nod at comparativism in the conclusion, and a juicy hint of how his book could have tied the occult strangeness of 70's California counterculture to the explosion of Silicon Valley and its effects on our current reality (and explosion of reality tunnels and fake news). However, Davis is content to gesture at that connection without teasing it out in any depth. Regardless of those weaknesses, I found this a delightful read and a welcome reminder of the allure of many of my youthful obsessions. 4.5 stars.
It's clear that his primary focus is PKD, and his best work lies in close textual readings of Dick's published works read in the light of the Exegesis. Davis is well-situated to shed light on this subject, as he served as an editor for the published edition of that wild welter of pages. He also admirably acquits himself in sketching the ideas and fixations of the McKenna brothers and RAW, although in a more straightforward way.
My only real ding to this fascinating book is that Davis advances only modest claims in his thesis, declining to take a strong stance in integrating these thinkers or adopting strong metaphysical claims. I understand the latter choice, as he's trying to hold open an aperture of weird Pyrrhonistic skepticism wholly in keeping with the projects of his subjects (especially Wilson). However, it leaves the book more descriptive than explanatory, where I think he has the chops to do more. There's some nod at comparativism in the conclusion, and a juicy hint of how his book could have tied the occult strangeness of 70's California counterculture to the explosion of Silicon Valley and its effects on our current reality (and explosion of reality tunnels and fake news). However, Davis is content to gesture at that connection without teasing it out in any depth. Regardless of those weaknesses, I found this a delightful read and a welcome reminder of the allure of many of my youthful obsessions. 4.5 stars.
January 8, 2020
This is an odd one. If you know nothing of its subjects, you'll find yourself quite lost. Yet, if you are already well-versed in the McKenna mythos, the RAW doctrine and the PKD canon, then you'll be experiencing deja vu.
Honestly, I really like Erik Davis. He's definitely well-meaning, good-hearted and "one of us"; but this book comes across as trying way too hard. It's overly long and often overly-worded. He has the penchant for using fancy esoteric words in place of more commonly used words to make a simple point. It comes across as trying to sound academic instead of being truly academic, or being down-to-earth. Yet, a truly academic book wouldn't reach half of us, and be a chore to plow through if it did! So, I guess the faux stoner academics works for that intent. Just not for me.
In the end, I'm still not sure who the intended audience is here. Clearly, a lot of people like this book, so there is an audience. But, if this book was intended to break these three people out into the mainstream, I doubt that it will. Sure, a few "fringe" journals will review it and try to help out here and there. I still can't imagine that it's doing nothing more than fueling a lot of armchair intellectuals' beer/weed fueled rants down at the local micro-brewery. (Which surely, McKenna and RAW would appreciate!)
It's definitely a huge task to write such a book, and I congratulate Mr. Davis at his attempt. For the fans out there, check it out of your local library or thumb through it at the bookstore first. You might save a few bucks (it was $40!) and buy a used copy of Cosmic Trigger instead.
Honestly, I really like Erik Davis. He's definitely well-meaning, good-hearted and "one of us"; but this book comes across as trying way too hard. It's overly long and often overly-worded. He has the penchant for using fancy esoteric words in place of more commonly used words to make a simple point. It comes across as trying to sound academic instead of being truly academic, or being down-to-earth. Yet, a truly academic book wouldn't reach half of us, and be a chore to plow through if it did! So, I guess the faux stoner academics works for that intent. Just not for me.
In the end, I'm still not sure who the intended audience is here. Clearly, a lot of people like this book, so there is an audience. But, if this book was intended to break these three people out into the mainstream, I doubt that it will. Sure, a few "fringe" journals will review it and try to help out here and there. I still can't imagine that it's doing nothing more than fueling a lot of armchair intellectuals' beer/weed fueled rants down at the local micro-brewery. (Which surely, McKenna and RAW would appreciate!)
It's definitely a huge task to write such a book, and I congratulate Mr. Davis at his attempt. For the fans out there, check it out of your local library or thumb through it at the bookstore first. You might save a few bucks (it was $40!) and buy a used copy of Cosmic Trigger instead.
April 7, 2023
I read this because I was interested in learning more about the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick, four colorful counterculture figures who’s work I’ve enjoyed over the years. As a casual psychonaut, I thought it might be fun. Since finishing it, I now feel like I know LESS about them, if that’s possible. This book was apparently written as a doctoral thesis and academically examines “weirdness” through the lens of these figures’ mystical/psychotic experiences in the context of the America’s culture in the 1970s. On the surface, this seems like it might deepen one’s understanding of their experience. However, the result of reading this for me was to render all of these characters’ undisputed magic into something so incredibly boring in its granularity that I wonder if I even care any more about any of them. Maybe I’m just simple-minded and reductive. Who cares? This was categorically UNFUN. Taking in the subjects’ work and coming up with my own decidedly-non-academic interpretations was, is and I’d imagine will remain far more rewarding for me. The coolest thing about this book for me is the sleeve design and the (pretentious) appearance of heft next to the other books of psychedelic non-fiction on my shelf. The word “hermeneutics” is ruined forever.
August 27, 2019
This book takes a while to get started: the section on Terence & Dennis McKenna seems much less engaged than Erik Davis' writing on Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. That may be because the McKennas wrote (basically) non-fiction, while some of the work by Wilson and Dick that Davis grapples with pushes genres categories in order to describe real psychic experiences that the writers went through. Davis does a good job of explaining how the psychedelic extremes of the counterculture have now formed our everyday reality and pulling out the contradictory politics of Wilson and Robert Shea's ILLUMINATUS!, whose mixture of conspiracy theory, pulp excess, literary ambition and libertarianism/anarchism predicted the worst aspects of YouTube rabbit holes but may not have been the height of responsibility in retrospect. He deals with Dick as a religious writer first and foremost, with respect for his ideas' roots in Christianity. I learned a few new things: UFO theorist and Silicon Valley pioneer hung out with Anton LaVey!
July 4, 2019
An in-depth and erudite exploration of the psychedelic and the esoteric, triangulated through the lives and work of Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. It feels as thorough a summation as one could hope for of these weirdos and their weird era without ever going down the rabbit hole and into mild psychosis that these three thinkers themselves inhabited. It successfully walks the tight rope neither rejecting the weirdness nor being "seduced by madness" a tricky feat!
July 14, 2022
This book is full of words and phrases like: Coinkydink, loop-de-loop, oneironaut, “surfing the froth of hypnogogia” as well as a genuine effort to define a “mindfuck”. I loved it. Surprisingly challenging but also hard to put down. I want Davis to do more decades.
October 10, 2021
Great content but the fact it was a PHD thesis is apparent and all the weirdness is often dulled by academic language.
August 8, 2022
I surprisingly got a lot of value out of this after I was 50:50 on whether I would enjoy this book at all. I never really cared (and still don’t) for the McKenna’s schizo theories on botany, the occultism of Robert Anton Wilson, or Tim Leary’s advocacy for everyone to abandon industrial society and chase some chemical nirvana that doesn’t exist.
However I have always been interested in the weird synchronicity folklore, ideas, theology and experiences relating to Kesey, The Grateful Dead, John C Lily, and the Principia Discordia. Most of all I picked this up for the analysis of PK Dick and the exploration of weird 70s literature and the influences of Jung, Lovecraft, Shaver, Robert Chambers etc.
I knew when Davis started discussing William James in the introduction to contextualize his subjects that I would enjoy this book. Interestingly... as a side note, Davis will provide detailed parentheticals and timelines for each subject’s drug use – but pretty much omitted James’s equally controversial relationship with nitrous oxide (even when James comes up later in later chapters). Anyway, Davis also does a great job prefacing that his thesis relies on taking these experiences and weird visionary reports seriously – but not often literally, which I think is important for books like these when trying to develop a cohesive narrative on explaining the “otherness” or network consciousness.
Overall, it’s very well cited and thorough, especially when you get to PKD towards the end. I would recommend the PKD chapters especially for anyone who has read VALIS and his other novels and wants an Exegesis/(2-3-74) preface, with generous inclusion of theories from several other PKD scholars. I am still skeptical on his interpretation that the Exegesis should be viewed as the recursive and almost hyperstitional (ala Burroughs) tome he suggests it should be. Davis does an excellent job biographically as well, providing clarity on PKDs relationship with Christian mysticism, his hypnagogic influences, and what made him so unique to the previous authors in the book.
It is also worth noting Davis approaches a lot of these authors from the more historical angle of 70s occultist revival. But there is still a lot to appreciate here even if that is not something you’re interested in.
However I have always been interested in the weird synchronicity folklore, ideas, theology and experiences relating to Kesey, The Grateful Dead, John C Lily, and the Principia Discordia. Most of all I picked this up for the analysis of PK Dick and the exploration of weird 70s literature and the influences of Jung, Lovecraft, Shaver, Robert Chambers etc.
I knew when Davis started discussing William James in the introduction to contextualize his subjects that I would enjoy this book. Interestingly... as a side note, Davis will provide detailed parentheticals and timelines for each subject’s drug use – but pretty much omitted James’s equally controversial relationship with nitrous oxide (even when James comes up later in later chapters). Anyway, Davis also does a great job prefacing that his thesis relies on taking these experiences and weird visionary reports seriously – but not often literally, which I think is important for books like these when trying to develop a cohesive narrative on explaining the “otherness” or network consciousness.
Overall, it’s very well cited and thorough, especially when you get to PKD towards the end. I would recommend the PKD chapters especially for anyone who has read VALIS and his other novels and wants an Exegesis/(2-3-74) preface, with generous inclusion of theories from several other PKD scholars. I am still skeptical on his interpretation that the Exegesis should be viewed as the recursive and almost hyperstitional (ala Burroughs) tome he suggests it should be. Davis does an excellent job biographically as well, providing clarity on PKDs relationship with Christian mysticism, his hypnagogic influences, and what made him so unique to the previous authors in the book.
It is also worth noting Davis approaches a lot of these authors from the more historical angle of 70s occultist revival. But there is still a lot to appreciate here even if that is not something you’re interested in.
October 19, 2020
Davis handles a considerable heft of weird, clunky material here not quite gracefully, but compellingly. He's not great at introducing topics or transitioning from one thing to the next, and he lets himself get carried away and his rhetoric winds up emulating the long winded obtuse rambling of his subjects. But it's altogether an interesting trip.
He gets better with each section. I'm still not sure what to make of the Terrence McKenna chapters, but his work on Robert Anthon Wilson and Philip K. Dick was fantastic. Despite its flourishes and needless jargon (maybe a relic of it starting as a doctoral thesis), Davis's goal of taking the experiences of his subjects seriously but not literally is admirable. It added a fine layer over my impression of the 70s, highlighting aspects that haven't been given sufficient attention in more respectable histories of the era, so that's worth considering.
I can't with his cartoon French accent whenever he quotes Felix Guattari though.
He gets better with each section. I'm still not sure what to make of the Terrence McKenna chapters, but his work on Robert Anthon Wilson and Philip K. Dick was fantastic. Despite its flourishes and needless jargon (maybe a relic of it starting as a doctoral thesis), Davis's goal of taking the experiences of his subjects seriously but not literally is admirable. It added a fine layer over my impression of the 70s, highlighting aspects that haven't been given sufficient attention in more respectable histories of the era, so that's worth considering.
I can't with his cartoon French accent whenever he quotes Felix Guattari though.
October 31, 2021
I was very intimidated by the length of this book. But I found it moved quickly. It was a fun, wild, disorganized, artistically literary, deeply philosophical romp through the 70s - with all the psychedelic, paranoid, weirdness of the time. I enjoyed the conclusion that reflected how the weirdness of the 70s is back and becoming the new normal for today. (e.g., lsd microdosing, false-news v. paranoid news, reality tunnels vs. confirmation bias)
I was young at the time of these events, but remember many that made my local news. I especially enjoyed the detailed analysis of Robert Anton Wilson who I met personally at a workshop. I regret that I didn't bring along my copy of sex magicians to get it signed. Oh well. I can't find it anymore after 30+ years.
I was young at the time of these events, but remember many that made my local news. I especially enjoyed the detailed analysis of Robert Anton Wilson who I met personally at a workshop. I regret that I didn't bring along my copy of sex magicians to get it signed. Oh well. I can't find it anymore after 30+ years.
June 19, 2023
Immediately after logging this brilliant "counter-intellectual" exploration (and exegesis) of psychedelic esoterica in the 70s, I realized that Davis' book is the 23rd I've read this year -- a coincidence (or, perhaps, a synchronicity) so deliciously fitting and wonderfully unsettling I can't help but see it as a cute little mico-eruption of the weird.
August 29, 2021
One Sentence Review: “Really fuxking weird.”
April 14, 2022
One of the best discussions of Philip K. Dick that I've ever read.
January 30, 2024
While I liked the basic concept for this book it was kind of difficult to get through. A lot of it read like a long dry academic paper. Also a good percentage of this, like cirka 70%, is more or less a summary of the writings and lives of the McKenna brothers, Robert Anton Wilson and Phillip K. Dick which if you're familiar with them you already know their story and if you aren't you're better off just reading what they wrote or biographies of them.
2.5 out of 5 stars.
2.5 out of 5 stars.
September 8, 2021
Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who study esoteric subjects, a much more fraught and murky intellectual/emotional space for me. It is impossible to disentangle these strands in “High Weirdness” and pointless to try. In the end, the challenges involved in taking this book in have helped make it, for me, one of the best books I’ve read this year.
I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and scifi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties, and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.
Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.
This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonautry- materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”
And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history PhD — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.
Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element, or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days, if they could stop laughing at what they saw as countercultural clownishness long enough.
It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers’ efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently-sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.
But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six year old desiring magic power, but the twelve year old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.
Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography. I basically agree with this notion, but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.
Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks. I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society, but there wasn’t much peace and love there. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.
Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.
Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick- “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson- Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.
Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses. Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work. *****
I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and scifi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties, and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.
Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.
This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonautry- materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”
And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history PhD — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.
Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element, or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days, if they could stop laughing at what they saw as countercultural clownishness long enough.
It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers’ efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently-sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.
But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six year old desiring magic power, but the twelve year old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.
Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography. I basically agree with this notion, but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.
Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks. I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society, but there wasn’t much peace and love there. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.
Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.
Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick- “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson- Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.
Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses. Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work. *****
February 6, 2022
I had high hopes for this book. In theory, it's right up my ally -- an exploration of the weird world of California in the 60s and 70s, as engendered by the proliferation of psychedelics and other consciousness-changing or eradicating substances, practices, beliefs, and/or rituals. The book seeks to describe this context, as well as a new concept of "high weirdness" (a sort of aesthetic and quasi-"religious" state), through the experiences of three figures prominent in the 60s and 70s -- Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Before beginning Davis' book, I was passingly familiar with all three, but had only read one Wilson book and one book by Dick.
Unfortunately, Davis too frequently gets in his own way and creates a somewhat jumbled mishmash of philosophical concepts, "low brow" pop culture, occult(ish) practices and beliefs, and earnest psychedelic explorations. Somewhere in this book is a truly mind-blowing and revolutionary story about human potential and the edges of human knowledge and consciousness. What this book desperately needed was an editor, someone who could effectively push back on Davis and work with him to clarify concepts and simplify what is often the worst kind of academic speech. It won't come as a surprise to any reader of this book that it began its life as a doctoral dissertation. An example of the kind of needlessly complex writing: "This question also compels the longings of esotericism and a myriad of religious cosmologies, and is as good a diagnosis of the weird as anything. But in Rickles' emphatically embodied view, which insists on absolute finitude, the absent presence of such specters negates the existential possibilities of the supernatural views they inevitably engender" (emphasis mine). If something is finite, it is absolute, fully contained, so "absolute finitude" is a redundancy that adds nothing and only serves to confuse the reader. Likewise, "absent presence" is meaningless, self-satisfied drivel that should have been caught and cut by an editor. The book is laden with this type of writing, which only obfuscates an already challenging concept (an aesthetic of "the weird"). So often, it took my an hour or more to read 10-15 pages, and I would have to reread certain sentences over and over to try and understand them. As a reader, it is frustrating, particularly as you might consider this to be an interpretative text, one that is trying to explain and contextualize a new idea for a more general audience.
It is clear that Davis owes a great debt to cultural critics like Greill Marcus, people who are able to connect wildly different historical figures and movements to precise moments of culture eruptions in ways that are new and surprising, and which are therefore enlightening or challenging, depending on how you view their assertions. Unfortunately, where Marcus takes great pains to illuminate the core concepts of his books (thinking specifically of his books Lipstick Traces and The Old, Weird America) in language most of his readers will be able to comprehend, Davis instead leans too heavily on academic or specialized language to move the reader through key concepts in the book. I can't tell you how many times he used such words as, "ontological," "hermeneutics," "exegetical," "oneiric," and so on. I'm not trying to be petty or insolent in this critique -- one of my favorite writers is Cormac McCarthy, who is often accused of using obscure or difficult language for no real reason. But Davis' is not a work of fiction, and unfortunately the bridge through the difficult material that he builds for the reader is beset with mines and snares of his own making.
The other note I would add about this book is that, while it is not necessary for the reader to be familiar with McKenna, Wilson, or Dick, it would be helpful, and I suspect that they would get a lot more out of this if they were more familiar. Often, the tone of the book assumes familiarity, and while you might hope that Davis will go deep into the context and happenstance of particular incident, he doesn't. This is not a retelling of Dick's 2-3-74, McKenna's Experiment at La Chorrera, or Wilson's climb out of the "Chapel Perilous." Some explanation is provided, of course, but if you, like me, aren't familiar with those incidents just listed, you may find yourself somewhat frustrated by how they are handled in this text.
I don't mean to be too harsh. I really wanted to love this book. And yet, after finishing it, I'm only relieved at having made it through. Now, onto reading some Philip K. Dick!
Unfortunately, Davis too frequently gets in his own way and creates a somewhat jumbled mishmash of philosophical concepts, "low brow" pop culture, occult(ish) practices and beliefs, and earnest psychedelic explorations. Somewhere in this book is a truly mind-blowing and revolutionary story about human potential and the edges of human knowledge and consciousness. What this book desperately needed was an editor, someone who could effectively push back on Davis and work with him to clarify concepts and simplify what is often the worst kind of academic speech. It won't come as a surprise to any reader of this book that it began its life as a doctoral dissertation. An example of the kind of needlessly complex writing: "This question also compels the longings of esotericism and a myriad of religious cosmologies, and is as good a diagnosis of the weird as anything. But in Rickles' emphatically embodied view, which insists on absolute finitude, the absent presence of such specters negates the existential possibilities of the supernatural views they inevitably engender" (emphasis mine). If something is finite, it is absolute, fully contained, so "absolute finitude" is a redundancy that adds nothing and only serves to confuse the reader. Likewise, "absent presence" is meaningless, self-satisfied drivel that should have been caught and cut by an editor. The book is laden with this type of writing, which only obfuscates an already challenging concept (an aesthetic of "the weird"). So often, it took my an hour or more to read 10-15 pages, and I would have to reread certain sentences over and over to try and understand them. As a reader, it is frustrating, particularly as you might consider this to be an interpretative text, one that is trying to explain and contextualize a new idea for a more general audience.
It is clear that Davis owes a great debt to cultural critics like Greill Marcus, people who are able to connect wildly different historical figures and movements to precise moments of culture eruptions in ways that are new and surprising, and which are therefore enlightening or challenging, depending on how you view their assertions. Unfortunately, where Marcus takes great pains to illuminate the core concepts of his books (thinking specifically of his books Lipstick Traces and The Old, Weird America) in language most of his readers will be able to comprehend, Davis instead leans too heavily on academic or specialized language to move the reader through key concepts in the book. I can't tell you how many times he used such words as, "ontological," "hermeneutics," "exegetical," "oneiric," and so on. I'm not trying to be petty or insolent in this critique -- one of my favorite writers is Cormac McCarthy, who is often accused of using obscure or difficult language for no real reason. But Davis' is not a work of fiction, and unfortunately the bridge through the difficult material that he builds for the reader is beset with mines and snares of his own making.
The other note I would add about this book is that, while it is not necessary for the reader to be familiar with McKenna, Wilson, or Dick, it would be helpful, and I suspect that they would get a lot more out of this if they were more familiar. Often, the tone of the book assumes familiarity, and while you might hope that Davis will go deep into the context and happenstance of particular incident, he doesn't. This is not a retelling of Dick's 2-3-74, McKenna's Experiment at La Chorrera, or Wilson's climb out of the "Chapel Perilous." Some explanation is provided, of course, but if you, like me, aren't familiar with those incidents just listed, you may find yourself somewhat frustrated by how they are handled in this text.
I don't mean to be too harsh. I really wanted to love this book. And yet, after finishing it, I'm only relieved at having made it through. Now, onto reading some Philip K. Dick!
September 3, 2019
If you were there in the 70 s, or was it the 80’s, and had a certain, fringe culture frame of reference, then you will either love this or wonder if it was telling you anything new.
August 15, 2020
The main thrust of what Erik Davis does is this book is attempt to take anomalous experiences seriously, if not literally. I really like that approach. Anything but curious agnosticism seems like keeping yourself in the dark. If you only believe in the quotidian physical of ordinary experience you close off all possibility and arguably become as ignorant as someone driven by superstition.
The book is kind of hard work though. I don't know that much about Robert Anton Wilson, or Terrance and Dennis McKenna, so the sections on them were a bit lost on me. I was hoping for more of an introduction/overview of their work, but this one's probably for the fans.
I am a big Philip K Dick fan though, so I really enjoyed that part, especially the bits to do with VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer and the Three Stigmata of Palma Eldritch, because those books all had quite a big impact on me. The analysis of the 2.3.74 leaves you inside out. Philip K Dick was a very weird guy. As someone who identifies as neuro-divergent, I found the hypothesis of PKD's neuro diversity very interesting and the fact that his mystical experiences can be pathologized, doesn't preclude the possibility they originated from an external agency.
Heavy going, but good, probably like PKD's Exegesis itself - Davis would know, he edited a version. I was going to give it 3 stars but that felt unfair, I didn't enjoy chunks because I didn't know the subject he was writing about, so really I should mark myself down a star rather than the book.
The book is kind of hard work though. I don't know that much about Robert Anton Wilson, or Terrance and Dennis McKenna, so the sections on them were a bit lost on me. I was hoping for more of an introduction/overview of their work, but this one's probably for the fans.
I am a big Philip K Dick fan though, so I really enjoyed that part, especially the bits to do with VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer and the Three Stigmata of Palma Eldritch, because those books all had quite a big impact on me. The analysis of the 2.3.74 leaves you inside out. Philip K Dick was a very weird guy. As someone who identifies as neuro-divergent, I found the hypothesis of PKD's neuro diversity very interesting and the fact that his mystical experiences can be pathologized, doesn't preclude the possibility they originated from an external agency.
Heavy going, but good, probably like PKD's Exegesis itself - Davis would know, he edited a version. I was going to give it 3 stars but that felt unfair, I didn't enjoy chunks because I didn't know the subject he was writing about, so really I should mark myself down a star rather than the book.
July 30, 2019
High Weirdness by Erik Davis
Interesting, academic insights into the 70s thru the literally comparative and religious analysis of 3 writers/physic explorers (Terence Mckenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K Dick) bordering the thin line between madness, creative genius, mystical / psychotic visions and the dynamic uroboros loop between popular culture motifs, the zeitgeist and the internal "heart of darkness" adventure that each encountered.
Davis the ultimate post modernist shows an openness to taking explorers seriously but not literally that is welcomed in opening the farthest ranges of human thought, action and state.
Importantly Davis shows how the private closed world engages directly with the external through "weird" resonance - a useful tool and framework for understanding how ones current zeitgeist materializes from internal states and vice versa.
Practical reading for advanced psychonauts, explorers of consciousness or even just people trying to understand their own challenges, pain and delights and how those mental states may or may not materialize through interaction with reality.
To be taken as Davis says "seriously but not literally."
Interesting, academic insights into the 70s thru the literally comparative and religious analysis of 3 writers/physic explorers (Terence Mckenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K Dick) bordering the thin line between madness, creative genius, mystical / psychotic visions and the dynamic uroboros loop between popular culture motifs, the zeitgeist and the internal "heart of darkness" adventure that each encountered.
Davis the ultimate post modernist shows an openness to taking explorers seriously but not literally that is welcomed in opening the farthest ranges of human thought, action and state.
Importantly Davis shows how the private closed world engages directly with the external through "weird" resonance - a useful tool and framework for understanding how ones current zeitgeist materializes from internal states and vice versa.
Practical reading for advanced psychonauts, explorers of consciousness or even just people trying to understand their own challenges, pain and delights and how those mental states may or may not materialize through interaction with reality.
To be taken as Davis says "seriously but not literally."
August 16, 2021
This book is a cornucopia of information about some of the weird parts of the late 60s and early 70s, focusing in particular on the McKenna brothers (esp. Terrence McKenna), Robert Anton Wilson (of Illuminatus! fame), and Philip K. Dick. As a longtime fan of PKD, that alone made it worth the price of admission for me. (I discovered listening that the author, Erik Davis, had worked on the published version of PKD's Exegesis, so he knows whereof he speaks.)
The discussion is written at a high level of abstraction, which gives it extra depth but makes it harder to follow (at least in audiobook format). It gives lots of references for future reading, but again, that doesn't work as well for the audiobook. And I'll probably read it again soon, if I can find time. Put that all together, and I'll give this five stars.
EDIT: Read it again in July and August. Still interesting, still lots of stuff to think about.
The discussion is written at a high level of abstraction, which gives it extra depth but makes it harder to follow (at least in audiobook format). It gives lots of references for future reading, but again, that doesn't work as well for the audiobook. And I'll probably read it again soon, if I can find time. Put that all together, and I'll give this five stars.
EDIT: Read it again in July and August. Still interesting, still lots of stuff to think about.
October 17, 2021
' These are archon times, my friends, and grappling with high weirdness may paradoxically be a kind of mental health regime.
An era of banal eschatology, a time when the old war in heaven, whose combatants we are condemned to hallucinate and misread, is waged through products, gadgets, media, and our own occluded minds - now riven by fears, traumas, and sometimes paranoid suspicions, but still sparkling with the hot light of resistance.
The weird that saturates culture today is present often through its memetic banalization, like magical sigils serving as corporate logos.
Contemporary technologies are, literally, mind-manifesting. Consciousness, consensus reality, and even matter itself are increasingly shaped - warped, shattered, expanded - by their use.
A deep familiarity with psychedelic phenomenology is simply a good skill to possess in an era of memetic struggle, of virtual realities, of archon stratagems. '
An era of banal eschatology, a time when the old war in heaven, whose combatants we are condemned to hallucinate and misread, is waged through products, gadgets, media, and our own occluded minds - now riven by fears, traumas, and sometimes paranoid suspicions, but still sparkling with the hot light of resistance.
The weird that saturates culture today is present often through its memetic banalization, like magical sigils serving as corporate logos.
Contemporary technologies are, literally, mind-manifesting. Consciousness, consensus reality, and even matter itself are increasingly shaped - warped, shattered, expanded - by their use.
A deep familiarity with psychedelic phenomenology is simply a good skill to possess in an era of memetic struggle, of virtual realities, of archon stratagems. '
September 23, 2019
A look at a particular time through three different writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. I could spend a lot of time trying to describe what is going here but instead I'll put it another way. If you are into the uncanny and the weird then this book is for you. If you spent time in Lovecraft or even read two of those three folks then this is an interesting trip to try and explain was was happening between 1970-1975.
There is a bit at the end that tries to tie it together and give a bit of importance. The sad, strange thing is that if you have been sitting in the weird, then you have suspected the use of these texts all along.
Yeah, get paranoid. Question your sanity. Then look around.
There is a bit at the end that tries to tie it together and give a bit of importance. The sad, strange thing is that if you have been sitting in the weird, then you have suspected the use of these texts all along.
Yeah, get paranoid. Question your sanity. Then look around.
January 20, 2022
This book was apparently expanded from a doctoral thesis, and it shows, because as fascinating as the subject matter is, it’s ultimately strangled to death by the kind of interminable academic jargon that I used to dread having to wade through while studying for my degree.
I made it through 136 pages and then gave up.
If you want someone who explores this kind of material in a way that is just as intelligent (and frankly far more accessible and entertaining), check out the esoteric analyses of the late great philosopher and autodidact, Colin Wilson.
I made it through 136 pages and then gave up.
If you want someone who explores this kind of material in a way that is just as intelligent (and frankly far more accessible and entertaining), check out the esoteric analyses of the late great philosopher and autodidact, Colin Wilson.
February 10, 2021
A very dense, very academic text. I found the book most interesting when Davis discussed his subjects in the context of the 1970s as a whole— I would rather have read more of that analysis, I think. The sections examining the McKennas, Robert Anton Wilson and PKD separately got bogged down in a lot of heavy academic discourse at times. I think Davis has some fascinating insights into these guys, but there’s a lot to sift through.
July 8, 2019
If you’re interested in Terrence McKenna and/or Robert Anton Wilson and/or Philip K Dick, this book is for you. The author, Erik Davis, adds rich and fascinating context to the very weird “contact” experiences of the 3 thinkers above, without diluting the mystery.
It’s one of the most interesting and compelling books I’ve come across on esoterica since Cosmic Trigger.
It’s one of the most interesting and compelling books I’ve come across on esoterica since Cosmic Trigger.
May 11, 2021
I haven't completed this book by a long shot, but if you aren't ecstatic over academic writing on historical figures in "psychedelic studies", you're not going to care about my review here anyways.
When I was in college in the late 80s, serious studies of the Beat writers and genres like sci-fi was a surprising change. Some pointed to Boomers finally becoming literature professors, wanting to relive the late 60s. But actual psychedelic drug-taking, and what is now being called "psychonautics", was still not viewed as worthy of serious study.
I am excited about this change in the public's attitude to psychedelics, having wrestled with major depression for my adult life, and a straight twenty years of conventionally prescribed antidepressants,... well I don't mean to write a memoir here, but I'll take the segue to a book I finished at the beginning of this year, "Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change", by Taiwanese-American writer, Tao Lin. He concentrates on Terrence McKenna, and finishes with an interview with the late McKenna's wife, Kathleen Harrison. Now, Lin is interested in making a literary experiment, he writes this "biography" in a very autobiographical way, in some ways in imitation of McKenna's writing and talks. Lin tells his own stories about himself by concentrating on a part of his life where he is obsessed with McKenna. Except, for example, he tells of a "bad trip" that doesn't go well, but not horribly either, just unpleasant with a "hangover" of paranoia. this is in completely in contrast to McKenna, who mostly told of his most spectacular and colorful trips. (perhaps exaggerating on occasion, like a prototypical Irish bard)
Lin's book also requires extra effort to read, because it plays these literary "meta-" games, and you have to accept that this "biography of McKenna" is really about Lin. It's like a mirror image, or even a fun-house mirror image of "Experiment at La Chorrera". If you don't like storytelling games, it's going to be a yawner, and Tao Lin will sound like an unappealing jerk.
"High Weirdness" goes in a very different direction, keeping mainly to conventional "popularized" academic writing, dumbing it down a bit, also in a fairly conventional way. Erik Davis doesn't try to imitate the writings of his subjects, and thank goodness! But it's going to turn off a whole spectrum of people, from Michael Pollan fans, the garden-writer and psychedelic newbie, to the rebellious psychonauts who want an insider version and modern versions of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Such a tale of a modern contemporary scene is Bett Williams' "The Wild Kindness".
Maybe you can tell the way I'm shamelessly name-dropping, I love this subject, and I don't mind getting into the weeds of academia writing, or prose-poetry. But, if you couldn't figure this out for yourself what this book is like. from a Kindle sample, or maybe leafing through pages at Barnes & Noble, I don't know what to tell you. I'd like to make taking and writing about psychedelics as boring as taking, or re-treading stories about the discovery of, penicillin. I think that would be a good thing. How we can get from A to B is through your personal choice, though. I'm not going to guilt trip anyone on what to read.
When I was in college in the late 80s, serious studies of the Beat writers and genres like sci-fi was a surprising change. Some pointed to Boomers finally becoming literature professors, wanting to relive the late 60s. But actual psychedelic drug-taking, and what is now being called "psychonautics", was still not viewed as worthy of serious study.
I am excited about this change in the public's attitude to psychedelics, having wrestled with major depression for my adult life, and a straight twenty years of conventionally prescribed antidepressants,... well I don't mean to write a memoir here, but I'll take the segue to a book I finished at the beginning of this year, "Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change", by Taiwanese-American writer, Tao Lin. He concentrates on Terrence McKenna, and finishes with an interview with the late McKenna's wife, Kathleen Harrison. Now, Lin is interested in making a literary experiment, he writes this "biography" in a very autobiographical way, in some ways in imitation of McKenna's writing and talks. Lin tells his own stories about himself by concentrating on a part of his life where he is obsessed with McKenna. Except, for example, he tells of a "bad trip" that doesn't go well, but not horribly either, just unpleasant with a "hangover" of paranoia. this is in completely in contrast to McKenna, who mostly told of his most spectacular and colorful trips. (perhaps exaggerating on occasion, like a prototypical Irish bard)
Lin's book also requires extra effort to read, because it plays these literary "meta-" games, and you have to accept that this "biography of McKenna" is really about Lin. It's like a mirror image, or even a fun-house mirror image of "Experiment at La Chorrera". If you don't like storytelling games, it's going to be a yawner, and Tao Lin will sound like an unappealing jerk.
"High Weirdness" goes in a very different direction, keeping mainly to conventional "popularized" academic writing, dumbing it down a bit, also in a fairly conventional way. Erik Davis doesn't try to imitate the writings of his subjects, and thank goodness! But it's going to turn off a whole spectrum of people, from Michael Pollan fans, the garden-writer and psychedelic newbie, to the rebellious psychonauts who want an insider version and modern versions of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Such a tale of a modern contemporary scene is Bett Williams' "The Wild Kindness".
Maybe you can tell the way I'm shamelessly name-dropping, I love this subject, and I don't mind getting into the weeds of academia writing, or prose-poetry. But, if you couldn't figure this out for yourself what this book is like. from a Kindle sample, or maybe leafing through pages at Barnes & Noble, I don't know what to tell you. I'd like to make taking and writing about psychedelics as boring as taking, or re-treading stories about the discovery of, penicillin. I think that would be a good thing. How we can get from A to B is through your personal choice, though. I'm not going to guilt trip anyone on what to read.
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