eBook White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary Allen Ginsberg ePub

makes you want the 60s again

Well written and places all the history of the sixties hippie movement in great chronological order. Refreshed my memory of an exciting and important time of my life.

The title refers to a drinking club of two Timothy Leary started at Harvard, around 1960. It never amounted to much, but Peter Conners uses it for his book, which links Leary to Allen Ginsberg over the decades, from the Beats to the Hippies, and into the Watergate era, the War on Drugs, and the final days of both countercultural pioneers. Their partnership is not an unfamiliar story.

What Conners contributes that is fresh are his excerpts and summations from the Ginsberg archives of his correspondence at Stanford; added to the referenced material from Barry Miles' and Bill Morgan's published research on the poet, Conners maps the trail of where Ginsberg's paths intersected with Leary's over three-hundred readable, well-paced, straightforward pages. While Conners does not credit Michael Schumacher's 1994 Dharma Lion biography, which focused on the poetry itself, his use of Miles and Morgan among others, along with a reliance on Robert Greenfield's excellent 2006 biography (see my review) of Leary, makes for a welcome overview for those seekers who may not wish to tackle those hefty volumes in their quest to find out about what linked, and sometimes divided, these two visionary pranksters.

Conners explains the Society, such as it was: Ginsberg introduces Leary, at the start of the Sixties, to the artists who can influence the Great Society. Leary exposes Ginsberg to "powerful hallucinatory visions." By making psilocybin and mescaline respectable, under Harvard's sponsorship, Leary sought to break out of academia while using his position within it to, at least not yet, drop out. First, he wanted America's elite to tune in and turn on.

Leary dominates most of the ensuing saga. As a "nirvana salesman," his entrepreneurial skills and charlatan flair enabled him, for example, to go AWOL from the Ivy League to hang out in Hollywood on behalf of his front group for psychedelic experimentation, The International Foundation for Internal Freedom. He crafted and timed his failure to show up for the end of the spring semester of 1963 so as to make it seem as if Harvard fired him "for taking and advocating the use of psychedelics." With such publicity, Leary launched his movement.

As Ginsberg represented the activist, Berkeley, politically radical contingent, Leary spoke for Haight-Ashbery's psychedelic flower-children, the pacifists and resisters to conformity, or to revolution. As the following month's "Houseboat Summit" on Alan Watts' boat in the San Francisco Bay documents in an appendix, how to drop out and from where, as Ginsberg and Gary Snyder challenged Leary, remained the practical problem. Leary insists that a portion of society will be able to withdraw from the straights, analogous to a day off every seven days in our work week, and that the world can survive. Ginsberg wonders how the engineers and astronomers will pass on their knowledge and skills to those who leave the universities for the prairies and woods.

Subsequently, after prison twice over, Algerian exile with an uneasy Black Panthers stay under Eldridge Cleaver, if told in a too compressed a form by Conners, Leary worked with the FBI and DEA in exchange for release from a second term in California's penitentiary when he was recaptured after uneasy passages with shady minders, via Geneva and Kabul. By the 1980s, Ginsberg eased into the role of elder statesman to the non-territorial tribe he helped shepherd. Despite the War on Drugs and the Reagan years, both men wind up their lives with a degree of grace.

Leary "with a puckish twinkle in his eye and the rumpled demeanor of a pleasantly stoned Classics professor," for his keep turned to debating Liddy on the road. Space travel occupied his interests in the 1980s. His ashes, after his death in 1997, joined those of Star Trek's creator Gene Roddenberry to circle the earth aboard Spain's first satellite, for two to ten years in orbit.

Ginsberg lamented that government research on "human mind engineering" had, except for a few military projects, been stopped, and he mourned the control of heroin by the mafia and police. He too lectured on the college circuit, continued to advise LSD use "for an intelligent kid," and stood to the left of the mainstream--even if the mainstream had moved closer towards him over the past generation. While less confrontational, his stands on homosexuality, spirituality, and ecological issues, as Connor reflects, had been adopted by millions since he had first expressed them publicly. As a Buddhist and in more genteel fashion, he spoke in 1987 of not challenging the neurotic and incompetent anymore so much as trying to enrich those who needed inspiration and guidance.

While Leary may have gained more notoriety, and may have been unable to shake his need to stay in the spotlight as an agent and a provocateur, one closes this dual biography convinced that Ginsberg may prove the more lasting contributor to personal freedom and social liberation. Conners ends his book by summing up what Ginsberg worked on in 1997, during his final days: a long poem "Death & Fame." He wanted a "big funeral" where all who were touched by him and who touched his life could attend. Conners concludes: "Allen's list in `Death & Fame' is long, but nowhere near comprehensive. That would have been impossible."

I love the way this book starts (and the way it reads throughout!). I had known about Ginsberg's Blakean vision and really appreciate Conners' perceptive ideas about it as a triggering mechanism for Ginsberg's lifelong investigation of other-worldly possibilities through tuning in and turning on to various hallucinogenic and meditation practices.

My connection to Leary has always been more to his notoriety, good and bad, as a leader in the psychedelic movement. Even at the time, his making any sense as a social scientist or thinker came and went for me, and I was then, and remain, skeptical of a number of his notions. Sometimes he was strong, sometimes very weak and his antics didn't help the movement. The inclusion of the Houseboat Summit, especially with our hindsight perspective, often shows him to be out of touch altogether (it's a wonderful showcase for the good souls of Allen and Gary Snyder as they come to his rescue or re-direct the conversation).

But, I must also say, the opening Leary chapter helps my understanding and provides clues to what motivated his passionate pursuit of the LSD experience. A number of other moments along the way also show Leary's humanity, and at times his human desperation, in a positive light.

This was quite an era and for someone who lived through it and was at least somewhat "tuned in" it was great to re-live it and to learn more about how it all went down. While the book is thorough it is hardly a textbooky historical account. It is smoothly organized and, its biggest plus, Conners has written it with a flair for storytelling that will keep you turning his pages!

This is one of the best books I have read about Ginsberg and Leary. Written without sensationalism, it chronicles the times beautifully. As one influenced greatly by both men, I was more than pleased to read such a balanced rendering, something not easy to do given their shared notoriety.

Poetry and trickery.

Courageous psychonauts I salute you in the world beyond, and I bless the author for a sensitive portrayal, warts and all, of the dreams you lived.

Sex and Light: How to Google your way to Godhood

Some Americans have attempted to turn me into a highly medicated individual, so I find ironic links to the MK Ultra project when intellectual activity is associated with drugs by those who hope the world will save itself by becoming normal. As a student at the same universities where the Unabomber obtained his degrees, I knew someone who went to a talk on: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Young people who do not want to take part in a society that has so many laws against personal behavior can study what goes on in the brains of people who are up on something, but the misfits who find themselves playing with supernatural powers when going to the moon was supposed to make sense can confuse how much of our past is still in the future. Anything I could say would be outrageous because the people in this book became the stereotype for antiestablishment thinking.