Dying Inside

That’s not so bad. Six double-spaced typed pages. At $3.50 per, it earns me a cool $21 for less than two hours’ work, and it’ll earn the brawny halfback, Mr. Paul F. Bruno, a sure B+ from Prof. Schmitz. I’m confident of that because the very same paper, differing only in a few minor stylistic flourishes, got me a B from the very demanding Prof. Dupee in May, 1955. Standards are lower today, after two decades of academic inflation. Bruno may even rack up an A — for the Kafka job. It’s got just the right quality of earnest intelligence, with the proper undergraduate mixture of sophisticated insight and naive dogmatism, and Dupee found the writing “clear and forceful” in ‘55, according to his note in the margin. All right, now. Time out for a little chow mein, with maybe a side order of eggroll. Then I’ll tackle Odysseus as a Symbol of Society or perhaps Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. I can’t work from my own old term papers for those, but they shouldn’t be too tough to do. Old typewriter, old humbugger, stand me now and ever in good stead.

FIVE.

Aldous Huxley thought that evolution has designed our brains to serve as filters, screening out a lot of stuff that’s of no real value to us in our daily struggle for bread. Visions, mystical experiences, psi phenomena such as telepathic messages from other brains — all sorts of things along these lines would forever be flooding into us were it not for the action of what Huxley called, in a little book entitled Heaven and Hell, “the cerebral reducing valve.” Thank God for the cerebral reducing valve! If we hadn’t evolved it, we’d be distracted all the time by scenes of incredible beauty, by spiritual insights of overwhelming grandeur, and by searing, utterly honest mind-to-mind contact with our fellow human beings. Luckily, the workings of the valve protect us — most of us — from such things, and we are free to go about our daily lives, buying cheap and selling dear.

Of course, some of us seem to be born with defective valves. I mean the artists like Bosch or El Greco, whose eyes did not see the world as it appears to thee and me; I mean the visionary philosophers, the ecstatics and the nirvana-attainers; I mean the miserable freakish flukes who can read the thoughts of others. Mutants, all of us. Genetic sports.

However, Huxley believed that the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve could be impaired by various artificial means, thus giving ordinary mortals access to the extrasensory data customarily seen only by the chosen few. The psychedelic drugs, he thought, have this effect. Mescaline, he suggested, interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral function, and by so doing “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet. This . . . seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value. Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometimes spiritually valuable, material may occur as the result of illness or fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a place of darkness and complete silence.”

Speaking for himself, David Selig can say very little about the psychedelic drugs. He had only one experience with them, and it wasn’t a happy one. That was in the summer of 1968, when he was living with Toni.