Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it. In 1934 and 1935 respectively, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the now-familiar modus operandi of private session between psychiatrist and artist, with the scientific gaze and the philosopher’s insights informing—or, more often, pitted against—one another. And in 1936, Antonin Artaud, having already cut himself loose from the strictures of Breton’s Surrealist movement and the precepts of scientific materialism, abandoned the Old World for the New and the narcotics of western pharmacy for the ancient sacrament of the cactus, and launched himself into a self-experiment without limits.

Sartre was injected with mescaline by his old school friend, the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache, at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in January 1935 in the course of his researches into phenomenology, Edmund Husserl’s radically reconceived form of philosophy, which Sartre had encountered in 1933 and relocated to Berlin over that summer to study more deeply. Mescaline was a tool of obvious relevance to Husserl’s injunction that “a new way of looking at things is necessary.” Phenomenology aimed to describe reality purely as it was perceived, stripped of all theories, categories, and definitions: turning attention exclusively, in Husserl’s famous dictum, “to the things themselves.” Much of the mescaline literature to date, from the early peyote reportage of Silas Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis to the stream of consciousness dictated by Witkacy, had tended in this direction: in aiming simply to describe its visions and sensations without imposing definition or meaning on them, it had in a sense been phenomenology avant la lettre.

Sartre wrote little directly about his experience, describing it briefly in notes that later found a place in L’imaginaire, his 1940 study of the phenomenology of the imagination. He found its effects elusive and sinister. “It could only exist by stealth,” he wrote; it distorted every sensation, yet whenever he attempted to perceive it directly it withdrew into the background or shifted shape. Its action on the mind “inconsistent and mysterious,” offering no solid vantage point from which to observe it. In contrast to previous descriptions of the “double consciousness” or état mixte, in which the normal self was able to observe its hallucinations dispassionately, Sartre found it impossible to be a spectator of his own experience. On the contrary, he felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him. Read More

Yukio Mishima delivers a speech shortly before his death. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A city always keeps part of itself back.

If Tokyo were a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight—the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata—and I were strangers.

These are the northern wards, in what was the old High City. The gardens of Rikugi-en and Koishikawa. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and “soaplands”—red-light districts—and apartment blocks for salarymen.

In Ichigaya, I passed concrete office block after drab office block—Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building—when suddenly the landscape cracked open. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss.

A natural amphitheater. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward. A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema.

What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again. Read More

Walter Benjamin’s membership card from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Take, as a foundation, the image of women carrying full, heavy vessels on their heads without using their hands.

The rhythm in which they do this is what the proverb demonstrates.

A noli me tangere of experience speaks from the proverb.

And through this, the proverb declares its ability to transform experience into tradition. Read More

Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride

The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland cast a profound, immersive spell on me as a boy, years before the movies existed. The raft floats past a fake Louisiana plantation, where no slaves are bought or sold but real people sit around white tablecloths in a restaurant my mother always said was too expensive. Banjo music, fireflies. Blue twilight on the bayou. A deceptive calm before the raft from the watery parish of “New Orleans Square” to some burning island in the Caribbean. The smell of chlorine.

I know more now about pirates than I did as a child: I was kidnapped and held hostage by a Somali pirate gang from early 2012 to late 2014. I’d made the mistake of traveling to Somalia to research a book. In 2005, when Somali pirates first hijacked a major vessel, they sparked a revival of an ancient crime that had lain dormant in the world, with a few exceptions, for almost two hundred years. The topic had riveted me then as a sign of historical breakdown, a fascinating old-new phenomenon.

Now, more or less recovered, back in California, I found the strange hokeyness of that Disney ride tugging at my memory. So I drove to Anaheim one recent morning and floated through the chlorine canals. We used to wait hours in that snaking line, when I was a boy, for fifteen minutes of dark fascination. But now, the wild interior world, with its animatronic drunkards and growling pirate captains, its blade-killed skeletons on piles of glittering jewels, left me empty. “Ye come seekin’ adventure and salty old pirates, eh?” said a talking skull. “Sure, you come to the proper place. But keep a weather eye open, mates—”

Read More

On the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to Gabriel García Márquez in Bogotá, Colombia, Santiago Mutis Durán, the son of Márquez’s close friend Álvaro Mutis, gathered together small author-less stories that Márquez had written down or told over the course of his lifetime. Mutis Durán’s essay was originally published in Conversaciones desde La Soledad magazine in 2001 and has been translated for The Paris Review by David Unger.  

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ IN HIS HOME IN MEXICO IN 2003. PHOTO: INDIRA RESTREPO.

We’ve all heard the kinds of stories that get passed around, author-less and persistent. I once heard Gabriel García Márquez tell the Mexican poet Adolfo Castañón one of these “unsigned” stories:

A young couple, a bit tired of city life, decided to move to the country with their two Labradors. Once settled into their little country house, they became friends with their neighbors, a couple that had fruit orchards and raised rabbits. One morning, their neighbors came over to say that they were going to town and would return the following day. The morning passed peacefully, but in the afternoon, the Labradors came into the kitchen with rabbit parts in their mouths. Shocked by this unexpected turn of events, the couple discussed what to do next. After putting the rabbits back in their cages, they returned home, decided not to say anything to their neighbors. They felt disheartened, but went through the rest of the day as if nothing had happened. The following morning their neighbors knocked on their door. Each held a dead rabbit in their hands. Before the couple even had a chance to come up with an excuse over something they had been dreading since the day before and that had kept them awake all night, their neighbors said: “We found them dead in their cages this morning; we’re in shock since yesterday we buried them in the garden.”

Read More

Thom Gunn, left, in 1960 at Hampstead-White Stone Pond. Oliver Sacks, right, with his beloved BMW motorbike at Muscle Beach. Courtesy of the Oliver Sacks Foundation. Photo taken from Sacks’s memoir On the Move.

Back in the early eighties, when I first met up with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, he was still largely unknown. Though his masterpiece Awakenings had appeared in 1973, it had gone largely unread and was actively dismissed, if read at all, by the medical community, since its layering of nineteenth-century-style case histories ran against the double-blind, quantitative-tracking, peer-reviewed conventions demanded of medical writing at the time.

Newly arrived at The New Yorker, I persuaded Sacks to let me attempt to frame him as the subject of one of the magazine’s legendary multipart profiles, and we began to spend a lot of time together. Ever so gingerly, Sacks began to broach a quite astonishing prehistory—how at age twenty, when his Orthodox Jewish mother, one of England’s first female surgeons, first learned of his homosexuality, she had torn into him with hours of “Deuteronomical cursings” (filth of the bowel, abomination, the wish that he had never been born); how a few years later, in the late fifties, having completed his initial medical training at Oxford, he bolted free of homophobic England, like a bat out of hell, racing toward California, where he undertook four years of medical residencies, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, and threw himself into a leather-clad, motorcycle-straddling, bodybuilding, drug-fueled scene. His original impetus for heading to San Francisco, he told me, may have been the presence there of the poet Thom Gunn, who was openly dealing with material Sacks felt he still couldn’t. Sacks urged me to go visit Gunn to get his sense of things, which I happily did, meeting him at an espresso place in the Castro.

After I’d worked on the profile for more than four years, Sacks asked me to shelve it: still deeply closeted, and in fact entirely celibate at that point for the fifteen years since he had left California for New York, he couldn’t deal with the prospect of having his sexuality revealed—and I certainly had no intention of outing him if he did not want to be outed. Seven years before his death, after by that point thirty-five years of celibacy, he finally allowed himself to fall in love and be fallen in love with, by the superbly kind and elegant writer Bill Hayes—and indeed a few years after that, Sacks wrote about his sexuality in his late-life autobiography, On the Move. And then, on his very deathbed, Sacks urged me to return to my original intention, to write up the multipart profile I’d been planning to all those years earlier. “Now,” Sacks said. “Now, you have to do it!”

At last, the book I produced with his blessing, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks, has been released this week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book includes my 1982 interview with Gunn, which is excerpted below.

WESCHLER

How’d you first meet Oliver?

GUNN

I met Oliver here in San Francisco in it must have been 1961, shortly after he’d arrived in California as a medical intern. He rode a motorcycle and called himself “Wolf,” which is apparently his middle name. One time he kiddingly said, “What would my maternal grandfather think if he knew the way I am using his name?” It sounded nicely ferocious. And he wrote a great deal. He wanted from very early on to be a writer, and he kept extensive notebooks. Extensive. I remember at one point there being something like a thousand typed pages of journal. One summer he decided to chronicle the trucking life, had gotten on his motorcycle, which broke down, and ended up hitching with truckers and coming back with a long account of what it was like to be a trucker. Read More