Psychedelia, p.55
Psychedelia, page 55
Higher worlds that you uncover
Light the path you want to roam
You compare there and discover
You won't need a shell of foam
Twice-born Gypsies care and keep
The nowhere of their former home
They slip inside this house as they pass by
The phrase 'shell of foam', referring to the physical body, is typical of ancient Indian and Chinese literature and occurs in both the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada. 'Twice-born' is a title originally given to Brahmins in Northern India, though today the term is used for anyone belonging to the higher castes. Hall may have been interested in the literal meaning of the word as well.
The nomadic Gypsies echo the Bedoine in the first verse, but are seen here as an example for the single protagonist to follow. He is not yet member of their group, but passing through stages of illumination and learning, perhaps through meditation. The protagonist is informed that the redundancy of the physical body does not mean that it is useless – the 'former home' may be kept and cared for and visited once in a while. This is an example set by the highly evolved Twice -born Gypsies. The verse could in fact be seen as an advise against suicide, and in any event an urging not to forget the physical pleasures of life. The eclectic elements are even stronger in the following lines:
Four and twenty birds of Maya
Baked into an atom you
Polarized into existence
Magnet heart from red to blue
To such extent the realm of dark
Within the picture it seems true
But slip inside this house and then decide
Central American and Indo-Vedic elements are mixed with references to modern science and meditation. The 'birds of Maya' combines images of Central American religion with the unrelated Sanskrit word for the veil of illusion. 'Four and twenty' is an enumeration that occurs in Indian mythology – Ramakrishna refers to the 'four and twenty cosmic principles' in his famous autobiography – as well as for the Elder of the Book Of Revelations, and in Occidental folklore such as sea shanties. The 'polarization' seems to be a merging of ideas from modern physics, familiar ground for a former engineering student like Hall, and the ancient Chinese book Secret Of The Golden Flower, which Hall has cited as an inspiration. In this book the term polarization and non-polarity is used to describe aspects of meditation. The mind, or 'heart', is thought of as a compass which should be directed towards the proper points. Like the previous stanza, this passage seems to warn of the pitfalls of meditation. Numerous illusions and false gods may be created by the mind as it passes through states of awareness. The magnetic compass may be turned 180 degrees in the wrong direction and falseness may appear as truth. However, these are still stages that must be passed and tested by the protagonist.
The Blake and Swedenborg-like prophesies of the next verse are more straight-forward:
All your lightning waits inside you
Travel it along your spine
Seven stars receive your vision
Seven seals remain divine
Seven churches filled with spirit
Treasure from the angel mine
Slip inside this house as you pass by
The syncretistic strain is ever-present. The lightning along your spine – echoing the 'thunder' from a previous verse – recalls not only kundalini yoga but a physical sensation that psychedelic drugs may produce. In kundalini inner energy is made to travel from the base of the spine and upwards, passing the chakras as it goes along. This 'lightning' travels from the eyes or third eye chakra – the wordplay on 'vision' is typical of Hall – to the seven stars of The Book Of Revelations. Other elements from the Revelations are summoned up, but the Seals remain divine rather than causing apocalypse. The churches filled with spirit – again a wordplay – may recall the Gospel churches of Memphis where Hall grew up, as much as the seven Congregations or Vials Of Wrath in John. A treasure is brought up from the 'angel mine', rather than the smoke and human locusts of the Fifth Angel. A jubilant, triumphant mood emerges, and the mass destruction of John's prophecy is replaced by a single person's visionary fulfillment. The individual process of illumination that was begun in the fourth verse is now completed. In the short refrain (type B) that follows, the consequences are presented:
The space you make has your own laws
No longer human Gods are cause
The center of this House will never die
By transcending mass religion and finding his eternal center the protagonist has made himself ready to approach the group. The second refrain (type C) that was heard before the 'initiation' verse appears again, as if to signal that the retrospective cycle is complete and we can move forward. Th is is followed by another bridge-like verse (type D):
Draw from the well of unchanging
And its union nourishes on
In the right rearranging
Til the last confusion is gone
Water brothers trust in the ultimust
Of the always singing song
They pass along
The 'you' has again disappeared. Like the previous bridge-verse, this passage speaks of an initiation. 'Water brothers' is a phrase from Robert Heinlein's famous '60s novel Stranger In A Strange Land, and refers to a ritual symbolizing friendship, particularly among outcasts. The well of unchanging echoes both the 'angel mine' and the eternal center of the House. The final illumination is to be found deep down, inside. Metaphors of permanence rather than change are now used – the well replaces the river.
The neologism ultimust may recall the 'ultimateless' of the Secret Of The Golden Flower; a finite state beyond dualism. The trust in the validity of the union as described in the 'always singing song' completes the journey of the protagonist, and we are back among the fully enlightened bedoine of the first verse. A summation of sorts completes 'Slip Inside This House' in a fairly straightforward way, broadening the aspects of the evolutionary process and applying it to society in general. The resulting 'three-eyed men' are presumably not different from the psychedelically enlightened 'new man' discussed on Psychedelic Sounds. While his poetical craftsmanship has evolved substantially, Tommy Hall's underlying philosophical program is the same: acidheads should come together in small enclaves where they can live joyfully in peace while seeking out ways to achieve permanent spiritual breakthroughs. As the present chapter has shown, such developments did indeed occur during the early, psychedelic phase of the counterculture, but few survived the tumultuous and counter-productive climate of the late 1960s.
4
The rest of Easter Everywhere covers a broad spectrum of human experience – love, friendship, sex, alienation, drugs – all skillfully explored and presented. From a psychedelic perspective, "Dust" on side 2 commands special attention. This folk-influenced number is perhaps the most beautiful song the Elevators recorded. The influence from The Rubaiyat is strongly felt, and direct links can be found to several of Fitzgerald's stanzas (e.g. #23, 36, 38 and 65). The Persian poem's encouraging message to live in a now of hedonistic pleasure aligns well with Hall's psychedelic program, even if Omar Khayyam's alchemical agent was wine, rather than LSD. Much like how Hall drew lyrical energy from the contrast between a rich visionary flux and the immobility of a house in 'Slip Inside This House', he now builds his life-embracing world-view around a word usually associated with death:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust
(Cymbeline, IV:2)
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
(The Waste Land, III)
Perhaps inspired by the play of dust in a shaft of sunlight, Hall sees not death or decay in the 'dust from your skin' but an affirmation of on-going life, where 'only love matters'. Despite the shared influence from The Rubaiyat, Hall's lyricism here differs radically in style from 'Slip Inside This House':
Scents and perfumes
Wince, since
Your higher fragrance
Is memory incense
And never destroyed
The clipped, tightly rhymed verses owe little to Fitzgerald, but are reminiscent of William Blake's early poems such as 'The Sick Rose', a rarefied style given particular attention in Swinburne's 1868 study. The complex emotional imagery of 'Dust' deals with love and the passing of time, but beyond these classic Shakespearean themes a sense of celebration of human existence takes hold:
Taste past our thirst
Faced, waste
Beyond uses
With so many juices
We're filled to the brim
The harnessing of the trip's creative energy, and the development of a new representational language to fit the new theme, are sublime achievements even for the experienced psychedelicist. Like the opening image of wind-scattered dust, many of Hall's beautiful visions may be best understood as concrete impressions received under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs:
Every stop we've taken
Is now a wondrous shrine
The trees in our gaze
Will show us the love that we bring them
These are not metaphors, but remembrances of actual visual-emotional experiences from the psychedelic state. This is what the world actually looks like – or what it can look like – when the third eye is sufficiently awakened. The inflowing sense data is imbued with tones of warmth and love, and the impressions come equipped with emotional weight. The altered awareness of the passing of time, the rich, sometimes synaesthetic, input from all five senses, and the blending of the perceptual and the emotional, as in the anthropomorphic trees, are all typical of The Psychedelic Experience.
Unlike the peak experience ride of 'Roller Coaster', 'Dust' emerges from a state of psychedelic maturity called the high plateau experience.4 In the high plateau, the radical initiation of one's first journeys into Innerspace have developed into a more balanced and thoughtful mode of psychedelization, which can be sensed both on the micro-level of an individual trip and on the macro-level of a psychedelic lifestyle shared with others. In "Dust", the group of select individuals from "Slip Inside This House" is seen through the eyes of a member of the group. The 'I' is no more important than the 'you' or 'us' – the words are used interchangedly. They reside in a paradisiacal rural setting, the river bend from the earlier song is there, as are trees and animals. It is not a wildlife scene, but a nurtured and tilled environment, where nature 'is in order' and we 'cultivate our bend'. The group has found a permanent 'house' for their psychedelic enclave. The house is also a final resting-place for their physical bodies, a place to wait for definite transcendence, which may be physical death, or nirvana:
The faith that we build
Will strengthen our close growing closer
'Til waiting is filled
We simply remember we are
Wherever we are
Within this setting, the protagonist contemplates aspects of physical existence – dust from the skin, scents, tastes, facial expressions. These are things of beauty that will be lost when the journey is completed, as it must be. A sense of mourning, mixed with wonder and love, emerges. It is hard for humans to abandon such things:
'Til we're complete
Will, still
Is intention
We still need attention
To help us along
The song is written from a perspective of awestruck love for the human experience. It transcends the Rubaiyat in that it recognizes the higher realm to which the group will ultimately travel, and its celebration of life lacks the bittersweet irony that the Persian poem offers in its references to death and forgetfulness. As an anthem of Psychedelia's high plateau, 'Dust' echoes of Plato's anamnesis inside the great temple at Eleusis; the rediscovery of eternal life and the celebration of this life.
As images of a communal lifestyle built upon spiritual experiences, the key songs on Easter Everywhere are reminiscent of the League of Hermann Hesse's Journey To The East, which influenced Tim Leary's Millbrook group (another psychedelic enclave, like the Elevators) a great deal. Presumably an account of Hesse's partaking in a mescaline-fuelled artist colony in the early 1920s, the novella evokes both the sad loss of the youthful companionship within the psychedelic group, and the loving warmth of their otherworldly adventures while they were taking place. The observation can expand to include all of Hesse's later prose works, which outline a thematic arc which clearly resembles the trajectory in the Elevators' recordings, from the first initiation ('Roller Coaster'/Steppenwolf) into the deeper illumination ('Kingdom Of Heaven'/Siddharta), followed by shared, communal psychedelic exploration ('Slip Inside This House'/Journey To The East) into sparse utopian retreat ('Dust'/The Glass Bead Game). Incidentally, the recurring phrase 'Til Waiting Is Filled' is another quote from Heinlein's Stranger From A Strange Land, a book whose cult status among hippies in the '60s seems difficult to understand today, except perhaps as a symbol of an increasingly self-aware counterculture.
Written at the band's long rural retreat during the 'Summer Of Love', 'Dust' captures the last stage of the psychedelic lifestyle, not in retrospect but in real time; the life inside an earthly utopian enclave soon to be replaced by something undefined but even greater. This double positive is the fundamental spiritual message of Tommy Hall's work with the 13th Floor Elevators: to enjoy the magic of one's everyday life while waiting to enter the timeless, higher realms.5
Notes
* * *
1 Quotation from Bob Rafelson's & Jack Nicholson's Head (1968).
2 The Process Church saga falls outside the delimitations of this book due to their essentially non-psychedelic nature, yet their story is worth examining for anyone interested in '60s-70s underground culture. A full-length book written by a former cult member appeared in 2009, Love Sex Fear Death: The Inside Story of the Process Church of the Final Judgement by Timothy Wyllie. Emerging as an off-shoot from Scientology, the Process founders developed their own occult ideology which went very much against the flower-power message of the '60s. The group relocated to the USA, and had connections to a few underground rock bands.
3 The 'house' metaphor can be found in the story of the historical Buddha's supreme enlightenment, recounted in works like Coomaraswamy's classic Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism: 'Through many diverse births I passed / Seeking in vain the builder of the house / But O framer of houses, thou art found / Never again shalt thou fashion a house for me'. A commentary note explaining the house as meaning the individual existence and the builder as earthly desire amplifies a possible relevance to 'Slip Inside This House'.
4 A proponent of the high plateau experience and its related lifestyle was the American psychologist Abraham Maslow. The last section of Chapter XIX features a more detailed discussion of the high plateau state.
5 The 13th Floor Elevators' third and final studio album Bull Of The Woods has emerged as a cult favorite in its own right in recent decades. More of a private testimonial than the universal acid liturgy of the two preceding albums, it is to some degree a solo LP from guitarist Stacy Sutherland, characterized by intense, brooding moods reflecting a darker side of the band's psychedelic lifestyle. The exceptional lyrics to 'Rose & The Thorn' echo a terrifying vision Sutherland experienced during an infamous concert in Houston '67 when the band got on stage loaded on upwards 1000 micrograms of LSD; the ensuing musical confusion was in fact captured on tape. During this trip Sutherland was given three prophecies by a hallucinatory angel, which he seemingly refers to in the lyrics. In 1977 he recounted the experience and explained that two of the things the angel prophesized had now come true while the third one hadn't yet, 'and I hope it doesn't'. The following year he was shot dead by his wife in a domestic fight.
'When the pioneers came to the edge of the Pacific the only geography left to explore was that which lay 1 within them.'
XV
HAIGHT AND LOVE
1
As Gene Anthony makes clear in his photo reminiscence of the Haight-Ashbury, the truly vital year for San Francisco's alternative culture was not 1967, but 1966. Ironically titled The Summer Of Love, Anthony's pioneering book places the emphasis on a cycle that began with the Trips Festival in January 1966 and ended with the Human Be-In 12 months later. Charles Perry paints a similar picture in his standard work on the era, The Haight-Ashbury: A History. When his colorful account of the early San Francisco street culture enters '67, Perry's commitment to the storyline trails off and the vivid narrative is replaced by a somewhat mechanical week-by-week account of what he calls The Deluge. The second half of the year 1967, which was when the San Francisco trend went viral, is covered most briefly in an appendix.2
Unlike most who claim to remember 'the sixties', Anthony and Perry shared the advantage of being present in the early, formative days of the Haight scene, rather than flying in from Madison Avenue or jumping aboard a Greyhound after hearing Scott McKenzie singing about wearing flowers in your hair on the radio. The fundamental message these authors bring, like many of their local peers, is that if there ever was a 'Summer Of Love' in San Francisco, it took place in 1966, and what the original Haight-Ashbury street culture entailed was a unique social experiment in alternative lifestyles, not some trendy pop music scene. Unfortunately, Anthony's and Perry's works appeared at a time (1980 and 1984 respectively) when public interest in old acid freaks was at a nadir, and the two writers did not fully succeed in altering the misperception of San Francisco's psychedelic '60s that Johnny-come-lately weekend hippies and rock journalists had handed down.
The Haight scene in its early, important form was first and foremost a street culture; a bohemian enclave with roots among the '50s Beats. There was no leadership, yet an ethical code of sorts emerged under the aegis of the Diggers, whose stream of letters and pamphlets commented upon current events in clear-cut terms. The Diggers were an off-shoot from the SF Mime Troupe and referred to themselves as politico-artists, a label which provided them with plenty of intellectual freedom. Although deliberately anonymous and faceless, the Diggers' initiative rapidly spread to other underground scenes, and set the tone for alternative urban cultures as far away as Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The Haight community was fully conscious of the international network taking shape in 1966-67:
