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2012/2
Peter Heigl: Mystiek en Drugs (126p.)
Peter Heigl’s Mystiek en Drugs (originally Mystik und Drogenmystik – has not been translated in English) reminded me of how much I like to read non-fiction, which was my staple between 2000 and 2004, later to be replaced by fiction.
In this pleasant little book (which fell into my hands in a derelict bookstore downtown Ghent while waiting for the windshield of my car to be replaced) and after examining the evidence, Peter Heigl concludes that to the question whether psychedelics can induce genuine mystical experiences (similar to those described within the world’s major wisdom traditions) the answer is an affirmative yes, and proceeds with investigating the ethical, religious, and philosophical consequences. Naturally, such genuine mystical experiences are the exception rather than the rule (in one experiment only the experiences of 6 out of 206 participants classified), and require not only a proper dosage and setting, but most importantly a proper ‘set’ as well, i.e. for the recipient to be in the possession of a well-integrated personality structure, and an open and creative mindset already pre-disposed to religion and spirituality.
According to some sources, psychedelics are even what boosted man’s outlook from animistic to mystic/religious to begin with; otherwise said, in the psychedelic experience lies the kernel of all religious feeling and thought. The Aryans who conquered India carried Soma with them which they had gotten acquainted with in their native Central-Asian highlands, and which became a key element in Vedantic religion. As the Aryans further penetrated the Indian lowlands (where Soma didn’t grow), they developed yoga to foster the same psychological conditions (conducive to spirituality) as Soma had done before. (In a remarkable reversal, Timothy Leary much later dubbed LSD the ‘yoga of the West.’)
2012/1
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (476p.)
I used to score books here on the Mountaintop, as in Alberto Moravia The Conformist 9 Mountaintops, until one night I woke and sat, beads of sweat lining my forehead, in panic at the thought of so much foolishness, the talentless a posteriori bookkeeping of someone else’s a priori talent. I got myself a hand pick (Steinbeck: a han’ pick) and tore apart the cabinet, only retaining the top drawer, 10 Mountaintops, in which I had previously stored away (out of the last four years of reading only) Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and to which I’m now adding John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Steinbeck busies a colloquial version of American English which might intimidate fair-weather readers not used to reading in English (‘something’ as ‘somepin’’), but it fits the Joad family wonderfully well, a hardened family of sharecroppers forced to flee native Oklahoma (Dust Bowl) during the Great Depression, migrant Okies on the way to California, a tale of unspeakable suffering in times of a changing economy.
Steinbeck himself quoted that “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but maybe even more so The Grapes of Wrath is as powerful an anti-globalization statement (50 years before globalization became mainstream in the mid 80s), as Animal Farm is against communism or 1984 against totalitarianism.
Nobel Prize Literature 1962.
For those who have nine minutes to spare (I think you should): Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello (RATM) in a brilliant live rendition of Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, named after the main character in The Grapes of Wrath.
(Hard times on Wall Street, hard times on Main Street.)
I got this picture out of De Muur, a Dutch quarterly (and literary) cycling magazine, of which I had ordered the January 2011 edition because it contains an anthology of cycling literature, compiled by Arthur van den Boogaard, who is in the picture, together of course with the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, the great John Maxwell Coetzee (in front) – wearing ONCE cycling tights (very 90s again) and riding a Bianchi road bike (no doubt colored ‘Celeste’ (Italian), ‘Selest’ (English), or Bianchi Green for the rest of us – the oldest bicycle company on the planet), both tights and bike on borrow as Coetzee was on a visit to Amsterdam, as a writer, not as a rider.
2011/27
Scott Young: Neil and Me (379p.)
Scott Young’s Neil and Me is a rare case of a biography written by the dad on the son, the dad being Canadian sports journalist Scott Young, the son being Neil Young, rock ‘n roll’s creative genius who over 50 years has built himself a career in rock only equaled by Bob Dylan, and this without compromising himself once. With his falsetto voice and acoustic guitar, Neil Young might come across as outdated to the younger generations, but I have listened to his music on tape, vinyl, CD, and MP3, and I would through streaming too were it not that accessing Spotify requires a Facebook account. His Live Rust album really got things going for me back then, a quarter of a century ago – I’m getting old.
Neil Young has three children, two boys and a girl, and while there is no genetic component to cerebral palsy, both his boys suffer from it, Zeke mildly, Ben strongly. Amber, his girl, has epilepsy. There are a lot of nice passages in Neil and Me about what it means or can mean to be a father, but otherwise, I’d say Neil and Me is for the fans really, which I am. The front cover says ‘A gem in the library of rock’ – I’m still hoping to discover that gem one day.
Get his Live at Massey Hall album (1971).
(Rumor has it that Neil Young is in the process of writing his autobiography. Panic among the Young fans as it might detract him from working on his Archives series – the definitive, comprehensive, chronological survey of his entire body of work.)
NY holding Zeke at a 1974 San Francisco Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young gig.
