The following is an
expert from Primal Regeneration by neo-beat writer Nicolo Capelli in which the author talks
about the historic role of “systematic derangement of the senses” as the key to
creative inspiration.
In The
Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley once famously wrote: “If the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of
his cavern.” In the same work, Huxley
states the goal of mankind as to be “shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be
shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to
an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and
notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at
Large.”
Huxley’s view is that we human beings have allowed ourselves to
view the world through the narrow and constricting prism of ordinary
perception. In The Doors of
Perception, he posits that if we could but “cleanse” our way of looking at
the world—to get beyond, in other words, the tyranny of our scientific,
pragmatic ways of understanding reality—new possibilities that are virtually
limitless would open themselves up to us.
The full potentials of our fantastic selves, in other words, would
inevitably be unleashed.
So how
exactly does one go about liberating his or her mind from its ordinary, mundane
forms of perception? Actually, this has
been a question that has intrigued artists and writers for most of the 20th
century, but particularly during the 1950s and 60s in the United States, when a
new consciousness was developing in the country and young people in particular
were searching for ways to break beyond the conformist sensibilities of their
parents’ generations. The figure that
many of these iconoclastic visionaries looked to in particular was a young poet
with a checkered past and some rather strange ideas about artistic
liberation—the 19th century French bad-boy, Arthur Rimbaud.
Born in
1854 in the small French town of Charleville, Rimbaud had already begun winning
awards for his writing by the age of 13.
Attempting to flee the sterile conformism of his home life, he went to
Paris and began a torrid affair with the poet Paul Verlaine, which ended badly
for both of them. In 1873, he wrote his
most famous work, A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), which
had an enormous impact on the direction of modern poetry. By the age of 19, Rimbaud stopped writing
poetry completely and left for Africa as a colonial tradesman. In 1891 he developed a cancerous growth in
his leg; the leg was amputated, but the cancer continued to spread, and he died
at the age of 37.
In letters
that Rimbaud wrote when he was still only a teenager, he outlined his vision
for the true poet:
Right now, I’m beshitting
myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn
myself into a seer: you won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that
I’ll be able to explain it to you. It
has to do with making your way towards the unknown by a derangement of all
the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it,
to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am.
The Poet makes himself into
a seer by a long, involved and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness;
he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only one essence
remains. He undergoes unspeakable
tortures that require complete faith and superhuman strength, rendering him the
ultimate Invalid among men, the master criminal, the first among the damned—the
supreme Savant! For he arrives at the
unknown! For, unlike everyone else, he
has developed an already rich soul. He
arrives at the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends up losing his
understanding of his visions, he has, at least, seen them! It doesn’t matter if these leaps into the
unknwn kill him: other awful workers will follow him; they’ll start at the
horizons where the other has fallen.
As I
mentioned, Rimbaud inspired many of his own contemporaries, but it was not
until the 1950s, when he was “discovered” by Beat Generation writers like Jack
Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Alan Ginsberg that Rimbaud’s vision truly began
to take hold.
In particular Rimbaud’s view that true vision is attained by the
artist though “a long…and systematic derangement of the senses” (dérèglement raisonné de tous les sens) would have
an enormous role to play in the art, music, and culture of the Beats and the
Counterculture. For Rimbaud, this
disorganization took the form of wild evenings drinking absinthe and smoking
hashish to excess and engaging in outrageous behavior that scandalized Parisian
society. When the Beat writers
encountered Rimbaud during their years at Columbia University they too
attempted systematic derangement through excessive alcohol consumption,
experimentation with narcotics, and anti-social forms of behavior
(cohabitation, homosexual activity, the celebration of the criminal, the
junkie, and in general all outcasts of society).
Later in the 1960s, Rimbaud provided the inspiration for the
founding members of the Counterculture, who saw LSD as a way of achieving
Huxley’s cleansing of the doors of perception.
Individuals as diverse as Timothy Leary (a Harvard psychologist),
Richard Alpert (later to become Hindu mystic Ram Dass), Huston Smith
(theologian and author of The Religions of Man), and Andrew Weil (natural
health guru) would unite to form the Harvard Psychadelic club, the aim of which
was to use drugs like LSD to achieve personal and spiritual liberation.
There’s no doubt that some of the greatest achievements of 1960s
Counterculture—in particular the wild, psychedelic music of the period—were
fueled by the use of LSD. Bob Dylan, The
Beatles, The Greatful Dead, The Doors, and Jefferson Airplane wrote some of
their most original music while under the influence of the drug. Unfortunately, LSD proved to be a gateway drug that lead to the
deaths of some of the brightest stars of the sixties music scene—most notably,
Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimmy Hendrix—and to serious rehab issues for
many others.
The heavy toll that drug use took on young people during the 1960s
would make the lifestyles of the Counterculture—and to a lesser extent the Beat
Generation—seem somehow illegitimate as a result. But what exactly was the goal of those
admittedly unconventional lifestyles? It
was nothing other than the desire to liberate oneself from the tyranny of
conformism, to explore one’s deeper potential as a human being, and to allow
one’s innate and unique creative potential to reveal itself as a result. To the extent that human beings have fantastic
selves buried within them, it seems evident that at least some members of the
Beat Generation of the 1950s and the Counterculture of the 1960s were
extraordinarily successful in unleashing them and produced wild, uninhibited,
often surrealistic creative work as a result.
Systematic derangement is certainly the key to breaking free of
static, conformist, bourgeois notions of the self and is the catalyst for true
creative inspiration. But this
derangement, if it is to be sustainable and non-destructive, must take a form
other than chemical. Hallucinogenic
drugs may jolt the artist into perceiving the world around him in unconventional,
spontaneous, and fluid ways, but the price he pays for such flashes of insight
is often far too great—madness, debilitation, and ultimately premature death.
So how does one engage in systematic derangement without damning
his soul at the same time? The answer
lies in existential revolt. The artist
must constantly be in a state of resistance against all those social mechanisms
that would confine his spirit. He embrace the social outcast as his constant companion, he must spend his time in the dark places
where the truly original minds lurk, he must pursue forbidden love, he must
reject all static notions of the self, recognizing that he can be all things,
that he is not limited by any essential nature.
Revolt enables the artist to become Rimbaud’s “first among the damned;
the supreme Savant.”
Such revolt against the status quo is never easy and often comes
at a sharp price. But unlike chemical
derangement, existential revolt offers the artist the possibility of transcendence
without the total annihilation of the self.
In this sense, it is the only true solution to the modern crisis of
spiritual banality that we all face.
