What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been…

Ralph Metzner, October Gallery, London June 16^th 2009

The October Gallery in London has been doing a series of talks on the nature of consciousness. Step forward, for one night only, Ralph Metzner. Who he? Well, now children…

Back in the 1950s all sorts of folk, including the CIA, were looking at drugs. LSD 25 was one of those drugs. Metzner, a graduate student at Harvard, helped Timothy Leary and Richard “Baba Ram Dass” Alpert in their studies into this new field. This is before it was illegal and a counter-culture developed. Why, it was even a fashionable thing in Hollywood and people like Cary Grant swore by it.

Leary urged the world to “tune in, turn on, drop out”. Metzner helped, tripping with the likes of Kesey, Cassady and Kerouac. But he’s no burnt out acid casualty. Far from it. His interest in the human brain and consciousness has been his life’s work and, indeed, he’s a respected academic.

Recently he’s published his own account of those heady daze, to give his side of the Tale of The Sixties. And so a small audience gathers at the October to see and hear a living link to those times. A primary source.

The evening was a gentle affair. We were shown a trailer for a documentary film about Leary and Alpert, based on home footage shot before Leary’s death. It looked lo-fi but fun. Then Metzner, a twinkly 70 year old, read a few passages from his book. Nothing heavy, just a few glimpses into what it was like to explore the inner mind back then.

The Q&A session after was too short but showed a healthy sense of humour and lack of concern for authority. They took LSD themselves to have a subjective understanding of what people went through otherwise, “it’s kinda boring taking notes for 6 hours of someone going “Wow!””. Harvard didn’t like their approach. Others, like Huxley, believed LSD was only for the cultural elite. Metzner agreed more with Leary’s egalitarian American classlessness: everyone should have the chance.

The talk ended with a quick slide show of the L’Omo tribe of Africa. Incredible painted faces and bodies, that seemed to fuse the human with plant. It captured the trippiness of a drug experience and the power of the mind to project and actualise thoughts, feelings and environment. Phew.

Ralph Metzner. A footnote in the alternative history of the Universe.