The Strange Attractor of 90s Cyberdelia and His Afterlife In VR

Graham St. John: It was and continues to be mind-boggling. So many stories yet untold. As a biographer, I feel like I'm somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Captain Willard, tracking Kurtz up the river. But I'm no assassin. The approach is sympathetic, but no hagiography.

A big highlight of the entire process was my friendship with Terence McKenna’s old Buddy Rick Watson, who died last year—to whose memory the book is dedicated. Rick saw the merit in the project and shared many stories. Rick is the author of exquisite unpublished writings including those that feature his old pal, and some of which helped shape the narrative. Most memorable is a story called ‘Morning Glory’ that documents Ricky and Terry's first psychedelic trip—on morning glory seeds—in 1964. The teenagers had met at Awalt High School in Mountain View [California]. It was there that they took a night science class when, on one occasion, the guest teacher there was a young Stanford psychologist PhD student who had been administering low doses of LSD in controlled settings at the International Foundation for Advanced Study.

Unwittingly serving as their psychedelic "psychopomp," this character that they subsequently visited in his office in Menlo Park, grilling him for information on sourcing, preparation, and dosage. He was not as forthcoming as they desired, but the duo ended up acquiring several dozen packets of “Heavenly Blue” from a Los Altos nursery, grounding seeds by the hundreds, wolfed them down and had a wild altered sojourn through San Francisco, Golden Gate Park and City Lights. As Rick revisited this experience, we discovered that the doctoral student was none other than James Fadiman, subsequent promoter of the microdose (who had somewhat ironically helped turn on the heroic doser). Watson was an exceptional writer, and if nothing else, this book effectively introduces the world to a figure who, unlike his buddy, did not seek the limelight.

Another highlight of the book, which might be a tale of McKenna's lowest ebb, is the story related by Kat Harrison, his spouse of 16 years, of the "terror trip" on Hawaii in early 1988, after which McKenna is reported to never again take a heroic dose of mushrooms, and after which their relationship was effectively done. The tale is told in full for the first time by Kat, and I'll leave it to the reader to encounter that in text. It's worth reading in full, as is taking into account the afterwash of the discussion. One thing's for sure, Terence rarely had an opportunity to stop and smell the roses. His life was like a rollercoaster ride, remarkable for any biographer, not least due to the hundreds of hours of raps that he left us with, which serve almost as dream narratives that will be mined by researchers of all stripes and persuasions for years to come.
 
I begin that exercise here but there is so much more to be said about his iconoclastic metaphysics. Indeed, I have at least one more book in me that may plunge down that path. So while this leans in the direction of an intellectual biography, the more important details are yet to be fully unpacked. I imagine such will be the product of much study and conversation between many folks in the years to come. The fact is, any such conversation has needed a decent biography from which to make properly grounded observations. I hope this book serves that end.

GSJ: What, you want some sort of cheat sheet to his opus, the Timewave, to which McKenna's eschaton, the "transcendental object at the end of time", is implicit, and which my book attempts to unpack—and takes 500+ pages to do so? I'm compelled to relate a passage in the book about this phenomenon:

In a favored passage from Finnegans Wake, McKenna lit upon the word “prospector.” It was a status with which he had identified as a spritely rockhound who upgraded the scouring of Black Canyon for fossils to a ques tfor “the stone” of alchemy. This quest eventually turned over an idea: The Timewave, his identity-defining artifice. McKenna was an avid prospector who loaded this device with a kaleidoscope of signifiers: mathematical mandala, score of the bio-cosmic symphony, holographic modular hierarchy, hyper-novelty map, interference pattern detector, puzzle garden, fractal time, time machine. It might have been the stand-up philosopher’s showstopping act, but more than a bit in a stage routine. The Timewave was a hobby, theory, performance, vision, prophecy, and commercial software with an oracular application, all rolled into one. An enigmatic conjuration animated by his own doubts and hopes, insecurities and desires, hubris and humility, it was cardinal to the myth of Terence McKenna, the substance of his inner workings, his spiritual compass. His opus.

That’s the opening salvo of the chapter ‘Timewave’. Readers be warned, strap a plank to your back before jumping down that well. What he called Timewave Zero is, in my unpacking, less a mathematical object than a mythopoetic object.  

By the way, as Dennis will aver, he was not the co-author of this; in fact Dennis cautiously distances himself from the prophetic proclivities of his brother, who was as much trickster as prophet.

GSJ: As a "philosopher"? Neither would afford him that pretension. He and his ex-wife cultivated quite varying attitudes towards indigenous peoples and their relationship with plant allies, divergent perspectives that I begin to address in the book. As said earlier, Dennis, an ethnopharmacologist, though he loved and still loves his brother, has distanced himself from Terence, who developed a quite ambivalent relationship with science. This is born out in the contemporary climate where Terence is something of a persona non grata in the world of psychedelic science, in the legitimate environs of Psychedelics 2.0, as a kind of intellectual outcast whose reception in academia has been, despite some exceptions, rather mute. And yet, at the same time, McKenna is a heroic occult figure in the psychedelic underground, "the Bard", the stand-up philosopher, a meta-trip sitter who today, 25 years after his passage, is among the most sampled voices in electronic music productions. I long ago thought someone ought to write a biography about this  enigmatic figure! I've barely scratched the surface.

GSJ: Well of course none of the early stuff—i.e. from the Sixties—was recorded and we must rely on the memories of those who were present. I was fortunate enough to chat with many who were—including those with sharp minds, like Ralph Abraham (right to the end),  likewise Rick Watson also to the end, and Douglas Hansen, who take us back to high school at Mountain View in the South Bay of San Francisco. Watson speaks of his buddy modeling his style of delivery on Dylan Thomas. Hansen speaks of witnessing his teenaged friend extemporizing on a  couple of core ideas that were to become signature themes in his life: “the new eschatology” and the “aesthetics of chaos.”

Later fellow UC Berkeley alumnus George Csicsery became a friendly sparring partner with McKenna, defending his own sense of disillusionment with the sociopolitical moment: “Terry’s political stance was always bound up with his cosmological perspective that we were in a transformative phase that marked the end of a certain kind of civilization and the beginning of something superior.”

GSJ:  A riot of passage. The McKenna brothers ventured to the Amazon in 1971 at a critical juncture in both of their lives, in search of “the stone” (an orally active form of DMT) and stumbling instead, at the mission of La Chorrera, Colombia, upon the Psilocybin mushroom, the spores of which they transported back to the US where they discovered a cultivation technique that became hugely successful in the underground. La Chorrera was a great height from which Terence would never quite descend, the “experiment” there was the doorway to his communications with a mushroom muse that would continue to show him the way for the next two decades, the “inner voice” directing him to decode the I Ching and formulate the wave of time that was eventually known as the Timewave. 

GSJ:  His was the way of the gnomic-shaman. It was a “way” that was thoroughly unique, which some will read as single minded and arrogant, others courageous. His was a cryptic approach not replicating any precursor, and never to be repeated. Not unlike Burroughs, there was a distrust of the brujo. It was a libertarian’s distrust extended to all authorities, whether spiritual, political, scientific, or culture itself, which was “not to be trusted.”  A persistent disregard for native lore and practice—he was no linguist, nor ethnologist—led to some questionable views and a distorted understanding of “shamanism.” McKenna would be no ‘mark’ for indigenous tribes and academic tribes alike; his best vitriol apparently reserved for scientists, and those borrowing from its power and prestige. Of sociologists he once remarked, “these clowns have just snuck under the tent and should actually be shown the door and put back outside with the card-readers”. Of course, as but one sign of the contradiction that ruled his roost, he sought legitimacy from science himself, as notably evident in his book Food of the Gods.

Nothing if not insistent, he stuck to his guns vis-a-vis paths to the transpersonal and paranormal, whether ancient, indigenous, or modern: if they’re unstoned methods, they were of little interest to him. Driven by a singular evolutionary perspective that prophesied the “archaic return” of the stoned ape’s descendants, this judgement he pursued to uncomfortably chauvinistic degrees: even if the natives were getting stoned, they tended to put the breaks on the shamanic enterprise.

GSJ: Well, he would say that he’d imagined VR coming to be from the late 1960s, that it was somehow a projection of his own wish and fantasy —a position that would later form something of a bit in his standup philosopher routine where, not unlike a comic, he would concede his own faults before audiences with disarming honesty; faults like his megalomaniacal tendencies.
 
If cybernetic virtuality was a critical juncture on the path towards immortality, as he assumed through the Nineties (in the most gushing tones), was that not something of a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mention this, in the light of his own notably spectral stature over the 25 years since his death, a figure who, by way of his archive of hundreds of hours of recorded raps, came to permeate the Net in an unparalleled fashion, his voice sampled by musicians more than any other in the history of electronic music, whose disembodied voice is now the basis for multiple mega LLM metaTM’s [Terence McKenna’s]that serve as digital oracles that provide “informing voices” for the living; not unlike what the mushroom muse once served for TM himself. From the time he departed in the year 2000, TM would become a Net-era exemplar of a figure who exists in a permanent state of departure while always arriving. We are still attempting to come to terms with what this state of hyperliminality actually means.

GSJ: You’ve likely already come to your own conclusion that he is all at once both and neither.  Responding to these kinds of inquiries compels me to contemplate my own role, or the role that has been thrust upon me by those hungry for answers.  I am compelled to contemplate my apparent guise as an authority on Terence McKenna, a more than faintly ludicrous proposition. I suppose among the key understandings I have acquired about TM is that he is a phenomenon. And, as is the nature of phenomena, he’s a figure who is the subject-object of a multitude of authoritative views, perhaps as many as there are folks who knew Terence and to whom he spoke directly. That is a very sizable number of experts whose opinions today proliferate on the Net. I imagine my book will serve to augment the knowledge of multitudes, hopefully sharpening critical skills while enabling a sympathetic criticism of a figure with a complex background and nuanced biography which this work has only begun opening up, a biography to which I expect many others will contribute. Strange Attractor is not the final word on Terence McKenna.