Consciousness Expansion in the Cuckoo's Nest
How Ken Kesey Turned On America
http://counterpunch.org/jacobs11052010.html
By RON JACOBS
November 5 - 7, 2010
Ken Kesey dedicated his first novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
to his friend Vik Lovell with these words: "To Vik Lovell, who told
me there were no dragons and then led me to their lairs." Kesey was
speaking, of course, about his experiences with LSD and other
psychedelic drugs. It was these experiences that not only fueled
Kesey's first two novels, but also his subsequent life as a cultural
revolutionary.
As I write this review I am listening to a recording of one of the
"Acid Tests" sponsored by Kesey and his cohorts, the Merry
Pranksters. For those who are unaware, these gatherings combined the
liberal use of LSD, marijuana and other mood modifiers with jazz/rock
music, films and other images, costumes, and dancing to create an
experience often described as ecstatic and tribal. Their arrival on
the California cultural scene spawned a number of imitators and even
more detractors that saw these experiments as dangerous and
revolutionary. The recording is an montage of guitar, harmonica,
extemporaneous poetry played through time-delay mechanisms and just
plain old psychedelic mayhem. It could certainly be considered
disconcerting to those used to a linear reality. Of course, it was
exactly that reality that the tests aimed to subvert, which is the
primary reason why they were considered revolutionary.
Mark Christiansen came of age during the heyday of the LSD historical
moment. Ken Kesey was not only one of his psychedelic heroes, but a
literary acquaintance of his poet uncle. Christiansen is also the
author of the recently published Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the
Politics of Ecstasy. Nominally a biography of Kesey the writer
turned zeitgeist superhero, Acid Christ takes the reader through
the author's experience of Kesey's books and life as countercultural
guru. Although he begins with biographical information about Kesey's
childhood and early life as a writer, Christiansen quickly moves his
narrative into another sphere. Using Kesey primarily as a foil,
Christiansen writes about his experiences as a suburban child of the
1960s. Naturally, that experience involved a bit of drug use and
abuse, some dealing and a lot of trying not to join the conventional
world of a career and a mortgage.
He begins his story with a cynical undertone reminiscent of one of
the 1960s many detractors. It isn't Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh,
but it occasionally comes pretty close. Furthermore, his cynicism
often comes off sounding timeworn and trite. Fortunately,
Christiansen redeems himself quickly, as if he realized that
disparaging the counterculture in terms he once heard used by those
who disparaged him might be a dead-end road.
If one is looking for literary criticism of Kesey's books, the most
that will be found here is an overview of criticism written by
others. While this is certainly useful to those unfamiliar with
Kesey's works as well as to those that never examined them
critically, there is nothing substantially new for the Kesey
aficionado. However, since this is a biography and not a book of
criticism, this omission seems appropriate. It is Christiansen's
rendering of Kesey's post-novelist life that this book focuses on and
it is that which consumes the bulk of the text.
Christiansen at times refers to Kesey as a libertarian in the Ayn
Randian sense. While Kesey was certainly a libertarian, that
libertarianism was far removed from Ayn Rand's selfish
objectivism. Indeed, his libertarianism seemed, like the philosophy
of much of the counterculture, to be inspired by the early Christians
or by the concept the anarchist Kropotkin called mutual aid. In
other words, free individuals lived outside the law but within a
community with shared values that encouraged communal sharing, not
selfish hoarding. As Kesey often noted, Captain Marvel and peyote
were his inspiration. Whatever his inspiration was, it certainly
wasn't some Ayn Rand character who rationalized selfish egoism.
There are a few historical inaccuracies in Acid Christ. Most of them
have to do with the timing of certain rock album releases and exactly
when Orange Sunshine LSD first came on the scene. These errors do
not change the overall reality described by Christiansen and will
only be noticed by folks like me who remember such details.
Some of Kesey's confidantes were not happy with Christiansen's desire
to write this book and have dismissed it and its portrayal of their
friend and fellow intrepid traveler. Acid Christ wavers between
presenting an encouraging image of Kesey and the counterculture he
represented and a sanctimonious yet unnaturally mild-mannered
dismissal of the entire historic episode. It's as if the author is
still uncertain whether those years he describes were a period of
positive change with a bit of excess or a pointless hedonistic binge
leading to the death of Western civilization.
Then again, perhaps this uncertainty is exactly what he was looking
for when he finished his final draft. If so, he would be one among
many for whom the verdict is still out on the period now known as the
Sixties. No matter what Christiansen's intentions were: to write a
biography of Ken Kesey, or a memoir of "his Sixties," or to question
the entire experience and its meaning, Acid Christ is an intriguing,
humorous, and occasionally insightful four hundred pages.
--
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs'
essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short
Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
[email protected]
.
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