Turn On, Tune In, Drop by the Archives: Timothy Leary at the N.Y.P.L.
by Scott Staton, m.newyorker.com
June 16th 2011
The project’s lack of discretion and diminishing credibility aroused the ire of
the Harvard faculty and student body, resulting in a dispute over its merits
that wound up in the pages of the Harvard Crimson and then the national press.
By the end of the year, the university had shuttered the project. Defiant,
Leary and his chief collaborator, Richard Alpert, defended their work in a
letter to the Crimson. “A major civil liberties issue of the next decade will
be the control and expansion of consciousness,” they declared. “Who controls
your cortex? Who decides on the range and limits of your awareness? If you want
to research your own nervous system, expand your consciousness, who is to
decide that you can't and why?” Both were soon out of a job, but Leary
continued to pursue his idiosyncratic research with a large supply of L.S.D.,
most of it administered at a magnificent twenty-five-hundred-acre estate in
Millbrook, upstate from New York City. By the mid-sixties, following numerous
run-ins with the law, he had completed his metamorphosis from Ivy League
academic to countercultural high priest, tirelessly espousing the gospel of
mind expansion and the politics of ecstasy.
After a prison stint in the mid-seventies, Leary toured the lecture and club
circuit as a “stand-up philosopher.” He even launched a show alongside
Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, who had plagued Leary in his Millbrook days
as a Dutchess County assistant district attorney. The psychedelic era having
dissipated entirely, Leary turned to futurism, advocating space migration and
personal computing. He became an enthusiastic booster of the Internet and
cyberculture. Years spent hobnobbing in Hollywood renewed his celebrity. But
while his influence on pop culture is undeniable, it’s difficult to escape the
impression of Leary during this period as a fading opportunist, trading on his
sixties iconography as best he could before his death from prostate cancer in
1996.
The Leary trove is immense, spanning his childhood to his death, comprising
some three hundred and fifty boxes of correspondence, experimental data, legal
records, and manuscripts, as well as several hundred hours of video and audio
recordings. Robert Greenfield’s informative 2006 biography, reviewed for the
magazine by Louis Menand, made extensive use of the archive, examining Leary’s
mythos with a great deal of skepticism. Greenfield portrays Leary as a
narcissistic professional whose willful intemperance and disaffection with
middle-class life triggered his reinvention as a drug-fueled neurological
religionist—a kind of radical illustration of the excesses of the American
Dream.
Greenfield also catalogs the various casualties of Leary’s strange adventure,
not least the suicides of his first wife and his daughter Susan, who was swept
along with her brother Jack into a traumatic whirlwind of alternative living.
He relates how Leary, facing a lengthy incarceration for possession of a small
amount of cannabis and a 1970 prison escape, informed on former lawyers and
associates in an effort to ingratiate himself to federal authorities and win
his freedom. To aid their investigation during this period, the F.B.I. seized
Leary’s papers from his longtime archivist, Michael Horowitz. (Leary was
godfather to Horowitz’s daughter, Winona Ryder.) “Transgressors—both mercenary
and conceptual—play a key role in the religious rituals of an electronic media
culture,” Leary wrote in one particularly angry and self-pitying tirade from
federal prison. “The ceremonies of hunting sinners, publicly trying them, and
assigning retribution is the basic religious ceremony of domesticated
primates.” Remarkably enough, this was published in the National Review in
April, 1976. Shortly after the issue appeared on newsstands, Leary was granted
federal parole. In a letter to his mother the following June, he wrote, “You
may know that William Buckley was very helpful in getting my release from
prison—and has published articles I've written in his magazine.”
Leary’s hucksterism and the insouciance with which he regarded scientific
protocol undeniably imperiled the study of psychedelic drugs, about which he
testified before the U.S. Senate in 1966. His widespread advocacy of
hallucinogens helped give rise to the Summer of Love, but also helped ensure
the criminalization of these substances. Only recently have scientists and
psychologists been able to win regulatory approval for their study.
Nevertheless, Leary occupied the vanguard of this field (much of it covertly
funded by the C.I.A., as detailed in “Acid Dreams,” by Martin Lee and Bruce
Shlain) when it was just developing, and his archive has been likened to a
clearinghouse for drug research. In addition to his Harvard records and
correspondence with such figures as Albert Hoffman (who first synthesized
L.S.D. in 1938) and Aldous Huxley, Leary’s papers include the complete records
of the various entities he established to continue his hallucinogenic studies:
the International Federation for Internal Freedom, the Castalia Foundation, and
the League for Spiritual Discovery. They constitute an immense amount of
material to be assessed and reëvaluated by researchers today. The piles of case
studies, session reports, and letters describing personal experiences in his
archive are among the earliest ever recorded in such a fashion, and will offer
scholars a unique perspective on the subject.
Cultural historians will turn to the collection in an effort to shed greater
light on this paradoxical figure who typified the acid-fueled, utopian
indulgences of a far younger generation. Leary’s escapade was seriocomic—a
midlife crisis that took on the dimension of a cultural revolution. In a
private, lucid moment, he might have conceded this disproportion. As a teen-age
Tim Leary presciently noted in a letter to his mother from West Point, from
which he would drop out after being censured by its honor committee, “You
thought I wanted to reform the world and bring it some great, metaphysical
truth. To be frank, what I really long for is fame.”
Original Page:
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/06/turn-on-tune-in-drop-by-the-archives-timothy-leary-at-the-nypl.html
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