These Luminous Counterfeits
These Luminous Counterfeits
Ashley Lande
I became Bob Dylan once. For one brief, shining, atom-splitting, mind-melding moment when I was blazed out of my mind on psilocybin mushrooms 15 years ago, I merged with the being of Bob Dylan. At least, I was certain of it at the time. The fast and loose, jingling slapstick jamboree of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” tumbled out of my stereo’s speakers as I mimicked making snow angels on my apartment’s hardwood floor, a drug-drunk holy roller sweeping dog hair into little dust bunnies everywhere. My blown-out pupils beheld scenes of ramifying geometry and prismatic fractals which warped and wove with each winking jangle of the song, the lyrics of which now uncannily narrated my very existence.
“I am Bob Dylan”, I whispered, and my hushed proclamation reverberated throughout the universe. I tried out this revelation in a hundred different inflections off my tongue, language a new and faltering thing in my mouth: “I am Bob Dylan. I AM Bob Dylan. I am BOB DYLAN. I AM BOB DYLAN.”
It wore off, of course. In the glacial light of the morning, the room was no longer overlaid with spinning mandalas, and the glittering revelation which had seemed so sure in the graphically alive dark, howling with electric neon pomp, now seemed less so as I downed the speed pill I always took the morning after a trip. These pills helped fuel my frantic Bic pen drawings on butcher paper that I pilfered from the restaurant where I waited tables—sometimes while high on LSD. (I had the ultimate rationalization for my burgeoning speed habit: Bob Dylan was known to pop amphetamines back in the day, too). I wondered feverishly: how can I contact Mr. Dylan to let him know of this most extraordinary occurrence? How can I convey to him this vitally important knowledge?
*
With psychedelics, I believed I was ever on the cusp of shattering, ecstatic, sputtering revelation. I was Jacob beholding the heavenly ladder, Moses standing barefoot and dumb-mouthed in front of the burning bush, Peter gaping like a trout at the Transfiguration. Psychedelics were healing me, buoying me, enlightening me, burning away my ego and precipitating my evolution.
But really, that morning, I was nothing but a strung-out, teeth-grinding druggie, perhaps only one speed pill away from being a stalker of Mr. Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, whom chemically-induced visions had convinced me was my brother, savior, twin, soulmate and very likeness. The chronic pummeling “ego deaths” that LSD and mushrooms effected gradually threatened to sever my fraying ties to reality. I felt like I’d been pushed through a honeycomb sieve again and again, my scattered brain and increasingly dissociative sense of self oddly mirroring the fractals and geometric lattices I so loved to draw.
Years later, I’d flushed the speed pills down the toilet, but I couldn’t forsake my beloved psychedelics. Yet, as I continued, the visions conjured by my psychedelic trips had become darker and darker until I was finally incapable of having a “good” trip. I became so plagued by a foreboding sense of chaotic evil, so desperate for reprieve from the anxious vyings of my mind, so hungry for Truth that endured beyond my chemically-charged revelations that I finally staggered, one lonely Sunday morning coming down, into the one place I’d vowed never to enter: a church.
*
William J. Craddock wrote a brilliant, soaring, gritty, and unreliably in-print novel in 1970 called Be Not Content, billed as “a skeletal history and chronicle of the experiences of a single, minor freak connected to a single, minor tribe of acid freaks in California, beginning in the early days of the psychedelic revolution…”
Be Not Content is many things—a vaulting into a luminous counterfeit heaven, a plunge into the subbasement of psychotic horror, a fantastic memoir written feverishly by a precocious, self-absorbed 20-year-old chasing Kerouac’s amphetamine-buzzed ghost, a graphic descent into the worst predatory elements of 60s psych culture, a probing but ultimately cynical chronicle of a spiritual quest that begins with the winsome exuberance of youth and ends in the jaded but uneasy nihilism of thwarted idolatry. Perhaps foremost, though, it is a journey from staggering illumination, all the way to washed-up, puckered disillusionment at best and utterly unmoored insanity at worst.
“There was a time,” Craddock’s protagonist Abel reflects, after a group-LSD-trip turns terrifyingly weird and from which one of his friends has yet to re-emerge psychologically intact, “There was a time when God was just a game for old people looking for a reason after all the others had fallen by the wayside.”
There was that time for me, too, before I let that first hit of LSD, on a sharp-sweet Smartie, crumble to paste on my tongue. But for a time, too, I was convinced I’d found God in LSD. LSD seemed to disclose The Answer in a white-hot paroxysm of revelatory lightning that at the same time yielded ever more questions.
I’d found God, or what I thought was God, but deep within me a chasm still yawned, a darkness still lurked, a nameless shame still skulked. Although I believed I was hastening toward some apocalyptic end where I would find The Knowledge Which Will Make Everything Okay Forever, as I wrote in my diary back then, I felt increasingly alienated from human warmth and connection. This Knowledge, it seemed, would cost me my sanity. But what did that matter? The universe seemed to have no center at this point, anyway; all was uncertainty and ambiguity and ever-shifting kaleidoscope. There was no terra firma. But I was intent and fixed on storming the gates of heaven, on seizing again that first gasp of glittering transcendence, even if it cost me my very soul.
*
The church was glowing. Autumnal light diffused the mosaic stained glass—red, green, blue, gold. My husband and I sat near the back, just next to the sound booth. Conceit and shame warred within me; conceit because I had convinced myself I occupied a higher spiritual plane than these naive people, shame because in some crevice of my worn-out soul I knew the truth— despite assailing myself with drugs for years and regularly contorting myself into yoga asanas, I was no closer to the Knowledge That Would Make Everything Okay Forever than when I’d begun.
I didn’t understand. The substances and practices that were supposed to right my vision, that were supposed to clear the impediments that dammed my ascension to pure being, had failed me. I didn’t know how to relate to God anymore, didn’t know where He could be found. God to me was a punishing ego death, a white jagged vein of electricity cracking the night sky, an Ourobourian infinity of collapsing and blooming geometry. I had bought the ticket and taken the ride, again and again. I had been a true believer. And yet my soul was in torment, and these churchy squares seemed to be on to something I was not, something that allowed them to persevere. Perhaps it was willful naivety, I rationalized.
“My head feels like it’s been through sixty kinda meat-grinders an[d] I’m still not close to anything,” a character in Be Not Content laments. I had been through the meat-grinders. “You have to go there to get there,” as my motto went. I’d gone there. I’d tried. I’d believed.
I bent my knees sideways in the pew so others could shuffle past us to take communion. But at the conclusion of the service I realized, to my horror, that I was expected to stand and join hands with the person next to me and sing a parting song, effervescent and jubilant: My friends, may you grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior / I pray today if we learn from one another, may we glorify Him / and if the Lord should bring us back together, may we be in his arms til then. How ridiculous! How positively gauche, I thought. Could these people be for real?
*
Considering how consistently I’d questioned the nature of reality and how consistently I’d intentionally warped my perceptions with drugs in the past several years of my life, this question was rich coming from me. I’d both savored and recoiled from Philip K. Dick’s famous quote: “Reality is that which, once you quit believing in it, does not go away.” With psychedelics, the emperor had no clothes; I could vault myself into phantasmagorical spaces and yet I invariably found a reality waiting to be reckoned with once I came down. After a bad trip, it was comforting; after a good one, it was sorrowful. Reality persisted. My own brokenness persisted. Other people, and my need for them, persisted.
I took the warm hand next to me, tentatively, without making eye contact. I came back again, the next week. When will the pastor tell me how to get to God? I wondered. When will he tell me how to clench that feeling in my hands again, to seize the reins of transcendence? Dear God, when will they tell me their secret, I cried within, remembering how conspiratorially I would once whisper the question to friends and acquaintances—Have you ever tried LSD?—as though there were FBI wiretaps everywhere, but also because to me it was a holy secret which warranted hushed, reverent tones. I recoiled from casual assents: “Oh yeah, did it a bunch in college. It was fun.” Fun?! I balked. This wasn’t a game! This was GOD.
God wasn’t a game to me then, and he sure as heck wasn’t now, either—now that I had become so thin of soul and mind-sick that a church, of all places, was my last resort. Jesus, they said. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. It was all about Him, they said. All about a person? No, it was all about blowing my mind sky-high searching for the lost elation, as the Beach Boys sang. No, it had to be more complicated than that, I thought. But the cross called out, in a harmony of notes both clarion and tender, to something in my soul. There was a wound deep in the earth and a wound deep in me, both utterly irremediable except, perhaps, by this: God becoming one of us, turning creation inside out, making a sacrifice awful and staggering in its cost and breathtakingly fantastical and complete in its accomplishment.
My acid trips took me further from being human. I was a cyborg, a freak; more highly evolved than the square world, I thought, but increasingly alien to it as it became increasingly alien to me. Yet the cross of Christ seemed to draw me more deeply into my fragile humanness as it drew me more deeply into the mystery of Christ and his sufferings. “God is relational,” our pastor repeated again and again. And there, in the crucible of relationship centered around Christ, in all its messy, dynamic, complicated, emotionally fraught and wildly joyful glory, I began to find the precious treasure for which I once nearly traded my soul. It wasn’t what I thought it was at all. It was Jesus. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. There was no disembodied Knowledge That Would Make Everything Okay Forever—there was a person, known only by relationship, believed only by faith.
*
Craddock’s book concludes with the kind of trip so wrenchingly nightmarish that Abel, the protagonist and a thinly veiled avatar for Craddock himself, emerges a stunned survivor to witness the dawn, both literally and figuratively.
As Abel begins to come down, he and a friend settle on a hilltop overlooking a lush valley to smoke a joint and ruminate. After his hell-trip, Abel seems glad to re-encounter reality as it is: the reality God has so lavishly provided. Abel thanks God for creating the consummate beauty of their surroundings. “No one deserves such beauty,” he says, while his friend murmurs Tibetan prayers beside him. “No one deserves the privilege of being on the earth.”
It was something I’d never thought to say: thank you. I didn’t know Whom to say it to, hadn’t encountered One worthy of worship. I feared psychedelics, and worshipped them in my perverse way, but thanking them seemed a bridge too far for the psychological trauma they’d inflicted upon me. God had so long been an abstraction, a fearsome and capricious dynamo from whom I could expect rapture or ruin. If God was the god I found in psychedelics, He was a roll of the dice; He was an angel and a monster, a madcap trickster and a maniac.
But Jesus was the redemption of the warped ideas I’d developed around God. I stepped into the light of togetherness from the darkness of my own private acid-theology, a hollow echo-chamber of vapid doctrine and circular, go-nowhere musings: something about love, something about light. Some Hindu-inflected tautologies about the nature of reality. But here was an unbelievably bold claim: God came down. The God in whom “all things hold together” was held together in perishable flesh. How could one countenance such a thing as remotely plausible, let alone believe it, I wondered? It was so intimate, so personal, so close, so weird; the opposite of abstraction. Yet something in this impossible mystery rang with eternal resonance. I realized with a cataract of tears that it was something I’d shunned for too long, something which seemed naive and unsophisticated and pitiable: it was hope.
Jesus doesn’t make everything okay forever here and now, not exactly. But the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection gave and give me an explanation for how things are and a promise of how they one day will be. The journey is winding and fraught, but hemmed on either side by a deeply human and deeply holy promise: God became one of us in Jesus Christ, and will one day make everything right. Nothing real will ever be lost, and our hope will not betray us.
Existence is not marked by a deficit of meaning, against which we must buffer ourselves with a shrug of indifference and Nietzschean resolve to impose our will upon the world and seize pleasure wherever it can be found, but a surfeit which bleeds into and colors everything, past, present and future, and to which we must continually yield through the cross of Christ: the fulcrum of history and the only story big enough to explain and redeem this churning, howling world.
*
I took the hand next to me, and my own hand was taken, again and again, Sunday after Sunday, and I felt a hardness in me begin to yield. My friends, may you grow in grace, and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. God was working backwards in me, undoing the cynicism wrought by knowledge I was never meant to hold, unfurling the mystery which trumps all knowledge: Love founded the universe, Love is the ultimate reality, and Love is all which shall remain in the end. These all sound like aphorisms I could’ve heartily embraced in my acid days, but this is all the difference in the world: love is not a disembodied concept, floating about in the ether, untethered and uncommitted, a gilded ideal with no skin in the game. God is Love. And Love became Jesus Christ, and bled and broke and died for us.
I had become the one thing I swore I’d never be: a Christian. And, lo and behold, so had Bob Dylan.
Ashley Lande
Artist & Writer
Ashley has been published in Fathom Magazine & (in)courage. Find her work here: ashleylande.com
Photography by Martin Sanchez
