'Angel-Headed Hipsters' - Lucien Carr

Yesterday, I read an article about Alexander Shulgin (billed as Dr. Ecstasy) a 79 year old chemist who has (legally) created over a hundred hallucinogens during his career. This is the kind of guy who really fires my imagination. 'Intoxication,' has been one of the key themes of my theater work, but not so much as an escape but as journey of discovery and (my favorite word) transformation. I really enjoy it when a man of science talks like a mystic, for instance, here is Shulgin (a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. working at Dow Chemical in 1960) describing his experience with mescaline: 'I realized everything I saw and thought had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid...I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny it's existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.'

Yes, indeed: 'the entire universe is contained in the mind and spirit.' Beautiful. This is one of my personal credos. But I think there are many paths to this insight for instance: creative exploration, visualization and meditation. Chemicals are a short-cut, but not the only pathway. Creating a new chemical is like, 'the pleasure of composing a new painting or a piece of music.' Plus: 'You're meeting something you don't know and it's meeting something it doesn't know. And so you have this exchange of properties and ideas.' I'm thinking Shulgin will turn up in one of my future plays. He's just the kind of explorer I admire, journeying to the center of his mind. The world is mapped. The last frontier: human consciousness. What beasts and angels wander in that strange, uncharted realm?