Discovering Baudelaire; an Introduction

I've been working out the details of a writing project for a about a month now and I'm getting ready to share it.

Back in 1999, after moving back to Sacramento, I found a book that changed my life. 

That isn't hyperbole, even though I didn't want to type it. At the old Walden Books on Douglas out Roseville way I purchased a copy of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

Never before had I come across such a compelling, well written, well intentioned, and important piece of literature. In it, an intellectual eats some mescaline in the name of science, and sets down one of the best descriptions of a psychedelic experience ever attempted.

The early on-set of the trip; the best recollections of the peak supplemented with audio tapes and a sober guide/buddy to corroborate afterwards; the come-down period and the post-come-down time. Before the mescaline is eaten and after the post-come-down, Huxley discusses the place of psychedelics in both ancient civilizations and the modern scientific world, and what kind of good they can do for psychiatric advancement.

By that time I was an experienced head and fan of whacked out writings, having settled on Hunter Thompson as King of the Freak Writers, over Ken Kesey for some reason.

And Aldous Huxley is not Hunter Thompson. He wrote Brave New World! And his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a personal friend to, and public defender of, Charles Darwin. 

Slightly different than, say, eating a sheet of LSD and running a burn on a Vegas hotel. But, it wasn't Huxley endangering himself by taking the LA Sheriff's Department to task for their murder (by tear-gas-bazooka) of LA Times reporter Ruben Salazar. 

Whereas Hunter was brazen and swaggering, Aldous was straightforward and clear. Aldous was not a public head, rather, he was a Serious Man. At least that was my take after reading his long essay back in 1999. 

Trivia moment: Jim Morrison liked the piece so much he named his band, The Doors, after it; while Huxley took it from William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"---"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite." Blake to Huxley to Morrison. Quite the chain.

After reading The Doors of Perception, and subsequently digesting it and re-reading it, a new path for serious scholarly work appeared to me out of the haze: I was inspired to imagine a world where someone could be both a serious head and a Serious Man of Letters, and not to gender-normalize anything, I'm only talking about myself. I began to see a future where being knowledgeable about head-topics and being a serious writer of literature could be compatible.

It seems silly now to even write it: so many of my favorite authors and philosophers were messed up on plenty of things, but at that time this was a revelation to me. I had a bad case of tunnel-vision, where being a renegade writer describing the constant state of being loaded was the only useful thing I could imagine doing with my need to write.

It was an important summer for me, making the transition from en soi to pour soi. Between Huxley and the Cartesian epistemological trial by fire kick-started by "The Matrix", of all things, I experienced a lot of personal growth.

That was nearly twenty years ago, and if I'd been asked about the chances of finding a long essay/tiny book that would rival The Doors of Perception in nearly every way, from its psychoactive substance content matter to its starkly amazing ability to accurately describe an experience to the inherent importance of its author, I would have set them within an epsilon neighborhood of zero.

But still, there exists such a book as described above, a rival to Huxley's classic that predates it by nearly a century, and, judging by the way Aldous structures his piece, he most assuredly had read this elder.

I like the metaphor of discovery here, and have been inspired to discuss the tiny artifact that is in my possession, how it came to be, how it came to me, and how my world view has been altered. It may even balloon and obtain a glandular problem.

The next series of posts will be obviously related, but only obvious if you read them---the titles won't match up, if you know what I mean.