The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
By: Tom Wolfe
Here lies the story of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. The real-life saga of a man dosed with acid by the US government, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while working security in the lab in which he was dosed, and ultimately “liberates” acid from the lab to culture at large. Kesey becomes a kind of psychedelic prophet, and his Merry Pranksters — pulling wild acts of acid-inspired profundity — become a founding force of the 1960’s hippie movement.
It’s wild how many cultural icons appear in these pages: The Grateful Dead, Hunter S. Thompson, the Hells Angels, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert, The Beatles, Allen Ginsburg, Stewart Brand, and a dozen others you’d know that I can’t name off the top of my head.
The author, Tom Wolfe, present at the height of the cultural movement, asked Kesey why he didn’t plan to do any more writing. Kesey’s reply: “I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” spoke volumes, and his electric actions not only fill the pages of this book, but still quake through our cultural world.
I wanted on the bus — what a ride!
Favorite Quotes:
“I had told him I had heard he didn’t intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.
“I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph,” he said.”
“The whole other world that LSD opened your mind to existed only in the moment itself—Now—and any attempt to plan, compose, orchestrate, write a script, only locked you out of the moment, back in the world of conditioning and training where the brain was a reducing valve…”
“… for it was like it had been ordained, by Kesey himself, back in San Juan Capistrano, like there was to be a reaction scale in here, from negative to positive, and no one was to rise up negative about anything, one was to go positive with everything—go with the flow—everyone’s cool was to be tested, and to shout No, no matter what happened, was to fail.”
“Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Guatama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain “psychological state in the here and now,” as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short.”
“Gradually the Prankster attitude began to involve the main things religious mystics have always felt, things common Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and for that matter Theosophists and even flying-saucer cultists. Namely, the experiencing of an Other World, a higher level of reality. And a feeling of timelessness, the feeling that what we know as time is only the result of a naive faith in causality—the notion that A in the present caused B in present, which will cause C in the future, when actually A, B, and C are all part of a pattern that can be truly understood only by openning the doors of perception and experiencing it… in this moment… this supreme moment… this kairos…”
“He usually starts off with something specific, something he’s seen, something he’s been doing… and builds up to what he’s been thinking.”
“Onstage, Kesey, not talking in any formal way, more like performing, working magic—telling of the kind of symbols we use and the games we’re in, and how you can’t really know what an emotion is until you’ve experienced both sides of it, whereupon he seizes the big American flag up onto the stage and steps on it, grinds it into the floor…
Sawyer hears sobs, wheels around in his seat, sees a group of teenagers behind him, from Salt Lake City, looks into their faces, reads the horror that fills them—The Flag!—then feels the manic energy from the crazed thing that has been packed into these children even at this age like a time warp vibration from the Salem witch hysteria, the primordial cry of Die, Infidel—and yet he can’t leave them with that. So he rises up and faces the crowd and says,
—Now, wait a minute. The flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols. I remember when I was in school we used to sing America the Beautiful and somebody would walk down the aisle carrying the flag. I always wanted to be the one who carried the flag down the aisle but I never was…
“Do it!” It’s Mountain Girl, beaming at him from her folds of purple, quite delighted with the turn of events.
Before he knows it, he is leading them all in the singing of America the Beautiful, and O-beau-ti-ful for spa-cious skies rings out in the hall—as he holds the flag staunchly in his hands and marches up the aisle and then down the aisle, signifying—what? Ne’mind! But exactly! Don’t explain it. Do it!”
“Paul Sawyer looked at Kesey… and he saw a prophetic figure. He had not taught or preached. Rather, he had created… an experience, an awareness that flashed deeper than celebration. Somehow he was in the tradition of the great prophets. The modern world knows prophets only in the stiff, reverent language of the texts and scholarly limnings of various religions. Somehow Kesey had created the prophetic aura itself, and through the Pranksters many people at the conference had not observed but experienced mystic brotherhood, albeit ever so bizarre… a miracle in seven days.
”
“So few humans had the hubris to exert their will upon the flow, maybe not more than forty on the whole planet at any given time. The world is flat, it is supported by forty, or maybe four, men, one at each corner, like cosmic turtles and elephants in the mythology books, because no one else dares…
And Miracles? You haven’t seen miracles yet, Job, until you see the Pranksters draw the Beatles into their movie.”
“The world is not a line of cause and effect heading forever forward, but finite and ever-repeating, so that all that ever was and all that ever will be is caught up in now, in endless Recurrence, only waiting for the Superheroes to resurface; after which, a total revaluation. And combining Nietzsche’s inspiration with his own of at-present-best—of man forever watching his own movie and never being able to get to the paradise beyond the screen: as Nietzsche glimmered, life is a circle and so it is the going, not the getting there, that counts. Live in the moment. Lots of good heads said it. I tried. I devoted much time and much energy. To find that those good heads had been tricked—that simple trick of I was right about living in the moment but we can never get in the moment! Orgggggg!
”
“One trouble with this Kesey was, he really meant it.”
“We’ve been going through that door and staying a while and then going back out through that same door. But until we start going that far… and then going beyond… we’re not going to get anywhere, we’re not going to experience anything new...”
