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The Brave Traveller is aware at once of a distance between him and his surroundings, a kind of space in between his experience of a place and a culture and an affinity as he relates what he experiences with what he now sees. As travellers, we are often looking for meaning, for lines of similarity, moments that resonate with another place we've been to or other people we've encountered but what if there is no resonance? No sameness? What if you are visiting a place that is so distant from anywhere you've ever been or imagined that you can truly call it 'foreign'?
Albert on LSD
Albert and the newborn drug were soon dancing to a frenzied rhythm. He wasn't in control of and perhaps for a while he might have felt he was but he describes an incident in his book entitled 'LSD, My Problem Child' that resonates with a man in a place totally alien to him. He is enraptured with the view from the top of this mountain but he is also unable to control the heights or depths this drug forces him.
After his introduction to LSD, Albert describes his delirium as he experiments again with the drug. The dizziness gives way to further, deeper hallucinations and the sense that he's losing a sense of his own physical body. He begins to think that he may be going insane and the irony hits him that the drug he had brought into the world would be the same one to take him out of it. An inspection by a doctor and his own assistant brings no help and eventually Albert slides into a technicolored play of the world around him; sounds becoming colors becoming shapes becoming forms and shapes without edges and spirals of warmth.
He finally sleeps and wakes to declare: 'The world was as if newly created'.
Albert had travelled into time and space and returned with heightened sensitivity and a longed-for appreciation for the normal props and staples of his world. He had returned with the gift that extends to us all as we travel the pastures, cities and forests of this world: The world, once old and worn to me has become new.
'Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialistic culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of God offers in the world of faith.'
Albert was captured by that first experience and captured in that moment for a long time.
Father of LSD
The composition of chemicals he'd worked on previously for five years had turned and bitten him. What was once irrelevant to his work now became a doorway to another world, an entire realm of new possibilities. He rode home on his bike and once home, was forced to lie down and succumb to the hallucinations.
How extraordinary, this changing of life. Seemingly by accident, a dabbing of this with a touch of that and LSD is born.
Albert had grand plans for his 'problem child' of his; plans to open up the divine and connect people to the mysticism of their spirituality, plans to use the drug in the areas of psychiatry and to help people. It was a grand idea, a vision in its purest form and his desire to help people, to expand them and put them in touch with the things materialism and consumerism had stolen from them but something so powerful...perhaps we humans are unable to take anything in balance. We are creatures of greed and terminal neediness and when windows to the divine opens, perhaps it is in our natures to smash it open and to create doorways.
'Gehen Sie zur Wiese, gehen Sie zum Garten, gehen Sie zum Holz. Oeffnen Sie Ihre Augen!'
Go to the meadow, go to the garden, go to the woods. Open your eyes!
- Albert Hofmann
Basel, Switzerland is an important little city, a hub for train and car traffic on the Upper Rhine. It has great sunshine and enjoys a spring-like climate for much of the year. I first went to Basel to enjoy Art Basel, the 'Olympics of the art world' (quoted by New York Times) but more on that another day.
The second time I went to Basel, it was something to do with Fasnacht, another famous festival that sees three or four days of constant partying (again, more on that another day). Today, I'm more interested in another kind of event that happened in Basel - namely, the day Albert Hofmann discovered the potency of what came to be known as LSD. He died at the beginning of the year, on the 28th February.
Basel Switzerland
I often wonder how we find ourselves standing in a world with guns, instruments of torture, drugs and never stop to think where they came from or from what mind they sprung from. Albert Hofmann was working on something called lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD-25 when he accidentally rubbed it into his eyes. When he hallucinated, he saw colors and strings and ribbons of light. Even sound was a color.
It was doomed to end badly.
It’s been a while.
Even though the blog’s been quiet, I’ve been active and reading the mail from readers, I know that you’ve been beating a path through life too, sometimes with a machete and other times with a smile.
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If we are always arriving and departing it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things
- Henry Miller
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All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.- Martin Buber
The place of arrival is a mysterious culmination of pleasure and disappointment. We travel to arrive, or so we think and when we do finally set our suitcase down and nestle into the comforts of a lengthy stay, be it weeks or years, we secretly wonder if we did something wrong. Shouldn't it feel like the end of Titanic? Where's the choir, the heated music, the kiss that ends all kisses? Where's the climax?
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People walk around with frames around their souls. Are we born with it? I don't know, but from an early age we begin to feel the edges of the permissible, the accepted and the traditions into which we now do life. Our frame can shrink and enlarge depending on the company we keep or the view from where we stand.
Travel helps us to look beyond our frame and to look into another's. By the connecting of minds, ideas, a common view, we find that our own frame begins to shift and bend and before, what was an encumbrance has become another perspective. The brave traveller understands this and uses every opportunity to rid himself of the fear that the frame is all there is. The frame is not all there is and it's not who we are.
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Living in Sydney, I enjoy walking through the city at night. Surry Hills is a favourite with roads lined with trees, every one a timepiece and every falling leaf is a reminder that all is subject to change. Everything and everyone is in a sense, passing through from one state into another, from one room into the next. It is while traversing the streets of this city that I look into the faces of others as they brush past me...and I think on the loneliness that glistens in their eyes and tightens the line of their mouths. And I wonder if they look at me and see the same.
From Nice we travelled our way to the Principality of Monaco. The train ride took us through picture perfect vistas, a spattering of ocean views and green hills bursting with life and colour. There is a distinctive air of wealth as one arrives into Monaco. Even the train station is a beautified version of public transport found anywhere else in the world. We immediately got lost and had to ask a local standing on the platform for our way out. Once outside, the day ahead of us promised to be one of warmed sophistication
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When we step outside our doors, we rarely expect the day to bring anything more than what we managed the day before. It takes a series of decisions to force us to seek out the red pill and swallow it whole but some manage it.
And they never look back.
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Comment by Michelle
on Taking on Wellington
Travel Brave