December 2008

[Sweder]

Unlocking the mysteries of the human mind – perfect fodder for a misty mountain hop.

Thomas Harris wrote of Hannibal Lecter that he occupied his waking hours by moving through his own mind as one might the rooms of a large country house. Each ‘room’ housed something particular or personal to the good Doctor; here a theatre where he might enjoy the Marriage of Figaro; there a concert hall to indulge his fetish for chamber music; along this corridor a gallery to review his collection of rare paintings, and over there a fully stocked kitchen, replete with all manner of well-honed implements, walls hung with framed recipes for the most sumptuous feasts including some unusual, rather unsettling ingredients. Lecter visited these rooms whilst incarcerated, living a life of luxury and indulgence without leaving his cell.

Notable characters of popular culture sought chemical enhancements to expand their minds. Timothy Leary was the father of the acid generation. LSD dissolved the restrictive walls for many a sixties artist – Warhol, Giger, Dali . . . the effects all too evident in their nerveless, sometimes visceral work. In the world of literature such luminaries as William Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson fed their cerebellums on hard drugs with disturbing results, testing their endurance to the very edge of self-destruction. Some succumbed, swept up in a mental whirlpool, lost forever to society and the real world. There are many terrible tales of psychedelic adventurers living out a life on largactyl, brains permanently cross-wired by too much ‘enlightenment’. I’m reminded of an old joke:
[SIZE="1"]Mother, anxiously, to son:[/SIZE] Son, have you seen my pills? They have ‘LSD’ on the bottle.?
[SIZE="1"]Son, alarmed:[/SIZE] Screw your pills – have you seen the dragons in the kitchen?

An old band-following mate of mine, Gary ‘Newcy Brown’ Woodley, was one such lost soul. We parted company at the end of Motorhead’s Bomber tour. I went back to my dreary day job, Gary on to the hedonistic heaven that was high summer in Salisbury. He dropped six tabs of acid in one day, got arrested by two plain-clothes coppers and spent the next twenty years on a variety of controlled substances in an effort to re-wire his fried synapses. A salutary lesson in self-restraint that steered me away from hard drugs and prompted a period of knuckling down and counting my lucky stars.
There but for the grace of God go I.

Music plays a big part in unlocking my thoughts these days, especially out on a run. The delicate blend of familiar distraction and flowing endorphins can prove intoxicating, opening doors to memories long forgotten or, in some cases, deliberately locked away. I’ve not got the combination right lately. Running has become a chore; all too often I’m left, like so many of us in this helter-skelter, materially-driven world, struggling to remember where I might have left my keys. This morning, as I chugged along familiar, sticky trails, my DAB served up the Golden Earring classic Radar Love. As that familiar driving bass-line boomed in my head a long-stored anecdote began to rise through the murky waters. I turned my thoughts towards it, eager to offer a helping hand, to pull it out into the weak sunlight. Alas, it was not to be. Even as the freshly-jogged memory started to swim into focus it bumped into an impenetrable layer, like the intransigent surface of a heavily frozen lake. I could make out the thought, see its shape pushing against the opaque membrane of my subconscious, but the barrier would not yield. Exhausted, it gave up, sinking back into the darkness, a forlorn trail of tiny bubbles following it to whence it came.

The views across the downs matched my mood. Heavy cloud lay overhead, dense, lazy, barely moving – bloody teenagers again! To the south a bright, thin wedge of light beamed along the horizon. I’ve seen this before but today the phenomenon seemed premonitory, like an Arthurian mist. Later I had occasion to drive along the coast at Lancing. Out across the pond-calm ocean sat a low bank of heavy fog, rolling landward like the advancing dust-cloud from a massive explosion. Again that stretch of unfettered sky under more recalcitrant, adolescent cloud. It all made for a stunning picture and I snapped away with my inadequate phone-cam, cursing myself for not carrying a better camera.