Ken Kesey was born and raised in Oregon, and was a big and charismatic man with the body
of a wrestler and the roughness of a wild-man of the woods.
On top of that, he was also gifted with a brilliant mind and a writing talent, and in
1958 he was granted a scholarship to learn creative writing at the Stanford University
in San Francisco.
As he got there, Kesey mingled with the bohemian crowd in the vibrant city, became familiar
with the Beatniks, then centered in North Beach, and even planned to write a book about
them.
But fate intervened and offered him another plan, when in 1959, in order to make a living,
he volunteered to be one of the subjects in a scientific experiment.
The experiment was financed by the CIA, which sought to examine the warfare possibilities
of drugs, and it exposed Kesey to several synthetic drugs that were yet unknown to the
general public.
These drugs generated different reactions in him, both good and bad, but one drug in
particular had an effect that changed his world, and consequently, our world too.
The name of this drug was LSD.
When LSD first infused Kesey's mind, he felt as though his senses grasp reality in its
fullness.
The boundaries between him and the world were dissolved, everything began swirling and forming
in fantastic patterns, and he was floating at the heart of happiness.
From that point of view, the scientists who were interrogating him and asking him to define
the experience in objective terms seemed ridiculous and pathetic, people who are trying to foist
boundaries on a unified universe, to impose exact mathematical terms on an ever-flowing
existence.
Kesey felt that he found the key to happiness, and that the scientifically-oriented Western
society is based on a lie.
From here on, the psychedelic experience will be at the center of his world.
LSD, Kesey felt, is much too important to be left in the hands of the army, the CIA
and the scientists.
It can be used for a more vital role, such as bringing ecstasy and joy to the world.
Since the drug was not illegal, there was no problem to use it privately, and Kesey
found the way to get a supply.
He began throwing parties in his home, offering his Beatnik neighbors a drug that was much
more potent than the cannabis they used to smoke, a new type of experience.
The Beatniks, who from the start regarded this wild outdoors man as an outsider, were
mostly dismissive of what he offered them.
But some dug it, and slowly, his circle began to grow.
But Kesey still needed money, so when the experiment was over, he found a new source
of income as a watchman in a psychiatric ward.
And there, in the bowels of fifties medical establishment, a picture was revealed to him
that seemed to him like a reflection of the crooked structure of Western society, and
the outcomes it leads to.
The ward, he felt, is doing the exact opposite of what it should be doing, and instead of
trying to help the patients develop their personality and humanity, making them stronger
and able to overcome what ails them, it administers scientific and technological tools that destroy
their humanity.
The book he was planning about the North Beach Beatnik scene was scrapped, replaced by a
new idea, a novel that will take place in a psychiatric ward and will be a parable to
Western society.
He wrote during his nightshifts, sometimes high on LSD, and you can feel it in the parts
of the book where we enter a state of hallucinations, which always yields insights about the structure
of society and how it corrupts our human spirit.
Kesey even managed to persuade one of the orderlies to give him an electric shock treatment,
and described it through the mouth of the protagonist, a patient in the ward.
Soon he completed his debut novel, and in 1962 he got it published.
The book is called 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', and its hero is Randle McMurphy, a
spontaneous, virile, mischievous and resourceful man.
In short, he is full of life, and obviously much healthier than any other character in
the novel, but he lives in a world where this type of health is considered a menace to society.
His roughness gets him in trouble with the law and he is sent to prison, but his craftiness
helps him replace the prison cell with the psychiatric ward, where he believes he will
have a more comfortable incarceration.
But when he gets there, he realizes he made a bad deal, because in the ward he is only
seemingly freer.
The rules of the institution, presented at the beginning of the book by one of the doctors,
are humane and enlightened rules sincerely aimed at helping the patients become healthier
and happier.
But the person who really rules the place is the head administrative nurse, the representative
of bureaucracy, and she exploits these rules to her means.
Her demeanor is always that of a compassionate angel, and she seems to care deeply for her
patients, but her real goals are different.
In her view, a healthy man is an adjusted man, a man whose will has been conformed to
the collective will, and she acts to degrade the patients and turn them into human doormats,
who would obey her completely and won't upset the perfect order by which she runs the place.
The book doesn't hide that it is an allegory to the modern democratic society, in which
Man thinks that he is freer than in other societies, but in a way he is more oppressed,
because the shackles are invisible.
The mechanical punctuality that the head nurse tries to impose on the ward is an allegory
to how we are all programmed to be cogs in the machine, obeying its rules and adjusting
our will to what we are told is the general will.
The power that the head nurse holds is absolute.
To preserve the inmates in their docile condition, she keeps them constantly under the influence
of sedatives, which they are compelled to take without being told what they are taking
and for what purpose.
None of the patients dares defy her, because she has the authority to decide if a person
is healthy and can be released, or remain indefinitely in the ward.
And if anyone displays any anger or resistance, she sends him to electric shock treatments.
McMurphy is appalled by this trampling of the human spirit, and decides to fight back,
but he knows that he can't win in a direct confrontation, so he chooses the way of cunning.
He knows that as long as he doesn't break the rules, there's nothing she can do, since
she must preserve the façade of a democratic institute that cares for its patients, so
he launches a series of pranks and manages to make her lose her composure again and again.
In this way he exposes her human weaknesses, undermines her angelic image, and breaks the
hold she has over the minds of the other inmates.
The novel eventually reaches a climax in a violent altercation between them, and a very
bad end for McMurphy.
But for most of the other patients it ends well, since under McMurphy's influence they
develop a stronger personality, and are able to leave the ward as healthier people.
The book was applauded by the critics and the public, Kesey's fame began to spread,
and people began to flock around the writer and his drug parties.
One of those people was Dr. Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary's partner, who dropped by to
tell Kesey about their experiments and compare notes about the psychedelic experience.
Another was none other than Neal Cassady, the original Beat hero, who read the book
and identified with McMurphy's vigorous character, and felt like Kesey was his spiritual brother.
Kesey's circle began to expand, but his hope that the book will inspire a shift in the
consciousness of people was dashed.
It became apparent to him that the written word has lost its power to change the world,
and that what is written in books is now read only by a certain crowd whose mind is already
formed, and then placed on the shelf.
To cause a social change similar to the change McMurphy brings to the ward, he realized,
he would have to find another way, more direct and with the ability to reach a larger audience.
In mid-1963, Kesey's neighborhood was bought by a constructor and demolished, and he moved
his quarters to La Honda, a sparsely populated place south of San Francisco.
And there, in a cabin in the woods, he and his friends began to develop a new consciousness,
based on the psychedelic experience.
They did it through talking.
While they were all under the influence, one would start talking, the next person would
riff on what he said, a third would enter and embellish, and so forth, until they were
all talking together and affecting each other, creating a kind of a hive mind, a mind that
isn't driven by preconceived rules but regenerates itself at every moment, and remains tied to
the present.
It is basically a verbal version of the bebop experience, but without an audience of listeners:
the experience here is only in the minds of the participants, as words come in from all
directions and swirl in it, causing it to create its own words in response.
To enhance the experience, they installed microphones everywhere and hooked them to
tape-recorders that would play them back in different delays, so what was said a few seconds
earlier was also part of the mixture, and you could riff on the same theme once again.
Out of this concoction, a new ideal was born: henceforth, their life will be dedicated to
perform pranks and provocations, which will expose more people to the experience and will
make them want to join this joint consciousness.
There was undoubtedly something of McMurphy here, a belief that pranks are the way to
undermine the establishment.
The name of the group was also born in these psychedelic sessions, and from hereon they
would be called "the Merry Pranksters".
They all assumed comic-book style characters, created colorful psychedelic costumes for
themselves, and set out to bring color and joy to the grey world of Western technocracy.
But before we see how our heroes pranked the world, let's dally for a moment to summarize
what we've learned about the psychedelic experience.
As we've seen, there were two main ways in which the experience was interpreted, and
both of them reached fruition in 1964, with the publication of Timothy Leary's first book
and with the birth of the Merry Pranksters.
Leary's approach is rooted in old traditions, while Kesey's approach is rooted in contemporary
pop culture.
They both agree that the Western society of the mid-20th century is repressing the human
spirit, and that the psychedelic experience is the key to liberation, but they understand
liberation differently.
They both believe that the experience connects us to the truth, but for Leary truth is eternal
and external to the human mind, whereas for Kesey, every moment has its own truth, that
spring from the minds of contemporary people.
For Leary, freedom means liberation from individuality, whereas for Kesey, freedom is a state in which
the individuality expresses itself, and combines with other individuals to create a shared
consciousness.
And finally, Leary regards daily existence as a state of suffering which the psychedelic
experience frees us from, whereas Kesey sees daily existence as a neutral state, and the
psychedelic experience is a leap into a state of elation.
As mentioned, Kesey reached the conclusion that the written word has lost its power,
and he must seek another form of art if he wants to change people's minds.
But before he made that observation, he managed to complete another novel, and in July 1964
he was scheduled to be in New York for its publication.
The Pranksters, who were about a dozen people at this point, decided to turn the trip from
California to New York into a shared experience, that all of them will take part in.
So they bought a school bus, painted it in psychedelic Day-Glo colors, wrote 'Furthur'
in its destination sign, installed microphones and tape-recorders all over, and placed a
big tank of Kool-Aid spiked with LSD in it.
For Kesey, the bus became a symbol for the ideal world he saw in his mind, a world where
everyone allows their will to flow spontaneously and their creativity feeds all the rest.
As he defined it, one can either be "on the bus" – that is, part of the liberated hive
mind – or off the bus, and the aspiration was to get as many people as possible on the
bus and liberate them as well.
The Pranksters also bought movie cameras to record their journey, and show the world the
ideal life on the bus.
And so, the Pranksters filmed their own version of 'On the Road', with Neal Cassady once again
in the role of the driver.
In their many stops on the way to New York, they would play loud rock'n'roll music through
the bus's loudspeakers and go outside to dance, amazing the crowds of onlookers that came
out to see this weird and flamboyant bunch.
When they got to New York, Kesey announced in the media that literature is an out of
date art-form, bound by the laws of grammar, and that he moved on.
To the question of what is the art-form that fits our time, he had two answers.
First, the bus, which functions as sort of an ongoing creation that moves through the
world and performs as a stage for the journey of the human spirit.
Secondly, the art of movie-making, like the movie the pranksters were shooting throughout
their journey.
The way he saw it, we are all living in a movie, whose script was written for us.
The goal of the Pranksters was to write a new script, a happier one, and try to get
the world to be part of it.
From now on, along with wanting to get people "on the bus", they will also talk in terms
of getting people "into the movie".
And the Pranksters knew who they wanted to get into the movie first.
In New York, after all, lived some of the people which they regarded as their spiritual
fathers.
First, they threw a party and invited Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, the founders of
Beat.
The success was partial: the open-minded Ginsberg got immediately into the movie, and integrated
into the new spirit.
Kerouac, in contrast, was dismayed by these grownups acting like clowns, with their comic-book
characters and rock'n'roll records, which he perceived as an erosion of the Beat spirit
to the level of commercial pop.
At heart he was still a novelist, still looking for high art, and he didn't want to be part
of the movie.
The bus left Kerouac behind, and in the years that passed until his death in 1969 he would
be bitter and critical towards the culture that came out of his loins.
From there, they got on the bus and drove to Millbrook, to have a psychedelic summit
with Timothy Leary and the League for Spiritual Discovery.
True to the spontaneous nature of their endeavor, they did not inform Leary of their visit,
so that there will be no script for the meeting but everything will be written on the spot.
But when Kesey's circus entered the gates of Leary's estate, playing ear-splitting rock'n'roll
and throwing color smoke bombs all around to announce their arrival, they got the cold
shoulder from the somber group of scientists and mystics that dwelled in the place.
The Pranksters disturbed the silence that they needed for meditation, and they didn't
like that at all.
Leary himself was in the midst of an important experiment, a three day long psychedelic trip,
and refused to leave it to welcome the guests.
The Pranksters, too, felt alienated to the place and the air of seriousness that surrounded
it, and felt that their hosts are a group of inhibited people, still bound by the consciousness
they claimed to have liberated themselves from.
In 1964, the two streams of psychedelia were simply too contrary to each other, and could
not come together to create a collaborative movie.
The Pranksters got back on the bus, and returned west.
Back in La Honda, the Prankster family kept growing, and they continued to develop a new
consciousness from their joint experiences.
The next insight emerged out of their aforementioned custom of using tape-recorders that played
back their words in delay.
They started to think about the concept of time lags.
Our consciousness perceives the world through our senses, and the senses present thing to
us a split second after they happen.
Which means that we don't really experience reality, but watch a movie about reality,
a movie that documents what happened earlier.
And there are other things that cause time lags: our worldviews, based on our opinions
and beliefs, are actually scripts that shape the way we perceive and understand reality.
Each one of us has their own script, a script that is a combination of their perception
and their worldview, and these scripts prevent us from being part of the flow of reality,
turning us into spectators instead.
Happiness, the Pranksters claimed, is dependent on our ability to free ourselves of these
scripts and live in reality, and psychedelic drugs are the means to achieve it.
The universe, they believed, is made of bodies that are constantly moving in perfect synchronization,
and enjoying being part of that synchronization.
And so, anyone who manages to free themselves of the time lag and become part of this cosmic
dance will be happy.
That is also the reason that if you have several individuals who achieve liberation, they feel
coordinated with each other, and their minds merge together.
The universe, in other words, is an eternal bebop jam session, and we want to become part
of that jam.
The movie they filmed on the bus was supposed to document that ideal, but when they started
editing it, they realized that what they filmed fails to capture the experience, and will
not get the viewers into the movie.
It turned out that movie-making was also not a suitable medium to connect us to the truth,
and they needed to find a different art-form.
And so, their attention was diverted back to the original medium that gave birth to
the Beat experience, back to music.
But, of course, the music of this generation was no longer jazz, but rock'n'roll.
And if we're talking rock'n'roll, we're talking Beatles.
In mid-1965 the Fab Four's second feature film was released, a movie called 'Help!'.
The soundtrack was still based on the raw energy of rock'n'roll, but already displayed
Bob Dylan's influence and the calming effects of pot smoking.
Their first movie 'Hard Day's Night', which came out a year earlier, was a screwball comedy
that reminded people of the Marx Brothers, and achieved great success.
'Help!' pretty much replicated the formula, but this movie is a lot more surreal, and
those in the know got that the Beatles are definitely dabbling in drugs, although they
have not discovered LSD yet.
The Merry Pranksters got it, too, and decided it was time to take the Beatles a step further,
and get them into a new movie, their movie.
On September 2nd, 1965, the Beatles were performing in San Francisco, and the Pranksters decided
that this is a good opportunity to get them into the movie and on the bus.
They didn't know exactly how they were going to do it, but they believed that the universe
will arrange something, since they were destined to get together.
They got on their bus and drove to the event, but when they got there, they realized that
they are facing a phenomenon that is bigger than them by several orders of magnitude.
None of the screaming girls gave a fuck about them and their psychedelic bus – they had
only Beatles on their minds.
The concert itself scared them even more – it was nothing like the jazz performances they
knew.
Instead of a shared experience where every musician is an individual who feeds others
and is fed by them, here there was a band that played as one unit, sending powerful
electric waves into the audience, which reacted with wild squeals and was like a tumultuous
ocean.
The Pranksters fled the place while they still could, and declared the venture a failure.
But it also got them thinking: if the order of the universe is indeed like a bebop session,
where every being does their thing but they are also synchronized together, then like
in bebop, there always is the leading soloist.
At that moment, the Beatles were the lead, so to take it away from them, they should
do what a bebop musician does: appropriate their ideas, and improvise on them.
They started asking themselves: can you somehow fuse the power of rock'n'roll with the psychedelic
experience, to create the strongest experience of them all, an experience that will be even
more powerful than Beatlemania?
They started to plan it.
Meanwhile, though, they got a golden opportunity to run another prank.
On October 16th, a large rally against the Vietnam War was being organized at the University
of California in Berkley, the stronghold of the radical left.
All of the leftist movements and folk singers were invited to take part in the event, and
someone on the organizing committee, who has heard that the Merry Pranksters are some sort
of seditious group, made the mistake of assuming that they are also on the left, and invited
Kesey to speak.
The Pranksters enthusiastically accepted the invitation, and got to work.
First, they painted their bus blood red, drew various militaristic signs on it, and armed
it with toy cannons and guns.
Secondly, they invited the Hell's Angels, the notoriously violent biker gang that would
occasionally hang out in their drug parties, to escort them to the event.
When it was Kesey's turn to speak, the Pranksters all got on stage with weird brass instruments
and started to make a cacophony of noise, and Kesey, wearing a military helmet, played
a patriotic tune on a mouth harmonica and had his say.
A long line of speakers already spoke before him, and they all spoke in the superficial
way that characterizes the radical left, and blamed their country for being the only party
responsible for the war, inflaming the crowd through spreading hate to capitalism and the
American way of life.
Kesey, on the other hand, told the crowd that they are playing the same game as the people
they are against, and that he listened to all the previous speakers and couldn't tell
the difference between them and Mussolini.
If you really want to stop the wars, he said, you have to turn your back on this entire
political game, and say "fuck it".
Like Bob Dylan, then, Kesey felt that there was actually no difference between the left
and right of his time, but they are both sides of the same coin.
In his view, we need to stop defining ourselves as one side of this coin, and find a new way
to solve our problems.
Within a month, the Pranksters were ready to present the new way to the world, and the
opportunity presented itself on December 4th, when the Rolling Stones performed in San Jose.
The Rolling Stones came from London, and from the start they presented themselves as the
radical alternative to the Beatles, as the embodiment of youth rebellion.
Where the Beatles dressed rock'n'roll in a suit to make it more presentable, the Stones
emphasized its wild, anarchic and rebellious sides, and did all they could to terrify conformed
society.
By 1965, they were already challenging the Beatles for the title of the world's greatest
rock'n'roll band, and their fans saw themselves as the representatives of liberation, the
spearhead of the new generation.
This time, the Pranksters came prepared, hired a house in San Jose beforehand, and appropriated
it for their means.
When the youngsters left the Stones concert, they were met by a weird group of people in
Day-Glo clothes, who handed them fliers asking "can you pass the acid test?"
Being Stones fans, and thus regarding themselves as daring and free, many of them accepted
the invitation, and headed towards the house to take the test.
The Acid Test was Kesey's final conclusion from everything the Pranksters went through
in the past year.
He realized that the only way to get people on the bus would be to get them to go through
the psychedelic experience themselves, to understand it from within.
Passing the acid test means going over the ledge and stepping into the experience, because
only then will you be able to understand what the Pranksters are trying to tell you.
Timothy Leary preached that before you go through the experience you must undergo some
preparation, and while you are in it you must listen to a guide that sits by you, but the
Pranksters despised such caution.
For them, preparation and listening to a guide meant that you are operating according to
someone else's script, instead of being in the moment.
And so, they've allowed themselves to play Russian roulette with the minds of people,
believing that what they are offering is worth the risk.
When the guests stepped into the house, they found that there's a party going on, with
a rock band playing rhythmic music to get everyone to dance, a band called the Grateful
Dead.
If you were thirsty from all the dancing, there was a big container of Kool-Aid in the
corner, and the dancers drank from it, unaware that is was spiked with LSD, or "acid" as
it was started being called.
In a short while, they found themselves in a wondrous world of sounds and visions, created
by the acid in their body but also by the atmosphere the Pranksters generated.
Stroboscopes projected a myriad of lights, tape-recorders recorded everything and echoed
it all back, and the Grateful Dead played improvised, liquid and loud rock music.
Everybody danced, but under the influence, they did not dance the typical dances of the
time, which were based on preconceived steps, but everyone danced freely, following their
inner rhythms.
This was a microcosm of the ideal world that Kesey saw in his mind, a world in which we
are all part of one great cosmic dance, in which everyone does their thing and contributes
to the whole.
The Acid Test did to San Francisco's bohemian scene what Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' did to
it a decade earlier: it gave it a new center around which everything gravitated.
In January 66 it already hosted a three days festival that was called The Great Trips Festival,
which hosted artists of many kinds, and climaxed in a large scale Acid Test administered by
the Merry Pranksters.
The word began to spread, but it also caused moral panic in the general public, and caught
the attention of the authorities.
Within a few months, LSD was outlawed, and the police kept snooping around the bus.
Kesey was eventually caught possessing drugs, and was facing a few years in jail.
The Pranksters, in response, ran another prank and staged his death, and by the time the
media was on to the hoax, Kesey was already in Mexico.
The Pranksters tried to carry on without him, but without his leadership they soon fell
apart.
So, the Merry Pranksters succeeded in getting part of the world on their bus and into their
movie, but their success came at the expense of their downfall.
And yet, not everything fell apart.
There was a part of them that remained standing, and soon became the new center of gravity
in San Francisco.
That part was the Grateful Dead.
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