Breaking Open the Head

A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism

By Daniel Pinchbeck

(Broadway Books, 272 pp., $24.95)

Though Daniel Pinchbeck’s name will doubtless gain familiarity with the publication of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, heretofore he has been known mostly to the younger literary cognoscenti who comprise the target audience for Open City, the literary magazine he began with the late fiction writer and onetime Tennesseean reporter Rob Bingham. Since Bingham’s untimely death from a heroin overdose in 2000, Pinchbeck has continued Open City, publishing, among others, Nashville-based poet/musician David Berman. But his new book represents a personal quest that at first he found vaguely embarrassing even to talk about. For Breaking Open the Head delves deeply and seriously into the use of psychedelic drugs, drawing on one of the loftiest heroes of 20th century thought, Walter Benjamin, as a major influence in its attempt to achieve what the German thinker called “profane illumination.” And though the book aims for nothing less than spiritual penetration into the heart of both light and darkness, psychedelic drugs themselves have not only been considered “so frightening and dangerous that possession of them is punished by long prison sentences,” as the author reminds us, but they have also increasingly acquired a taint of the jejune, if not the downright adolescent.

“Most of my friends dismissed my new enthusiasm,” Pinchbeck writes of his initial forays into chemical hallucinatory experience, which were supplemented by his increasingly intense study of shamanic cultures. “Psychedelic drugs were weird and childish, something you did in high school or college and got over.... You tried them a bunch of times, had some freaky trips, then moved on to the adult lubricators of social interaction—booze, coke, Valium, pot, heroin.” While Pinchbeck’s friend Bingham isn’t mentioned in this part of the book, there’s more than a little ominous truth of observation in the writer’s regretful comment that in his circles, “heroin, above all, was the downtown hipster intoxicant of choice.... Over a decade, I knew at least a half dozen people—bright, artistic, confused—who died from overdoses. Compared to these hipster intoxicants, mushrooms and LSD were seen as silly, somehow regressive, or weak.”

By contrast, Pinchbeck implies, antidepressants fit our culture’s current worship of the aggressive, decisive, Type A personality that has so often succeeded everywhere from Pennsylvania Avenue to Wall Street to Hollywood. From his point of view, Baby Boomers and the members of Generations X and Y aren’t terribly different from the older, substance-befuddled, status-obsessed generations that preceded them: There’s little distinction, finally, between the heroin-dabbling, greedy corporate expatriates in Bingham’s two books, Pure Slaughter Value and Lightning on the Sun, and the characters found in the works of John Cheever, John Updike and, more recently, Rick Moody, who creates memorable characters from both age brackets in works like The Ice Storm.

Pinchbeck’s own book is elegantly structured, kaleidoscoping between personal narrative, scientific research and cultural history. While the latter two are presented in scrupulous and carefully delineated fashion, the chronicles of Pinchbeck’s own experiences with psychedelics and the places he traveled to find them are unsparing in their details of the physical rigors involved. These drugs do not taste good and wreak a certain amount of havoc on the digestive system; adult-sized Pampers are sometimes involved.

Visionary states of any kind are difficult to describe and apprehend, as reading authors from St. John of the Cross to Rimbaud to Ken Kesey and Carlos Castaneda will prove. But Pinchbeck offers marvelous—though not overstated—descriptions of context in which everything makes sense, even though some of the psychedelic journeys he takes are terrifying. Perhaps not coincidentally, the bad trips largely result from his experiments with manmade—as opposed to plant-based—chemicals, many of them consisting, metaphorically enough, of isolated molecules. And for the most part, these frightening, fracturing and too often lonely experiences take place not in South America or Africa but close to home, which for Pinchbeck is New York City. Even the closest circle of urban or suburban friends can’t approximate the genuinely tribal groups Pinchbeck finds, for example, in the South American rain forest, groups who share an endogenous cultural history dating back at least a couple of millennia.

Yet Breaking Open the Head doesn’t advocate the use of any drug; Pinchbeck believes that his visions, and the insights gained therefrom, can be achieved by other means. As Benjamin wrote, “The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. Not to mention the most terrible drug—ourselves—which we take in solitude.” In the end, Breaking Open the Head advocates a new way of seeing the world and all of its levels of intelligence, one rendered not only with eloquence, but also with an admirable, fully earned sincerity.

For more information on Pinchbeck’s book, visit www.breakingopenthehead.com.

More quests for knowledge

Sociology, not solitude, underlies other recent nonfiction releases that, like Pinchbeck’s, present themselves in the general tradition of quest literature. Both American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and the End of White America, by Wall Street Journal writer and NPR commentator Leon E. Wynter, and The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress, by Bloomsburg University professor Betina Entzminger, represent chronological quests in search of understanding racial and gender dynamics. Nonetheless, both books also draw on other traditions; indeed, both expand on classics in the genre, such as Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act and feminist landmarks like The Madwoman in the Attic and Adrienne Rich’s early essays.

Valuable documents, American Skin (Crown Publishers, 288 pp., $25) and The Belle Gone Bad (LSU Press, 201 pp., $24.95) contain entertaining anecdotes and incisive commentary, such as Wynter on the famous Mean Joe Green Coke commercial and Entzminger on recent fiction by Lee Smith and Kaye Gibbons. Yet they also suffer the plight of far too many current nonfiction tomes by relying on a single thesis that is repeated so often, we feel we know what the writer is going to say before he or she says it.

By contrast, a new collection of essays by triple-threat writer Carol Muske-Dukes, who is well-known for her poetry and her mystery novels, hints by its very title that we can expect surprises. The far-ranging discourse in Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood (Random House, 208 pp., $23.95) not only juxtaposes the noir ridiculous with the Parnassian, it also prompts images of the ice-pick-wielding Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and a Hitchcock villain or two.

We discover on the first page that Muske-Dukes’ husband, actor David Dukes, suffered a fatal heart attack before the book was completed, and that the essays here, though written over a period of years, consequently took on a different resonance, one whose valedictory nature surprised Muske-Dukes and asked for her surrender. Wisely and humbly, she gave it.

Married to the Icepick Killer is hardly a gloomy book, and indeed, it will delight, instruct and affirm the struggles of those who practice serious art in our own industry town. For example, Muske-Dukes relays an anecdote about a cocktail party she attended with her husband, a soiree populated by TV and film representatives, shortly after she moved from New York to Los Angeles. She tells one of these industry movers-and-shakers, when asked, that she is a writer. “Half-hour or hour?” he asks, a question that one would think was reserved for massage therapists or even prostitutes. “Neither,” replies the indulgent Muske-Dukes, fixing him with what she “likes to think of as an Oversoul gaze” and telling him she’s “lifetime.” He smiles back. “Oh, you work for cable.”

Man on a mission

The most famous detective in American fiction, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe prowls Los Angeles on perpetual quest for the elusive good, or truth, that lies somewhere beneath the murky corruption of most human existence he finds there. Knopf’s Everyman’s Library series has happily surprised Chandler fans, both longtime and incipient, with a wholly new edition of his collected stories (1,344 pp., $27.50), which includes some that have long been unavailable, along with eight pieces that Chandler cannibalized for his novels. (These eight stories have also been published separately by Everyman’s Library in two very handsome omnibus volumes.) One could set out on few more valuable—aesthetically, psychologically, morally—and enjoyable quests than the one Chandler offers.