Oh, Carl! You so Crazy!
May. 4th, 2003 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
weaktwosI was reading an exerpt from Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. This exerpt involves the human's predilection for mind altering plants, a la marijuana, or opium.
It was a most interesting read. What made me chuckle was the following:
So there it seemed the neuroscientists had stranded me, all on my unscientific own with a dime bag and the dubious company of such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Baudelarie, Fitz Hugh ludlow and (yikes!) Carl Sagan --but Carl Sagan wearing his goofiest nonscientific hat. You see, I'd discovered that in 1971 Sagan had anonymously published an earnest, marvelous account of his experiences with pot, which he credited with "devastating insights" about the nature of life. "There is a myth about such highs, " Sagan wrote:
(Sagan's essay, atributed to "Mr. X," appears in Marihuana Reconsidered, by Lester Grinspoon. After Sagan's death in 1996, Grinspoon revealed Mr. X's identity.)
Wow! And who is this Lester Grinspoon? Could it be the nom de plume of someone else who is famous? Like Alan Greenspan, hmmm?
And I wonder, did Sagan take a toke before he did his "Cosmos" shows? Hence the problem with the relaxed, "Billions and billions..." phrases?
One wonders what I could come up with and tell my sober self the next day.
It was a most interesting read. What made me chuckle was the following:
So there it seemed the neuroscientists had stranded me, all on my unscientific own with a dime bag and the dubious company of such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Baudelarie, Fitz Hugh ludlow and (yikes!) Carl Sagan --but Carl Sagan wearing his goofiest nonscientific hat. You see, I'd discovered that in 1971 Sagan had anonymously published an earnest, marvelous account of his experiences with pot, which he credited with "devastating insights" about the nature of life. "There is a myth about such highs, " Sagan wrote:
The user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day....If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say, "Listen closely, you son of a bitch of the morning! This stuff is real!"
(Sagan's essay, atributed to "Mr. X," appears in Marihuana Reconsidered, by Lester Grinspoon. After Sagan's death in 1996, Grinspoon revealed Mr. X's identity.)
Wow! And who is this Lester Grinspoon? Could it be the nom de plume of someone else who is famous? Like Alan Greenspan, hmmm?
And I wonder, did Sagan take a toke before he did his "Cosmos" shows? Hence the problem with the relaxed, "Billions and billions..." phrases?
One wonders what I could come up with and tell my sober self the next day.
