Psychedelic questions coming back to life

It is tempting to assume we know everything we need to learn about the Sixties and to leave safely submerged what cannot be re-floated (thank God, say some). But two current books remind us that questions raised then and never wholly answered are arising again, buoyed in part by legal but quiet research conducted abroad and here in the U.S.

I've been following this re-emergence neither as a devotee of the war on drugs nor as an old hippie (I am an elder, but was never a hippie); rather, as a former board member of a group organized by Robert Jesse and "dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred more available to more people." One evening in winter 1967, I was just a tourist lucky enough to witness Jim Morrison of the Doors on the stage of San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, instructing his baby to set the night on fire. As a relentlessly single-minded graduate student then, I watched as Timothy Leary, dressed in a white Nehru outfit, grinning broadly, twirled a long strand of glass beads under a strobe light, his teeth flashing on and off.

What is the benefit, decades later, of revisiting the melodrama initiated by a Harvard psychologist eating bitter, stringy psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca in summer 1960? Okay, the cast of characters soon included Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, and the comparative religionist Huston Smith. Set at a prestigious university, an isolated Mexican beach town, and a patrician Hudson Valley estate, the story boasted cinematic potential. However, the main benefit for us is that the Harvard group was presented with many of the questions that illegality soon froze like actors in a prolonged tableau, questions now twitching back to public life.

Like Jay Stevens' earlier book Storming Heaven, Don Lattin's recent 'Harvard Pychedelic Club' is a wryly tumultuous history, but whereas the former covers a wider scope ("LSD and the American dream"), the latter focuses sharply on the group that began in Cambridge. In contrast to Latttin's account, Gary Bravo's 'Birth of a Psychedelic Culture' brings us the ruminations of two of the surviving principals of the Harvard group, the scholarly Ralph Metzner and the psychologist formerly known as Richard Alpert, who transmogrified into the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. Their recorded conversation has the flavor of a lively reunion as the two recall an astonishing young adulthood, generously illustrated with snapshots and brief statements from colleagues.

[Thanks Jonathan!]