Harley Loco - Rayya Elias, The Centre of the Cyclone, The Human Biocomputer, The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography, John C Lilly,

One of the things that this memoir, like others of this genre, the "I fucked up bad with coke/e/alcohol/absinthe/heroin/opium/valium" genre (no-one's done a ketamine one yet - except Yes They Have!! - John C Lilly, he of dolphin research and The Centre of the Cyclone, and The Human Biocomputer followed up his seriously serious taking of acid with a major, and I mean major, ketamine habit - this indiscretion is now going to be the main subject of this blog entry, but I guess I need to finish the sentence outside the brackets first), illustrates is just what huge quantities of illegal drugs you can consume, for days on end, before it all goes really, really bad.  

We're onto John C Lilly now though - after the LSD centre book, The Centre of the Cyclone, and presumably a long time in counter culture circles, as they used to be known, he got heavily into ketamine.  He didn't slump on thew kitchen table in a  K-hole - he went all the way down that hole and out the other side into other universes - or so he reports. His book The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography is a bizarre mish-mash of his writings,  bits that others have added, out of context photographs of famous people (including Richard Fenyman) with quotes from them beneath the photos saying, more or less the same thing,  that John C Lilly was a nice, intelligent interesting guy, an obligatory foreword from Timothy Leary. I still don't know what to make of him. He believed, from his ketamine induced journeys, this (only a full quote from his Wikipedia entry will suffice:

Solid State Intelligence
Solid State Intelligence or SSI is a malevolent entity described by John C. Lilly (see The Scientist). According to Lilly, the network of computation-capable solid state systems (electronics) engineered by humans will eventually develop (or has already developed) into an autonomous life-form. Since the optimal survival conditions for this life-form (low-temperature vacuum) are drastically different from those needed by humans (room temperature aerial atmosphere and adequate water supply), Lilly predicted (or "prophesised", based on his ketamine-induced visions) a dramatic conflict between the two forms of intelligence. Wikipedia, 29/07/13

He once rang the President of the United States to warn him about this entity, after which he was forcibly detained in a psychiatric hospital



I picked up the book second hand because I'd always liked the stuff he wrote about acid. This book was a bit of a shock with its mixture of fantasy, reportage. To me it's a reminder that very bright people can have truly awful, wacky views despite their preeminence in other fields. You've only got to think of Linus Pauling, double Nobel prize winner and his obsessive belief that vitamin C cures 75% of all cancers.