In need of a slim volume to pass the time on a flight to Rome recently, I packed my copy of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a 50-page miniature from 1954.
The book takes its name from a poem by William Blake and would in turn, abbreviated, inspire the name of a famous rock-band, founded in 1965 by Jim Morrison.
It describes an experiment in which Huxley, then at the height of his career as a novelist, philosopher and public intellectual, took the drug mescaline at his home in Los Angeles, under observation by a psychiatrist.
Extracted from the peyote cactus, mescaline is a psychedelic drug, used in Native American religious ceremonies for millenniums. The observing psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, had published an academic paper on its possible benefits to human understanding.
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Even so, Osmond worried about the risks it might pose to his subject’s mental state: “I did not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.”
His concern was unfounded. During eight hours under the drug’s influence, the writer remained thoughtful and articulate, able to explain what he was thinking and seeing in minute detail.
He would use mescaline periodically for the remainder of his life, always under scientific conditions, and wrote a follow-up book, recognising its negative as well as positive potential, called Heaven and Hell (1956).
In The Doors of Perception, Huxley describes the unprecedented intensity with which, thanks to the drug, he saw a vase of flowers. He also listened to various pieces of music with which he was already familiar, and studied old paintings, recording how differently he experienced them than before.
But a more surprising aspect of the experiment, to him and the reader alike, was the profound fascination he developed with his own trousers.
They were ordinary, grey flannels. And yet, staring at their folds – a “labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity!” – Huxley experienced an epiphany on the nature of art.
The spectacle felt no less meaningful than when, later, he gazed again on a Botticelli painting. Suddenly, he realised how dependent religious art, in particular, was on the semi-abstract depiction of “draperies”.
“In the average Madonna or Apostle, the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole,” he wrote. “All the rest consists of many coloured variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen.”
For the artist or mescaline taker alike, Huxley concluded, “draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being”.
Not that he was suggesting all artists were on drugs. Drunk or sober, they just had more access to something he called “Mind at Large”, a phenomenon evolution had taught us to keep under wraps.
“What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescaline, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge of Mind at Large oozes past the reducing value of brain and ego into his consciousness.”
In Rome, by a happy chance, the venue for my book-reading and interview was just around the corner from the Archbasilica of St John Lateran.
Founded in AD 324 but rebuilt in the 16th century, this extraordinary church is the seat of the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope), and in grandeur almost rivals St Peter’s. But not the least impressive thing about it is the giant statuary in the niches along the main aisle, depicting the 12 apostles.
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Here, sculpted large, was exactly what Huxley was taking about, or as near as I could experience it in sobriety. The representational parts of the apostles were indeed about 10 per cent on average.
The head of John the Evangelist, for example, gazed upwards, as if experiencing an apocalyptic vision, while his left hand held a book and his right a quill. Feet apart, the rest was drapery, its flowing folds only occasionally hinting at a body underneath.
The various sculptors who carved the statues were superstars of their day, with hard, business heads to match their artistry. Camillo Rusconi, who sculpted John and others, enjoyed a long, successful career that, on his death at 70, earned him a “magnificent funeral”.
But if Huxley is right, Rusconi also had more than usual access to that mysterious quality, Mind at Large.
Did John the Evangelist have it too? Maybe, although his extraordinary writings have led some latter-day scholars to speculate that he may also have been aided by substances like Huxley’s.
Not mescaline, but more likely psilocybin (magic mushrooms) or other flora on Patmos, an island where he wrote. George Bernard Shaw was, as usual, in no doubt about it. A student of the Bible from his early days in Dublin, Shaw once questioned the church’s wisdom in admitting the Book of Revelation to the religious canon. So doing, he described it – somewhat uncharitably – as “a curious record of the visions of a drug addict”.
