What a strange and delight-filled book is John Geiger's "short history" of science, art and the brain. Plunging us back into a time of idealistic and mind-expanding adventurers that included Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, Geiger's book reminds us that that psychedelic' journeys were originally a serious business, and only gradually widened-many would argue degenerated-into a mass cultural phenomena.
Geiger skillfully takes us through the earliest days when science began to probe light and the mind, beginning in 1823 with a Goethe disciple called Purkinje, who recorded the geometric patterns produced by flickering light or by exerting pressure on the eyeballs. Of particular interest is the 1946 introduction of the electronic stroboscope by Dr.W.Grey Walter, a scientist and researcher in Bristol who was also "a glider pilot," and according to his biographer, "home guard explosive expert, wife swapper, TV pundit, experimental drug user, and skin diver." No kidding. No one Geiger introduces us to fits the average image of the plodding scientist; Walter is one among many original minds that illuminate his text.
The man central to the art-as opposed to the science-of the flicker, or "Dream Machine," is Canadian-born artist and writer Brion Gysin, who experienced a dizzying "fall out of rational space-time" in 1958 while travelling on a road in France, as light flickered through a row of trees. Inspired, he fashioned, with the help of a Cambridge mathematician called Ian Somerville, a revolving cylinder, cut with various patterns. Thus was born the "Dream Machine." Designed to be experienced with closed eyes-the expression "eyes wide shut" comes immediately to mind-Gysin's machine had a vivid effect on viewers, many of whom saw gorgeous, transcendent images and cinematic scenes, caused by the rhythms of stroboscopic flickers. Others, like poet Allen Ginsberg, who was subjected to flickering light under the influence of LSD, intensely disliked the experience; still others found-and still find-strobe lights and flickers can induce epileptic seizures.
Geiger traces the attempts by Gysin and various converts throughout the Sixties and Seventies to market this drug free equivalent to the ecstasies written about by psychedelic pioneers like Aldous Huxley in his account of taking mescaline in Heaven&Hell, all which came to naught. Although Gysin, near the end of his life, knew he'd failed to share his invention with a wider public, Geiger's account of his efforts never fails to fascinate. We might not be surprised by Paul McCartney's interest, but who'd imagine cosmetics maven Helena Rubinstein would have been an early Dream Machine fan?
Geiger traces the attempts by Gysin and various converts throughout the Sixties and Seventies to market this drug free equivalent to the ecstasies written about by psychedelic pioneers like Aldous Huxley in his account of taking mescaline in Heaven&Hell, all which came to naught. Although Gysin, near the end of his life, knew he'd failed to share his invention with a wider public, Geiger's account of his efforts never fails to fascinate. We might not be surprised by Paul McCartney's interest, but who'd imagine cosmetics maven Helena Rubinstein would have been an early Dream Machine fan?