Le Smoking

AFTERTHOUGHT

By JOHN WELLS

THERE was a time, shortly after I had read Huxley's

Doors of Perception of Heaven and Hell, when I was rather drawn to the

idea of expanding my con- sciousness: I also particu- larly enjoyed Professor Zaehner's account of his

experimental 'trip' at the end of his Mysticism, Sacred and Profane. The professor had taken 0.4 of a gram of mescalin 'accompanied by tablet of dramamine to

prevent possible nausea,' had then walked round Oxford in the company of two 'investigators,' and had visited, among other places, the Cathe- dral in Christ Church. Here the rose window had 'seemed to expand and contract rhythmically, its pattern continually changing meanwhile.' After a few moments Professor Zaehner 'had found this growing and shrinking annoying, and had proceeded down the northern aisle.'

On returning to his rooms in All Souls the professor had rolled about laughing helplessly

for some time and had found the idea that there

were people who still believed in cause and effect `grotesque.' 1 now asked Tyson,' he goes on,

'for a glass of water, since the quite immoderate amount of laughing I had been doing had made me very thirsty.' On Tyson's return : Zaehner: 'I was about to tell you my great thoughts. . . .

I'll think twice about that because . . Tyson: 'What were they?' Zaehner: 'No, no, it's all right. I'll tell you when they come again.'

'In actual fact,' the professor note:, 'I did not disclose the "great thought" because even then it seemed trite and amounted only to "Every- thing is much funnier than it seems." Throughout

the manic period I had been suffering from a feeling of cold in my extremities and also in

my genitals. The cold seemed to be creeping up my legs. It was slightly unpleasant, but in no way alarming.'

Some pages later in the text Zaehner is still roaring with laughter and trying to warn Stuart Hampshire, who for some reason has come into the room, against taking the drug, 'since all it did was to reduce everything to the level

of pure farce.' Zaehner: 'Everything is very funny indeed.' (More uncontrollable laughter.) Hampshire: 'How long has this been lasting?' Zaehner: 'Oh, quite a long time. Ever since the Cathedral stopped going round . . (peremptorily to Tyson, who had already sup- plied, on request, endless glasses of water) 'Alan,

water . . . If you laugh as much as that and

sweat as much as I do, you need an awful lot of water . . . [uncontrollable laughter]. Physio- logical fact.' Tyson now returned with a glass of water. The room seemed to be getting awfully full of people and it brought the cabin scene of the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera vividly to mind : Zaehner: `Ah, this is getting like a Marx Brothers film. . .

Inspired with the prospect of endless after- noons spent rolling about on the sofa helpless with laughter, I set about trying to obtain mescalin from Boots, but without success. Soon afterwards, however, I was sent a circular letter from an old friend who had apparently devised a method of becoming 'permanently high' with- out the use of drugs. It was all to do with cerebral fluid and pressure inside the skull, and the fact that man, in adopting his present upright position, had in some way cut down the amount of blood reaching the brain. It was therefore suggested that one should bore a small hole in one's skull, thus releasing the pressure and pro- ducing a state of sustained elation. I was thinking of reaching for the mallet and chisel with the intention of doing myself this mischief when I happened to see the author of the tract in the King's Road, dragging his feet and wearing an expression of vague melancholy that put me off the experiment once and for all.

Seeing this particular vision of bliss fade, I began to observe the activities of those in the habit of smoking marijuana. It has a reputation for intensifying the mood of the smoker, whether one of gloom or delight, and therefore seemed a possible alternative to the professor's mescalin, particularly if one was of a naturally sunny tem- perament. The first trouble I had was in per- suading the few anonymous smokers I ap- proached to communicate. Being of a rather self-consciously relaxed manner, with a good deal of finger-snapping and cool 'sixties slang, they all seemed unable to bring back any clear im- pressions from the wonderland into which they had wandered, and could not manage much more in the way of description than `. y'know . . . it's great.' They also seemed gloomily dedi- cated about it, and did not spend much time rolling about on sofas.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the smokers' way of life is what one could call a suburban delight in the current vogue. If one went to some whitewashed, green-windowed home near Virginia Water and was greeted by a toothy woman who insisted on one having one of Gerald's White Sidecars, bored on about the ingredients while the moustachioed Gerald shook his chromium shaker back and forth, and then spent the rest of the evening retailing tedious anecdotes about great afternoons they had spent drinking cocktails, and about the time the police came past the Pig's Nostril when they were enjoying an illicit Blue Manhattan after hours, one would very naturally seize up the chromium-plated Queen Anne poker and beat them both over the head with it.

If, on the other hand, one mingles with the swingers, one is expected to sit wide-eyed at the wonder of it all while some tedious jerk scrapes the ingredients into a hollow cigarette, to listen to terrible reminiscences of fabulous sessions in the past when applause is almost expected for the degree of intoxication achieved by the speakers, and hear stories of childlike naughti- ness when the police were evaded or duped.

If nothing else can save the innocent from falling into the degradation described in recent articles in the popular press, perhaps the horrible tedium of the fashionable smokers will. Mean- while, I suppose, there's always laughing gas.