The Doors Of Perception - Aldous Huxley

THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION -

HEAVEN AND HELL -

ALDOUS HUXLEY

It's been a few years since I last read The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell by Aldous Huxley. A lot of water has since passed under the bridge and a lot of drugs consumed, I should declare. I'm not proud. I've not sampled every type of drug in the world, far from it, but I've done a fair share of them. But then haven't we all? It's like the scene in The Rutles movie where Dirk is being interviewed and he admits “It's the truth, I have had tea. Lots of tea. Indian tea. And biscuits.” For all that, nowadays the subject of drugs is old hat it seems, and you're considered weird if you've never imbibed. As Hunter S Thompson once wrote: 'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.'

So where does this leave Aldous Huxley? Well, don't worry, he's still a person of interest and his observations regarding his experiences with mescaline are still noteworthy.

Huxley's first trip in 1953, for example, where he becomes fascinated by a vase of flowers, a chair leg and the fold in his trousers still makes for very good observations not only on the effects of mescaline but also on art. When highlighting the sense of 'an obscure knowledge that All is in all and that All is actually each', or 'the perception of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe', Huxley points out that the same perception can be recognised in paintings by Van Gogh, Botticelli, and Vermeer. And I'd tend to agree.

What Huxley says about mescaline heightening the perception of colour is true but also of interest is what he says about man's ability to recognise colours being unnecessary to his survival as an animal. According to Huxley, man's highly developed colour sense is a biological luxury. To which I would argue against. If the world is viewed as black and white then surely this is being reductive? There is beauty and value to be found in images of black and white, for sure, but to see the world in blazing technicolour leads to an enhancement and to a greater understanding of it, does it not? And greater understanding of the world should lead to greater chances of surviving in it – as a species – should it not? Reducing the world to black and white means reduced awareness. Reduced awareness means not only a lack of a sense of beauty but also of danger.

It's a conundrum. If the world, as Huxley writes, is the universe of reduced awareness then why is there an innate yearning in us for a better world? Why is there a desire to escape – for escapism - to improve, to create? If reduced awareness is a prerequisite for our survival then why have we not remained living in caves? Why is there such a thing as 'art'? All we really need to survive is food, water, and heat – and to be able to reproduce. The same as any other living thing. Why the desire and the need in man to create? Why is there art? Ultimately, what good does it do us?

Huxley wrestles with these questions himself but finds no answer. 'This is how one ought to see, how things really are,' he tells himself during his mescaline experience. To always be able to see Infinity in a flower. But if that was the case you'd never want to do anything else because just looking and being would be enough, he realises. But what about other people? What about human relations? What about the ordinary? How do you function in a world where ordinary concerns, moral judgements, the concept of time, of selves, of cocksureness, of over-valued words and notions are an irrelevance?

The end lesson that Huxley gains from his mescaline experiment is that 'the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.' But even this is a million-dollar question because ultimately, how do we know? Viewed both subjectively and objectively, how can we know?

As I said, nowadays the subject of drugs is old hat it seems, but so too are the concerns as raised by Huxley in his book. Does it matter? Does Huxley's questions count for anything these days? If not, then why might this be? Have Huxley's questions all been answered? Have we all moved on? That, again, is just another million-dollar question...

John Serpico

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

BRAVE NEW WORLD - ALDOUS HUXLEY

Is life an illusion and love but a dream? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Is art subjective, or objective? Is art a mirror? Or a hammer? Upon such complexities I sometimes ponder. What makes for a legendary band? And what makes for a classic book?

At this moment, that latter question is the one I'm asking myself.

Every once in a while a list is published of 'The 100 Greatest Books Ever' or 'The Best 100 Novels', or there's such books as '100 Books To Read In a Lifetime'. These lists always contain the most obvious books such as Ulysses or Moby Dick both of which, as examples, I would heartily agree belong in the top 10. Ulysses, in fact, often makes the number 1 spot though more often than not with the proviso of 'begun by many, finished by few'. I happen to have read Ulysses twice now and it gets my vote too for being the greatest of books. There are some, however, that appear in these lists that I'm in complete disagreement with. On The Road by Jack Kerouac? It's good but it's not his best. Finnegan's Wake by Joyce? Life just isn't long enough. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad? Very debatable. And then there's Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Having just read it, I must say that frankly I'm not impressed. I dig Huxley's groove, as his acolytes might have said in the Sixties but in no way is Brave New World one of the greatest books ever.

For anyone not au fait with the story, it depicts a future society where everybody's happy; this state having been achieved through the advancement of and domination by the forces of capitalism and science. People are no longer given birth to but instead are hatched in test tubes then during infancy inculcated through subliminal messaging virtues such as passive obedience, material consumption and unrestricted copulation. In later adult life the population is kept occupied by sports, mild labour and mindless entertainment, and kept under sedation by a freely distributed drug by the name of soma.

We are introduced to Lenina and Bernard who in their own particular ways and for their own particular reasons are not quite content with the ways things are. Together they visit what is called a Savage Reservation in New Mexico; a place where primitive civilization still exists and where people still marry, give birth, die of old age, and use such antiquated terms such as 'mother' and 'father'. There they encounter a savage called John and his mother, Linda, who are brought back to London. The mother ends up strung out on soma before dying, whilst John ends up as a freak to be gawked at until after being unable to take any more, hangs himself.

This is, of course, just a brief synopsis of the story-line and isn't really doing it justice because the true point of Brave New World as I see it, is for it to be a vehicle for ideas. And what are those ideas? Well, I presume Huxley knew what he wanted to say when he started writing the book but a lot of it feels as though it was being made up on the hoof. It's as though he took bits and pieces from here, there and everywhere, and tried to knot them all together into a coherent whole. He didn't exactly fail in his task but when main characters are given names such as Marx, Bakunin, and Lenin it just comes over as a bit... ham-fisted.

Huxley depicts a future society where the human spirit has been extinguished and where the control systems that maintain the staus quo are all that matters. He also depicts a savage society where science doesn't exist and the human spirit is apparently unfettered. The problem, however, is that both societies are shown to be just as bad as one and other. There's a false dichotomy between them and presumably this was fully intentioned - to present both worlds in the same dim light? So, on the one hand Brave New World warns against the danger of a totally controlled society yet also despairs at an uncontrolled society.

Now, in a foreword written 14 years after the first publication of Brave New World, Huxley considered adding a depiction of a third type of society to his story; one where economics would be decentralist, science would serve rather than dictate, and politics would be Kropotkinesque. An anarchist society, essentially. He obviously chose not to do this but I rather wish he had because if Brave New World is a vehicle for ideas then perhaps it would have done away with any ambiguity about those ideas.

There are a lot of readers who like Brave New World precisely because of the ambiguity of it but for me, all it does is to shift attention away from what the book is meant to be about and on to the author himself and where he's coming from. And of course, where Huxley's coming from is the public school education system of the early 1900s - Eton, to be precise. And however much of a freethinker Huxley presented himself as, he would still have been inculcated with all the attitudes and indeed, prejudices that would have come from such an education. You don't have to look far into the book either to see these attitudes on full display, particularly in the hierarchical make-up of his controlled society where there is a class of Alpha-Plus intellectuals who are bred to govern and a mass of Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons bred for menial labour.

When first published in 1932, Brave New World was viewed as being prophetic and has been deemed as one of the most influential and important books of the 20th century. I've no argument with it being prophetic as indeed, Huxley has in many ways been proven right - more so, in fact, than George Orwell in his own particular vision of the future, 1984.

Brave New World, however, is now out of date because social control systems (rather by accident than by design, I feel) have superseded anything Huxley envisaged and we are now (or at least those in the First World) in what is essentially a virtual state. We are removed from what might actually be reality and are living and thinking in a virtual reality where our opinions, thoughts, ideas and perhaps even our dreams are not our own but simply versions of others. And when I say 'virtual reality', I don't mean as simulated by computers or the Internet but as in shadows of the form and substance of life itself, those shadows being far more complicated than they ever were in Huxley's day.

I suspect that some years after Huxley wrote Brave New World, he himself began to realise that his book was a mere tinkering around the themes he was exploring - simply an entertaining sideshow; which would explain his growing interest in mescaline, leading to him writing what is probably his most famous essay, The Doors of Perception.

Compared to say, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, Brave New World has now lost its power and I suspect also that if Huxley were around today then he too would refute the idea that it's one of the greatest books ever, and that puts me in good company. Me, the uneducated lout from a council estate in Bristol, and Huxley; a polymath of the highest order and one of the greatest British thinkers of all time....

I may even have one up on Huxley because I've got a sense of humour and as far as I know, Huxley was never really renowned for his jokes.

I must admit, however, that until reading Brave New World I never realised that it took its title from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it." And also that the song Everybody's Happy Nowadays by the Buzzcocks was derived from it....

John Serpico