July 24th, 2024

​                   “Only Crumb Didn’t Forget”: Traces of the High Preserved, and Harnessed
There’s a quote I’ve been turning over in my mind for a while, but alas, I can’t remember it verbatim or even remember who said it. Maybe, then, it wasn’t that memorable? Anyway, it was in the intro to a volume of comics by the artist R. Crumb, in “The Complete Crumb” series. For those not familiar with Robert Crumb, he’s the incredibly sartorial weirdo who basically rewired American popular consciousness with his comix. He was uncomfortable, though, with his place in American pop culture, and so fled to the South of France, where he lives as an eminence grise in exile. That he remains prolific while abroad—and seems spry in recent interviews despite being an octogenarian—is proof that he made the right choice.
Anyway, this intro (by Spain Rodriguez or S. Clay Wilson?) talked about the impact of first seeing Crumb’s work, and the effect it had on the young artist. He described it as like the weird epiphanous insights that come to one on a strong LSD trip, a truth revealed that’s almost religious in its intensity. But then as the high wanes, what seems like a newfound addition to the human sensorium—this keenness of vision and feeling—disappears.
“Only,” according to this person, “Crumb didn’t forget.”
That’s the part of the longer quote that’s been sticking in my craw all this time, the part that I actually do remember word for word. “Only Crumb didn’t forget.”
It plays over and over in my mind, taunting me when I write knowing that I’m only accessing a portion—a small percentage—of some great storehouse of power. I’ve glimpsed the full power in dreams and it seemed to course through my veins in childhood, waning in pubescence, practically surviving now only in the faintest echo. Still, some artists seem to be able to induce this state whenever they want.
To quite Baudelaire (we’ll get back to him in a minute), “Genius is childhood recaptured at will.”
But my own access to the magic is rather marginal by comparison to those I consider greats, and its appearance is rare in general even among their cohort.
Should I maybe take a shortcut in opening my third eye? Get a tab of sunshine blotter acid and blow the hinges off the doors of perception rather than continuing to knock politely?
I’ve never done LSD, and my friend who’s done quite a bit says I shouldn’t. “You’re basically on a 24-hour acid trip. It might just make you normal.”
But when I was young I used to smoke a lot of weed. These days, due to decriminalization in lots of places and outright legalization in others, weed has lost a lot of the allure as something illicit.
Back then, though, sitting in the bedroom of the apartment I shared with my mom—towel stuffed under the door, bong in hand—it still felt illicit. Sometimes I imagined myself a sailor supine in a hammock in some quayside opium den, feeling that temporal displacement Lou Reed invoked when singing of that great big clipper ship. You know that strange feeling you get sometimes when incredibly stoned, the suprachiasmatic nucleus confused between day and night, feeling that you’ve somehow smoked a hole in time?
I was already given to fantasy and the overdramatic, and I’d read some Coleridge and De Quincey and Blake, so why not indulge in some hop house idylls? Needless to say, it didn’t take much imagination to turn my bedroom in that high-rise to a berth on a galleon floating through a city’s harbor at night.
We lived downtown and there were plenty of cynosures for my bleary eye; I especially enjoyed the way the neon bulbs on the “24 Dollar Motel” fritzed on and off in sequence. And the dirty red sidings in the railyard beyond that always made me winsome. Cincy isn’t quite the Rustbelt, but the hints of heavy oxidation were there, in broken windows and the sooty brick faces of crumbling buildings. Yes, it started a melancholy ache in the belly, but so does falling in love.
When I got bored with watching the world outside the window, I would read comics (or even comix), read books, and sometimes even do some homework. More often I would play videogames, usually the more immersive RPGs that took me away from my depressing and quotidian existence. When you’re a mage leading your party through the dark forests, slaying kobolds and seeking the king’s castle, it’s easy to forget your real life misery. That you’re failing out of high-school, that your parents are still at each other’s throats despite the divorce having been finalized years ago, that you’re basically going nowhere.
The weed did what it was supposed to do, brightened colors, sharpened sound, made the dull feelings in me keen again. The world felt animate, friendly, as if it had a secret and it were sharing it with me, and things previously inert were loosening, becoming alive.
But then the weed wore off, and there was a feeling of depression again—not just depression, but betrayal. For the glimpse of an enhanced perception had tempted me with a small taste of what might be. I probably would have been better off without the knowledge that altered states exist, since they were hard to reach, probably impossible without substances (or so I believed.) And you can only afford so much and only such quality when your entire income consists of allowance money, especially in that pre-decriminalization era when it was more expensive.
Still I wondered:
Was the seeming insight always a lie, or did the drug offer a true glance into a realm that might accessible, and maybe by other means?
 Even now I do catch glimpses of something—enter a heightened state occasionally in the course of writing—but it tends to be ephemeral and elusive. Reaching that state—that Stoff—is never guaranteed, and even when I do reach it, it recedes quickly.
The writer and philosopher Colin Wilson had a name for this faculty, the one we could obtain by chicanery like drug use or obtain honestly by hard work. Or, if not hard work, then at least by rousing ourselves out of the general lethargy in which so many intellectuals and artists sink, mistaking their despond for revelation.
Wilson’s claim, again and again, in works as diverse as Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders and Origins of the Sexual Impulse, is unvarying. And it simply boils down to this: the chance to ascend in consciousness is always there, and simply requires us to push through that initial inertia. That bit of calcified chitin that accretes layer by layer, day by day, convincing us that there is nothing really numinous, is a lie. That we are powerless and hopeless playthings of Lovecraftian cosmic malignancies, or absurd tangles of essence born of senseless existence, a la Sartre, is also a lie.
Wilson called this ability to see through the self- and society-imposed fog Faculty X, and considered it the cornerstone of his own philosophical weltanschauung, which he called “Positive Existentialism.”  
He thought it had some uses specifically for ESP and more generally as applied to phenomenology, but also saw it as relevant to art and aesthetics. Those of a more religious bent might see it as a Blakean encounter with the divine ecstatic; or, if you’re of a darker disposition, an the encounter with the unholy, the Satanic, as in Crowley or Baudelaire’s formulation. Then again, Baudelaire’s idea that it would be worth it to sell one’s soul for one moment of divine ecstasy is far beyond anything I’m talking about here. A bad trip or a bit of post-smoking depression is one thing. An eternity in flames in exchange for one great moment’s insight or exquisite pleasure is quite another. Even Faustus wouldn’t have made that bargain.
Wilson very much believed we’re all wrong in seeing this great thing as ephemeral and transitory, as something we can only catch temporarily via butterfly net. There’s no need to torment ourselves with glimpses of it via drugs, which show then remove the sight of it, fill us with a pneuma that quickly outgasses. Neither is there, like Yours Truly, a need to perceive this thing as something that can only be grazed with the hand after hours of frustrated toil.
It can in fact be seized and wielded, provided one does so with a modicum of grace, without too much brute force. Imagine it as more like trying to approach a fawn in a clearing than trying to win a prizefight.
There’s simply a need for work and discipline, and discipline is just work that’s consistent in effort expended and time invested. In other words, work day after day, deliberate but not necessarily exhausting.
Eventually, if we return to the wellspring often enough it can be relocated almost at will. I don’t think we can live in this magical place—outside of perhaps some very lucky and mentally powerful gurus and magi—but we can make the trip from here to there easier. And the less time spent getting from here to there, the more time we get to enjoy being there, before being called back; as, alas, must inevitability happen.
We just need to try a little harder. Or at least, I do,
That’s the theory at least, as summarized and related by one marginally successful writer on his ill-trafficked blog late at night.
Good luck getting there for yourself.