Sublime Web-Weaving

A review of Cobweb of Trips (2024) by Robert Dickins

This history of LSD from a British perspective presents us with some well-known figures, together with an intriguing array of lesser-known ones, the whole bound together using the analogy of a spider’s web – and here Rob Dickins recalls a celebrated experiment where researcher Peter Witt dosed spiders with various psychoactive drugs, finding LSD improved the acuity of web weaving, whereas others, such as Benzedrine and mescaline, had detrimental effects.

Aldous Huxley sits at the top of the pyramid of British LSD luminaries, author of the seminal non-fiction works, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, extrapolating a philosophy of psychedelics from his own experiences. Dickins entertainingly describes the interaction between Huxley and psychiatrist Humphry Osmond – two Englishmen in California in the 1950s, the cradle of the soon-to-develop psychedelic scene. Osmond provided Huxley with his first dose of mescaline, and he also won a competition with Huxley to provide the neologism for this novel phenomenon, noun and adjective: ‘To fathom hell or soar angelic / Just take a pinch of PSYCHEDELIC.’ Huxley’s word was ‘phanerothyme’…doesn’t quite trip off the tongue so well…

Dickins does a deep dive into Huxley’s thinking, crystallising around Huxley’s concept of ‘the sublime’ with regard to psychedelics. Huxley concluded that the same elevated viewpoint which affords one infinite beauty and transcendence also offers up the terror of the abyss – the two are inseparable – and here lies the essence of the sublime, summed up in the title of his second work on the subject: Heaven and Hell. Dickins also explores the fictional drugs in Huxley’s novels, starting with soma in Brave New World, which was written well before the author’s own experiences, and unlike LSD and mescaline is designed to shut down the sublime and induce a contented passive state, affording no trouble to the world rulers. Later, in his final novel Island, Huxley’s moksha does embody the fruits of psychedelic experience, with the aforementioned duality running throughout.

Another figure who comes under the microscope is Dr Ronald Sandison, best known as a consultant psychiatrist at Powick Hospital, Worcestershire, where he was involved in pioneering LSD therapy in the 1950s. In 1955, Sandison undertook a sea voyage to the United States in order to take part in a psychiatric conference. Bad weather seemingly inspired him, and he got the idea for a semi-autobiographical novel, Simon’s Daughter, which he would work on for many years before its completion in the 1980s. Sandison met Huxley at the conference, and the former’s impressions of the latter appear in the novel, along with Doors of Perception-like trip accounts and an in-period sense that LSD was a drug ‘out of time’ – that time would come later, as the ‘psychedelic ’60s’ developed. Dickins says of the novel:

Underscored by the ship’s passage, the characters and the era float through a liminal space – between past and present; old and new ideas; between ‘the sea and the sky’. LSD acts as a locus of synchronicity through which their paths coalesce. Indeed, LSD itself was at the beginnings of a journey; still in search of meaning.

This concept of ‘acid liminality’ crops up elsewhere in Cobweb of Trips. In the fields of psychiatric medicine, theology, spirituality and radical politics, various figures grappled with how to assess LSD within the frameworks of these disciplines. Frank Lake, a psychiatrist and committed Christian, had very positive acid experiences, seeing the ‘beatitude’ and ego-dissolving qualities of the substance as totally in accord with his beliefs. The Rev John Gardiner was an alcoholic who underwent LSD psychotherapy and discovered that the root of his problems lay in the fact he should never have become a priest. He left behind ‘the yoke of the clerical dog collar’ and celebrated his liberation with a drink!

As the 1960s scene progressed, LSD became marked out as standing against conservative churchgoing principles, alongside such issues as divorce, homosexuality and abortion – the whole permissive caboodle – which was also blamed for declining church attendance. Lake found himself on the wrong side of this argument, and was forced to defend his views. Malcolm Muggeridge – a prominent intellectual who underwent a hedonistic ‘sinful’ youth in the pre-war period, only to ‘find God’ in later years – was a caustic critic of LSD’s ‘instant enlightenment’, seeing the new permissive movement as politically sinister and definitely opposed to church teachings. Muggeridge is best remembered today for his argument with John Cleese and Michael Palin about their film The Life of Brian; if ever there was a perfect illustration of the gulf between two worldviews, this is it.

Undoubtedly the most intriguing figure that Rob Dickins highlights is the British-American poet Harry Fanlight, who had associations with Beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and is rumoured to have had a brief fling with William Burroughs in ’60s London. A highly regarded poet, he entered the ‘acid liminal’ phase with scintillating descriptions of tripping, such as: ‘Everything is happening too fast for my brain to reverse it / GOD IS PHOTOGRAPHING ME UPSDIDE DOWN’. One LSD poem entitled ‘The Spider’, a meditation that is both comical and nightmarish, undoubtedly forms a motif for Rob Dickins’ own meditation. Unfortunately, Fanlight had mental heath problems, consigning him to a twilight world of paranoia, yet in his poetry he captured ‘the sublime’ in psychedelics as surely as the famous Huxley.

In Cobweb of Trips, Rob Dickins captures the sense of unparalleled social change during the 1950s-’60s era excellently. The connections between the figures involved, mapped out by their trips and forming patterns not unlike a spider’s web are lucidly and lyrically articulated. Dickins has an acute sense of the mindsets of these past times, and when he describes the thinking and occurrences, he avoids any kind of projection of more recent ideation and accompanying judgement, and renders a veridical picture of what went on. His book is both a valuable historical document, containing the very obscure alongside the better known, and a most entertaining read, a page turner. Do take a trip around the cobweb and see for yourself.

Cobweb of Trips is available in hardback and paperback directly from the publisher, Psychedelic Press. It is also available in these formats and Kindle from Amazon sites worldwide.