OK I researched it.
QUOTE
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‘“What crabs? Are you mad? What crabs? Ah! Yes. Well, yes… The crabs are men. And so? Where did I get that idea? Real men, good and beautiful, on all the balconies of the centuries. As for me, I was crawling in the yard; I imagined I heard them speaking: ‘Brother, what’s that?’ That was me. Me the Crab…’
– Sartre, The Condemned of Altona
Huxley, Sartre, and Mescaline
In 1954, Aldous Huxley famously detailed his experiences with the psychedelic drug Mescaline in his seminal book
The Doors of Perception. Throughout the 60’s, with the increasingly popular use of other psychedelic drugs such as LSD, Huxley’s book became somewhat of a counter-culture bible for many young people at the time. The book was the key influence for Jim Morrsion naming his band The Doors, and Huxley was also featured on the cover art of The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
Huxley’s Mescaline experiences in the 50s had led him to describe: ‘the other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open.’ The great change for him was instead an alteration ‘in the realm of objective fact’. Rather than a visualisation of imaginary objects
The Doors of Perception contains a series of beautiful, detailed descriptions of patterns and colours:
there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight.
However, 20 years earlier in 1935, while he was attending France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, another famous thinker also decided to experiment with mescaline, with startlingly different results. Jean Paul Sartre’s fame was still several years ahead of him; he was then in his late twenties and employed as an unpublished and unknown philosophy teacher. At the time Sartre was writing a book on the imagination and he hoped that the drug would induce hallucinations that would give him a new insight into his research. However, his lifelong companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir reported later that the plan may have succeeded all too well…
During the midst of his trip Sartre had received a phone call from de Beauvoir; a phone call that had apparently rescued him from a desperate battle with scrambled lobsters, octopuses and other grimacing sea-life. To Sartre ordinary objects had begun to change their shape grotesquely: umbrellas were deforming into vultures, shoes were turning into skeletons, and faces looked absolutely ‘monstrous’. All the while, behind him, just past the corner of his eye was the constant threat of the terrifying deep water dwellers. Yet, despite these horrible hallucinations (that seem rather uncharacteristic of the mescaline experience), by the following day Sartre had apparently recovered completely, referring to the experience with ‘cheerful detachment.’
UNQUOTE.
reaction thing.
