The Man Who Turned on the World
Michael Hollingshead
7. The New Heresy
Six accused in Chelsea drugs case
'Arrested
at a flat in Pont Streets Chelsea, yesterday evening, an artist, writer,
physician, company director and an art dealer and his wife were each remanded
on £100 bail until March 18 at Marlborough Street today.
All
were charged with unauthorised possession of cannabis sativa (Indian Hemp). They are:
Joseph Chase Hunt Mellen, 25, writer; John Laurence Doyle, 29, art director;
and Mrs Monica Doyle, 23, all of Pont Street; Sheldon Cholst,
41, American physician and author of Pembridge Square, Bayswater; Mark
Anthony Warman, 21, company director, of Bywater Street, Chelsea; and Michael
John Hollingshead, 34, artist, and occupier of the flat, who was also accused
of permitting it to be used for smoking cannabis.'
Being busted is like going bald. By the time you realise it is happening
it is too late to do very much about it. So one tries to minimise the consequences
as best one can, though of course the damage is already done. Later,
perhaps, it may even become one of those stories that, suitably edited,
you tell against yourself…
No one was particularly surprised when the police raided my flat. The place
was a centre for all kinds of psychedelic experimentation, and it
was only a matter of time before someone complained or turned me in. There
had been a number of 'incidents' surrounding the history of this flat, such
as a party attended by some eighty guests who got accidentally turned
on via a spiked fruit-and-wine punch, amongst whom were some police spies
masquerading as hippies. There was also the problem of noise since the speakers
were seldom off, always playing at full volume. Yet despite all this, I
observed the scene with complete indifference; I was in any case unable
or unwilling to do very much about it. It was an oversight I was to 'learn
to regret', as the saying goes. Indeed, yes, it was, for I had not expected
anything quite so serious as it subsequently all turned out.
I think this
was due in part to the fact that Leary himself had been busted in Laredo,
Texas, only a short time before the police in London got after me. Tim had
been passing through Laredo on his way to Mexico with his daughter,
Susan, and his son, Jackie, and Susan had a small stash of grass hidden in
her brassiere, which the American customs found. Tim did the only thing a
parent could do under such circumstances, he admitted that the grass
was his and that he knew where it had been hidden. The Texan judge sentenced
him to thirty years' imprisonment. And Susan got off. The American Establishment
had got their man.
But this left me in a somewhat difficult situation in London,
for the plan had been that Tim would join me before Easter for a big Psychedelic
Rally, possibly even at the Albert Hall, with pop musicians, poets and members
of the British underground taking part. I had come on ahead to set
it up, and, like a juggler, I had several things suspended in mid-air at
any one time in the sure knowledge that when Tim came he would be able to
act as my 'apologist' and catch them. Now that he was unable to
leave America, l suddenly found everything tumbling about my head. My world
had come crashing down and I was unable or strangely unwilling to do much
about it. I simply let events take their course, that's all.
It was difficult to explain any of this to either the judge or
the jury. The 'politics of ecstasy' was a completely foreign world to them,
and one moreover they seemed to equate with drug-taking of the very worst
kind. l had also violated the law. I was now liable for a penalty
of ten years' imprisonment and a fine of £1000.
Yet despite the seriousness of the charges and the fact that I would almost
certainly be found guilty, I treated the whole matter as an exercise in breathtaking
intellectual negligence. It seemed to me that the whole purpose
of the British legal system, with its roles and rules and rituals, is to
convince you that, by its gravity and seriousness, it knows better than you
do. And it was through this insight that I decided to defend myself
rather than have a barrister do it.
I had also taken some LSD before arriving at court, which enhanced the
unreality of the scene, myself high in the witness box on a charge of getting
high, the judge in his robes and wig, the jury banked in rows like
eggs, a gallery filled with plain and faceless men, and I saw myself as an
actor in a B-movie.
There was one exchange I remember; it was during my cross-examination
of a Detective Sgt. Dalton of the London Flying Squad, who had arrested
me in the first place. The case had begun to drag a little. The witnesses—for
the prosecution—were uniformly serious in their evidence. They all made me
look like some kind of horrible pervert who took non-prescription
drugs as for themselves it would be, say, whisky or beer. The scene had become
'heavy'. Now that Dalton was in the witness-box, I could try to lighten the
proceedings a little, and addressing myself to him, I asked him
to tell the court what he had done when he first entered the bathroom, where
the marijuana had been found.
'I went over to the toilet-bowl,' he replied.
'Very good, you went over to the toilet-bowl,' I said, carefully
lowering my voice so that it was almost a whisper. 'And did you see anything
in there ?'
'Excuse me, but I didn't hear the question.'
I raised my voice slightly: 'Did you see anything when you looked into the toilet-bowl ?'
'Yes. I saw some leaves of what I believed to be cannabis sativafloating on the surface of the water.'
'So,' I said, my
voice in rising crescendo, 'you saw some grass floating about in the toilet. Well, isn't that a good place for it, then—in the toilet-bowl?'
I thought it was a good joke, and inoffensive, but I was told later that it had
probably cost me an extra six months on my sentence.
As it was, I was unprepared for the sentence—twenty-one months for less
than an ounce of hashish and a negligible amount of marijuana. It seemed
altogether too long and I must have just stood in the dock in utter
amazement, for the next thing I knew was being grabbed on both sides and
propelled down the staircase to the cells under the court, there to await
the Black Maria or something, to take me and the other new prisoners
to Wormwood Scrubs.
When my name was finally
called, I was brought out and handcuffed and put in the van. And it was a
strange sensation to observe London through the grillwork and glass, handcuffed,
and coming down off a trip. It also happened that the van actually
drove past my old flat, and I wondered how I would have reacted if a few
weeks earlier someone had said that one day I would be passing the place
under the exact circumstance I described. It was all very curious.
Soon enough, however, we reached
the Scrubs, a huge mausoleum of a place that could have been built as a Victorian
factory, with high walls and gothic towers, dustbin-dirty in the way of railway
stations, and rife with the smell of incontinence of urine. I felt
as if I were entering the bowels of the earth. I don't think that I have
ever been quite so depressed as I was for those first few minutes in prison.
My soul turned grey, if such a thing is possible. I felt drained
of all light in this netherworld place in which it was impossible to imagine
how anything had ever been young or beautiful. My sensibilities simply turned
themselves off in the face of this monstrous universe. I could have
been a stick a stone, a zombie, for here there were none who could emphathise
with my plight.
But after a night's sleep, my heart began to revive, and my curiosity about
my unknown daily routine got the adrenalin working. There was also
the novelty of getting into my new prison clothes—a striped shirt with a
black tie, socks about quarter of an inch thick, a pair of trousers and military-style
jacket made of thick material, and a pair of heavy marching boots.
Nothing fitted properly, of course. Oh, I felt like a walking scarecrow,
which was probably the intention anyway.
I had no sooner got dressed than the landing officer unlocked the cell
and told me to go down and get breakfast. The noise in the hall
and passageways was quite deafening, redolent with the sound of male voices,
hoots of laughter, crashing metal and bells. It was like living inside a
huge alarm-clock, I reflected, as I made my way down the narrow
iron staircase to the main hall. Prison is one huge sensory deprivation tank,
an incredible human vault that echoes to the least footfall. It is a way
of life to suit a sort of monk.
Breakfast consisted of a plate of watery porridge, a couple of
table-spoon measures of milk, a dry sausage, as much bread and marge as you
could eat, and a mug of tea.
After breakfast, I was told to go back to my cell where I would be called during the morning
to see the Governor who liked to meet each new charge. He would also allocate my work.
My cell was not very big. The walls had been painted a sickening pink,
the colour of corned beef, and the cell door was a bright green. Light
entered through a barred window recessed some two feet into the wall.
There was a table, a plank hard chair, a bed, and a metal chamberpot. To
look out of the window you had to stand on the table, and it was possible
to discern in the distance beyond the high prison wall the contours
of the city, to look out nostalgically at all the lightness of heart and
foot going past in the park, never knowing for sure whether you would ever
rejoin it. This is something of what it means to be a prisoner.
The morning passed with monstrous
slowness. A prison sentence is a certain fixed period of enforced idleness.
Things—I was to learn—have their own momentum of realizability. You can rush
your life on the outside by the scruff of its neck, but in prison
everything happens according to the rules. It is a permanent 'working to
rule', you might say; rushing anything would be like trying to rush a stalactite.
So one needs to be philosophical about the slowness of it all and
develop the necessary mental and physical yogas to overcome inertia, impatience
and boredom. It's not so strange this world as so different.
Like most new inmates, I suppose, I went through quite a few mental
changes during those first few days. They were appallingly difficult. My
head was ambushed by depression and stagnation, and it seemed that I was
beset with all sorts of cares, existential longings to be free again, angst.
I think that to be locked up without freedom—that is, without access
to love—is something you have to adapt yourself to, for man cannot live by
bread alone. We like to think it. And of course we should, but we really
cannot, you know. Individual human life needs the closeness of another
body, a warm hand or look, the occasional kiss and merging with another.
The inhuman regimen of prison existences does not allow for spontaneity with
joy, but dictates a certain style of living in a prescribed manner,
always to form, always to rules accepted as facts. It is indeed an experience
of so-called reality. I continue to be amazed that there are so few suicides,
singly or even on mass scale, a reaction to the tyranny of a system
that allows bodies of men to press on the bodies of men, and usually for
so little reason. But with patience and the passing of time, the mind-body
adapts itself, trying as best it can to keep a little flame of humanity
alight in the dark, womanless silence, and later, even achieve a simple
affirmation of the world. You must or otherwise you would die. So you live
on in the hopefulness that once beyond these walls your heart will quicken
and your tongue renew. I think prison is really dedicated to the
idea that we should think of ways in which to bring each other down not up,
and is thus the antithesis of the aims of our new 'psychedelic revolution'.
When the Governor finally sent for me, I was taken to the main
administration block, and told to remove my shoes before entering his office.
I saw the reason for this when I went inside. The Governor sat at a desk
about fourteen feet from where I stood. We were separated by glossy
linoleum as smooth and as slippery as an ice-rick. It seemed that inmates
were sometimes in the habit of reacting violently to the Governor's decisions,
and this (almost) foolproof method protected him from assault. He
had of course nothing to fear in that way from myself.
The
Chief Prison Officer gave my number and name to the Governor, who looked
up and asked me if I had ever been to prison before. 'No, but I've worked
in a prison.' 'In this country ?' the Governor asked.
'No, in America, at a maximum
security prison. I was with a group of people from Harvard who used to run
LSD sessions for some of the inmates—revelation followed by reformation,
that sort of stuff.'
'Yes, I see. Now, it seems you were charged with possession
of dangerous drugs. And that is why you are here now. It seems a pity that
someone like yourself who is obviously well-educated and literate should
find consolation in drugs. How is such a thing possible ?'
Like the New York
call-girl from Radcliff who is asked how a nice girl like her came to be
in such an occupation, I replied 'Just lucky, I guess.'
The Governor also expressed concern
about what work to give me. He finally settled on the steam laundry. And I was told to report there after lunch.
The chief laundry officer was an amiable sort of man who had been at the
same job for twenty years. He began by showing me around the laundry.
There were huge steam rollers and presses, washers and dryers, ironing rooms
and drying rooms, and about thirty prisoners variously engaged in keeping
the flow of laundry moving at maximum speed, or so it seemed at
the time. He then showed me what I had to do. My job carried 'a lot of responsibility';
I was on the reception desk, and I had to check in and check out all the
laundry and to see that what came in also tallied with what went
out. A simple enough job on the face of it. There was one snag, however:
the nurses' laundry. It could happen, if one didn't watch the articles like
a hawk, that brassieres and panties simply 'disappeared' at some stage on
the way through the various laundry processes. And a number of such
articles often found their way back to the cells. My main job, the officer
told me, was to see that this didn't happen. There was also a complicated
system of record keeping, which was explained to me, but my brain
couldn't embrace all the details and I simply 'tuned out' halfway through
the hour-long laborious explanation by the officer. The result was that by
the end of the third day the laundry was besieged with complaints,
particularly from the nurses' home, which reported nearly a dozen panties
missing and several brassieres. There were also complaints from the long-term
prisoners, for whom clean laundry was one of the few remaining pleasures,
who were understandably impatient that their bespoke shirts or specially
fitted trousers had not been returned.
I was transferred to the ironing room and told to iron shirts. Here again
I seemed to get things cocked or somehow not quite right. And this
time the complaints were that shirts were coming back from the laundry with
big burn marks, missing buttons, and twisted collars.
Once more I found myself standing shoeless before the Governor. I had not
been charged with negligence or insubordination, but the implication
was there. I was given a 'second chance' and transferred to the book bindery,
which is considered something of a plum of a job at Wormwood Scrubs.
The book bindery is run by a civilian, and it is quiet. In appearance
it resembled a Dickensian solicitor's office, with high tables and chairs
and strained faces buried in piles of books. I was put in the paperback section
to be trained in the craft of hard-cover binding, a job by which
none would be particularly impressed but requiring a certain amount of manual
skill, nonetheless. The civilian supervisor told me in this connection that
book-binding required three things: 'The first is dexterity, the
second is dexterity, and the third is dexterity.'
I was glad to be away from the old steam laundry and was quite enjoying
my new job when another one of those unwritten minor tragedies occurred.
I had left a foot-high stack of books in the press; the new covers
had been glued on and the idea was to let them dry overnight. This was the
culmination of a week's work, and I was naturally excited to see how the
finished products looked in the morning. The civilian supervisor
came over with me to unscrew the press and see what kind of a job I had made
on my first assignment. He began to turn the handle; and his dismay was equal
to my own, for all the bindings had stuck together with the result
that the books rose as one, in concertina fashion, and then crashed on to
the floor, sending loose pages all over the place. The civilian supervisor
stood for a moment, his mouth wide open, and then said very, very slowly,
and with great pathos: 'Good God! Good God! Good God!' (I was with
him on the first two all right, but he lost me on the third.)
That was the end of my stay in the book bindery. A complaint was made to
the Governor who immediately despatched me to a foetid factory building
to sew mailbags, the final degradation, no doubt, for after mailbags there
is nowhere further down the work rung to go, except possibly being a waiter
in the Prison Officer's Mess.
With the slowness of the Himalayan range, it seemed, my average
uneventful days passed into routinely ordinary weeks. There had been quite
a bit of news about hash and LSD in the daily Press, mainly about people
getting busted, so that by the beginning of the summer quite a few
of my friends were inside with me—Nick Douglas, the painter; Hugh Blackwell,
the writer; Hugh Lansdowne, the poet; Pat Ryan, the musician; Robert Fraser,
the art gallery owner; and John Hopkins, one of the editors of the
International Times of whom Christopher Logue wrote in his poem:
'Mistakes like mine occur
Bored with the cosy spiral of my galaxy
I went off limits
And time slammed around me like
The door into a pillar box.'
And there were to be several hundred more 'psychedelic' inmates in British jails before the year was out.
The Press was having a field-day on the topic. Pot and LSD were the new
twin menaces of our Western kind of society, evils which had to
be stamped out. 'At least 100,000 more Britons will take psychedelic drugs
this year in spite of new provisions in the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1966,'
said one headline, and went on to say that this figure was the result
of twelve-month nationwide survey conducted by a Dr. Jim Marle, the Atlantic
psychiatrist, at a meeting in Oxford.
In fact this was more likely to happen because
of the provisions in the Dangerous Drugs Act. Restrict anything
and immediately people want it. There must be thousands of readers now buying
grass and LSD who would never have done so but for articles of this kind;
and quite a few I daresay now believe that LSD is compulsory, like vaccination
or fluoridation Besides, total prohibition has never worked.
Yet drugs is a subject that can never come under discussion
without so much emotion that rational argument becomes obscured if not totally
banished. The Press, and to some extent publishers as well, seem to delight
in touching people where they are most vulnerable—producing articles
and books which threaten the incredulous and the superstitious. Whenever
one of these articles or books appears in public they set off a chain of
articles or letters, each more heated than the last. This is possible
because the problems concerned with drugs are not susceptible to single convulsive
solutions. It is as though where questions of morality come in that detachment
quits the scene.
And often the Press would slant a particular piece so that not
even an idiot reader could miss the point. One example comes to mind, also
from this period in the mid-sixties. It is from the now defunct Daily Sketch.
It showed a photograph of Leary, smart and serious in a suit, deep
in conversation with the reporter. The article was headed 'I'll Turn On Britain,
says the leader of the Drug Church'. And Leary is then quoted as saying:
'I don't imagine I shall run into as much opposition for my religion in Britain
as I have here in the States. The British are more tolerant and have a sense
of humour.'
The question of drugs inside the prison was also a matter
of some concern, for as the 'psychedelic' inmate population rose, and as
other prisoners became cognizant of the phenomena LSD and hashish, there
was a corresponding increase in their availability. Many ways were
used to get psychedelics in, from felt-tip pens stuffed with Red Lebanese
to bunches of grapes spiked with acid. I myself had a reasonably steady supply
of hashish, and a stash of LSD which Richard Alpert and Owsley had
left during their visit to the Scrubs. There was very little if anything
the prison authorities could do to stop it.
Naturally, I would often be approached by other prisoners to tell them
something about these drugs, or they simply wanted to score. And
as a general rule, I would share any hashish I might happen to have, whilst
refusing to give them LSD, that is, unless they were already pretty experienced
in using it. There were exceptions, however, most notable of these
being George Blake, the spy then serving a sentence of forty-three years'
imprisonment. He had served about five years of his sentence when I met him.
And it was not long before we were having long discussions about
'turning on'; and he said he would like to try it.
We decided to run a session on the Sunday, when the cells in 'D' Hall are
left open all afternoon and one can roam at will about the landings without
supervision. Blake's cell was on the ground floor, comfortably furnished
with a carpet and curtains, a bookcase stuffed with books and, on the table,
a short-wave radio, which he had somehow acquired in order 'to listen to
Arabic language stations'.
Nothing much happened for the first hour. But
as the session developed, Blake became quite tense, a nervous strain verging
on complete paranoia, and seemed to believe that I was a Secret Service agent
who had administered him a truth serum. He told me that I'd be killed
within the next twenty-four hours, and made other similar threats. I felt
quite baffled as to what to do, so I did nothing, merely listened as he went
through his flip-out, and tried to reassure him by means of treating
the whole affair as if it were all somehow something quite ordinary strewn
into the everyday, though secretly I was quite alarmed in case a prison officer
happened to look in and hear what was going on.
He finally settled down, however, and the last
couple of hours were spent in deep thought and quiet reflection concerning
his future existence, and he said he might not be able to stand up to many
more years of incarceration. I suggested they'd probably let him
out on parole in a few years' time, but he doubted this. He felt that he
was in prison as a living warning to others who might be similarly tempted.
But I said that was an old cliché, and had never worked anyway.
As it happened, Blake escaped only
a few weeks after the session, by scaling the wall one Sunday afternoon by
means of a rope-ladder thrown over by an accomplice, who had been in touch
with him via the short-wave radio in his cell. When I last heard
about him, he was living in Moscow and working for the Cairo Section of the
Russian Foreign Ministry.
I had been at Wormwood Scrubs for about four months when I was asked about
going to an 'open prison' at Leyhill, near the English-Welsh border.
I said I'd prefer the country. And shortly after this interview, I was transferred
to Leyhill Prison.
Leyhill was in some sense a reprieve from the double-dense monotony
of a 'closed' prison like the Scrubs, where no-life and all-life hang precariously
together there. Here in the country one could not only see the beauty of
the natural landscape but also feel it, and I am eternally grateful to
whoever it was who got me there.
Upon arrival, I was taken
to the kitchen and given a dinner of fried eggs, bacon, beans and chips,
freshly baked rolls and butter some cake, and coffee. The Duty Officer told
me that there were some 450 inmates and two night guards, that there
were no walls or fences surrounding the prison, and that anyone was free
to escape at any time.
I was then shown into a dormitory of about fourteen people and given a
bed and bedside locker. Pat Ryan, the musician, occupied the bed
on my right, and Jerry, a singer and lyricist, the one on my left. They had
both been busted for hashish. A couple of others in the dormitory had also
been similarly busted for possession, and not a few of the ordinary
prisoners were starting to smoke.
I was called to meet the Governor the next morning. He was an amiable,
elderly Scot, who managed our meeting very well. He told me that this was
his retirement year, that his wife was dying of cancer, and that
he was a lover of Robert Burns and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. He suggested that
I join both the bridge club and the debating club, help start a flying club,
and apply for a course in fish ecology at nearby Bristol University,
all of which I subsequently did.
My first job at Leyhill was as a waiter at the Prison Officers' Training
School, which was sited in the former Earl of Ducy's estate and house, next
to the prison. It was a good job as it meant in effect that one
ate civilian food, which made quite a change from the plain prison fare.
And the work was far from boring. I would wait on about four tables at which
would be four trainee prison officers attending their eight-week
induction course. I was probably the first live prisoner they had ever seen.
And it was interesting to observe their reactions.
My initial approach would never vary. I'd meet them at the table on their
first day, extend my hand to each one, and welcome them individually.
By the end of the second day they all knew why I was in prison. And by the
end of the week, our conversation was generally about ways to get high. Some
of the groups were quite generous, and would slip me the occasional
bottle of wine. Some let me use their billiard room. Some even said they
were looking forward to meeting me again at some point in my future, when
they would see that I got an easy deal. They were a pleasant crowd,
by and large, mostly respectable working-class, who needed some kind of job
with tenure in order to keep their game going. It was a job. It gave financial
security. It made their respectability possible.
Life at Leyhill had a particular flavour all its own. Physically,
the layout was perfect. There was a huge sports ground with cricket, rugby,
and soccer pitches, running tracks, and places to fly your kite. The Ducy
estate contained an arboretum filled with trees and bushes from
every part of the world, a constant delight to both mind and eye. There was
one tree in particular I was attracted to. It was Japanese and, I believe,
magical, whose flowering one spring turned me on to the plant kingdom.
The exquisite beauty of this tree was like a window in which you could see
the existence of this Other World. And it was a point of routine for me to
spend most of my lunch time smoking praises for Shankar in the half-lotus
position under the boughs of this holy tree.
One of the highlights of my stay at Leyhill was the production of a physio-psychedelic musical called Paradise Lost — The True Story,
which had been sent to me by Joey Mellen, friend and former associate
from Pont Street, who had decided that the best way to stay permanently 'high'
was by trepanning a hole in his head the size of the old sixpenny piece.
The play was a strange mixture of Milton and Mellen, with lyrics in praise
of trepanation or 'getting the hole'. I reproduce one of the songs below,
called 'The Great Brain Robbery':
THE GREAT BRAIN ROBBERY
By Joe Mellen
Up stood the ape—down came the drag—
The beginning of the blues—
Can't talk your way out of it adult
Daddy there's a drag on you.
Oh adult the mistakes you make
You ignorant little man
Adult oh the liberties you take
You mistaken little man.
Between your meals you make your deals
And send your sons to war
Talk all you want but don't you know
We've heard it all before.
Adult will you never see
All you want is to agree—
The lies you tell to save your face
Constitute your grave disgrace.
You're losing and you think you're gaining
It's just your ego needs maintaining
Adult d'you know what is true ?
The drag is bearing down on you.
What you're trying to regain
Is blood belonging to your brain
Will you know before you're dead
That paradise is in your head ?
You was robbed—so you made belief—
It's gravity—we've caught the thief
All you prayers won't save your soul
Adult you need a hole.
Another song, called 'Brainbloodvolume', has been set to music by Julie Felix in her furthest-out number yet.
BRAINBLOODVOLUME
It was lost and now it's found again
Don't drive it underground again
Brainbloodvolume—
They call it love and heaven above
Some take it for the hell of it
That's sugarlack—
Brainbloodvolume—
It's you it's me it's good
Understood ?
Brainbloodvolume.
It's what the poets have written for
Painters have painted for
Priests have prayed for
Prisons have filled for
Soldiers have killed for
Brainbloodvolume.
It's what the pipes have been smoked for
Witches have been cloaked for
Headstands have been done for
The whole thing was begun for
It's what the world was made for
The price must be paid for—
Brainbloodvolume.
It was necessary to approach the Governor to obtain permission to stage
it in the prison theatre, perhaps even before an invited audience of students
from Bath and Bristol universities. I decided to plug the Milton section
at the expense of the rest, feeling that the Governor would be more
sympathetic to it than the modern additions.
The Governor was most attentive during my outline of the play, and wrote a memo to the Prison Chaplain that he should
consider staging it one Sunday in the Church.
Accordingly, I met with the Chaplain, a nice, easygoing man with a strong
sense of Christian vocation, who had been at Leyhill for four years and had
a good understanding of prisoner psychology. I introduced the matter
by suggesting that there is a mystery in the story of Paradise Lost
that lies at the heart of all our lives. And this is older than
that of Oedipus. In the play there are overtones of the great four stories
of the world's various religions, and specifically of the Hebrew-Christian
tradition. Guilt and Sin are pretty powerful themes of the Christian Church,
and any attempt to understand their place in the world and their relevance
to contemporary man was, I assured him, a matter of concern to today's criminal.
One begins by depicting man as some kind of "hairless talking ape" who is
unable to benefit from the possibilities of his own existence, who then has
a revelation, in this instance, through piercing a small hole through his
skull to increase the volume of blood to the brain.
The Chaplain looked puzzled. 'But what has Paradise Lostgot to do with making holes in your head ?' he asked.
'Well, the theory is that by increasing the amount of blood to the brain
the surface of the capillaries—millions of them—increases, which
in turn release glucose from the blood into the brain cells. This is the
physiological secret of "getting high". So the "hairless talking ape" who
does not know that his "fall" (loss of brainbloodvolume) has a purely
physiological cause. Thus he lives out his simple life or death without ever
realising his golden future, truly the parable of fallen man.'
'It sounds all rather godless to me.'
'Well, the modern writer uses myths and metaphors in order to get his message
across. And in the case of this play, he has found modern counterparts to
the story of the Fall in poetry, science, and music to express an
awareness that we all have, however obscurely, that there are vast capacities
in man which he continually fails to realise. The message of the play is
simple. If things are not right inside yourself, then change them.
The evolutionary leap in being from monkey to man produced a new kind of
animal, a creative animal, an animal with imagination, who could devise ways
to regain the lost paradise of lost brainbloodvolume.'
'But why trepanation ?' the Chaplain persisted.
'Because trepanation offers a solution on a manageable scale.'
'A solution to what ?'
'A solution to the problem of staying "high".'
'But what has staying "high" got to do with putting on a musical play in my Church?'
'The Governor and I thought that because of the religious themes you might… '
'But I find the whole thing utterly "godless", and I could never
allow such a production to be shown. And now that you have explained it to
me, I doubt whether I could allow it to be performed in the theatre. Prisoners
are very suggestible you know, and we could not risk wholesale trepanations.
It is just what the Daily Express
are looking for. I really think, Hollingshead, that you ought to
concentrate instead on more practical plans for your own future than try
to launch a social movement based on people putting holes in their heads.
Have you ever considered the profession of the church ?'
'I'm sorry you don't like the play. I thought you would.
What we are seeing today is merely the visible aspect of a universal neurosis,
and the Fall myths, in whatever language, illustrate humanity's unconscious
awareness of human suffering, which is the failure of humanity which
Paradise Lost
symbolises. God is simply a creative power which is part of human
life in the Garden. A voice within man tells him that he can and should regain
the lost brainblood of childhood—should exercise some degree of control over
his own consciousness, in other words, which is the message of the new developing
religions in the West. The problem facing the established Church is that
if man lived up to his full creative capacities, there would be no religion.'
We decided to go ahead anyway, and started rehearsals. Hugh
Landsdowne, a poet and magician, who had been imprisoned for growing half
an acre of marijuana at his farm in Essex, linked in the I Ching;
and together we made a huge stroboscopic mandala with an electric
motor we pinched from one of the machines in the tailor's shop. The play
was never performed in either the church or the theatre, due to the misunderstanding
as to what the play was actually about; but it was seen by most of the inmates
at some point in its actual unfolding; and helped keep our minds off more
dangerous matters.
I tend to remember perhaps only the positive things about
my last year in prison. Yet in all honesty I cannot rid myself of the thought
that my life there might have been very, very different indeed. I think all
of us carry around in our heads some picture of how we imagine prison
life to be, though doubtless altogether impossible to identify in reality.
Mine was a superstitious mixture of Gestapo camps and what I had seen in
American movies. The reality is quite different; there is, for instance,
very little real fear of the intentions of the prison authorities, who tend
to stick to a rule book that does not include physical brutality or torture
or idiosyncratic sadism. There is also very little physical violence
going on between inmates, though incidents happen from time to time, like
anywhere else. Man is only human after all. And violence is part of his human
nature.
And yet… the experience of prison is a
painful one. It may be no more than an enduring slight headache,
but it is always there, forever encroaching on your private world, an impersonal,
indifferent environment in which you are physically contained; and all for
the greater public good. Prison is a feeling, a subjective as well
as a purely physical thing. It hits directly at your sensations, but acting
more like a dampener than an actual brake. It lowers by its sense of decay,
its corridors of refuse, its wasteland approach to fallen humanity.
No wonder one feels saddened to observe how as our twentieth century develops
so too does the machinery of incarceration and the illegality of our various
legal actions, who seek to condemn even the children who comprise
our future brave generation.
Prison is some kind of other place in which I would never wish for anyone to have to live out their simple life or death.
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