Facing Entropy

Sometimes Hippie Law requires that when faced with horrible circumstances one must delve deeply into one's own soul and psyche in order to get high as illustrated in a scene from J. P. Dooley's not-yet-published tales of Vietnam, Sergeant on the Wall:

"Dust from our approach was settling on his eyes and flies crawled over his lips and into his wounds.  The wrack of his legs was particularly unsettling.  "I'm glad it's you and not me, bro…" I said softly.

I was stuck there for a long time; Markus decided to change tactics and bring the tracks around before going on.  It had been a hot night, and Mr. Charles had been dead for almost eight hours.  As the heat of the day really came on,he began to change and melt, right before my eyes.  His stomach began to swell and the rest of him to leak and further deflate, breaking down into essential fluids with their separate recognizable smells:  blood, bile, piss, shit, mucous, saliva, lymph, fats, waxes and oils.

I found myself staring at him fixedly, at first with growing horror and distaste, my head spinning; my body saw its fate and cringed.  But then I began to feel something else:  a liberation from the flesh, a clear space, a deep peace.  Then I was barely breathing, looking at the whole scene at once, the light filtering through the trees, so beautiful, and the corpse melting into the sand."

The Psychedelic Rule

The analysis and incorporation of the cosmic truths of psychedelic experiences is de rigueur in Hippie Law. Adherents of Hippie Law accept this as a matter of course as illustrated in this excerpt from the soon-to-be-released novel, Two for the Road, by J. P. Dooley:

'DeSoto Jr., deeply into the cosmic oneness of things, a concept he had come on in a flash of insight when we took Morning Glory seeds in the fall of 1964, was doing research for his dissertation on the inter-relation of human thought and natural process.  “Everything defines, limits, causes and conforms to everything else!” he used to say, and it was still a liberation for him, a relieved collapse into the arms of the universe and wild nature.  Searching for a population to demonstrate what he had in mind, he had run into a fellow grad student doing a monograph on commercial fisherman, and muscled in on his data base by helping him conduct interviews.'

The Deeper Meaning of Getting High

In Two For the Road, by J P Dooley, Lee and Jaymo discuss the true, deeper meaning of what it means to get high:

"Many years down the road, Lee Callahan and I were staying with Franklin DeSoto Jr. and Marlise on the Santa Barbara Riviera, in the apartment downstairs.  The sun had just gone down, lights coming on in the town and around the harbor, but the sky was still bright enough for reading.

“Look at this,” Lee said, tossing me last week’s newspaper.

 

A bold headline:  FREAK TIDES EXPOSE OLD CANNON.  Apparently seen by many from the beach at the mouth of the Goleta Slough, then officially discovered and removed to the University where they were surmised to be from a wreck or perhaps jettisoned to get a ship over the bar and into the estuary behind it.

 

“I saw those cannons, Lee!” I said, and told her about it, the ship rounding the point, the cannons falling into the sea, and how I had found them.

 

“It must be something I remember, something that native man saw.  He must be real too.  And he made a song about it.”

 

She nodded, pausing to light the pipe.  “Who do you think he was?”

 

I had never considered it; he had always just seemed to be me.  “Someone who wandered around and looked at things,” I said, groping. “Someone both young and old and always alone.”

“Maybe he was a ghost.”

 

And a persistent memory, if not mine then a feature of the collective unconscious of humanity, where everything is also the seed of the next thing; stories repeat themselves, the past spontaneously recalled, re-created or merely re-lived without awareness. 

 

And I thought about the vision of the ship, how I had just imagined it, a kind of fantasy, psycho self-indulgence that conformed to something real, the accurate vision of an actual historical event.

 

And then, watching Lee blow smoke rings, I remember that this is how I have peered into the future as well, the same unreasonable imaginary place, and how I saw her, my beautiful unconventional companion, this citizen of the future—not just as some ideal image but sharp, true and complete down to the details of her lips and easy smile— before I ever met her, as clearly as I saw the ship and the cannons."