Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Altered States
Ken Russell’s movie Altered States came out in 1980. I saw it the following year at the UC Theater, a repertory moviehouse a stone’s throw from the Berkeley campus. What must have been serious, sensitive stuff most anywhere else in the nation was, for us, high camp. Best part came soon after the protagonist (William Hurt playing a scientist and doing a laughably unconvincing job of it) has, in short order, dropped some hallucinogens, placed himself in a sensory deprivation chamber, and regressed to an ape man of Falwellian paleolithicness.
Hurt’s research associate (Charles Haid), upon discovering Hurt’s miraculous transformation from suave-witty martini-sipping academician to grunting zoo-sleeping feces-flinger, declares — paraphrasing here: “This is the breakthrough of the decade! We have to study this further. I know, we’ll advertise in the Student Union!”
Whereupon all us college kids burst out laughing. To this day, I wonder if the line was intended as comic relief. Kinda like that scene in Terminator II when Linda Hamilton dreams of the Los Angeles skyline dissolving behind a mushroom cloud. How come no one else in the theater was laughing?
Back to altered states. The experience, not the movie.
Sometime in college, I encountered the hypothesis that humans have a drive for seeking altered states of consciousness. Aside from explaining the growing interest in hallucinogens, the hypothesis tried to account for alcoholism and religious ecstacy. In 2000, a bloke named Samorini revived the idea and wrote a book about it. Sounds like Samorini has improved on the theory by invoking evolution. From an Amazon review:
This humorous and entertaining book deals with the use of psychedelic substances by our 4-footed and 6-legged friends. The author, an ethnobotanist, provides amazing examples of animals and insects seeking out and consuming psycho-active substances in their environments.
Samorini suggests that the desire to experience altered states of consciousness is a natural drive shared by all living beings. This urge is not confined to humans because animals/insects deliberately engage in these behaviors. His theory is that beings that consume these substances contribute to the evolution of their species by creating new patterns of behavior that are eventually adopted by the other members of the species, in what he humorously terms “evolution by inebriation.”
Interesting thought, although the biologist in me balks. For this “drive” to survive the mathematics of natural selection, the adaptive benefit of consuming natural hallucinogens would have to counterbalance maladaptive features like, um, poisoning yourself, like this jimson weed user:
I later found out I had been crawling on the floor, where we originally drunk the datura, eating ‘bugs’ while my friend convulsed and foamed at the mouth. When his straight sister called the ambulance, I lept off the balconey in pursuit of a friend who was actully on the other side of the house. Then my mum was called (by whom I still don’t know) and she took me home where I spent hours rolling imaginary joints, snorting imaginary lines, talking to thin air about crap and basically scaring the shit out of my family.
. . . .
I can tell you its a very disturbing experience to take a drag on your ciggerate and find out you dont have one.. Or to talk to your brother about himself thinking he’s someone else… or having your friends come round to see how you are, having a long chat with them only to realize they are not there. I cannot remember it all as it was only three days ago and I can’t operate properly (its taken 2 hrs so far to write this because i cant see).
I do remeber trying to smoke my belt, throwing my cat in the bathtub, thinking my mum was Spike Milligan. The list goes on.
. . . And that guy survived.
Not that I’m anti-drug, but you have to admit, some of this shit is dangerous. Jimson weed (datura), for example, is notoriously deadly.
I understand where my drug-using patients are coming from. I sympathize with their desire to escape, check out for a while, have a little excitement. All the above. I don’t use drugs, but that has more to do with (A) availability and (B) responsibility. No one’s offering me the stuff (availability) and I’m on call five days a week (responsibility). Yup, I can’t even drink a beer, since I’m a lightweight and I wouldn’t trust myself driving, let alone treating a patient, after a single beer. It’s an effin drag. And even when I’m not on call, I still have a wife and kid to take care of.
But still . . . if we’re talking dreams, if we’re talking fantasy, then it would be nice to trip out on some wonder herb/shroom which gives the user mystical visions, ideally without killing or scaring the crap out of him.
Trouble is, I have all the younger versions of myself rolled up inside me. Ten-year-old me is in there and so is twenty-year-old me and so forth. And the kid who gobbled up Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books like they were Skittles, well, he still wants to meet his damn spirit animal.
My luck, it would probably be Don Imus. C’mon you bald-headed ho, follow me. I’m your damn spirit animal.
D.
Ken Russell… “serious, sensitive stuff”
Crimes of Passion
Gothic
Lair of the White Worm
Salome’s Last Dance
Yup, serious, sensitive stuff indeed 😉
My recollection of Altered States: a very silly movie told with all the humorless seriousness of a door-to-door missionary.
Of that list, the only one I saw was Lair, and I remember that being rather serious (and dull), too. Bet my wife remembers it better than me, though.
Lair has that uber-ridiculous scene of Amanda whosit as the evil snake priestess chasing the policeman around a sundial hissing while he held her off by playing blasts on his bagpipes.
Other than that, it was a long dull slog to get to Amanda whosit’s naked cans and Catharine Oxenburg hanging in her skivvies.
I tried marijuana three times in my teens. The first time I threw up violently and my friends laughed at me calling me a lightweight. The second time, I threw up violently and then thought I saw shark’s fins coming at me though the grass in the field we were in. I was also covered in ants – so we now add hallucinations. My friends thought I was faking and trying to get attention. How does one fake vomiting? The third time my friends smoked it first and once assured it wasn’t something spiked or tainted I smoked it – voilently ill, felt the vibrations of alien space probes trying to make me pregnant and again, was covered in ants all the while completely paralyzed.
I’ve never bothered trying anything else – it’s just not worth it, and not remotely fun or relaxing. I got new friends too.
Dean: were the naked cans worth a re-watch? There’s always the fast-forward button 🙂
Lyvvie: bad trip, man. Bummer! How do you do with booze?
You forgot the scenes of death-by-strap-on…
I tried pot a couple of times and wasn’t too impressed – oh, sure, it was nice and mellowing, and once it helped stave off what should have been a massive red wine hangover, and that was a Good Thing, but still… I never understood what the big deal was.
And then I had some good stuff. It wasn’t laced – the girl who brought it wasn’t into anything but good pot. We were in RFK Stadium in DC. Watching Pink Floyd.
Did you know colors could talk? I could almost understand them…
And that was the last time. It was cool and all, but not so cool that I felt a need to repeat it. I’ve long been curious about other, more historical drugs – you can’t grow up an Edgar Allen Poe fan and not be at least passingly curious about laudanum, for instance… But as the song goes, “I’m an adult now.”
Clearly, you’ve never seen The Great Santini. Take one can cream-of-anything soup, hide it under your jacket…
Laudanum? Feh. There’s nothing mind-expanding about the opiates — they merely take the pain away and, in sufficient doses, put you to sleep (sometimes permanently).
Maybe I should look for Lair. I don’t remember a Death-by-Strapon scene!
PT – shuttup or they’ll totally think I was faking! they’ll all be like “Yeah she pretended to freak about sharks and shit and then threw a can of cream of chicken soup in the grass. Totally lame, yeah.”
Doug, I can drink, but most things will knock me out. Not drunk, but just really sleepy. My only saving grace is sweet glorious gin. But on the whole I rarely drink. Maybe a snifter of port, or whiskey. I’ve learned drinking isn’t worth the trouble unless it’s top quality stuff. Shame I can’t manage the same control with chocolate.
(If this shows up twice, I apologize. My ‘puter is acting up today.)
The other biological theory about favoring hallucinogens is that there is an adaptive benefit to having a personality which is a risk-taker. Yes, if you have too MUCH risk-taking bias, then you will kill yourself with your foolhardy behavior and take your genes out of the gene pool.
On the other hand, if an individual is curious enough to try a new food source which others are too scared to try, then that individual’s offspring will have a greater chance of survival in times of drought, starvation, migration, etc. There’s some thought that the “reward” risk-takers get (an adrenaline rush, for example) is similar to the “reward” animals get for finding a food high in sugar. “Mmmm. That tastes or feels good.”
But then there are individuals who abuse that pathway, either by becoming sugar junkies or drug addicts.
Another odd thing is that a lot of ungulates have a freeze response to having their noses grabbed. It’s been shown that horses, for example, experience an endorphin rush while being twitched. HOWEVER, this same response is used by pack predators to bring down ungulates in the wild. As three predaotrs circle behind, another will often leap up and grab the nose of the elk or antelope. This causes the prey animal to slow down, and sometimes cause them to fall to their knees before the predators in the back even reach them.
You would think that over time this response would have been selected against, as all the ones with strong twitch responses would have been eaten. However, it hasn’t.
So maybe there’s some other reason why having a decent twitch response is adaptively useful. We just don’t quite know what it is.
Personally, I think that most animals have pleasure pathways hard wired in, and that a lot of animals abuse that at will. (But “abuse” is a morally-laden term in and of itself.) The risk-taking hypothesis seems to make the most sense to me as a layman.
Oh, I dunno. Poe, Coleridge, De Quincey… and that’s without even getting into the modern pantheon of heroin users. It may not be mind-expanding in the Castaneda sense of things, but still – there’s a pretty good track record (rimshot!) of creative opiate junkies.
OY. I can’t seem to stop posting on this topic.
The other mood altered state that horses seek out on their own in captivity is thought to be related to smoking in humans. (Or to whatever pathway allows humans to derive pleasure from smoking.)
Horses in captivity can be horrendous “cribbers”. A cribber grabs hold of a horizontal object (the top rail of a fence, the top of his stall door, a bucket, etc.), holds on with his top teeth, tightens his face and neck muclses, and sucks in a huge amount of air. Sometimes they get so into it that they will rock their weight backwards on the air-sucking. There are cribbing collars you can put on the horse which supposedly prevent the larynx from expanding in the wind-suck phase, but they generally don’t work.
I’ve seen mares crib on their foals’ backs, and thenteach their foals how to crib. If you bring a cribber into a barn, often an entire aisle will learn how to do it. If you visit a barn, you can see the tell-tale dips in the wood fence where the cribber was pastured. It’s a habit that is almost impossible to break. (Once they really get going, a dedicated cribber can turn into a wind-sucker, where essentially they just stand in place gulping air without relying on the horizontal bar for leverage. Windsuckers don’t tense their face — they relax the underside of the neck, which makes all anti-cribbing equipment useless.)
Veterinarians have discovered that with very small injections of anti-depressants, a dedicated cribber will stop until his dosage runs out. Most owners though do not want their horses doped up 24/7. It makes them unreliable to ride, for one thing, and inelegible for competition for the other.
No one knows WHAT causes cribbing, but it only shows up in captive and recently feral populations. The point is, it’s essentially incurable once the animal starts doing it.
Suisan, you never cease to surprise me. Figging. Sheath-cleaning. And now cribbing!
PS, I think a lot of those dudes would have been just as creative without the opiates. Of all the opiate-treated patients I’ve dealt with, none has ever reported any enlightening experiences.
sounded like the normal lds party I went to in the 80’s and 90’s to me. Whats the deal? These drugs can have the effect of enhancing ones awarness I admit, but 90% of the time its taken for sport and some users end up fragmenting the personality as a result. Though the condition can be resolved by time in some cases, many have never recover. Its dancing with trains, and unnessary when eastern yoga or western meditations can produce the same “altered states”. But I also thought it was fun as a kid and didnt find out about yoga and meditation till long after then.
Dougal: I seem to remember them as being a remarkably fine set of cans, and they were onscreen for more than a brief flash.
I had also forgotten about the strap-on scene. I’ve obviously still forgotten about it, because I cannot remember it.
Catharine Oxenberg, bound, in her underwear, was cool though.
Damn. My reply seems to have been eaten.
The strapon appears several times: in the dream/hallucination at the beginning, once in the middle of the film (more scenes from the hallucination at the beginning, intercut with scenes from the manor house), and finally at the end in all its ivory silliness. And it is quite a silly strapon…
http://www.geocities.com/lairof/subpages/scenepics/dildo.gif
Oy, PS. That is one evil looking strapon. The Impaler!
Dean, it cracks me up when you call me Dougal. Reminds me of how absurd it was for my father to give me a distinctly nonsemitic name.
It certainly isn’t a terribly functional strapon. Unless, of course, you’re going for some kind of over-the-top Vlad Å¢epeÅŸ/Elizabeth Báthory sort of thang.
Cribbing sounds like deep breathing exercises to me, but why the biting part? I wonder if this is why several of the stables nearby have brass over the tops of the stable doors.
Horses are weird. But I can see why this would be dangerous to a horse as they are prone to bloat which can be deadly. Sucking in wind when it can’t burp is just dumb.
Lyvvie–They have to bite in order to get leverage for the upper neck muscles to tense up. I can’t quite describe it. They don’t actually swallow the air in cribbing, but exhale it (while grunting) on the release phase of the movement. If you muzzle them to prevent grabbing with the front teeth, they’ll rest their chins on a horizontal surface to crib.
If they go on to be windsuckers, where the bottom of neck is relaxed as opposed to cribbing where the bottom (underside) on the neck is tense, then yes, they do swallow some air.
The brass caps don’t prevent cribbing, but they do prevent the wood from developing dips where the horses latch on. The brass caps DO prevent wood chewing, which is a whole other vice. My aunt’s horses all chewed wood. Ugh.
Equine insurance companies as a rule will not insure a cribber. There’s a higher incidence of colic, although now people feel that this is due to poor dentition, not from swallowing air (causing bloat). I knew a pony who would rather crib than eat. If you didn’t hand feed her, she would routinely drop 100 to 150 pounds until her spine stuck out.
Suisan, on that link you provided, there was some speculation that cribbing releases endorphins. That would go a long way towards explaining the addictive behavior you’re describing.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that horses can be neurotic. God knows I’ve known enough neurotic dogs.
Catrina (one of my employees) notifies me that there are other neuroses, too, and they all fall under the title of stable vices. She says if you can’t afford to board your horse somewhere where he’ll have lots of field time, you shouldn’t buy the horse.