How AK Ramanujan’s hallucinogenic experience with mescalin had a lasting effect on his writing

Alone in a Madison apartment, on a Saturday evening in the summer of 1971, Ramanujan took a dose of mescalin given to him by a friend. This was his sole experiment with a hallucinogen that had become quite popular among artists, writers and psychologists in America after Aldous Huxley had described its psychic effects in The Doors of Perception in 1954.

Ramanujan did not have any particular expectations in mind when he ventured into this new exploration of the self, apart from being convinced (as was his habit) that he had to write down the experience, to the extent that was possible. At the same time, he was also in some measure following Huxley’s footsteps, for the British writer had recorded, decades earlier, his experiences with hallucinogens on an audio tape accompanied by a doctor.

On this particular journey into his inner realms, Ramanujan was armed only with paper and pen. And had he not jotted down the entire experiment and filled those blank pages with cataracts of words – an explosion of colour, images on the prowl, mind flow in free association – readers of his oeuvre might never have known how long-lasting the after-effects of this singular “trip” really were.

Though he soon discarded most of the lines written under the drug, the experience had a profound effect, in an aesthetic and intellectual sense, on his later work. The idea of an external force or elixir “inspiring” or “possessing” poets, both a drug and a god or soma, as the ancient Hindus called it in the Vedas, lingered in him for years; and it even resulted in an unpublished sequence of poems he titled “Soma”, which he intended to bring out as a new collection in 1982. But soon afterwards, he rejected the idea and the entire project, unsure of its poetic quality and to some extent fearful that readers and critics would associate his new work with Huxley’s.

After Ramanujan divorced his wife Molly Daniels (who left for india with their two children) in 1971, he went through a psychological depression that resurfaced in later years, as diary entries reveal. He found respite and inspiration in the South Indian mystics, for in the years that followed he published two volumes of poetry translations from medieval Kannada and Tamil.

His landmark volume, Speaking of Śiva (1973), shows him repossess the revolutionary Kannada Vīraśaiva poets he had “discovered” in his native Mysore in the mid-1940s. And from 1976 he immersed himself in the Vaishnavite Ᾱḻvār poetry while he was translating the Tiruvāymoḻi by Nammāḻvār (published as Hymns for the Drowning in 1981), which remained one of the deepest influences in his life and made him emulate a poetry of “possession” and of “connections”.

During the mescalin trip, it is quite astounding how, even at the height of the drug’s effects, Ramanujan is able to scribble down his sense impressions and visions; he keeps up the pace of writing in this mad, flowing free-association, in an unstoppable stream of (dream-) consciousness. A good deal of his prose and poetry from the 1970s embodies these visions, and represents the fluctuation between wakefulness and the dream world (or maya), that is, the dualities of structure and variation (in linguistics), solidity and fluidity, fixity and dissolution, which are equally present in the poetry of the Ᾱḻvārs.

(Editors’ Note by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez)

~~~

[Extracts below from Ramanujan’s “Mescalin Notes”]

August 12, 1971

Brad gave me two capsules of mescalin – I’m constantly tempted and scared by it – want to take a small dose right away – afraid only of being caught making a fool of myself, than of anything physical –

Roses
are easy to paint.
The leaves are difficult – haiku

The book cover for OUP came and disturbed me no end – sent a wire – the cover picture was bizarre, sentimental, father and mother imprinted on my forehead – didn’t also like the blurb, which didn’t seem to be fair to my variety in poems, and didn’t mention my translations.

August 28, 1971, Saturday
6.00 pm, evening

Vivaldi – flowing –
expectancy – surveying all the objects in front,
slight weakness and tremor of limbs –
lying down – evening sunlight fell on my
stretched hand with watch, golden-yellow
hair – the sun was really a reflection in a west-facing
window

Dry chalk-like feeling in the throat – shiver
in the calves.

My handwriting isn’t clear, getting less coordinated
as my forearm muscles are aquiver –
a coursing of blood all over –
earlier on, I took count of all fearful
objects, tribal spears, the pufferfish
over- hanging – but i’m not going to be
afraid – I’m going to meditate,

put on Vivaldi again – sitting at centre for stereo.

As I stood meditating, hands together,
images of hundreds of hands together cartooning
behind my eyes...

Feel fragile – heartbeat faster – breathing hard
all muscle seems relaxed, weak –
I’d to run down three stairs and up because I heard
the doorbell – no one –
faint – music – body muscle weaker...

Have been writhing on the floor to the Vivaldi
– as I close my eyes, the after-images glow in
“conventional” psychedelic colours – weak –
yellow sunlight of evening – as in some after-fever.

Time picture of Nixon – looked too menacing –
the cigarettes on the back too 3D – so turned it
other way – can’t write easily – throat
still a little like chalk –

Now the Beatles – twinges of fear – also colour –
humour – especially crescendos – colours behind
the eyes – O Molly, it’s all a scream of longing
for you! It is this! The No. 9 No. 9 No. 9 –
and the rainbow-like coming and going music –
and voices in it getting urgent and fading...Must
listen to this when out of this – crowds –
snatches of No. 9 – claps – soft
clang of symbols – crescendo of applause –
behind my eyes, drips of real moist
blood, in folds of clothes – fear of closing
my eyes – though the music is “Sweet Dreams”...

Body – shaking – weak – always on the verge of
a trance, a sleep, but not quite falling off.

7.30 pm

Needed water – could walk to the john
then to water – hands trembly...
Reality of next-door brick, or Drano
on the bathroom windowsill, still there –
but as if I’d woken from sleep –
weak of body.

Now have put on Mozart’s Flute Sonata.
Couldn’t take human voice any more,
proliferating colours and shapes and prints behind
my eyes – open them only to assure myself
of the real light, the ground in front,
the hard floor – the weakness of the hand-
writing – close my eyes – a brilliant glow
of green with shots of orange, purple – all a
changing mist – not even sure I’m
not just weak from hunger, not from the
drug – can’t tell.

Time’s heavy – maybe because of
muscle weakness – like being very
drunk when I close my eyes –
time’s slow – measured thank God
by Mozart’s harp and flute –
behind my eyes – exhausting
inexhaustible turnover of coloured
shapes begetting glowing colour shapes, designs
of red, black and green dots as on tie and dye sari.
Will I be exhausted at the end of this?
Is this the peak? I want reality to
glow – only the colours behind my eyes
do. Even the clicks and thuds of the
turntable change into scorpions of
colour – no words – the turnover is
exhausting.

7.50 pm

Indian music – sounds too thin and
scratchy – like a mosquito whine –
though the ragas were all familiar – heard
literally every turn and note hundreds of times in
Mysore on the radio – feeling chilly – occasionally...

I watch my own hand with a watch on it;
it’s there – weak, bodily – burdened with its own weight.

I close my eyes and see insects disintegrate it,
leaves cover it, grubs on it – slowly crumbles into a
wrist-bone with a wristwatch on it.

Only Molly could have been here, all else I’d
have felt guilty – for no one else
would have given me all of themselves –
would have wanted to be with
someone else.

Others, I’m glad you were
not here – I’d have wanted to be
close yet would have been distant as
you’d have been – would be unfair –
yet I wish you were here.

This summarizes a lifetime’s restlessness –
tossings – and not finding utter sleep
because of continuous dream, body-ache,
being here and yet not here but in the
crystal forest.

Fear of someone who may want to come in
if the music is too much – or break open to
find me weak and on the ground.

Indian violin – only tinsel images of gold
lace, not even real gold – don’t like gold on
clothes and velvet – except the green velvet that Amma
stitched for me and took a baby picture in...
No sympathy for this music – as I always
know – too thin – reedy –
intricate in a worthless inhuman
way – call up no images, no memories.
I said personal unhappiness in an intended
letter explaining why I got so angry about
my book cover – at the word unhappiness, the
colours were drenched, dripping with black ink –
childhood photographs of Veda, Saroja, me –
Chinu – now so far away – as childhood
itself – letter to Amma about the green velvet gown.

Let me endure the silence – full of
downstairs child’s street voice – the toilet drip –
car – a door latch – mind always on the
point of fainting into some turquoise
mist, often intricate marble – very little
“nature”, said Shirley’s rather fatly coy,
slightly ironically feminine parody voice –
the way she walks – I’m seeing all
the colours in the world I’ve wanted to see –
mists, mingling, waves, diffusion,
never really white or black, only
aquamarines – laughter in street, a creak
at the next door – child’s cry – door hinge –

waste of paper! – body weak, frequent need to
urinate – O the pleasures of the visual man! –
exhausting – a word Stefan used in a pot session –
how can you read or write anything in such
a state except this? I close my eyes on a
multiplicity of metallic glints in self –
reproducing dynamics of vessels,
suddenly all edges in
a neon (keep saying nylon)
glow –

(still spelling right! – O language
you win everywhere
don’t you!)

an orange mist over a book cover –
cogwheels, playful, of many enameled metals –
eyes open only to test reality, ears hear the
toilet drip, body feels the quivering inner
weakness of muscle as of the deep age
hidden within all living things, especially middle-aged
things at forty-two – mogul images, floral, the
ages owing through me – feel nothing
personal, human, except an occasional
cry within for Molly!

It’s such a rich culture – world –
where’s nature? Why is it all sculpture?
Where the seas, the trees, the grass (why is
it only a handkerchief of God) –
from which all cities come and to which
I hope they’ll return – where is the
sky? only washes of colour; I don’t have
the words for all the colours I can distinguish,
blood and mango green thick swatches of it,
effuvia of it, lightly phosphorescent like
smoke in a half-green glow light –
No rest – restless, fatigue – reality realistic
out there, crumpled bedsheets.