662 - Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 3

Program Notes §

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com


Guest speakers:
Ben Sessa, Tom Roberts, and Kat Lakey

Today’s podcast features a reading of Chapter 3 from Leonard Pickard’s novel, The Rose of Paracelsus. The chapter is read by Dr. Ben Sessa who is currently leading a psychedelic research project with Professor David Nutt in the UK. The reading is followed by commentary by Dr. Thomas Roberts. Long time listeners to the salon will remember Dr. Roberts from my Podcast 633 – “The Man Who Invented Bicycle Day”.

Leonard Pickard’s email addressaphrodine (dot) 1 (at) gmail (dot) com

Links to previous Rose Garden Podcasts

Podcast 609 – “The Rose Garden – Introduction”

Podcast 629 – “The Rose Garden” 002

Podcast 644 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 1

Podcast 652 – “The Rose of Paracelsus” – Chapter 2

Ben Sessa’s Current Project

Books by Thomas Roberts

Psychedelics and Spirituality: The Sacred Use of LSD, Psilocybin, and MDMA for Human Transformation

The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values

Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design Foreword by James Fadiman

PCs – Right click, select optionMacs – Ctrl-Click, select option

Download free copies of Lorenzo’s latest books

Previous Episode §

661 - Psychedelia_ History, Science, and Mysticism

Next Episode §

663 - The Day After the Insurrection

Similar Episodes §

• 609 - The Rose Garden – Introduction - score: 0.80065
• 664 - Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 4 - score: 0.75801
• 644 - The Rose of Paracelsus – Chapter 1 - score: 0.74246
• 676 - Leonard Pickard’s Rose of Paracelsus Ch 5 - score: 0.74055
• 652 - The Rose of Paracelsus – Chapter 2 - score: 0.72289
• 362 - Flashbacks - score: 0.68539
• 176 - Surfing Finnegans Wake Part 1 - score: 0.63824
• 494 - The Alchemical Angel Will Not Die - score: 0.61565
• 194 - The Future of Higher Intelligence Part 1 - score: 0.59880
• 186 - The Genesis Generation - score: 0.59847

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ► §

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ► §

And if you’re looking for a way to get your mind off the pandemic for a while,

00:00:28 ► §

well, you’ve come to the right place, because this is going to be a long podcast.

00:00:34 ► §

In fact, you most likely won’t listen to the entire program in one sitting,

00:00:38 ► §

but, well, I didn’t feel like it should be separated into two parts,

00:00:42 ► §

and I think you’re going to see why.

00:00:44 ► §

The first part of this

00:00:45 ► §

podcast features Dr. Ben Sessa, who reads chapter three of Leonard Picard’s novel, The Rose of

00:00:52 ► §

Paracelsus. Ben’s reading is followed by commentary from Dr. Thomas Roberts. Now, long-time listeners

00:00:59 ► §

to these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon will remember Ben Sessa from podcast 609, which was an introduction

00:01:06 ► §

to this novel. And you’ll probably remember Tom Roberts from podcast 633, the man who invented

00:01:13 ► §

Bicycle Day. Now, in the program notes for this podcast, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com,

00:01:20 ► §

I’ve added links for the previous podcasts with readings from the first two chapters of Leonard’s book.

00:01:26 ► §

Also, in the program notes, I have posted Leonard Picard’s email address.

00:01:31 ► §

Although he may not be able to answer everyone who writes,

00:01:34 ► §

I’m sure that he’ll most certainly appreciate hearing from you.

00:01:38 ► §

As you are about to hear, both Ben and Tom have spent a significant amount of their professional lives

00:01:44 ► §

involved in psychedelic research.

00:01:47 ► §

And, if you have already read The Rose of Paracelsus, then you know what a powerful work of literature it is.

00:01:54 ► §

So, you may ask, how did I find these two amazing young women, Alexa and Kat Lakey, to produce this series of readings from Leonard’s book?

00:02:04 ► §

What are their qualifications, you ask?

00:02:06 ► §

Well, first of all, I didn’t find them.

00:02:09 ► §

In a way, they found me.

00:02:11 ► §

And I think that the story of how today’s program came to be

00:02:15 ► §

is worth telling as perhaps an inspiration for others

00:02:19 ► §

who may want to become involved in this work.

00:02:22 ► §

You see, everyone in the psychedelic community is self-selected.

00:02:27 ► §

Here is how it worked with the Lakey Sisters.

00:02:30 ► §

A while back, Bruce Dahmer asked for volunteers to come to the DigiBarn

00:02:34 ► §

and help organize the part of the Timothy Leary archive that Bruce is having digitized.

00:02:40 ► §

Now, besides the Lakey Sisters, my friend Lex Pelger was also a volunteer at the time, and Lex told me about them.

00:02:47 ► §

We connected via email, they did one of the podcasts for me during my Salon 2 period,

00:02:52 ► §

and then Kat returned to Peru where she has been studying with several medicine workers.

00:02:58 ► §

Well, when Leonard sent me a copy of his book and asked if I would review it,

00:03:02 ► §

I immediately realized that this book was worthy of,

00:03:05 ► §

well, significantly more than a review by me. It needed its own series of podcasts. Long story

00:03:12 ► §

short, I recruited the Lakey sisters to take on this project. Now, fast forward to the program

00:03:18 ► §

we’re about to listen to. When they began working on this chapter, Leonard was still serving life without parole in a maximum security prison, which greatly complicated the process.

00:03:29 ► §

On top of that, Kat was in Peru when the pandemic hit, and she had to be evacuated back to the States.

00:03:36 ► §

Well, not long after Kat returned to the safety of her sister Alexa’s house, they were both evacuated due to the fires in Northern California.

00:03:46 ► §

And after that, Kat reloc due to the fires in Northern California, and after that,

00:03:52 ► §

Kat relocated to the East Coast. And in between all of that excitement, these wonderful women produced the program that we’re about to listen to. The reason I feel this story is important

00:03:57 ► §

is in the hope that it will give you some encouragement to follow your own dreams.

00:04:02 ► §

Alexa and Kat decided that they wanted to take part in

00:04:05 ► §

what many are now calling a psychedelic renaissance. They didn’t wait to get a degree or for someone to

00:04:11 ► §

hire them or to train them somehow. They just jumped in, volunteered, taught themselves how to

00:04:16 ► §

create a podcast, and moved ahead in spite of many obstacles. They are a real shining example of our community, and on behalf of us all, I thank them for their tireless work.

00:04:28 ► §

Now, before I turn this program over to the Lakey Sisters, I want to do something that I’ve never done before,

00:04:35 ► §

and that is to dedicate this podcast to someone.

00:04:39 ► §

His name is Richard DeLisi, and until this month, he was the nation’s longest-serving inmate for a

00:04:46 ► §

non-violent marijuana offense. Richard served over 31 years of a 90-year sentence in Florida,

00:04:54 ► §

and in the same case, his brother Ted also served over 20 years. So, I believe that it’s appropriate

00:05:00 ► §

in today’s podcast, where we’re celebrating the release of Leonard Picard, that we also recognize all of our other friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers

00:05:10 ► §

who are still being persecuted by the war on drugs. Now is not the time to ease off

00:05:15 ► §

on the work required to dismantle these unjust laws. We must press on. And now, on a much

00:05:23 ► §

less confrontational note, I turn you over to the peaceful voices

00:05:27 ► §

of the Lakey Sisters.

00:05:36 ► §

Hello, and welcome to the third chapter of the Rose of Parasolsus podcast here on the

00:05:41 ► §

Psychedelic Salon. My name is Kat.

00:05:43 ► §

And I’m Alexa. For those of you who have been

00:05:46 ► §

following along with the series, this is the first episode since William Leonard Picard was

00:05:50 ► §

freed from prison back on July 27th of this year. Leonard was released after serving 20 years of

00:05:56 ► §

two life sentences for psychedelics in a maximum security prison. He is now with his family and

00:06:02 ► §

sends his loving regards to those friends whose kind words and actions provided the only light in a seemingly endless darkness.

00:06:10 ► §

Kat and I had the honor of finally meeting him in person back in October.

00:06:14 ► §

Leonard welcomes correspondence and Lorenzo will provide an email address to reach him at in the description of the podcast.

00:06:20 ► §

Chapter 3 is titled What the Doorknob Said and is read by Dr. Ben Sessa.

00:06:24 ► §

Chapter 3 is titled What the Doorknob Said, and is read by Dr. Ben Sessa.

00:06:32 ► §

Ben Sessa is an acclaimed author, researcher, addictions psychiatrist, and MDMA psychotherapist for the Imperial College London.

00:06:35 ► §

He is in the process of opening Awaken Life Sciences, the UK’s first psychedelic-assisted

00:06:40 ► §

psychotherapy clinic, and will serve as its chief medical officer.

00:06:44 ► §

Ben will introduce himself before the reading and give some background on his work. Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy Clinic and will serve as its chief medical officer.

00:06:48 ► §

Ben will introduce himself before the reading and give some background on his work.

00:06:54 ► §

As always, we recommend picking up a hard copy of The Rose of Paracelsus to follow along.

00:07:00 ► §

After the chapter concludes, we’ll play a brief phone interview that Kat recently held with Thomas B. Roberts, PhD, professor of Educational Psychology at Northern Illinois University.

00:07:06 ► §

Thomas is also an acclaimed author and the man who coined the term Bicycle Day.

00:07:11 ► §

So without further ado, here is Dr. Ben Sessa.

00:07:16 ► §

My name is Dr. Ben Sessa. I’m a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist. I went to University College London Medical School, qualifying in 1997,

00:07:28 ► §

and then stayed in London for another three or four years, specialising in mental health and

00:07:34 ► §

psychiatry. I then took about 18 months off and travelled around, spent seven months on my own

00:07:41 ► §

in India, finding myself, came back considerably more lost than

00:07:46 ► §

when I’d set out. Then went to Oxford and studied in child and adolescent specialty

00:07:52 ► §

and became a consultant psychiatrist in 2006. I now work in the southwest of England in Bristol

00:08:02 ► §

one day a week doing child and adolescent psychiatry

00:08:06 ► §

in a custodial setting for 11 to 17 year olds on long custodial sentences, mostly violent crime

00:08:15 ► §

and that kind of thing. I do one day a week in an addiction service for adults and I do three days a week working in

00:08:25 ► §

psychopharmacology research based at Imperial College London under Professor

00:08:30 ► §

David Nutt. In the last 15 years I’ve become increasingly involved in

00:08:37 ► §

psychedelic research having taken part in studies at Imperial College London and Bristol University with LSD, DMT,

00:08:48 ► §

psilocybin, ketamine and MDMA. I’ve had the great fortune and pleasure to have been either

00:08:57 ► §

study doctor or a healthy volunteer subject, receiving each of these different drugs on various occasions, usually

00:09:05 ► §

intravenously, apart from the MDMA, which was oral. These studies in the last 10 years at Imperial

00:09:13 ► §

have taught us a lot about the mechanism of these drugs within the brain and indeed the

00:09:19 ► §

neurobiological substrate of consciousness itself. The multimodal imaging techniques developed by Robin Carhart

00:09:27 ► §

Harris at Imperial have really pushed back the boundaries of our neurophysiological understanding

00:09:33 ► §

of psychedelics. It’s been a great privilege to be part of this. More recently, I am now running

00:09:40 ► §

a clinical study in patients with alcohol use disorder, looking at MDMA-assisted psychotherapy

00:09:47 ► §

as a treatment for this. And we’re doing this in Bristol, under the auspices of Imperial College

00:09:53 ► §

London. This is the world’s first addiction study with MDMA. Obviously, classical psychedelics have a very rich history in treating addictions,

00:10:07 ► §

but it’s never been proposed nor attempted with MDMA.

00:10:11 ► §

And in many ways, this might not work,

00:10:14 ► §

because as we know, the most powerful aspect of classical psychedelic therapy for addictions is the strength of the mystical spiritual experience

00:10:28 ► §

induced by classical psychedelics that seems to be the greatest factor for inducing abstinence

00:10:35 ► §

from substance addiction. And MDMA classically does not have such a high mystical spiritual effect. Maybe 10 to 15 percent of first time threshold dose

00:10:49 ► §

users of MDMA will report a sort of divine aspect to the experience, which is tiny compared to the

00:10:55 ► §

80 to 90 percent that report such experiences with classical psychedelics. Nevertheless,

00:11:01 ► §

what we do also know of MDMA is that it has particularly good effects at managing

00:11:06 ► §

trauma and inducing empathy and increasing and augmenting the relationship between the patient

00:11:14 ► §

and the therapist so we are putting two and two together here and saying we know that addictions

00:11:19 ► §

are underpinned by trauma in the majority of cases and we know that MDMA works for trauma so let’s see what

00:11:25 ► §

happens if we use MDMA assisted psychotherapy for trauma and that really is the rationale behind

00:11:31 ► §

our current study. So anyway it’s a great pleasure to be reading this and I’m going to be reading

00:11:37 ► §

chapter three what the doorknob said so I will stop this recording, check the levels and then get on with the reading okay thank you chapter three

00:11:47 ► §

what the doorknob said

00:11:49 ► §

inscription over dexter gate entry to harvard yard

00:11:55 ► §

enter to grow in wisdom depart to better serve thy country and thy kind.

00:12:09 ► §

Radical journalist John Reed, 10, author of Ten Days That Shook the World, on the Bolshevik Revolution and Buried Outside Kremlin Walls.

00:12:21 ► §

There was talk of the world and daring thought and intellectual insurgency.

00:12:28 ► §

Heresy has always been a Harvard and New England tradition.

00:12:34 ► §

No matter who you were or what you did, at Harvard you could always find your kind.

00:12:56 ► §

always find your kind. Somni 451 in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Snow is bruised lilac in half-light.

00:13:08 ► §

The heavyweight eight crew, pulling the long blades of their rowing skulls in tandem, raced down the Charles River towards Longfellow Bridge.

00:13:12 ► §

It was a halcyon August at Fair Harvard.

00:13:21 ► §

The brilliant plumages of students, umbrellas adorning the wide mossy banks of the Charles’s tawny waterway,

00:13:25 ► §

the summer curving in from some mystic latitude.

00:13:31 ► §

Sails of small boats filled and tossed.

00:13:36 ► §

There were obscure movements of oars and arms above the glittering water.

00:13:43 ► §

Students crowded the coop for texts or strolled Harvard Square. Many paced along the Charles,

00:13:46 ► §

beneath the cupolas and bell towers of Eliot, Lowell and Dunster houses,

00:13:51 ► §

the elegant Neo-Georgian revivalist piles for upper classmen and women.

00:13:59 ► §

Some students were electrified by their prospects,

00:14:03 ► §

some fearful,

00:14:05 ► §

others soberly entered the houses as the faithful to mosques,

00:14:09 ► §

but all were preparing for the intense labour of thought and ritual to come.

00:14:16 ► §

A long-legged undergraduate girl, slender as an Easter lily and almost naked but for shorts lay unsheathed reading a volume on the decryption of linear b by mycenaean scholars caressed by white doves upwards the distant singing and music of those gathered here

00:14:48 ► §

to learn evoked ancient robed musins

00:14:52 ► §

at dawn reciting the abed

00:14:55 ► §

I praise the perfection of God

00:14:58 ► §

the forever existing

00:15:00 ► §

we were assembling on the Charles Embankment in these first days, retreating from the loutish reality of the world.

00:15:12 ► §

Thrilled and anxious scholars hearing legends of Cambridge and its jasmine-petalled nights.

00:15:19 ► §

We walked down the remembered streets, at moments even dancing among their novel innocences.

00:15:27 ► §

In these treasured handfuls of the last blue days of summer, with soft cloud formations high above,

00:15:36 ► §

white puffs of blossoms scattered in Harvard Yard, we all became encompassed by the university’s sky-floating mirages of our futures and its

00:15:50 ► §

granite monuments to the dead. Many were from the far corners of nations, but all had arrived

00:15:59 ► §

in this capital of memory to rework our personal and the world’s realities. Among the burnished arbors of

00:16:09 ► §

leaf-green ivy, a new sense of self-possession was kindling. At first, like travellers relating

00:16:19 ► §

only to sullen cashiers, we were isolated by by loneliness yet from the balm of frequent receptions soon

00:16:29 ► §

arose a new village of lightning friendships although garden party hats and gloves were seen

00:16:39 ► §

no longer in the mauve dusks the exclusions and rigors of expected excellence still prevailed.

00:16:48 ► §

The towers of Winthrop and Adam’s houses looked upon us, the newly anointed, the fleet,

00:16:56 ► §

and those uncertain of their gifts. All too soon a blood-red moon sometimes would wander

00:17:05 ► §

As term progressed above the white steeples of Memorial Church in the yard

00:17:11 ► §

Waiting for our fear of the ungraspable lecture or assignment

00:17:17 ► §

And our dismal, irrevocable public failure.

00:17:35 ► §

But on this special night, the moon was high and white, turning over Harvard Square. It was the evening before orientations for the undergraduate classes in the yard,

00:17:43 ► §

and at the Kennedy School of Government, now Harvard

00:17:46 ► §

Kennedy School, HKS, the moon seemed of other faiths, the square full of its light upon

00:17:54 ► §

a sprawling subcontinent of castes and creeds, as students from a hundred cultures gathered

00:18:02 ► §

to worship the gods of thoughts.

00:18:07 ► §

Ranks of mathematicians and cyberneticists locked in royal chests by their patisseries,

00:18:15 ► §

while young tattooed and pierced townies sat in small groups before the MTA entrance,

00:18:27 ► §

small groups before the MTA entrance, with exaggerated purposelessness.

00:18:37 ► §

Low mists trammeled the outline of the Charles, as ghostly sails like wings went down moonbeams in the water. It was a tableau vivant of song and intrigues, cooperation and competition.

00:18:48 ► §

Student a cappella groups serenaded the undergraduate crocodillos

00:18:55 ► §

in tuxedos and green shoes singing Istanbul not Constantinople.

00:19:01 ► §

The Radcliffe Call Society with magicals in counterpoint with the Collegium

00:19:08 ► §

Musicum, while Elizabethan minstrels performed among scurrying bagpipes.

00:19:17 ► §

Lackluster pigeons began to flap beneath the excited crowds. A shiver of tambourines announced the haunting gentleness of Peruvian flutes,

00:19:27 ► §

while buskers played the Beatles and sang, you say it’s your birthday.

00:19:35 ► §

Students and faculty, laughing or in somber homage, considered the graduate schools of law and medicine, arts and sciences, or malic-quant laboratories,

00:19:49 ► §

where insulin, lysergic acid, chlorophyll, quinine, and napalm first were synthesized.

00:19:58 ► §

Dog-eared jazz flowed from street saxophones, idlers squatted or walked apathetically off stage, and fellow

00:20:07 ► §

Kennedy School matriculants with name tags began practicing the elaborate kindnesses of diplomats.

00:20:15 ► §

By the Charles, alone, I sang to myself.

00:20:32 ► §

to myself. We shall gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river.

00:20:49 ► §

I struck up a conversation with Chris, an entering HKS student. We sat on the steps of Holden Chapel, 1744,

00:20:56 ► §

in the north-west side of the old yard beneath Mrs Holden’s coat of arms.

00:21:00 ► §

Young men and women, required to live in the yard in their first year, were struggling with sofas into Pennypacker and Rigglesworth halls.

00:21:06 ► §

A few had the look of inheritors some seemed the children of tradesmen or merchants others from straightened

00:21:13 ► §

circumstances but all with the gifts upon which no value could be placed the yard seems too small for everyone i opened tentatively after freshman year they go to the houses cabot leverett quincy others by the charles or near radcliffe How does admissions choose? Harvard could fill its freshman class with perfect SAT scores,

00:21:47 ► §

but seeks the ineffable potential for greatness.

00:21:51 ► §

Not to worry, we’re merely grad students.

00:21:56 ► §

A lesser breed.

00:21:58 ► §

Many of us were in our 30s or later and struggling even now.

00:22:04 ► §

Already proven failures at being titans, he said,

00:22:08 ► §

smiling broadly. He seemed admirably balanced in perspective. Can you distinguish who’s who yet

00:22:17 ► §

among the freshmen? Some are poor Indians with the mind of Ramanujan, whose equations could change the world.

00:22:26 ► §

Another might be the future Aga Khan, with a string of chateau or the daughter of a seamstress.

00:22:34 ► §

So it’s a matter of mind, not circumstance.

00:22:39 ► §

That’s it.

00:22:41 ► §

Even the president of the university, an English literature scholar, a noted expert

00:22:46 ► §

on the verse of Sir Philip Sidney, is the son of a guard at Danbury Prison and a lifelong

00:22:53 ► §

waitress. Harvard is the ultimate meritocracy. He had me for a moment i said nothing thankfully he went on the houses all have formal dining rooms music rooms lesser works of old masters

00:23:13 ► §

they smell of potpourri and antiquarian books wax polish candles and camellias and brow sweat and sex although less often the latter we considered a trio of radcliffians now harvard women very much arm in arm and trouncing onwards singing ode to joy in german the cliffies are so fast academically at least that if we were horses he reflected airily they would be in the paddock at longchamp at the angel-haunted spaces of the Aiken Computer Lab,

00:24:08 ► §

the site of the first computers and internet node. At the law school, I fell asleep on couches

00:24:16 ► §

beneath paintings in the treasure room. Its windows looked in upon a sealed space designed to protect atomic secrets during World War II

00:24:26 ► §

that opened to secret underground tunnels to the physics labs.

00:24:32 ► §

Penetrating closer to the decision makers, I dreamed of a star on Earth and a dragon that ate the sky.

00:24:42 ► §

that ate the sky.

00:24:47 ► §

A surreal jolt.

00:24:50 ► §

Early orientation at the Kennedy School was a torrent of unfamiliar words and concepts.

00:24:55 ► §

A wonder-working cure for our huddled anonymity.

00:24:59 ► §

On a break, some students seemed agromaniacs

00:25:03 ► §

like inbred politicians.

00:25:07 ► §

Others had a heightened social awareness, while a few at first were completely at sea. By noon it was a rancorous gaggle of the

00:25:15 ► §

blessed mixing in the trumpeting sunlight. Ever surrounded by the university’s unconscious pageantry of feudalism,

00:25:25 ► §

in these first weeks before midterms there were to our delight the vertiginous pleasures of imagined competencies and equality.

00:25:35 ► §

We toasted each other, suspending our prior mental sloth, private wilderness and obscure missions.

00:25:48 ► §

sloth, private wilderness and obscure missions. We smiled affectionately and had undisguised fervour for our future professions as analysts. Our need for reserve and solitude, though,

00:25:56 ► §

as we began scrambling to survive the progressive cognitive challenges, too soon made us recluses.

00:26:06 ► §

No less than Ho-Shin-Ji, we were scholar-monks,

00:26:10 ► §

meditating on information as streams of data merged and flowed in our darkness.

00:26:19 ► §

Multinational in origins, ethnically diverse,

00:26:24 ► §

HKS students inevitably possessed a certain high-strung quality.

00:26:30 ► §

Fully grounded competitors born to excel, they frequently were magnetically engaging,

00:26:37 ► §

while some, more rarely, were withdrawn in such an academic way that one erred in thinking them timid,

00:26:46 ► §

then later comforting a ferocious intellect.

00:26:52 ► §

While a few retained a sense of entitlement as heirs to the university’s imprimatur,

00:26:59 ► §

all students soon were tempered by a pervasive feeling of constantly drowning together,

00:27:07 ► §

overwhelmed by the rings of the world’s sorrows and its unimaginable promise.

00:27:17 ► §

Chris reappeared, forever au courant with university law and politics.

00:27:27 ► §

forever au courant with university law and politics. I spotted him being ejected from a closed and gloomy subterranean library, relying on his default of good manners.

00:27:34 ► §

Vaguely amiable and bespectacled, with shiny black Oxford brogues and the physical size and mental agility of T.E. Lawrence, he usually had an air of grave

00:27:47 ► §

preoccupation. Ever so courteous and cautious with Harvard women, he tried social endearments

00:27:55 ► §

and evuncular tricks of speech, occasionally managing a date. In battles of wit, he fell back upon Schopenhauer, Hume or Spengler, but his personal

00:28:09 ► §

kindnesses were disarming. His fine brows and future were unclouded. He never mentioned or

00:28:17 ► §

inquired as to others’ backgrounds, attracting me with this gentlemanly quality. Light-hearted at moments, he soon felt it his

00:28:28 ► §

duty to demolish my monk’s liturgical air. To that end, he delighted in mimicking esteemed

00:28:36 ► §

Cambridge notables, but took particular pleasure in the drawl of Strom Thurmond, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee,

00:28:47 ► §

with his wicked quotidian platitudes.

00:28:52 ► §

I am asking you about intelligence, sir.

00:29:00 ► §

Chris’s hand affects to cover a microphone. We deal in intelligence for this here intelligence committee.

00:29:12 ► §

Even if you can’t pass no literacy test.

00:29:20 ► §

Now, where’s my briefing book?

00:29:25 ► §

I termed him privately the Hulk,

00:29:29 ► §

for his diminutive size was offset by the playful muscularity of his thought.

00:29:37 ► §

Between our exhilarated but timid arrival

00:29:40 ► §

and our staggering but glorious departure years later,

00:29:44 ► §

there was, beside the information

00:29:47 ► §

and faculty, only the wonder of such bright souls.

00:29:57 ► §

Our first classes were pervaded with a sense of self-satisfaction at having arrived, but also with fright at the thought of not remaining so.

00:30:09 ► §

Papers shuffled, lights trembled from eyes contracted with adrenaline,

00:30:15 ► §

welcoming or exultant gazes were replaced with expressions of malaise at irremediable gaffes.

00:30:29 ► §

of malaise at irremediable gaffes. While several students were surviving dual-degree programs at the medical or law school, I was burdened by a simultaneous appointment at Harvard Medical School.

00:30:38 ► §

As a new officer of the university, I soon became aware of the six international psychedelic chemists and,

00:30:47 ► §

among proliferating research topics, sought to study them. In lectures, young assistant professors

00:30:56 ► §

evoked nervous laughter by their hope that in a few weeks we might be up to speed.

00:31:09 ► §

in a few weeks we might be up to speed. Distinguished older faculty peered in upon us with laboured almost heretic movements. I noticed a faint blue love-bite, a rarity never to be seen again among Harvard’s fairest, fading upon the long,

00:31:30 ► §

lovely neck of a daughter of a leading Buenos Aires family. It was the last kiss of an Argentine

00:31:40 ► §

night. I scribbled in the margins of a dream while others addressed themselves to sheaves of notes,

00:31:48 ► §

stunned but affecting to think. The air became charged with the savagery of competition.

00:31:57 ► §

Mind and spirit grew restless. The first deadlines for insoluble problem sets were in sight.

00:32:07 ► §

I began studying the love-bite as it disappeared,

00:32:12 ► §

her quiet profile bending over inscrutable passages.

00:32:18 ► §

In the mental Saturnalia to come,

00:32:22 ► §

we would all play the role of a machine à plaisir.

00:32:31 ► §

A sea of academic stars, confronted by ceaseless, insurmountable waves of data,

00:32:40 ► §

purposely generated by faculty to be almost unmanageable, all somehow persisted through

00:32:48 ► §

their sense of duty to public service and in part from their origins. Half the students were

00:32:56 ► §

international. The gifted youth of small villages in India and Russia, chosen for this privilege, brought to America, exposed to the

00:33:08 ► §

democratic ideal and, through such harvesting of talent, trained to lead, influence decision-makers

00:33:18 ► §

as analysts or become high-level officials. Harvard continually reseeded nations with future policy makers and connections,

00:33:32 ► §

yielding a porosity of intelligence information among peers worldwide

00:33:38 ► §

that no covert action ever could accomplish.

00:33:52 ► §

action ever could accomplish. La Femme Murphy, the student’s name for her, bounded into view.

00:34:01 ► §

To me, she was Murph the Surf, a Boston Irish redhead with a disputed overseas history and uncertain friends in Malibu. She was rumoured to be a Wellesley survivor.

00:34:09 ► §

Displaying perfect graces and the de rigueur tailored navy blue suit cut slightly too high,

00:34:17 ► §

she was beautiful in an etiolated way, with legs as long as an ibis, and almost trembling with life-force,

00:34:27 ► §

surf was wind-blown when she arrived, spring dew without a flaw. Her skin flushed lightly.

00:34:37 ► §

She sometimes had a low, melodious voice among her many dramatic poses, like a woman ruthlessly aware she was marooned on some

00:34:48 ► §

inaccessible moonscape. Cerf still had a little cream on her lip from a café vinoise, a blue

00:34:58 ► §

velvet ribbon surrounded her throat. She had noticed my guileless admiration in class. Just out of our lecture on childhood

00:35:09 ► §

poverty in the Bangladeshi slums, she was dismal, tearful, moving awkwardly. In a sweet high register,

00:35:19 ► §

her blue eyes changing to smoke, she made a broken pronouncement quoting her beloved yeats

00:35:26 ► §

she comes the human child to the waters and the wild with a fairy hard in hand

00:35:36 ► §

for the world’s more full of weeping than she can understand. Her looks that day were unguarded and shy as a small ancient trusting

00:35:49 ► §

girl. We had no idea of her personal experiences. Although Cerf at times had an unconscious

00:35:58 ► §

coquetry, she was unmated among the diverse heredities at HKS, for her subtle wildness was fearsome to

00:36:08 ► §

conservative academics. At lecture, she had a powerful grasp of policy matters and prevailed

00:36:16 ► §

unshrinkingly like a medieval scholar splitting theological hairs. She could be stern with those splendid eyes.

00:36:31 ► §

Less about knowledge than acquiring personal confidence to engage in serious dialogue,

00:36:38 ► §

from boardroom to national laboratory to defence establishments to palace halls,

00:36:48 ► §

to national laboratory to defense establishments to palace halls hks first taught us intellectual fearlessness then evolution from competitive harvard arrivists to eager cooperation in groups

00:36:58 ► §

we trained to submerge lifetimes of one upmanship for the broader public good.

00:37:08 ► §

One student circulated through HKS minefields to become the youngest minister of Serbia.

00:37:15 ► §

Another mid-career CIA officer returned to the duplicates of spycraft to ferret out the next traitor in the ranks, yet another to dusty

00:37:27 ► §

encampments in Tibet to lay water lines and treat endemic high-altitude glaucoma.

00:37:36 ► §

Many others went to the White House or State or Congress as staffers or policy analysts,

00:37:44 ► §

or state, or congress as staffers or policy analysts,

00:37:50 ► §

some to the financial sector and leisurely lunches in Brussels and The Hague,

00:37:54 ► §

another to the World Bank to make loans for milk for a hundred million children on the floodplains of India.

00:37:59 ► §

A few were destined to Wall Street’s golden handshakes and trading in arbitrage. Even

00:38:08 ► §

as a cluster went to the Peace Corps for food and a tent while teaching disaster management

00:38:14 ► §

to thin, bedraggled refugees digging latrines in Eritrea’s famine belt.

00:38:30 ► §

Eritrea’s famine belt. Classes began promptly on Harvard time, seven minutes after the hour,

00:38:40 ► §

a habit some alums continued all their lives. In these first months, as dreaded midterms approached, we became filled with forests of heartbeats, for our thoughts were those of

00:38:46 ► §

startled hairs. Some of the lectures had evolved into such fusillades of words that we became as

00:38:55 ► §

poor worshippers in a cathedral of sighs. While statistics professors eagerly loaded whiteboards with indecipherable nests of flowcharts.

00:39:07 ► §

Cerf took to making suicide gestures across her delicate throat with her long, perfect fingers.

00:39:17 ► §

Against this deluge of demands, an intellectual rigor mortis soon developed. Only flickering electric signs of the imagination occasionally flashed down from the firmament.

00:39:31 ► §

Even Hulk, after being summoned to stand and deliver a summary of the week’s salient points,

00:39:38 ► §

surreptitiously placed his head in his hands.

00:39:49 ► §

head in his hands. Under such stress, the elms and oaks in the yard began to seem like crude Dadaist’s paintings. Wigglesworth was a bristling fortification. On good days, we mistook the yard’s

00:39:59 ► §

failing light in the fall for some hopeful vernal landscape. Hulk, stricken with the pace,

00:40:07 ► §

began appearing with a cold, marmorial cast to this skin. Surf, though, whom one might think

00:40:15 ► §

the fruit of perfect breeding, pretended a studied naturalness, claiming with careless hair tosses and impatience with partial information and a mania for exactitude.

00:40:31 ► §

But Cerf, and all of us by that time, were merely waxworks lost in a house of economists’ mirrors.

00:40:55 ► §

mirrors. Not all was glory. One hapless visiting researcher in a small seminar intoned axioms in a listless voice, espousing the dogma of a sect, but with an expression as though he were bequeathing knowledge in a shower of silver

00:41:07 ► §

arrows. Unintelligible, and the prevailing egalitarian sympathies of Keynesian theory,

00:41:16 ► §

he fluted. At the very edge of hysteria, we all listened gravelyly pens motionless over paper the excellence of hks professors

00:41:29 ► §

had made us hypersensitive to cant imperiousness or illogical thinking we rebelled this seminar

00:41:37 ► §

at the portentous circumlocutions of his meddlesome pedantries with the fervor of amateurs in a new medium prone to unhesitating argument we were a difficult audience an unearthly light, one I forever kept to myself. The last of the camellias, their foamy white

00:42:08 ► §

blossoms loose with petals, were infused with music and radiance. I had just returned to Cambridge

00:42:17 ► §

from interviews with Crimson on the beach by the fireside the night of illumined moon and sea.

00:42:28 ► §

the beach by the fireside, the night of illumined moon and sea. My notes on that ungraspable event, some written in an alley in San Francisco, were in disarray.

00:42:35 ► §

It still was an uncertainty that analysis of an international psychedelic trafficking

00:42:42 ► §

organization would be achievable at Harvard Medical School,

00:42:46 ► §

with its primary concerns about addictive drugs. In haste, over masses of economic graphs, I wrote

00:42:55 ► §

crimson in large block letters on my notepad. Hulk, obliquely overseeing this reminder,

00:43:03 ► §

thought I referred to the Harvard student newspaper or the athletic teams.

00:43:09 ► §

Pretending to listen to the lecture, I failed to dissuade him.

00:43:13 ► §

A petal floated through symphonies and choirs, and worlds upon worlds to the earth.

00:43:22 ► §

The visiting researcher, a contented dogmatist, was assailed by wry comments.

00:43:30 ► §

His fifty minutes no more, he grew specious, then seemed more attentive to the oriental

00:43:36 ► §

allurements of our Filipinas, sisters from a notable banking family in Manila.

00:43:47 ► §

from a notable banking family in Manila. Decidedly unimpressed with his occidental piety, they abruptly did a volkfass, long hair flinging, glasses perched on noses.

00:43:55 ► §

A roaring northern rain began, the last of the fall. The camellia petals were swept downstream.

00:44:07 ► §

of the fall. The camellia petals were swept downstream. A telephone shrilled as a thousand scholars marched to the next ganglion in our HKS nervous system. We, thankfully, were among them.

00:44:35 ► §

I recognized a lean, solitary figure besieging a young HKS woman, who began yielding her perceptual coolness with a grudging but obvious pleasure. of friends was Hammersmith, or Hammer to me, named for his absolute incisive mind and concise

00:44:48 ► §

arguments, always directly on point. Hammer was a Kentucky boy with a Judaic gloom and a

00:44:59 ► §

Levantine shadow of a beard, despite attempts at being clean-shaven. He had surrendered his private life to HKS and

00:45:08 ► §

Harvard Law School as a dual-degree student. A provincial at heart, with a formal politeness

00:45:16 ► §

and bright, tired eyes, he was a king of complex absorption. While HKS students were learning deportment, diplomacy, speech,

00:45:29 ► §

and oratory, networking analysis, and briefing book writing, Hammer conceived and promulgated

00:45:38 ► §

secretive barbed poetry. In a seminar with a Pentagon official, he passed a handwritten note resorting to Blake.

00:45:48 ► §

And the hapless soldier’s sigh runs in blood down palace walls.

00:45:57 ► §

I first noticed Hammer in a national security lecture, lifting his eyebrows to me like someone signaling from an unknown universe.

00:46:08 ► §

In class confrontations, he often had the last word. His logical summations dropped like falling

00:46:16 ► §

stars and expired in the astonished silences. Hammer had dark, appraising eyes. He admired the HKS woman’s surly magnificence,

00:46:30 ► §

her own satin eyes like a thundercloud brooding over fertile fields. Hammer the lad was clever,

00:46:40 ► §

not pressing. He waved to me, then sauntered with an umbrella and his new acquaintance passed the

00:46:48 ► §

line of black limousines and duty cars of visiting dignitaries through the HKS gates.

00:46:55 ► §

He had exemplary dispatch and a profile of crisply cut features. I heard him entertaining her with Cambridge quotes in his clearly enunciated

00:47:08 ► §

way. Francis Crick would seduce undergraduates by saying, dear, do come up and see my Nobel.

00:47:20 ► §

She tittered and smiled. They cut in front of the Defence Minister of Lebanon, Hammer unsettling me with a look while describing his lost weekend and paraphrasing Arthur Koestler.

00:47:34 ► §

I had the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.

00:47:41 ► §

I forgot what it was.

00:47:49 ► §

With such a layering of personalities, introductions, histories, futures,

00:47:52 ► §

and hidden reasons for being at Harvard,

00:47:58 ► §

a moment’s encounter resulted for many in a project anywhere in the world, under any government researching weapons systems or children’s diseases,

00:48:07 ► §

fragile oceans or toxic atmospheres, diplomatic intrigues in Namibia or Malaysian financial systems. HKS case studies

00:48:16 ► §

were directed at leaderships or controlling parties, while training increased one’s ease with high officials but most of all for the public good

00:48:28 ► §

instruction concerned how organizations could be made more humane or more lethal

00:48:36 ► §

mid-career students who were night fighter pilots were at first unaware of others nearby who were prospective or actual intelligence analysts they both separately considered from their prospect of the trigger or the pen HKS courtyards, how Warcraft might be refined against those who would violently oppose the

00:49:08 ► §

interests of the United States. I first observed a splendid young six-foot Princeton woman,

00:49:20 ► §

now an HKS student in clinging Gossamere Grey, Kashmir, when she giggled during

00:49:28 ► §

lecture at the elitist tone of an Indian Oxford alum’s comment on populist manners.

00:49:36 ► §

She reappeared at the HKS gate, breathless and bouncing, in a skin-tight black tracksuit, her slender eyebrows narrowed, her blonde hair

00:49:47 ► §

in a runner’s ponytail, provoking me with a question as she continued to jog up and down.

00:49:55 ► §

Given the demands of our evenings, do you think a Polish immersion course is insurmountable.

00:50:06 ► §

I mean, as an elective, could one squeeze it in?

00:50:12 ► §

Through Old Yard, then dancing lightly in her long black coat up the steps of Widener Library

00:50:19 ► §

past the massive granite lion’s couchant, sheiled awake like comets hair fanning her smoldering blue eyes unconscious of their effect and focused on the data at hand induced in others a starry ache long-waisted, slinky from a perspective strikingly European. Once past this formidable exterior,

00:50:49 ► §

one found a secret warmth, an endearing candle. I could only give her the sobriquet

00:50:58 ► §

Haagen-Dazs, so much was she fancied by Harvard men, like ice cream by the Charles on a summer’s afternoon.

00:51:08 ► §

She tasted like strawberries, her rumours held.

00:51:15 ► §

But within her physical vessel lay oracular thoughts.

00:51:19 ► §

She was an unimpeded academic since her childhood at the Lycée Francaise in New York City and La Rosy

00:51:28 ► §

in Switzerland. The daughter of an accomplished couple, surrounded as a girl by artists and

00:51:35 ► §

writers and scientists who frequented her home and dinner table, Haagen-Dazs was always a step ahead. Her failings included the touch of envy in others,

00:51:49 ► §

but she preserved her graces. When in the night she passed the inviting doors of Wigglesworth

00:51:56 ► §

or Pennypacker, she became a legitimate idolatry for undergraduate men, and even a few women who in their scholarly tensions

00:52:06 ► §

still retained a certain ardor for school mistresses. Handsome and reserved, she had a cool,

00:52:16 ► §

clear, honeyed voice, perhaps in F major, except when in opposition or annoyed. Her secret followers imagined her divine splendour in

00:52:28 ► §

bed, but if she had lovers, they remained forever conjectural. In lecture, she caught my eye.

00:52:38 ► §

Her arm held behind her head, stretching, pushing back the fair hair, a little mild stargazing. I got her wavelength.

00:52:50 ► §

Haagen-Dazs, golden blonde, writing in Widener in her exquisite hand with long, silken fingers,

00:52:58 ► §

often seemed like a Victorian gentlewoman painting watercolours. My experiences prior to Harvard, though,

00:53:08 ► §

and more so during Harvard when later exposed to the majestic erotic practices of the Six,

00:53:15 ► §

led me to a tolerant admiration of her rather than some disturbing, inconvenient, unquenchable desire.

00:53:27 ► §

They all cornered me one day.

00:53:31 ► §

Hulk, Surf, Hammer, Haagen-Dazs, and a tall white Africana woman,

00:53:36 ► §

and an eternally serious Albanian girl from Tirana.

00:53:42 ► §

How does data-swamping turn us into leaders, said Haagen-Dazs, born to

00:53:48 ► §

direct. We’re becoming data rats, borrowers, said Hulk, overlooking the moles. Statistics notes,

00:53:57 ► §

anyone, said Hammer, ever cautious at sneak attacks by observant faculty with pop quizzes.

00:54:04 ► §

cautious at sneak attacks by observant faculty with pop quizzes.

00:54:12 ► §

Penny loafers, cried Cerf to my horror, pointing gleefully at my new conservative footwear.

00:54:19 ► §

I had arrived from Ocean G with only a few clothes in underground ascetic black, the fashion of the day. Later, adopting Crimson’s practice of not being noticed but blending in seamlessly,

00:54:27 ► §

I had acquired a dull grey slacks and sports jacket, and was indistinguishable from overstressed

00:54:35 ► §

junior faculty. The white Africana had the last word. thinking i had succumbed to harvard’s dubious sartorial flair she dryly commented to nods all round i don’t let this place get to me of HKS with its mandarin calm, cinnamon walls, green-baize tables, roped-off sitting rooms,

00:55:08 ► §

New England paintings and overview along the Charles from Harvard to MIT.

00:55:14 ► §

Here we learned the easy aridities of social practice and our hearts were bright.

00:55:22 ► §

Several exceptionally promising young doctoral candidates were visiting.

00:55:28 ► §

We arrived at one of the myriad gatherings for students to engage with faculty, governors,

00:55:34 ► §

and noblists, and rainbow of former White House officials. The latter commonly were defrocked

00:55:43 ► §

high-level bureaucrats waiting out the current administration

00:55:47 ► §

with hks teaching appointments mingling with this electric assortment of potential encounters

00:55:54 ► §

each a railway to traditional worlds we passed a gallery of presidential portraits from washington

00:56:01 ► §

to eisenhower through the vocal scholars beyond the well-tendered lawns,

00:56:07 ► §

sunshine was rippling on the Charles. We soon spied a tidy, poised gentleman in his early 70s

00:56:15 ► §

standing somewhat apart. With tailored suit, tight military haircut, pale blue eyes and bow tie, he was reminiscent of a headmaster at

00:56:27 ► §

St. Paul’s or Coate. After light pleasantries, we entered into commerce with Ken Knauss, a senior

00:56:38 ► §

officer late of the CIA Operations Directorate, now the National Clandestine Service.

00:56:46 ► §

He chatted as amiably as any Gloucestershire vicar, rather than one protective of unspeakable secrets.

00:56:56 ► §

He was a master of war.

00:57:08 ► §

Naus was a prime example of legendary CIA spies always in residence hobbyists all as talent spotters who harvested analysts from HKS classes

00:57:14 ► §

he was writing a manuscript on his early days as the young case officer

00:57:20 ► §

who smuggled the adolescent Dalai Lama out of the Patala Palace in Lhasa,

00:57:27 ► §

through regiments of Chinese seeking his holiness for other than religious purposes,

00:57:33 ► §

on a train of mules accompanied by monks with prayer flags and bells, porters with bricks of

00:57:41 ► §

tea and yak butter sampa, together with a small coterie of armed CIA

00:57:47 ► §

personnel with encrypted radios, Naus and the Dalai Lama carefully treaded across the ice abysses

00:57:57 ► §

and couloirs in the high passes of the Himalayas, from Tibet down into the lush lowlands of Dharamsala, India.

00:58:09 ► §

Knauss deflected our tentative inquiries into CIA tradecraft by easy and inoffensive verbal parries,

00:58:18 ► §

the skills of a lifetime. He did acknowledge knowing Ken Olson, the biochemist under CIA psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb, who died suddenly by defenestration plunging 20 stories, either pushed or suicidal, after being overdosed by CIA employees.

00:58:42 ► §

Yes, I’m aware of Olsen.

00:58:52 ► §

employees. Yes, I’m aware of Olsen. CIA technical services staff purposely administered Olsen LSD as an unwitting experimental subject in Operation MK Ultra during CIA’s effort to weaponize lsd as an interrogation agent in the cold war now said little about olsen

00:59:09 ► §

our benign generalities otherwise were not too pressing for him so that we parted in an urbane

00:59:17 ► §

way i remained gratified by the gentlemanly manner of the secret services,

00:59:30 ► §

if not their artful circumspection of actual intelligence information,

00:59:35 ► §

for they were deft in creating a black hole from which no light emitted,

00:59:39 ► §

save the smile of a Cheshire cat.

00:59:52 ► §

Surf and Hulk and I sought refuge on a saturday night as fall term began to coil towards winter we came from memorial hall in the yard into the square where before the mta entrance was a scattering of club kids with smudged eyeliner and one likely predator with an uncouthness of mien on the far dark bank of the charles as though it were the last of summer evenings a Mount Holyoke t-shirt and quite snug pink short shorts, sat barefoot with her long legs

01:00:27 ► §

tightly embracing a thin Boston conservatory student. His violin case was opened wide,

01:00:36 ► §

exposing folds of soft red velvet. In slow movements, a kind of andante glissando, he in perfect time caressed her

01:00:48 ► §

burgeoning cleft. As she approached the Beatitudes, eclipses of the moon began spreading across her

01:00:56 ► §

face. In the fecund silence, the sky in those long moments seemed molten stars. In an accelerando, her muffled

01:01:08 ► §

cries were inaudible but to us. We withdrew past the Anderson Bridge to give them peace.

01:01:16 ► §

Hulk grew quiet with sympathetic adoration at the simple beauty of shamelessness.

01:01:23 ► §

at the simple beauty of shamelessness.

01:01:27 ► §

Clearly a summer student,

01:01:30 ► §

Sir remarked with irreverence,

01:01:32 ► §

the spell evaporating.

01:01:35 ► §

In a huff, she paced restlessly,

01:01:38 ► §

turning here and there with pangs of envy,

01:01:42 ► §

but still transfixed on the distant passion.

01:01:48 ► §

There have been no orgasms at Harvard, she said,

01:01:52 ► §

since the business school shorted Wall Street in 1929.

01:01:58 ► §

Cerf referred to the apparent lack of sex among grad students.

01:02:03 ► §

Although many walked purposely, intent on world conquest,

01:02:07 ► §

one rarely saw anyone even holding hands.

01:02:16 ► §

One’s calendar of desire was penciled in lightly, and mostly erased among impossibly scheduled hours weeks in advance. Our relentless, hyperactive undergraduates, with those pre-possessing frontal lobes and the obligations of genetic drift were quite another matter.

01:02:32 ► §

We continued up the Charles in the evening, where Memorial Drive traffic had been blocked off all the way to MIT.

01:02:49 ► §

way to MIT. Beneath grand tents, almost nude, taiko drummers in sweaty loincloths struck great drums in racy, overheated rhythms. Flocks of skaters swayed like seagrass as they flowed down

01:02:57 ► §

open lanes. Semi-professional student mourners wore skeletal masks in a burial procession for the Chemical Weapons Treaty.

01:03:07 ► §

Danish women engineers picked suggestively at the tassels of soft cushions beside owlish,

01:03:14 ► §

frozen MIT students, while strobes and lasers shot from high suites in Lowell and Elliott houses.

01:03:28 ► §

in Lowell and Elliott houses. The light show precipitated thoughts of Crimson and how Harvard students were not unlike the six. Both groups had a global theatre of operations. They were

01:03:35 ► §

exiles of circumstance from many worlds, yet there was a fantastic poetry to them.

01:03:48 ► §

was a fantastic poetry to them. Floating to the square, we saw Harvard women, fresh from encounters down the cobbled streets, teetering in high heels in the walk of shame for Puritans or the stride of

01:03:55 ► §

pride for Libertines. Parisian students sat with languid, fruitless airs, having lost their half-dozen pliant French mistresses and now confronted

01:04:07 ► §

by thinking women with advanced cognitive skills. They claimed no taste for a girl that night.

01:04:17 ► §

Posses of diverse women students were practicing the samba down Mass Ave, reeling hasty-pudding dramaturgs flouncing in diaphanous lace and

01:04:29 ► §

chiffon spikes, affected messy chic party hair and faux whorish latex pencil skirts.

01:04:37 ► §

Clusters of cosmological physics students from Lowell Observatory wore fitted tops, corset belts, killer heels with vanity straps or houndstooth and snakeskin pumps.

01:04:51 ► §

Others, the last of the Egyptologists, danced with Professor Gropius’s Bauhaus school designers.

01:05:20 ► §

We had stumbled upon some celebrity haute couture catwalk of academic orgiasts, where excluded and less well-feathered males grouped in local bars resorting to dropping the H-bomb, their matriculation in Cambridge, in hope of a date. College girls from west of the Charles to the Pacific were visiting.

01:05:26 ► §

UCLA undergrad women on leave wore mouse ears.

01:05:31 ► §

Dunster house men wore moose ears.

01:05:34 ► §

Leveret house men wore rabbit ears.

01:05:38 ► §

Mass Ave was rather like a galactic watering hole.

01:05:44 ► §

I thought of the Harvard Botanical Museum nearby, where the

01:05:49 ► §

inestimable Amazon explorer and ethnopharmacologist Richard Evans Schultz often had startlingly

01:05:57 ► §

elegant, formidably serious grad students. Arrived from hot tribal nights in primitive villages in the Orinoco Basin,

01:06:07 ► §

they insisted on keyboarding about hallucinogenic snuffs administered through blowpipes,

01:06:13 ► §

while in the muggy Cambridge summers, the women writing their PhD theses were simply

01:06:20 ► §

adorned with a macaw feather on a leather string, and were otherwise naked to the

01:06:26 ► §

waist. Within these visions, with their assumption of permanent excellence and privilege, the

01:06:35 ► §

corrective sense of midterms came softly toward us. They were clouds filling our horizon, condensing in the mind like dew. The autumn

01:06:50 ► §

lucidity became smoky. A strident, curt reality began to set in. Leaves rained down in drifts

01:07:00 ► §

to motley patchworks, as did our progressive sense of desolation.

01:07:07 ► §

All wired together now to survive, HKS students bewailed their misfortunes about

01:07:15 ► §

McIllevian problem sets. The libraries at HKS and Widener became machine-like with robot intensity.

01:07:27 ► §

S. and Widener became machine-like with robot intensity. Hammer began clutching his notes,

01:07:35 ► §

his face ashen and furtive, as if economic analysis were a crime. Ad-hoc study groups proliferated fearfully, our mingled voices like prayers for knowledge to be contagious.

01:07:48 ► §

for knowledge to be contagious. In her round violet sunglasses, Haagen-Dazs pretended a cool exterior, but we all trudged on in dogged misery. A few HKS students tried late transfers to the

01:07:59 ► §

Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. More scholarships. Or the safety school, Yale. The images of eight

01:08:09 ► §

U.S. presidents and 48 noblists from Harvard seemed guardian angels ascending into the blue,

01:08:16 ► §

expanding like some mystical rose, until the harsh truth of our frantic incompetence dispersed these hosts with blistering candor.

01:08:28 ► §

In our half-dreary stupefaction, some tried to catechise the silences with sacraments of caffeine and chocolate,

01:08:36 ► §

but by that time thought had perished.

01:08:39 ► §

There was a mental shrieking. The air was rank with fatigue and wet overcoats.

01:08:48 ► §

In the last dusk before midterms, I walked on a break through the variable airs of the Charles to a far jetty.

01:08:58 ► §

Thinking of the night with Crimson, I saw overhead an unforgettable grandeur.

01:09:07 ► §

crimson, I saw overhead an unforgettable grandeur, the lightest of silver rains from the north,

01:09:14 ► §

the last of the dying sun opposing a young rising moon, the cobwebs of changing light,

01:09:26 ► §

as if the sky had gone mad. Returning to HKS for the final push, I remembered that the faculty had been exemplary.

01:09:36 ► §

They were rhetoricians of peace, then of war, even as their speech in the first months had the cadence of immortal poetry.

01:09:47 ► §

But as we lost control of the information, and our fear broke loose, lectures sometimes seemed oratund, then doggerel, the poetics of distraction. Withdrawing into anxiety, we only half heard what had become

01:09:55 ► §

wretched words. I saw that the faint blue love-bite had yellowed.

01:10:02 ► §

The days of golden anticipation were no more.

01:10:08 ► §

Even rushing to Widener would waste precious minutes. In the HKS library was Haagen-Dazs,

01:10:16 ► §

her flawless head bent down to take long draughts of impenetrable arcana. Our Mediterranean women, puzzling over great tomes, had Byzantine faces,

01:10:30 ► §

their profiles like frescoes. Hulk crouched over a statistics problem, totally anesthetized.

01:10:39 ► §

Cerf had a not-altogether-mock resignation. Hammer, his reserves depleted, approached the next page

01:10:47 ► §

with reticence, almost shame. An iron band was around our heads, putting us out of humour.

01:10:55 ► §

We began to read widely, fretfully, with a sullen emphasis. Morkish and callow undergrads,

01:11:07 ► §

unemphasis. Morkish and callow undergrads fleeing from Widener looked on us with pity.

01:11:15 ► §

We tried clearing our minds of the debris of fumbling calculations, one eye on our inadequacies and the other on janitorial careers. At closing bell, we all detached ourselves from our study corrals, clumsy and taciturn.

01:11:28 ► §

Those pulling all-nighters walked in somnambulant shrouds by the darkling Charles,

01:11:34 ► §

I among them, lost in a maze of breathing amorphous data. Someone was sailing under the moon,

01:11:43 ► §

heeling on a freshet, waters lapping the prow, then tacking with one running light down the channel as though it were a Venetian grand canal.

01:12:08 ► §

upwards to moon-white clouds. Still sensitive from my encounter with Crimson, I briefly banished midterms from my mind with the scent of their enigma. I remembered the transformations by the

01:12:16 ► §

fire with Crimson, where all the ages of history passed like a storybook. It seemed some mythical calculus of hermetical law, but others would think

01:12:28 ► §

it mumbo-jumbo, a kind of parlor mysticism. It was then that I firmly decided to investigate

01:12:36 ► §

such visionary states through the appointment at Harvard Medical School, secondary to a study of the economics and methods of the six.

01:12:47 ► §

From these recollections my mind fired. I sat reviewing notes by the Charles until dawn overtook

01:12:56 ► §

the sky. We entered the lecture hall in a dream, blank, lightly crazed, our confidence a poor joke.

01:13:08 ► §

Hours passed in white light. Torn blue books, hastily inscribed with best guesses and parroted

01:13:16 ► §

fragments of misinformation, circulated limply back to the proctor. The only smiles were those of relief. Suddenly midterms were over. Where the

01:13:28 ► §

first now became the last, then we were free, like bandaged patients climbing from gurneys

01:13:36 ► §

into the delicious morning air. The weather was changing. Great winter storms lurked off kennebunk port up the rugged main coast

01:13:50 ► §

wet leaves lay in mounds in the yard students were bound up tightly by the alien integers of

01:13:57 ► §

their mid-term grades there were histrionic silences and a pervading melancholy under cold rains.

01:14:06 ► §

Intermittent stabbings of reality assured us of our imminent demise.

01:14:12 ► §

The Charles was choppy, with white crests from magisterial north winds.

01:14:18 ► §

Even in calms, a heavy damp came off the river with dense, blurred ground mists. A last sailboat

01:14:29 ► §

wallowed and yawed for a while, then suddenly heeled before the wind. Laying in sheets,

01:14:36 ► §

shaking down the jib, coming about and tacking to shore to make fast, It finally turned on the stern anchor, helpless before the incoming weather.

01:14:48 ► §

The high-spirited little warrior tribes of Harvard Square dwindled into gossip of the lazy and

01:14:55 ► §

envious. Unconscious moral judgments flashed about. One unfortunate girl, common and fast-looking, kept swinging her leg so close to the needles and sores.

01:15:08 ► §

After the hushing of the rains, as rare sunlight dried its damp facades, Massachusetts Hall became an old, faded daguerreotype.

01:15:29 ► §

we moved through cold currents the air full of static electricity our colored fantasies soon drained in the insistent river wind the nights became frozen the stars brilliant

01:15:37 ► §

i often walked by the crisp beauty of elliot quincy and Laurel houses, alight by the lonely waters of the Charles,

01:15:47 ► §

thinking that this marathon intellectual orgy was but a spiralling labyrinth of concealed motives.

01:15:56 ► §

The survivors thus far only whispered bruised affections,

01:16:01 ► §

for our piercing happiness was suspended until finals. The grad students

01:16:09 ► §

looked for traction. The undergrads yielded their infectious high spirits, their champagne tipsiness,

01:16:17 ► §

their spent kisses for new constellations of profound effort.

01:16:29 ► §

new constellations of profound effort. Odd gleams of sunshine riddled the yard. Torrents of brass brown leaves swirled until the first heavy frosts peeled the sky clear. Lean, long-haired,

01:16:38 ► §

well-featured senior women undergrads stalked the steps of Widener, their chilled cheeks blushing, wearing long

01:16:47 ► §

mufflers, fine gloves or mittens, leg warmers and ankle-length coats nipped at the waist.

01:16:55 ► §

Lovely in their focus, they sought warm silent alcoves to ponder Goethe or Swedenborg with furtive glances at Exeter or Andover Alums, or at each other.

01:17:12 ► §

I spied Hulk, a victim of the historical virus, explaining with a cordial futility to ice-bound

01:17:20 ► §

tourists the three lies of John Harvard’s statue, as if the tale were dismembered

01:17:27 ► §

fragments of a novel. I surreptitiously joined the group. The statue of John Harvard in the old yard

01:17:37 ► §

was throughout the year, but particularly during commencement, an academic mecca. A bronze figure of a seated youth in the 1600s, it was akin

01:17:49 ► §

in religious terms to the massive shrouded cube of the Ka’bah, about which Islamic devotees on

01:17:57 ► §

the pilgrimage of Hadji circumambulate counterclockwise in reverent masses the statue attracted much devotion among international groups of visitors no less than the rumored white meteorite within the mecc, which had become a type of genie representing the limits of human consciousness.

01:18:31 ► §

Hulk encouraged tourists to rub the bronze-buckled boots of this hersuite founder with his fine countenance and frock coat, like actual students who appeared at the statue to coax scholarly excellence to emerge

01:18:47 ► §

before reading period. Harvard’s sanctuary was allotted often to the truly accomplished,

01:18:54 ► §

and more rarely to wandering monks of questionable backgrounds.

01:19:00 ► §

Visitors sometimes mistook these privileges for the tawdry commonality of prestige a word derived from prestidigitation or the making of illusions

01:19:13 ► §

however it was regarded by passers-by or what sins it harbored so mutely it was regarded with affection as the statue of the three lies. Hulk was pontificating marvelously and winked at

01:19:28 ► §

me. Cast by Daniel Chester French before he sculpted the Lincoln Memorial, he said, the

01:19:37 ► §

inscription reads John Harvard, founder 1638, but none of this is true. The statue is of Sherman Hoare, class of 1882,

01:19:51 ► §

descendant of a prior president. I whispered, don’t forget his pluck. Hulk threw me a foul look.

01:20:02 ► §

Sixteen years after pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts Bay Colony purchased

01:20:08 ► §

this acre of land that became the yard and founded the college in 1636. John Harvard,

01:20:16 ► §

minister at Charlestown, donated in his will 400 volumes and 779 pounds, now an endowment of 35 billion. I began to flap my arms

01:20:31 ► §

behind the transfixed tourists. 17th century Harvard accepted tuition as wheat, Indian corn, apples, honey, firewood, sheep, and, ah, chickens. As the visitors moved on,

01:20:49 ► §

Hulk and I remained at the statue, observing there were not three lies, but five. The seal

01:20:57 ► §

on the left side of the statue read Veritas, but the original motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, Truth for Christ and the Church.

01:21:10 ► §

And in all other images, the seal was of a shield with three open books, but the statue had the middle book facing downward, a Puritan reminder that not all knowledge is written.

01:21:29 ► §

Puritan reminder that not all knowledge is written. From these unsteady bases, the moral imperative of Veritas unseated the prestigitation of those early board members whose nimble wits

01:21:38 ► §

first conjured the statue’s lies. Passing this icon frequently, we were reminded to look beneath accepted reality,

01:21:48 ► §

even that written in stone and bronze for centuries, to question even the underpinning

01:21:55 ► §

of the university itself. We discerned with amusement our first and final lesson, that the true can be false,

01:22:06 ► §

so that when we were at last set upon the world, standing in caps and gowns before John Harvard’s statue at commencement,

01:22:16 ► §

it was as if we were favoured politicians at a landslide, recorded forever before a background of lies.

01:22:29 ► §

The Harvard Square denizens, a polyglot congregation of medieval historians,

01:22:37 ► §

chess masters, hasty pudding fashion models of the year, fry cooks, CIA analysts, panhandlers, nervous parents,

01:22:49 ► §

faculty with clutches of admirers, pretenders to Bavarian thrones, pot dealers, ethnographers,

01:22:57 ► §

medicinal chemists, and lampoon staff burgling the sacred cod of Massachusetts,

01:23:04 ► §

and Lampoon Star burgling the sacred cod of Massachusetts,

01:23:12 ► §

all buckled down for what might be considered by New Englanders as cooler weather.

01:23:20 ► §

The unsuccessful French students occupying the Boulangerie-aux-Montpans,

01:23:26 ► §

panicky and wrapped in long black coats against a serious change in climate, assumed a forlorn but waspish attitude of no moral responsibility.

01:23:35 ► §

They kept checking Harvard’s Let’s Go office for cheap Air France tickets for weekends in Paris,

01:23:43 ► §

for cheap Air France tickets for weekends in Paris,

01:23:49 ► §

fleeing presumed sapless Puritan women in their urgency to, as one delicately proposed,

01:23:52 ► §

ramonner une bulle.

01:23:56 ► §

A great livid winter cloud, scratching the sky, heralded an ice storm.

01:24:04 ► §

Imminent snow burials were announced.

01:24:08 ► §

Students became frantic for comforting dates in the long winter.

01:24:13 ► §

Unpaired undergrads roved in wan packs.

01:24:18 ► §

Condensing breaths were rising.

01:24:19 ► §

Anxious student meteorologists began rushing about with skyward faces.

01:24:27 ► §

Overnight, it befell us.

01:24:31 ► §

The yard became the ruins of a snowbound Norman castle.

01:24:36 ► §

Fingers of thick ice marched across shadowy oaks.

01:24:40 ► §

Fearsome spikes of frosted grass lacerated cliffy’s knee-length boots nor’easters began whipping us mercilessly as students ran down mass ave shivering uncontrollably actually howling into the eye of a ceaseless blizzard, I negotiated snowdrifts in high Sierra expedition gear to the steps of Widener,

01:25:10 ► §

the monumental brace of granite lions, now with snowy manes and muzzles of icicles,

01:25:18 ► §

looked upon disordered thickets of cross-country skis and snowshoes.

01:25:23 ► §

of cross-country skis and snowshoes.

01:25:30 ► §

Surf was within, banging snow from her boots and gloves.

01:25:38 ► §

Hulk brushed the stars from her hair with a stealthy, manly glance at her milky white skin,

01:25:42 ► §

his eyes then softening in their austerity. We hovered on a broad staircase with carved balustrades

01:25:47 ► §

in this paragon of Harvard’s 70 libraries,

01:25:51 ► §

with Widener’s 17 million volumes on eight levels,

01:25:56 ► §

four underground, the world’s largest academic library,

01:26:01 ► §

second only to the Library of Congress.

01:26:10 ► §

library, second only to the Library of Congress. Two massive John Singer Sargent murals occupied facing walls, the diptych flanking the entranceway to memorial rooms with a Gutenberg Bible.

01:26:19 ► §

Hulk kept quoting graduation dates. Sargent, 16. We found leather chairs and green lamps beneath the

01:26:28 ► §

Rococo ceilings. Quite a setting, I opined, ripping off stiff ski gloves. Hulk, the HKS

01:26:39 ► §

class curator of Harvard Law since his senior days with the Crimson Key Society, seized the moment.

01:26:47 ► §

The Titanic built this place. His hypnotic, hushed delivery captivated me. Imagine the white

01:26:56 ► §

starline flagship Titanic on her maiden voyage out of Southampton, crystal tinkling, chamber music, leading families, then the tear in the hull, the screaming, the black icy death.

01:27:16 ► §

Slender women from Radcliffe Quad and Lowell House stood with their elegant hands poised over medieval texts.

01:27:24 ► §

stood with their elegant hands poised over medieval texts.

01:27:30 ► §

Bootless, with thin black stockings and twilled wool scarves,

01:27:34 ► §

they had the luminous quiescence of bewitched Madonnas.

01:27:39 ► §

Pre-med refugees from the basement of the Cabot Science Centre,

01:27:42 ► §

eyeing the beatific feminine argued with sophomore computer scientists on the maternal inheritance of

01:27:49 ► §

mitochondria hulk persisted there was 27 year old harry elkins widener class of 1907 for whom

01:27:59 ► §

our surroundings are named with his father in the madness of death and bravery, helping his mother,

01:28:06 ► §

Eleanor, her maid, and John Jacob Astor’s wife into Lifeboat Four. Harry’s brother,

01:28:15 ► §

Vincent, was a freshman, too busy for the trip. Did they make it? Well harry was a devoted collector of rare first editions an antiquarian his will conferred the collection to harvard but father waited. The stacks were exploding, the Titanic at a frightful angle, people singing

01:28:47 ► §

hymns, praying, fighting, scenes of courage and cowardice. A girl was sniffing a grand bouquet

01:28:56 ► §

of white lilies, her long hair spilled in slow waves before an early 20th century photograph in silver frame of a very proper young man.

01:29:08 ► §

Harry and his father, George D., perished. Eleanor provided these memorial rooms for her son,

01:29:15 ► §

and the library itself, and insisted on fresh flowers daily, forever in perpetuity.

01:29:30 ► §

forever in perpetuity. The photograph is of Harry. I thought to plumb Hulk’s depths.

01:29:41 ► §

What was the book? Ha! A 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s essays.

01:29:47 ► §

There’s probably one at Houghton Library through a secret tunnel under Widener.

01:29:57 ► §

And the women? Eleanor and her maid survived with Mrs. Astor. Eleanor demanded architect Horace Trumbauer, who designed the campus at Duke, to do the drawings. Everything we see is the expression of a mother’s love.

01:30:09 ► §

Cerf was contemplating the distant John Singer Sargent murals, apparently lost in some dream

01:30:18 ► §

of shellfire and poison gas, but listening to Hulk’s tale of the flaming frozen night.

01:30:26 ► §

That affidavit you signed swearing you knew how to swim? I vaguely recalled some university

01:30:35 ► §

requirement. Eleanor demanded every freshman have swimming lessons. After the Titanic, it spread throughout the Ivy League. By then,

01:30:46 ► §

we were in the central suite with its massive chandeliers where Harry’s collection was housed,

01:30:53 ► §

with its deep 30-foot embrasures and rotunda of 10 circular windows. Hulk lectured, elated in a way,

01:31:05 ► §

Hulke lectured, elated in a way, rolling with Havardiana.

01:31:11 ► §

At the 1915 dedication, Eleanor gave President Laurel the key.

01:31:17 ► §

A graduating senior gave a class oration on the new art.

01:31:24 ► §

E.E. Cummings surf-piped in a minor key, then in major key related a woman’s right harvard refused to give

01:31:27 ► §

eleanor an honorary degree she said simply because she was a woman hulk newly appointed feminist

01:31:35 ► §

did the apologia then again the yard dorms were only fitted with bathrooms, showers, and electric lighting in 1914.

01:31:54 ► §

Surf again, trumping Hulk, a mistress of detail. One honoree was the dashing Alexander Hamilton Rice. Hulk interjecting. 98 MD 04. Physician and explorer of South America, Mrs. Widener soon was Mrs. Rice.

01:32:06 ► §

She wheeled about, striding away, long red muffler flowing,

01:32:12 ► §

kitten hips, wizard of politics, tough and tender.

01:32:17 ► §

Come on, you two, people are dying.

01:32:35 ► §

are dying. Stricken, we hurried to surf. Always the poetess, she took us by the hands to the sergeant murals on the main staircase of Widener. Hulk. Somber. President Lowell’s commission to honor the 373 Harvard dead in World War I.

01:32:50 ► §

43 were undergraduates and 11,400 served. I looked up at the coming of Americans to Europe.

01:33:01 ► §

A phalanx of doughboys with identical faces. Every man, Hulk noted.

01:33:09 ► §

All were reaching for the hands of anthropomorphized Britain with Grecian helmet,

01:33:17 ► §

Belgium with broken sword, France a young heroine and nursing mother. She was blonde, with sallow, dark, circled eyes,

01:33:28 ► §

red chapeau, and a suckling babe in arms.

01:33:33 ► §

Surf.

01:33:35 ► §

Think of them, the chlorine gas attacks at Ypres.

01:33:39 ► §

The second mural, Death and Victory, took me away.

01:33:44 ► §

A dying soldier, lying beneath a faceless phantom, The second mural, Death and Victory, took me away.

01:33:52 ► §

A dying soldier, lying beneath a faceless phantom, grappling with a triumphant angel of victory, her face and arms heavenward, her lavish breasts, her back arching.

01:34:00 ► §

The unearthly light of the camellias, the rain washed the last petals away manifested for some seconds

01:34:10 ► §

after crimson archives of the unconscious sometimes emerged shells burst overhead heads blown off entrails eviscerated. Havardians in the Royal Scott Fusiliers, Royal Canadian Highlanders,

01:34:28 ► §

and even foreign students in the German Army, all slaying and slain. Radcliffe women,

01:34:38 ► §

volunteer ambulance drivers at the front, at night no headlights, shell-pitted robes,

01:34:50 ► §

at the front, at night no headlights, shell-pitted robes, the rapes, the poison gas, the killings.

01:35:07 ► §

Hulk’s voice over bodies in trenches. First to show the American flag in France was Norman Prince, 08 to 011, founded Lafayette Escadrille, trained under the Wright brothers.

01:35:18 ► §

Cerf, to me, are you not feeling well? I quietly collected myself. Oh, yes,

01:35:23 ► §

I just have an appreciation of desperate moments. The yard suggested a forgotten winter palace, its serenity belying

01:35:32 ► §

the periodic colossal mental breakdowns in the undergrad houses. We passed the archway at Sever Hall with its conduit of distant whispers. We could hear breathing, murmurs, no,

01:35:49 ► §

light moans of one, a straining virginal undergrad with the accent of the Dordogne,

01:35:55 ► §

urging her companion before reading period to deposeleur her. Harvard Square had dug out. Old people teetered carefully about,

01:36:11 ► §

snowball sabotage rampant. Folk singers emerged. A well-bundled three-year-old with masses of curls

01:36:19 ► §

bounced with snowflake happiness in her pram, then cried with fervent tears,

01:36:29 ► §

snowflake happiness in her pram, then cried with fervent tears, Mickey, Mickey, as her mouse balloon floated upwards from her grip, loss and impermanence soon assuaged by copious hot chocolate.

01:36:38 ► §

A hive of faculty manses streamed beneath crisp winter skies the street again a honeycomb of faces and mental gymnastics i thought of cambridge as a filter from which technocrats and meritocracies arose a kind of dragnet of the seed with a café crème and her fetching little movements, settled on an icy iron bench among

01:37:06 ► §

durable chess players, teasing Hulk with harmless sallies and elaborate rhetorical devices.

01:37:14 ► §

Nearby was a downcast physics major of eighteen, engrossed in a text on quantum mechanics.

01:37:22 ► §

Cerf swore she sensed that his failed calculated charm at mixes,

01:37:28 ► §

his subsequent renouncing of worldly pleasures,

01:37:31 ► §

had terminated in ejaculato praecox.

01:37:36 ► §

He was expressionless,

01:37:38 ► §

assaying incalculable matters of naked providence.

01:37:43 ► §

The thin sun shone upon us, the stunning cold making ghosts with our breath.

01:37:51 ► §

The Charles was a lusterless sheet of lead overhung with mists like low-lying clouds,

01:37:57 ► §

the sun dying into amethyst. Frosts crystallized on chess pieces. As as surf was musing on the physics major hulk launched his wit to surf do i intuit a disenchanting sense of professional inadequacy one-ups woman, she lobbed it back. No, that was my pre-final expression of neuralgic vacancy.

01:38:29 ► §

Laughter at each peal of church bells as they argued about which was more wicked, more wayward,

01:38:35 ► §

the flesh or the mind. Hulk concluded it would depend, like Harvard’s students’ prowess and the university itself, on the monomania in which it

01:38:47 ► §

was built. Mass Ave was broken with flagrant street hustlers, one confiding with a grin that he made

01:38:56 ► §

hundreds each day, more than many in the public sector with Harvard degrees.

01:39:07 ► §

public sector with Harvard degrees. Excuse me, excuse me, sir, sir, ma’am, ma’am.

01:39:15 ► §

We defected to the embrace of the Kennedy School, where we became face down on the texts,

01:39:21 ► §

flat against the wall of information, our progressive insanities as yet unchecked. From the years as a lay monk at Hoshinji, I had developed the habit of handling

01:39:29 ► §

objects quietly, from dishwashing to sweeping to placement of silverware or pens or paper,

01:39:37 ► §

rather than clattering of unconscious movements. In restaurants, I still noticed if plates were placed with care or in haste.

01:39:47 ► §

Of the hundreds of faculty and students rushing past the heavy glass entryways into HKS departments each day,

01:39:56 ► §

I may have been the only one who didn’t let the doors slam.

01:40:09 ► §

the doors slam. Even within the frenetic activity, I turned the knob slowly, opening the door in half-time and seating it soundlessly. It was a monk’s sleight of hand, for other methods of

01:40:18 ► §

passing doorways seemed discordant. No one noticed this private exercise, while I found it comforting. Except for

01:40:28 ► §

the cloistered hallways within the Divinity School, it was one of the reverent ancient disciplines

01:40:34 ► §

outside the expertise of Harvard. As I silently slipped past the entry adjacent to the office of

01:40:42 ► §

the crime scholar Francis X, who normally tolerated the door

01:40:46 ► §

crashing loudly throughout the day, he called me into his office. You know, you’re the only person

01:40:55 ► §

who doesn’t slam the door, which I appreciate. How did you learn that? Frank was Bostonoston born and bred early sixties wiry with an ascetic air taken aback at being detected i could only mumble uncertainly if that doesn’t sound too odd. Not at all. I thought it might be the case, he said with a

01:41:26 ► §

confiding smile. I was trained in such practices as well as a Jesuit priest. Although excited by

01:41:36 ► §

this senior’s instructor’s awareness of such subtleties, but too shy then with faculty to accept his offer of lunch and the inevitable scrutiny such intimacy

01:41:47 ► §

entailed, I finally submitted to a curious offer he made. Why don’t we walk over to a place next

01:41:56 ► §

door? Something I’d like to show you. I assented. We strolled through the Kennedy School walkways

01:42:06 ► §

under arbours of bare dogwood

01:42:09 ► §

trees facing the Charles

01:42:11 ► §

finally encountering a gothic entry

01:42:14 ► §

with massive wooden doors

01:42:16 ► §

and a broad elaborate iron frontispiece

01:42:19 ► §

we had arrived at a monastery

01:42:22 ► §

I come here most every day he said opening the interior door to the nave and sometimes when things get too confusing or rough or just to lift the spirit stained glass and by tall beeswax votaries surrounded by a few elderly Cantabrigians

01:42:46 ► §

and the profound mysteries of Christendom. Within moments from the vestries beyond the

01:42:53 ► §

heavy stone walls appeared two rows of white-robed, full-bearded monks. All walked slowly, their hands clasped under swaying robes,

01:43:05 ► §

singing the processional of Verilla Regis of Venanitus Tortunatus. the twenty men collected in two groups on both sides of coral pews perpendicular to us and facing each other. Motionless,

01:43:46 ► §

we were all suspended in time, in perfect silence. One voice in Latin song lifted upon the stillness

01:43:57 ► §

like a single flower petal buoyed upon a soft breeze. The monks responded with a thousand-year-old liturgical chant in plain song.

01:44:09 ► §

Back and forth, the voices rose, turning, majestic, humble, devoted,

01:44:18 ► §

spiraling inward upon themselves and ceasing unto peace.

01:44:31 ► §

upon themselves and ceasing unto peace we were only steps away from the kennedy school’s intrigues its defense intelligence reports of kill radii and raptor missile lethality the criminal justice analysis of cocaine overdoses and violent prison gangs the manipulation of third worldastic tradition then wandered back into the complexities of harvard

01:45:11 ► §

in the weeks that followed we again visited the brothers to hear their chants from the dark ages when only the rare monk scribe was literate and cunning and malice reigned we received these graceful

01:45:28 ► §

teachings for we both had heard long ago what the doorknob said

01:45:33 ► §

a strange pallor occupied the days finally clearing into everlasting winter the window-sills were frosted the snow weighing down black branches of oaks and smoothing the graves in cambridge churchyards

01:45:53 ► §

promising an invigorating tour and a jog hammer and hagendass intercepted me in the harvard coop as i contemplated an eight-seat rowing skull and oars mounted high

01:46:07 ► §

on the wall. We withdrew to Mass Ave. Haagen-Dazs clutching an orange juice, her skin flushed,

01:46:16 ► §

her breath of clouds. On this fine ringing morning, always a gallant creature, she smelled like apple blossoms.

01:46:28 ► §

Hammer had his customary morose hangdog expression of a Sunday, but a thrilled gravelly voice.

01:46:36 ► §

His powerful introspection was sharpened by a weekend of incessant review, stretched out on bare mattresses in cheap housing of rigorous texts

01:46:47 ► §

and nubile tutors. They were like finely bred animals. Hargandars, with a lilac afterglow,

01:46:57 ► §

gave me one of her conspiratorial looks. As we warmed up with a walk in the yard,

01:47:08 ► §

looks. As we warmed up with a walk in the yard, the sky had a glassy freshness. My first semester,

01:47:17 ► §

unawareness of locale, soon was enlightened. Massachusetts Hall, Hammer pointed with his cup.

01:47:25 ► §

Second oldest building in the country, after Christopher Wren’s admin building at William and Mary. And if the doorknobs could speak?

01:47:28 ► §

Haagen-Dazs grinned.

01:47:30 ► §

She had observed my modest habit, now apparently common knowledge.

01:47:36 ► §

Washington’s troops were stationed in the yard during the Revolution, Hammer explained.

01:47:41 ► §

Continental Army soldiers melted down mass halls, doorknobs and metal rooftops for ammo.

01:47:49 ► §

But there they are, I retorted gamely.

01:47:53 ► §

The university was the first corporation in the Western Hemisphere, existing long before the United States.

01:48:02 ► §

First institution to sue against the new government, demanding payment

01:48:07 ► §

for the doorknobs, and won. Moving quickly now, gaining heat, we soon passed Lowell House.

01:48:15 ► §

Within were white naperies on long tables, candles, slender stems of glass. Snow laced the tall filigreed ironwork gates.

01:48:28 ► §

Leafless topiaries in baroque planters.

01:48:32 ► §

Old ballrooms with replicas of Queen Anne and Chippendale chairs.

01:48:37 ► §

Tarnished Edwardian mirrors.

01:48:41 ► §

Their motto is occasionum cognosi recognize opportunity hagendass observed there is thursday tea in the master’s residence on may day they do champagne toasts on weeks footbridge A Lowell House bells were ringing in a mournful joy, like the end of the War of the Roses.

01:49:08 ► §

The seventeen bells are from St. Danilov’s Monastery in Russia, Hammer noted.

01:49:14 ► §

Stalin was melting church bells for canon, but a Harvard alum, philanthropist Charles Crane, slipped them out of the country.

01:49:24 ► §

Our clappermeisters ring them every

01:49:26 ► §

Sunday afternoon. Sviato Danilov Monastery, Haagen-Dazs insisted. They are going back soon

01:49:35 ► §

with our blessings. The Vera Foundry in Voronezh is making 17 new bells for Lowell House.

01:49:43 ► §

is making seventeen new bells for Lowell House.

01:49:50 ► §

I noticed her Russian accent was flawless, like crimson’s, but said nothing.

01:49:58 ► §

Crossing over the Charles, we loosened up by the aged grey stadium, with its thick mats of ivy roots in the winter deadness.

01:50:09 ► §

of ivy roots in the winter deadness. Like plants, students had a sessile lifestyle and combated their immobile scrutiny of data with serious athleticism. Hammer, doing deep knee bends,

01:50:17 ► §

provided background. This is the world’s first massive reinforced concrete construction nineteen o three like greco-roman colosseums

01:50:32 ► §

lunges stretches our eyes on hagendass’s whipping ponytail national historic landmark like the Rose and Yale Bowls. Haagen-Dazs on tiptoes, stretching to the sky

01:50:49 ► §

and our devotion, then with legs spread wide and strong, folding forward, grasping ankles,

01:50:58 ► §

pony tail swinging, face inverted, we attentive. 1906, she breathed upside down. The classics department did

01:51:12 ► §

Agamemnon, chariot racing, troops of horses and Grecian temple. The last theatrical was, head touching ground now, Euripides in 1992. Hammer, in a triangle pose,

01:51:30 ► §

this stadium created football’s forward pass. Pass? I was monosyllabic with effort,

01:51:39 ► §

remembering only my semester goal. 1906, President and alum Theodore Roosevelt, to reduce violence at football games,

01:51:49 ► §

had to decide whether to widen fields by 40 feet. Because Harvard Stadium could not be widened,

01:51:57 ► §

the forward pass was introduced. Greatest innovation in football.

01:52:01 ► §

Greatest innovation in football.

01:52:08 ► §

Our straining threesome now gasped together in a composition lane,

01:52:11 ► §

Haagen-Dazs between us and leading,

01:52:14 ► §

Hammer close behind her and I last,

01:52:18 ► §

fueled by the lonely hours of prior incarnations running hard under the blinding white sky.

01:52:26 ► §

Reading period embraced us,

01:52:29 ► §

the silent two weeks before finals.

01:52:33 ► §

The winter’s cold cut to the very bone of thought.

01:52:37 ► §

We wound along against obstinate winds in painful dusks.

01:52:43 ► §

The campus was virtually deserted. The archways loomed with thinking

01:52:48 ► §

students who moved ponderously with the gravity of church wardens. I resided in Radcliffe dorms

01:52:58 ► §

this term. During frequent storms, the small window by my desk ticked with flecks of tossing snowflakes.

01:53:08 ► §

At brain break, the hiatus at 9pm, when everyone stopped tearing hair and smoting breasts,

01:53:16 ► §

the wandering halls were a maze of students. They suddenly appeared and disappeared as if in a house of mysteries. I came upon a nearby door,

01:53:28 ► §

opened so very slightly upon a room rosy with candlelight and the urgent night odour of flowers.

01:53:38 ► §

A single curtain moved softly like a sail in the air. Within were the sounds of some resurrected Aphrodite,

01:53:47 ► §

astride an unseen lover, a glimpse of a satin duvet bunched at her waist,

01:53:53 ► §

the plunging of her hips yielding shrill, incoherent cries.

01:54:00 ► §

A tartan shawl with a white brooch lay loose over a harvard chair absolute humanity replaced my logic with entangled emotions

01:54:11 ► §

i listened like some anxious voluptuary until one could bear it no longer then retreated to blank pages. The last lectures and reviews had passed. We reeled with images of bio-terror

01:54:30 ► §

outbreaks, statistics of swine flu, decision trees on air cover at the Bay of Pigs,

01:54:37 ► §

all of us obsessively meticulous over fine points as if we were senior microbes.

01:54:44 ► §

meticulous over fine points as if we were senior microbes.

01:54:52 ► §

Snow fell steadily past tall windows in the numb drowsiness of winter.

01:54:58 ► §

Coughing and whispering, brooding and worrying, we looked absolutely pious.

01:55:27 ► §

Battles of resignations were won or lost those long nights even surf with her faintly apprehensive solicitude began showing elements of despair from street lamps on decaying snow banks, Hulk staggered up with his thick binders of notes.

01:55:33 ► §

With a light fatalistic glance, he summed up our predicament.

01:55:49 ► §

One financial analyst on her way to the World Bank just told me that she can mechanically do the stat problems but is hopelessly confused.

01:55:57 ► §

She said it’s like mumbling some debased liturgy, well, without realization.

01:56:07 ► §

Hulk had it. By only a hair’s breadth’s deviation, we lacked ultimate comprehension of the data.

01:56:14 ► §

At Harvard, we all had beginner’s mind, floating like strange solitary jewels, hovering late and early over the river of information while mankind slumbered.

01:56:21 ► §

In these weeks, Haagen-Dazs temporarily founded, Hammer obviously suffered. Everyone had

01:56:29 ► §

the nursery troubles of teething competence. With rueful attitudes, we closed our books,

01:56:37 ► §

then wished we could die upon the snows under a high moon.

01:56:49 ► §

snows under a high moon. We tried painting fine landscapes of correct solutions with brushstrokes of thoughts, but always slipped on our overbred finesse. As we walked to our rooms,

01:56:58 ► §

we shivered in the chill air as sirens pierced the night all the way from Boston Harbor.

01:57:04 ► §

as sirens pierced the night all the way from Boston Harbor.

01:57:11 ► §

Glory or disgrace, our futures hung on the reading period.

01:57:20 ► §

Sheltered from powdery snowfalls, we found some relief in huddling under Sever Arch with cups of hot cider, listening to undergraduates’ secret kisses. Benign snatches

01:57:28 ► §

of moonlight crossed frost-laced paths. LeMonsters, bleary students emerging from

01:57:36 ► §

all-nighters at LeMont library, weaved bloodshot on caffeine overdoses underneath dying elms.

01:57:48 ► §

a bloodshot on caffeine overdoses underneath dying elms. The university’s hollow-eyed,

01:57:56 ► §

gaping towers and spires, like tinted cyclorama, considered this fourth century of classes implacably. For relief, Haagen-Dazs, Hammer and I began to run at night, crunching on the frozen track in the then-undomed bowl,

01:58:08 ► §

as the brindled moon striped the endless, fatiguing lanes.

01:58:15 ► §

Returning to HKS or Widener, for a moment errated and alive, we too soon became again like Tokyo’s otaku, the reclusive computer people,

01:58:27 ► §

in the requisite tedium vitae of our isolation.

01:58:34 ► §

On brain break at Widener, the night before finals, as students retreated into panic,

01:58:42 ► §

the Harvard band entered, and as a form of redemption launched into yellow

01:58:48 ► §

submarine. Cerf rose and sang brightly in her soprano, coaxing morose undergrads from their

01:58:57 ► §

desperate labors. We whirled outside to drink in the freezing air on Widener’s steps,

01:59:05 ► §

our Puritan consciences swept away by the shrieking of naked students sprinting in the yard.

01:59:14 ► §

It was the primal scream, the ritual nude lapse of streakers before finals,

01:59:22 ► §

as hundreds of delighted unlockers danced and howled.

01:59:27 ► §

If we didn’t command the information by then, all was lost anyway.

01:59:36 ► §

I couldn’t sleep. I took the shuttle to Countway Library at Harvard Medical School.

01:59:47 ► §

The bus had only a few slumped, speechless students staring at bleak snowfields.

01:59:54 ► §

Under the deep night with rising moon, the Charles curling, inky water was swollen with blocks of black ice.

02:00:02 ► §

swollen with blocks of black ice.

02:00:09 ► §

At Countway, beneath paintings of physicians in frock coats conducting the first surgical procedures with ether,

02:00:12 ► §

I thought of Brigham and Women’s Hospital close by,

02:00:16 ► §

with its soft blooms of paediatric cancers,

02:00:20 ► §

the children on uncomfortable steel beds

02:00:23 ► §

concealed down long green anonymous corridors.

02:00:28 ► §

I wondered if they had flown pink kites.

02:00:32 ► §

Fatigue, with its ghostly anesthesia, had clipped the angels’ wings.

02:00:40 ► §

Concentration was futile.

02:00:48 ► §

Concentration was futile. It had been only months since I sat in a San Francisco alley after the events with Crimson. Reflecting on the six spread about the earth with their potential

02:00:55 ► §

medicine for the cancers of hatred, I felt they had an elementary moral beauty, one alien to the lesser manufacturers of addictive drugs, one worthy of study as a

02:01:07 ► §

policy fellow. The night was spent reading 19th century medical literature on visionary

02:01:15 ► §

manifestations and altered states. The work of Alexandre Briere de Boismont,

02:01:23 ► §

the records of Charles Bonnet on phenomena among the blind.

02:01:30 ► §

I was due in Vienna after finals to interview researchers at the United Nations Drug Control

02:01:37 ► §

Programme on proliferation of heroin and cocaine, a topic more fundamental to Harvard’s concerns with the public health

02:01:47 ► §

aspects of lethal narcotics. My itineraries through varying countries often were impromptu.

02:01:55 ► §

The next of the six were unlikely to find me overseas.

02:02:01 ► §

Others, studying all night at Countway, were staring at graphs, grasping at elusive facts, far too late for understanding.

02:02:12 ► §

Snow raced past in razor winds until a greyness, a faint light, touched the east.

02:02:20 ► §

The dawn came beating up white with a thin snowstorm and gusts of light.

02:02:26 ► §

The shuttle to the yard was noisy, careening, like the harsh metal of doom grinding past the Charles.

02:02:36 ► §

Slow flights of long-necked geese were bracketing the low winter sunrise.

02:02:50 ► §

the low winter sunrise. Students, pale with apprehension, sat possessed before proctors,

02:02:59 ► §

most assailed by dreams, had sullen, immobile features. Having long surrendered to the power of each word, always clutching at the grains of thought, we had the nerves of lovers and trembled

02:03:08 ► §

slightly. Hulk was fascinated by the ceiling, as if waiting for some signal from outer space.

02:03:17 ► §

Surf danced down the rows, blowing frightened kisses. Haagen-Dazs was drawn, internalized, shadows under her eyes.

02:03:29 ► §

Hammer had a chewed pen dropping from his mouth like a cigarette before a firing squad.

02:03:35 ► §

With dignity, he saluted.

02:03:40 ► §

It passed like a fitful dream among sleepwalkers.

02:03:46 ► §

We wrote what we knew or supposed, filling voids with hopeful conjectures puerile to the accomplished.

02:03:55 ► §

Marginal costs blended with statistical deviations, nuclear weaponry with cholera,

02:04:01 ► §

presidential advisers with street people, humanity with

02:04:06 ► §

extrajudicial killings. The clock hands swept the last hour. My ignorance was revealed,

02:04:15 ► §

replaced with a somber humility. I saw the trees bordering the Kennedy School lawns, all adorned with soft snow, blown white in the wind.

02:04:26 ► §

It was a December morning of crystal, where the very sounds transmitted with clarity.

02:04:35 ► §

The riverside was dark with evergreens, cold and snowy like white flowers,

02:04:41 ► §

the frost hoary and blue in the pure, sweet air.

02:04:51 ► §

At Boston’s Logan Airport on Christmas Eve, I weaved noticeably. Ragged with a dirty blue pallor,

02:05:00 ► §

I stumbled into the aisle seat on Lufthansa’s evening departure to Frankfurt and Vienna.

02:05:07 ► §

The Charles soon became scattered pieces of silver on the impassive earth.

02:05:12 ► §

A tide of darkness overcame the clouds, while above appeared a swarm of stars and immense stillness.

02:05:23 ► §

The flight was a purgatory between worlds. I still wondered when and where

02:05:29 ► §

others of the six might appear. Indigo, vermilion, magenta, cobalt. Crimson had seemed uncanny,

02:05:39 ► §

strangely familiar, while I, daily mingling with the Kennedy School’s many covert personnel,

02:05:46 ► §

had become a fabulist of superimposed identities, of doubles.

02:05:54 ► §

I wore a cheap blue jacket and a Harvard tie to strike conversations with researchers during journeys.

02:06:02 ► §

with researchers during journeys.

02:06:06 ► §

Like the leather wristbands or piercings among the little warrior tribes of the square,

02:06:10 ► §

the tie denoted another tribe,

02:06:13 ► §

faster, more ruthless,

02:06:14 ► §

with the outrageous freedoms of academic privilege.

02:06:20 ► §

Penurious on a small stipend and full scholarship,

02:06:45 ► §

I occupied the last row in tourist one had grown far from the camp simplicity of Hoxin Ji.

02:06:54 ► §

Over the cold Atlantic, to clawing fatigue and relentless beating of my heart,

02:06:58 ► §

I remembered being a small boy marching to communion,

02:07:03 ► §

toward Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,

02:07:09 ► §

through the window with the solemnity of perfect solitude,

02:07:19 ► §

and its infinite, nameless colours, was the evening star. Music was playing, a poignant,

02:07:25 ► §

rare recording from post-war Berlin of Marlena Dietrich. It alternated with the same song by the Simeon Choral.

02:07:31 ► §

Our crossing was to music from Austria’s high, holy days. LARGE ALP Lieber König, in kalte Winternacht, hab euch nichts mitgebracht, Nicht Gold und Edelstein, pa-ram, pa-pa-pa-mram,

02:08:25 ► §

pa-pa-pa-mram, pa-pa-pam.

02:08:29 ► §

Nur mein Lied allein,

02:08:32 ► §

pa-ram, pa-pa-pam,

02:08:34 ► §

pa-pa-pa-pam,

02:08:36 ► §

hört mich doch an.

02:08:42 ► §

Und er spielte, pa-ram, pa-pa-pam, And he played the little trombone man,

02:08:52 ► §

the little trombone man,

02:08:54 ► §

the little trombone man,

02:08:58 ► §

the little trombone man,

02:09:01 ► §

and then he laughed to him

02:09:05 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:06 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:07 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:08 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:10 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:11 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:12 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:13 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:14 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:15 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:16 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:17 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:18 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:19 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:20 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:21 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:22 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:23 ► §

And laughed to him

02:09:24 ► §

And laughed to him And laughed to him And laughed to him And laughed to him And laughed to him Next up, we’re going to play a phone interview that Kat had with Thomas B. Roberts.

02:09:51 ► §

Thomas is the professor of educational psychology at Northern Illinois University,

02:09:56 ► §

where he teaches courses on transpersonal, mind-body, psychedelic, and consciousness topics.

02:10:03 ► §

He is the author of several books including

02:10:05 ► §

Psychedelics and Spirituality, The Sacred Use of LSD, Psilocybin, and MDMA for Human

02:10:11 ► §

Transformation, Mind Apps, Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design, and The

02:10:17 ► §

Psychedelic Future of the Mind, How Entheogens are Enhancing Cognition,

02:10:21 ► §

Boosting Intelligence, and Raising raising values. Thomas also coined the term

02:10:26 ► §

bicycle day, which psychonauts worldwide celebrate as the anniversary of Albert Hoffman’s fabled

02:10:31 ► §

bicycle ride home from the Sandoz laboratory in Switzerland. So chapter two closes with the

02:10:40 ► §

narrator leaving the Buddhist monastery. He describes it on page 63. So Leonard says,

02:10:47 ► §

I know that the next monastery is one of competitive students and learned faculty,

02:10:51 ► §

all striving to solve social problems, world hunger, cyber warfare, overpopulation,

02:10:58 ► §

bio-warfare, etc. He describes going to Harvard as entering into the dragon’s mouth.

02:11:03 ► §

He describes going to Harvard as entering into the dragon’s mouth.

02:11:10 ► §

The last chapter compared and contrasted Leonard living in the Buddhist monastery to living in the prison.

02:11:16 ► §

Could you talk a little bit about the contrast of being at the monastery to going to Harvard?

02:11:22 ► §

So the differences between the tranquil monastery and the rigorous academia of Harvard University.

02:11:26 ► §

Well, never having spent any time in a monastery,

02:11:29 ► §

there isn’t much I can say about that.

02:11:34 ► §

I thought that was a very clever way for him to write about it as going from one kind of monastery to a kind of a different monastery

02:11:38 ► §

about as opposite as it could be.

02:11:41 ► §

So the entire book, The Rose of Paracelsus,

02:11:44 ► §

is framed as a type of research project.

02:11:47 ► §

Harvard was where Leonard decides to research

02:11:50 ► §

and interview the six clandestine chemists

02:11:52 ► §

for the report to the Human Subjects Committee out of Harvard.

02:11:56 ► §

Besides being a launching point for this research project,

02:11:59 ► §

which becomes the bulk of The Rose of Paracelsus,

02:12:02 ► §

the bulk of the story,

02:12:04 ► §

why else do you think Harvard is

02:12:05 ► §

such a significant location and so prominently featured in the book? Most of the chapters take

02:12:10 ► §

place in unique locations all over the world, but Harvard’s the only reoccurring location.

02:12:15 ► §

So why do you think it’s significant? Of course, it’s the best known of American universities.

02:12:22 ► §

And of course, particularly in the area of international relations at

02:12:26 ► §

Harvard Kennedy School.

02:12:28 ► §

And of course, there’s a connection with Larry.

02:12:31 ► §

It also turns out, interestingly, that Harvard has picked up on some of its psychedelic pasts

02:12:37 ► §

and is beginning to be active that way again, much to my surprise and delight.

02:12:42 ► §

So although he wouldn’t have known it at the time,

02:12:48 ► §

when Leonard wrote it, he was sort of preceding what was going to happen there a few years later.

02:12:53 ► §

Yeah, and that sort of leads into my next question,

02:12:55 ► §

which was that Harvard seemed, from an outside perspective,

02:12:58 ► §

Harvard seemed to be a bit of a hub for psychonauts and psychedelic cultures

02:13:02 ► §

since the time of Timothy O’Leary and Ram Dass and Richard Evans Schultes. Even on page 81 of the Rose, Leonard describes some of Schultes’

02:13:13 ► §

startlingly elegant, formidably serious grad students.

02:13:17 ► §

Could you discuss the psychedelic history of Harvard a little bit?

02:13:21 ► §

Well, as everybody knows, this is where Ram Dass and Larry got

02:13:26 ► §

going, and they

02:13:28 ► §

in my view and other

02:13:30 ► §

people’s view, sort of scared a lot of

02:13:32 ► §

the people away.

02:13:34 ► §

And that sort of

02:13:36 ► §

set back the field. There’s a big

02:13:38 ► §

argument, of course, as to whether

02:13:39 ► §

Larry set back the field or advanced

02:13:42 ► §

the field. And he did both.

02:13:45 ► §

Personally, for example, I wouldn’t have known about psychedelics,

02:13:48 ► §

and other people wouldn’t, had it not been for Larry amplifying them

02:13:55 ► §

at the same time he gave them a bad rap.

02:13:57 ► §

So it’s an ambiguous taste with me.

02:14:04 ► §

And, of course, that was the sort of key place even then, even more now,

02:14:09 ► §

that people thought about as being sort of the great American university.

02:14:13 ► §

Now it’s clearly, you know, one of the greats among others,

02:14:16 ► §

and particularly in terms of psychedelics.

02:14:19 ► §

Other places have caught up or even passed Harvard.

02:14:22 ► §

But they recently started,

02:14:26 ► §

there’s a student psychedelic science club,

02:14:30 ► §

and they were going to have a meeting there last April.

02:14:33 ► §

I was going to speak there, but of course COVID intervened,

02:14:35 ► §

and so the meeting had to be called off.

02:14:38 ► §

That’s interesting.

02:14:39 ► §

Some of these major Ivy League schools,

02:14:42 ► §

the students there are getting active in the psychedelic era.

02:14:46 ► §

Like Penn has a lot, and Harvard, or Yale now has a couple of faculties doing psychedelic research.

02:14:55 ► §

And so there it’s sort of catching on.

02:14:58 ► §

There’s something now called the Intercollegiate Psychedelic Network,

02:15:06 ► §

the Intercollegiate Psychedelic Network, which basically is these students from many schools,

02:15:10 ► §

both some leading schools and some ordinary schools that have joined it.

02:15:16 ► §

And that’s actually a very good place for people to find out about it,

02:15:20 ► §

particularly if they’re students and interested in psychedelics,

02:15:22 ► §

the Intercollegiate Psychedelic Network.

02:15:24 ► §

It’s online and so forth.

02:15:32 ► §

And then in the emails earlier, you mentioned how, did you meet Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard?

02:15:33 ► §

You described a good encounter there.

02:15:35 ► §

Yes, in a way.

02:15:44 ► §

My good friend Tom Riedlinger, who was a Watson scholar, was a grad student at Harvard Divinity School at the time.

02:15:50 ► §

And he had worked with Wasson’s work and was sort of the guy who actually edited a book on Wasson

02:15:55 ► §

called The Sacred Mushroom Secret.

02:15:58 ► §

And Wasson’s materials were at the Harvard Botanical Museum

02:16:04 ► §

up in the attic

02:16:05 ► §

where Schultes had his

02:16:07 ► §

office

02:16:08 ► §

and

02:16:09 ► §

it was

02:16:10 ► §

sort of off limits

02:16:11 ► §

but Tom had

02:16:12 ► §

access there

02:16:13 ► §

and took me up there

02:16:14 ► §

one day while I was visiting

02:16:15 ► §

and I finally got a chance

02:16:17 ► §

to meet this guy Schultes

02:16:19 ► §

and I thought

02:16:20 ► §

I’m finally going to get

02:16:21 ► §

an answer to a question

02:16:22 ► §

I’ve always wondered about

02:16:23 ► §

and if anybody knows

02:16:24 ► §

the answer it’s going to be Schultes.

02:16:27 ► §

So I told him I had an important question I wanted to answer.

02:16:32 ► §

He’s a very scholar, and I was in the university, so he looked very seriously and said,

02:16:37 ► §

well, what is it you want to know?

02:16:38 ► §

And I said, how did the people in the jungle ever figure out how to make ayahuasca?

02:16:46 ► §

And then we’ll take these two herbs, putting them together, and just the right parts of each one and how to put them together.

02:16:54 ► §

I mean, that’s just something you wouldn’t run into by chance.

02:16:57 ► §

So how did they finally do that?

02:17:00 ► §

And he looked at me as if I had asked the most insignificant question imaginable.

02:17:04 ► §

The little botanist, he didn’t care about that

02:17:06 ► §

he just wanted, he was interested

02:17:08 ► §

in the plants and how

02:17:10 ► §

on the sort of anthropological stuff

02:17:12 ► §

to him was just sort of a boredom

02:17:14 ► §

and never got an answer from him

02:17:16 ► §

so that was my experience with Schultes

02:17:18 ► §

although he had a map of

02:17:21 ► §

if you did

02:17:22 ► §

Ecuador

02:17:22 ► §

and he pointed to it with a lot of pride and said, look at

02:17:29 ► §

this.

02:17:29 ► §

And I saw the word Schultes on the map and he has a river there named after him, which

02:17:36 ► §

he’s very proud of.

02:17:37 ► §

So at any rate, that was my run into the Schultes.

02:17:40 ► §

And of course, he was extremely important in getting a lot of his grad students going

02:17:44 ► §

in the field and keeping the field of psychological drugs going. But she was interested

02:17:50 ► §

in the plants and the plant angle of things, not the psychotherapy or the anthropological

02:17:58 ► §

aspect of it. But as you know, his interests are rubbed off on a lot of other people.

02:18:05 ► §

So that was my experience with Schultes.

02:18:09 ► §

And I enjoy him very much.

02:18:11 ► §

He’s very much of an old-time New England-y type professor.

02:18:16 ► §

And a little formal.

02:18:19 ► §

I would call him stuffy, but formal.

02:18:21 ► §

He had standard ways of interacting with people.

02:18:25 ► §

Yeah.

02:18:26 ► §

And, of course, it was fascinating because that’s where Wasson’s collection was.

02:18:31 ► §

His books, and it’s mostly his correspondence.

02:18:34 ► §

Amazing correspondence.

02:18:36 ► §

He corresponded with everybody.

02:18:39 ► §

And I’m not sure.

02:18:40 ► §

I think it’s still up there.

02:18:42 ► §

I haven’t been there.

02:18:43 ► §

I know anybody who’s been there for a long time.

02:18:45 ► §

But anyway, that was my introduction to Schultes.

02:18:49 ► §

And it’s one I won’t forget because he was such a character.

02:18:52 ► §

Yeah, I bet.

02:18:53 ► §

He’s one of my heroes.

02:18:54 ► §

I actually spent the last three years working in the southeastern Peruvian Amazon with the indigenous people there, the Huracanbut and Amarkay area.

02:19:03 ► §

Oh, wonderful.

02:19:04 ► §

Sort of inspired by him in the long run.

02:19:06 ► §

But yeah, just as an aside.

02:19:08 ► §

Were you one of his students at some time?

02:19:11 ► §

I’ve actually never even been to university.

02:19:14 ► §

I’ve just, it was just a personal interest.

02:19:16 ► §

I was attempting to apprentice as an Ayahuasca and ended up having to evacuate back in March

02:19:22 ► §

because of COVID.

02:19:23 ► §

But that’s another, that’s another story.

02:19:26 ► §

Well, let me cut to the side here in a minute.

02:19:29 ► §

You know, the better universities, places like Stanford and the Ivy League

02:19:33 ► §

and the major state universities, have more than enough students applying for them.

02:19:38 ► §

And what they’re looking for is someone who has a distinct background

02:19:42 ► §

that can contribute to them, and you have that.

02:19:45 ► §

You really ought to, you know, apply it.

02:19:47 ► §

And because, you know, your work down there and your work at Eric’s thing,

02:19:51 ► §

or rather in the audio part of Leonard’s book, really would make you stand out

02:19:56 ► §

because you have something that, you know, the ordinary high school senior,

02:20:00 ► §

even those, let’s say, with perfect SATs, they have plenty of those.

02:20:04 ► §

But what they don’t have is someone who’s trained as an ayahuasca and worked on this book.

02:20:10 ► §

Really, you know, you could be in line for a very major university.

02:20:16 ► §

Thank you for saying that.

02:20:18 ► §

Do look into that.

02:20:19 ► §

Yeah, I will. Thank you.

02:20:21 ► §

I went to a college in upstate New York called Hamilton College,

02:20:26 ► §

and that would be a good place for you,

02:20:29 ► §

although I expect you might want to go to one of their even more prestigious universities.

02:20:34 ► §

Yeah, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a degree in anthropology lately,

02:20:39 ► §

but it’s been an interesting year, so we’ll see how it goes.

02:20:43 ► §

Well, while you’re on anthropology,

02:20:42 ► §

It’s been an interesting year, so we’ll see how it goes.

02:20:53 ► §

Well, while you’re on anthropology, there’s a guy named Jerry Brown at Florida International University who is the founder of the anthropology department.

02:21:00 ► §

And starting in January, he’s offering a course on psychedelic anthropology religion.

02:21:01 ► §

Oh, really?

02:21:05 ► §

It’s going to be all online, and it’s going to be international students,

02:21:09 ► §

so there’ll be students from everywhere. And this is like, this is your anthropology in terms of psychedelics. Yeah, that sounds right up my alley. Yeah, it really does. Yeah. Good. All right.

02:21:16 ► §

Okay, so I just have one more question about the book. Leonard describes Harvard students as being

02:21:21 ► §

not unlike the six. Both groups had a global theater of operations.

02:21:27 ► §

They were exiles of circumstance from many worlds,

02:21:29 ► §

yet there was a fantastic poetry about them.

02:21:30 ► §

So that’s a cool… Yeah, that’s a wonderful description.

02:21:33 ► §

Yeah.

02:21:33 ► §

So a major part of this chapter involves the narrator

02:21:35 ► §

encountering and befriending these four younger grad students.

02:21:38 ► §

There’s two men and two women,

02:21:40 ► §

whom, like the six, he refers to by pseudonyms,

02:21:43 ► §

Hulk, Hammer, Surf, and Haagen-Dazs.

02:21:47 ► §

I love Haagen-Dazs.

02:21:48 ► §

Leonard explores Harvard and its fascinating history through conversations with these four

02:21:52 ► §

graduate student friends. My question is, what was your impression of these four characters

02:21:57 ► §

in this chapter? Are they supposed to be similar to the Six or related to them in any way?

02:22:01 ► §

to be similar to the Six or related to them in any way?

02:22:06 ► §

I think they were real people,

02:22:09 ► §

but he did a certain amount of creativity with them.

02:22:18 ► §

So I expect they had real,

02:22:23 ► §

originally real people,

02:22:24 ► §

but being a fiction writer, that’s people, but, you know, being a fiction writer or, that’s

02:22:28 ► §

funny because I don’t know whether to call that book fiction or nonfiction, it’s both,

02:22:32 ► §

you know.

02:22:33 ► §

That’s one of the fascinating things about it.

02:22:35 ► §

It works both ways.

02:22:37 ► §

So I think he probably built up these characters.

02:22:41 ► §

But what’s his name?

02:22:42 ► §

The guy who went to Harvard and knew all of Harvard history.

02:22:53 ► §

That was an amazing character. Anyway, so I really thought a real strength of Leonard’s writing is his ability to use details to make a point.

02:23:01 ► §

That he’ll be walking along and notice something or describe something.

02:23:06 ► §

And you get not just what he sees,

02:23:09 ► §

but how he feels about what he sees.

02:23:11 ► §

That’s something a good writer can do.

02:23:13 ► §

It’s not just describing something,

02:23:15 ► §

but you’re involved with his interaction

02:23:19 ► §

with what he sees.

02:23:20 ► §

I thought he did that just beautifully.

02:23:24 ► §

Yeah, and then my last question was just

02:23:26 ► §

if you have any other observations about this chapter

02:23:28 ► §

or anything else you want to say about the book

02:23:30 ► §

as a whole I’d love to hear your thoughts

02:23:32 ► §

on it

02:23:33 ► §

one very little minor thing

02:23:36 ► §

he mentions a camellia’s

02:23:38 ► §

growing and I didn’t think

02:23:40 ► §

they grew that far north

02:23:41 ► §

that’s you know

02:23:44 ► §

I haven’t looked it up.

02:23:46 ► §

I think of them as being warm area plants.

02:23:50 ► §

You know, maybe I’m off about that.

02:23:52 ► §

And there are places you can put warm area plants around buildings and stuff.

02:23:57 ► §

Anyway, that’s the only question I wanted.

02:23:59 ► §

Also, I thought on his description of how he and the other students felt on the first days of class.

02:24:07 ► §

It was fascinating.

02:24:08 ► §

So among the privileged and at the same time ill at ease.

02:24:14 ► §

Very nicely put, yeah.

02:24:15 ► §

And then the characters that he runs into, you know, the faculty and the sort of advanced students who this guy was from the CIA and another guy was somebody famous in a former field and so forth.

02:24:31 ► §

It’s just fascinating.

02:24:34 ► §

Yeah, and I like the way he walks around.

02:24:38 ► §

He does a very good job of describing the Charles River.

02:24:41 ► §

You know, we don’t get a sense for it in that.

02:24:44 ► §

And I really think that’s good.

02:24:46 ► §

And, of course, there’s various libraries and things hanging in the libraries.

02:24:52 ► §

Nicely done.

02:24:54 ► §

I really like the idea of the main people who show up, you know, whose names are colored.

02:25:03 ► §

It’s fascinating.

02:25:02 ► §

people show up whose names are colored.

02:25:04 ► §

So it’s fascinating.

02:25:13 ► §

I was amazed at, I don’t know how many, did he actually go to those places that you described or some of them?

02:25:15 ► §

What is the story behind that?

02:25:17 ► §

I don’t know.

02:25:18 ► §

I actually met him in Santa Fe last month, and he maybe jokingly said that he’s never

02:25:24 ► §

been anywhere, he never

02:25:26 ► §

traveled anywhere, so if he hasn’t

02:25:28 ► §

been to these places, he’s got a very active

02:25:30 ► §

imagination.

02:25:32 ► §

That’s good. I figured he’d been to

02:25:34 ► §

some of them, but couldn’t possibly have gone to

02:25:36 ► §

all of them. Well, you know, there’s

02:25:38 ► §

a good writer for you, because you can make

02:25:40 ► §

it seem real.

02:25:42 ► §

He’s also kind of cryptic and mysterious

02:25:44 ► §

about a lot of this stuff,

02:25:45 ► §

so who knows?

02:25:48 ► §

That’s not unusual for people who are in lockups.

02:25:51 ► §

Yeah.

02:25:52 ► §

There may be a trait of them, I should say, us.

02:25:57 ► §

So you met him in Santa Fe?

02:25:58 ► §

That wouldn’t be the first time.

02:26:00 ► §

Yeah, it’s the first time I’ve ever met him.

02:26:02 ► §

He seems really happy to be out and, you know, just like a new lease on life.

02:26:09 ► §

Oh, yeah. I should think so. Boy, he really got a raw deal.

02:26:16 ► §

Yeah. Had you met him before or have you ever met him?

02:26:19 ► §

No, I’ve never met him. Just, you know, emailing.

02:26:21 ► §

Yeah.

02:26:21 ► §

I’m just, you know, emailing.

02:26:22 ► §

Yeah.

02:26:24 ► §

I don’t know how I heard about the book.

02:26:26 ► §

Yeah.

02:26:30 ► §

It’s quite a, you know, a great vocabulary.

02:26:31 ► §

Yeah.

02:26:32 ► §

An incredible vocabulary.

02:26:36 ► §

Every now and then, you know, I’d underline words and have to go back and look them up.

02:26:39 ► §

A lot of foreign phrases, but some English ones, too.

02:26:42 ► §

Did he actually spend time in a monastery?

02:26:44 ► §

Yeah, I think that was true.

02:26:46 ► §

The woman he describes as being the head of it was an actual person,

02:26:47 ► §

so I’m pretty sure that was true.

02:26:51 ► §

I hope someday they make a movie out of him and his life.

02:26:55 ► §

Yeah, I know there’s a bunch of people trying.

02:26:57 ► §

I don’t think Leonard particularly wants anyone to do that,

02:27:00 ► §

but it is a fascinating story,

02:27:02 ► §

and it would make a really good movie.

02:27:13 ► §

That concludes the third chapter of the Rosa Parasolsas podcast.

02:27:14 ► §

Thank you for listening.

02:27:16 ► §

Signing off, I’m Kat.

02:27:29 ► §

And my name’s Alexa. Happy holidays! To lay before the King So to honor him

02:27:43 ► §

When we come.

02:27:56 ► §

Maybe

02:27:58 ► §

he’s too far

02:28:01 ► §

I am a poor boy too

02:28:10 ► §

I have no gift to bring

02:28:19 ► §

I have no gift to bring

02:28:21 ► §

That’s it to give our king ¶¶

02:28:48 ► §

For you, ba-rum-bum-bum-bum, run my drum.

02:29:00 ► §

Very naughty, ba-rum-bum-bum-bum,

02:29:06 ► §

The ox and lamb can’t I played my drum for him

02:29:15 ► §

I played my best for him For Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:25 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:27 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:29 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:31 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:32 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:33 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:35 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:37 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:39 ► §

Rump-a-pump-a-pump

02:29:41 ► §

Give me smile and be part of the fun

02:29:48 ► §

Me and my drum

02:30:14 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.

02:30:16 ► §

Namaste, my friends.