High Weirdness Quotes

“By refusing randomness and unpredictability, conspiracy theories and paranoid reality tunnels reify the hubris of systematic rationality as such. “Maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia.” As an “antidote” to such paranoia, Dick called for an injection of surprise into life—a cultivation, as it were, of noise on the line. “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

“The transitive shift from observer to participant, from gaze to encounter, requires both active engagement and a passive willingness to allow the phenomenon to reveal itself in its own terms. This visionary leap opens a dimension of experience, of ontological possibility, that is simultaneously a kind of abyss. In finding a “Thou” where before there was an “it”—as Martin Buber would describe it—the psychonaut suddenly faces all manner of risks: terror, madness, delusion, or what Terence ironically called “death by astonishment.” But to not take the chance, for some anyway, falls short of the mark.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“The technological audacity of the Apollo program, with it's largely symbolic payload, was also sinking into the trivialisation that Guy Debord had identified the decade before as the underside of media spectacle. When Commander Alan Shepard strapped a six iron to a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became, for a spell, nothing more than a tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as Debord had written, is "nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“One important consequence of this approach is that the meaning or full activity of a drug can only be worked out and constructed in practice. A drug's effects, in this view, aren't discovered, but nor are they purely invented. Instead, they are enacted.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“The first domain is aesthetic. The weird describes a peculiar domain of feelings and images associated with stories, spaces, atmospheres, and moods that relate to the uncanny, the fantastic, the perverse, and the macabre side of the supernatural. The weird here is essentially a genre—not just of cultural production, but of affect and possibility, of the visionary imagination and the experimental body. Books can be weird, but so can subcultural happenings. The second domain marks the weird as a space of deviancy, social or otherwise. Weird things are anomalous—they deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations, sometimes quite radically. In the human world, you are being weird or a weirdo when you refuse or transgress dominant behavioral and conceptual codes. Despite its numinous, supernatural ambience, the weird also hunkers down in the margins of the actual, as a centrifugal turn away from naturalistic or probabilistic or historical norms to which it remains, nonetheless, intimately tied. The third and most substantial sense of the weird is ontological.4 In this view, weirdness is a mode of reality, of the way things are or the way they appear to be (which may be just two sides of the same strange coin). Weirdness here is not simply an artifact of our bent minds but a feature of the art and manner of existence itself—an existence I believe we can still talk about directly, though perhaps always with a forked tongue. More than a genre, more than a psychological mode, the weird inheres in the loopy, twisty, tricksy way whereby things come to be.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“My theoretical approach here, I want to insist, will be decidedly experimental, more of an attempt—in the classic sense of “essay”—than an analytic framework. In cobbling my network of concepts together, I am driven by my dissatisfaction with the idealism of religious and mystical thinking, on the one hand, and the stinginess of the usual reductionism on the other.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In the court of the mind, skepticism makes a great grand vizier, but a lousy lord, and a worse bard. As readers and interpreters, I believe we must move gingerly when dealing with reports of extraordinary experiences, which can be convulsive to experiencers, but strangely delicate things in the analytic afterglow. While I do want to analyze the experiences ahead, as well as the written accounts, I am far more interested in providing close readings of them than in explaining them away. I want to provide maps of their influences, resonances, and structural dynamics rather than unravel their ultimate meaning or origin or cause. We need to give these enigmas and strange loops room to breathe and to be—to enjoy what Bruno Latour, a philosopher and sociologist who will accompany us throughout our work, calls their own “ontological pasture.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“After all, the encounter with supernatural agents brings us back to arguably the most archaic religious idea (or at least the most archaic idea of religious scholars): animism, the belief in, or communication with, otherworldly beings. High weirdness is weirdness animated.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“More dramatic than the presence of this remixed cultural material, of course, is the startling appearance of an Other: the reptilian entity who pops out of the phantasmagoric scene and returns the observer's gaze.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In this book, I will argue that, at least under conditions of high weirdness, the causal relationship between cultural codes and “experience itself” gets twisted into a loop whose unstable and resonant dynamics actually drive the mode in question.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In encounters with high weirdness, culture becomes consciousness. Marginal and esoteric cultural narratives—particularly those wrapped up in conspiracy theories, extraterrestrials, occult forces, strange gods, and fantastic pulp fictions—intrude forcefully, uncannily, and sometimes absurdly into the texture of lived experience.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“But high weirdness is equally a mode of extraordinary experience. At”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“suggestion: anomaly is a characteristic of the real. Whatever”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of “acoustic space.” When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, “Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experiences in the Seventies

“Binswanger's vision of this pathological but visceral gestalt deeply influenced Dick's construction of the various idios kosmoi in his works.65”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“Psychokinesis”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“In an entry from late 1979, Dick writes Heuristics is right on. The closer you get to reality the closer you get to (and to seeing) process. Q isn't “what is (esse)?” but “What does?” […] replace each “is” with “does” and ontology vanishes. All you have is a perpetually perturbed reality field! With a self-producing vortex.12”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies