Lipton’s Journal/Introduction: Difference between revisions

Marijuana: Smoking pot sanctioned and smoothed what Mailer called “the journey into myself,” acting, he said, like an anti-spasmodic drug. It enfeebled his societal self and emboldened his instinctual self; or, put another way, it helped him marginalize the “despised image” of himself: “the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy,” and become a rebel with a cause, a “psychic outlaw.” He found the drug both a means and an end, pleasurable in itself and also an enhancement of his sexual performance, his appreciation of jazz, and even his bodily strength. Without Lipton’s, “Lipton’s” would have been a thinner gruel, more circumspect. Yet, on occasion, Mailer found the use of marijuana, buttressed by [[w:Seconal|Seconal]] (a barbiturate derivative), booze, cigarettes, and black coffee in various combinations, to be perilous, driving him uncomfortably close to the edge of madness. He knew he was “wandering through all the mountain craters of schizophrenia.” Some of the insights he gained while using Lipton’s, particularly his vision on the evening of February 25, 1955 of a divided, vertiginous universe, were terrifying. Both madness and suicide seemed possible. “I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life,” he wrote.