11 minute read
the first trip
from 1234
Thefirst Trip Thefirst Trip
On April 16th 1943 the organic chemist Albert Hoffman noticed a “not unpleasant intoxicated condition” whilst purifying Lysergic Acid Diethylmide 25, a compound derived from ergot, the fungus that grows on Rye grass. He worked in a pharmaceutical lab in Switzerland where, during the war, fuel was hard to come by and car travel a rarity so when, three days later, he deliberately “dropped” 250 micrograms of the drug, and experienced, according to his lab journal “anxiety, disturbed vision, paralysis, urge to laugh” he clambered on his bicycle and rode home. Thus it was that the discoverer of LSD took the first ever “trip” on two wheels. “Everything in my field of vision wavered,” he said, “and was distorted as seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot,” even though his lab assistant, a young woman called Susi Ramstein, had to pedal furiously to keep up. At home the bemused family doctor proclaimed Hoffman physically fit, if somewhat deranged, and it was only then that the chemist began to relax into his experiences. “A kaleidoscopic flood of fantastic images dazzled me; they circled and spiralled, opened and closed… [and] for each sound there was a corresponding, vividly shifting form and colour.” Later, after rest, he discovered “a feeling of extraordinary well-being… outside, the garden was still damp from a spring rain, and the sun made everything sparkle and gleam in fresh light.” Hoffman’s experiences were the hallmarks of a classic acid “trip”; a stimulation and distortion of perception, dissolution of the boundaries between the internal and external world and, at the right dose in the right setting, a mystical union with the natural world.
April 19th was later christened “Bicycle Day” by Thomas B. Roberts, a professor of psychology, and when Hoffman asked why he had used the image of the bicycle Roberts replied “the bicycle was a more concrete image than a chemical structure, and in America there is a famous poem that marks the start of our revolution in 1775…
With LSD, he inferred, there was a revolution of society, on a par with the War for Independence, and a revolution of the mind, with the chemical’s overhaul of our states of consciousness.
But the connection between cycling and LSD is more than a coin flip of the calendar. If, like me, you decide a bicycle rides through the mind as much as through the land, then you begin to find a network of links, in a way the psychoanalyst Jung would have called “synchronicity” but I prefer to call the syncing of gears, a meshing of the cogs of possibility. Long before Albert Hoffman took up his vocation as an organic chemist he escaped the industry of his home town of Baden, whose narrow streets whirred to the sounds of cycling factory workers, and explored the skirting forests of Martinsberg. Hoffman’s boyhood bicycle may not have been his only route into nature (there is a picture of him on his first bike beside the woods) but it would have been a prime metaphor for fleeing the urban grime of Baden. One childhood spring, entirely without psychedelics, he “experienced a spontaneous mystical vision of the unity of all being” that “convinced me of the existence of a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday sight.”
It’s clear Hoffman was not a ‘straight’ in a white coat but neither was he a hippy on an astral carpet. He was in fact an irrational rationalist, who, while respecting the “physical” basis of reality, the atoms that put us together, also recognised there were many other ways of perceiving that reality.
It is a shame that the letters ‘LSD’, when coupled with cycling, are now taken to mean ‘Long Slow Distance’, where a rider cycles steadily over large distances to build stamina and “increased capillary density, more myoglobin, better use of free fatty acids and larger glycogen stores.” In other words ‘LSD’ has come to mean more ‘rationality’, a greater scientific mastering of the human body and a clouding of the joys of expanded consciousness. I am here to reclaim those three letters for the beatnik on a bike. There was no imperative on Hoffman to synthesise ‘LSD 25’ on April 16th 1943. His lab had rejected it as a useful medicine some five years before. He didn’t have to
experiment by self-administering a dose, nor commute to his Basel lab by bicycle from his rural home in the Swiss countryside (his son riding along on the bike’s luggage rack to be dropped at school).
Hoffman later said he hadn’t chanced upon LSD but that LSD “had found him” and his subsequent psychedelic experiences reinforced his belief that a materialist, purely scientific, view of the world had led to a profound divide between man and nature, the city and the country. “Experience of the world as matter,” he wrote, “…to which man stands opposed, has produced modern natural science and technology-creations of the Western mind that have changed the world. With their help human beings have subdued the world. Its wealth has been exploited in a manner that may be characterised as plundering.” The irony of the bicycle is that it is a technology that reverses this notion. It takes us closer to nature, out of the city and onto the back roads in a way that can subtly alter our perceptions of reality. We stay “still” on the saddle and the world moves “through us”, light, colour, sound, smell, touch, mixing in a thrill of synaesthesia. The more I ride, the more the “I” dissolves. A carefree “trip” on an open road encourages a meditative state. The regular rhythmic contraction of muscles and breathing fosters an awareness in the moment that can dissolve the artificial notion of mind and body, self and other, and, in its best moments, conjure a sense of oneness with what we find around us. In this way cycling is not just a vehicle into the natural environment, it is a psychological bridge to that world. “Woohooo Mr Moonbeam,” you say, “I didn’t come here for Zen diagrams and hippy platitudes, I just want to ride my bike.” Well I too judged LSD and the sixties hippy culture it came with, its leathery Woodstock tan, at shallow face value. But prod the creases in that face a little deeper and you begin to discover that LSD and sixties counterculture were on the same, more considered, road to Eastern
philosophy and meditation. While flower power was a dead end, the roads that led off it, heading east, changed lives forever. LSD was the ticket shop to mystic oneness. A generation responded to this, and decided to take the whole journey, gravitating east on the hippy trail to discover an older culture that venerated a much wiser way of thinking. LSD was the “trip” but to an extent Buddhism, and meditation, were the whole journey. Fifty years ago hippies piled into old buses and made the overland journey to India in smelly jeans. Now an invisible tribe of independent cyclists are making the same journey in smelly shorts. I know. I met a bunch of them, cycling through the thin films of surface tension that stand in for national borders. The sixties counter-culture is, if not dead, then in cable TV cold storage, but counter-culture itself lives vividly on and cycling has always been a part of that. Conscious of it or not punks, anarchists and activists on bikes, bunny hopping the kerbs, remain in thrall to the same altered reality that cycling encourages; an oil-under-the-fingernails up yours to the prevailing philosophy that says, “we are unconnected floors in a tower of science and money.”
So far, so naïve. Cycling has been around for over a century and the numbers of cyclists worldwide are going down not up. Where’s the change? The change is not in the numbers, but in the ideas; the ever fertile mindset of cycling, planting its fruit stock in the unconscious of generation after generation.
Joe Boyd, promoter and producer of Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett and many others, was in the heart of the psychedelic sixties scene in the UK, a landscape that grew alongside LSD. He called his biography WhiteBicycles. WhiteBicycles referred to the 1967 single My White Bicycle by the psychedelic rock band Tomorrow, who Boyd promoted at LSD-inspired club UFO (‘Unlimited Freak Out’). My White Bicycle was a homage to ‘The Provos’, the Dutch countercultural movement of the mid 1960s. The Provos came up with a series of ‘White Plans’ that included “the closing of central Amsterdam to all motorised traffic” and the buying of “20,000 white bikes per year that were to be public property and free for everyone to use.” When these plans were inevitably spurned the Provos went ahead and painted fifty white bikes and left them on the streets for anyone to use. “The bike is something but nearly nothing it’s so simple,” Robert Jasper Grootveld explained. The Amsterdam police impounded all the bikes saying that it was against state law to leave a bicycle unlocked. So then the Provos equipped all the bikes with combination locks and painted the combinations on the frames.
Joe Boyd writes that “Bad drugs…commercialism and…violence” began to replace the utopian hopes of the psychedelic era and White Bicycles became “a metaphor for the decline of the energy and ideals of the sixties”. He notes that in Amsterdam in people began “stealing and repainting the white bicycles.” But the White Bicycles of the Provos did not enter a state of terminal decline, they merely buried themselves into a common unconsciousness and remerged as the Yellow Bikes or ‘Velo Jaunes’ of La Rochelle in 1974, a community programme that is still running forty years later. Today there are over five hundred bike-sharing schemes around the world, sharing over 500,000 bikes. That’s a lot of bicycles for a metaphor in decline.
There is an expansiveness about bicycles and bike culture that has a global reach and it is uniting the independent thinkers and cyclists of the world into a more coherent whole. I hope it is not too much to argue that just as LSD helped Hoffman recapture the mystical experiences of nature of his youth, a radical oneness with the natural world, so the simple bicycle ride can connect us with the sensuous environment and each other, the common consciousness of a single hot planet. The bicycle is a common touchstone around which we can generate a larger community, a movement, a scene, a belonging. So, yes Lance “Test-me-I’m-clean” Armstrong, “it’s not about the bike”. It’s about the idea of the bike, an idea bound up with human connection and community and not malevolent competition and material acceleration.
‘Civilisation’ had always looked down at ‘primitive’ cultures venerating the herbal psychedelics (mushrooms, peyote, Ayahuasca) that shamans use to connect to the natural world. And then LSD came along and filled a gap that society didn’t even know it had lost;
between life in the city and the actuality of feeling alive in the livinggreen earth. It is that ancient ritual psychedelic masquerading as a ‘scientific’ tablet. It is ‘magic’ by another word. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and the bicycle is that sufficiently advanced technology, an alchemy so simple it barely reveals itself, quietly transporting us to a different relationship with the world around us. It too is going through a process of rediscovery as if it was something we didn’t even know we’d lost. It is the psychedelic of the tattooed bike crank and the trouser-clipped Brompton commuter. Maybe not as instant, maybe not as immediately profound, but taking us there by degrees.
Aldous Huxley, author of mescaline-inspired Doors of Perception and Brave New World, asked on his deathbed to be injected with LSD. “LSD-try itintramuscular-100mmg” Albert Hoffman in his last interview said “I don’t need LSD to die; I can face death with joy…the beauty of creation is the best drug in the world.” High on endorphins after a good ride through overgrown lanes I can agree. Not because I’m hippy or hip but because it’s true. And when I recall those roads now they come as a pattern of images and sounds, turning and revolving.
Leaf spin circles tree fire bell yellow hand judder soil taste
sing spoke chatter garlic white pool of pupil tarmac bird cough ing blink into million million million rain.
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The world is our great book of beauty and romance, and on your cycle you can gradually master it, chapter by chapter, volume by volume.
ELIZABETH ROBBINS PENNELL, 1890
