Journal Entry 719: Cecil Miller

I watched a documentary on Dead Heads last night. At the end there were snippets of Ken Kesey talking about the Dead and Acid Tests. We need artists to tell us what it's all about. It's so big, how could we depend on anyone else?
Kesey talked about how the Acid Test really was a Test. Some passed, some didn't. He couldn't really give an explanation of what it meant to fail, but he gave an example of passing. How a man came in to a Test dressed in a business suit and carrying an umbrella. He was given the "customary cup" and a few hours later Kesey says he saw the man watching his shadow and parading around with the umbrella over his shoulder saying something like: "The king turns left. The king turns right." He watches his shadow all the while and turns back and forth. He'd passed the Test, says Kesey.

Why did he pass, I think. Kesey doesn't say. Most likely it is because the umbrella guy got the notion that he is his own aesthetic, his own source of comedy, bodily experience, words, symbolism and all other forms of energy and meaning rolled into one, making him both the center of the universe and the butt of all divine and philosophical jokes ever conceived by the human mind. The guy finally got the absurdity of life. He understood he was at once both nothing and everything. If you were one or the other but not both, that wouldn't be funny. But once you see that you are absolutely and completely insignificant and at the same time connected to everything, including God maybe even, then it becomes possible to laugh, to really laugh, to laugh that cosmic clowny laugh which is the laugh that puts you far beyond the world you lived in just the day before. It puts God in your pocket. It makes Him see Himself as little more than an extension of your own absurdity.

Perhaps, then, a question comes as to whether that is good or bad: God, realizing His own absurdity. Perhaps such an understanding is what God needs in order to be released from the seriousness of the world, the turmoil of being connected to us and to this confusion we call Life. It helps God laugh too, helps God laugh the big belly-aching, open-mouthed, tear in the eye laugh that is always floating in the air if you're paying attention.

"Good morning you Mother Fuckers," says God. "I'm going to go off and read a book for a change and maybe take a dip in the Creek. I should be back by lunchtime. You ought to be okay on your own. If you're feeling murderous or lonely, just lie down in the sunlight over there and take a nap. I'll wake you with some lemonade, fresh cold cherries, and those little cheese and tomato sandwiches that you love."
Kesey also talks about why Dead Heads did what they did. He is forthright, direct and simple: "They're looking for magic."

And he gives evidence of it. He talks about what happens during a concert, how the Dead are playing and people are dancing and grooving but they're sort of dancing on their own, each of them, different rhythms, different little egos with separate notions of Time and Space; and everyone there is looking and waiting for this moment when you can feel it all come together. He says it is like a tiny shaft of light coming from a chink in the moment, like it's a piece of magic that opens into a whole new realm where everything becomes linked. The Grateful Dead is no longer playing music in their heads, they are playing what is in the air. He says people will wait four hours during a concert for that one moment when it all comes together and they are all linked.

He's not just making it up either. I've been there. I remember that feeling, like a bottle is being opened up, sometimes the sound of tearing cloth. And the groove is there. He's right. That's what it is. Or was. The groove.

But they're gone now. Jerry's dead.

If all of this is true, then we've got to figure out what it means. Why are we ignoring this? It may be the only way to save ourselves.