‘When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist’, recalled raconteur Quentin Crisp, ‘a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?”
Crisp’s anecdote anticipates a modern distinction between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’, an idea devised by British journalist David Goodhart. The former folk are more parochial, local and rooted; the latter internationalist and metropolitan, at home in airport spaces and global consciousness. Communication between them is fraught with misunderstanding.
Psychedelic literature tends overall to be an ‘anywhere’ genre, bending to the universal. Since the renaissance of the last decade has gathered momentum and blown into the maelstrom of fashionable culture, the genre oscillates between hyper-individualism and globe-sized mental health questions. Rootedness, when it is described, is usually abstracted as an other.
However, there’s an interesting conversation to be had between the psychedelic ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’, which if skilfully conducted might lift some veils. In short, if these dialogues are opened they might invite us to think differently about psychedelics in the world. Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics (2023) by Andy Mitchell does just that.
Ten Trips is ostensibly a globe-trotting narrative in which Mitchell seeks out a variety of psychedelic experiences against the backdrop of the ‘renaissance’. He provides a glimpse of global psychedelia while also delving into the rootedness—or otherwise—of some people who are more-or-less involved. The book manages to carve out some substance from behind the hype, and the author neatly narrativizes himself in undertaking this journey.
On the surface, Mitchell is an archetypal anywhere—a well-travelled, Oxford literature graduate and NGO worker who then retrained in psychology and neuroscience. As a member of Narcotics Anonymous, he has experience with drug-induced states, and in keeping with his professional class, he has managed his career without falling off the map. Therapy and its rarefied language, pastoral care for the middling sort, predominates.
Yet as a somewhere, Mitchell writes the confession of an Englishman, quite grounded as if you were speaking with him in the pub, rather than through the newspeak of some NGO-funded symposium. This character gently sneaks out in odd references, such as to Little Chef, or in seeing eels while tripping; ‘I’m from England: we don’t really have serpents—eels are what we have.’ This local character gifts groundedness, colour and curiosity to the book.
In the opening chapter Mitchell applies to be a ketamine trial participant. I had suspicions at this point that Ten Trips would be yet another work of elite reportage—more Pollan than Thompson. Then, unexpectantly, the trial lead decided subjects needed to be psychedelically-naïve, so Mitchell was debarred having recently taken ayahuasca. In an interesting twist for this reader, the same thing happened to me on the same trial!
Adrift, what does our intrepid author do? Like most Brits today, he got on the blower and scored himself some K. You see, a free market still hides behind the scientific and political unreality of drug regulation. Two worlds kept apart by the flimsiest legal veil.
Hospitals, like airports, are homogenous, clean (hopefully!), starkly bright. They are places that could often be anywhere… or nowhere. They have rigid rules and regulations to which one must adhere. Tossed out, Mitchell turned to the darker, the heterogeneous and uncontrolled. ‘I talked too much,’ he wrote of K, ‘like cocaine-fuelled self-talk, only wonkier, stupider: ketamine the pantomime-horse tranquiliser.’ Ten Trips dialogues these extremes.
In ‘The Substitute Trip’ the focus of Mitchell’s hunt turns to ibogaine. He drives around North America hither and thither, talking to potential leads, and is confronted by a range of subcultural lingo and persons—techno-babble, new age healing, global therapeutics. A lostness emerges through the chaos of an unrooted community fuelled by hype.
‘Substitution’ takes Mitchell beyond the spectacle of renaissance discourse. It’s only when he returns home to England, and speaks to someone who had studied in a Gabonese village with other iboga initiates, that something more closely approximating that elusive concept of ‘authenticity’ emerges—at least something less beguiled by fashion. Traditional practices are passed on, re-seeded; they are not easily re-imagined when uprooted and homeless.
The author as doctor is ever-present, notionally rational and sceptical, but the Oxford literary graduate also makes incisive deconstructions. On reflecting about an extraordinary ibogaine experience that someone describes to him, he writes:
A trip experience of eighteen or more hours is made up of thousands, tens of thousands of individual episodes: thoughts, sensations, pictures, short sequences, snatches of conversation—all momentary fragments for the most part, like dreams. Yet all that gets smoothed, compressed, modelled, into a story—a trip report.
As Mitchell points out, a reasonably long trip is a range of emotions, memories, and visions. The story we tell ourselves post hoc is a characterization; as true for a whole renaissance as it is for a single trip. One must surely remain vigilant of a descending, universal veil in order that the richness and diversity of psychedelics are not done away with.
In a chapter on psychedelics and meditation Mitchell delves into non-dual states and 5-MeO-DMT—‘Duality is crumbling like the masonry on a temple dedicated to Descartes at the foot of a volcano’. He also discusses that tedious arch-intellectual of the American establishment, Sam Harris. Although a fan, Mitchell finds rigidity in Harris’ rationale that psychedelics and meditation don’t really mix, finding such distinctions less clear through the ‘Toad’.
And so when we wake up, or make sense, when we think we’ve caught them in our net, we also stand in danger of obscuring the inherent mystery of psychedelics with our generic (and yet overly-personalised) models and hypotheses.
As Ten Trips unfolds and Mitchell travels deeper into different South American cultures, peppered throughout with reflective sections on psychedelia more broadly, the book gets more deliciously weird. Not only are his personal experiences more off the acceptable renaissance territory, but the individuals and characters are more attuned to far flung alien worlds and views. And paradoxically, this is because they are more rooted, not lost.
It is in this space that resolutions are found. Near the end the author finds his ‘drug of choice’ and there is the resolution of narrative (ably abetted by the fabulous poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who he was also ‘on’ at the same time). He writes:
Somehow in this Andean cactus garden, under the influence of wachuma, I had happened upon a lost ‘Englishness’, an indigeneity of my own—a time when everything in the natural world was still charged with urgent, personal significance—layered in me as deeply as the land, only obscured under the mud of hundreds of years of reason. The lesson was enchanted, and we had disengaged with it: that was the lesson.
In a perfect therapeutic arc he alights on the relationship with his father, but resonances of his heritage, country, and Englishness echo through. In the rootedness of his surroundings and its people, and his own history, he finds the mystery hidden away behind the veil of the spectacle of current day reason. It’s a deeply satisfying and well written moment.
While I wholeheartedly agree with Mitchell that we should ‘treat the trip not as an experiment or a therapy but as a poem, a drama, a dream’, it should also be noted that the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ is not ‘owned by clinical science in the West’ as he suggests. It is the clinical science—spectacle and all. The poetry never left; it persists behind the regulatory and manufactured veil, just as K does.
Ten Trips is a fine addition to the literature on psychedelics. However, I would have preferred the title he suggested to his editor (and mentions in his acknowledgments): Hyperdelic Smash Tour. It suggests the very best of the book; a chaotic but meaningful journey through anywhere to somewhere.