VINCENT: Is it out of your LSD you’re talking now or are you jumping?
EMILY: I’m jumping.
VINCENT: Oh, jumping. Because I don’t want to go off into marriage, that’s a whole other discussion. I want to stay on what you learned out of your LSD experience.
EMILY: I’m not a pragmatic person, so I can’t say that it had a use. I only know that the only time I’ve ever gone beyond any point of identity in terms of Emily Benson was then.
VINCENT: But now, when you look at reality, has it made a new imprint on you? Do you see things in a different way? Do you feel more religiosity? I sound like David Susskind.
EMILY: No, but you asked me about the religious part. First of all, in a crazy way, I don’t want to use the word religious, but you know that from my father I have a mystical side to my mind, my nature. And I’ll tell you, Vinnie, the phoniest thing, the Zen koan at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye—I really love Salinger very much, I’m very hooked up with him — it says we know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Now that’s a very kind of trite thing, it’s pat, but I really get it and I get all the vibrations. You know I called Marsha up when I was under LSD and she said I was talking pure poetry.
VINCENT: Really?
EMILY: A child is crying in the wall. You know the idea that flowers cry when they’re picked? Well the sensitivity was so great that if the flower was picked, I could hear it crying. I didn’t identify with the flower, I was the flower. And it wasn’t like I’m such a sensitive person or anything, it was simply that the power or the chemistry of the mind reached a certain level. I remember pouring a glass of milk, and as I did, I experienced myself being poured into the glass. The milk was part of me, an extension, that’s what I mean by mystical.
VINCENT: Incredible.
EMILY: I shouldn’t really say mystical, because the word evokes a whole mysterious realm of associations, whereas this was absolutely logical. Say for instance right now we both look up: we both see a certain kind of blue sky, a certain kind of star, and it makes a certain kind of sense, so that if we each sat down to paint it, the paintings would correlate to a great degree. But if we both took LSD, the art would instantly change. That’s what pre-Columbian art is all about, you know, because those guys weren’t straight, they were chemically different, and the whole distortion of style was just a reflection of what they saw. The reality of the landscape is completely determined by the people who see it.
VINCENT: Of course.
EMILY: Like when a madman on the street says get away from me, it’s because he sees a person with a knife trying to kill him. It’s not that he’s a lunatic seeing a mirage; he actually, for his own mind, sees it. It’s completely real. That’s why the word mystical is misleading. You know, Vinnie, I really believe that the nature of the fucking sands would change if the chemistry was a little bit different in all our heads. For instance, if my chemistry was different, I might see that this sand wasn’t sand. Look, I’m going over to it right now, I’m walking to the sand and I’m going to the LSD experience. I’m getting canyons, and these little things that dip in all of a sudden become miles dipping in. The top becomes sunbaked peaks, and these specks become arid plants growing.
VINCENT: No kidding!
EMILY: And the white becomes illusions of clouds floating on top. All kinds of things start to happen if I let my mind go. I don’t associate just sand is sand, like I’ve always seen sand and I know it because I’m secure that that’s sand. All the security is taken away from everything. Suddenly I’ve never really seen sand before — and I haven’t, because my eyes have changed, the retinas.
VINCENT: But isn’t that flirting with the psychotic? Isn’t it like a psychotic interlude? I’m scared, Emmy.
EMILY: Of course, it induces a false psychosis, that’s what the drug is all about. But the term psychotic means a flight from reality, and the reality, as I just said, is based upon what we all define it to be. If we took those limitations away, a psychotic would just be someone on another level.
VINCENT: Why don’t we take them away?
EMILY: Why don’t we? Because we have to function within orders, within laws, within rules of society, whatever it is people say we have to function in. You know that as well as I do.
VINCENT: You’re brilliant, Emmy. But look at the sand. You know, when you walk over there it’s not a canyon.
EMILY: Why isn’t it? Because I know all about sand, I’ve walked on it since I was a child, I know you can walk on it and you’re not going to sink. But if you never have walked on sand before….
VINCENT: So you’re saying you have to go back to the innocence of not knowing.
EMILY: Back to a total innocence of not knowing.
VINCENT: And if you were on LSD and you walked over to that sand, you might feel you were sinking?
EMILY: I could feel that the sand might be a grave beginning to open.
VINCENT: In other words, you don’t really believe that there are objective limits.
EMILY: No, I don’t believe that we, who are all sane, know all there is to know about that sand. I think that if we took LSD right now, we’d know something else about it. The thing is, if we were babies, we couldn’t say what we felt about it; we’d just have a certain kind of feeling about the sensation. We couldn’t articulate it, right?
VINCENT: Yah.
EMILY: And it wouldn’t be the same for both of us. Maybe for me it would be dirt or shit and for you it would be some kind of cream like your mother used or hair or what it feels like to touch your clothes. Whatever these things are, they wouldn’t become sand right away, with a word.
VINCENT: Look, I understand that under LSD, I might experience this coffee cup in huge, monumental fashion; I just wonder if there isn’t a reality outside that. I mean I can make this into a thousand bigger or different qualities, but after all it is porcelain, it is four inches in diameter, and it can hold maybe half a pint of liquid. Aren’t those limits that exist outside any potential it has in our psyche?
EMILY: Yes, but those limits are absolutely infinitesimal.
VINCENT: What do you mean?
EMILY: That the possibilities are infinite, whereas the limitations are infinitesimal; that this is porcelain, that it weighs half a pound, that it holds half a pint, these qualities, confronting the possibilities of it, are minute. They’re nothing to what it could possibly be. You know that Marsha, for example, would never take LSD.
VINCENT: I know she wouldn’t.
EMILY: She’s terrified of all drugs. She needs her controls, she can’t give them up. Of course she will someday.
VINCENT: You think she’ll take LSD?
EMILY: No, I think someday she’ll surrender, she’ll love.
9. EMILY AND MARSHA PLAY A GAME
MARSHA: Okay, Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre?
EMILY: Sidney Greenstreet.
MARSHA: Joe DiMaggio or Arthur Miller?
EMILY: Joe DiMaggio, he went to the funeral.
MARSHA: He arranged the whole thing. Jack Kennedy or—
EMILY: What about me?
MARSHA: Wait a second, you’ll have your turn, you’ll be asking me. Jack Kennedy or Fidel Castro?
EMILY: That’s very close. When you first said it, I didn’t think so, but it’s really very close.