Also meant to add: There is a Cervantes-like obsession in the McKenna brothers with the lovingly focused impossible task. Their attempts to execute actual alchemy are both earnest and batshit, and they know that, and like Don Quixote who has flashes of awareness, they keep at the doomed to fail delusional effort because it’s righteous to fail being wrong for the right reasons.
It’s all very baroque performance arty on some level.
Love your writing. It’s always evident that you’re both blisteringly bright and that you have done a lot of work on yourself, now in possession of the Authentic Person’s proper self assessment. It’s a subtle and uncommon pairing.
On the topic at hand, I really keep coming back to McKenna myself a lot because I just can’t make the man. He’s like some kind of bizarre inconsistency heuristic on all levels of his life. It’s abundantly clear he was comfortable working on collapses metaphors making mythos real.
"If anyone wants me to go into those criticisms, we can. Just comment to let me know." I don't know anything about them, so please do.
"The Schizophrenic, which I’m also going to treat as a cartoon because nobody really needs to take 50-year-old ideas about mental illness seriously." What do you mean by that? Ideas about schizophrenia at their time or schizophrenia in general?
Also meant to add: There is a Cervantes-like obsession in the McKenna brothers with the lovingly focused impossible task. Their attempts to execute actual alchemy are both earnest and batshit, and they know that, and like Don Quixote who has flashes of awareness, they keep at the doomed to fail delusional effort because it’s righteous to fail being wrong for the right reasons.
It’s all very baroque performance arty on some level.
Love your writing. It’s always evident that you’re both blisteringly bright and that you have done a lot of work on yourself, now in possession of the Authentic Person’s proper self assessment. It’s a subtle and uncommon pairing.
On the topic at hand, I really keep coming back to McKenna myself a lot because I just can’t make the man. He’s like some kind of bizarre inconsistency heuristic on all levels of his life. It’s abundantly clear he was comfortable working on collapses metaphors making mythos real.
Fun stuff.
"If anyone wants me to go into those criticisms, we can. Just comment to let me know." I don't know anything about them, so please do.
"The Schizophrenic, which I’m also going to treat as a cartoon because nobody really needs to take 50-year-old ideas about mental illness seriously." What do you mean by that? Ideas about schizophrenia at their time or schizophrenia in general?