Barrett: Burnout Or Beatitude?

taken from Escimo Chain

Where did Syd go? The authorised version of the Barrett legend is that he 'fell into an abyss of his own making' (Julian Cope in Foreword to Crazy Diamond, p 7). Under the heavy pressure of stardom, he turned to LSD, which led in a spiral to more negative pressure and more LSD. Increasingly out of touch with social reality, he ceased to be the leader of what he had created, slipped to being an incoherent contributor somewhere on the margin, and then wandered away somewhere else, unable to take the pace.

Like all myths and legends, this story smuggles in assumptions which are not spelt out. We might see Icarus in it: he flew too high and fell to earth - or Faust: he sought for secret knowledge and power, and was damned for it. A comfortingly normative myth, as the man who lives beyond the edge is punished for his presumption, but inadequate in several ways, above all because it tells us nothing about Syd's subjectivity, then or now. It gives us a map, but it brings none of the landscape to life.

With the myth come labels. Schizophrenic, paranoiac, acid-casualty, eccentric, goofed, spaced - these are the labels that are used to define the place where we can't go with understanding. The implication, even among the most sympathetic, is of breakdown and failure. Yet there is another way of framing up Syd's life story. Syd was a culture hero of psychedelia, but the version of his life above is resolutely post or non-psychedelic: though Syd does not live inside the hive any more, this is the hive's version of his story. What is the other story that this one suppresses?

In the sixties there was no success like failure. The mythology of psychedelia did not talk up success or the people who pursued it - Branson only became a role model much later on. The key idea behind the psychedelic movement, formulated by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception as early as 1954, was that mind-altering drugs set you free. According to Huxley, the human brain is 'a great reducing valve', and what it reduces is the wealth of possible experience. Each of us according to this creed is born capable of seeing differently, of seeing more intensely, of experiencing the wonder and terrifying beauty of being part of creation, rather than separate from it.

Huxley also explained how it came about that most of us, most of the time, are not in touch with all this. We all sadly have to learn to negotiate our trolleys carefully down life's crowded supermarket aisles: we are forced to learn to close down on the sense of wonder, to put a distance between ourselves and true vision, so we can meet our targets and fulfil our quotas. We learn to control, and we learn too well. The self, which arises through the need for controlling and manipulating the world, cannot switch itself off, and we are trapped in the games of survival, which become the games of goal-seeking. And so, enter the psychedelic drugs, mescaline and LSD, which can get in there behind the self and start throwing switches, restoring something of the original sense of splendour.

Cynics may want to deny that sixties youth in general or Syd in particular had so philosophical a purpose, and link drug taking with hedonism, but these are false alternatives. The philosopher searches for an enhanced sense of self, the mystic for an encounter with god, while the kid just wants to play his bongos in the dirt and not have to do what he's told; but if the kid and the mystic and the philosopher all do the same thing, then they're all fighting the same enemy, of impoverished consciousness. The kid may have been more intuitive, less rational about what what he was doing, but this at the time was nothing negative: it just gave him that little head start of flower-child innocence, which was part of what the whole thing was about.

It was fine for social visionaries and bongo-children, but this prevailing creed created a sharp dilemma for rock culture heroes. By doing your musical thing you were blazing a trail towards the Great Letting Go, but at the same time you weren't doing your career any harm. The last thing a successful rock-musician could do if he wanted to stay successful was follow the propaganda. You might be telling others to 'turn off your mind, relax and float downstream', but you'd be foolish if you did too much of it yourself.

Syd was caught in the dilemma. Obviously highly sensitive to the zeitgeist, he was under conflicting pressures, to do what the culture said you did, and to be a suckcess. How serious the dilemma was can be seen through the Beatles, who handled the need to get in touch with something Outside by going off to join the Maharishi. No doubt it seemed a good idea at the time, but it somehow trivialised the revolutionary psychedelic potential: finding yourself was just something you pencilled in your diary.

Implicitly, Syd took the whole thing more seriously. With an honourable contempt for suckcess, which seems sadly alien nowadays, he chose to take LSD, and to go on taking LSD. By doing so he became the glorious but tragic hero of the psychedelic Mythos, the shaman who decided to find out what lay beyond the borders, and to live there. It is not enough to call him the victim of career pressure, because he understood that part of his role was to refuse it. His incoherent non-performances, strumming untuned guitars while the band played on somewhere else and so on, are part of the texture of his refusal, keeping on opening up the music, not letting it settle into a mould he had already reached beyond. In the more self consciously high-art worlds of jazz and painting, the chaos of pure inspiration was followed by other artists with success and approbation, not rejected. Syd was keeping in touch with the zeitgeist in his refusals, but even in that experimental heyday rock was not quite open to the amount of chaos he claimed. Of course he earned all the labels - schizophrenic, paranoiac - because these are the labels which normality applies to those who evade its clutches - part of a process that most will describe as disintegration.

Nor is it surprising that it is musicians who took the other path who most decry the psychedelic Mythos. Dave Gilmour insisted in 1982 that 'Syd's story is a sad story romanticised by people who don't know anything about it' (Crazy Diamond, p 131). But Gilmour had long before made his choice - he wasn't part of the psychedelic Mythos. The authorised version of Syd's life is the version of these other musicians, and it testifies to their unease not just about dumping Syd but also about dumping what he stood for. If suckcess and the glamorous world of the rock star are our measure of human value we will have to agree with Gilmour and the others - but again the psychedelic Mythos suggests the possibility of other values which are more than merely 'romantic'.

It's not possible to know how much or how consciously Syd chose to live by the psychedelic creed, and how much he had it thrust upon him (there are persistent rumours that some of his acid consumption came from the spike), but his tenuous relationship with possessions and his refusal of glamorous opportunity are consistent motifs in his life after 1970, and he probably continued to accept gifts of acid long after he recognised that it had the power to change him. It is well-known that LSD is not addictive; there must have been some element of choice for Syd in where he went and what he chose to experience.

Nor is it easy to decide how much we should regret what happened to him. If we conceive of rock stars as people who make music, then Syd didn't make much of it, which is a shame. But at another level, rock is a kind of theatre: its images are made of the lives of people who stand for new values and different ways of living. If as is often claimed James Dean's death completes his life, it is because of the inner logic that connects his creed - 'too fast to live, too young to die' - with his fate. Dean's story too can be read as punishment, but most of us don't want to see it that way: we may choose not to live that way ourselves, but we understand and share the glory of the man who did. Syd has a place near him as one of the exploding iconic stars of the culture-world: his life also shows us who he is and what he stands for.

Syd did not sacrifice himself: he sacrificed his self. The distinction is small but important, as it raises questions about who and what we are. With the hindsight of acid-casualty it's tempting to rewrite what Huxley said: it's not the brain which is the reducing valve, but the self. To understand where Syd is now, and what his refusals mean, we must understand what selves do, and how they're made.

A panoply of psychologists and other social scientists has been assuring us for over a century now that we are not, mostly, in touch with the real reasons for our actions. We feel we are in command when we make choices, but we're not: really we chose the Cadbury's Flake because of the associations someone linked with it through television images, and we chose our partner for reasons of class and psychological fit which we didn't recognise at the time. A more extreme example is post-hypnotic suggestion. The hypnotiser has suggested that the subject untie his shoelace ten minutes after 'waking up': he does so, and when asked why he has a perfectly good reason - his feet were hot or he wanted to wriggle his toes. Consciousness is a machine which invents reasons for what we do, in order to give us the feeling that we are in control. It makes the cosmos more user-friendly. Selves are big ships made of this kind of timber; they float in rivers of sensation but they give us coherence, shape and control, and above all a sense of familiarity.

Unusually good artists often have shaky selves. Charles Baudelaire, Vincent Van Gogh, Dylan Thomas, Charlie Parker were all open to an intensity that came from somewhere beyond the suck-self; they didn't have good trolley management skills, but were attuned to following every wayward impulse that gripped them, as they recognised that living like this nourished their art. They were at war with familiarity and self-coherence, and they were not in control. Behind the psychedelic myth is the more generalised one of the romantic artist. All of the above, seen from closeup, led sad lives romanticised by people who 'didn't know anything about it', but it is as wrong to see them as failures as it is to see Syd that way.

It has to be said that, for a functioning artist, Syd went too far. The artist's trick is to unfocus the self, to see things new, but there still has to be enough self to record what is seen. But his life now may be a continuation of what his music tried to do, not its negation. His music sought strangeness and unfamiliarity, and wherever he is now, we can be sure that the world is less familiar to him than it is to most of us. It may have its moments of wonder when objects shine out truth of being, or it may be haunted by terror, because the unfamiliar must always have the potential for terror. But Syd's self - his capacity for creating and experiencing familiarity - is what he blew.

We can watch it through the stages. The earliest stuff he wrote, say Arnold Layne, is full of ordinary social assumptions, about perverts and so on: the music is strange and unfamiliar as is the subject matter, but the song as a whole conveys recognisable social attitudes. By Jug Band Blues all that has disappeared: there is only a texture that comes out of nowhere. The line 'I'm most obliged to you for making it clear that I'm not here' has been taken as a barbed comment on the way the other Floyds treated Syd, but the later line: 'I'm wondering who can be writing this song' plunges identity into doubt - only the halting cadence behind the line, wavering between major and minor, hints at command, control, identity. When the song gets positive the self seems to bounce back, 'I don't care that nothing is mine,' but it's an attempt to edit a self, or even create one, not a confident statement by a self.

It's this song which shows Syd choosing his path. 'I don't care'. Cracked and carefree, it shows him choosing the psychedelic myth. The path thereafter had its down side, its moments of wayward, diminished selfhood, and megalomania, violences and oddnesses. But in continuing to subvert the controlling entity in himself, in insisting on experiment to the point of infantilism, Syd was not merely failing to be a rock'n'roll star: he was living out a bigger myth.

Dr Adrian Eckersley 1997

The Doctor is nostalgic about sixties music and the knighthood of astral travel. He claims a distant family tie with the Huxley he quotes above, but, always at odds with received values, he chose the thornier path of life's supermarket aisles. There he passes the time perfecting trolley manipulation skills, which include the writing of fiction, and the study and teaching of literature.