John Higgs, author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary, was gracious enough to grant a two part interview to increasingintelligence.com. We published part one several weeks ago and are pleased to present part two below:
increasingintelligence.com: How would you describe that unwavering "core spark" of Leary that transcended the transient personalities?
John Higgs: I don't think I can, Sean, not in a few sentences. I spent the 113,000 words that make up the book trying to sketch exactly that, but trying to condense it to a paragraph is just beyond me. Annoying really, as you can catch the 'core spark' of a person in a flash, but never really properly describe it.
For a while I used the phrase "an optimism addict" to describe Leary as succintly as I could, but I stopped using that when it got misheard as "an optimistic addict", heh!
i2: Most of the other books and articles on Timothy Leary (including Leary's autobiography Flashbacks) fail to mention much about the role of Brian Barritt in Leary's life as fugitive. Why do you think that is so?
JH: There's a few reasons, the main one being that Leary and Barritt had a big falling out around 1980, which led to Brian being written dismissed in 'Flashbacks'. This was basically because Brian dedicated himself to taking heroin for a decade, rather than writing and being productive. 'Flashbacks' has since stayed in print, whereas Leary's previous books which did include Barritt, in particular 'Confessions of a Hope Fiend', have not. (Others that mention Brian are less approachable than 'Flashbacks', such as 'The Intelligence Agents'.) Happily though they reconciled before Tim died.
There's also the fact that most commentary about Tim and his life comes from people who knew him in the last 20 years of his life, and this tends to be filtered through Californian preoccupations and counter-culture politics. Which is all absolutely understandable and I certainly don't mean it as a criticism, but it is very noticeable to an outsider such as myself. Brian lives in London and is off the radar to a lot of people, so to speak. As he in particular, and the whole exile period in general, was frequently skipped over it made sense for me to go into detail about it all in the book, as I had a lot of new information that wasn't on the public record. And it's a great period, lets face it, the archytype of a disgraced philospher exiled from his homeland and forced to wander in the wilderness is a pretty compelling one.
There's a piece of paper in Leary's archive where he made a list of each year since he first used psychedelics, divided them into the four seasons, and listed for each quarter his closest male influence, his most significant lover and the work he produced at the time. It starts at Harvard with Richard Alpert being listed as his biggest influence, then Alpert and Ralph Metzner together (the only time he had equal male influences), and so on. What's interesting is that many of the people who are better known in the Leary story are not listed - people like Aldous Huxley, Art Kleps, or Eldridge Cleaver, for example. Instead there are people like John Griggs (of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love) and of course Barritt, who figures very heavily during the early seventies. I wasn't able to give all those people he listed their full credit in his life, but it was good to be able to tell Brian's story.
i2: It seems that few new intellectual icons are capturing the public consciousness that way that Leary and some others did in the recent past. One might argue that as mass media becomes less and less massive while "the long tail" of micro-media becomes more the norm, almost no one is likely to be famous for more than 15 minutes (15 friends on MySpace, 15 megabytes, etc.). It even seems that Osama Bin Laden is less popular (and potentially less threatening) that Leary was when Nixon labeled him the "most dangerous man in America." With that in mind, do you think there will ever be another Timothy Leary?
JH: It's a very interesting question, and I don't disagree with your take on it. A big part of the problem is that the commercial reality for western mass media is that it must give the audience what it wants, and people prefer to be given information that reinforces their beliefs, rather than challenges them. As a result it's hard to imagine anything as wild or radical as Learyism being conveyed by the mainstream these days.
I sometimes wonder if Hugo Chavez is the closest thing we have to a Timothy Leary today. He's utterly demonised in the mainstream media - in America at least - as a dangerous, self promoting idiot who is leading vulnerable people astray. Pretty much how most people saw Leary by the late sixties, really! The two men both have ideas that that are presented as worthless in the media, in a way that doesn't explain their extraordinary popularity or the size of their following. Leary's promotion of expanded consciousness and Chavez' approach to geopolitics are very different causes, of course, but there's certainly a similarity in the way they both push the mainstream's buttons. If nothing else it goes to show that there will always be shitkickers!
Of course, the world as it appears in the mass media is very different from the world we live in. There are all sorts of amazing things going today, away from the mainstream spotlight, and their value and their impact is real, regardless of whether the mainstream acknowledges them or not. We have to go and look for the good stuff, rather than expect it to be handed to us, and we have to remember that something's value is independent of it's celebrity, but there are big juicy ideas out there - ones that would humble Leary! So in a sense it's not really a big deal that the mainstream is so narrow, assuming you can see it for what it is.
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