In my (fairly limited) experience of psychedelic fungi, the main effect of eating them is that you lose your settled beliefs about what constitutes “normal”. This happens partially or completely, depending on how much psychoactive you ingest. But either way, everything you usually take granted is suddenly new and fascinating.
Now a parent, I’ve often wondered how trippy it must be being a baby, and whether the sheer newness of everything is one of the reasons we find early childhood near-impossible to remember. For if adults have to take psychoactives to be temporarily relieved of ingrained ideas about how the world works, babies simply haven’t acquired those ideas yet.
By the age of about three, my daughter had a basic working knowledge of what is and isn’t “normal” in her little world. This was also roughly the point where she started to find surrealism funny rather than just baffling or upsetting. These things go hand-in-hand: to see something as absurd, you need a well-established template for “normal” or you won’t get the joke.
Now nearly five, she’s embraced surrealist humour and recently asked the cat solemnly if he was made of cheese. I was thinking about this when we watched Disney’s interpretation of Alice in Wonderland together. The movie (70 years old this week) seems strangely dated now — despite being an update of a book written in 1865. And the story’s evolution seems to be to track a gradual loss of confidence in the nature of reality, that’s seen all of us – adults and babies alike – sliding toward a hallucinatory new normal.
Victorian England was confident in its ability to distinguish reality from nonsense. This culture’s solution-oriented practicality abounds across Britain’s architecture and infrastructure: our many handsome Victorian-era railway bridges and viaducts. So practical were they that Charles Dickens satirised the hyper-focus on bare facts in the teacher Thomas Gradgrind, a figure in his 1855 novel Hard Times dedicated to stripping all wonder out of schoolchildren in place of abstract facts. Overly-arid educational programmes are still described as “Gradgrindian”.
Under assault from Gradgrind and his real-world analogues, the realm of fantasy retreated to the nursery. Lewis Carroll’s Alice, written in 1865, joined the surrealist verse of Edward Lear (1812-1888) and the proto-fantasy-fiction of George MacDonald (1824-1905) in cementing the realm of fantasy as something only for children.
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