Obtaining the Mystical: An Interview with Dr. Erik Davis (2024)

Modern day psychonaut Dr. Erik Davis is an American writer, scholar, journalist, and public speaker whose writings range from rock criticism to cultural analysis to esoteric explorations of California’s history. He is the author of Techgnosis, High Weirdness, Nomad Codes, and Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium.

Chase

A new Erik Davis book for me and the rest of your superfans is more than just another book release. A new Dr. D book is not a pub date, it is a capital E EVENT. And what an EVENT your new book, Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium sounds like it’s going to be. Can you tell me a little bit about this forthcoming (now available) experience of a text?

Erik

Well for hardcore Erik Davis fans, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that it’s only about 50,000 words. The good news is that it’s classic Erik Davis: subcultural archaeology, art history, freak ethnography, media theory, sacred and profane iconography, and a general air of entertaining weirdness. It’s also profusely illustrated with images from the LSD blotter archive of Mark McCloud, who was my main partner in crime in terms of research. So it’s real purty—and we made sure not to have the layout be “trippy,” so there is a contrast between the cool formality of the layout and the wildness of the images.

There has never been a book about LSD blotter, and very few essays have even been written about the form, so Blotter is also a rarity these days: a psychedelic book that covers genuinely new ground! In addition, no one has written about the form as the unique “medium” it is, a strange tendril of underground print culture you get to consume (if you want).

Chase

Your writing style is so electric, so alive! It’s a motion. Your writing seems to be an import from Borges’s Tlön. How do you do it? I understand time, patience, blood, sweat, tears, and other fluids, but I swear there’s another element, a mystical element. What advice do you have for new writers? How can they obtain the mystical?

Erik

Hmmm. I work pretty hard on writing, but over time it has also come more naturally to me. I found a story I wrote when I was ten years old a couple years ago, and I can recognize traces (or seeds?) of my “voice”: a certain humor, a certain street-smart attraction to slang, an existential undertow. So in some ways it’s always been there, and even papers I wrote in high school my teachers told me “sounded like the way I spoke.” And since I am also a reasonably gifted extemporaneous speaker, there is an aliveness to the prose that I think comes from that unusually intimate connection, in my case, between writing and speaking. I “hear” my prose as I write it, which means I am very attentive to the prosody, the rhythm, assonance, and alliteration that helps make prose sing in a poetic way (it also explains the fact that most of my misspellings are hom*onyms—I am “hearing” the word as I (mis)type it!). I rewrite a lot, and have been using computers to do it since the 1980s, so I am a very cut-and-paste, multiple revision guy. Some of the singing is quite natural, but a lot of it requires a lot of work—if I turned my work in earlier, it would still be competent, but I choose to keep rewriting so it can sometimes take off. Even though I write nonfiction prose, I believe in invoking the spirit of poetry, and the particular pleasures of description (especially of enigmatic forces and feelings) as an art of the impossible.

Chase

The acid that exists on top of or underneath or to the side of that fabulous street art of the perforated age changed our culture so much, vastly shifted and contorted and morphed the collective unconscious, and while there were some casualties along the way, I think most of the change was for the better. Some of the great psychonauts like McKenna thought, like many thought, the net was going to be almost like a virtual version of the collective trip, and maybe it was for a little bit, but it seems corporate and governmental entities have recuperated its revolutionary power and nearly stomped it out. What do you think is to be done about this? How do we get back on the trip? How do we get back to the collective shifting?

Erik

There was a lot of genuine hope and possibility in modernity. There is a way to imagine a history of the modern world where goods were shared, human collectivity nourished, products made in consort with material constraints, and technologies built with human flourishing in mind. Those things were possible, at least to a degree, so while I can look at digital utopianism as naive—a naïveté that, for better or worse, I never fully bought as a journalist and participant in the 1990s cyberpunk tech theory scene—it also reflected actual people, institutions, possibilities. But I am afraid the windows have largely closed, and that, whatever else it does, AI will ensh*ttify the Internet big time by lowering the cost to churn out distracting crap to effectively zero. I think things will get bad enough that some or many of us will be driven more fully back to offline life, community, nature, and connection, albeit in a more stressful and unsupported and precarious way. That’s one of the reasons a lot of my energy these days is poured into the Alembic, a center in Berkeley that specializes in meditation, movement, and visionary arts and culture. We do stream online, but the point is to get people together in a room, exploring the mystery together. The digital world can do that to some degree—I think podcasting and Substack are overall a very positive development, although the problem of noisy overwhelm is impossible to avoid—but that we will have more chance to reconnect with our embedded condition on the earth as things continue to unravel.