The one where I talk about sex and the mind and my C-class drug…

The following is an extract from my book, Silly Games to Save the World, which is available on Substack. It is a compendium of new ideas about poetry, philosophy, psychology and politics, all gathered under the general question WTF is happening to us? There are various playgrounds, poems, new writing and links available over a mild paywall. It’s published every other Sunday. For the last six months or so I’ve also been posting 101 Extinction Songs, poems about the world’s most Endangered Creatures, and many of these remain available for free on the site.

The starting-point for the philosophy is a children’s skipping-rhyme that came to me in a dream. I use this as a version of the ‘Seven Ages’ of humankind - Dot, Spot, To and Fro, Round, and Up, and Out You Go. These Stages are a kind of shorthand to help me write about distinct phases of life, from infancy to extreme age.

Thieves In The Temple

I am lying alone in bed in daylight, in my flat by the canal. I am gently inhaling a legal, C-class drug and waiting to see things. See things as in seeing things, I am waiting to have visions. It’s 2023.

In the alchemical world of salt, mercury and sulphur, where (a) things happen, or (b) might as well have happened, or (c-class) didn’t but I made them up, this did happen, tens of thousands of times, does, several times a week. Thomas De Quincey had his opium; I have my disco drug. It’s been a constant inclination, habit, addiction, for nearly twenty years and it’s time I mentioned it, as it’s affected me in many ways. A great deal of what I’ve written, often for better, or how I’ve acted, sometimes for worse, has been influenced by this compulsion.

In the state of Up, the state of seeking wisdom, the indigo realm of passing things on, I generally do this to help me enter Active Imagination, whereby you open your conscious resting mind to the shades of the Unconscious. Most people who do this don’t need a disco drug to take them there, but I do know it’s a habit and that’s how habits roll. I mean to write about what I found there – as in And What Alice Found There – in a later chapter, the one called Out You Go, not because I think it’s innately interesting, it’s only me, but because in the event of my mind going out before I go out, I would like those who love me to know I knew, no, that I know, the way to mysterious sweet places, where mysterious means places where time seems not to pass, and sweet means like home. Places where the person you knew is still passing. My mum might find the actors from the old plays there.

In the state of Round – the state of living life to the full, the realm under the blue sky where you travel far enough to see how things were, but not far enough yet to rise up into the next dimension of knowing why they were like that, what they meant, how they might be understood, or somehow help or heal – in the state of Round I did the C-class drug for a pretty different reason.

 I would lie alone in bed in the dead of night, in my flat by the canal. I would gently inhale the legal drug and wait to see things. See things as in seeing things, I would wait to have visions. It was about 2010.

Love come quick, love come in a hurry.

In the state of Round, the life preceding wisdom, that meant sexual fantasies. Fantasies in no hurry at all, fantasies lasting hours, the longest of the small hours, fantasies that truly seemed to tell themselves, generate, propel themselves relentlessly without the guidance of my imagination, or choice, or any writerly input. If I couldn’t reach the extinguishing moment – and sometimes the story was so enthralling I wouldn’t let the extinction happen – I would eventually pack it in exhausted and let the effects wear off.

The creature within, that would one day grow strong and help me move from Round to Up, that creature would be quietly pleading Go to sleep, that’s enough now, look after yourself. Most times I’d start right up again, like Edmund with the Turkish Delight and the White Witch in the space in the forest, to see what would happen next, to stand in the falling snow and listen out for sleigh-bells. Then I’d set up another story and let it roll like film for my pleasure. I’d go on like that for half the night, inhaling, lying back, seeing things, go again. I had never encountered this before, have never experienced it anywhere else, don’t know a soul who experienced it like I did, can’t do it anymore, and wouldn’t if I could. Somewhere inside me something called it a night. I wasn’t in the greatest shape in those days. Not every man alone is an alchemist, and I wasn’t then. It mostly happened to the music of Prince.

*

Rush

Anyone who knows poppers might guess I’m talking about poppers. They have several chemical names and slang names, but if you look up poppers you’ll find all the warnings you need.

Never drink them, they are a poison. 

You inhale it, it’s a vasodilator, meaning it opens, widens the blood vessels. It’s prescribed for various medical conditions, chiefly angina. It’s not meant to be used recreationally but very widely is. It’s sold as ‘room odourizer’ which is, to say the least, telling the truth slant. It can damage your eyes. Folks have tried to ban it here, but they never quite succeed. Perhaps it has its fans in the Palace of Westminster. It turns you on for a short spell, it goes well with dancing. If you overdo it you get a headache.

I’ve never read about or heard of anyone experiencing the effects quite in the way I have. I’ve no pride or shame or stake in saying any of this, I just think it’s taught me stuff about creativity, joy, the Self – selfishness too, which I’ll get to – and how certain lit cottages in the brain would appear to be close neighbours.

Because after about five years of using it exclusively for Dionysian delight, I realized that using it gave me ideas for my work. For the dramas, fictions, poems that were and are my daily function. I found that its quality of dilation, of opening, solved structural problems within plots and scenes. Sometimes it gave me whole lines, twists in tales, takes on events, flashes of insight. It amazed me.

When the wracked and fevered Robert Louis Stevenson was woken from a druggy nightmare by his concerned wife Fanny, he famously cried out ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale!’ 

That’s the sound of Jekyll and Hyde being born. 

In Ian Rankin’s documentary on this subject, the actor Ewen Bremner, playing Stevenson, tubercular, high on cocaine, wakes up in a sweat, wild-eyed, saying ‘He drinks the potion, he drinks the potion!’ This may be too on point to be quite true – I figure that detail would have been in the plot from the start – but boy do I recognize the moment.

Stevenson’s first draft was certainly written in an astounding rush – three days, which is ten thousand words a day, I crack the fizz for a fifth of that – after which Fanny showed her appreciation of Robert’s frantic act of creation by calling it ‘full of utter nonsense’ and throwing it on the fire. For the next three days, with Fanny and the children nervously peering round the door, Robert sat there in his bed, sick, high, doing it all again in a sea of scrunched-up paper. Two drafts in six days: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And what title has he scrawled upon that crumpled first chapter?

*

Story Of The Door

There are three ways in which the C-class drug has played the guide in my lifetime: to the erotic, to the creative, and to the field of meditation. That’s a chronological progression, not an ascent towards nobility, or even dignity. I would say, again, with the old alchemists, in sterquiliniis invenitur, in filth it shall be found, but the only aspect of sexuality that can justly be called filth is the absence of consent. Everything else in sexuality, the sensual that sleeps in the cool white sheets of consensuality, seems to me pure Rainbow, an iridescence vaster than any single soul can grasp or imagine, and one of the few things a believer in human belief can happily call gifted from heaven.

So the work and play with the popper drugs was erotic, then also creative, then meditative too. 

Once there was only one, then two, now all three, steadily alongside, never together. The choice depends on energy, mood, time of day, state of mind. Things change in time because libido subsides, imagination endures, one begins to look for answers, or at least for better questions. Dot, Spot, To and Fro, Round and Up and Out You Go, as we sing on the school playground, turning our rope all the way to the bell.

The physiological and psychological openings that the popper drugs facilitate – my own stories of the door – clearly operate in a similar way in each case, whether the effects are spiritual, creative, or pornographic. What is decisively the case is that one cannot enter two rooms at once. I believe these chambers sit very close in the cerebrum, but to enter one is always not to enter another. The pornographic choice utterly precludes the creative one, and the other way round. But I know they are close neighbours in the brain because an hour of fruitful creative musing will hours later lead, scout’s dubious honour, to a powerful denouement in the earthier pursuit.

Staying with the body, some times of day the choice, the gate, quivers in two minds like the epiglottis at the top of the throat, the flap that keeps breath away from the gullet and food out of the windpipe. You should not have both at once. By and large the epiglottis means you can’t. That kind of gate.

The third way, Active Imagination – which semantically will do of course for a not-inaccurate description of both sexual fantasy and thinking up stuff for stories – can only be undertaken on its own terms. I tend to augment it with ritual, as Jung and his disciples say to: scented candles, gendered robes, incense, gong-baths and so on, but, aside from a distinct shift in the nature of the desired conclusion, how’s that essentially different from cranking up Thieves In The Temple or Little Red Corvette?

And though one might expect Active Imagination to overlap with writerly exploration, those two aspects of the triad also exclude one another, in my experience, entirely. My Active Imagination was intense before I began this book; it has steeply diminished since because, I think, of the level of creative energy I’m expending on the fictions, memoirs, and extrapolations of Silly Games. Trying to remember what happened, what might as well have, what I’m making up.

The Jungian psychologist Robert A Johnston, a fine advocate of and guide through Active Imagination, asserts that it makes one dream fewer dreams, because the Unconscious is being ‘attended to’ in conscious daylight rather than sleep. My experience inclines me to agree.

And whether the creatures I meet in my Unconscious end up as matter for poetry, it’s way too early to know. I spent the last six months of 2024 writing 101 poems about the world’s most Endangered Creatures – under the title Extinction Songs – so a distinctly conscious endeavour open to the unconscious, as any alert poetry ought to be without trying to be.  

*

All Being Well

The thing is a system of gates. If I’m alone and choose to lie down, do I lie down in order to write a better play, to explore my unconscious, or to vanquish sexual pressure?

Speaking of the latter, is there any departure in life that’s as total as that release? Death, as Wittgenstein said, is not an event in life, so I’m not counting death. Keats gets close to capturing it when the nightingale song ends – Fled is that music:– do I wake or sleep?– but solitary sexual climax has an extraordinary escape velocity I find nowhere else. The mind is drained of its props, prompts and persuasions with terrifying and gladdening instantaneity. The all-clear. How could one get through the day if it wasn’t?

This is probably a gendered thing, love is a many-gender’d thing, and one of a certain gender can only speak for that gender – well I’m open to some debate on that, if not exactly keen. In the event, I speak as a cisgender male and wish all the genders nothing but joy. To repeat myself, carousel not spiral, I don’t do binary anywhere. Those who fondly believe they’re of the Rainbow but will not accept the unaccepting are, to be blunt, of the Barcode.

*

So, I’m alone and choose to lie down. Let’s see what’s through the gates. At this point I feel duty-bound to reassure any nervously abiding companions that I’m not going to recount my personal preferences in any of these fields.

In Active Imagination yes but not yet, in literary endeavours obviously elsewhere, and, as for writing of the sexual field, if the inclinations are shared it shades to porn, and if they’re not it shades to drivel. What it is is the business end of nobody’s business.

What matters is the nature of the gates, and consequences of the choices.

There is a descending order of mental energy and cleanliness of mind, by which phrase I don’t mean moral rectitude, I mean blood alcohol. Active Imagination takes precedence. It’s what, all being well with me, I would most like to do with that holy window of privacy and peace. Once within the meditation, the initial choice is where to begin, what to visualize, where to be open to what might emerge. Robert A Johnston says he starts by the ocean; I start at the gateway to the woods by my home town. One hopes that the choices thereafter stem from the Unconscious. I end the meditation when I think I’ve seen as much as I can store, as I always rapidly jot down what appeared to me.

At a relatively clean, strong, sharp level of mood or mind, a middle state, I’ll lie down for storywork. That calls for silence, not gongs or When Doves Cry. The only choice with storywork is which project to choose. Pròject, projéct, projection, projectile, language knows the riddle. Only one story can be attended to at a given time – play, fiction, opera, poem – only one that’s at the right developmental stage for this mental angling trip. There’s no choice to make beyond that.

But if I lie down for sexual release, if I settle for that gate, many other choices can’t help but follow. At a level of mental strength that can rise to storytelling, the means of arousal are one’s own creation. Whereas the feeblest choice of all – the choice of the feeblest – is porn, which asks of the subject not much more than keep up. Something you see coming gets you hundreds of times. Someone ends up having to do what they want to anyway. Things lying around will have to be used, like a pantomime take on the gun in Chekhov. And so on.

If I feel stronger than that, which to be fair to me I tend to, another choice arises, between sexual memory – things that happened as they’re sort of remembered – and sexual fantasy – our old pal shit-you-make-up. The latter choice was of course the small-hour lab-work Prince sang along to all those years ago:

Feel like I’m looking for my soul

Like a poor man looking for gold

There’re thieves in the temple tonight

See? Of course Prince knew it was alchemy all the time.

Men alone, underground, undisturbed, seeking gold in lab or studio or study? Prince, Paracelsus, Isaac Newton, me: not all of them fools, in fact only one. And not all of them men – think of little Maria-Louise Von Franz, climbing trees to make a miraculous, no impossible, yellow pearl from resin and seawater, but she’s getting some fresh air, it’s already way better.

Anyway the contemplation – thieves in the contemplation tonight – of memory and fantasy gives me pause. I don’t have the science, as has doubtless been firmly supposed by now, to talk with confidence about what’s happening in the brain – chemically, physiologically – though I wonder if these speculations and suppositions might take an imaginative science grad down an interesting towpath one day – so I talk in metaphors, as poets, alchemists and therapists do, or in guesswork, as – what do the young say? – same. Down in the subterranean realm, I say down not morally or judgmentally, but down because the energy is low – low is what you settle for at a certain age in the afternoon – creative work is out of the question, meditation beyond you, these twin guides appear:

Come this way, say your memories of sex; come this way, say your fantasies of it. I’m reminded of something my director friend Alex Clifton wrote in The Actor’s Workbook, about mirror neurons: ‘cells that fire when you do something, but also when you watch someone else do something’. No not voyeurism, theatre. Theatre couldn’t exist without the mirror neurones.

Whether you do a star-jump or watch your friend do one, your brain’s mirror neurons will behave in exactly the same way.

Whatever glows upon the brain when one remembers sexual joy that happened (sort of happened, we’re talking memory, remember) and whatever lights up when one conjures sexual fantasy that certainly never did, it’s hard to believe the exact same lights aren’t switching on.  What’s it to the brain? What’s it to the brain – that wants only for the body to do what it must to propagate the species – whether you did that sweet ecstatic ludicrous weird thing long ago or last week, haven’t yet or never will? Same lights, same star-jumps.

Note on the parallel case for poets, if you’re still with us: what’s it to the poem whether you actually did or felt or saw what you’re describing? If the poem is good enough, it’s what will explain itself years later at a reading or seminar or soirée, not you.

The former choice – things that happened and are sort of remembered – is a pile of archives in a yellow old library, things fade and fall apart, the newer archives displace the old. What I find interesting about this choice, between sex memory and sex fantasy, is that, just like the prior choice between the creative and the arousing, once it’s made it really must stay made. To state this delicately, the downward (upward? homeward?) journey is disrupted, delayed, if the mind trips from one to the other. Either is fine, there can always be pressing reasons for either, but those chemicals really seem not to mix. Is it just me? I don’t know, I’m not soliciting contributions, I’m a freaking scorpio alchemist fascinated by this shit.

And let’s not lose sight of what I just lobbed in parenthetically: the brain that wants only for the body to do what it must to propagate the species. In every case – except sex that’s consciously conducted in the cause of making offspring, the way wildlife tends to do it – the brain is required to make a fool of the body.

To be sure, all the following examples are from the realm of the consensual; anything else is filth and not the subject here. But to take the descent through the circles of heaven: (a) sex with another in the name of love, but consciously avoiding propagation, (b) sex with another in the cause of sex, same, (c) arousal alone over history or fantasy, either way, level-pegging, or (d) arousal alone over porn, it’s not a stretch to suppose the seeds within are all twisting down the rope in the station to the sound of the same fire-alarm, but – but what – what if one journeys upward from there, away from the corporeal? Does creativity relate to the generating of seed? Does Active Imagination? Can art, philosophy, mystery be brought to this holy place? Given light and time, the light and time we’re running out of in this paragraph on earth, does the thing that makes more humankind also mean to make a kinder human? One that can imagine the feelings of others while also understanding the nature of itself?

Erotic fantasy, literary work, active imagination: all require distinct energies and proportions arising from within. All grow their stories down there, in the conscious or unconscious, and all the drug is doing is lighting lamps down passageways. What’s being mined is what the alchemists called the prima materia. Different proportions of earth, air, fire and water would, in their ideal outcome, turn the prima materia to gold. It would never work as science, but as metaphor it’s been working ever since. Leonardo Da Vinci, the greatest of all who ever sought truth in both science and art, knew where to look: ‘it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or mud or like places in which…you may find really marvellous ideas…’

Can’t really say fairer than Vitruvian Man, so I’ll stop at that. Like I stopped after listening to Gett Off and Cream and Raspberry Beret for three hours swimming in myself in the eddying rings of Round, and, as I wrote above, the creature within, that would one day grow strong and haul me out of Round up into the cloudlands of Up, that creature would be quietly pleading go to sleep, that’s enough now, look after yourself.

*

Back To Mine

A rhyme came in a dream seven years ago.

Dot, spot, to and fro; round and up and out you go…

The skipping-rhyme can be poorly represented by a G in any font without serifs. Poorly because it can’t show you the Dot in the centre that turns to Spot as it sees for the first time, or the sound of Fro turning its back on To as life is broadened with experience, and most of all because where the tail of the outer G ends it doesn’t end, it rises into the air, into a spiral, and vanishes into nothing we know. So it’s a mandala you can’t show on a flat page. The above is the best my keyboard can do.

The below: what’s the best this keyboard known as I can do? Build a humane secular philosophy for this day and age, this month, this week. It’s a projection of human life lived under the blessing of good fortune and honest experience: an ideal life, something to be wished for, worked for. It’s not a birthright, not a test, and not a joke.

I think it’s worth writing because we are at a stage in history unlike any other, cf every news item from a source one can believe. It draws from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, other religions, I call it treasuring, it’s magpie – the only black-and-white beauty in the realm – shouldn’t it be magpie? Isn’t that simply saying there’s not One Way to save us, and looking for One Way is the one way we’re doomed?

No one can say they’re the-truth-the-way-the-life on this side of fairytale. No one who can help us. We must mudlark in the sand to constellate a hope of survival out of jewels we find there. It’s not a dogma, not a manifesto, its high priest is Socrates who knew he knew nothing. It’s really not a manifesto, but I have hands – I see hands in manifesto etymologically, whether they’re there or not – and I will raise them to the reiteration of these beliefs:

That the digital life, which I call Barcode – incorporating all economic systems based on binary calculations, therefore major corporations, big tech companies, all AI, all advertising, all social media, all constructions that simplify questions to admit of two answers only, 1 or 0 – is a backward evolutionary step for humankind;

That the effects can be seen already in the gross infantilization of public and political discourse, the rise of misinformation, and the corruption of electoral systems;

That the defining characteristic of Barcode thinking – whether it’s conspiracy-theory, cult-forming, de-platforming, or unquestioning support for demagogues – is cowardice in the face of life’s complexity;

That only women, or the other genders that partake of Rainbow ways of thinking – both their friends and foes know what these are – can save the world, the free one or the natural one, and in fact both worlds, for the two go hand in hand;

That the white space is changing on the page because it’s changing at the poles of the earth, and both phenomena say we’re running out of time;

That art will not survive without the absorption of ancient craft, which I call Unconscious Means, and I call its traces faums;

That we should meet in person, sooner rather than later.

Other new philosophies based on old philosophies are available. Though I notice that nowadays the most popular thrive in the service of deep ideas like:

Be More Like Men Used To Be (Because Nothing’s Your Fault)

Make More Money So You Could Give Some Away (If You Wanted To) 

or Save The World (From People You’re Afraid Of).

NOTE: see if you can match the philosophy to the fool. The fools have the initials EM, JP and SB-F.

Anyway, back to mine, my philosophy. If you think it’s mad or bad or lame or silly (don’t get me started) come and tell me, as in 2025 I want to use my Substack site – Silly Games To Save The World – as a forum for lively and/or friendly discussion, whether of poetry, philosophy, psychology or breaking news. Back to mine, I suppose, in a virtual and respectable way.

*

Psychopomps

That creature within, that would one day grow strong and move me from Round to Up, that creature would be quietly pleading: Go to sleep, that’s enough now, look after yourself.

That creature is called a psychopomp. Okay I call it a psychopomp, it is after all my creature. Now the Oxford online dictionary gives me two definitions of this word: the headline originates from Greek mythology, ‘a guide of souls to the place of the dead’ but beneath that the dictionary offers ‘the spiritual guide of a living person's soul,’ okay, and the cool example given: ‘a psychopomp figure who stays by her and walks in her dreams’. It’s these latter definitions I’m bringing to the light. Anyway I regard the phrase ‘a guide…to the place of the dead’ as about as helpful as a bus with THE DESTINATION written on its front. What my psychopomps do is suddenly appear, whisper something in your ear you might be ready to know, and run away again in their little cloaks.

Because when I first heard the word a matter of months ago it cracked me up and I had to have it. It was so peculiar it reminded me of hearing any good word for the first time, and of course I know what the prefix psycho means, but I couldn’t resist it as the street abbreviation for psychopath along with the self-importance of pomp. The fact that there are seven of them – seven states to haul you out of – made me think of the Grimms and Disney and of seven gentlepersons not-at-all-tall, of homunculi height, fierce, eldritch, full of themselves. They’re trickster figures. You won’t shake them off. They’ll stay with you and walk in your dreams, I and the dictionary say so.

In terms of the skipping-rhyme, I was looking for creatures who suddenly show up in one stage and begin to make the advance to the next one irresistible. I call this moment Incipience, when one stage can do nothing but turn into the next one. Earlier I tried to illuminate Incipience by describing the feeling when the shedding of a body fluid cannot be prevented, and being me I painted a delightful rainbow: crying, pissing, bleeding, shitting, hurling, sneezing, coming. Run a mile, Snow White.

Then I had to give them names. Who’s the pixie who helps you from nothing into life? NODOT. You may have to wait for her, you probably know her brother.

Who’s the shimmering elf pointing somewhere out of the picture? DOTSPOT is saying there’s something else, look, look, in the hedges, where Mary Lennox finds the key to the secret garden.

As you stumble towards bright light without the ghost of a plan, who was the ghost who made you do it, Alice? Bilbo? Papageno? That would be SPOTTO.

What doleful phantom makes you see that what you could have had is gone? TOFRO. Andrew Aguecheek finally whispers to the gang ‘I was adored once.’ None of them even comments.

Who’s the gloomy gnome who prods you, saying ‘You don’t know nearly enough, there’s more.’ FROUND, her arm’s around the Wedding-Guest when all the guests are gone.

Who’s the cryptic kelpie saying it’s time to make ready? ROUNDUP. King Lear stops laughing at the jokes of his fool. He was about to finally get them, but the fellow went to bed at noon. Lear stays in Round till death, tied to the wheel.

Who’s the grey apparition moving slowly out the door? UPOUT, telling Kent it’s time to say this: ‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;/My master calls me, I must not say no.’

*

I was back from a literary festival, I was a couple of days off fifty. I was jetlagged, I was not at all well, but I went round to see my daughter, who was fifteen. She had homework on The Tempest and I said I’d try to help her. She had to write about Act I, Scene II, the one where Prospero bores Miranda to sleep with the longest exposition in Shakespeare. We sat down by a crackling fire. I gravely tried to remember the play so I could explain it to my daughter, I rambled on a while. She was soon staring off into space, her thoughts miles away, and I hadn’t even noticed. We basically played the scene. I burst out laughing when I realized. For the first time ever, I saw I could grow wise, grow old, grow foolish, be a Prospero for my Miranda. I felt bliss. Incipience. A little psychopomp tiptoed out, cracking up, job done.

Glyn Maxwell