ACADEMIA Letters

“An Introduction To Writing The Trip And The Problem Of

The Ineffable”
Richard English

This article provides an introduction to the authorial problems in depicting the hallucinogenic
trip. I take into account the narration of trips in both fiction and non-fiction, and I consider
trips induced by mescaline and peyote as well as LSD.
The principal problem about verbalising a trip is that, at best, it is a severely limited ex-
ercise and, at worst, an impossible task. The impossibility claim is upheld by Tom Wolfe and
Aldous Huxley. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test [KA], Wolfe writes,

“.. you couldn’t put it [the trip] into words … The whole thing [is] the experience
… this certain indescribable feeling … Indescribable, because words can only
jog the memory and … there is no memory of … that feeling!” (KA 45)

Aldous Huxley in The Doors Of Perception [DP] theorises this verbal-expressive hole.
According to Huxley, taking a mescaline trip releases the Mind at Large, which is unreachable
under ordinary circumstances. He asserts that the primary function of the brain, nervous
system and sense organs, is to symbolise and rationalise the tiny residue of sense data needed
for survival. Huxley maintains that mescaline and other hallucinogens disengage the editing
process and return the tripper to the Mind at Large (DP 11). He concludes that “We can pool
information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves” (my italics). In making
a distinction between the aboutness of a trip and the unmediated or sui generis nature of the
experience,Huxley argues that it is possible to verbalise about a trip, but impossible to recreate
its lived experience.
Many attempts to write the trip do not always make clear if the objective is to mimeti-
cise aboutness or the sui generis experience. Whatever the authorial intention, much of the

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard English, rwhe1878@yahoo.co.uk

Citation: English, R. (2021). “An Introduction To Writing The Trip And The Problem Of The Ineffable”.
Academia Letters, Article 1505. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1505.

1
verbal-expressive problem lies in the nature of a trip, which is psychedelic, a term introduced
by the experimental psychiatrist Dr Humphry Osmond. Ironically, Dr Osmond, in his corre-
spondence with Aldous Huxley, uses a poetical couplet rather than academic terminology to
define the term:

“To fathom Hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic”1

This light-hearted approach indirectly acknowledges the difficulty of the semantic task,
given the nature of a trip and the limits of language. A trip involves euphoria, paranoia,
hallucination, distortion of time, epiphany, omnibenevolence, dread, terror and a plethora of
other mental states that fall into the categories of ‘Hell’ and ‘angelic’.
Henri Michaux in Miserable Miracle [MM] talks about the “insurmountable difficulties”
of rendering a trip, which derive from:

“the incredible rapidity of the visions; from the multiplicity, the pullulation of
each vision; from the fanlike and umbellate developments through autonomous,
independent, simultaneous progressions; from their unemotional character; from
their inept, and even more, from their mechanical appearance: gusts of images,
gusts of ‘yes’s’ or ‘no’s,’ gusts of stereotyped movements.” (MM 6-7)

The “insurmountable difficulty” of portraying an epiphany typifies the verbal-expressive

problem of writing any of the aforementioned psychedelic features of a trip. When rendered
in word form on the page, an epiphany often reduces to a collection of platitudes or unintelli-
gibility. For example, Tom Wolfe observes,

“What they all saw in … a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being
human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It,
the world around me. Sud-denly!-All-in-one!-flowing together, I into It, and It
into Me, and in that flow I perceive a power, so near and so clear, that the whole
world is blind to.” (KA 117)

In this quote, the subjects on LSD recognise the solution to the human condition, “the
basic predicament of being human”. However, Wolfe’s attempt to convey the profundity of the
moment falls short of meaningful impact because it tends towards cliché and gobbledegook,
“Sud-denly!-All-in-one!-flowing together, I into It, and It into Me”.
1
William Safire. “On Language, Psyche Delly Mead”. The New York Times Magazine. June 14, 1981. Safire
quotes from Dr Humphry Osmond, Predicting The Past. London: Macmillan, 1981. He gives no page reference.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard English, rwhe1878@yahoo.co.uk

Citation: English, R. (2021). “An Introduction To Writing The Trip And The Problem Of The Ineffable”.
Academia Letters, Article 1505. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1505.

2
 Michael Pollan in How To Change Your Mind [HCM] disputes the validity of the impos-
sibility claim. He argues that a middle ground can be achieved by juxtaposing “the ironies
of ordinary consciousness” with a best effort mimesis of psychedelic states of mind. What
this suggests in terms of praxis is a combination strategy, where the trip is narrated from both
inside and outside the focalisation of the hallucinating subject.
As already indicated, Michaux writes from inside the trip, and Huxley writes from out-
side. In section two “With Mescaline” of Miserable Miracle, Michaux writes the trip using
notes that he has scrawled down while under the influence. This leads to lengthy passages of
incoherent prose, which, in the published text, he annotates in the margin (retrospectively) for
the sake of analysis. Moreover, he provides drawings that he produced during the trip (MM
20-27). In sum, he generates a graphic nonfiction, asemic text that is written in the first person
present tense from inside the trip. It engenders bafflement and insecurity in the reader, but
fails to bring out the radical nature of the experience apart from these two qualities.
By contrast, Huxley writes from outside the trip, preparing his text some hours, days or
weeks after the event in traditional, quasi-academic prose. He makes no attempt to bring out
the phenomenology of the Mind at Large, which, as already indicated, he considers impossi-
ble. He intermingles the use of the first person and past tense to narrate the aboutness of the
trip and the third person and present tense to narrate his comments and generalisations.
Wolfe in The Kool-Aid Acid Test and Thompson in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, write
the trip from both points of view, that is, they incorporate a dual perspective as endorsed by
Pollan. Some material is a mimeticised version of what the tripper is imagined or remem-
bered to be going through combined with other material that the narrator mimeticises as a
non-participant observing the tripper. Both authors use experimental writing techniques as
opposed to the conventional prose of Huxley.
In the foregoing, I have argued for two claims that relate to writing the trip. The impossi-
bility claim implies that writing the trip in and of itself cannot be achieved because ordinary
language is not calibrated to describe the extreme mental states involved. Following Huxley,
the Mind at Large is ineffable. The second claim implies that there is no barrier to writing
about the trip, although this is no easy task. As stated in the first paragraph, this article is an
introduction. Many areas of interest have not been touched upon that invite investigation, for
example, the religious, psychotic and ritualistic aspects of tripping and the special problems
that they pose for praxis. A more general question that arises is how far the ineffability2 of the
2
p.210. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (Complete Edition) (p. 209). Musaicum
Books. Kindle Edition. James asserts that the mystical state of mind is “ineffable”, since it “defies expression,
that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be di-
rectly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Thus, James holds to what I have termed the

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard English, rwhe1878@yahoo.co.uk

Citation: English, R. (2021). “An Introduction To Writing The Trip And The Problem Of The Ineffable”.
Academia Letters, Article 1505. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1505.

3
trip calls into doubt the capacity of language to record any human experience, not just those
experiences that are extreme. Adherents of such scepticism may well use trip ineffability as a
starting point for their defence of linguistic solipsism.

References
Huxley, Aldous. The Doors Of Perception. London: Vintage, 2004. [DP]

Michaux, Henri. Introduction by Octavia Paz. Miserable Miracle. New York: The New York
Review of Books, 2002. Viii. [MM]

Pollan, Michael. How To Change Your Mind - The New Science Of Psychedelics. London:
Penguin, 2019. [HCM]

Thompson, Hunter S., with illustrations by Ralph Steadman. Fear And Loathing In Las
Vegas: A Savage Journey To The Heart Of The American Dream. New York: Second
Vintage Classics Edition, 1998.

Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. London: Black Swan, 1989.

impossibility claim, but about the mystical rather than the hallucinogenic.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Richard English, rwhe1878@yahoo.co.uk

Citation: English, R. (2021). “An Introduction To Writing The Trip And The Problem Of The Ineffable”.
Academia Letters, Article 1505. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1505.