GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 80

At the wildest end of the spectrum, in the late 1950s flicker came to the
attention of the group of writers and artists that centered on William Bur-
roughs and Allen Ginsberg, often to be found in Tangiers, where Paul Bowles
was a key figure, or staying at the Beat Hotel, 9 rue Git le Coeur in Paris. As I
mentioned earlier, the Beats' connection to Walter was textual, chancy, and
undisciplined, going via The Living Brain . Burroughs read it and was fasci-
nated to find that “consciousness expanding experience has been produced
by flicker 70 For the Beats also, flicker and drugs ran together. In 1959, when
Ginsberg took acid for the first time at the Mental Research Institute in Palo
Alto, it was in the framework of a typical Grey Walter setup: “Burroughs sug-
gested he did so in concert with a stroboscope. The researchers . . . connected
the flicker machine to an EEG, so that Ginsberg's own alpha waves would
trigger the flashes.” I mentioned earlier the strikingly cyborg aspect of such a
configuration, and interestingly, Ginsberg experienced it as such (quoted by
Geiger 2003, 47): “It was like watching my own inner organism. There was no
distinction between inner and outer. Suddenly I got this uncanny sense that I
was really no different than all of this mechanical machinery all around me. I
began thinking that if I let this go on, something awful would happen. I would
be absorbed into the electrical grid of the entire nation. Then I began feeling a
slight crackling along the hemispheres of my skull. I felt my soul being sucked
out through the light into the wall socket.” Burroughs also gave a copy of The
Living Brain to another of the Beats, the writer and artist Brion Gysin, who
recognized in Walter's description of flicker a quasi-mystical experience he
had once had on a bus, induced by sunlight flashing through the trees. Gysin
in turn discussed flicker with another member of Burroughs's circle, Ian Som-
merville, a mathematics student at Cambridge, and in early 1960 Sommerville
built the first do-it-yourself flicker machine—a cylinder with slots around its
circumference, standing on a 78 rpm turntable with a 100 watt lightbulb in
the middle (fig. 3.13). It turned out that fancy and expensive stroboscopes
were not necessary to induce the sought-after effects—this cheap and sim-
ple Dream Machine (or Dreamachine), as Gysin called it, was quite enough
(Geiger 2003, 48-49). 71
From here one can trace the cultural trajectory of flicker in several direc-
tions. Burroughs both referred to flicker in his writing and built it into his
prose style in his “cut-up” experiments (Geiger 2003, 52-53). 72 Gysin and
Sommerville published essays on and construction details for their Dream
Machine in the journal Olympia in February 1962 (Geiger 2003, 62). Timothy
Leary, ex-Harvard psychologist and acid guru, was one of the Beats' suppliers
of drugs and learned from them of flicker, which he began to discuss, along