a loose tooth in Tim Leary’s papers
I’ve been in the archives a lot this month. The New York Public Library has the Timothy Leary papers, MssCol 18400, on-site here. I sit here in the afternoons, trying to reconcile the ORDERED with the Random, trying to string out timelines and events from tickets and letters and brochures.
Any archive, though seemingly Ordered, draws much of its allure from the Random. For instance: an envelope stamped with Chemical Bank New York Trust Company. In pencil on the front is scribbled madly some boy’s name. The envelope says: “All of us at Chemical New York join in the wish that this Holiday Season will bring you good health and a full measure of prosperity and happiness.” Where there is a place to write checkbook information, someone has instead written flattering adjectives: tall, dark, handsome, kind, and so on. Inside the envelope is a lock of human hair, bound together by a white ribbon. I feel like I shouldn’t be seeing it, that it shouldn’t be here. I take a photograph and put it back. Give yourself over to someone and who knows where you will end up.
Yes, there are facts to be found here. But plenty of the contents do not tell you much of anything. Unknown names and illegible phrases, checkbooks and names and amounts, artifacts arranged in a neatly pencilled chaos. Notes from a phone call taken down on a barf bag. Catalogs, Hallmark cards, a note from Eldridge Cleaver. Cryptic readouts from something called the Experiential Typewriter. Collages, postcards, photographs, receipts for rum and tonics ordered in Mexican hotel rooms. Much of it is mundane: “Would you please be so good as to Park your Car in the Official Car Park.” Some of it is not: an account of a man on psilocybin coming “upon God standing waistdeep in the churning waters.” Some of it is both: small notes from Leary’s children, throughout the whole collection: I love you; I miss you; Where are you? Each folder a composite world of layer and surface.
It’s hard not to be somewhat nostalgic for it all. The texture of carbon paper, for instance—that literal, old-time way of CCing before it became a thing of endless emails. A letterbound world was a slower one, a more drawn-out one, one with stacks and boxes full of proof of something. Communication burst with difference: unique handwriting, purple inks, foreign stamps, newspaper clippings, weights and hues of varied paper. Hardly the stuff of Gmail, that monolithic service so streamlined it can write your emails for you.
And yet all this paper is a mess, convoluted and impossible to Ctrl+F. Receipts, bills, Pan Am boarding passes, old American Express cards and documents, business cards, invitations. It is a reminder of the perpetual existence of the corporation, of how much that world of letters was no less full of payment and transaction. Its messiness, too, jumbles my sense of time more than clarifies it. I flip past tacky greeting cards, doodles, and jokes. If asked to date all this stuff, I would do a terrible job. Some of it could have happened yesterday.
At one point I found an envelope labeled “Tooth.” Inside was a human tooth. Leary’s or one of his children’s. Or—who knows?—someone else’s. I held it in my hands. It was smaller than I would’ve thought. I put it back in the envelope, back in the folder, back in the box, which at day’s end was wheeled away to some storage shelf. I imagine it as an infinite, subterranean place. It is probably very ordinary.
What persists? The things you keep but also the things you send. The stuff you clip out or clip off. After seeing God astride the waves, the man’s psychedelic vision continues: “There was little that we could do to control our course or predict our destination.”
And later: “I turned off the phonograph but kept hearing music.”
ben tapeworm