Mind Hacks 2: Adventures in Fantasia

Frame grabs from "The Nutcracker Suite" segment of Fantasia. Is this the seed of the glowing pastoral utopia in Cameron's Avatar?

 

Adventures in Wonderland

When, in her 1967 hit song, “White Rabbit,” Gracie Slick sang that “one pill makes you large and one pill makes you small” she was alluding to the contemporary use of LSD to explore altered states of consciousness. But she was specifically invoking words from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll’s Alice books are that sort of children’s book that are also, albeit perhaps secretly, aimed at adults. In the guise of providing charming entertainment for children, Carroll wrote metaphysical fables for adults in which the most fundamental aspects of reality – the conformation and behavior of objects in space and time, their identity from moment to moment – are curiously and marvelously fluid. There is some suspicion that Carroll himself experimented with hallucinogenic drugs – the caterpillar in the famous Tenniel illustration is sitting on a hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Whether or not that is so, drug use and its hallucinogenic effects was not exactly a secret among educated Europeans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To name only a few obvious examples:

• Samuel T. Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” was supposed to have been composed under the influence of opium .
• Charles Dickens’ last, and unfinished, novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, features an opium den among its settings.
• Sigmund Freud experimented with cocaine.
• William James wrote about his experiences with nitrous oxide.
• Drug use (cocaine and morphine) was part of the cerebral mystery of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, known best as a paragon of deductive rationality.

For Alice’s author, an instructor in mathematics and logic, and the adults in his audience, a child’s book was a way to escape the reality-based thinking demanded of Victorian adults. This trio – a dreamland, childhood, and mathematical logic – is the mental venue which hosted the late 20th century dance of drugs and computers.

1940 – Fantasia

First released in 1940, Fantasia was the third animated feature produced by Walt Disney and was a tour de force in the century’s new aesthetic and entertainment medium, film. Disney wanted to break new cinematic ground, to present moving images of a kind that had never been seen before. His animators set non-narrative and even abstract imagery to music, packaging avant-garde visual material as new form of family entertainment. Animation freed image-makers from the bounds of ordinary reality allowing Disney to create worlds beholding only to the idealized patterns and rhythms of the human nervous system. The public, however, was not ready for Disney’s vision and it failed at the box office; it did not find a large audience until the counter-cultural 60s, hardly the audience Disney had originally imagined.

Meanwhile physicist Richard Feynman was at Los Alamos running the computation shop in a secret government project to build an atomic weapon. An assembly-line of women cranking mechanical calculators ran algorithms specified by Feynman. This, and the British code-breaking shop that employed Alan Turing, is where the modern computer was born. When the hot war against Germany and Japan gave way to the Cold War against Russia and its allies the US government funded the further development of computing as part of its defense and space programs.

Immediately after World War II Benjamin Spock published the Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, with 50 million copies in world-wide sales. This book defined the liberal approach to child-rearing that formed the baby boomers. When they hit adolescence many of them would come to see LSD as a way of creating their own private Fantasia; a decade later in their lives, many baby boomers staffed Silicon Valley high-tech start-ups.

Thus we have the cultural niche in which the seeds of psychedelia and cyberspace were planted. Disney provided the latent rationale for psychedelia in the form of a child-oriented garden of multi-sensory delights while Dr. Spock provided an ideology of childhood that justified and protected this niche. The exigencies of defense drove the development of computing and, as we will see, psychedelia as well. As William Wordsworth has said, “the child is father to the man.” And so it would be with the children reared in this, their culture’s playhouse of the mind.

Selected Milestones:

• 1936: Alan Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This paper established that some computations were, in principle, impossible to perform.
• 1936: Avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud travels to Mexico to try mescaline. Artaud’s writings were very influential among the people who created the “happenings” of the 1960s and 1970s.
• 1938: LSD was first synthesized at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, though its mind altering properties were not discovered until 1943. LSD, of course, was the major “drug” of the psychedelic 60s.
• 1945: Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly. This article, written by a government research administrator, is often regarded as a harbinger of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s.
• 1945: Hungarian emigrant and polymath John von Neumann wrote “First Report on the Development of EDVAC,” the document that defined the basic scheme used to implement software in digital computers.

ADDENDUM: Since originally drafting this document I've written quite a bit about Fantasia. The post that's most relevant to my argument here is one in which I argue that Fantasia is encyclopedic in they way it "samples the space" of, well, not merely of human possibility, but of the known universe. Disney gave us a new cosmos for the 20th century, if not the 21st.