Confessions of an Early 1970s Hippie – Philosophy and Special Ed

This is where I had Philosophy 1000.

We had three or four profs for this course, each of them teaching a different part of Philosophy, you know, mind/body problem, religion, how to dig a square hole with a round shovel. The class was divided into serious students, losers who thought that Philosophy would somehow answer all those questions they started asking in high school, and the hippie element, who were speeding up the expansion of their awareness through a finely tuned mixture of pharmaceuticals and higher education.

I was in one of those groups. We sat to the right of the picture, about midway between the front of the class and the back. It was a morning class and we were generally feeling the effects of the previous night’s intellectual explorations.

One of the profs drove us nuts.

He looked like Vincent Price. He talked like Vincent Price. He acted like Vincent Price. Vincent Price as, of course, you already know, was a horror movie actor who played the diabolical doctor or the gentle-mannered fool who, through betrayal, rejection or chemical stimulants, became just plain Joe Diabolical. But even in his most horrifying film role, Vincent Price could not have been as insidiously diabolical as this particular Philosophy professor.

It was rumored that he delved in opium, seeking enlightenment and a form of free thought and erasing of the slate. It was just a rumor, of course, but it might have explained the extraordinary manner in which he conducted his lectures.

You see … we were allowed to smoke in class back then. And we did. Even the profs. And his one did. Or … at least … so he insinuated. He smoked cigarettes from a purplish pack, long cigarettes, long enough that you might use them to point out a truth hidden between molecules of air. At the beginning of his class, he took one out of the package, slowly, while he lectured about what is was to be human and how we came to know things. Then, he broke a match away from his matchbook and began to strike it with the cigarette hanging from his mouth. But then he would have a sudden flow of intellectual inspiration, pull the cigarette from his lips and wave his hands around while he expounded upon his point.

Then he’d put the cigarette back into his mouth and begin to strike the match. And have another thought. And again, his arms were waving and gesturing and poking at the air with an unlit cigarette.

All of us in my group stared at him, at the cigarette, at the match, at the matchbook, and wondered when the hell he was going to light that goddam cigarette as he made point after point every time the match came within a plausible argument of lighting. By the time the class was winding down, we were sweating with antici …. pation. And then, just before he finished the class and we started to gather our books and pens, he lit the match and put it to his cigarette and smoke curled into the air and we all thought as one: There is a God.

And talk about crazy people. The door at the end of this hall is the tunnel leading from the basement of the library to the Psych Building (a term of endearment we used for Keirstead Hall).

Now, first of all … we need to cover this bit of ground. We need to look at the basement of the library back then. At the time, benches lined this area instead of vending machines. There were a couple of machines, but we used to kick the shit out of them when we put money in and got nothing back. It was an out-of-the-way place to talk, veg out, and sleep. It was a mellow place.

This is where a few others and myself taught Rolling 1000. We considered this normal enough at the time that we called the advanced course Deviant Rolling 2000, which involved creative use of corn husks and even some cool things you could do with a straw and a corn cob.

But then, there was that damn tunnel leading into the Psych Building. We used to hear strange noises coming from it, demonic laughter, terrible grunts and roars, hideous moans and long drawn-out sounds that surely couldn’t have come from anything remotely human. Classes sometimes stopped in mid-roll, conversations paused in mid-sentence, snores silenced in mid-glottal, when the awful noises started. No one dared open the door. No one moved. Everyone stared at the door and waited for the sound to stop.

Sometimes the door opened and strange beings disguised as students, though with dark eyes and malevolent smiles, emerged from the tunnel and passed through our cozy little basement world. We tried not to stare at them. We didn’t dare utter a word for fear we’d come under their hellish scrutiny. When they’d passed through, things returned to normal. Conversation continued, rolling rolled on, and snores bellowed. But, I swear, when I took the picture of this tunnel door all these years later, a chill raced up my back and those small hairs at the nape of my neck that are so tuned into the other-worldly twitched at the level of cellular memory.

Just around the corner there was a study hall. Here’s what it looks like now:

It was much friendlier looking in the 70s. There was a place to check out archived documents and other stuff that certain evil profs assigned as reading material even though there was only one copy and maybe about fifty thousand students who needed to read it. Somehow, we managed. But that’s another world … the study hall on the other side of those doors just past the water fountain, was one of my favorite places. It was away from everything. The librarians only told us to keep the noise down twice that I remember, and I think both occasions had something to do with the fragrance that seeped under the doors and into the halls and down to where the librarians were passing out one copy of a document simultaneously to fifty thousand students.

Now we fast forward to a later year when I was an honors English student and still sneaking down from my top floor honors English carrel to study in surroundings that nurtured my expansion of thought in days gone by. In other words, it was years after the last time I’d fucked my mind up on acid.

But one night, I was sitting in one of the downstairs carrels getting ready for a seminar class I was giving on something really tedious when suddenly I wasn’t sitting in the carrel anymore. I was circling the carrel about twenty feet away from it, inscribing a circle around where I was sitting, and I was watching myself study as I circled around myself. I watched my eyes roam the pages of the book and noticed the way the muscles of my hand shook like tiny jelly sausages as I took notes. I watched individual hairs growing on my eyebrows.

This went on for nearly an hour before I decided it was time for a beer. This is what we used to fondly refer to as a flashback, a free trip stored somewhere in the neurons and axons and slimey stuff of the brain ready to break out into a full-fledged acid trip like an old girlfriend dropping by to tell your wife how well you used to fuck. It was the last time I ever had one of those.

On the other hand, the years and years and years I’ve worked in the IT industry may have all been a flashback. That would explain a lot of things.

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