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That's right, and we'd better start learning how to die before we actually do
take the trip with your eyes open
At Death's Door, the Message
Is Tune In, Turn On, Drop In
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by LAURA MANSNERUS
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Timothy Leary is dying, and he is delighted to talk about it. A sensualist to the end, he is charting his last few minutes on earth, or at least the last few that anyone can be certain of, making sure that the nation's death industry will not spoil this, the experience of a lifetime.
"It's called designer dying," he explained cheerfully into the speaker phone at his house in Beverly Hills the other day. "It's a hip, chic, vogue thing to do. It's the most elegant thing you can do. Enven if you've lived your life like a complete slob, you can die with terrific style."
In Mr. Leary's very public life, first there was drugs, then Eastern mysticism and drugs, followed by stand-up comedy and, most recently, cybernetics. And this latest enthusiasm has understandably absorbed Mr. Leary completely. He learned in January that he had inoperable prostate cancer, whereupon he called his old Harvard colleague Ram Dass, among others, to share "the wonderful news" and began the "directed dying" that he had been writing about for 20 years.
"Mr. Leary turned 75 last month, and those around him describe him as tired and frail. But he insisted that he has suffered no fatigue and "no symptoms, none at all." ANd though he announced as the interview began that "I'm totoally amnesiac, so I'll probably forget the questions in the middle of my ansers," the answers were those of a man who'd spent a lifetime thinking out loud -- recklessly but persuasively (and often for pay).
"Im looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying," he said. "You've got to apporach your dying the way you live your life -- with curiosity, with hope, with fascination, with courage, and with the help of your friends."
Mr. Leary doesn't mean for any of this to sound reverent. In his latest book, "Chaos and Cyber Culture" (Ronin Publishing, 1994), he wrote: "Let us have no more pious, wimpy talk about death. The time has come to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility afor managing the dying process. And he wrote about "creative alternatives to going belly-up clutchiing the company logo of the Christian Cross, Blue Cross or Crescent Cross, or the eligibility cards of the Veterans Administration." The born-and-raised Catholic is fond of taunting priests who would shuffle us off the scene with the sacrament of extreme unction: "What a phrase, really!"
A Sliver of Time
Mr. Leary is setting up his own event at home, in his bed, with particular attention to that sliver of time between life and death, or near-death and death.
"When your heart stops beating, there's a period of 3 to 15 minutes while your brain is still alive," he said. "It's that period that's never really been explored.
Everybody has the same story of the near-death experience -- my entire life flashed in front of me, the white light and all that -- but no one really knows it". (He pointed out, though, that anyone who takes LSD, or the anesthetic called ketamine, can come close to that experience.)
Mr. Leary says life-sustaining equipment will be moved into his bedroom, which he calls "the de-animation room." He has devised a "quality of life index," and when it gets too low, he said, his "executors are ordered to pull the plug and release me and deliver me from my pain."
"I can't wait for the moment when I'll have the experience of being in my brain withouth my body being around," he said. "I'm working on ways of sending signals, my eyebrows moving, that sort of thing."
Timothy Leary at home, defying "priests, popes and medics."
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"The pop scoutmaster cheerfully invites the world to join him as he goes through "the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying."
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At his death, he will have a small audience. When dying, he advised, "do not be alone." And Mr. Leary hardly ever is, to judge from the number of people circulating around him, helping him with his archives, enlisting his help in multimedia ventures or, apparently, just passing the time at his house. "Dying," he said, "is a team sport."
"It may be a farce," he added, "but people will learn from my experience with dying."
Mr. Leary is not stopping there, either; he also wants to have his brain frozen. "Yes," he said, "I'm getting ready for the frosty freeze. I'm lining yp a cryonics team that will be there as soon as I'm declared dead."
For someone with such expansive ideas about the boundaries of consciousness, Mr. Leary approaches the afterlife rather literally. He wrote in "Chaos and Cyber culture": "Letting one's body and brain rot seems to imply no possiblity at all for your future. Why let the carefully arranged tangle of dendritic growths in your nervous system which store all your memories get eaten by fungus?" Better, he said, to allow for reanimation by employing one of the services, legal and reasonably priced in California, that will store the body )or just the head, if the owner has lost interest in the rest of himself) in liquid nitrogen.
When asked why his own body couldn't come along, Mr. Leary said: "Oh, maybe my body, too. Or I might clone myself. My expectation is that in three years or five years there might be entirely new options, and I'm keeping my options opn until the very last minute.
To Barbecue or Not
"That's the beauty of directed dying. At the last minute I can decide to be eaten by worms or go to the barbecue."
Meanwhile, Mr. Leary, buzzing along on cigarettes and coffee, is also mapping his immortality on the World Wide Web. His web site (http://www.leary.com/) is still under construction, but it is open and he greets visitors there. Soon - he said, "we 're working full tilt" - his books will be on line, in an interactive format, which means that people can contribute their own thoughts.
Mr. Leary has been something of a pop scoutmaster since he was fired as a lecturer in Harvard's psychology department in 1963 for his experiments with LSD. After that, except for the two years he spent as a fugitive and the three and a half years he spent in prison on drug charges, he cultivated larger audiences.
He came early to the information age, convinced that computers are great for playing with one's brain and even for designing one's own hallucinations. He has a sizable cyberpunk following. Just last year, he made dozens of campus appearances.
The lectures have stopped, although he reported enthusiastically on his recent "telelecture" to 2,000 people in London from his study, and he had to cancel a book tour this month for a new edition of his 1968 book, "High Priest."
Still, insofar as he is able to, he continues to deride authorities of all kinds. In the matter of death, he exhorted over the phone, "I would say to everybody, do not let the priests and popes and medics tell you what to do."
Given that, it's no surprise that Mr. Leary admires Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan doctor who has helped many terminally ill people kill themselves. His one criticism is that Dr. Kevorkian acts so darned funereal.
"He's a tremedous hero," Mr. Leary said, "but he's treating himself like a victim. He hunches over when he's arrested. He should get himself a really elegant set of clothes and swagger around. He should stand up and tell everybody, 'No more victims, including me.' He should cover himself with Hawaiian flowers and have a champagne glass in his hand."
Everything I say is true and false and meaningless
O, Hail Eris |
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