The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 31 of 125
Resistance to feeling on acid
Hurriedly I looked for one of our son . . . and, yes, that one worked. Taken when he had lost his front tooth, it went straight to my heart. I turned the pages of the album, and all the photos of him had the same sparkling, happy quality . . . though they didn’t suck me into them almost bodily the way the childhood ones did. Looking at the photos of my son simply made me see how much I loved him. But, returning to the photos of Asha, I drew the same blank. I turned over pages of her pregnancy, of pictures I’d taken of our son’s blood-splattered birth, of the funky old North London houses where we had lived . . . and all of it had the emotional impact of a bus timetable. Uh-uh, I thought, I don’t like the look of this. There’s something I’m deliberately refusing to feel here. I pushed the albums aside and leaned back against the wall. But what do you do when you run into massive resistance like this? Volatile as ever, the acid promptly turned against me, and I was flooded with doubts about everything I had been trying to do. Could you try to analyze yourself with no professional training of any sort? Didn’t dissolving blocks like this call for considerable expertise? Or, I reflected after a moment, was I making a basic mistake with what I was trying to do? Could it be that acid simply didn’t work with recent memories? That its forte was the distant past . . . particularly early childhood? Not just for the rest of the session, but for several days afterward I was in that state of irritability and pervasive depression in which a dud or ill-resolved trip can leave you. I began to suspect I could not think my way through this alone. What I needed was someone to talk to. Probably just a few tips from a professional would be enough . . . but where could I find such a person?