Strange Attractor
The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna
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- USD 21.99
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- USD 21.99
Publisher Description
An intellectual biography of one of the most celebrated and yet least understood figures of the late twentieth century, Terence McKenna.
A stand-up philosopher who made a unique contribution to science, humanism, and the hidden arts, Terence McKenna (1946–2000) was the twentieth century’s psychedelic Renaissance man. Perfecting his rugged philosophy on the role of psychedelics in evolution, consciousness, and time, McKenna was a riotous charmer who stalked the shadows, but also sought the iridescence. More than twenty years since his untimely passing, McKenna has an enduring magnetism across the virtual pop stream, in pervasive digitization, and within social media networks. In Strange Attractor, the first biography of this enigmatic figure, Graham St John detects the signal behind the noise.
This book is an engaging chronicle of the life, works, and legacy of this brazen adventurer of the inner and outer dimensions, whose weird intelligence has affected multitudes and whose spirit continues to haunt the present. It draws on original documents and letters, features fifty two rare photographs and artworks, and shares previously untold stories from over eighty people. Neither glorifying nor disparaging its subject, Strange Attractor will appeal to those interested in the evolution of a psychedelic intellectual, and to those for whom McKenna’s wisdom endures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This definitive biography from cultural historian St John (Weekend Societies) explores the life and ideas of psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, who died in 2000. The culmination of a heroic research effort, given the loss of McKenna's archives in three separate fires, the biography charts McKenna's transformation from a gawky, science fiction–loving "small-town boy from Colorado" into "the ascendant Oracle of the Weird." While McKenna's experiments with mind-altering substances like morning glory seeds began early, an encounter with DMT at UC Berkeley and subsequent visions of "machine-like language elves" kick-started his lifelong promotion of hallucinogens as "enzymes for the imagination." From there, St John follows McKenna as he hunts butterflies in Asia while avoiding arrest for drug-smuggling; sojourns in the Amazon, where, following copious psilocybin use, he believed he "crank-started the Millennium"; and, late in life, becomes a guru for 1990s rave culture. St John also sheds ample light on McKenna's influences and his philosophies, including his late-'60s prediction of "a worldwide ‘electronic community' interconnected with ‘total knowledge' on demand"—an uncanny foreshadowing of the internet. Some of the author's explanations of McKenna's more esoteric notions are frustratingly dense; still, the occasional impenetrability is made up for by captivatingly humanizing depictions of McKenna's family life (his response to taking his eight-year-old daughter to Chuck E. Cheese: "MEDIOCRITY IS DEATH"). It's an account as weird, wild, and nontraditional as its subject.
