BOOK REVIEW: 'Pharmako Gnosis'

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BOOK REVIEW
'Pharmako Gnosis' by Dale Pendell
If Homer had been a drug connoisseur, his epic poems would have sounded
like this.

By Emily Green
Emily Green is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

May 13, 2007
Los Angelese Times


DALE PENDELL has the kind of counterculture bona fides that either kill
you or make you eccentric. He was in the Bay Area leading up to the
Summer of Love. In 14 years living in and out of the Sierra, he
botanized with old miners, hooked up with Gary Snyder, started a poetry
journal and published Allen Ginsberg. He did just about every drug with
a street value until 1989, when he curbed taking them, the better to be
able to write about them. "Pharmako Poeia," the first of a trilogy,
appeared in 1995; the second, "Pharmako Dynamis" in 2002; and the third,
"Pharmako Gnosis," last year. If there has ever been a more sustained
but unremarked effort to shock, it would be hard to find. All three
books have gone largely unnoticed.

It's a shame. They could not be more collectible, particularly volumes
one and two. It might have been the style. They were conceived as epic
poems, shifting freely between poetry, chemistry, taxonomy and bouts of
backchat. It might have been censorship. Perhaps the book-reviewing
world Just Said No. More likely, Pendell has bet his career on a subject
that exists in a twilight beyond polite conversation. He writes in a
country where doing drugs is so basic to youth that it might as well be
curricular, and denying having done them is just as basic a rite of
passage into adulthood.

For those interested in some recidivism, the books are helpfully
arranged by high. Volume one is devoted to dreamy stuff: alcohol,
absinthe, heroin and pot. Volume two's about speed: caffeine,
amphetamines, cocaine, Ecstasy and more. Volume three, it's a trip. It's
about psilocybin, mescal, peyote and LSD.

Every subject has its perils. Compared with the first two books, the
third is blurry and grandiose. One wonders whether the wine taster
forgot to spit. The best line about acid is a closing fillip in which he
remarks on "a certain sparkle." There are even baseball stories -
including the legendary one about Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis throwing a
1970 no-hitter against the San Diego Padres after taking a tab of acid.

Every so often you think Pendell's in earnest sociological mode, as when
he delivers a list of uses of peyote, until you arrive at the entry "a
good reason to get people together and enjoy each other." Dangling acid
before the inexperienced, he taunts, "Pop a ten strip!" (That's enough
to have a football team dancing to "Swan Lake.") "You deserve such joy!"
he baits. "You deserve release from so many years of encrusted cynicism.
You have worn your pain as a hair shirt, a burden-basket trumped and
creased on your forehead. Lay it down. Give it to Jesus. Give it to
Buddha. Give it to the great psychedelic Earth, and let the Earth
respond and accept you just as you are. You deserve it." Then his alter
egos, protestants all, appear:

And now, O Arbiters of Responsibility, what do I deserve?

A flogging, I'd say.

He wishes. What he got instead was stony silence from the daylight world
of modern America.