Psychedelic Art

I was reading this book called The Secret History by Donna Tartt earlier and something about a ritual described there made me think of Psychedelic Art. In the book, a group of students, considered scholars, specifically of the classics, tried to perform this old ritual (called the “bacchanal”, performed in honor of the Roman God Dionysus) and in the process committed a murder that no one among the four of them remembers except for the proof of the body - the mutilated corpse of a farmer, killed in his own land, by the hands of four youngsters who claimed to have a sort of like an out-of-body experience. One of them related the experience as being in the presence of Dionysus himself, where each of them are sometimes a man or a woman, or sometimes is not even human. The group hid the crime, which remained unresolved until the end of the book. In the course of the events that followed, the people involved were said to have moved on quite well by blocking the “memory” of the tragedy.

Something about that kind of darkness, in the way that the book described that swirling emotions of guilt/non-guilt, shock, and revelation made me see the parallel with the pictures of UV Backdrops that I saw featuring psychedelic images. It’s the same with those Psy-Trance Clubwear you can order online. In those images, the colors, the texture and the overall impact is just surreal, almost dreamlike. One can interpret them in so many ways and yet I guess only the artist can really explain what they mean, if they do mean anything specific at all in the first place.

Well, the book is not really about being in a trancelike state or the hallucinations induced by whatever substance or physical or environmental stimulants. It’s actually a dark psychological thriller that deals with social structures and norms, and the people who, by choice or circumstance, live outside of them. It’s about friendship and how far one will be willing to go in order to protect that illusion of brotherhood and belongingness.  It analyzes the separation of fiction and reality and what happens when people hold on to literary beauty that it takes over and distorts the “reality”. Can an act like murder be justified? The book deals with two - one accidental while the other was carefully planned.

In the end, there is no excuse for a wrongdoing. Everyone pays, one way or another.