Tripping into Retirement
A new book published by
David O. Seal
A story of two trips, one tucked inside the other.
Memoir. Entheogens. Psychedelics.
Plagued by a traumatic image endured at age nineteen, and unable to heal himself intellectually during his academic career, the author turns to South American indigenous psychedelics as the first act of retirement. These medicines, until recently both illegal and culturally suspect, as now gaining a foothold in treatments for traumatized veterans, sexual assault victims, the suicidally depressed, and the religiously dispossessed. But can they also be used to address ordinary hidden issues? Can they unveil “the reasons of the heart?”
Praise for Tripping into Retirement
“Tripping into Retirement is a fascinating look at a personal journey and a stage of life. If that’s all there was, this memoir would be a worthy read. But there is an embedded wisdom here, offered with a stylistic grace, that raises the book from the personal to the universal. It has the magical alchemy of all good literature - in the course of its pages his story somehow becomes your story, and when you finish the journey, you find yourself changed.” - Kent Nerburn, author of Lone Dog Road and Neither Wolf Nor Dog, and two-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award.
TRIPPING INTO RETIREMENT is my story of two trips, one tucked inside the other: A larger literal one, five weeks in Peru beginning the very night I retired, in order to drink two native medicines, ayahuasca and huachuma, in controlled settings; and a shorter, metaphorical one, even more difficult, from the head to the heart.
Both trips were meant to take on a traumatic episode. At age nineteen, working as a deckhand on a Great Lakes iron ore boat, I and two others climbed down into the hold to paint the inside of the forepeak with aluminum spray paint. We had no masks or ventilation; inhaling fumes was unavoidable. On my third trip up, at the top of the vertical, 35 foot ladder, both boots, their soles wet with paint, slipped simultaneously. A fatigued decision to hook my elbow over the top rung saved my life. Pulled up and out by others, I was mute, confused. So I was led out on deck, prodded to lie down on a hatch cover for fresh air. I then hallucinated that I did fall. But not into the hold. No: I imploded, digested myself, excreted me through the planet–our cultural site of Hell–and into the vastness of space. I knew, with a profound certainty, that I would never return.
During my 37 year career as a college English professor, I became fascinated with where I’d gone. My mind pursued two tacks. In one, I framed the hallucination mythologically. Like Persephone, I’d been to a kind of Hades when I too was young, virginal, innocent. Her name means “bringer of destruction.” It took me years to realize that the vision had meaning: I had “digested”--read, destroyed–my youthful, Eagle Scout/Good Boy persona, and expelled it out. And like Persephone, who returned to Hades yearly, I too would return, ceremonially, with the medicines from “the Green Brain” of the jungle and the mountains. In the second tack, I researched what contemporary scholars of religion and Greek culture were concluding about the Classical world’s longest and most sustained ritual: the Eleusinian Mysteries, dedicated to Dionysus, God of ecstasy. They used a potion, the “kykeon,” that contained alkaloids from a fungus that grew on grain, ergot. Thirty alkaloids have been processed from ergot, the most famous the 25th, LSD. All those famous Greeks, together with other noble men and women, spent one ceremonial night tripping out of their minds.
I now had understanding. But not healing–I had deep fears about letting go. Insomnia was the least of it. My head would not cede power to what Pascal called “the thought of the heart.” I trained my body to manage its fear of heights by taking climbing classes. But my heart always got short shrift, as it often does in our career-obsessed, ego-aggrandizing way of life. Could I let go into a deeper, more caring, more appreciative, me? Into the domain of the heart?
I knew from youthful experience that psychotropic medicines take you out of your head and out of your body. But could their sublime and often terrifying images help heal hearts? This trip, this book, is the story of my quest to answer that question.
Statement
About the Author
David O. Seal was born in 1946 and raised in Minnesota. He attended St. Olaf College and graduated Magna cum Lauda and Phi Beta Kappa. He received an M.A. and a Ph.D. with Honors from the University of Chicago, where he studied with Norman Maclean and Wayne Booth. His dissertation was an interpretation of three problematic memoirs: Gibbon’s loose collections of drafts and strategies, Coleridge’s collage-like Biographia Literaria, and Henry Adams’s Education, with its mysterious elision of twenty years of his married and professional life. He taught English for thirty-seven years at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, retiring as Full Professor, with classes in autobiographical writing, fairy tales, dreams, travel writing, and short fiction. He also taught undergraduates and graduate students for six months at Zhongshan Daxue, Guangzhou, in the People's Republic of China in 1985, and again in Chengdu for a month in 1992. He raised a daughter, chaired the department, volunteered at the zoo, and wrote locally on community issues. He was Tacoma’s The News Tribune’s first Guest Columnist, and his by-line appeared well over a dozen times. He also wrote two articles, including a cover story edited by David Brewster, for The Seattle Weekly.
He’s had a particular interest in elephants. He published articles on a local zoo elephant who had her own troubled history. He observed elephants in the wild in Thailand and Tanzania, and spent a month in India interviewing elephant experts, accompanying them into the field to observe their research, and published articles about them in professional elephant manager journals. He also published articles on dreams, on creativity in teaching, on Biblical scholarship, and on the poet Robert Bly.
In his free time, he back-packed, climbed, and competed in sprint and Olympic triathlons. He passed the Basic Climbing class with the Tacoma Mountaineers.
He is a drafted U.S. Army Vietnam-era veteran, trained on the Redeye shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, and serving as a sergeant with the 3rd Infantry Division in West Germany. He also served with the Merchant Marine for three months on the Great Lakes.
He and his wife live in Hood River, Oregon.
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