Tim Hayes | November 7, 2024
Following Bicycle Day, about Albert Hofmann giving himself the world's first deliberate LSD trip, and Mycelium Wassonii, about R. Gordon Wasson's research into psychedelic mushrooms and the indigenous cultures using them, Lilly Wave is Brian Blomerth's third investigation of a 20th Century psychonaut. It tells some version of a small section of the cosmic scope of the life of John C. Lilly, which is to say it's hunting wilder game than either of its predecessors. Lilly was a different kind of voyager than Hofmann or Wasson and walked a higher tightrope, one that led him from behavioral control studies to talking with dolphins to communing with non-human intelligences plotting the doom of humanity, facilitated by prodigious ingestions of LSD and ketamine.
But Blomerth has kept the artistic template the same, an idiosyncratic and recognizable one that he has labelled "adult contemporary dog-face," bustling with color planes and with characters anthropomorphized into lovable capering canines. A personal art style isn't always the same thing as a brand, and neither of them need to be an artist's perspective on the world. But which one are you looking at on the page?
As a route into someone else's visionary experience, funny animal comics shouldn't be underestimated. They fetishize the human body and its many sensations while also invoking all kinds of Othering, they skew familiar things into odd forms while forcing new metaphorical business between you and the outside world, and they are inherently pretty damn trippy. In Blomerth's books all of this artistic affect happens all the time, piling on and squirming over the page even when unmedicated individuals are just walking down the street. And with three books now in print, his approach forces a connection between the protagonists too. Although these characters are technically different people morphed into different dogs – Lilly has the spotted ears and snout of a dalmatian while Hofmann is more of a spaniel – the body language is identical across all three books. Whether scientist, wife, lab partner or passer-by, they all beam beatifically or bliss out with tongues lolling and eyes closed, or caper along in oversize shoes at the end of bendy pipe-cleaner legs, haloed by sweat beads and snapped in mildly melodramatic crisis.
Lilly had some melodramas of his own going on, and worked his way through a menu of altered states from which Lilly Wave selects some choice nuggets. The book starts with Lilly's first work on isolation tanks and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, which prompted hallucinations and waking dreams and visions of, among other things, a voluntary self-lobotomy. Mention is made of Lilly's previous efforts to modify animal behavior through electrical stimulation of the brain, abandoned once the U.S. military pondered the mind control possibilities it opened up – abandoned by him but not by them, although the book doesn't get into that.
While bobbing in floatation-tank dreamspace Lilly encounters the Earth Coincidence Control Office, benevolent alien beings drawn by Blomerth as ETs somewhere between grey Gumbys and the Ghostbusters logo. Under ECCO guidance Lilly starts thinking about how to communicate with dolphins, and enhances the sensory isolation experience with doses of LSD before working his way up to ketamine. A malevolent and Borg-like cosmic Solid State Intelligence enters the picture, communicating its plans for every aspect of mankind to be computer-controlled by 2100 and for the Earth's atmosphere to be destroyed by 2300, both of which a modern reader might feel are proceeding ahead of schedule. Unlike Hofmann and Wasson's calmly linear internal investigations, Lilly's voyages spin in grand hectic and attritional circles, often taking convoluted routes to leave him returned back to the starting gate. Reaching the end of a second complex and expensive program of dolphin studies that delivered ambiguous results, Lilly shrugs and says "oh well back to the ketamine."
Is the art psychedelic, or simply flamboyant? Does it activate the life of the mind with ink lines and chromatic forms, or mainly give the layers function a workout? There's some of both. Blomerth's full-page illustrations bear more similarity than you might expect to the 1970s drawings of John Thompson, who also saw limber figures and floating mandalas and pulsing geometric shapes caught in tumbling overlap. Lilly Wave's best stretch is a sequence putting Lilly's first experience of sensory deprivation on LSD against a somewhat dubious experiment in dolphin communication going on next door, in which a female lab assistant ends up masturbating the animal to climax. On the left of each pair of pages, a full-length floating Lilly disassembles into rainbows and intricate roulette curves; on the right a staccato barrage of small panels takes a narrower mechanical approach to the life of the body.
Neither session seems ecstatic. The funny in funny animal art can't be suppressed easily, even if Lilly himself noted that some of this stuff was terrifying; and Blomerth includes Lilly's report of the time those wacky ECCO jokers surgically removed Lilly's penis and reattached it, of which the psychonaut later said "Who the hell is running the show up there? Bunch of kids?" But Lilly was also solidly part of the deepening gloom of the 1970s, less gag style and more "Paranoid Style," a cultural dimension which Blomerth isn't inherently geared up for. Lilly also drags Blomerth into places the art simply feels less comfortable. Whatever Blomerth's art does for innerspace, its visions of outer space and beyond the infinite are less charged. Lilly looked out of an airplane window in 1974 and received a threatening transmission from the Solid State Intelligence via Comet Kohoutek promising a grand gesture of power, duly delivered when his destination airport shut down. This moment in the book is barely a throw-away. It carries no cosmic chill, partly since the psychedelic sublime isn't really Blomerth's bag, and because in its final stretches the book is bustling rapidly along, compressing a lot of Lilly into a small number of pages.
Lilly Wave's introduction by drug activist Rick Doblin calls it "a nuanced portrait" and describes Lilly's eventual severe physical decay and collapse, something else the book doesn't get to and which might have been hard to square with the art's mood if it had. Probably better to take Blomerth at his word in the end notes, where he says that after reading Lilly's own publications the artist had no idea how he felt about the scientist, and anyway "these silly books are not about casting judgment because that would be utterly insane." Drawing your guy as a lolloping dalmation tripping balls might be a judgment of sorts, about how ineffable or not Lilly's raids on his own neurons actually were. About a world where humans aren't technically even involved but every dog has its K.
English (US) · 