Bicycle Day, April 19, is the anniversary of something that never really happened.
Celebrated by psychonauts all over the world, today commemorates the 73rd solar rotation of the day Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamine, or LSD. After consuming what he thought would be the lowest perceptual dose, Hofmann began to feel effects that were increasingly acute and weird: dizziness, confusion, and distorted perception, from visual hallucinations to the sensation that he was barely moving even as he cycled frantically home from his job at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
While the lore portrays Hofmann’s infamous bicycle ride as one of wonder and awe, a mystical journey that transformed a buttoned-up materialist into a rapturous psychonaut, his own accounts, written at the time, reveal that the extreme and unexpected effects of the drug were incredibly uncomfortable and scary. He called the doctor afraid that he was dying, later calling the 250 micrograms he consumed an “overdose,” likened to amphetamine poisoning.
(Disclaimer: For many, including myself, this amount would be too much; don’t try this at home without a sitter and prior experience!)
It took Hofmann many years of reflection and rounds of experimentation to arrive at his view of LSD as a mind-expanding, creativity-enhancing, therapeutic substance, as chronicled in his memoir, LSD: My Problem Child. The euphoric, Van Gogh-like vision that has gone down in popular imagination was first published by the son of Sandoz’s CEO, Werner Stoll, in 1947. Hofmann’s experience was less “Starry Night” and more of the cut-off-your-ear-in-a-delirium variety—but then, we all tend to look back on our past with different lenses.
The company had tasked him with examining ergot, a fungus with psychoactive properties that Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson—the scientist credited with introducing the Global North to “magic mushrooms”—later argued was the active ingredient in the psychedelic brew consumed at Eleusis in ancient Greece, a mystery school where a cross-section of society, including its most Stoic thinkers, engaged in death-and-rebirth rituals credited with not only individual enlightenment and ecstatic communion, but stability and social cohesion.
Wasson himself is part of a revisionist history. He went down in history as some kind of hippie mycologist, but it was really his wife, Valentina, who introduced him to the mushrooms she had spent years learning from and observing. The journey to Mexico where the Wassons discovered their “magic” was immortalized in an article for Life Magazine that caused thousands of psychedelic pilgrims to flock to the home of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec woman who shared her ancestral medicine with Wasson—eroding local culture to the point that Sabina’s own people turned against her and she died penniless.
Oh yeah, and Wasson’s trip, though he didn’t realize it at the time, was funded by the CIA’s MK Ultra program. Meanwhile, Hofmann’s employer, Sandoz, was participating in Nazi practices by firing staff of Jewish descent.
So, why didn’t Hofmann just write about what really happened? Why go back and paint that first experience as something amazing? Maybe it’s because Global Northern cultures aren’t great at holding ambiguity. If there was ever to be widespread support for LSD, surely he couldn’t talk about how, before it gave him revelations and made him feel amazing, he thought that he was dying or going crazy.
How, most would wonder, could it be both of those things?
Most of life lies not in black or white, but the gradient. Yet our collective need to make sense reduces things that are ever-changing and terribly complex to a simple, static narratives. So we tell revisionist histories about how we always knew, right from the very first moment. How a thing was first one way, and then it was another.
Many of us spend a lot of our lives in the past or the future, so the human experience is often defined in terms of potentiality: what was, could have been, or still could be. Since we’re rarely truly present, it’s no wonder I’m not the only one who struggles with making decisions. Some thinkers, such as biologist Rupert Sheldrake, theorize that consciousness itself is the sea of quantum possibilities, where everything is infinitely possible, and our individual conscious experience is simply the process of making choices from among those. Everything is possible, but nothing is real, until we impose a limitation, the restriction that is actually expansion.
But quantum things can’t be conjured into existence without someone there to see them. By this reasoning, we aren’t even really conscious without another’s presence; reality is a shared experience.
Can I get a witness?
Part of the way we witness things is through language; as Terence McKenna often rapped about, the process of naming makes an intangible experience material. There is much discussion today—including from people who are not members of the affected communities, and therefore have not earned the right, in my opinion, to pass judgment about the expressions or behavior of the people within them—about issues of gender and sexual orientation, and a lot of it comes down to definitions.
People are up in arms about what makes someone a “man” or “woman,” focused on transition as not only a process that always comes with biological implications, but has a clear beginning and end. Similarly, bisexual people are maligned even within queer communities as those who are simply on their way to gay, told to “pick a side” or erased when they engage in heterosexual dating. It supports these old narratives that gender and sexual orientation is a “lifestyle choice,” even if the words used now are different, and puts tremendous pressure on those of us who are most clearly on these spectrums to make a decision, and then stick with it.
First you’re this. Then you’re that. Either way, there’s something we can call you that fits within binary definitions. If it’s just a reframing, nobody really has to learn anything.
But this pressure to present ourselves in a framework that society and our loved ones understand can result in us internalizing our own revisionist histories—and that goes for anyone who wanders outside the mainstream. Since coming out as queer and trans, I’ve found myself resisting any indication, not just in what I share with others, but my own self-reflection, that my past relationships with men were anything but trauma and confusion. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of that. But I also really loved him.
It can be both things. In fact, it has to be. I can be queer and trans and still have attractions to male-bodied people. Some days I might feel more like a boy or girl, but mostly I float in that in-between place, the gradient of gray. One day I might decide to change my body more substantially, and if I do, that won’t negate the other experiences that also felt like me.
I recently had my own reality-altering bicycle ride, which I embarked upon sober, yet resulted in a fall where I broke my pelvis and sacrum in five places. It was both the best and worst thing that ever happened to me. Societies steeped in Newtonian physics still resist such quantum possibilities; they try to tell us our experiences don’t exist unless we stick to a clear narrative. But I think most things in life are like Hofmann’s bicycle ride: horrible and beautiful, terrifying and mystical, shifting and changing with each moment as we make our way home.