Even great writers trip up on psychedelic endeavors

I’ve always loved that quote, which has been attributed to Frank Zappa, Martin Mull and Elvis Costello, to name a few. The gist, according to those who agree, is that music criticism is absurd, a pointless enterprise.

The same could be said of writing about a psychedelic experience. How does one describe an intense interior experience? Can it be done?

Among those who have tried are Aldous Huxley, whose “The Doors of Perception,” written in 1954, described experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. In “The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge,” Carlos Castaneda documents his initiation with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian shaman who used peyote for spiritual encounters. The millions who have read these books suggest Huxley and Castaneda got something right.

Michael Pollan’s 2018 “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” sent many Baby Boomers back to psychedelics for ostensibly therapeutic, rather than recreational, purposes.

In an essay in the New York Times titled “How Does a Writer Put a Drug Trip Into Words?” Pollan writes: “Soon after I set out to write a book about psychedelics, it became obvious what I would have to do: Trip, and then write about what it was like. … But while it may have been obvious that I would have to trip in order to write ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ it wasn’t at all obvious how I would write about that experience, one often described as, well, indescribable.”

After each trip, Pollan spent hours transcribing everything he could remember, “resisting the urge to interpret, comment, assess or otherwise shape.” Pollan himself was unsure if he was successful in his effort, acknowledging (and sharing) his readers’ potential skepticism and the “delicate line between profundity and banality.”

Suffice it to say writing about tripping ain’t easy.

Recently I’ve read two accounts of psychedelic trips that were both effective and credible within their context.

In Ann Patchett’s “These Precious Days,” an essay originally published in Harper’s Magazine and included in a new collection of essays of the same name, she writes of a psilocybin trip she takes with Sooki, a friend suffering from pancreatic cancer who’s staying at her home.

Patchett suggests they have the experience after reading on the Johns Hopkins Medicine website about how the drug produces a substantial and sustained decrease of anxiety in patients with lifethreatening cancer.

So they eat packets of mushroom powder mixed with yogurt. Initially, everything is fine. Patchett describes a “car taking me into yellow, not a field of yellow but into the color itself. … The color was keeping time with the music, the color was breaking apart into tiles the size of Chiclets, the color of Chiclets from which cathedrals rose in the sacred spirit of the Johns Hopkins playlist.”

All is well until it isn’t. Patchett has a bad trip, likening it to “eight hours of hard labor. … I was hacking up snakes in some pitch-black cauldron of lava at the center of the earth.”

Sooki, meanwhile, has a lifechanging spiritual experience, where she felt the love of all the people who love her. Patchett definitely took one for friendship.

The second account comes from Jenni Fagan in her 2012 novel “The Panopticon.” Fagan grew up in the Scottish foster care system and had 29 placements under four different names during her first 16 years. Her heroine, Anais, has the same background and is a teenage hellion.

Drugs? Hell yeah. One morning she drops two tabs of acid on her way to school, ditches class (duh) and drops a third. Again, at first it goes well, the teapot and tablecloth on the breakfast table shape-shifting, the sugar granules “making a high-pitched weeeeee noise,” the outside stunningly beautiful.

But soon, “My arms feel strange and my skin goes all see-through, and it feels dirty and just like – wrong hair.” She ends up in a heroin den in a feather headdress and polka-dot bikini doing a war dance, followed by being handcuffed and shoved into the back of a police car.

Both Patchett’s and Fagan’s accounts would seem to suggest “don’t try this at home.” Pollan, on the other hand, might tilt you toward giving it a whirl.

Barbara Lane can’t remember a time when she didn’t have her nose in a book. Her column appears every Tuesday in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com