Inside Terence McKenna's Lost Archive
Terence McKenna's daughter, Klea, is archiving her father's work and documents.
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Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] Just in case any of our viewers don't know this, there was a massive library held by Terrence McKenna that mysteriously went up in flames after his death. And so a big question for a lot of Terrence McKenna fans have been what books did he have? And you know, like wanting to kind of see the material that he was reading through to kind of come up with all of his ideas and stuff like that. And so I kind of think like part of this is like a redemptive moment for that as well to kind of bring some more what he was thinking, what he was doing to light for people. I think that's really cool. On the topic of archiving data, it's an article I saw pop up in High Times recently about Clea McKenna.
[00:50] They still exist. They do. They still exist. They're still publishing and occasionally they have an interesting interview here and there, but this one was with Clea McKenna who's the daughter of Terrence McKenna. Before we kind of dive into what she's doing, I'm sure we all have thoughts on Terrence McKenna. He's kind of a iconic figure in the history of psychedelia, I think we all probably had a time of loving Terrence and had a time of feeling a little skeptical around Terrence. And I'm curious where we've all shaken out around Terrence McKenna's legacy. I don't really see him as super controversial. I think he prefaced most of his things by telling the listener to call [expletive] That was sort of always a disclosure from him.
[01:39] I think the only controversy is just that he went around for a long time promoting the heroic five gram dose while he hadn't done it in years because he freaked out. I think that's one of the main that's like the main controversy, right? No. Yeah. I would say like my background with Terrence was that he was one of the main figures I really started listening to when I got into psychedelics. Like the psychedelic salon had all these archives of his talks and stuff. He's a wonderful speaker. He like will talk at length on art and religion and philosophy and I always loved that. And I think the one thing that always tripped me up or the talks that I couldn't really get into were the time wave stuff, the Iching and the time wave theory. He kind of had this big overarching theory for Yeah. theory of everything kind of [expletive] Yeah.
[02:29] So, I think that's where he kind of lost me a little bit, but otherwise, he's a fun listen. He makes great I think he's mentally different than like the influence grifters that are out now. you and I just have a very different view. He wasn't trying to sell I what's he trying to sell, right? Like the self, I guess, to come to talks, but he wasn't trying to put I never I've listened to a lot of Terrence McKenna in my earlier days. And I never I don't know. I didn't think he was trying to like he's fundamentally different than what you see now in my opinion. Yeah. No, I kind of classify him as like high thinking. It's like not necessarily based like I think that his arguments get weaker whenever he tries to introduce science because a lot of times like whatever he's talking about isn't really scientifically based.
[03:21] But I always kind of felt like a lot of his stuff was like finding the things that we can't understand and then toying around with different like fanatical possibilities that could come from it. And I thought that was mostly just like fun like high thought experiment type stuff. Exactly. I will say too that when I got into psychedelics at first, I also was a big Terrence McKenna fan. I actually have this Terrence McKenna shirt on right now that isn't it's not going to play for like a black shirt to me. Our listeners got a one last trip there and then yes that had the psychedelic guys for me it was kind of like McKenna Robert Anton Wilson. I always like Robert Anton Wilson a lot. He was kind of he was one of the super weirdos.
[04:09] Not like McKenna. I don't think he was really like McKenna. He was a little more far out. More more Philip K. Dicki kind of. Yeah. No, when I whenever I first got into psychedelics, I got really into to kind of Terrence and like Roms and kind of just like the more like I guess surface level like I feel like those are the people that like everyone who gets into psychedelics kind of knows about. Like I think it's fun having True Hallucinations on your bookshelf because then every now and then someone will come over and be like, "Oh shit." And then you'll be like, "Ah, okay. Where you know, True Hallucinations is the experiment." Yes. Columbia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the best one. Yeah. It was it's a lot of it's cuz he I always say he writes like he talks and so like he'll have these crazy long rambling sentence paragraph pages and like I feel like sometimes it's a little bit harder for me to get through in print than it is for me to just like listen to.
[05:09] But I really liked that book. It was just like an enjoyable read in general. And it's just it's like it feels psychedelic reading it. I feel like is why it's Yeah. He Yeah, I would say my favorite writer that puts you into that state of consciousness would be Dale Pendle. Yeah, Dale Pendle. Yeah. In the Pharmacopia trilogy. It's they're we should really do like a full breakdown of Dale Pendle sometime cuz he's one of my favorites. They're excellent. They're beautiful. They combine history, science, philosophy, kind of alchemy. There's no other writer I've come across that's quite like him. Yeah, he kind of did like the trip report book on all of these different drugs, but from different like mind states and different perspectives.
[05:58] His like history of coffee is one of the most interesting reads I've ever read. Like it's great. Yeah. No, I remember because I read a couple of his and I remember that I really loved his breakdown of tea and just to throw one of those up there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is an incredible series of books. I think I read two of the It's a trilogy, right? Yeah, I read two of the three. But yeah, he said something about tea. It was like some old saying that was like drinking too much coffee will make me throw up, but drinking too much tea will make my belly happy or something like that. [laughter] You remembered that one? Yeah, it was something. Yeah, I can't quite remember, but I just thought it was fun. Yeah, really cool. And anyway, back to Terrence though.
[06:43] I think he does have like a special place in my heart as kind of an early figure that I listen to a lot when I was first thinking about psychedelics. It's just kind of refreshing thinking about I haven't read or listened to him in quite some time now. It's been multiple years and he I think he represents something that's really lost in the space too. Like just the insight everything has become so narrow and medicalized. This it the weirdness is gone. Yeah. Is really gone. At least from the mainstream space. It's been sterilized. It's been corporatized. The fun weird. The bad weird is Exactly. Yeah. The bad weird is here for sure.
[07:29] The bad weird. The bad weird got stronger. Dystopian weird is here. You used to have good weird. Yeah. Yeah, but that's one of the things when I saw this article about Clea McKenna that sort of turned me on to this whole project where I was like, well, yeah, I love the idea. What she's doing is archiving her father's documentations and things like that and like letters and writings and all of this stuff that she has access to. And I was like, that's cool in this time when everything is getting sterilized and whitewashed in this space that she's really working on preserving all of this. And if you want to just before we get into that, she's a visual artist. She has some cool stuff. I think I tossed a couple of her pieces in the files there under Clea's work. She does like she's kind of known for doing these cameraless photography.
[08:17] I'm not entirely sure what the process is, but like this is a tree. I think there were like two more in there. If we just want to scroll through those real quick. That's like some like network and stuff. and then these kind of cool prints like these cameraless photographic prints that she does. That's sort of what she was doing before this archive project and now she's sort of taking on more of the McKenna's old business and doing some of some archive work. The High Times article kind of got into why she began cataloging her father's work. I think those are like the first one to three files there. So, High Times asked her what inspired her to begin archiving her dad's work. And she mentioned that her dad died when she was 19, and it had been a fairly traumatic decade leading up to that.
[09:03] At the time, I walked away from everything, was looking to build my own life, kind of got into her own art career. But now she's kind of coming back to it with two kids, an art career, and she's managing the family's company Lux Natura, that I believe Terren and Clea's mother started together. The archival work began, she said, by trying to triage the occasional rights request for Terren's work and realizing that if you pull out one thread, the whole thing starts to unravel. At that point, nothing was organized. So, she started gathering disperate pieces from the different locations and different people, friends, family, and institutions he lectured at to create this collection and began cataloging, digitizing, and transcribing those materials. She mentioned that there was one storage unit in Hawaii she'd been paying for 25 years and had never opened. Just kind of out of grief.
[09:51] I think the next picture we have might be like kind of some of the boxes that she'd been keeping. So these are like just stacks and stacks of Terrence McKenna's documents and you've got manuscripts there, correspondences, documents, medical records, books, magazines, like all this stuff. So that's kind of cool. And then like the general direction she's trying to go with this project. The end goal is to find a forever home for this collection in an institutional archive where it can be professionally preserved and made available to the public for research and collaboration. She says that archives act as an official form of memory. It's how events and people are written into our collective history as the roles of psychedelics in our culture changes. Characters that were once on the fringe are becoming the history of a mainstream phenomenon. Terrence and others of this millu should be archived and recorded just as any major cultural moment should be not just for individual perspective but as a part of the history of the west coast counterculture and its broader impact.
[10:46] I think that's kind of something that we were touching on in our discussion of Terrence before this of like what he represents in this changing psychedelic space right now. Oh hey there. It's just me again providing some interstitial here. I just wanted to let viewers know that there is alongside our Patreon another way that you can support our work which is through our merch shop. That's shop.psymposia.com. You can find a bunch of cool stuff there with our logos on it, some corporate merch, all that kind of stuff. We've got an apparel tab, accessories, buttons and stickers, artwork. So, if you pop into our apparel tab here, there's some great t-shirt designs. We also added just recently some tank top designs. So, if you're looking for something to work out in or go do lawn work in the summer heat, that's good for you.
[11:35] Also, the buttons and stickers tab here. We just added kind of a new collection to that's some of these corporate collages I've made over the years and this kind of cool swirly Psymposia logo sticker. There's a regular edition and holographic edition of both of these. I actually just got testers for these in the mail the other day and they're looking pretty sweet. I stuck them onto my sketchbook. Let's see if we can get my camera to focus in on it. But if you're into stuff like that, you can check that out at shop.psymposia.com. All the money goes back to our project and the work that we do and we really appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the show. And then there was one other line here that I really liked. She said she's also interested in finding a new aesthetic direction for his work. I think the psychedelic community are hungry for that as well. to leave behind the kind of 90s doing7s aesthetic that we've been stuck in for 30 years, but without sterilizing it by going into the corporate pharmaceutical whitewash direction either.
[12:31] This feels like a timely and enticing challenge. So, I thought that was kind of cool. And for our Patreon viewers and listeners, stick around after our end roll and we're going to be discussing some of our opinions and thoughts on psychedelic artwork as well. Nothing against the 90s doing 70s. There's a place in my heart for that, too. But I really liked what she was saying there. I love the idea of kind of broadening what that means to people and how people experience art or doing art with psychedelics or viewing art through psychedelics and things like that. I think it's an interesting lens. It says the podcast is launching in June. It's currently June. Yeah. See what we got. They're launching a podcast with some of his archival materials as well. I think they said there doesn't look like it's come out yet necessarily. It's just kind of upcoming. But yeah, these are some of the new projects that they're working on with his archive.
[13:19] That one there, Blue Streak, a podcast about the life and work of Terrence McKenna, seen through the Lux Natura Archive. Terrence McKenna Spacetime Continuum, a new album of never-before published live concert will be released in vinyl, CD, and digital download. I got that is tight. I'm going to have to get that. And that's going to have to replace my Bonav vinyl that sits. Maybe we should do like a Patreon listening session with that one or something. Yeah. I just wanted to bring that project and Clea to our audience's attention in case they were interested in her artwork and this kind of archival project. I think like I said, Terrence McKenna kind of holds a nice place in a lot of people in the culture heart. So, well, and just in case any of our viewers don't know this, there was a massive library held by Terrence McKenna that mysteriously went up in flames after his death.
[14:10] And so a big question for a lot of Terrence McKenna fans have been what books did he have? And you know like wanting to kind of see the material that he was reading through to kind of come up with all of his ideas and stuff like that. And so I kind of think like part of this is like a redemptive moment for that as well to kind of bring some more what he was thinking, what he was doing to light for people. I think that's really cool.
