Brad Phillips and Tao Lin in Conversation
Illustrations by Brad Phillips
Brad Phillips is a contemporary Canadian writer and artist who has a forthcoming publication coming out on Tyrant Books in fall 2018. Tao Lin is American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He has published three novels, a novella and two books of poetry. His latest book, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change, which is part memoir and part journalistic exposé, is a first-person exploration of psychedelic culture in the 21st century, from his experiences taking psilocybin, DMT, cannabis and other psychoactive drugs. In the following interview, Phillips and Lin discuss conspiracy theories, circumcision and collapsing lungs.
MKULTRA
BRAD PHILLIPS: Trip has the word alienation in its title. When I met you was the first time I met someone as self-isolated as me. Someone mentioned neither of us had seen anyone in months. Was there a specific time or moment where you realized you were on some sort of trip or inside a narrative?
TAO LIN: I remember on LSD in Taiwan on vacation with my parents and my mom’s sister and brother, in 2014 or 2015, I felt I was in a strange, funny, poignant, slightly science-fictional, slightly fantastical movie. I’ve felt variations of that probably hundreds of times. I increasingly like to tell myself that I’m on a trip, with many sub-trips within it, and that I’m also experiencing various narratives, which I can control to some degree. I’ve been writing a novel, Leave Society, based on my notes on my life from 2014 to 2018, during which I’ve viewed myself as part of that narrative. Trip is a separate, but connected, narrative that also spans that time. I view myself as part of four main narratives currently—Trip, Leave Society, my notes, and my life—that change one another.
PHILLIPS: How is Trip separate, but connected?
LIN: In both books, I write about recovery, which I talk about as a never-ending process due to how damaged mentally and physically people are in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Many things are helping me to recover, including psychedelics, which I focused on in Trip. In Leave Society, I focus on other things more, like nutrition and detoxification and stopping paying attention to most of culture, and learning what the New York Times and other media are inaccurate on, aren’t telling people about, or haven’t investigated, like Surviving Evil (2014)—Karen Wetmore’s horrifying account of surviving terminal experiments by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s. Her book has gotten no mainstream coverage, even though the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Rutland Herald covered her story in 2008. Surviving Evil is the scariest book I’ve ever read, I think. I recommended it to a few people, and they didn’t read it, then I recommended it to you, and you read it. What did you think of it?
PHILLIPS: It confirmed everything I knew about MKULTRA through my own obsessive research, and the multi-tentacled, horrifying actions of the CIA. As a Canadian I think we always assume the worst about America off the bat, so any new information is just a confirmation. But I had no clue about Karen Wetmore and what happened in Vermont, and it was heartbreaking and nauseating to read about a little girl being kept in restraints naked on a concrete floor for weeks getting mysterious vaginal enemas, etc. I think it’s unfortunate that her book hasn’t been read more. I noticed you didn’t mention Surviving Evil in Trip, even though, in the chapter where you serve on a drug-only grand jury, you wrote about MKULTRA while discussing early use of LSD in the 1950s. Why?
LIN: The first draft of Trip had around five thousand words on Surviving Evil, but it was deleted in the second draft. My book does reference In the Sleep Room (1988), which is about Dr. Ewen Cameron’s CIA-funded work in Canada. He gave people unwitting injections of LSD, intensive “depatterning”-goaled ECT, and made them wear football helmets with speakers repeating the same thing hundreds of thousands of times in what he called “automated psychotherapy.” You told me about how your grandmother worked for him, and how she has only started talking about it in the past ten years. What’s something memorable that she’s told you?
PHILLIPS: My grandmother is ninety-nine and has been suicidal for years. She states it daily. So lately she’s just been unpeeling the veneer of her grandma-ness. She started, before working in Montreal, as part of the Canadian project to forcibly sterilize Hutterites and Doukhobors when they’d come in for gynecological exams. She’s only spoken briefly about the work she did with Cameron, but she’s completely detached from any morality around it. She’s of the generation that kept people in ice baths for hours, witnessed the first public display of an orbital lobotomy. I think having been in the Second World War and working as a trauma nurse, she developed the ability to dehumanize people, venerated male doctors and followed orders. The most I know for certain was she had something to do with the days and weeks patients spent in sensory deprivation tanks on LSD while listening to the piped in psychic driving you mentioned.
LIN: People assume that MKULTRA-level secret projects don’t exist anymore. But it seems to me more likely that many more, that are better funded and more secretive, exist now than sixty years ago. I think this is because no one involved in MKULTRA was ever punished, the mainstream media doesn’t care about MKULTRA or Karen Wetmore, the government has gotten exponentially better funded, and secret projects aren’t exclusive to the CIA. The Army was using LSD in the 1960s also—giving a “suspected Asian espionage agent” around 2.5 tabs of LSD and interrogating him for more than fifteen hours, for example. The Department of Defense had $304 billion to spend in 2000; on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced on TV that the DOD was missing $2.3 trillion; and in 2016 the DOD said it was by then missing $6.5 trillion.
PHILLIPS: It definitely goes on. Gang-stalking, brown noise, all of this I assume happens daily— I can’t imagine what the new technology and tactics are. With psychic driving, the goal is to break down the self completely, and I know too much about Jonestown, the state-of-the-art hospital on site, that people prayed to get manual labor jobs further out in the land because Jones’ voice was piped throughout the community 24/7. That was undeniably a CIA funded MKULTRA project. It’s interesting to me because there’s also a connection to Tibetan Buddhism, where each adherent is meant to do 100,000 protestations when they pilgrimage to India, and this has the same goal, but might be a positive eradication of the self, which really is just so many feathers and opinions.
LIN: I like that connection, though with the CIA people often don’t know they’re being targeted, so their eradicated selves leads to hellish mental states instead of existential calm. The most blatant example of the new technology that I’ve found is in 9/11. Judy Wood, in her book Where Did the Towers Go? (2010) compellingly argued that the seven World Trade Center buildings were turned to dust in a technology that interferes electromagnetic energy in a static field, like in a microwave. I talk about this in my next novel also. It makes sense that that technology exists, because Nikola Tesla was already experimenting with it before World War II. In the 1970s and 1980s, John Hutchison, basing his work on Tesla, was able to interfere electromagnetic energy to create “magical” effects, like levitation of heavy objects, turning metals into other metals, causing metals to fume, causing cylindrical holes in materials—all things that happened on 9/11.
CIRCUMCISION
PHILLIPS: We’ve talked about circumcision. In reading your book it made me think about how being circumcised is like being traumatically sent down an altered reality for life. What are you thinking about circumcision right now?
LIN: I like that— “being traumatically sent down an altered reality.” Writing my book, I’ve become more aware that humans evolved at least 280,000 years ago, and that for hundreds of thousands of years it was almost the same, with people living in sustainable symbiosis with thousands of lifeforms in nature, and that the period of time after people started farming and living in civilizations around 12,000 years ago can be viewed as a traumatic altered reality, and so circumcision can be viewed as one of the thousands of parts of that, sending babies into yet weirder and more painful altered realities. To just seemingly randomly cut off an important piece of the body. I thought all babies were circumcised in the hospital. How did you avoid being circumcised?
PHILLIPS: My dad was violently atheistic and very pro-sex, so I think that his experience of being circumcised really affected him. It’s strange to me because it’s mainstream genital mutilation that doesn’t get talked about. All these myths about cleanliness etc. are total bullshit when what we should be talking about is that I have twenty thousand more nerve endings in my penis than you do, and as a result certain things are more pleasurable for me.
LIN: I’m glad you can get more sexual pleasure, and have a less traumatized crotch, than probably most people reading this. When we talked about circumcision, I wondered if surgery existed to put foreskin back on. I haven’t looked it up yet. Modern society seems to inflict hundreds of circumcision-level things on its people, like feeding babies the equivalent of five birth control pills of estrogen per day via soy milk formula, or the government allowing glyphosate and other contaminants to be in food, vaccines, public parks and tap water at ever-increasing levels, as corporations ask for higher levels.
PHILLIPS: When I lived in Vancouver there was a lot of public acknowledgement of men developing gynecomastia (female breasts), because of the high levels of estrogen being expelled from women on birth control into the water. There’s no surgery that I know of. I did watch a very sad documentary about one man who viewed his circumcision as the deepest trauma he’d experienced, and attached weights to the remaining skin on the shaft of his penis, but that would only have cosmetic results. There’s no growing back those twenty-thousand nerve endings.
PNEUMOTHORAX
PHILLIPS: Both of our lungs collapsed when we were teenagers. From 17 to 19 my left lung collapsed four times leading me to mistakenly be diagnosed with Marfan syndrome. It ended up being chronic costochondritis. In high school yours collapsed three times—pneumothorax, it’s called. I was reading sickly Russian writers at the time and I remember the exact diagnosis - “mild pneumothorax with bilateral pulmonary infiltration”. I felt like I was part of a club, I liked it. How was it for you?
LIN: I was in the hospital for around a week each time. Part of me liked it. I remember my mom brought me McDonald’s more than once, and I got IV morphine, and I watched “Survivor” on TV on morphine, highly enjoying it and feeling fine. The second time they scalded the inside of my lung with antibiotics in a dubious-seeming thing I want to research at some point to find out how it has damaged me. After the third time, I had surgery and they cut out “blebs” from my lungs and stapled it with steel staples, which are still in me, and on which biofilms of unnatural microbes probably live. Pneumothorax has officially no known cause, but it seems probably due to me sitting for years fifteen hours a day at school and in a chair playing computer games, combined with malnutrition, chronically stuffed up nose, and hundreds of other problems - in other words society-caused.
PHILLIPS: In your chapter, “My Drug History”, you talk about your history of listening to punk rock as a teenager. We both found punk rock, but for me it was Fugazi instead of Operation Ivy. Both are good. I miss that kind of energy and have no idea where to find it. There are fluky connections between this shared experience, that we agreed online after meeting in person and connecting right away to have and nourish a “hermit friendship,” and that we’ve both made very inward work about self-examination.
LIN: You seem like you’ve been more physically active than me, generally, in your childhood and life. Is that right? I think I’ve heard that you played basketball in high school.
PHILLIPS: I played what I guess was high level basketball in high school but then dropped out. I wonder what altered course my life would have taken had if drugs hadn’t replaced basketball. Lately I guess cause I’m also in literal ‘recovery’, I’ve realized that I miss the body that I had then, or that I had control over the shape and use of. So I’ve been going to yoga 3-5 times a week cause my wife got me to stop being stubborn, and then I just got obsessed I guess since December with doing the exercises I did when I was seventeen. Push-ups sit-ups triceps-dips etc. I’m up to three hundred and twenty reps a night, drink whey and casein shakes. I’m forty-four, so it feels urgent to focus on health. I only really discovered the allure of computers when I was in my mid-twenties through chat-rooms that had girls in them, and after that I just watched tennis and basketball on television. When did you start using the internet?
LIN: In middle school, I think. Our family had one computer, and we got American Online on it, and I would use chat-rooms, then I got obsessed with the text-based multi-user-dungeon Gemstone 3 and played that for two years. It decreased my already low in-person social skills, and probably stunted my growth, but maybe I got more facility with language from that experience, since the game had no graphics, and everything in its world was described with words. It was from Gemstone 3 that I first learned of Operation Ivy. Another player told me to listen to them, this player I had a crush on who could’ve been anything from a 15-year-old boy to a 30-year-old woman, but who played a female character in the game.
PHILLIPS: You write about, in high school, enjoying an Atom and His Package song titled “Hats Off to Halford” praising a heavy metal singer for coming out as gay, and how a third to half of your teachers “used the concept of homosexuality in a derogatory manner, calling people or things ‘gay’ as a synonym for ‘bad.’” I experienced that all throughout primary and high school too. I have a good friend today I’ve known for years who still calls me “gay” for not knowing about new hip-hop, or certain of my friends will call people faggots, in this same way that Louis C.K. said had nothing to do with homophobia, but is clearly homophobic. Calling things gay is not some reclamation of derogatory language. But when I was young, I don’t know that I really knew what it meant, and then when I did, I was awkward and ill and bookish. I began to understand it, and wondered if I was literally gay and “bad” cause I was so different. This was pre-puberty. Did you think anything of it at the time? It’s strange to me your teachers would use that language.
LIN: It was normal where I grew up for teachers to do that. Characters in The Simpsons also called things gay as a synonym for bad, and other people on TV. I don’t think I knew of anyone who was openly gay in my high school. I remember masturbating, in high school, while thinking of a male friend, and I remember not being able to conclude if I was gay or not.
PHILLIPS: I’m straight for pay.