Erik Davis

“In the court of the mind, skepticism makes a great grand vizier, but a lousy lord, and a worse bard. As readers and interpreters, I believe we must move gingerly when dealing with reports of extraordinary experiences, which can be convulsive to experiencers, but strangely delicate things in the analytic afterglow. While I do want to analyze the experiences ahead, as well as the written accounts, I am far more interested in providing close readings of them than in explaining them away. I want to provide maps of their influences, resonances, and structural dynamics rather than unravel their ultimate meaning or origin or cause. We need to give these enigmas and strange loops room to breathe and to be—to enjoy what Bruno Latour, a philosopher and sociologist who will accompany us throughout our work, calls their own “ontological pasture.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

“More dramatic than the presence of this remixed cultural material, of course, is the startling appearance of an Other: the reptilian entity who pops out of the phantasmagoric scene and returns the observer's gaze.”
― Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies