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Daniel Pinchbeck is our guest blogger during the week of September 10th. If you have any questions for Daniel Pinchbeck, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some information about 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl:
“Pinchbeck, who is actively bidding to become his generation’s Timothy Leary – or, more precisely, the less famous psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna – has created a scene around him that is perhaps the youngest and most vibrant of the current psychedelic establishment.”
- Rolling Stone
Cross James Merrill, H. P. Lovecraft, and Carlos Castaneda -each imbued with a twenty-first-century aptitude for quantum theory and existential psychology-and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet, nothing quite prepares us for the lucidity, rationale, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.
Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York's literary select. He wrote for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Harper's Bazaar. His first book, Breaking Open the Head, was heralded as the most significant on psychedelic experimentation since the work of Terence McKenna.
But slowly something happened: Rather than writing from a journalistic remove, Pinchbeck-his literary powers at their peak-began to participate in the shamanic and metaphysical belief systems he was encountering. As his psyche and body opened to new experience, disparate threads and occurrences made sense like never before: Humanity, every sign pointed, is precariously balanced between greater self-potential and environmental disaster. The Mayan calendar's "end date" of 2012 seems to define our present age: It heralds the end of one way of existence and the return of another, in which the serpent god Quetzalcoatl reigns anew, bringing with him an unimaginably ancient-yet, to us, wholly new-way of living.
A result not just of study but also of participation, 2012 tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own hopes and anxieties about modern life.
About Daniel Pinchbeck
Author Daniel Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father was an abstract painter, and his mother, Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson’s bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir). Pinchbeck was a founder of the 1990s literary magazine Open City with fellow writers Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. He has written for many publications, including Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. In 1994, he was chosen by The New York Times Magazine as one of “Thirty Under Thirty” destined to change our culture.
Pinchbeck lives in New York’s East Village, where he is editorial directory of Reality Sandwich (www.realitysandwich.com). He writes a column, Prophet Motive, for Conscious Enlightment publishing (www.cemagazines.com), which appears in Conscious Choice (Chicago), Conscious Choice (Seattle), Whole Life Times (LA), and Common Ground (SF).
2012
The Return of Quetzalcoatl
Daniel Pinchbeck – Author
$26.95 | add to cart
Book: Hardcover| 9.25 x 6.25in | 416 pages | ISBN 9781585424832 | 04 May 2006 | Tarcher
Penguin Books 
books, 
Daniel Pinchbeck, 
2012,
Synchronicity led me to pick up 2012
Senior Pinchbeckian,
A while ago, I visited Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville, NC, where I gave your book 2012 a brief perusing. As I placed your book back on the shelf, I felt a sixth-sensory gravitation toward it, as if I was supposed to be taking your meaningful literary work home with me. I did not purchase it at that point, as I did not know who you were or how good the book was.
Five months later, I bought Breaking Open the Head. I have always been interested in psychotomimetics and tribal cultures. Shamanism always intrigued me and I wanted to learn more. I snuck away from my family, while we on our summer road trip, to read it and receive bursts of ephemeral flight.
I used to frequent Grateful Dead shows at an early age. I spent a lot of my youth with my third eye open. A great deal of my youth was spent seeing for myself. I have seen millions of tight, spirals in undulating hues covering living organisms while tripping. LSD, mescaline and cubensis, however no DMT. After completing Breaking Open the Head, which, by the way, was the most refreshing read I've had in a long time, I went into the bookstore to look for a new book. Somehow, (mind you, I did not know you wrote 2012 at this point) 2012 just found its way into my hands. I looked at the cover and lost it when I realized that you were the author. Maybe it is because I have experienced many psychedelic experiences in my lifetime that I have had such a multitude of synchronicity, but one thing is for sure, I was supposed to read 2012. I didn't pick it, it picked me ... that's synchronicity, brother.
I am also a writer, although I'm still stuck in the fiction slush pile. Mr. Pinchbeck, as a loyal, grateful fan of yours, I'd like to ask you a question. Why has my vivid imagination been at odds with reality all through my life? Up until I turned 29 years old, I often felt like the broken windshield wiper from the analogy in the film Killing Zoe.
I'm trying to get an agent for what I know is the absolute greatest piece of poetic fiction that I've ever written. It's called Kaufnauphia. I know now what I didn't know when I began my continually rhyming, 30,000 word, fantasy verse novella. Being that this story is about a man who snaps himself free from the depression umbilical currently connecting every human in the modern world, and that his adventure paves the way for other human beings to find keys that lead them into their own revelatory adventures of self-consciousness, I can make this a series. If each new protagonist in every new book I write as a part of the series, undergoes a transformation through the removal of their personal melancholy, I will be able to demonstrate from a fictional standpoint, how a planetary shift in consciousness takes place. This could ultimately pull us into a positively charged noosphere. Word.
The book opens with Stephen (Steph) Vernon, a lonely forty-something who suffers from depression brought on by the loss of his wife and father. On this particular evening, Stephen enters the creek on his property to search for crayfish, his weekly routine. Under a rock, he finds a glowing key with a strange symbol embedded in its side. He attempts to dispose of the key, but it returns, and directs him to a pair of newly-formed cellar doors. Stephen opens the doors, navigates through a tunnel and ventures into the strange land of Kaufnauphia. As he travels through this bizarre land, Stephen meets an odd cast of creatures who inform him that he must save Kaufnauphia from impending chaos, but in order to do so, he must also save himself from depression through a series of personal revelations—hope, trust, perseverance, acceptance, forgiveness, and love.
If you read this post, that is just f&@!ing awesome. If you wish to give me any, and I mean any, advice as a writer, I am all ears and eyes. I would be humbled, honored and ecstatic to get advice from you. You have got a gift, brother. Can't wait for your next book.
Sincerely,
Jason Panutsos
imaginal worlds
Hi Jason,
I wrote two novels that each took me a few years when I was in my late 20s, and neither were published. One was an attempt at a literary book and the other was a far-out fantasy mixing Samuel Becket and Philip Dick.
Although the books never got published, I would never be the writer I am now if I hadn't done that grueling work of apprenticeship. Writing is a real artist profession and requires a dedication to craft that is almost total. Also you really don't know - until it happens - if your labor will ever be meaningful to the public. At least the Net now allows anyone the option to put their texts up for whatever audience finds their way to them (have you looked into Creative Commons licenses?).
The work has to be its own ultimate reward - not just because of what happens on the page, but because of the way that the work transforms your own psyche and opens new doorways in your mind. Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" could be a useful text for you to read.
Also I really like a story of Chogyam Trungpa: A friend of mine who was his student talked about his poems and his depression over not getting them out into the world. And Trungpa pointed out that the root of the word "inspiration" was "in-spire," breath. In other words, inspiration is a natural process like breathing. You don't necessarily have to be attached to the outcome, if you realize that art is a natural expression of your own being.
When I wrote "Breaking Open the Head," I was fully involved in investigating something I didn't understand - and felt the need to give the fullest possible expression of my attempts to make sense out of my experiences. I think that my writing became good when I stopped caring about what any presumed audience might make of my ideas - when I knew that I had to solve this puzzle for myself, first of all.
Hope something in there helps.
Yours,
Daniel
Your In-Spiring Response
Daniel,
When I saw how long your response was, I must admit, I felt like doing a backflip. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love the creative process, but I must agree with your friend, Trungpa, that the outcome is not as important as the meaningful expression of one's true self. My mother is a painter and artist,
and whenever someone asks her why she doesn't sell her artwork, she responds, "Because, all that preparation just to sell it would really be work, and it would take time away from my passion. No thanks, I just want to paint!"
I had an epiphany after reading your response, a true turning point. Writing, this is what I want to do for the rest of my physical existence. No matter what else is going on in my life, I will continue to immerse myself and in-spire myself. When I wrote Kaufnauphia, I was living the experience, going to new worlds. I have written poetry since age 13 and it has always helped me, as a therapy. I have used writing to obliterate the maniacal voices of depression and addiction in my psyche. I mainly have had trouble with pills and alcohol, that age-old staple of social death (2 rehabs, jail, broken relationships). But, I haven't picked up a drink in going on 4 years, no AA either. I have done it myself, I have overcome my own personal f$#@!ing archons. Mind you, they do come back-I just have to envision as the gutless, spineless imps that they are, and dispose of them properly.
I can't thank you enough, Daniel. You are good to your fans. I checked out Reality Sandwich, and the content is right up my alley. I will also look at Post Modern Times, and will post my thoughts. Thank you for your tip on Creative Commons. You have a lifelong devoted fan on your hands here, one who can both spread the Pinchbeckian gospel to likeminded individuals and hopefully articulate the premise of your work well enough to get them to read your writing.
I don't know if you like hip-hop music, but, there is a song by a fellow, native New Yorker of yours, Aesop Rock, called No Regrets. It echoes the Trungpa idea of inpiration and true expression of self being more important in art, than the actual mass selling of artwork in the marketplace.
Regards,
Jason Panutsos
japanutsos@earthlink.net
you choose
So how will WE write it? How shall it read when we look back on December 21, 2012? We certainly have the elements in place to destroy ourselves. The planet has experienced cataclysmic events in its history - polar shifts, ice ages, etc. No one really knows. What the Mayan’s meant with their End-Count calendar will always be up for speculation. It fires the imagination, for sure. SOooo let's write it like we want it. That is what Chris Fenwick did in the #1 Visionary Novel: "the 100th human." You choose...