Author’s Note
Nowadays, the word “psychedelic” sounds like a marketing buzzword, neurolinguistically employed to promote an aspiring industry that teeters between commercial boom and collapse. Referring mainly to a class of psychoactive compounds made famous in the ’60s for bending time and warping perception, along with a loose network of related aesthetic and social movements, psychedelics are now more typically paraded as clinical healing substances known to treat a variety of mental health conditions. In other words, psychedelics are in a decades-long process of “journeying” from the counterculture to over-the-counter-culture. But in this poetic portrait of artist and poet Gerd Stern, we explore what it means and looks like to actually be psychedelic—not only to be influenced by substances like LSD, but to live a life that puts the psychedelic ethos into practice. This never-before-published encounter with a true countercultural elder is like a time capsule, punctuating today’s psychedelic discourse, and offering a glimpse into the past of Jewish psychedelic culture.
The first person to get Allen Ginsberg high was Gerd Stern. “Allen wound up being a big pro-marijuana person, more than I ever had been, although here I am still smoking,” Stern tells me from his Chelsea apartment on a frigid Friday afternoon in December 2021, almost seven decades after their fateful encounter.
Just a few miles away, New York’s longest-standing conference on psychedelics, Horizons, is kicking off the weekend, drawing “psychedelic industry” folk from far and wide. I’ve dipped out of the ritual networking that happens at such gatherings to interview New York’s eldest psychedelic culture maker and one of the last living members of his generation of countercultural, spiritual thinkers. At ninety-three years old, Stern is perhaps a bit too frail—and by now, maybe even too esoteric—to take the stage at an event like Horizons. And yet, sitting at his breakfast table in an eclectic studio, filled to the brim with books, tchotchkes, collage-plastered furniture, woodwork, framed sketches, and photographs of loved ones (including a sepia portrait of his dear friend and personal hero, rabbi and countercultural icon Zalman Schachter-Shalomi), Stern feels as personally and creatively invested in psychedelic culture and consciousness as anyone I might encounter in the lecture halls of the nearby conference, if not more.
A poet, painter, sculptor, and multimedia artist, Stern has roots in the psychedelic movement that predate even the beatniks. Born in Saarland, a German state on the French border, in 1928, Stern and his family immigrated to New York in 1936 as Hitler ascended to power.
Stern was rebellious from a young age. His tenuous relationship to his family landed him on the streets of the city, where he lived in an “old burnt-out car,” or hopped from one crash pad to the next with his girlfriend du jour or other street hippies.
“It was a time when things were much looser than they are at the present—relationships started and finished in a much easier fashion,” he says. “I was part of that world.”
One girlfriend, a UC Berkeley graduate who lived with Stern on Jane Street, was the first to help him discover that he was a poet. “I wrote something for her, and she said, ‘This thing that you wrote for me is a poem,’ so I took that seriously and have taken it seriously ever since,” he recalls. “When I think of the actuality of it, it wasn’t a big deal, but it turned me into who I am—boom—just with a few words.”
And so he delved into the arts—but not without getting into some trouble. “I visited my father and stepmother in Washington Heights one time, and I was wearing terrible hippie clothes and a fur coat. He was terribly annoyed and railed against me till I was out the door, and I realized that my rebellion was not being received very well at all,” Stern recounts. “It caused a huge disruption in the family. They sent me to a psychiatrist, who said to me, ‘Look, your father can’t afford me, and there’s nothing really wrong with you. You’re not crazy, but you’re malnourished. Look how skinny you are!’ So he said, ‘I have a wonderful idea for you, but you can’t tell anyone it came from me: If you go to the psychiatric institute and tell them that you’re a poet, they’ll accept you because they’re very interested in having interesting people as patients, and you’ll have to tell them that you’re a danger to yourself. At least they’ll feed you and you won’t be starving.’ So I persuaded my father that it was a good idea, and he reluctantly signed me in.”
At the psych institute, in the late 1940s, Stern met Allen Ginsberg, who was there as part of a plea bargain, as well as the writer Carl Solomon. “We became friendly and we misbehaved rather badly altogether,” he says of the trio, reminiscing about sharing joints and making art. What came out of their psychiatric stint included one of Solomon’s best-known pieces, Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient, and the inspiration for Ginsberg’s seminal poem “Howl” (also known as “Howl for Carl Solomon,” which famously begins: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . ”).
As for Stern, being a jack-of-all-artistic-trades, he began creating collages in the psych ward, which he says led him to get involved in the art world—and eventually, in USCO. An acronym for the Company of Us, USCO was a multimedia art collective that Stern cofounded in 1963 with the electronic technician Michael Callahan, whom he met while living in the Bay Area, and the former pop art painter–turned-Sufi devotee Stephen (aka Nooruddeen) Durkee. A close friend of Ram Dass, Durkee edited and laid out the manuscript that ultimately became Be Here Now.
USCO was based inside a church building in the hamlet of Garnerville, Rockland County, about forty-five minutes outside New York City. The collective’s interdisciplinary approach brought together painting, poetry, sculpture, and multimedia projects “involving film, light, motion, and sound,” which, in the words of the curator Raymond Foye, had “an important early influence on the culture of light shows and psychedelia, as well as computer programming and software development.” Influential indeed: the art created through USCO has been shown in MoMA, the Whitney, Tate Liverpool, Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and (naturally) Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater.
Integrating a variety of media and spiritual philosophies ranging from Mehir Baba to Kabbalah to Buckminster Fuller, USCO made extensive use of stroboscopes, projectors, audiotapes, and lasers in their performances at arts institutions and universities across North America. Their ultimate goal was to produce an aesthetically induced mystical experience of “oneness,” and in that spirit, the famed Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas described their performances as “the beginnings of a new religion.”
The USCO church building became something of a revolving door for a commune’s worth of poets, artists, filmmakers, composers, and engineers, who all lived and worked there together. “The whole idea was that this was not one person or many persons who took the responsibility, but a group [as a whole]. We had a certain amount of mystical, spiritual—you might even say religious—ideas behind what kept us together and working on certain installations and performances,” Stern says. “We kept very busy, and at the time, people paid us not a lot of money, but something adequate in order to put on fairly complex multimedia performances, which was a new idea at the time.”
Their ultimate goal was to produce an aesthetically induced mystical experience of “oneness,” and in that spirit, the famed Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas described their performances as “the beginnings of a new religion.”
To even mention the role of psychedelic influence in USCO’s work would be stating the obvious—as if noting the role of food in sustaining a human being. Stern’s first psychedelic experience was with peyote, which he tried while living in Oakland; his second, also with peyote, took place on a ranch in the mountains of Big Sur. But his acid trips, he says, were what “changed the level of reality” in their extreme color and awe. And yet, Stern says, “they weren’t anything more than what was happening to most people. We knew a lot of people who were doing acid for quite a long time. We spent a lot of time at Millbrook [Timothy Leary’s estate and LSD commune].”
In truth, writing a single article about Stern is like trying to describe the breadth of a psychedelic experience in a single sentence. Prolific as an artist, Stern was also prolific in his personal life, fathering multiple “children by various mothers,” rubbing shoulders with Jewish countercultural contemporaries like Ram Dass and Lionel Ziprin, and pursuing fellowships and other academic relationships with institutions like Harvard and Stanford. The expansive life and work of Gerd Stern may be better examined in a series of interlocking discrete pieces or fractal shards; in fact, Stanford University is spearheading one such effort, having acquired his archives for their special-collections library. Ultimately, though, Stern’s poetry says more about his essence as a human being than any profile or academic rendering could capture.
In Stern’s apartment, I look around again at his array of lovingly accumulated and artistically displayed objects. Inscribed onto magnets, posters, and even the cover of his poetry book WhenThen is a poem that Stern says is his mantra:
Take the NO
Out of the NOW
Then take the OW
Out of NOW
Then take the then
Out of NOW
I stare at the magnet, where the poem’s white text is overlaid with a blended rainbow. “English is the only language that has ‘then’ in both the past and future,” Stern tells me. Perhaps one of the most psychedelic attributes any language or encounter can have is the feeling of time bending beyond itself, of transcending the linear mundane and settling into a swirling moment of infinite stillness. Ultimately, speaking with Gerd Stern is a kind of psychedelic experience in and of itself: the conversation isn’t neat and tidy, but feels more like a living collage. In Stern’s creatively cluttered apartment, time—and the people, places, and things that came to define an era or a zeitgeist—all converge and coexist. They are as much a part of current reality as they were at any other point in history, past or future. Stern himself said it best in his poem “Yom Kippur, 1992”:
istory not itsory
history and herstory
their and ourstory
wastory and willbe
Gerd Stern’s time-bending and vision-warping art and life remind us of a bygone era when the counterculture was less slick and corporate and more, well, countercultural. Let us not forget the winding, weird, and wonder-filled ways of the “angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”1 who laid the groundwork for this current phase of the psychedelic renaissance.
Footnotes
- Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Books, 1956), 9. ↩︎
Madison Margolin is a journalist covering psychedelics, cannabis, spirituality, and Jewish life. She is the cofounder of DoubleBlind Magazine and has written for publications like Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Vice, among others. Also a cofounder of the Jewish Psychedelic Summit and host of the Set & Setting podcast on the Be Here Now Network, Madison has traveled from cannabis farms in Northern California to underground ceremonies in Brooklyn to the shores of the Ganges River and all over Israel|Palestine, reporting on the role of entheogens in religion, culture, and healing. Find out more about her work here, or follow her on social media.
Ayin Press is deeply grateful for the support of the Dr. Bronner’s Family Foundation, which made this project possible.