The Best of Science Fiction 12

The word is groove and careful there, because the new edition is a verb. You can groove on almost anything including the things you can groove behind, but the latter usage is usually limited to speed, smack, acid, grass, weed, pot, Mary Jane, hash, and other chemical turn-ons. Lexicographers and jargon collectors are advised to be wary: possibly in an effort to maintain freedom of speech in an illegal zone, head talk has an even faster turnover of meanings than most pop jargon, and nothing specified here is likely to mean just the same thing by the time this book is published. Head itself, for instance, is already used with a completely different meaning in the phrase to have a head — nothing to do with hangovers, rather with philosophy.

Or it may be that the swift-shift thing is simply an advance-guard symptom of the general effort to reach beyond the Word Barrier. I have a notion that what the 'psychedelic' people mean by 'consciousness-expanding' is that the tripper can drop out of his customary semantic matrix, turn on previously unexercised nonverbal perceptions, and tune in to aspects of his environment invisible inside the word-spectrum.

The French poet and painter Henri Michaux is one of the very few writers who has succeeded in the improbable effort to translate some of this kind of experience back into words. His book Miserable Miracle (City Lights, 1963, translated by Louise Varése), a record of mescaline and marijuana experiences in words and drawings, should be a shelf-companion (less instructive, more immediate; less analytical, more poetic) to every copy of Huxley's Doors of Perception.

In science fiction, the same impatience with the limitations of words-as-medium has led to some fascinating speculation about 'ESP', or psi (not necessarily 'extrasensory' but specifically nonverbal) communication. One of the most memorable psi stories from the peak interest period in the fifties was Katherine MacLearn's 'Defence Mechanism'. In recent years, Miss MacLean has published very little: she was back at school studying clinical psychology; this is one of the first of the new ones.