I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now — now!”
And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved — never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought — it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo
For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum — but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display — lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth — and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists!
During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce — no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.
When a friend and colleague of my parents’ — Augusta Bonnard, a psychoanalyst — came to Los Angeles for a year’s sabbatical in 1964, it was natural that we should meet. I invited her to my little house in Topanga Canyon, and we had a genial dinner together. Over coffee and cigarettes (Augusta was a chain-smoker; I wondered if she smoked even during analytic sessions), her tone changed, and she said, in her gruff, smoke-thickened voice, “You need help, Oliver. You’re in trouble.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “I enjoy life. I have no complaints; all is well in work and love.” Augusta let out a skeptical grunt, but she did not push the matter further.
I had started taking LSD at this point, and if that was not available, I would take morning glory seeds instead (this was before morning glory seeds were treated with pesticides, as they are now, to prevent drug abuse). Sunday mornings were usually my drug time, and it must have been two or three months after meeting Augusta that I took a hefty dose of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds. The seeds were jet black and of agate-like hardness, so I pulverized them with a pestle and mortar and then mixed them with vanilla ice cream. About twenty minutes after eating this, I felt intense nausea, but when it subsided, I found myself in a realm of paradisiacal stillness and beauty, a realm outside time, which was rudely broken into by a taxi grinding and backfiring its way up the steep trail to my house. An elderly woman got out of the taxi, and, galvanized into action, I ran towards her, shouting, “I know who you are — you are a
