PREFACE
by Charles Hayes
One of the things that prompted this book was the tale of a real Celt
of a fellow I knew who worked as a pressman in the inky bowels of one of New York City’s dailies, where the paper was printed. One night
at a smoky, old-time saloon for “newspapermen,” he relayed how he’d taken acid one evening and witnessed his own conception by way
of catching his parents in the act of making him. There they were on
the living-room sofa, enjoined at the loins, making tender love in
the supple skins they wore the night they brought him into this world.
He said that he’d just sat there and wept at the shuddering beauty
of the scene, the roseate gleam on the lovers’ bodies, the sweet desire that moved them to merge so moistly and meaningfully.
The story amazed me. It was as if he’d been granted a glimpse of his own genesis through a sort of umbilical telescope, a once-in-a-lifetime cruise through the sap of the family tree. Still, I wondered about the rules that govern such screenings. “Of course, you’re really not supposed
to see these things,” I thought. It must have been the action of some powerful agent that had pulled some strings to broadcast such
a sacred moment.
Visions of this sort are naturally considered forbidden, a violation
of the sanctity of parental privacy, akin to unveiling the face of Jehovah Himself not to mention the whole rap sheet of Oedipal transgressions inherent in peeking through the keyhole of your parents’ love chamber when they’re getting it on. It’s just not done. If you get caught, you’re
in trouble, right? But who was there to catch him? Only his conscience, perhaps, but he didn’t feel guilty about what he was seeing. Far from it. He was so overcome with joy and tenderness -- and gratitude for being hatched in such a loving, orgasmic reverie -- that he was weeping
for the sheer conjugal majesty of it all.
I wondered, “Is there a legitimate spiritual, psychological or emotional purpose for his being shown this vision? Will he be a better person
for having spied on his parents in the act of coitus, even if they were doing it to beget him?” Well, spying may not be the word for this,
but the sort of act he’d just taken in is not your standard spectator sport. Should his peeping be chalked up to chemical tomfoolery and summarily tossed back into the iridescent spume of the psychedelic sea as so much indigestible Freudian detritus?
Other questions arose… { back }