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From The Desk Of Entrance: Joe Mellen’s “Bore Hole”

Entrance (a.k.a. Guy Blakeslee) just released the great Promises EP and is gearing up for a full-length early next year via Thrill Jockey. In the meantime, he’ll be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Readers, you’re in for some really good stuff.

https://vimeo.com/137933878

“This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my head to get permanently high.” —the opening line of Bore Hole

Blakeslee: Joe Mellen’s autobiographical tale, originally written in 1970, is fascinating, inspiring and a little disturbing. After reading it a few months ago, I was definitely moved to reconsider some fundamental things about the way I view reality and consciousness.

The book tells the tale of Mellen’s life, growing up in England and coming of age during the 1960s, but is mostly concerned with the events that followed Mellen’s chance meeting with Dutch psychedelic theorist Bart Huges. Huges was a scientist and an evangelist for the gospel of LSD; he encountered some difficulty participating in the academic world due to his advocacy of psychedelics and became a kind of renegade teacher, traveling throughout Europe to bring his ideas to the communities where people were experimenting with LSD and other ways of altering consciousness. Huges theorized that a lot of our problems as adults come from the lack of blood in our brains, a condition that increases when children come of age and their “soft spot” closes up. He claimed that by drilling a hole in the forehead, permanently removing a piece of the skull, human beings can regain some of the lost blood-flow and reconnect to the more expanded consciousness of childhood, and he performed the operation on himself. Mellen was so taken with Huges and his ideas that he too came to drill a hole in his own head, and so did Amanda Feilding, who was close to both Huges and Mellen. The process, known as “trepanation,” is actually an ancient one that was employed by many cultures at one time including European culture, where it was once known as “cutting out the stone of folly.” Feilding ran for Parliament under the slogan “Trepanation for the National Health” … The book is full of colorful characters and an exciting energy from a time when people were more daring in their attempts to know— this is the thing that really struck me. It didn’t make me want to drill a hole in my own head, but it did make me think about how far I’m willing to go in search of knowledge and to remember that the greatest way to learn is to find out for oneself, to experiment on oneself. The foreword to the book reminds us that in 1784, Immanuel Kant proclaimed that the motto of the Enlightenment would be “saper aude” (or “dare to know”).