This is the eleventh edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly(ish) column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, we’re rolling round and round and round with Jimmie Dale Gilmore.
One summer night, I was home from college and I ate some psychedelic mushrooms with a couple of friends. Arguably I ate a bit too much, but we had a nice time walking around and accumulating observations and giggles that now escape me. At a certain point, I lost track of who I was altogether. Some other friends, who were merely drinking, came to hang out with us and we were unable to make sense communicating with them. It was a goofy confusion, of the kind that will be familiar if you have ever found yourself in a similar situation. At a certain point we wound up on a playground. And one of my best friends was trying to talk to me while I tried to explain that I had no idea who he was. The part I remember most vividly is that at a certain point, I could picture my house and I could picture my parents, but these images had absolutely no meaning to me, no sense of connection. I could even access a sort of mental map of Nashville and follow the streets that would lead to that house and to those parents. But that was just information. Intellectually, I knew that was the house where someone called “me” lived, and those were “my” parents—but I did not know any of that in any intimate sense. Likewise with this person claiming to be my close friend. There was no “me” so there could be no history. These were just images and facts. I was just another fact, another image. There was no I. It’s always hard to explain psychedelic experience when you’re back on the other side of the looking glass, but that’s what happened.
Many years later, at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, I was having a conversation with two friends, Mikey and Casey. Mikey was a father at the time; Casey and I would be soon, but not yet.
This memory, experienced by each of us in our own private subjectivity—subjectivities that felt shared and communal on account of the drugs we had taken—was written and lodged and became lore. Casey asked what the most difficult part of being a parent was. Mikey said the most difficult part was the total annihilation of his identity. Was that so bad, though, I asked? It was rough, he said.
Later, when I had a second child, people would ask me what that was like. Easier, I would say, because the part where you lose your identity already happened, so this is just, like, another kid.
Some years after my chat with Casey and Mikey, I was in New York City. By this time I was a dad—our daughter was not yet 3. And I wound up in a conversation with a mildly famous actor, who was asking me about what parenthood was like. I was articulating this concept, this loss of the sense of self. He was very intrigued.
He explained that he had been doing everything he could to eliminate the ego. Drugs, meditation, scuba diving, etc. He was having a hard time. To lose the self, to quash the ego, this seemed to him the solution he was seeking. That would be a kind of renewal, he thought.
I could see a bit of his chest hair peeking out from his shirt as he explained this to me. He was divorced. He just had to find a way to do it, he said—to zero out the ego. His sense of self, his identity, all that: good riddance.
I said: “I know what you mean.” I said: “But that’s not a good reason to have a baby though!”
The Lubbock band the Flatlanders recorded some songs in 1972 that, by my lights, deserve a place in the country music pantheon. And a different pantheon, too: the Psychedelic Western. Like the film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, or Dead Man. And Terry Allen’s Juarez album; or the novel Sisters Brothers, or Blood Meridian, in its way. Or the bolo tie.
True to form, after the Flatlanders couldn’t sell records and split up, Jimmie Dale Gilmore lived in an ashram, read “philosophy and lore,” and studied acupuncture. He drifted around. He spent time with a teenage Himalayan mystic in Colorado and worked as a janitor at a synagogue. Later he had a cameo in The Big Lebowski.
Gilmore once asked a buddy what his favorite thing about infinity was. “Well,” his friend said, “I could just go on and on.”
Gilmore returned to recording music after sixteen years away, now often as a solo artist. He started getting interviewed, and he seemed conflicted about the value of discursive thought, in ways he couldn’t quite explain. Was it a hindrance to enlightenment or the gateway to the good stuff, like song and dance?
One time, a journalist from Lubbock asked Gilmore what made the town such a special hotbed for musicians. He demurred. History, he said, is contingent. “[S]o many factors are dependent on so many other factors—the interdependency of everything—that I think it’s always misleading and kind of ‘unreal’ to say, ‘There was something special about this place in this time that produced this Magic,” he said. “I just don’t think it works like that.”
When little Jimmie Dale was four years old, he’d get up on the haystack at his father’s dairy farm and sing Hank Williams songs to the cows. In first grade, his family moved to the city. “The most interesting thing to see in Lubbock,” he said, “is the lightning.”
Another time, an interviewer opened with the query, “Who is Jimmie Dale Gilmore?”
“Well, let’s see,” he said. “That’s a very loaded question.”
Every hour, a human being loses 200 million skin cells. Over the course of a few weeks, you shed the entire outer layer of your skin. The skin I live in now is not the same skin I lived in when I was on the playground in Nashville, or partying at Mardi Gras, or chatting in New York City. We live in new skin. We leave little pieces of our selves wherever we go.
The physicist Sean Carroll, an advocate of the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics, argues that the self in a given branch of the wave function has no moral obligation to the essentially identical self that lives in some other, unreachable version of the universe. To me, this seems to raise questions about the self’s obligation to, for example, the self in the unknowable and unreachable future. And that seems weird, but I’m not going to pretend I really understand the equations for the quantum wave function.
Psychedelic drugs stimulate a certain serotonin receptor, the serotonin 2A receptor, which is located in the membrane of the neurons in your brain. Particularly in the cortex, the stuff that is so well developed in humans. (Apparently for this reason, LSD and the like seem to have more dramatic impacts on humans than on, say, dogs—though hard to know for sure.)
I am not queasy about drugs, but I’m queasy about pharmacology. Just typing this information makes me feel a little faint, for some reason. So let me just say that the bits of your brain that are getting tickled are involved, among other things, with counterfactual thinking, association, and daydreaming. Psychologist and neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris argues that the brain on psychedelics can perhaps be understood via an increase in entropy: “psychedelics increase the unpredictability of spontaneous brain activity.”
The first time the philosopher Daniel Dennett tried to explain how consciousness works in the human brain, the metaphor he reached for was Multiple Drafts.
“The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting,” David Berman sings on his final album. My wife finds this line almost too excruciating to listen to, because he took his own life not too long after the album was released. For me, though, you could read it as Zen-adjacent self-help—not about death, but an aspirational pathway for life. It doesn’t have to be a suicide note, even if it was. We think of negation as an end point, but maybe that’s a lack of imagination. I have no good, or even bad, metaphor for consciousness, but my intuition is that it’s something to do with em dashes.
That day on the playground in Nashville when I had no sense of self at all, it seems like it would have been more alarming, more scary, than it was at the time. It wasn’t so bad, really. Maybe that’s because it’s me, my self, that would be scared—and that subjective experience of me was not available, so there was no one to be scared? But then, who was the self, the identity, the consciousness, that was experiencing all that, that could narrate the elimination of the ego as a subjective experience? I don’t know. It’s silly to tell a first-person story without an I.
At some point, I wound up in the sand, lying down on my back, looking up at the sky. I still had all of my clothes on but I felt naked. I felt suddenly and completely like an infant. The sounds that came from my mouth were each distinctive fascinations. Lying there I spread my arms and I spread my legs and made angels in the sand. To make clear what I was doing, I spoke, perhaps not in words, that I was making sand angels. I am a baby and I am making sand angels, I said, or did not say, or something.
I understood, or did not understand, that the death of the self is not a final act, it’s a new beginning. A fresh new self emerged like an infant there in the sand. Or maybe it’s the same old self, or maybe there are countless selves, dying and returning and dying and returning. It’s a mystery. But I felt very good.
I had fallen and I had risen and I had been reborn.
And the sky and the trees looked so familiar and so brand new. I was touching a tiny part of the planet, there in the sand, with my hands and feet, and the planet was rotating imperceptibly, and I perceived its imperceptibility, and I breathed, and my heart beat, and the blood moved through my body, and the neurons in my brain did their thing and the bones and muscles moved and I stood up and I was myself, my old self, in the old world, but a newer self in a newer world, a new skin, and I knew but did not know that some millions of imperceptible molecules of my skin were gone and now in the sand, part of me was there, and I knew but did not know that it mattered and did not matter that I was with the sand, whatever that might mean, and the part of my body that remained walked out of the sand and told my friends, here I am, and they were either high as well or drunk or just forgiving, and they said, there you are, and I said here I am and the lights in the park let us see each other’s faces and the stars and moon above shined down on the wide spinning world that was for all of us our only home, rolling round and round and round and round.