FANTAST IN FOCUS: MIKE JAY
Mike Jay is a cultural historian who hounds the maddening stories of the people who ventured to bizarre borderlands of consciousness. Praised by the Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesmen, Mike has written about nineteenth-century drug culture, the Illuminati, and the earliest claims of machine-based brainwashing. Mike currently curates Mindcraft at the Wellcome Collection, an installation on mentalism, mystery, and intrigue.
The Custodian: The mind and all of its deep and seemingly impenetrable terrain is definitely a frontier that humans have been exploring since the Stone Age. What first got you interested in pscyhology and the study of the unconscious?
Mike Jay: The simple answer is how can you not be? For me it’s most interesting when it’s socially and culturally rooted. I’m interested in the beliefs that people share—consensus reality—and how that forms itself. What I mainly do is look at what’s exlcuded from the consensus, things that are so-called ‘on the fringe’, such as intoxication and madness. Consciousness is seamless, and is constantly shifting in its definition with interesting stories and interesting people to follow.
C: Some of your works have focused on aristocracy and on Thomas Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institution…
J: The Pneumatic Institution is at the very beginning of modern drug culture. It’s the first place where we see a group of people deliberately intoxicating themselves just to see what it feels like. It was obvious to them that you had to take it yourself and have the experience yourself, but to describe it they had to talk to chemists, poets, philosophers, and scientists. They were using a ‘language of feeling’; talking about experiences that had never been experienced before. What a fascinating moment in history that was.
C: I’m intrigued by a “language of feeling”, especially because you spoke about a confluence of art and science. Madness and genius have always come hand and hand. Why do you think creatives have always seemed to maintain open relationships with drugs?
J: The relationship between drugs and creativity is very complex and ambivalent. There are so many types of drugs which are very different from another. A lot of the opiated Romantics probably didn’t partake to give themselves visions, they probably just did it to calm themselves down. If you were one of these people, you’d try to live every single moment living as intensely as you could. You’d be more likely to spend the second half kind of sedated on opiates or alcohol. Some musicians use it to enhance their talents, but I don’t think that works for painters or writers who oftentimes need a lot of concentration. I see drugs as prosthetics with various costs and consequences.
C: Any favourite characters you’ve come across in your research?
J: Humphry Davy first made me realise there was some kind of extraordinary story there. He was just a prodigious polymath. I think in terms of the figure I’ve studied most in the history of madness, I’d have to say a character called James Tilly Matthews. I’ve written a book on him called The Influencing Machine. He was the first person to believe that his mind was being controlled by a machine. He drew beautiful diagrams of it and he thought that it was powered by the cutting edge technology of the day (pneumatic chemistry, magnetism). He thought it was operated by sinister Jacobin terrorists who were trying to brainwash him. I found his work to be unbelievably rich. It’s like something out of Philip K Dick or the X-files.
C: That’s what’s so fun about history. A lot of people tend to think that everything occurs linearly; that the history of ideas goes from point A to B on a straight line. All the figures that you’re studying would seem to be blips on an otherwise straightforward graph. It just proves history’s spread out all over the place like the expanding universe itself. Could you give us a preview about the kind of things we can expect from the installation?
J: It’s a digital essay and interactive documentary. It’s tied in with the library because they’re digitising it at the moment. In the new reading room gallery, they’ve got a a beautiful portrait of Mesmer’s salon in Paris and the’ve also got a replica of Freud’s couch. The journey uses those memorabilia as starting and ending points.
C: I don’t know as much as I should about Mesmer, but I do know a few practising hypnotists.
J: What Mesmer was doing was faith healing. It’s trance. It’s something that never went away and had never really been forgotten. So the Academy of Sciences with Benjamin Franklin looked at Mesmerism and said some stuff was definitely happening, but they figured out pretty quickly that it wasn’t anything physical, just the power of suggestion through imagination.
C: Have you ever had any experiences with psychic anomalies?
J: I was hypnotised a long time ago. As it was happening, I was thinking that it wasn’t working. When they took me to the mirror to look at my eyes, I saw that they were flickering away like nothing I’d ever seen before. It just seemed like a really neat state of consciosuness in which some things were dulled and I wanted to talk as little as possible. I didn’t see any past lives or anything like that.