feeling my neoprene skin fill with brine. A handful of hardboard
surfers cork in a line about a hundred yards o=shore, waiting for
the combers that mount smoothly on the outside reef. By contrast, the shore break is sloppy, more up and down than straight
ahead; but it still feels good to move freely in the active surf.
When a fair-sized wave rises behind me, I give a kick, throwing
my legs up into the curl. One stroke and I am in the churn, body
sti=, chin tucked, hands out, splitting the liquid like a prow and
feeling the hard sand as I am driven ashore.
Why was Lilly so amazingly successful at promoting his unlikely program of research on the bottlenose? After all, he managed to cash in upward of half a million dollars a year in grants at
his peak—big money in those days. And for what? Dolphin communication? Rolling over in the spent foam of a receding wave and
looking out across the heaving blue, it occurs to me that part of the
answer lies right here: in the ocean and its changing meanings.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of being propelled
through a slipstream in a sea surge, the rush of water seeming
to lengthen the body into a fusiform streak. So natural does this
watery pleasure feel, so native to the body and the mind, that
one easily forgets the novelty and historical specificity of this way
of experiencing the briny deeps. Granted, there have long been
surfers and surf-swimmers among the traditional peoples of the
Pacific islands, but it took a very long time for Anglo-Europeans
to approach the sea with anything but anxiety and disgust. The
beach as a locus of health and pleasure is a firmly nineteenth-century invention (before that it was a convenient place to throw
garbage). And our crystalline vision of refreshing, turquoise
waters teeming with beautiful fish would have had little currency before the mid-twentieth century — right about when Lilly
turned to the bottlenose. Only then did the widening availability
of inexpensive swim goggles and modestly safe diving equipment open leisured access to underwater vistas. Previously, the
sea floor fell away in the imagination as murky and abysmal—
unaccommodating, hostile, black.
The 1950s and 1960s, then, saw the emergence of a new and
widespread cultural preoccupation with the undersea world,
a burst of interest on which Lilly drew and capitalized, and to
which he ultimately contributed. It was in a file that he had labeled, somewhat ominously, “Solitude,” that I found Lilly’s dog-eared paperback copy of The Silent World, the popular oceanic
vade-mecum authored by the psychopomp of SCUBA, Jacques
Cousteau, and popularized in the U.S. in the late ’50s in connection with a successful motion picture of the same name. Significantly, Lilly had marked with care a number of passages, all
of which dealt with the kinetic and tactile experience of being
submerged, weightless, isolated, and sensitized by a descent into
the aquatic realm.
Lilly was no diver, however. His deep fascination with these
feelings hails from a very di=erent arena: his long-standing research into that menacing corner of the human sciences known
as sensory deprivation. While still working for the government
at NIMH, Lilly and several collaborators developed a new technique for testing the psychological stability of human beings
under sustained isolation and reduced sensory input: the flotation tank. Warm water, circulating silently through a perfectly
dark chamber, buoyed a naked experimental subject over whose
whole head had been fitted a latex mask attached to life-support and monitoring devices. Money for this sort of research
hailed, of course, from the military, which was mostly curious
how pilots and submariners (and potentially astronauts) would
fare during long spells of lonely tedium. When it turned out
that many subjects rapidly came unhinged in this disorienting
environment, unforeseen possibilities emerged: the technology
could be used in personality assessment, and perhaps also in
personality adjustment. Lilly himself—fearless about self-experimentation, and already beginning to conceive of himself
as a cosmonaut of consciousness —spent many hours encased
in his own tanks, exploring what happened when a mind in the
water was left to its own devices. The results were trippy (this
was, after all, the Lilly that would later inspire the sci-fi thriller
Altered States), but he was convinced that the mentally sophisticated and strong—those with what he would eventually call
“wet courage”— could thrive under these conditions. One had
to transcend the terror, because a kind of enlightenment lay on
the other side.
Suspended in warm water, in perfect darkness, Lilly became,
you might say, a brain in a vat. And he liked it. Liked it enough
that he took a flotation tank with him to his new St. Thomas dolphin laboratory, where it soon became an important tool in his
increasingly eccentric pursuit of cetacean intelligence. His own
lengthening spells in weightless submersion led him to ponder
with mounting awe the sort of mammalian brain that would
evolve to dwell in the deep sea. It would be, he decided, a mind
like his own, only more so: fearless, deep, and self-su;cient — an
expansive intelligence in contemplation of itself. Moving to the
Caribbean, Lilly mostly left the electrodes behind, and embarked
on a new way of getting inside the heads of his experimental animals: rather than cracking them open like nuts and rewiring them
like doorbells, he would cogitate his way in, commensurating his
intelligence to theirs, becoming, through strenuous exercises of
sympathetic convergence, his own instrument — more and more
he wanted to “think like a dolphin.” Thus a nasty piece of Cold
War psy-ops technology was launched on a new career path: as the
head-trip hot-tub of psychedelia. Before long, Lilly, floating in the
dark, was piping the feed from the hydrophones in the dolphin
