From the New York Times
The Prankster's Death
Some names come trailing behind them not a sense of the person but
an idea of something larger, a time, a possibility, an actual shift
in the ways of being. Ken Kesey's is a name like that. The man it
belonged to died Saturday at 66, after complications following liver
surgery. Mr. Kesey was only 27 when his first novel, "One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest," was published, a book that began the making of
his reputation. People will be arguing about the meaning of that
reputation for years to come, even as it grows more and more
elusive.
Mr. Kesey's creativity was never limited to the written page. His
other muse was collaborative, committed to the swift transformations
of the moment. For a time a drug - LSD - seemed to give those
transformations a kinetic reality. The story of Mr. Kesey's first
encounter with LSD in 1959, as a volunteer in an experiment, has
acquired the aura of legend. Depending on your point of view, he was
a guinea pig, a trickster or a criminal. He was, in any case, one of
the figures responsible for bringing LSD out of the realm of
national security, where it was being studied by the C.I.A. and the
Army, and into the realm of the public. In the "acid tests" he held
at La Honda, Calif., in the hills above Palo Alto, he and his
friends created much of the aesthetic context that came to define
the LSD experience as that generation knew it - a mix of music,
lights, nature, the surprises of consciousness, and the trip-long
drift of interpersonal connections.
To think back to 1964, the year that he and Neal Cassady and the
Merry Pranksters drove across America and back in a Day-Glo bus, is
to remember a far-off country. It was one of those transcendent
moments that ultimately seemed to conspire with the time, just as
the time was changing.
Jack Kerouac went on the road, but that was a private trip. Mr.
Kesey mapped the road out for the rest of us, whether we took it or
not, whether we found him merry or not, whether we liked his kind of
pranks or not. The Kesey road began in La Honda, where for years
afterward you could still feel the echo of the acid tests, and it
eventually led everywhere.
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