August is holiday time. France heads for the beach, Congress for home, and psychiatry for the asylum of Truro on Cape Cod. What makes for a holiday? Not time off from work. That happens on weekends, and no one calls that a holiday. Nor merely leaving home. That happens on business trips. Ask Willy Loman. On holiday one escapes more than work or home. One leaves oneself behind. The idea of holiday is a change of person, the remaking of oneself in one's own image. The baseball camp for adults, for example, where the bulky stockbroker, facing an aged Whitey Ford, can imagine himself the slugger he never was: that's a holiday.
On holiday one seeks to be what one is not. The accountant turns into a woodsman, the farmer into a city slicker.
And when they all go overseas, they insist that their tourist spot be tourist-free, the better to experience the simulated authenticity of another way of life. To holiday is to go native, to be native—temporarily, of course.
Reversibility is crucial. One wants to be native only for a time. The true holiday requires metamorphosis, but, even more important, return to normality. Return is what distinguishes excursion from exile. If the change of persona becomes irreversible—if the Mardi Gras mask becomes permanently, grotesquely stuck—holiday turns to horror. One must be able to go home.
And there are many ways, besides a Cook's tour, to leave home. One cheap, popular alternative these days is the psychic holiday: the cosmos on $5 a day. The preferred mode of travel is drugs, the destination lotus land. Madness is exotic. True, it is no longer celebrated, as it was in the heyday of R.D. Laing and the "politics of experience,"as the only real sanity in this world of (nuclear, capitalist, fill-in-the-blanks) insanity. But it retains a mystique, a reputation for authenticity and depth of vision. We know that the mentally ill inhabit a terrible place, literally a place of terrors. But that makes madness, like its two-dimensional facsimile, the horror film, all the more titillating.
For some, therefore, the ideal is to go there on a visit, a trip. The most widely used drugs, in fact, promise to re-create the experience of a major mental illness. Marijuana lets you circumnavigate the land of schizophrenia; LSD parachutes you in for the day. Quaaludes and downers promise a languid overnight stay in the Lethean land of depression, cocaine in the energized hothouse of mania.
As in any holiday, however, there must be an exit. For a drug to be widely popular it must be thought to be nonaddictive. That was cocaine's early, and false, claim to fame: the perfect high, it gets you there and back. (It is only those living in utter despair who choose a drug like heroin that takes you there for good: they are seeking not to holiday, but to emigrate.) The spirit of the psychic holiday was uncannily captured by Steven Spielberg, when he called Michael Jackson's peculiar child fantasy world (Disney dolls, cartoons, asexuality) a place where "I wish we could all spend some time." Living there, like living in New York, being another matter altogether.