White Rabbit

Looking back, I feel that my favorite song from the late 60s, was Grace Slick’s White Rabbit. Slick was considered the progenitive Queen of Acid Rock and the song has always been considered an anthem to LSD and other hallucinogens. The song caught me not because of its allusions to drugs, I was not a user, but by its connection with the novels of Lewis Carroll (among my favorites) and the “beat” of the song so strongly influenced by Ravel’s Bolero (one of my favorites).* This combination of favorites has persisted now for more the 50 years.

What links these favorites?

Curiously, it was Grace Slick who made it clear. She said the song was not about drugs, but about curiosity. For her, drugs were about opening the mind, but it was curiosity that was the gold. Drugs worked to break down the miasma of conformity that kept everyone trapped in uniformity. But it was curiosity that would truly open the mind and lead to a new kind of freedom, true discovery, and the release of the imagination from its culturally induced prison.  It was not just drugs that would do this. As she made clear, “to feed your head,” meant to read books, particularly books that would lead one to follow the white rabbit, that is, to follow curiosity.

One of my earliest lectures as a Jungian analyst, was built on this essential key of curiosity as a way into the deep psyche. I invite you to be curious about this word curiosity and explore it as I have suggested in recent posts on wordwork.

*Slick also mentioned the influence of Miles Davis’s 1960 jazz album, “Sketches of Spain,” and especially the “Concerto de Aranjuez.” I was never a jazz fan, though I loved reading the history of jazz. To this day, this album and his 1959 “A Kind of Blue,” are the only jazz music I listen to. So, another kind of favorite.