A Chemical Window to See Outside

Julia Case-Levine reviews Emily Witt’s “Health and Safety: A Breakdown.”

By Julia Case-LevineDecember 3, 2024

• Cultural Studies

• Memoir & Essay

ONE OF THE FIRST psychedelic trips Emily Witt describes in her new memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, takes place at a barn in the Catskills in 2013. She’s not there for a rave, a music festival, or a party, but for a “ceremony”—an event organized via Facebook group and shrouded in an atmosphere of pseudo-religious tradition that, as Witt writes, seems to treat “the whole world’s cultures, gods, and horticulture as a kind of buffet.” Witt recalls the events that follow with amusement and suspicion: 20 cheerful young professionals, freed from the supposed pressures of hip Brooklyn enclaves like Clinton Hill and Williamsburg, practice breathing exercises, pray to their mothers and fathers, and listen to a brief sermon comprised of what sound like “aphorisms from Alcoholics Anonymous.” This important work done, the group takes ayahuasca.

Witt experiences the drug as “a place outside of words.” Removed from the immediacy of language, her inner monologue becomes newly audible: “I was suddenly conscious,” she writes, “of what I can only describe as a ‘women’s magazine voice,’ a constant running narrative about how to be a more efficient, cleaner, healthier, more beautiful, undemanding, and more domestically competent human.” Crucially, according to Witt, the drug suggests she “could ignore the voice.” By observing the noise of advertisers and other people trying to sell her stuff—the din generated by forces indifferent, even antagonistic, to her well-being—it becomes a choice, rather than a mandate, to tune in.

It’s a familiar argument, ably couched here in Witt’s precise terms—that drugs, in briefly distancing us from our familiar selves, allow us to envision a fresh way of moving through the world. Indeed, in the decade since Witt’s ayahuasca trip, journalists and scientists have sought to reclassify psychedelic and other recreational drugs not as qualifiers for aberrant or criminal behavior but as tools that might be used to treat depression and anxiety for productive citizens. Often, the articles and studies in question assume a heartening optimism, promising alternatives where more “conventional” treatment has failed.

Health and Safety modulates this optimism with an unwavering note of dread. After the seeming success of her initial ayahuasca trip, Witt powers through texts like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), The Doors of Perception (1954), Terence McKenna’s lectures, and correspondence between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. For Witt, this research doesn’t represent a journey towards epiphany but a source of minor and eventually more substantial embarrassment. “I knew it was an unfortunate intellectual detour,” she writes, adding that “falling in was one of the greatest risks of adult life, not much discussed—falling in to conspiracy, fanaticism, religion, and embarrassing beliefs, as life continued on and the weight of it broke people left and right.”

The book tracks Witt’s own “falling in.” This begins in 2016, when her zeal for psychedelics expands to include a specific collection of places, people, and music. Put simply, a scene: clustered in Bushwick around clubs like Bossa Nova, and frequented by adults who, unsatisfied by their day jobs, seek joy, spontaneity, and connection in dance, drugs, and techno. Over the next half decade of clubbing, Witt reaches for acid and 4-AcO-DMT at parties like Sustain-Release and Fourth World. During these years, a certain type of party and person acts, for Witt, like a cathartic, seductive cocktail.

Witt’s introduction to the scene in early 2016 is followed by a series of world-rending events: Donald Trump’s election, the outbreak of COVID-19, and—following the murder of George Floyd—the eruption of more widespread protests against police brutality in the United States and elsewhere. The more depraved and inhospitable the world around her appears, the more Witt chases refuge. “I took [drugs] to psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive that I sought a chemical window to see outside of it,” she writes, acknowledging parenthetically that it was “also for pleasure, for fun.”

In this context, Witt doesn’t risk falling into substance abuse so much as into piety: into believing, with near-religious sincerity, that drugs and the worlds they promise to open up contain the answers to living well, tenaciously, authentically. Here, it’s all too easy to feel possessed of a knowledge unknown and inaccessible to outsiders, to take for granted that what happens within the scene is more real than anything occurring beyond its bounds.

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Today, Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she covers politics, culture, and nightlife. During the period covered by Health and Safety, Witt was regularly writing stories for the magazine on national tragedies and political fractures—the Parkland shootings, for instance, or Beto O’Rourke’s failed Senate campaign. Reporting these stories, Witt found herself required, as she puts it, to maintain, “a tone of authority, facts, and a confidence in right and wrong.” At first, Health and Safety seems to lean into this positioning: to frame Witt not only as an expert in her field but also as someone ultimately interested in the scene’s morality, or lack thereof. True to journalistic form, the book considers the relationship between the 1990s rave scene in Midwest cornfields and the techno music played in slick European clubs. It explores how the Cabaret Laws influenced New York’s nightlife. It describes underground raves like UNTER, held in empty, temporarily abandoned buildings, full of ravers exposed or in sportswear, high or sober, all there, according to Witt, “in pursuit of a glimpse of our best selves.”

For those familiar with the music and places she mentions, Witt’s reporting can be pleasurable to read. But it’s often unclear whether her intended audience sits outside of New York or if the book is primarily geared at denizens of Bushwick who attended the same parties around the same time. One chapter on Berghain—a Berlin nightclub whose infamy and cloying hype renders much writing on it obsolete—is oddly detailed for readers who have likely visited the club, or at the very least are aware of its outsized reputation. Other passages are littered with so many references to DJs, parties, and upstate raves that they read as though clipped from well-intentioned high school yearbooks, reaching to acknowledge every participant.

The memoir’s more interesting moments emerge less from this cataloging than from exploration of the tension between the authority Witt assumes, deliberately, as a journalist and her uncertainty as an individual. When, after the Parkland shootings, Witt writes a story commending the student activists for their “articulacy and moral righteousness” and predicting they would “shame us, all of us,” she’s left feeling that she has replicated the official position of a magazine rather than conveyed the depth of her own despair and confusion. In her writing, she senses “the ring of false optimism, the horror-normalizing machine.” Witt believes that journalism must hold space for a voice that doesn’t replicate the assumptions and standards of its audience—or whom its writer presumes to be its audience. The question becomes, How is it possible to escape that voice?

Health and Safety’s answer has to do with its refusal to reach any moral conclusions. Instead, the memoir lingers in moments of reservation, somewhere between belief and distrust—not just of the scene, but also of one’s public (often, professional) and private selves. Witt often doubts her own impressions; she seems torn about whether to treat earnestly or with skepticism moments that appear to her, at least as they’re unfolding, profound. Describing the “singularly transformative” experience of taking mushrooms, Witt recalls receiving a series of comforting messages from benevolent “entities” telling her that to “observe and report” would constitute her life’s mission. A few passages later, she questions the prudence of taking this experience too seriously: “The possibility of living my life in a delusional state of false revelation brought on by drugs troubled me.” Likewise, considering the scene’s cultural significance, she argues that “the hedonism was a resistance to something […] if in the world we were atomized, at the rave, for a few hours, we could model a collective ideal with its own manners and ethics.” Then, she hedges: “I knew our life in Brooklyn did not constitute any form of political resistance.”

There’s an interesting disconnect here between a popular culture that has come to handle questions like these with a self-deprecating wink (think Sabrina Carpenter: “I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life”) and Witt’s own ever-equivocating inquisition. Handled differently, many of the scenes in Health and Safety could be, put simply, funny. (The title itself seems to promise a wryness the book doesn’t make good on.) Yet there isn’t much space to poke fun because of how important it has become for Witt to parse the politics and influence of this group—to figure out which aspects of the scene she can defend, and which she can’t. What emerges over the course of the memoir is a sense of self-consciousness and confusion—a mind in movement (and often under the influence) that never quite knows what, including itself, to accept as true.

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We know that, by the end of the book, something will go wrong. Witt implies as much through several eerie, novelesque cliff-hangers—and the sheer volume and variety of drugs Witt consumes looms, ever-present, as a possible problem. We’ve also been trained, as readers, to expect an eventual comeuppance for a plucky, transgressive protagonist: “In nineteenth-century novels, the characters whose lives defy convention end up punished,” Witt writes. “They die of tuberculosis, or become prostitutes, or throw themselves into oncoming trains.” This may be nonfiction, but Witt gives us ample reason to believe the same lessons apply. For much of the book, it seems that whatever catastrophe strikes will most likely have to do with Witt’s relationship to “the scene.” In December 2016, a fire at the “Ghost Ship” warehouse, an illegally converted living space in Oakland hosting an electronic music concert, kills dozens of partygoers, and this profound tragedy makes the precarious spaces Witt frequents appear increasingly dangerous.

But this isn’t a 19th-century novel. It’s the 2010s, Myrtle-Broadway, and—comeuppance and convention aside—the catastrophe befalls someone else: “Andrew,” a programmer and music producer, and Witt’s chief romantic interest for the duration of the book’s narrative. Shortly after meeting Andrew, Witt explains how her “primary preoccupation” revolved around figuring out “how it was possible that people fell out of love.” She goes on: “I listened carefully to stories of breakups and divorce, looking for clues about how we manage to ruin even the greatest things that ever happen to us.” What, exactly, Witt loves about Andrew remains largely mystifying; she describes him as a stoner who frequently ignores her text messages, lives in a cockroach-infested apartment, and regards reading literature as a pretentious and embarrassing phase. And yet she captures her emotions nimbly: we feel her affection for him, muddled by rivaling hope and fear.

Things fall apart. Andrew spirals following a violent beating and arrest at a protest in the Bronx. He cuts up his clothes, piles trash on the floor of their shared apartment, and hangs disco balls from ceiling fans. He becomes obsessed with purchasing protective body armor and patenting a bicycle golf car. He drops fistfuls of rice into Witt’s wine, threatens to hack her computer, and pees on her belongings. Witt stays with Andrew for several agonizing months—only to leave him, in the memoir’s most lucid and propulsive chapter.

This chapter is also the book’s most devastating. Andrew’s breakdown may be related to drug abuse and police violence, but we can’t neatly fault either; what happens remains mysterious, indicative (mainly) of life’s arbitrary cruelty. This fact connects the story of their relationship—which at times verges on incongruous or separate-seeming—to the book’s focus elsewhere on the scene. It’s inevitable, a matter of human nature, Witt seems to be saying, to connect oneself to a crowd that seems, in some way, superior to everyone else: kinder, smarter, more authentic, more alive. It’s also inevitable to be, eventually, disappointed; to discover the members of one’s group succumb to prejudice, small-mindedness, and self-deception; to recognize that they, too, reflect the distortions of the world at large.

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At one of the first raves Witt attends with Andrew, they sit on the ground under pine trees. The pair is hungover, depleted, and listening as a performer—DJ Sprinkles (real name Terre Thaemlitz)—insults the event, calling it “Techno Sha Na Na,” which Witt takes as an indictment of the rave’s “bogus spiritualism.” Receiving this stubbornly dour lecture in a space designed for pleasure and fun, Witt comes to understand Sprinkles’s barrage, his very tone, as a form of ideology. It’s an attempt to, as Thaemlitz writes in Nuisance: Writings on Identity Jamming & Digital Audio Production (2016), “critically reject the incessant optimism lurking at the core of virtually all media, conferences, concerts, events, and symposia.” This might double as an argument for Witt’s own project. Health and Safety—which expansively covers Bushwick real estate, Nigerian cinema, gun violence, Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign, the unrelenting pressure women face to have babies, climate change, and white nationalism—might be simply and effectively summarized by its uncompromisingly bleak worldview.

Of course, cynical positions can be tedious and repetitive, obsessed with patterns, and insistent that things are and will always be one (awful) way. Much like optimism, pessimism has its clichés. (Ours is an age of viral nihilist memes, after all.) But it might also offer a remove from which to observe.

The book opens with a warning about the perils of “falling in”—of allying oneself to a conspiracy or fringe ideology, a movement obviously out of line with shared norms and beliefs. But don’t we all fall in, to some degree? Certain rituals, sometimes irrational, govern all of our behavior; often, we fail to see how these organize our lives (or, conversely, imbue them with disorder). Adults often chide teenagers for trying too hard to “fit in,” telling young people not to compromise their emergent, authentic personalities in the interest of belonging. And yet so much of adult life involves the pursuit of security and protection granted by one’s chosen group.

“Falling in” poses a particular concern for journalists, suggesting that the values of a community might inflect our powers of observation, might shape what we see or fail to see. And while we may never achieve perfect neutrality, maybe it is possible to stand just askance enough to identify and, from there, observe the languages of others (in Witt’s case, the “women’s magazine voice,” or “horror-normalizing machine”), even those embedded in our own heads. Perhaps, in writing from a position of distance, often disappointment, Witt manages, if not to avoid the great threat and temptation of adult life—falling in—then, at the very least, to pick herself back up and out again.