Barrett Syd - Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd

W hen we think of Syd, we first see his eyes. Syds eyes were haunted, but not haunted by something terrifying that he had seen and hated to face in the way we usually think of it. Haunted by the sheer complexity of everything in this universe and the none-sensus reality we humans seem to inhabit. Overwhelmed by the sensory responsibilities of seeing endlessly spiralling strands of DNA that programme our lives, our behaviours both as individuals and as a species.

Syd saw infinite fractals of fragile nature in layer after layer, interconnecting and separating, spinning particles filled with information and messages expanding and multiplying in intricate webs that threaten to paralyse all flexibility until we are entombed, immobile in a paralysis of inertia. The eyes have it, as they say in the hallowed halls of power.

Why was Syd so haunted by seeing so many strata of meaning and possibility? Because Syd was one of the rarest of souls that grace our transient paths of mortality. He was a storyteller, in the ancient sense of the shaman who instructs, forewarns, re-minds and heals others of their people, their clan, their culture or their chosen family and their community. This is a sacred calling, a spiritual duty that once understood as ones fate cannot be denied, no matter what the price.

In the Middle Ages, this would be the troubadour. The musician-poet who wandered from court to court, castle to castle, inventing songs and allegories of love, lust, betrayal, and all other aspects of the human condition often at the risk of brutal punishment, or even execution, should they offend the authority deciding the status quo of the moment. Regardless of danger, these beings are charged with seeking spiritual wisdoms to describe, interpret and, occasionally, even to elicit sense from nonsense.

For Syd, this religious obligation required language. Syd took and used words in order to describe incredibly difficult revelations and observations on our behalf. After exploring new landscapes, alien territories and complex feelings, his task was to retrieve what useable maps and explanations he could to share with his chosen community through the medium of the song. Lyrical lyrics. This demands an immensity of metaphor few can reach.

When we read Syds lyrics it would be easy to assume the jumbling, layering, colliding, anarchy of his surreal combinations is chaotic reflecting a chaotic mind. But, we would contend that his smashing together of clusters of images and phrases is not designed to create chaos, nor even describe it, but is ironically, a technique born of genius to enable him to be ever more precise and orderly in his messages.

In the 1950s, W.S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin sought to liberate the word in order to discover new ways to write reality as we really experience it through all five senses simultaneously, plus memories triggered, plus expectations of possible and impossible repercussions. With Finnegans Wake, James Joyce had tried to write down what the inside of a thinking brain is like. Samuel Beckett attempted to imply the nature of consciousness without motive but, until Syd Barrett, nobody had really applied this aspiration to the (often dismissed as banal) pop song, except maybe Bob Dylan.

What Burroughs and Gysin proposed was a tool they dubbed The Cut-Up where they literally cut-up pieces of their own texts and texts by other writers, then re-assembled them at random to see what it really says, as Burroughs pointed out. What they achieved was a neo-magickal system somewhere between prophecy and function. In their book The Third Mind, they discuss the various successes and failures of these experiments.

We had the great fortune to see the original Pink Floyd at the UFO Club and Middle Earth in the sixties and later without Syd several times in 1969 when they were promoting Ummagumma. Theres no space to discuss the pros and cons of Pink Floyd with and without Syd musically, though my personal preference remains for with Syd. What seems vital to focus upon is the poetic core of the Syd songs. He may seem to be extending an infatuation with the likes of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, The Wind in the Willows and nonsense limericks, as has been pointed out many times. (In fact Octopus has been noted as consisting almost entirely of quotes from other peoples poems, which is a pure cut-up in the tradition of the Beats.)

What seems to me to be the purest aspect of Syds genius is his appropriation of a highly stylised, individual language all of his own in order to achieve the impossible of describing a holographic picture of life, of existence both internally and externally. From the microscopic quantum landscape of psychedelically revealed particles, to the galactic expanse of space, stars, the planets and light.

In his solo work, Syd chose to insist on the inclusion of studio mistakes or misstakes, as he might playfully say. Syd is reminding us over and over again that the means of perception and creation cannot and must not be controlled or constricted into more conventional formats. To solidify rules and parameters is to confine and sterilise the very essence of imagination. No stone can be left unturned in this search to comprehend.

Interestingly, legendary biologist Francis Crick only admitted years after his groundbreaking work discovering the double-helix structure of DNA that he had been using LSD regularly for problem solving at that time. Using small (then legal) amounts of LSD to increase his powers of analytical thought and speculation. It seems that Aldous Huxley had introduced him to this option. Crick said nothing at the time, as it might have been used to discredit his research.

Syd Barrett was using exactly the same process in his search to find the perfect phrase, chord, surprise, and joke that would encapsulate in some oblique but precise way the mystery of being alive and being an alive being. His innately shamanic tendencies were a blessing, in that they exposed vividly to him the intricacies of existence and a spiritual view of nature. They were also a curse, in that they were so shatteringly pervasive that he became lost within their infinity. In a very real sense, he was drowning in sensation and vision at the mercy of ubiquitous sensation. What he desperately needed was not to be cast adrift in the eye of his storm, but to feel a loving hand reach out to him, to rescue him unconditionally before his catastrophic isolation was compounded irreversibly by abandonment.

These would be djinn in some cultures, angels in others, tricksters and spirits slipping temporarily into this linear dimension, the one we each think of as life as we talk to ourselves in our thoughts.

Syd Barrett took his journey for all of us. He was compelled to stare into the centre of all matter and meaning driven by an idealistic faith in the ultimate right to evolutionary salvation of our human species. He was not the first; he will not be the last of his kind.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, NYC