Interview

It’s an exciting time to be a doomsayer. The environment is ravaged, the world economy has collapsed, and every passing day seems to spin us toward a great, dark inevitable. Of course, we’ve seen this movie before (many times, in fact)—and here we are, still around to act it out again. But it does explain the recent resurgence of some of the doomsaying classics, including a grim forecast that dates back to theancient Mayan civilizations of Mesoamerica:the 2012 prediction.

The Mayans viewed time and history in terms of cycles, and according to their most expansive measuring stick, the Long Count calendar, the current cycle ends on December 21, 2012, with what is believed to be a particular alignment of the Earth, the sun, and the center of the Milky Way. (Many astronomers dispute this.) The Mayans didn’t elaborate except to say that the date would represent the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, which has resulted in theories about the date as a sort of fulcrum in the process of human evolution to others foreseeing all-out extinction.

It’s difficult to find a commentary on the 2012 phenomenon that doesn’t have some connection to Daniel Pinchbeck. The author of two books and numerous articles on the subject, Pinchbeck is an oft-quoted authority on all things 21st-century-radical, from free love and urban homesteading to the use of psychedelics (of which he is an outspoken advocate). But Pinchbeck’s relationship with the counterculture is more than just spiritual: His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract expressionist painter; and his mother, Joyce Johnson, authored a memoir about the women of the Beat Generation titled Minor Characters.

Growing up in New York City, Pinchbeck wanted to become a poet or a novelist. After dropping out of university at Wesleyan in Connecticut, he moved back to Manhattan, where he began working as a writer and founded the literary journal Open City with Thomas Beller and Robert Bingham. For a while, everything was going according to plan. But it all began to unravel one day in late 1999 when Bingham was found dead of a heroin overdose. Something began to change in Pinchbeck. He quit Open City and began a long—and, he says, very hermetic—process of retreating from the life he once sought so desperately to live.

On a trip to Africa prior to Bingham’s death, Pinchbeck had taken iboga—a root bark with hallucinatory properties. After that, his interest in psychedelics deepened beyond the LSD and mushrooms he had taken recreationally in college. He began to travel the world, experimenting with trip-inducing substances like ayahuasca (what the Beats called yagé), and immersing himself in the ancient tribal cultures that surrounded them—an experience he chronicled in his first book, Breaking Open the Head—which led to his interest in 2012.

The popular view of the 2012 prediction—that the end of the world is nigh—has spawned a cult cottage industry and even a big-budget feature film directed by Roland Emmerich, 2012, which is due out later this year. (The film’s tagline: “How would the governments of our planet prepare six billion people for the end of the world? They wouldn’t.”) But it is another interpretation—that the date represents aninitiation of sorts for humanity which is directly linked to our mistreatment of the environment and the current economic implosion—that interests Pinchbeck, even if it does include some of the fire and brimstone.

Pinchbeck recently co-edited an anthology titled Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, with Ken Jordan, composed of essays culled from their website, Reality Sandwich. He also authored another book on the subject, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and is involved in an upcoming documentary on 2012 directed by João Amorim.

On a recent Monday, in the café of a Jivamukti yoga studio, the 42-year-old Pinchbeck calmly explained why life—at least as we know it—is about to end.

STEPHEN MOOALLEM: You come from a family that has strong roots in the postwar counterculture. How did you feel about that growing up?

DANIEL PINCHBECK: I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having this alternate value. I always wanted to be a poet or a novelist, so I definitely associated with countercultural ideas. Allen Ginsberg was somebody I knew a bit when I was young—I really had a lot of respect for him.