Art/Artists & Intoxicating Tales & Ideas Posted by James Killus, 29 Aug 2007 06:31 am

The Occult History

I won the raffle at a party thrown by a job agency a while back, and one of the prizes was a gift certificate from Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee; a single glass of Coke at dinner is enough to move my sleep time back an hour or more. But Starbucks sells other stuff, so I had a cup of hot chocolate and bought the Dylan No Direction Home CD.

The PBS special on Dylan was directed by Scorsese, and covered Dylan’s career up to the point where he had his motorcycle accident. It feels important, somehow, that Dylan survived the accident, that he didn’t follow the “good career move” that got so many of the other 60s icons. Dylan was always the Trickster, so it also feels appropriate, and besides, living is better than dying. I don’t care how many mediocre albums he’s made since then, how many unmemorable songs. He’s alive; good for him.

One of the things that was very obvious, and left very unmentioned, in No Direction Home was how thoroughly ripped he was for much of the time. The scenes from “Don’t Look Back” were particularly obvious, with Dylan’s speech, wordplay, little tics and gestures, all showing the obvious signs of amphetamine use. Gee, a pop star in the 60s on tour, using speed. What a shock. And a lot of his songs are scornful; just watch one of his press conferences and take a guess as to why.

The obvious reason why the documentary didn’t mention the drug use is that, once drugs get mentioned in any narrative, the overall narrative gets hijacked by the drug narrative. It’s pretty much the same with sex; once sex gets mentioned, it takes over the story line, because that’s what people are most interested in. I’m not sure what happens to a sex narrative once drugs are mentioned, or vice versa. I suspect it’s just that there is a sex/drugs story, and well, there you are.

The drug narrative, in order to be palatable, pretty much has to follow either the “I saw the light and now I am redeemed” plot line, or the “descent into hell followed by death” plot line. No others are really acceptable to a mass audience, although there are specialty tastes, of course, and times do change. It used to be the case that adultery had to be punished, for example, but not so much these days. Of course, adultery used to be actually illegal, and drugs still are. More accurately, the drug narrative is the illegal drug narrative. Legal drugs tend not to get much of a mention because there is no “moral principle” involved, unless the drugs are procured illegally, of course.

This wasn’t always the case. Opium was legal when Coleridge wrote “Kubla Khan” and that got turned into a morality fable, of a sort. When you examine it closely, however, it’s hard to find what the moral of the tale is. Without opium, there wouldn’t have been a poem; its incompleteness is usually blamed on the “gentleman from Porlack.” It’s also worth asking if “Kubla Khan” would have received the same response if it had not been known as an opium dream, and if it had been finished. Again, no way to know, is there?

Drugs affect art. Hell, everything affects art. But drugs, owing to their effects on the psyche, modify art more than most other things. Of course, love has had more effect on art than, say, heroin or amphetamines, but love has its own neurotransmitters. Pharmacologically, love is a stimulant. Add War, in its most general terms, to the list, and you’re still talking about internally generated substances linked to external events. Love, War, Drugs, go write about those. Let me know if you find richer subjects.

Most of the attention given to drugs in the narrative of the artist and the artistic life follows the plot of seduction and corruption. He had such a promising career until he became an addict. By the time she was 40, she looked 70 and her voice was shot, owing to the combination of alcohol and drugs. And so forth.

I once saw a bio of F. Scott Fitzgerald that referred to the matter as a “Faustian Bargain,” and that has more truth to it. We can decry the art lost to early death from alcoholism, but we cannot know how much of the art during life was the product of that alcoholism. One is supposed to hew to the line that drugs and alcohol only subtract, never add, but can one really listen to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and believe that it would have been the same song without a speed boost?

Dylan in particular was old school beat poetry with a rhyming dictionary. Try to imagine Kerouac without the liquor and speed, Burroughs without the heroin, Ginsberg without the peyote. One might was well imagine Nick and Nora Charles without martinis or Hemmingway without the guns and fights.

In SF, there are also plenty of overt examples of the occult history. In my essay Sleeping in Fritz Leiber’s Bed, I note that Leiber’s alcoholism informed a number of his stories, including ”The Thirteenth Step”, “Gonna Roll the Bones”, and “The Secret Songs”. Leiber might have written other stories had he not been an alcoholic, but they would have been different stories. The same is surely true of Philip K. Dick, whose habit (until his health failed him) was to sell a book contract, then take enough amphetamine to “speed rush” (Dick’s own phrase for it) the book into existence. And really now, does anyone think that Dick’s paranoid, reality-shifting, dark-yet-glittering visions would have been the same without the meth and dex?

The title of this essay is the short-hand that my friend Dave and I use to refer to the general subject of the effects of drugs on history generally, but on art in particular. I think Dave first used it when he’d listened to Elvis: The Sun Sessions and discovered a cut entitled “Bop Pills.” “Jim,” he said, “We overlooked something very important. Elvis was a truck driver.” What he meant, of course, was that truck drivers have always used uppers, and always knew where to get them. “Bop Pills” was part of how you got to bop.

You can certainly make your own list of all the art that has had drugs as part of the pervasive influence. “Wine, women, and song,” has been replaced by “Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll.” It’s the same old song, though everything else about it has changed.

Well hell, without sex and drugs, what would the songs be about?

Trackbacks

Responses to “The Occult History”

  1. on 29 Aug 2007 at 3:00 pm 1. Bill Benzon said …

    Yes.

    On “Kubla Khan,” it’s not a morality play at all. It’s a mystical poem and it’s extraordinarily well-structured. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on this poem; you can see my most recent work here. And here’s an blog post where I surf the web for occurances of “Xanadu” and speculate about the how’s and why’s of that.

    As for drugs, biiiigggg subject. There’s a rather interesting theory going around that rock art is psychedelic visions painted on walls for all to see. I’ve written a review of a book (PDF) on that subject.

    Of course, rock art segues into my current project, graffiti. But I won’t go there now.

  2. on 29 Aug 2007 at 3:52 pm 2. Oaktown Girl said …

    I enjoyed reading this, James.
    The impact of drugs and art - it’s one of those things that’s impossible to measure. Improve? Impair? Increase (quantity and/or intensity)? A bit of everything over the course of a lifetime? And of course what constitutes “good” is completely subjective, making a measuring stick all the more impossible. Not that anyone would want to measure such a thing, except perhaps someone trying to formulate a cautionary tale.

    There are of course those who are great even before they start using, which I think must be a necessary ingredient. It’s unlikely that drugs could make a talentless hack suddenly talented. I know there’s the argument that drugs help unleash unlocked potential, but I believe if someone is truly talented, they will be able to access that potential anyway - given a decent opportunity to do so, that is.

    Certainly drugs might up the magnitude of an already highly talented individual. In any case, unquestionably I agree with James that the drugs make their works different than what they would have been without the drugs.

  3. on 29 Aug 2007 at 4:29 pm 3. Zeus said …

    I’ve often wondered if “love” could take the place of “drugs” in art if we had a society that was less repressive and Victorian and control-freakish in its outright dread of the uncontrollable creative process. It is almost as if society itself has an emotional imprint it imparts to the artist, not unlike a very dysfunctional parent, and in reaction too and artist “child” rebels by taking those substances that suspend this context or make is irrelevant.

    If society was more welcoming of the creative, of possibility, and energy did not need to be expended to subvert or protect oneself against the anti-creative fear inherent in rigid moralism, for instance, I wonder whether drugs would have been (or would be) seemingly necessary in the creative process.

    I also wonder if this wouldn’t increase the quality of art overall. Without the “against” of controlling norms, nor the “distortion” of mindbending drugs, wouldn’t an artist plausibly have a vulnerable and more direct, unclouded access to his or her muse, at least as an option? It’s an interesting mind experiment. I say this acknowledging the arguments that drugs like mushrooms or mescaline have been attested to have opened up spiritual and creative pathways.

  4. on 29 Aug 2007 at 4:38 pm 4. christian h. said …

    My own impression - probably influenced way too much by romanticism - is that many artist need some kind of extreme emotional experience to get them going, something the ancient Greeks personified in the Muses. For example, the German poet Heinrich Heine actively tried to have his heart broken in unhappy dalliances for inspiration.

  5. on 29 Aug 2007 at 5:05 pm 5. Oaktown Girl said …

    Zeus - you beat me to the punch. I was also going to say that the reasons for artists doing drugs are equally as important as the impact those drugs had/have on their works.

    While some reasons are simply for experimentation/recreation, often it’s used as an attempt to help deal with the tremendous pain of racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like. A less Victorian society would help with most of those things, though not all.

    For example, the German poet Heinrich Heine actively tried to have his heart broken in unhappy dalliances for inspiration.

    Oh my. That’s just wrong and sad on so many levels, I don’t even have time to deal with it!

  6. on 29 Aug 2007 at 5:25 pm 6. James Killus said …

    I’ll certainly agree with Bill Benzon that drugs are a big subject, but I had in mind something a little more restricted here, even more restrictive perhaps that the effect of drugs on art and artists.

    What I find interesting is not just that drugs affect art, but that there are so few ways of talking about the it. It’s all grist for the artistic mill, even that Victorian Repression that Zeus decries. Would Charles Dodgson have become Lewis Carroll without that distorted psychosexuality? And there’s nothing like the flood when the ice dam cracks.

    But the available narratives are so limited that discussion becomes first a matter of clearing off the overgrowht. It’s the hidden mass of it that tantalizes me, and that extends to all of human behavior. I think that if I am going to appreciate human behavior, I need to pay attention to even the morally repressed and emotionally stunted parts.

  7. on 29 Aug 2007 at 5:25 pm 7. christian h. said …

    Oh my. That’s just wrong and sad on so many levels, I don’t even have time to deal with it!

    Absolutely.

  8. on 29 Aug 2007 at 5:49 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …

    But the available narratives are so limited that discussion becomes first a matter of clearing off the overgrowth.

    You know what? That’s true for so many topics, and that’s a nice way of phrasing it, James (very artistic, might I add!). And even that’s not so direct as it sounds, as folks will inevitably argue over what constitutes overgrowth, and what constitutes “substance”.

    It’s the hidden mass of it that tantalizes me, and that extends to all of human behavior.

    Agreed. On a social-observational level, I personally tend to be most fascinated in how that plays out in the use of language and dialog interactions.

  9. on 29 Aug 2007 at 6:09 pm 9. James Killus said …

    very artistic, might I add!

    Well, I am, after all, on drugs.

  10. on 30 Aug 2007 at 12:15 am 10. JP Stormcrow said …

    And here’s an blog post where I surf the web for occurances of “Xanadu” and speculate about the how’s and why’s of that.

    Wow! That’s something, Bill. (Not quite sure what, but it is surely something.) Kind of thing I would love to do if I had a tad more time. I have been fascinated by knowledge/reference “links” for a long time - at an early age I tried to map out all of the (see article x, article y, article z) connections at the end of each article in the modest Encyclopedia we had at home. You can imagine the spaghetti mess I got not too far into the “A”s. (It was kind of like a “web” and in some sense it spanned the whole wide world…hmmm.) I must admit I do fucking ♥ the ‘net to an immoderate degree, adolescent wish fulfillment on a grand scale.

  11. on 30 Aug 2007 at 12:31 am 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    On the drugs….

    Am interested in the question of the characteristics of creative work produced by folks who are involved mostly with the dominant/sanctioned drugs of their culture versus other drugs. (I would call mainstream US an alcohol/caffeine/nicotine culture.) I am always intrigued by the seeming massive correlation of writing with alcohol use/abuse - my presumption is that little of the actual writing is done whole folks are literally drunk (with some notable exceptions) - but am willing to be educated on that point.

    Anyway too late for anything more now, but I will say that one can make a pretty good argument that most of these are in some manner performance-enhancing drugs, and World Rankings and the like should be adjusted accordingly. Coleridge should get an asterisk or a warning label for instance. (And then we should have long back and forths on the technical legal status of the different drugs at the time they were used. So Fitzgerald gets full credit for Paradise and Tender is the Night which bracket Prohibition, but Gatsby gets the asterisk.)

  12. on 30 Aug 2007 at 4:54 am 12. christian h. said …

    I can only speak to mathematicians (we fancy ourselves some kind of artists, too). While many of them drink a lot, it is completely impossible to actually work while drunk even a little bit - it just makes everything seem too easy. I would guess that it must be similar with writing, as I’m told good writing is hard work that needs concentration to detail.

    I’d also differentiate between mind-altering drugs (like LSD, say) and those that merely make you feel good. The experiences provided by the former can give artistic inspiration.

  13. on 30 Aug 2007 at 7:08 am 13. Bill Benzon said …

    JP – I never actually tried to map out encyclopedia article connections, but I was keenly aware of the connectivity – and among dictionary entries too. I used to spend hours with the encyclopedia reading linked articles.

  14. on 30 Aug 2007 at 11:22 am 14. James Killus said …

    Why are so many famous writers alcoholics? When you become famous you can afford scotch by the case

    –James Thurber, perhaps apocryphally, as the only citation I can find for it on the web is from me.