The Insights of Drugs

Jeronimo said that they knew something else. Did the drugs reveal that something else, or did that something else reveal them to drugs? I've been thinking about drugs most of my life, and I've been thinking about them and books ever since I started reading William Burroughs' Junkie. Jeronimo's remark on that certain in obtainable je ne sais quoi that drunken and stoned authors supposedly might have made me think even more about the relationship between getting high and writing. I just finished reading Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson and I have a lot of things in mind.

It occurred to me that this graphic novel, in structure and content, might be the exemplification of the mysterious rapport between authors and drugs. Although the pictures in their majority portray reckless behavior, the words are sober and thoughtful. What unites both elements of the graphic novel is feeling. The words in this page for example are extremely pungent. The images relate only at a metaphorical level with the words, but both meet in emotion. The vignettes provide a fragmentation in the reading that allows the reader to reflect more closely on what is said. The images aid the emotional impact caused by those words. 

And in this specific comic, words and pictures reveal the duality of Hunter S. Thompson's identity. Without the words he is a coke-snorting, alcohol-gushing, weed-puffing, unfashionable, bald guy. Your average American junky. Without the pictures he is an enraged, bitter, yet thoughtful man. Mix both elements, and the outcome is superior to the sum of its parts. Recklessness and thoughtfulness is a combination I've witnessed often as a product of a keen sensibility. Thompson's brilliant remarks and amazing critical eye are not in vain. I read his Kentucky Derby article, which bursts with wit and critique. It is evident that the man sees the world with an extra color receptor most people don't have. Seeing things with more acute eyes will only reveal evil to be more gruesome and beauty more breathtaking than they appear. Throughout the comic I sensed that disappointment was the predominant feeling in Thompson's view of the world. Whatever he loved and admired, he did intensely. But the world always gave him more reasons to feel contempt than to feel joy. 

A few years ago, I started reading Junkie with the hope that I would understand my father's drug addiction. The more I read, the more I understood drugs were a small part of the equation. The drugs seemed to be more of an adornment, an excuse, than the subject itself. I continued reading the works of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Hemingway, and others, as a child trying to understand her origins, and I discovered in the prose of all these men an equal fervent love for the world, and -just as when you see someone you really love hurt themselves- an equal rage and eventual disappointment caused by humanity's exacerbated corruption. The feeling is inescapable and it forever enveloped them. A while back I stole my father's youth journals and in his conflicted writing, I perceived the same vulnerability. I sensed, just as I did with all those authors, that my father cared more about honesty than his life. 

The drugs, then, are what's just out there.  Drugs don't take my sleep away anymore. In a different world there would be other ways to make blind sight to the horrendous harm around us and involving us which slowly eats up our soul.  

Drug use doesn't cause sensibility. Sensibility doesn't cause drug abuse. But both have met, and will continue doing so in writing, in art, in happiness, in pain. 

Slaves of Nativity

We have to wonder then, how much of what we are roots not from what we do, but from what has been done before us. 

David S. Reynolds’ cultural biography of the poet Walt Whitman “Walt Whitman’s America” gives us the detailed portrait of the antecedents that bred the poet.

Throughout the biography there is an over emphatic, almost incarcerating importance placed upon the social and economic background in which Whitman was brought up.  Born in 1819, the poet got to experience the last reminiscences of a rural America, and lived through the vicissitudes caused by economic transition to capitalism. But permeating in his life and work was a sense of perpetual (perhaps delusional) nostalgia for simpler past times, even ones previous to his birth. Whitman exhaustingly carries the weight of an unreachable past, and can only make sense of the present by lingering in his precedents. This is evidenced in his poetry, explicitly in his 1856 poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” where he writes:

                “Underneath all, Nativity,

                 I swear I will stand by my own nativity.”

Although Nativity proportions certain clarity to a people, it is also quite a burden. I can relate to Whitman’s thinking because in my family, the weight placed on family history is similar. In birth, one already bears the load of family history with the idiosyncrasies, mistakes, attitudes, and ideologies inherent to that heavy concept: Nativity. Because when one’s family has inhabited the same piece of land for such a long time, then one has to cohabit with the unerased, eternal action reaction chain from distant lineage. The genealogy that should be irrelevant to the present stares heavily into every action, and you, you are just another link to the chain, another proliferator of ritual and genetic tradition.

According to the book, the mentality of the time being revolved around believing that “Education is something, but PARENTAGE is EVERYTHING; because it dyes in the wool, and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.” (p.22)  In response to this, Walt “[who] could not change his parents, in poetry he constantly reinvented them and –by the law of hereditary descent- himself.” (p.22)

So although Walt bore the innate burdens of Nativity, he uses literature as an opportunity to abide to other constraints of character and history brought by an imaginary lineage.

Whitman’s obstinacy concerning parentage, nevertheless, is just him trying to make sense of his own being. It is easy and satisfying to attribute certain attributes of one’s self to genetics. Although obscure and far-fetched, it is less frustrating to attribute one’s “bad temper” or one’s “enthusiasm for thrill” to a predisposition than to the ether. Learning all of this contributes to a deeper and clearer understanding of Whitman’s work, which despite its transcendence, is nothing more than the expression of a conscience’s profundity. 

Unlearning to Learn

I thought it was simple: I disagreed with about one third of the world's population. The clash of my western mentality with that of the Muslim world, nevertheless still unnerves me. I can't grasp the notion that such a large body of people lives by ideas that at plain view I consider beyond ridiculous. Then I find out I will be spending at least three years of my life in the United Arab Emirates, and the resolution is simple: I need to understand Islam. 

A friend presented me with Eduard W. Said's book Orientalism and I thought that would be the perfect gate to my infiltration to eastern cultures and ideas. 

It didn't take long to find out that before I could understand Islam and Arab cultures I needed to understand why I thought about them the way I did.

The notion of prejudice when evaluating foreign concepts is always present. The first thing I learned in the book was about an embellished predisposition in the western mind rooted in an academic trajectory of European representations of the East that creates an initial image of the region. Said writes on the first page of his introduction "The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences." 

Said's main criticism is to the general grounds upon which such a vast land covered by the term "Orient" with its eternal cultural and geographical intricacies, heterogeneous nature, and detailed history has been crudely generalized and homogenized by the Western scholars of the 18th and 19th century. This unified image is one the modern western citizen keeps, and with time this collective portrait continues to grow and become more consistent. Two pages later Said writes, "...so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of their limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism." 

This indicates that the first step in understanding Islam is acknowledging one's own limitation of thought and extricating one's self from the imposed predispositions of stereotypical thinking. 

ascendancy

əˈsɛnd(ə)nsi/

noun

1.

occupation of a position of dominant power or influence.

inert

ɪˈnəːt/

adjective

1.

lacking the ability or strength to move.

"she lay inert in her bed"