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.