A Pause from Thinking

All of us need an escape from reality now and then. The constant affliction, the longing, the quest for a better life, love, that score of happiness or simply a better way to think, is only found through the endurance of the worse of times, and the sharpest, un-surest contours of the soul. The constant flow of all things, good and bad, can make kings of us all, make fools of us all, make us crane our heads and think certain cynical thoughts about even the most beautiful of situations and moments. We must take so much in, in terms of our own experience and journey, and there seems to be little respite (starts a little like last week, doesnt it? hmm, oh well, im bitter enough)

That is why we turn to the bottle, the tab, the line or the needle to suspend that noise for a time.

The poet, in his or her heightened state of metaphysical awareness, has almost always looked to these vices to keep the mind (in ceaseless chatter) at bay, or as Byron once described alcohol ‘a pause from thinking’. This is one function that alcohol or drugs will take in a poet’s life, to ease the strain, though often, with any vice, it can consume the taker. There are many famous cases of this, through poetry, and literature history, and especially in popular music over the last fifty years. Poets such as Kerouac, Thomas, and Bernstein are the best example of this in poetry. Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Elliott Smith are all examples of great songwriters (and in that regard modern poets) who let their necessity for escape (through vice), along with their shear brilliance, consume them. Yet the use of drugs is also used in great affect to broaden the mind, to awaken self-pity (the poet’s oldest friend) or open the eyes to true meaning, and in this a poet (a true visionary) will always rejoice. Most of our favourite poems and songs have fallen under (if not the general influence, at least in a catalytic role) the influence of drugs.

Now I am not advocating the use of alcohol and drugs at all, simply trying to demonstrate the function of them in their long and lengthy relationship with the poet. The strongest of people can continue without these vices, find happiness despite the pain, but as any real poet would tell you, an poet is not a stronger person. Neither am I. I too need the odd escape (though im not a real artist yet). I’m sure most of you would be in the same camp.

Since the first writers of prose, tortured souls have sought refuge in alcohol and drugs. Early Greek and Roman poets often turned to large excess of wine. The great haiku poet Basho found constant solice in sake. Of the romantics, Coleridge developed an opium addiction that would last a lifetime, and Byron was well-known for his love of wine, and his great writing sessions in poppy seed-induced hazes. Arthur Rimbaud, my favourite 19th century poet, used great quantities of absinthe and hash, to keep his beasts at bay, and feed his creative soul. Indeed, French symbolist poetry formed an almost absolute bond with absinthe in particular with poets such as Verlaine, Mallarme and Baudelaire all enjoying its sway from one time to another.

These trends continued into the twentieth century. W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Federico Lorca and e.e.cummings all depended on alcohol in some form, while Jack Kerouac’s reliance on cheap wine, though his creative spark at times, ultimately caused his death. The great Charles Bukowski accepted his dependence on alcohol and embraced it, often using it as a central theme in his writing, and a point to which he could expertly relate other ideas. Leonard Cohen (ah great sundown L.C) has been quoted as saying LSD ‘opened his eyes to reality’, and has advocated its use.

The poets of modern music, particularly from the 1960s, seem to have agreed with this notion. Most of Jim Morrison’s early lyrics were written on Los Angeles rooftops under acid-induced visions, while Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote a large amount of Led Zeppelins best songs on large amounts of hash. Lou Reed perhaps wrote of drugs the best, The Velvet Underground’s opus ‘Heroin’ explores that particular vice in its entirety, through verses of pleasure and pain, with its musical score matching its lyrical intensity. Bob Dylan introduced The Beatles to marijuana (an incident made famous by the song Doctor Robert, off the album Revolver) which led to LSD, and other drugs, but also some of the greatest music of modern history. Neal Young sung beautifully of the addict in his song ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. The list goes on and on and on.

And so the poet is a uniquely human position. It is un-doubtable what a poet can achieve with ‘assistance’ but it is also obvious the harm it can do. Their gift often overrides their strength, and so the role of alcohol and drugs, as an escape, is very common. Does the usage of drugs justify the art they can create? Does it justify their sometimes premature deaths? The answers to these questions are left to the reader.

I shall close with a verse from Steven Jesse Bernstein’s poem ‘Its Just A Little Bit of Everything’, which draws on his drug-taking and alcohol usage. Bernstein, born in 1950, was a post-beat poet who suffered from the veils of addiction most of his adult life. He achieved notoriety in the late 1980s when he was swept up in the punk movement emanating from Seattle. He was signed by the famous Sub Pop Records as a spoken word artist, and opened for Nirvana many times. He committed suicide in 1991, motivated by in large by his substance abuse. His story has its roots in the many of the lives of great poets, and in that, the true human dependence on escape.

[for an eye into Bernsteins fine prose, check out him reading 'This Clouded Heart' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdmkLcf13EE on Youtube]

Living in the afterglow
Of a flame that burned out long ago
And when the darkness fades from my window shades
It’ll be a little bit of everything
That brought me down to this.