Not Drugs The Anatomy of Melville's Melancholy (Thoreau: "when men are prepared for it")

[alice wellintown]

> It's also foolish to pretend that Pynchon didn't imbibe all them "useful
> substances" and that the results of all those psychochemical experiments
> didn't wormhole their respective ways into his Opera. It's foolish to
> pretend that psychotropics are a side issue in the master's œuvre. The
> trajectory is as follows. LSD slithers into CoL49, explodes in GR, is in the
> background of Vineland. I'll have to re-read the glorious M&D in that light,
> knowing full well that Tom's chemical adventures altered the writer's P.O.V.
>  permanently. If you talk of Gnosticism, ya have to talk about visionary
> experience. AtD has peyote as a forensic tool and here we are in Gordita
> Beach—Fat City by the Bay City. So the Golden Fang offers Doc Coke, the
> latest in a long line of CIA experiments. LSD now is being sold that's not
> LSD, youthful protest movements that emerged in the early sixties—MLK
> anyone?—are confused and splintered by 1970.

That the author took drugs, as many have in the past, doesn't matter.
We don't read Poe or Freud or Coleridge or countless others merely
because they took drugs or wrote drug induced or influenced prose or
poems or essays. The use of drugs to augment or expand artistic
expression or unblock artistic stops, is quite common. So common, in
fact, it's difficult to find artists in any discipline who have not
tried drugs or other "natural" methods for these purposes. That
P-texts are saturated with drugs, as they are saturated with TV is
obvious enough. Why? That's what you've not explained. You claim that
the author's POV has been permanently altered by drug use. This may be
true; you can't prove it. But why do you defend the claim? Is it
meaningful to some deeper reading of the texts?