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

[Otto]

2009/11/14 alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>:
>> Robin:
>> 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.
>
>> Alice:
> 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?
>
It is at least interesting to know that the author knows from "some"
personal experience what he's writing about and not only from books
about the topic. There should be things in the text that can be
appreciated better by readers who know too what he's writing about.

To put it plain and simple: were drugs the 'inherent vice' of all the
hippie-story, the reason behind its failure? Because drugs were part
of "the System" long before the whole thing started? As Doug says in
his post about Vietnam. Vietnam was the first fully televised war, we
had it in our living-rooms every evening before the weatherman. We
knew that many soldiers were stoned, could only cope with the
situation by taking drugs and that on the other hand young Americans
were in riot against that war taking the same drugs as those soldiers.

Dope and LSD doesn't make sure that you don't become a killer like
your boozing neighbour? We knew that from the Manson-story.

To claim "Love & Peace" is surely a good thing, but what if the term
"Love" is overused (p. 5), abused by people to manipulate others, in
combination with drug-use, as Manson did.

Dope and doper's greed make you vulnerable in a system like ours, you
can be blackmailed to snitch on your people, if you don't want "Them"
to destroy your live.

The hippies had no insurance against that, it was something that
couldn't be avoided (p. 351).