ON DRUGS AND CREATIVITY
A while back some clay pipes were found in Shakespeare's garden with residual traces of cannabis.
As a result we had the usual banter, bravado and brouhaha of people elevating drugs to the status of keystone and talisman for all creative endeavour.
This societal thirst to ascribe a holy grail-type connection between taking drugs and an artist's output is tiresome, predictable and ultimately flawed.
It undermines every other part of an artist's life that goes into their work: their formative experiences, their family, their upbringing, their soul, their obsessions, their intellect, intuition, graft, creative influences, their resilience, the love affair they have cultivated with the act of creation itself.
Just to get some perspective: there are lots of people who smoke pot who haven't written the complete works of Shakespeare.
When people get disproportionately excited about stuff like this a more representative headline might be: "Man sits in a room and smokes pot and does fuck all", or: "News that a creative genius smoked pot gives validation and hope to man who’ll only ever eat biscuits and play Call of Duty."
Same with declaring the music of the Beatles is simply down to drugs. There are more people who've taken drugs that didn’t write Sgt. Pepper than there are who took drugs and did write Sgt. Pepper's.
The only people I can think of who did take drugs and write Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were the Beatles, so statistically speaking this shows that other forces are at work within an artist in the creation of their art.
An alternative headline here might read: "Man takes acid and experiences panic attacks for the next thirty years - fails to pick up guitar without screaming.”
Of course taking drugs can be an experience and some work is created under its influence. But some work is created under the influence of coffee. Some work is created under the influence of being in love. Some work is created under the influence of being depressed. Some work is created under the influence of being inspired by a sunny day. Some work is created under the influence of having an idea. Some work is created under the influence of being bored. All of these generate some kind of chemical activity in the brain. They all create a mental state that can drive an act of creativity.
But for some reason there’s a lingering desire for us to romanticise drug taking and give it a vaunted status in the act of creativity - that somehow taking drugs is more important than all the other qualities listed above - that it somehow supercedes the artist themselves and the full sum of their being as the driving agent.
If Shakespeare smoked a bit of Elizabethan pot then fair enough. But he was also clearly a dude that must have passionately fallen in love with letters and worked at it for it's own sake and it's own buzz. He must have experienced a wealth of emotions, situations, thoughts and dramas that had nothing to do with taking drugs and which made the substance of his soul that he was drawing upon when writing.
Nor was he an aimless dunce who picked up a joint and instantly became a genius. He was part of a great literary tradition that he was well aware of - inspired by, influenced by, borrowing and stealing from what had come before. Moreover he was a product of his times, influenced by an ambitious age of ideas, a time of discovery and invention, immersed in a renaissance of culture and art that surrounded him every day in a bustling city.
But I suppose if you're sitting in a mound of McDonalds BBQ sauces and trying to get Luigi to reach some coins above a venus fly trap it's more fun to just say, "Yeah man...Shakespeare...I told you...he must have been so high...hur hur...what was he on???!!!”
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