The Road Of Excess
A Review Of Marcus Boon's A History Of Writers On Drugs
by Von Bark
 |
This is a book whose time had come, if not been long overdue. The reasons it seems so overdue could be self-evident: academic research into literature tends to be a rational process, while the taint of intoxication by controlled substances is, if not illicit or tawdry, at the very least ultimately irrational, lending itself to fanciful descriptions rather than concrete analysis. Boon’s comments on these subjects are crisp without being dry, gently ironic, and dare I say it, clear-headed; a sober yet surprisingly sensitive approach to a topic which is anything but sober.
more... |
The Road Of Excess continued...
Within the pages of this book are presented hundreds of fascinating and bizarre anecdotes ranging from an account of the death of Voltaire at the beginning of Chapter One to the Somatic cautions of the sages of the Vedas at the conclusion, and in between a dazzling kaliedescope of poetic and literary explorations, reinforced by an array of earnest scientific enquiries, sensational journalist exposes, and candid personal memoirs.
Many of the usual suspects one would expect in an endaevour of this scope make appearances in the course of various fascinating stories: obviously, William Burroughs and his beat associates Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac; Romantic-era figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas DeQuincey & Charles Baudelaire; the dystopian Sci-Fi visionary Philip K. Dick; and perhaps somewhat less-obvious but most intriguing are repeated references to Walter Benjamin, Ernst Junger, and Antonin Artaud.
Mr. Boon subdivides his enquiry into five sections, representing the influences of the main drug families he is examining here: opiates, anaesthetics, cannabis, stimulants and psychedelics. Within each section he describes not only the personalities involved and the effects upon their writings, but the cultural atmospheres of the times in which they were written in, as well as a series of modest speculations on the philosophical implications of these various literary experiments.
1) "Addicted to Nothingness," the opiate section, commences with a handful of references to Chaucer, John Dryden and Dr. Samuel Johnson (whose fondness for Laudanum went virtually unacknowledged at a time when its use was so common). Thomas DeQuincey provided some of the first detailed insights into the nature of addiction when he became hooked on the concentrated dosages of North England Lake District tonics, which also addicted his friend Samuel Coleridge. Boon weaves a hypnotic theme around the gnostic nature of narcotic detachment, and describes the transition of the role of morphine from a decadent distraction of the fin-de-sicle idle rich to a blunt force of nihilism sought to obliterate tragic memories of the first world war.
2) "The Voice of the Blood" is the most unusual, distinctive and perhaps enlightening chapter. In it, Boon describes the insular history of the somewhat less-recognized drug family known as dissociative anaesthetics, beginning with the first recreational usages of nitrous oxide, provided by its discoverer, the Romantic-era chemist Sir Humphrey Davey, who invited friends like his fellow chemist Joseph Priestly and the poet Coleridge to sample various compounds at their private drug-club, known as "The Pneumaticists." Audience volunteers staggering under the effects of this "Laughing Gas" provided amusement for yokels at carnival sideshows for several years before astute doctors began to suggest the possibilities which would revolutionize the science of modern surgery, around the same time that a handful of amateur philosophers were hoping that this substance might somehow provide a provocative (but ultimately unreliable) study tool in grasping the transcendental implications of the work of Kant and Hegel. The French Surrealist writer Rene Dumal, author of the cult classic A Night of Serious Drinking, hastened the conclusion of his brief career by various blindfolded, ritualistic self-toxifyings with carbon tetrachloride. In the late Sixities, dolphin behaviorologist and immersion tank theorist John Lilly claimed to achieve conversation with god(s) under the influence of Ketamine, as did yoga guru Marcia Moore, who tragically did not survive her final experiences back to an earthly plane of reference.
3) "Time of the Assassins" is a line from Rimbaud, and the title of the chapter on cannabis, which begins with a quote from Harry Anslinger, the achetypal narc and bane of all potheads, who spearheaded America's criminalization of Marijuana in the Thirties; Boon recounts with droll irony that Harry himself was a sort of literary type, who often personally composed the inflammatory newspaper articles, pulp paperbacks, and Hollywood film treatments which were used to make his case, and that Anslinger frequently referred back to the original legend of the crazed Hassassins; One could also note that while historians might acknowledge that someone named Hasan-i Sabbah probably inhabited a remote fortress in the mountains of medieval Persia, there is virtually no direct evidence that he commanded a squadron of lethal ninjas, or if he did, that cannabis was actually the medium by which he bent this hypothetic elite fighting force to his will. This classic story is a mere myth, one of the sort which would not sound out of place in The Arabian Nights, a document spiced with exotic and violent moments but also within its broader structure reflecting the lazy, langorous, digressive, anecdotal distractions which Boon describes as more representative of the casual storytelling nature of most cannabis literature. That such an indolent diversion would eventually be depicted as a threat to civilization is just one of those bizarre quirks of fate.
layout of this review as it originally
appeared in Grey Goo (Print Edition), 2005
4) "Induced Life" gallops off with Balzac's sprightly battlefield metaphors representing caffeine's spur to the writer's imagination. Arthur Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud may have praised cocaine as the amplifier of lucid thought and focused action, but the character of R.L.Stevenson's Mr. Hyde may have been one of the first to suggest the perils of this initially promising elixor. The propulsive dynamics exerted by stimulant usage eventually manifest themselves in varieties of mechanistic imagery, the depersonalized meta-amphetic man-machine grinding forward obliviously. Along with a diverting nod to a few of the sensational coked-out trash sagas of the Seventies, Boon does not neglect to mention the paranoid genius sci-fi hack Philip K. Dick, or the frenetic music critic Lester Bangs, who like PKD, flaunted a dazzlingly sloppy style embedded with rare gems of insight, and who has also recently begun to accumulate a degree of posthumous acknowledgement.
5) "The Imaginal Realms" covers the final and most challenging section of this book, the one where Boon confronts a paradox inherent in the psychedelic experience, wherein the taste of three-dimensional music resists lending itself to effortless translation into the medium of human language. The indescribable return voyage from the trip often suggested the inadequecy of conventional text to convey the experiential aspect of psychotropic phenomena. Aside from Hunter S. Thompson's disturbingly coherent nightmare vision of Las Vegas reality, or Terence McKenna's earnest babbling with the extra-terrestrials, the psychonauts who have dealt with these issues sometimes tended to present their offerings loosely woven within reference to their spiritual ancestors, the holy shamans of pre-industrialized societies. This shamanic cloak adorns Carlos Castenada, whose quasi-anthropological veneer attracted the scorn of cynics, but of whom Boon casually remarks that most of his fans seemed perfectly comfortable not striving to make any particular distinction between whether his efforts were meant to be presented as either fact or fiction.
My only modest criticism of this book is that it ultimately seems too short, and easily could have been expanded further. In the spirit of completism I could suggest a few additions, such as a mention of: Oscar Levant, the bon-vivant alter-ego of George Gershwin, whose Memoirs of an Amnesiac conveyed the trauma of addiction through a swarm of barbed wit; or, Robert Silverberg, the prolific sci-fi drudge who, after "dropping-out" in the late sixties, made a remarkable comeback with a series of psychologically intense works; or, Jeff Noon, a contemporary Mancunian sci-fi author whose poetic novels are saturated with suggestions of ecstasy usage, or more recently infused with the chilling Prozac metaphors of his novel Falling Out of Cars.
The Road to Excess is a charming, amusing, and tragic compilation of portraits and snapshots of creative individuals throughout history who have chosen to live on the edge of raw experience, and have chosen to use their natural talents to present the depictions of what they have confronted there. These transcripts are sometimes whimsical, often brutally honest, usually somewhat more or less decadent, and frequently striving either blindly or self-consciously towards the mythological resonance craved in order to harness the elusive spirit encountered in their artificial dreams.
Von Bark, "The Road of Excess: A Review Of Marcus Boon's A History Of Writers On Drugs,"
first published in Grey Goo (Print Edition), Toronto, 2005
|
The Road Of Excess
A Review Of Marcus Boon's A History Of Writers On Drugs
by Von Bark
- sally mckay 5-25-2006 7:18 pm
The Road Of Excess continued...
Within the pages of this book are presented hundreds of fascinating and bizarre anecdotes ranging from an account of the death of Voltaire at the beginning of Chapter One to the Somatic cautions of the sages of the Vedas at the conclusion, and in between a dazzling kaliedescope of poetic and literary explorations, reinforced by an array of earnest scientific enquiries, sensational journalist exposes, and candid personal memoirs.
Many of the usual suspects one would expect in an endaevour of this scope make appearances in the course of various fascinating stories: obviously, William Burroughs and his beat associates Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac; Romantic-era figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas DeQuincey & Charles Baudelaire; the dystopian Sci-Fi visionary Philip K. Dick; and perhaps somewhat less-obvious but most intriguing are repeated references to Walter Benjamin, Ernst Junger, and Antonin Artaud.
Mr. Boon subdivides his enquiry into five sections, representing the influences of the main drug families he is examining here: opiates, anaesthetics, cannabis, stimulants and psychedelics. Within each section he describes not only the personalities involved and the effects upon their writings, but the cultural atmospheres of the times in which they were written in, as well as a series of modest speculations on the philosophical implications of these various literary experiments.
1) "Addicted to Nothingness," the opiate section, commences with a handful of references to Chaucer, John Dryden and Dr. Samuel Johnson (whose fondness for Laudanum went virtually unacknowledged at a time when its use was so common). Thomas DeQuincey provided some of the first detailed insights into the nature of addiction when he became hooked on the concentrated dosages of North England Lake District tonics, which also addicted his friend Samuel Coleridge. Boon weaves a hypnotic theme around the gnostic nature of narcotic detachment, and describes the transition of the role of morphine from a decadent distraction of the fin-de-sicle idle rich to a blunt force of nihilism sought to obliterate tragic memories of the first world war.
2) "The Voice of the Blood" is the most unusual, distinctive and perhaps enlightening chapter. In it, Boon describes the insular history of the somewhat less-recognized drug family known as dissociative anaesthetics, beginning with the first recreational usages of nitrous oxide, provided by its discoverer, the Romantic-era chemist Sir Humphrey Davey, who invited friends like his fellow chemist Joseph Priestly and the poet Coleridge to sample various compounds at their private drug-club, known as "The Pneumaticists." Audience volunteers staggering under the effects of this "Laughing Gas" provided amusement for yokels at carnival sideshows for several years before astute doctors began to suggest the possibilities which would revolutionize the science of modern surgery, around the same time that a handful of amateur philosophers were hoping that this substance might somehow provide a provocative (but ultimately unreliable) study tool in grasping the transcendental implications of the work of Kant and Hegel. The French Surrealist writer Rene Dumal, author of the cult classic A Night of Serious Drinking, hastened the conclusion of his brief career by various blindfolded, ritualistic self-toxifyings with carbon tetrachloride. In the late Sixities, dolphin behaviorologist and immersion tank theorist John Lilly claimed to achieve conversation with god(s) under the influence of Ketamine, as did yoga guru Marcia Moore, who tragically did not survive her final experiences back to an earthly plane of reference.
3) "Time of the Assassins" is a line from Rimbaud, and the title of the chapter on cannabis, which begins with a quote from Harry Anslinger, the achetypal narc and bane of all potheads, who spearheaded America's criminalization of Marijuana in the Thirties; Boon recounts with droll irony that Harry himself was a sort of literary type, who often personally composed the inflammatory newspaper articles, pulp paperbacks, and Hollywood film treatments which were used to make his case, and that Anslinger frequently referred back to the original legend of the crazed Hassassins; One could also note that while historians might acknowledge that someone named Hasan-i Sabbah probably inhabited a remote fortress in the mountains of medieval Persia, there is virtually no direct evidence that he commanded a squadron of lethal ninjas, or if he did, that cannabis was actually the medium by which he bent this hypothetic elite fighting force to his will. This classic story is a mere myth, one of the sort which would not sound out of place in The Arabian Nights, a document spiced with exotic and violent moments but also within its broader structure reflecting the lazy, langorous, digressive, anecdotal distractions which Boon describes as more representative of the casual storytelling nature of most cannabis literature. That such an indolent diversion would eventually be depicted as a threat to civilization is just one of those bizarre quirks of fate.
layout of this review as it originally
appeared in Grey Goo (Print Edition), 2005
4) "Induced Life" gallops off with Balzac's sprightly battlefield metaphors representing caffeine's spur to the writer's imagination. Arthur Conan Doyle and Sigmund Freud may have praised cocaine as the amplifier of lucid thought and focused action, but the character of R.L.Stevenson's Mr. Hyde may have been one of the first to suggest the perils of this initially promising elixor. The propulsive dynamics exerted by stimulant usage eventually manifest themselves in varieties of mechanistic imagery, the depersonalized meta-amphetic man-machine grinding forward obliviously. Along with a diverting nod to a few of the sensational coked-out trash sagas of the Seventies, Boon does not neglect to mention the paranoid genius sci-fi hack Philip K. Dick, or the frenetic music critic Lester Bangs, who like PKD, flaunted a dazzlingly sloppy style embedded with rare gems of insight, and who has also recently begun to accumulate a degree of posthumous acknowledgement.
5) "The Imaginal Realms" covers the final and most challenging section of this book, the one where Boon confronts a paradox inherent in the psychedelic experience, wherein the taste of three-dimensional music resists lending itself to effortless translation into the medium of human language. The indescribable return voyage from the trip often suggested the inadequecy of conventional text to convey the experiential aspect of psychotropic phenomena. Aside from Hunter S. Thompson's disturbingly coherent nightmare vision of Las Vegas reality, or Terence McKenna's earnest babbling with the extra-terrestrials, the psychonauts who have dealt with these issues sometimes tended to present their offerings loosely woven within reference to their spiritual ancestors, the holy shamans of pre-industrialized societies. This shamanic cloak adorns Carlos Castenada, whose quasi-anthropological veneer attracted the scorn of cynics, but of whom Boon casually remarks that most of his fans seemed perfectly comfortable not striving to make any particular distinction between whether his efforts were meant to be presented as either fact or fiction.
My only modest criticism of this book is that it ultimately seems too short, and easily could have been expanded further. In the spirit of completism I could suggest a few additions, such as a mention of: Oscar Levant, the bon-vivant alter-ego of George Gershwin, whose Memoirs of an Amnesiac conveyed the trauma of addiction through a swarm of barbed wit; or, Robert Silverberg, the prolific sci-fi drudge who, after "dropping-out" in the late sixties, made a remarkable comeback with a series of psychologically intense works; or, Jeff Noon, a contemporary Mancunian sci-fi author whose poetic novels are saturated with suggestions of ecstasy usage, or more recently infused with the chilling Prozac metaphors of his novel Falling Out of Cars.
The Road to Excess is a charming, amusing, and tragic compilation of portraits and snapshots of creative individuals throughout history who have chosen to live on the edge of raw experience, and have chosen to use their natural talents to present the depictions of what they have confronted there. These transcripts are sometimes whimsical, often brutally honest, usually somewhat more or less decadent, and frequently striving either blindly or self-consciously towards the mythological resonance craved in order to harness the elusive spirit encountered in their artificial dreams.
Von Bark, "The Road of Excess: A Review Of Marcus Boon's A History Of Writers On Drugs,"
first published in Grey Goo (Print Edition), Toronto, 2005
- sally mckay 5-25-2006 10:30 pm