Cannabis, Mind Enhancements, and Culture, Part II
“Unquestionably, this drug is is very useful to the artist, activating trains of association that would otherwise be inaccessible, and I owe many of the scenes in Naked Lunch directly to the use of cannabis.”- William Burroughs, American writer (1914-1997)
Writers on their Use of Marijuana
The American writer Norman Mailer won the renowned Pulitzer Price twice and also won the National Book Award. In an interview with the High Times, he said about marijuana:
“I always tell my kids – I don’t know if they listen or not – that what I think is, get their education first and then start smoking pot. At least there is something to run downhill with. Because what I find is that pot puts things together. Pot is marvelous for getting new connections in the brain. It’s divine for that. You think associatively on pot, so you can have real extraordinary thoughts. But the more education you have, the more you have to put together at that point, the more wonderful connections there are to see in the universe.”
Many other writers found marijuana helpful for their work for various reasons. The French poet Charles Baudelaire was part of the Club des Hashashins in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, where famous writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo and other French intellectuals and artists would meet to experiment with large amounts of hashish marmalade. Whereas Mailer mentions how good pot worked for him to make new associations, Baudelaire described also how fast these associations often come:
“But a new stream of ideas carries you away: it will hurl you along in its living vortex for a further minute: and this minute, too, will be an eternity, for the normal relation between time and the individual has been completely upset by the multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas. You seem to be living several man’s lives in the space of an hour.”
The beat-poet Allen Ginsberg, best known for his famous poems “Howl”, used marijuana a lot and wrote extensively on its effects:
“(…) marijuana consciousness is one that, ever so gently, shifts the center of attention from habitual shallow purely verbal guidelines and repetitive secondhand idealogical interpretations of experience to more direct, slower, absorbing, occasionally microscopical minute, engagement with sensory phenomena during the high moments or hours after one has smoked.”
The influential philosopher, literary critic and essayist critic Walter Benjmain was strongly influenced and inspired by Baudelaire and Marcel Proust (who had also used cannabis), experimented with Hashish and wrote several essays about his experiences. I have recently argued that contrary to the belief of many Benjamin interpreters, his essays on the effects contain brilliant observations, and, even more importantly, I have further argued that many ideas in Benjamin’s important work might have been induced by his use of hashish.
Many other writers used marijuana; according to veryimportantpotheads.com, the list includes Arthur Rimbaud, William Butler Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Jack Kerouak (“On the Road”), Jack London, John Updike, to name only a few.
Artists and Musicians on Cannabis
Countless artists and musicians experimented with cannabis, many of them were long time users and some explicitly reported how the cannabis high had helped them to work on their music or art.
The French painter Eugène Delacroix had made experiences with hashish, was a member of the Club des Hashashins and known for his vivid imagination and his use of expressive colors, paving the way for expressionism. His famous painting “The woman of Algiers” depicts Algerian concubines smoking a water pipe used for opium and hashish, a painting much admired by another painter who used hashish, Pablo Picasso.
The influential Mexican painter Diego Rivera also used marijuana:
“The Book of Grass contains an account by the actor Errol Flynn telling how Rivera asked him whether he had ever heard music come from a painting. Then the artist proffered Flynn a marijuana cigarette, explaining, “After sm
oking this you will see a painting and you will hear it as well.” Flynn tried it and had a fascinating experience, in which he heard the paintings ‘singing.’“
The marijuana high was not only crucially important for the evolution of jazz with its altered rhythmic structure based on an altered sense of time during a high and its creative, free flow improvisation on stage. It was also central for other musical traditions such as our beloved reggae. Bob Marley, who smoked massive amounts of marijuana, knew about the potential of the plant also when it comes to introspection and insights. He once said: “When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.”
The Beatles, turned on marijuana in 1964 by Bob Dylan, were strongly influenced by their use of marijuana; it helped them to open their minds and to get deeper involved in the thinking of the evolving counterculture of the 60ies:
“The crucial catalyst for the Beatles’ transformation from lovable moptops to high-minded rebels was their involvement with consciousness-raising drugs, specifically marijuana and LSD. No one liked fun more than the Beatles, but for them drugs were not simply about having a good time. Marijuana and LSD were also and more profoundly tools of knowledge, a means of gaining access to higher truths about themselves and the world. Indeed, it was above all the “desire to find out,” as Harrison later put it, that lay beneath their involvement not only with mind-expanding drugs but with Eastern philosophy as well. (…) It was marijuana that came first and triggered “the U-turn,” as McCartney put it, in the Beatles’ attitude toward life.“
Clearly, the cannabis high affected The Beatles’ and Bob Marley’s music, and with it, hundreds of millions of people around the world – listeners, bands, songwriters, artists, politicians.
Of course, the list of prominent users does not only include writers, artists and musicians, but also scientists, business man, comedians, actors and others who have used marijuana for various enhancements that influenced their lives and work. Projects like Lester Grinspoon’s marijuana-uses.com (where he collects reports and essays about positive enhancing uses of marijuana) and veryimportantpotheads.com are an important start for a better understanding of how much a whole spectrum of enhancing uses of marijuana has influenced our culture and society as a whole – how much we probably all owe to people who have used marijuana for various enhancements. However, if we want to arrive at a deeper understanding of the positive impact of these enhancements on our society, we have to investigate deeper. I hope to see more scientific projects in this direction soon.
Let me conclude with a question: if many of the marijuana enhancements crucially depend on the skills of informed users and a favorable environment, and if we agree that many positive impulses already came from marijuana users in the past under the horrible conditions of a worldwide prohibition – how much could the skilled use of marijuana do for our culture if we would legalize it and educate the public better about its effects and risks?
Footnotes
1. In: Hager, Steven (ed.) (1994) High Times Greatest Hits. Twenty Years of Smoke in Your Face. St. Martin’s Press, New York, p. 66.
2. Charles Baudelaire, “The Seraphic Theatre”, translated by Normann Cannon, in: David Solomon (ed.) (1966), The Marijuana Papers, Signet Books, New York, p. 190.
3. Allen Ginsberg, “First Manifesto To End The Bringdown”, In: Deliberate Prose. Selected Essays 1952 –1995, Edited by Bill Morgan (2000), New York: Harper Colins Publishers, p. 87.
4. See my essay „What Hashish did To alter Benjamin“ (link to Sensi Seeds essay)
5.www.veryimportantpotheads, entry on Eugène Delacroix, 2014.
6.www.veryimportantpotheads, entry on Diego Rivera, 2014.
7.Mark Hertsgaard (1995) A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles. Chapter 6: We All Want to Change the World: Drugs, Politics, and Spirituality. In : Lester Grinspoon (ed.) marijuana-uses.com, http://marijuana-uses.com/we-all-want-to-change-the-world-drugs-politics-and-spirituality-by-mark-hertsgaard/
Source by by Sebastián Marincolo, SensiSeeds.com
