Altered states of conscientiousness

Note: Every Friday, The A.V. Club, my favorite pop cultural site on the Internet, throws out a question to its staff members for discussion, and I’ve decided that I want to join in on the fun. This week’s topic: “What pop culture is best consumed in an altered state?”

When Bob Dylan first met the Beatles, the story goes, he was astonished to learn that they’d never used drugs. (Apparently, the confusion was all caused by a mondegreen: Dylan misheard a crucial lyric from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high” instead of “I can’t hide.”) This was back in the early days, of course, and later, the Beatles would become part of the psychedelic culture in ways that can’t be separated from their greatest achievements. Still, it’s revealing that their initial triumphs emerged from a period of clean living. Drugs can encourage certain qualities, but musicianship and disciplined invention aren’t among them, and I find it hard to believe that Lennon and McCartney would have gained much, if anything, from controlled substances without that essential foundation—certainly not to the point where Dylan would have wanted to meet them in the first place. For artists, drugs are a kind of force multiplier, an ingredient that can enhance elements that are already there, but can’t generate something from nothing. As Norman Mailer, who was notably ambivalent about his own drug use, liked to say, drugs are a way of borrowing on the future, but those seeds can wither and die if they don’t fall on soil that has been prepared beforehand.

Over the years, I’ve read a lot written by or about figures in the drug culture, from Carlos Castaneda to Daniel Pinchbeck to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and I’m struck by a common pattern: if drugs lead to a state of perceived insight, it usually takes the form of little more than a conviction that everyone should try drugs. Drug use has been a transformative experience for exceptional individuals as different as Aldous Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and Steve Jobs, but it tends to be private, subjective, and uncommunicable. As such, it doesn’t have much to do with art, which is founded on its functional objectivity—that is, on its capacity to be conveyed more or less intact from one mind to the next. And it creates a lack of critical discrimination that can be dangerous to artists when extended over time. If marijuana, as South Park memorably pointed out, makes you fine with being bored, it’s the last thing artists need, since art boils down to nothing but a series of deliberate strategies for dealing with, confronting, or eradicating boredom. When you’re high, you’re easily amused, which makes you less likely to produce anything that can sustain the interest of someone who isn’t in the same state of chemical receptivity.

And the same principle applies to the artistic experience from the opposite direction. When someone says that 2001 is better on pot, that isn’t saying much, since every movie seems better on pot. Again, however, this has a way of smoothing out and trivializing a movie’s real merits. Kubrick’s film comes as close as any ever made to encouraging a transcendent state without the need of mind-altering substances, and his own thoughts on the subject are worth remembering:

[Drug use] tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas…One of the things that’s turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear so in the state of universal bliss the drug induces on a good trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life.

Which isn’t to say that a temporary relaxation of the faculties doesn’t have its place. I’ll often have a beer while watching a movie or television show, and my philosophy here is similar to that of chef David Chang, who explains his preference for “the lightest, crappiest beer”:

Let me make one ironclad argument for shitty beer: It pairs really well with food. All food. Think about how well champagne pairs with almost anything. Champagne is not a flavor bomb! It’s bubbly and has a little hint of acid and is cool and crisp and refreshing. Cheap beer is, no joke, the champagne of beers.

And a Miller Lite—which I’m not embarrassed to proclaim as my beer of choice—pairs well with almost any kind of entertainment, since it both gives and demands so little. At minimum, it makes me the tiniest bit more receptive to whatever I’m being shown, not enough to forgive its flaws, but enough to encourage me to meet it halfway. For much the same reason, I no longer drink while working: even that little extra nudge can be fatal when it comes to evaluating whether something I’ve written is any good. Because Kubrick, as usual, deserves the last word: “Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.”

“Insert brilliant idea here”

One of the most frustrating and challenging moments in any writer’s life is when you know where you are and where you want to be going, but have no idea how to get there. In fact, there are times when I feel like one of the gnomes in the celebrated episode of South Park from which the above image is taken. You’re writing a story, and you have some good ideas for the beginning and the end, but the part in the middle is a mystery. This unknown element can be as small as the distance between two minor plot points or as large as the entire second act, but in all cases, the essential problem is the same. All you need is something to get from point A to point C, and, ideally, it should be brilliant.

This situation is a familiar one for writers of mystery and suspense fiction. A good mystery novel should come off as a perfect puzzle, in which every element was carefully premeditated and laid in beforehand, but in practice, large gaps are often left by the author to be filled in later. In Writing the Novel, Lawrence Block relates that while writing the first installment in his popular series of Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries, he got within two or three chapters of the ending before finally figuring out who the villain was, thanks to a chance remark by a friend. “I had to do some rewriting to tie off all the loose ends,” Block notes, “but the book worked out fine.” I have a feeling that most mystery novelists could tell similar stories. And as long as the result looks preordained, it’s perfectly okay.

I’ve encountered similar issues all the time in my own writing, even though I outline like crazy. With The Icon Thief, I knew from early on in the process where the story would end: in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with my main character standing before the closed door leading into Étant Donnés. How to get her there, however, remained a problem for a long time, and it wasn’t until I had written more than a third of the novel that I managed to come up with a solution. Similarly, in House of Passages, there’s a moment when I knew that a character had to make a series of brilliant deductions to advance to the next stage of the plot. But what? I could see the blank space where they would go, but not the deductions themselves, and like Block, I ended up going back and laying in most of my clues after the fact.

And yet this is one of the great pleasures of writing. I’ve previously quoted Walter Murch on the fact that you don’t want to answer all of the questions posed by a work of art at its earliest stages. In fact, you should hope that serious questions remain unanswered until the very end. In any artistic pursuit, once you’ve reached a certain level of competence, there’s always the risk that you’ll become bored or complacent. The best way to avoid this is by deliberately leaving problems for yourself to solve, trusting that luck, intuition and skill will carry you through. Almost invariably, they do—or at least well enough so that, with the proper adjustments, nobody will ever notice the seams. In the process, you’ll grow as a writer. And maybe, in the end, you’ll even profit.