“In my early days, I just thought you got drunk and caught lightning bolts... I just didn’t have the edit part. So I was just… ‘write drunk and hope for the best.’ And when it works, it’s awesome. But when it doesn’t, then you can feel like a fraud.”
— Hayes Carll
There’s some nexus between youth, talent and ambition where an ‘enhanced’ moment of inspiration can carry the day. You get a little high, or a lot high and, sometimes at least, magic happens. You’re happily struck by the lightning bolt of frenzied creation. In the moment it’s exhilarating. Or to put it Bhuddisty, the self is momentarily struck dead, the artist disappears into his work, that judgey ego gets out of the way so something interesting or true or surprising can come through.
A few early successes with the get-high-and-see-method of generation can be very compelling to young man or woman lusting for artistic greatness. When you’re young you want so badly to join the stuff of your personal experience to the beautiful doomed parade of human consciousness that you will exchange any number of tomorrows for one fantastic today.
Its a transgression, though, to go that way. Getting high to make art. And transgressions have a way of bringing about their own atonement. You might have a great run of shows or hits or books or films but too many transgressions and you lose your life — meaning your relationships, or your actual life.
“Borrowing time against the future,” is how a mentor once put it to me. I was at the time a freshman in college and he was a greying professor, so it was impossible to take him seriously. We were having lunch at his house and he said this in the context of whether or not he should put jam on his toast. He had the toast there on counter. The knife in his hand, still smeared with butter, wavered over an open jar of strawberry preserves. He hesitated, then put the knife down, shaking his head. “No sense in borrowing time against the future,” he said. Being 18 and fairly immortal and unsure what eating jam had to do with getting high I was annoyed that now I too would be deprived of jam since he was already putting the jar back in the fridge. He was old and withering away in the soft tenured pasture of a backwater university so what did he know?
Intense guy but also still alive at sixty. Also probably does not have diabetes.
