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The Chemical Life
The Irish-born poet Paul Muldoon, poetry editor for the New Yorker, believes artmaking is a drug:
‘We see a connection, and endorphins or whatever go nuts. So I’m sure that a certain amount of art-making has to do with chemical dependency…that feeling, that extraordinary buzz that may be akin to a drugs buzz or an alcoholic buzz or a chemical buzz. Auden, as you know, referred to it as the chemical life.[...]Basically, I think all artistic lives are chemical lives. Why do people keep on doing this? Why do they keep on going back for more, more of the same, when there are so few rewards? It’s a drug. Art-making is a drug. I’m sure what keeps me going back for more is the particular ecstasy that one feels when — and of course it may be completely misplaced, that’s the problem with it — something comes together.’
Actually, when Auden referred to "the chemical life," he was not talking about art-making as a drug, but the drugs he took in order to produce his art: Benzedrine (an amphetamine) to activate his mind in the morning and Seconal (a sedative) to make him sleep at night. This reportedly went on for twenty years. And he wasn't alone. Graham Greene, Ayn Rand, and Jean-Paul Satre used amphetamines regularly, too. Auden said they were one of several "labor-saving devices in the mental kitchen," along with alcohol, coffee and tobacco.
This is a great post, and your pointing out Muldoon’s misattribution of that quote speaks so succintly to where I think his argument really goes south. He’s got it precisely backwards: the fact that our lived experience is expressed chemically on the physical plane doesn’t mean the chemicals themselves are somehow the “realest,” most concrete expression of what we’re experiencing. It’s just the opposite — we love the chemicals because they’re corellated with something ineffable, the grander and indescribable metaphysical experience of making art, that the release of those chemicals indicates. I have to feel like that’s what Auden and Sartre and all the rest were going for when they tried to insert the chemical experience as a means to access the creative experience. It wasn’t the other way around, after all. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteSpencer K-- Yes, you've nailed it. He's caught in the materialist mindset, mistaking the means for the ends.
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