The white rabbit's hole

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Lintelyg I mean please: The writer was obviously into mushrooms or LSD. Just think about it: You've got talking animals, falling into a deep hole and emerging into another world while following a white rabbit(Some LSD tabs have white rabbits on them)...

Most of the people I've known who took drugs couldn't write a decent memo, much less a novel. And yes, I know you're joking.

[Kameleon]

Quote:

Originally posted by fable Most of the people I've known who took drugs couldn't write a decent memo, much less a novel. And yes, I know you're joking.

It's actually a well known theory that Charles Dodgson was on drugs when he wrote Alice, or at least that he had lots of experience with them. Probably 'shrooms it was, too.

[Tybaltus]

I know for sure there have been some of the best poets have done their finest work while drugged out. And we read some of that stuff in Early British lit class. So there is very little doubt that when he came up with the idea of AiW, that he was drugged out.

[Nippy]

Ahah, I take it you mean Keats and that ilk. One word. Opium.

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Tybaltus I know for sure there have been some of the best poets have done their finest work while drugged out.

So name several. I don't know of one. I know of a couple of beat poets who took drugs occasionally, but tore up whatever poetry they tried to write while under the influence; it was extraordinarily bad.

[Mr Sleep]

Quote:

Originally posted by fable So name several. I don't know of one. I know of a couple of beat poets who took drugs occasionally, but tore up whatever poetry they tried to write while under the influence; it was extraordinarily bad.

Lets see, Xanadu was apparently written while Coleridge was ill and on opium. Poe was also apparently a drug abuser.

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Mr Sleep Lets see, Xanadu was apparently written while Coleridge was ill and on opium. Poe was also apparently a drug abuser.

The Xanadu/Coleridge myth is just that, a myth, as he himself admitted; but he never could shut the thing down. Poe did take drugs for a while, but he never wrote while using 'em. And much of his best and wildest work was done before that period. (Besides, Poe isn't unusual in his subject matter, which is what the drugs-free-you-to-be-an-artist crap tries to maintain. He was a standard gothic author in that respect. Rather, it's the sustained control of suspense and emotion through meticulous vocabulary and grammar that makes his stories thrilling, and you don't get precision from a drug high.)

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kameleon It's actually a well known theory that Charles Dodgson was on drugs when he wrote Alice, or at least that he had lots of experience with them. Probably 'shrooms it was, too.

There's no indication that Dodgson's delightful logical paradoxes were done on drugs. Hell, mathematicians (of which Dodgson was one) have been turning out the kind of thing that made up much of both Alice and LookingGlass on a far smaller scale for centuries. Could I have some references for this? Here's all I have been able to find on the subject, from a consensus of the experts who regularly post in the Lewis Carroll (International) Discussion Forum:

"The idea that Lewis Carroll's imaginative characters and stories are a product of drug stupor was first spread in the 1960's by adherents of the then new LSD subculture. The rumor is believed to have originated from the psychiatrists who introduced LSD into our society. The Lewis Carroll rumors claimed that Carroll used drugs when he wrote his stories, suggesting that a drug, not Carroll's fertile imagination was responsible for these creative literary works. These rumors have been a huge marketing success for the business of psychiatry, serving to instill the common belief that drugs are a useful remedy to an otherwise unimaginative lifestyle. However, the rumors are not based on facts. There is no evidence linking "Lewis Carroll" (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) with mind-altering drug use."

[Kameleon]

Quote:

Originally posted by fable There's no indication that Dodgson's delightful logic paradoxes were done on drugs. Hell, mathematicians (of which Dodgson was one) have been turning out that kind of thing on a much smaller scale for centuries. Could I have some references for this?

I said theory, just as a counter to your assertion that Lintelyg must have been joking - I have no belief of this myself, although it does seem strange to me that most of the arguments against the theory go along the lines of "LSD wasn't invented until the 50's". Why these people refuse to acknowledge the existence of magic mushrooms is beyond me. Anyway, I was just playing Devil's Advocate really, rather than stating my personal beliefs. It's very hard to find proof of such things one way or another, as drug use wasn't a socially accepted thing in these people's day either. There are rumours that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Walter Scott and Shelley were all on opium, too.

Oh, and even if Carroll did do drugs, I think that it's a far better proposal that he was merely writing some of the exceedingly weird things in Alice from memory of trips, rather than being on one when he wrote it. I agree that people don't do their best work under the influence of various substances...hell, I could probably show you a couple of examples

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kameleon I said theory, just as a counter to your assertion that Lintelyg must have been joking - I have no belief of this myself, although it does seem strange to me that most of the arguments against the theory go along the lines of "LSD wasn't invented until the 50's".

I know you said it was a theory, and you'll note my questions weren't addressed at you. Even so, it's more of a myth than a theory, since there's no evidence Dodgson ever took drugs, during a time when drug use had a lot less negative connotations than it has, today.

I agree that people don't do their best work under the influence of various substances...hell, I could probably show you a couple of examples

Unfortunately, the myth still persists that drugs enhance the imagination. This is nonsense. The hard part isn't accessing extraordinary visions; many people have them, and totally without drugs. The problem comes in developing and maintaining the incredibly delicate control needed to realize those visions for others in a specific medium. And that takes an enormous amount of hard work and concentration.

[Fairmaiden]

@ Jaesha, hi, yes I enjoyed the Disney version because it's still quite faithful to the book but pleasant enough to appeal to children, (and the child in all of us, blah, blah). Remember - the book still "works" as just a kids fairy tale (and fairy tales are often weird and gruesome, aren't they). The book was, of course, originally written as a gift to a little girl called Alice.

It's interesting that the Disney animators stuck closely to the original illustrations of the book which were done by John Tenniel. He had some affiliation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, so
that brings another dimension to what the book is really "about" in an artistic sense.

Can I just mention that I don't think there was any evidence to suggest that Dodgson ever took drugs, even though many other writers at the time did experiment.

He was a very, very shy Victorian with a tragic stutter, who was intelligent to the point of being a genius, never married and got on better with children than adults. I think his real life was rather quiet and he simply expressed his amazingness though his writing.

These ideas about the book being specifically drug related belong very much to the 1960s and what was going on then, I think. The Victorian mindset was very different to the modern one.

[fable]

One curious bit of trivia: Dodgson crossed both paths and swords with Gilbert and Sullivan, whose satirical operettas continue to be performed to this day.

The first big G&S hit, HMS Pinafore, is a trenchant satire on the British navy and contemporary melodrama. At one point, one of the heroes, the captain of the Pinafore, sings about what a kind, courteous, and clean-mouthed person he is. He never swears, he declares, and when the chorus questions this, he amends it to say, "Well, hardly ever." Later on, he utters a "Damme," which of course provokes horror among all the characters on stage--including every stage sailor in site. The audience, seeing a twisted version of its own reality, laughed for hundreds of nights of performances.

Yet it has to be remembered at this point that in English middleclass society of the period, swearing was tantamount to throwing a brick through a plate glass window. Even in private, it was seldom done by gentlemen and ladies. (The famed Victorian historian Macaulay, when writing to his nephew and later biographer, always used abbreviations when he wanted to indicate the force of his emotions through the use of four-letter words.)

The Reverend Dodgson was not amused, any more than Victoria was. He railed in the most prestigious newspaper columns of the day about this vulgarity on stage, in a production to which parents might accidentally bring their children. (Always, with Dodgson, it came back to children and innocence. I suspect there was some childhood crisis in the back of his own life.) The matter blew over after a while, but Dodgson's complaints did temporarily threaten this first great G&S success, since he was already an extremely popular and well-regarded author.

At another point in his life, Dodgson actually suggested obliquely to Sullivan, the composer part of the team, that perhaps he could do something about setting Alice to music on stage. Sullivan must have seen just how impossible that was, and with his equisite sense of courtesy, managed to deflect the idea tactfully. But it does leave me wondering what Sullivan might have written to Dodgson's satirical songs in Alice or LookingGlass, had he been given the chance.

[Mr Sleep]

Quote:

Originally posted by fable The Xanadu/Coleridge myth is just that, a myth, as he himself admitted; but he never could shut the thing down.

Says you, perhaps Coleridge felt the drug angle dimished his work so he tried to counter the rumour to make his work seem less effected by his opium addiction. It's conjecture but then it's equally as plausible.

[fable]

Quote:

Originally posted by Mr Sleep Says you, perhaps Coleridge felt the drug angle dimished his work so he tried to counter the rumour to make his work seem less effected by his opium addiction. It's conjecture but then it's equally as plausible.

Well, yes; but meaning no offense, one might as well say that your great-grandfather killed little children. It's purely conjecture, and there's no way to disprove it. The burden of proof, here, is on the person who makes the allegation. There's no evidence that Coleridge's opium-taking caused the poem; only the remarkable effusions of some Edwardian period writers who were totally in the dark about opium, despite it's widespread use.

Coleridge definitely did use opium, and he hated his addiction, as some pretty horrifying letters indicate; but there's no evidence that he ever wrote under the influence, and he resisted it during most of his active poetry-creating life. (He nearly ended up taking his life on one occasion to break the habit.) I tend to follow one of the leading modern scholars, Elisabeth Schneider, who writes: "The narcosis of opium has been popularly described as having the effect of heightening and intensifying the acuteness of the senses. This it quite definitely does not do. If anything, the effect is the reverse." Coleridge's own meticulous notebooks also pay tribute to the care with which he painstakingly worked and re-worked his supposed "visions."

But then, you know, that's the highest art, in some sense of the word. The ability to craft something so carefully that there seems no care in it at all. To cut a gem delicately into some animal shape so flawless, that nobody thinks it's a gem any longer, but something spontaneous, leaping forth into creation.

[Scayde]

@fable and Fairmaiden: Bravo...:ccol:

It is very refreshing to see such eloquent defense of the artist.
I wonder at times why it is that so many of the gifted are labled "addict and lunitic" Is it simply human nature that wants to find the darkness behind the light, or is it something far more sinister. Could it be the need to mark the exceptional among us as "undesirable" to make the pain of our own mediocrety more bareable. I think of the genious of Van Gough, Poe, Blake, Coleridge,Carrol.....the list is long and covers many times and classes, even Michaelangelo has his expose's, but the fact is, few of us will ever taste the brilliance of these great artists, let alone be able to create anything in their class.

I agree with fable. Greatness is born of a gift, not of a drugged state. Even if there were cases of those who may have been abusers, or suffering from mental illness, I believe their creations, (while possible being conceived of during an altered state) could have never been brought to completion with anything less than inspiration, clarity, and sobriety.