Does Weed Aid Creativity?
It is the common person’s assumption that whatever one likes is good. Your willingness to question your own tastes is the first step to what separates the creative from everyone else. Being able to step back from the canvas and question if a stroke adds or detracts from what is intended is the balancing act we must withstand. To be too critical of one’s taste is to risk not producing anything at all, and to be too uncritical is to produce something better left unsaid. And so to question even one’s own instincts is the beginning of self-awareness for the genuinely creative spirit.
With this in mind, marijuana can at first glance appear to be an exceptional tool toward the creative endeavor. Awareness of things previously unconsidered seems to explode into focus. One wonders where such senses had been all one’s life; how such mystical pleasures had escaped one’s view. Now the tiniest details appear as if beneath a microscope: the twitch of a friend’s eyelid, the melancholy of a family pet, the intricacy of a film’s themes, the hidden instrumentations of a well-worn soundtrack, the lightning-shaped weathering of a leather couch. Who knew there were so many buried treasures in everyday life?
I remember my first interactions with weed were all like this. In fact, I still have a journal entry from the first time I smoked weed when I was 19:
7/8/19 <<Weed>>
Getting super insanely fucking high on an unknown strain that is “better than Northern Lights”
What you see is not an objective reality
What you perceive (in all your senses) is a simulation of the cross referencing of stimuli, the backward retrieval of past information stored within… predictive systems trying to create shortcuts to the final “picture”.
Memories are only memories of memories
Your brain is a computer
This computing is constantly running in the background, our brain ignores it the same way that it ignores your nose in the field of vision. It is there, but the energy and attention required to perceive/be aware of this constant milli-second computing is exhaustive. [sic]
It’s like running your brain at a high FPS. The Monitor is going to get hot!
This computing… realization of how it’s [sic] gears turn are an exponentiated form of how when you’re high, you are more aware of relationships and connections between entities in their representation in media, and entities existing in the real world. [sic]
Its ability to shift perspective and to allow one to become interested in the most miniscule details are quite useful, or at least appear to be. McLuhan says that it is the responsibility of the artist to jar the public out of their perspectival repetition. Viewed merely from this perspective, it would seem fairly obvious that marijuana or substance abuse in general has something to offer. But looking back at my 19 year old self I am willing to offer some more context to this hasty conclusion.
There is here an attempt to scale the fence of perception via a stolen ladder. We want what is on the other side of enlightenment, and we’re willing to use what tools are at our disposal. But anyone who has had any experience in the world knows things swiftly gained are just as swiftly lost. Examples abound. The steroid user cheats his way to spectacular muscular gain without needing to know much about diet or exercise, and loses everything he so vainly attained by one swift stroke of bad luck. A chump turns into a lottery winner and the next week finds himself broke again. The main thrust here is that to maintain any form of gain and to gain it in the first place are not always part of the same package, and to struggle to gain something also usually accompanies knowledge of how to maintain it.
The hope is that to smoke something will allow the latent artist within to finally reach the state of inspiration necessary to produce what he knows he always ought to have produced, and that this is easier than waiting on mere discipline. No one can argue that these substances do not produce a sort of mystical experience, and that the creative experience, too, can reveal itself as deeply mystifying.
Anecdotally, I have found myself lost in a given tune while playing guitar after only a few pugs of a joint. I convinced myself that the substance shortcutted me into creative flow, that state of forgetfulness, weightlessness, whimsy that accompanies the pure act of creation. I even convinced myself it was something deeply spiritual– that to smoke and create nothing in particular at least aided in the flowering of my self-awareness, and so remained beneficial even apart from the act of creating. Within this, however, I sensed a sort of doubt within myself. My creative output, in all honesty, remained unimpressive. I routinely failed to commit myself to any serious creative endeavor. At first I began to use it more frequently, because I thought this might help me stay in that state of “feeling inspired.” Then, when I developed a tolerance, I convinced myself I needed a break from it so as to become more sensitive to its effects. This was even worse; I spent the intermittent periods waiting on my next great high, because I fantasized about just how inspired I would feel once I would be permitted to resume my habit.
In all of this, creativity as an end became a sort of wayside concern. What I had isolated as a means toward creativity had itself become my end. What I was very creative at was concocting reasons for which I needed to remain engaged in the habit. The final result revealed itself to be a spiritual torpor, lack of productivity, and procrastination. The art I did manage to produce while high could be called weird, but nowhere near approaching what I knew I was capable of. You could say that it’s ability to make anything, even the totally mundane, seem novel and interesting also makes everything you create appear to meet the standard. This is the real deathblow to the aspiring creative.
I smoked daily for close to three years and tried to quit many times throughout. I finally quit after a combination of two things– going to church and trying to hit strength PR’s in the gym. What it took was wanting something more than being high. I gained a lot of inspiration from reading and studying the Bible because its depth of meaning is inexhaustible, and therefore a very easy means toward inspiration. Also too, my desire to hit strength PR’s in the gym was at first manageable while high (I loved going to the gym stoned) but I after remaining in a plateau for a while, I realized that if I want to continue to progress I need to be fully present and in a sense tightly-wound. People like to point to the fact that marijuana helps them relax as one of the chief benefits of the drug. And I found that it could help me forget my worries via a sort of numbing of my higher faculties. But I would argue that sensitivity is one of our greatest strengths in any creative endeavor, and must be maintained. One must not shy away from facing what is painful in this life if one wishes to transfigure it into something beautiful.
If what we’re after is transcendence, then we’ve got to really ask yourself if that’s something you can purchase at a head shop. I won’t argue that the illusion of something profound cannot be purchased. In fact, illusions are so widely distributed in 21st century America you’ve really got to remain vigilant to recognize and refuse them all.
I don’t want to bash anyone who uses these substances, I’m only giving my honest analysis having been there, done that. When I smoked and thought about quitting, I remember thinking how boring it must be to be sober all the time. Now I’m pretty much always sober, save for the occasional glass of wine. It’s not nearly the nightmare I was afraid it would be. I realize now my fear that sober life would be too boring betrayed a serious lack of imagination. I had refused to believe in my own ability to produce new and interesting perspectives and ideas without some sort of outside help.
If I sound preachy, perhaps I am. But ask yourself: could I make the things I make without chemical help? If yes, why insist on the substance? If no, why not be honest about your dependency? If smoking grants you instant creativity, couldn’t it do so for anyone else? Wouldn’t then the only differentiating factor between what you make and what another person makes be your individuality? Do you not already possess that individuality? If you do, why wouldn’t it be accessible to you while sober? If you were to be completely honest with yourself, are you spending your sessions actually producing? Or just “brainstorming?”
No one can convince you drugs are inessential to your creative process. You’ll come to your own conclusions. Typically, these substances tend to produce in users an apologetic stance, wherein they feel the need to defend the substance’s validity. Isn’t that odd? How many stories do you hear of people saying “I smoked and realized I absolutely do not need this stuff in order to self-actualize.” Perhaps it happens sometimes, but if so then it is quite rare.
But what about the shaman? That archetype of heroic intoxication! Who for the sake of the collective is willing to undergo immense inebriation, if only to interface with that harrowing hell and bring back what we most need to hear. And what about him? If you’ll look around, there are plenty who are perfectly willing to become inebriated, sedated, hypnotized, entranced. Are we any better for it? Is there returning message anything we haven’t heard before? But to approach ultimate reality totally sober, with the fullness of one’s wits, refusing that wine mixed with gall, appears to me far more terrifying, far more heroic.
