Drugs and Surrealism

Dan and I don't really have an avowed position on controlled substances except to say this -- when people say that taking a consciousness-altering drug was "surreal," they're wrong. Surrealism, as we've probably talked about before (I mean, right? This seems like the kind of thing we'd talk about), is about two things that don't necessarily belong together colliding unexpectedly. And consciousness-altering drugs sort of render the idea of "unexpected" obsolete.

I mean, this isn't surreal: "Dude, I took a hit of acid and started seeing monkeys climbing all over my walls, and guess what? They all had kazoos and were playing Tool songs...on their kazoos!" This, however, would be: "Dude, I took a hit of acid and didn't see anything weird at all, so I went to the grocery store, bought some soup and stuff, then came home and mowed the yard, then my neighbor came over and we watched SportsCenter." Clearly, without the drugs context, the first scenarios seems defintely stranger than the second, but when you factor in drug use, the potential for Surrealism really starts to drop off.

All of that said, drugs can produce Surrealism, but the context has to be somehow Surreal -- someone unexpected on a hallucinogen, for instance. Like this seven-year-old boy who lives on YouTube.



Vince out.