These days-- these post-drug, post-drink, post-derangement days --reading is a straightforward affair. Like consulting an oracle, or the "books" of the tarot. You go to a book because you know you need something from it: the need is yours, and the reading is For You. One goes for divination as much as inspiration or straight-up knowledge.
It wasn't always so unmysterious. There was a time, away & over my shoulder, in the rearview, that derangement & literacy were glove over hand. The first time I did acid was seventeen. With wages earned at Ace Electronics I bought a couple tabs from Layne Milwood, that band kid everyone wanted to befriend, and early one September night holed up in my claustrophobically cramped bed with my headphones on, the 'Fixed' remix by Coil on repeat as I read Al Columbia's 'Tar Frogs' and whatever else was in that issue of Deadline Magazine that perv at the CD shop, Carl, sold me. Those were not good tabs. It was lowgrade acid, if it even was acid. I recall at some point that the norwegian wood paneling of my room began to flow & pulse like tides of pollen in mud puddles, but there wasn't much-if-any action beyond that. Jitteriness. Anxiety. A sense of being too tightly sewn into my own skin.
To be honest, I got better results from sleep deprivation. Which was my go-to for derangement, as it was cheap and also my natural state. Sleep deprivation, it adds a paranoid cast to people's faces, makes how they perceive you more interesting: livens up conversations by letting folks talk loudly without moving their lips. Sleep deprivation makes you feel like you're telepathic, and in low light conditions, really kicks out the jams. I remember my first real dance with the stuff had me full-on hallucinating; sneaking out to the woods to study the shadows of animals gliding and pouncing through the dark... Good times.
Sleep dep was a drag on my C to D average, though, and took too long to trigger. I'm pretty sure the idea came from the paperback edition of 'Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes'. Insomnia wasn't my natural state, at the outset. After a while fucking with my brain chemistry in this fashion, however, being nocturnal became a habit. I don't think it did me any favours when it came to reading comprehension or retension, though. Pretty sure it did the opposite. Trying to retain information with a sleep deprived brain is a little like trying to make a tape recording with scotch tape over the recording head on a reel-to-reel: the encoding is faint as fuck if not partly absent. So while I read anything I could get my hands on--
(and there was a lot to read, growing up, from sci-fi to horror to "adult comix" to architecture to occultism to engineering to my parents' separate, discrete Secret Libraries of hardcore smut & hippy-dippy witchlore. My parents were the kind of people who built their own bookshelves. Every house we lived in had ever-expanding sets of shelves, in distinct contrast to the amount of living space available. But back to the previous paragraph)
--keeping that data available in my mind was a struggle. It would take my developing some OCD and a tendency, in my twenties, to read every book twice in a row, to make it possible to Know What I Was Talking About. If my memory failed me, usually, I'd bluff. Which is why my test scores were abysmal. Probably. There was the PTSD nobody recognized somewhere in the mix, too. At any rate, all the components for a half-bright artfag's development were in place: a bibliophile with brain problems & a recreational interest in neurochemistry.
At that stage of my life pot wasn't really a thing. I'd tried my parents' stash, once, and didn't dig it. It wasn't until after running away, in my mid-twenties, that I got into that nasty shit, and even then, not habitually. Nope, mostly it was books & being On The Natch crazy. I developed an oracular faith in books; they became my muse & my offboard memory, part of my daily creative process. Somewhere between that first taste of acid and the time I ran away it became common practice to read two to three books at a time. Not that my reading tastes were particularly elevated. I gravitated towards trash, until some sort of personal snobbery developed.
Anyhow. Some two years after bailing from the nest, and plummeting into the depressingly workaday world of being a kitchen drudge, I tried acid again. The tabs were free, this time, a gift from my room-mate & co-worker, Chris Beck. By this time I was into my Burroughs worship, so after hours at our coffeeshop we all dropped. While my idiot friends did their "Whoaaaaa" thing listening to Skinny Puppy by the blue neon of the Galleria's signage, I read The Ticket That Exploded. At some point Chris looked over, incredulous. "Are you reading!? You're on LSD, and you're... reading?" So maybe it was ever-so-slightly his fault when the typesetting spilled off the paper and into the oily fractal patterning that slid over and through every surface, from my sallow skin to the denim of my JNCOs to the checkered tile floor. Maybe I wouldn't have developed that particular hallucinatory default, where I see words materially inveigled everydamnwhere. 'Environments speak to you,' as Ol' Uncle Bill sez.
It's happened since. Without the influence of mindmelting technologies. But putting that aside...
Reading is the practice. Without chemicals for casual inspiration, the shelves are where I gravitate. Mine, or anywhere in the world. If there's a book I go for it. And when I can't get myself to focus on the book I'm in the middle of-- I'm halfway through 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Cassara --my brain will drift onto other authors. Usually those I've found most inspirational. Over decades, my shelves have become a repository not simply for fiction but lived experience. Particularly lived experiences of writers whose lives are most unlike my own. Because I don't read just to get out of my own head: I do it to enter others' minds & times. It's the finest escapism I know.
Escapism, and research. Because it's a resource! And a necessary part of having that resource handy is making sure there will always be surprises. If I hit a dead end with a project, I don't want to go to the fucking internet to figure out a solution. I'd rather consult the oracle(s). Like last night. In the Ds, under Duras, there's a translated collection of Marguerite's journalism & essays, titled 'Outside'. Clearly I've never sat down to read it end-to-end, because if I had the presence of an interview with Francis Bacon wouldn't have surprised me.
Most useful, libraries.
I'll post excerpts from the interview, later. But it was revealing. Because there's a writer who's never done art, asking the most incisive questions of a notoriously self-taught & curiously chaotically disciplined artist. It's almost as though they were holding a miniature seminar for me.
Stating all this in light of my recent decision to go 100% sober again. It's not the easiest road to be on, in this life. But it's necessary for body & mind. Because, fuck, have you SEEN Francis Bacon's studio?
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