Interview of Nick Tosches

In your books (and especially in your novels), one feels a tension between two ways of being when faced with the world : you can either work with the forces exerted on and by the world or you can chose a more distant and secluded approach of life, one of asceticism. On one hand we have Johnny in Trinities, the control of the drug traffic, the power of life and death. On the other we have the wise old man isolated on an island in  In the Hand of Dante, and another type of power, possibly even stronger than the first one. The two characters of Dante and of Nick Tosches in In the Hand of Dante then might constitute a bridge between these two ways of life, since both of them try to reach a certain point where writing would disappear, or at least find the word through which existence, perfection, the murmur of life could be written. How do drugs take part in this tension ? Do they enable, through the emergence of silence and the development of one's own interior force, to be more distant from the world, and therefore to perceive its murmur and its fluxes ? 

The best way to live one’s life is in a state of serene clarity. But how many are capable of this, even for the span of a day ? Only wisdom can get you there, and wisdom is as rare as it is holy. In early childhood, we look at white clouds rolling across the blue sky, or at the stars in the black of night, and we feel a sense of illimitableness. But we lose that through the attrition of what we call civilization. And these days, many children do not even have that taste of the sacred. Three-year-old kids, five-year-old kids get diagnosed as having attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders—psychiatric witchcraft aimed at kids who would rather pay attention to the sky than to the voices of civilization, kids who would rather run around than sit still and turn into these fat little fucking blobs that end up with bad hearts at the age of twelve—and they dope these kids with speed—methylphenidate, stuff like that—or they put them on antidepressants. The thing is to find within ourselves that lost sense of illimitableness, that childhood kindredness with the gods of skies and breezes, and to bring it forth. But how can this be done if it never existed ? People are doping their kids to become as fucked-up as they are. So, on one hand, people dope their kids and, on the other hand, they talk about substance abuse. These are all jive neologisms—“attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,”  “substance abuse”; you won’t find them in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. But the point is, these days, from cradle to grave, we live in a drug-saturated society. And they’re the wrong drugs. They’re drugs that inculcate controllability, conformity, and the agitated emptiness that define society.
So the ability to live in a state of serene clarity becomes ever more rare, ever more elusive, ever more difficult. A lot of people fake it. They put forth a front of cheap cosmetic spirituality. But there’s nothing there.
Drugs can not bring about that state of serene clarity—not directly, anyway—but they can complement that serene clarity when that serene clarity isn’t there. They can bring you to that primordial Chaos of the soul that lies deep within us. I believe that thought is the root of all evil. Drugs can obliterate thought. They can bring us to know what the pre-Socratics knew. They can bring us to know what we can not express. They can bring us to know that there is really nothing to be expressed. Charles Olson’s great illumination, “Maximus, from Dogtown”—“We drink / or break open /our veins solely / to know.” But that same poem also gives a darker vision: “The four hundred gods / of drink alone / sat with him / as he died / in pieces.” I don’t find drugs to be a last defense against silence. I find them to be a last wall between us and the meaningless noise of the world. 

In your biographies one can notice that the relation drug consumption / creation has a dual aspect. Depending on the characters and the times, drugs (alcohol in the case of Emmett Miller) are seen either as a creative force or as an inhibiting one. How can they be both at the same time ? What role do they play in your own creative activity ? How can one estimate the part of drugs in such an activity ? Does everything amount to Johnny's dilemma at the end of Trinities : power or abstinence ?

It’s more a matter of drugs being either a creative force or a destructive force. Again, it’s that dance between the two. That breath between Olson’s gnostic illumination and dying in pieces. Drugs can bring about inspiration, bursts of poetic power, perception. But these things can not be brought to fruition under the influence of drugs. Drugs can bring you closer to the muse, but you can not properly court her unless you’re clean. And no, I don’t feel that everything comes down to a choice between power or abstinence. I feel that everything comes down to abandoning both power and abstinence.

The story of Jerry Lee Lewis, as you describe it in Hellfire, can be understood as a series of addictions : to alcohol, to drugs, to religion and its inverse, that being music. How does religion, which presents itself as the adversary and the remedy to all other addictions, in fact forces a form of addiction upon its believers ? In the preface to Hellfire Greil Marcus shows that Jerry Lee Lewis went from the music of sin (rock'n'roll) to the music of guilt (country). Is it this tension between the unavoidable sin and the feeling of guilt which maintains this state of dependancy ?

I never much cared for the poet James Dickey. But he did write one good line: “Guilt is magical.” As I said before, everything can be an addiction, everything can be a form of slavery. And everything can be a means of freedom, a form of salvation. The only sin is casting away the only gift we have: the gift of the breath of this moment. One thing that I have long been trying to figure out, in my books and in my life, is whether man invented good and evil before he invented the gods. All I know is that this whole monotheism thing is going to be the end of us.

You say in In the hand of Dante that music is a more efficient medium than literature when trying to account for the sensations felt when using drugs. Why is that so ? Is it because through music one can share more easily the savageness inherent to drugs with the public ? In Hellfire, the savageness of Jerry Lee Lewis' rock'n'roll seems to derive directly from the religious trances of his youth. Is there a link between the consumption of drugs and religious trances ? Can music be this link ? Is music a sort of synthesis of these two radically opposed addictions ? What role does religion play in popular culture ?
Subsidiary question : In Blackface you trace the history of the songs which deal with cocaine, from the first bands of “hillbilly” to Johnny Cash. How do you account for the longevity of the theme of cocaine of the recurring images linked to it ?
Bonus question : You say that the “ industrialists of the boxed images “ only give us “ fallacious images “ concerning drugs. What would be the “ true image “ of drugs ?

Music is wordless. Or—Arvo Part, the Rolling Stones—the words are subsidiary to the music. George Steiner has a lot to say about the purity of music in his book Grammars of Creation. I like to see trances in terms other than those in which we usually see them. We usually envision trances as states of transported tranquility. But we shouldn’t forget about all those great old wild trances of those great old mystery cults: Dionysos, Mithra, Eleusis, the rest of them. A lot of these cults used drugs in their rituals. Christian Pentacostalism—that speaking-in-tongues stuff—is a bit wild. But I don’t feel that Jerry Lee’s rock ’n’ roll derived from the religious madness of his youth as much as from the singular madness of the genius of his soul.

Both in Hellfire and in Dino you seem to want to decipher popular culture through the prisms of two of its idols. In what way is an idol related to the popular culture which created it ? How can idolisation help us understand the American culture ? Is Unsung heroes of rock'n'roll an attempt to deconstruct the idols of American popular culture ?

Hellfire was more the tale of a man who lived a life that was partly out of the Old Testament and partly out of a Faulkner novel. In fact, those are the rythms of that book: the rhytms of the King James Bible and the rhythms of Faulkner. In Dino I tried to use Dean Martin as the figure in the foreground of a much bigger story: the story of popular culture and corruption in America. I don’t believe that idolisation can help us to understand anything. All idols are false idols. We live in a culture of idols, but this is symptomatic of the sickness and emptiness of our culture. Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll was indeed an attempt to smash the idols of American popular culture. I wanted to show that a host of forgotten characters had done it first and done it better. And I wanted to have fun doing it.

Throughout Dino, the American dream seems to have a binary structure (truth/artificiality, dream/reality, the paymaster/the boss, “the inspiration of the dream and its Nemesis made one ”). Can the evolution of the American dream be understood as the shifting of the point of equilibrium between these two poles ? At the beginning of Dino, lies are presented as being true (when Dean Martin is young he believes Tom Mix to be real) whereas to the end of the book the truth is staged (towards the end of his career Dean Martin does not hesitate to show the dirty sides of the American dream and is presented as a vulgar and alcoholic man). Why did entertainment during a certain period of time present itself as it really was ? Why didn't it last ? How does the American dream live through these changes ? What causes these changes ?

The so-called American dream has not lived through these changes. America is little more than two hundred and fifty years old—a particle of bothersome dust in the eye of history. It has always been a child brat among older and wiser nations. Now the child brat has become an infant mortality. America is dead.

In Dino you show that the dream industry slowly but surely takes hold of the political sphere (or at least tries to with Sinatra and Kennedy getting closer) and always was an important driving force (“America pictured its destiny as a dream “). How is America's destiny thought and imagined through the prism of dreams ? How are politics and the American dream intertwined ?

Every politician in America today is a bad actor, and only those nurtured on television and moving pictures can believe them. Today the presidential staff includes a deputy assistant to the president and director of speech-writing, a special assistant to the president for economic speech-writing, a special assistant to the president and deputy director of speech-writing, a special assistant to the president and senior speech-writer, an executive assistant to the director of speech-writing, and a speech-writer for the First Lady. Long ago, before fatuous, disingenuous men mouthed the fatuous, disingenuous words of others, there were statesmen who spoke from within, and there was something within them. To read Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered on March 3, 1865, is to feel the power and immensity of what once was, and of what has been lost. Politics and the American Dream are one and the same: a lie.

In Dino you describe the American entertainment industry as being a mechanised version of the roman “ bread and games “. Is entertainment a drug ? Is it (through idolisation for instance) addictive ? How are machines and mechanisation linked to mass culture ? Is the reign of falseness and of disposable objects that you describe (“ eternity waned away in front of the present moment, like gold in front of plastic “) a consequence of mechanisation ? Is it the same phenomenon you describe in The last opium den when you write that opium was replaced by faster acting drugs ?

Entertainment is a worse drug than heroin. It makes people complacent, gullible, stupid, and estranged from their own lives. Mediocrity is probably the worst addiction. People who have never read thousand-year-old works of wisdom are in a hurry to see the latest moving picture. That is a bad addiction.

In Trinities and in Dino mastering fluxes (of drugs, of power, of mass culture…) is more important than mastering the objects of these fluxes : it is more important to control the channels than what they convey (which is for instance one of the principals of globalisation and of the main media groups). How do you account for this primacy of containers over their content ?
At the same time you seem to suggest that one only needs to change the content of these fluxes (to replace drugs by bombs or to represent the truth of popular culture) to disrupt these networks of power and to take over these fluxes. Is this the purpose of your books : to pervert the machine ?

In the world in which we live, substance means little, packaging means all. Soap, books, breakfast cereal, political leaders. It is not so much what they are as how they are packaged and sold. Even packets of heroin have brand-names stamped on them. We package ourselves. We walk around with brand-names on our clothes, paying to give free advertising to dead souls who profit from Third World sweat-shops. We wear fake hair, inject ourselves with Botox, collagen, silicon. But we’re still the same old falling-apart fucks, and there’s nothing inside.
I don’t believe that books should have a purpose. They should just be. If they’re good, readers will feel something. Something real. And if they feel something real, the perversion of the machine will be a result of that feeling.