Science, Art. Sex and Drugs.

I am sitting amid the wreckage and detritus of my second year of medical school. It isn't quite* over, and the accountability to my summer research funding shall begin soon, but a smug satisfaction and a ravenous appetite for leisure has already begin. (I awoke at 11 am today...about 4.5 hours later than i normally do. I was hung over. And i felt strange guilty already because i couldn't remember my to do list. I had forgotten my thur to do list was: Fuck around. So far, i have enthusiastically gotten in the groove of it).

My general dicking around had already begun though. On Tue, I fwd out from H (my brilliant stoner biophysicist hot sassy psychedelic lady friend) an invitation

A special event, a frank conversation about drugs...everything from caffeine & pot to ecstasy & prozac is fair game. This discussion will be driven by YOU. No presentations. No fancy powerpoints. Just your questions, your experience, and your curiosity.

What: This is Your Brain on Drugs: Psychoactives & Your Brain
Who: Professor David Presti, Prof of Neurobiology at UC Berkeley, Fire & Earth Founders of Erowid.org
The Deets:
Psychoactives...the name itself conjures up hundreds of images: hippies at Woodstock, those "well acted" anti-drug PSAs, even Colombian drug cartels. One thing is for sure, human history and psychoactive use are intertwined.
The term psychoactive covers a wide range of compounds...ranging from caffeine & alcohol to heroin & meth. Within that range, there again exists a wide range of use...historical use, cultural use, recreational use, and abuse.
But what do psychoactives reveal about our brain and its neural mechanisms? the connection between our mind & body? our spirituality? For once, we're going to have an honest discussion of psychoactives. Starting with the science, moving into historical/cultural use, and finally discussing the social impact today.

Friends E and J, also hyper intellectual, sassy good looking stoner lady friends (I am a lucky woman), come by. The event at the local cafe up the street was too crowded (the good professor, alas, was preaching to the choir), so we wandered off to get pizza and spent the evening digesting in the piles of pillows laundry and homework papers in my room.

While I hacked away at clinical write up on a woman with an atrial fibrillation and carotid endarterectomy, I proudly declared to my lady friends, feeling quite empowered, that i had bought my first collection of erotica. They ooh-ed and hooted and wanted to see. So I proudly handed them:

"The naughty bits: The steamiest and most scandalous sex scenes from the world's great books."

They then proceeded to groan and mercilessly mock me with accusations of the lowest pits of Nerddom. No less, the evening proceeded with raucous cackling over the seduction of Socrates, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's melancholy whores, and the bawdy rhymes of the not-so-Dark Ages of Italy.

I excerpt now from the Introduction, written by a drop out from a Medieval Literature PhD, from this charming little book:

"So, although it might have been nice to call this book The Best Sex Scenes from the History of Literature, that not what it is. Such a thing cannot really exist. Sex is too varied, personal, and intricate to qualify for Bests; what works at one point for one person doesn't necessarily work for someone else, or even for that same person at a different time. I also realized that the column would be a lot more interesting if I included scenes that reflected truth and diversity of sex, not just idealized fantasies. Cormac McCarthy's writing about necrophilia, a medieval poem equating homosexuality to bad grammar: these are not what you'd expect to find in your basic erotica anthology, and I'm happy about that. The Naughty Bits is ultimately less a book of* sex in literature as much as a book about* sex in literature. If you come looking for brief and steamy diversions, you'll find them, but if you are looking for the ecstasy, agony, absurdity and poignancy of sex, you'll find that too...

"Sex is everywhere in writing, but it's not always there in the form we think it's going to take. And not all authors are up to the challenge. I often joke about half the sex scenes in the history of literature consist of only one word: Afterwards. And it's almost true. You get all the buildup, perhaps even some heavy breathing and the taking off of shoes, and then 'Afterwards, Gary and Bunny picked up their fallen clothes and..." Yeah, yeah. Cop-outs we have known.

The Naughty Bits is a celebration of all writers who decided that a single word wasn't enough, that something in the knocking together of bodies, the mixing of memory and desire, the slip of skin and sweat on skin and sweat was an integral part of the human experience--something vital to their characters and thus their stories, not to be missed.

"Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people believe that sex is better left behind closed doors and that to bring it out for public scrutiny somehow demystifies it, strips it of its magic. To me, all human experience shimmers with the luster of miracles, if we can bring ourselves to see it. Poets and fiction writers do their best to point it out; in those rare moments that they succeed, they are really creating art. Yes, sex is full of mystery, but it would take a lot of monkeys sitting at a lot of typewriters for a lot of eternities to begin to capture any of that magic on paper. When we are examining what's worthy of spilled ink, we should be less concerned with robbing something of its mystery as catching some measure of it. It's doubtful that any art, even photographs, steals the soul of the subject; the bigger question is whether, when the negatives are tweezed out of the fixer, any soul is visible on the film. We have to hope there is. And if sex is so likeley to be divested of its gravity by writing about it, then what of love? And what of death?"

Drugs and Sex. The Analysis of Science, and the Recreation of Art. This is all very Serious Business.