The Arts Are Not Drugs

I recently came across a quote by E. M. Forster which I’ve been thinking about a lot.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

– E. M. Forster

I discovered this quote indirectly in the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks ¹ (I would definitely recommend checking this out if you are interested in music and/or neurology). I haven’t been able to find a reliable source for the origin. There are many layers to this quote. The quote is written in the context of music, and music for me is the most powerful of the arts, so I will talk about it primarily in the context of music. But I have no doubt it applies equally to the other arts as well.

The top layer - the overall message of the quote, I can directly relate to. Often I find myself looking to music in order to help “cure” how I am feeling. That’s not to say I’m always looking for it to cheer me up. Sometimes listening to sad music is just the right thing when you’re feeling sad. Sometimes you’re looking for that deep sense of relatability that music can provide. Sometimes catharsis. Sometimes you just want to feel a certain way, whether that be happy, sad, nostalgic, angsty, etc. But sometimes it just doesn’t work. More often than not, it doesn’t work when you try to force it. It has to arise spontaneously and unexpectedly. This idea is profound to me because it is deeply relatable, and because it is novel - it’s not something I’ve heard talked about before.

Dive a layer deeper, and the quote hints at the enigmatic nature of creativity. Most creatives intuitively understand that ideas seem to just “arrive” in your brain. There’s not really any reliable process you can use to spark it. And it often leaves you with the feeling that you didn’t really come up with the idea yourself, rather it was planted in your head by some greater power. Julia Cameron talks about this in her book The Artists Way ². She suggests that an artist is merely a channel or conduit, through which ideas flow from the heavens (for lack of a better term), that an artist is someone who just so happens to know how to convert those ideas to an earthly representation. What is most fascinating about all this is that the quote hints at this enigmatic nature of the creative process, but seems to take it as assumed knowledge. It is in itself a pretty deep concept, but E. M. Forster decides that it’s well-known enough to use it as an analogy to explain a yet more thought-provoking idea.

Finally, the quote suggests an elegant mirror between the processes of artistic creation, and artistic consumption. It suggests that they are both equally as “mysterious” and “capricious”. Maybe it makes sense that experiencing the result of a process so enigmatic should also be shrouded in a similar level of mystery. This needs more thought… If nothing else, the symmetry is deeply satisfying.

I don’t recall hearing anyone talk about the arts in this way before, yet upon reflection, it is something I experience deeply. I’m sure it’s quite commonplace for others to experience too. It is one of those truths that you might not have necessarily thought about, but when you hear it, you immediately know it to be fundamentally true. It’s also comforting to know that when I have moments where the arts don’t seem to “work”, it’s not because I’ve become an unfeeling zombie, it’s because the arts are not something that can be called upon on demand. And in a way, that’s what makes the experience so beautiful.