Go Sober for October – literary creativity or personal longevity…what’s it to be?

“Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy…but the Bible says, love your enemy.”

-Frank Sinatra

Mankind has always had a love:hate relationship with alcohol (‘mankind’ meaning both men and women, just to be clear!) The medical profession loathe it (officially at least – anybody who has ever studied alongside medical students might be forgiven for being slightly sceptical on this point), whilst the rest of us either like or love it (in varying degrees) , with the artistic profession more prone to loving it than most.

So, as it’s officially ‘Go Sober for October’, what better time to balance up the health-related downsides of alcohol versus the creative upsides?

Go Sober for October

“Age and glasses of wine should never be counted.” -Unknown

First the bad news re alcohol. There is no safe lower drinking limit. Anything causes cancer. Officially.

This seems to be exacerbated by the fact that those doing the most drinking are the ‘Baby Boomers’ (aged over 50) rather than ‘Juveniles’ (those aged under 25)

So, ‘Go Sober for October’ has its merits….but taken along with ‘No-vember’ and ‘Dry January’, do we drinkers risk losing our creative spark?

Alcoholic films

Films which show ‘alcohol’ in a positive light, tend to be comedies:

• Withnail and I – the cult classic…”We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!”
• The Hangover – (I don’t include The Hangover part III in this list by the way)…”Why don’t we remember a God damn thing from last night?”
• Trainspotting – drugs, alcohol and public toilets, all in Scotland…“Everything in the street today seems soft focus.”

There are no films which are about ‘abstinence’ as a subject matter in itself; any films which show alcohol in a negative light, tend to be dramas about the dangers of alcohol or the struggles with sobriety.

• Leaving Las Vegas –  a Hollywood screenwriter who has lost everything because of his alcoholism, arrives in Las Vegas to drink himself to death, but finds romantic love on the way.
• When a Man loves a Woman – a man struggles to cope with the effect of his wife’s drinking on the family.
• Flight – an alcoholic pilot (perversely) gets found out when he prevents a near-certain air crash.

Either way, alcohol is the catalyst here, whether in an affirmatory or a negative light.

I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food.” – W.C. Fields

Conclusion

Mankind will always seek out mood-heightening substances, the opposite of an extreme high being an extreme low, with extremes being the precursor of creativity….wouldn’t you say?

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

– Graham Greene