Hashish, Wine, Opium Page 5
The first attack gradually came to an end. Presently, I found myself calm and collected, without a trace of headache or any of the symptoms that accompany drunkenness and most astonished by what had just occurred. Not more than half an hour had passed before I succumbed once more to the hashish. On this occasion, the vision was of greater complexity and even more astonishing. In an atmosphere of confused light, there fluttered a never-ending swarm of myriads of butterflies, their wings rustling like fans. Giant flowers with crystal cups, enormous hollyhocks, lilies of gold and silver, shot up and spread about me with detonations like those of fireworks. My sense of hearing had become abnormally acute. I could hear the very sounds of the colours. Sounds which were green, red, blue or yellow, reached my ears in perfectly distinct waves. An overturned glass, the creaking of an armchair, a whispered word, vibrated and echoed within me like peals of thunder. My own voice seemed so loud that I did not dare speak for fear of shattering the walls or of myself exploding like a bomb; more than 500 clocks were singing out the hour to me in their fluting, brazen or silvery voices. Any object brushed against would emit the notes of musical glasses or an Aeolian harp. I swam in an ocean of sonority in which there floated, like an island of light, motifs from Lucia or the Barber. Never had such beatitude flooded me with its waves: I had so melted into the indefinable, I was so absent, so free from myself (that detestable witness ever dogging one’s footsteps) that I realized for the first time what might be the way of life of elemental spirits, of angels, and of souls separated from their bodies. I was like a sponge in the midst of the ocean: at every moment floods of happiness penetrated me, entering and leaving by my pores for I had become permeable and, down to the minutest capillary vessel, my whole being had been transfused by the colour of the fantastic medium into which I had been plunged. Sound, perfume and light came to me through multitudes of channels as delicate as hairs through which I could hear the magnetic current whistling. According to my sense of time, this state lasted some three hundred years, for the sensations came in such numbers and so thickly that true appreciation of time was impossible. The attack passed and I saw that it had lasted a quarter of an hour.
The intoxication induced by hashish is peculiar in that it is not continuous: it takes you and leaves you, raises you to heaven and restores you to earth without a transition – not unlike the lucid moments in a fit of madness. A third paroxysm, the last and the most bizarre, concluded my oriental evening: during this, I suffered from double vision: pairs of images were reflected by my retina, producing a completely symmetrical pattern. Soon, however, the magical paste having been entirely ingested and acting with greater force on my brain, I became quite mad for an entire hour. All the Pantagruelian fantasies defiled through my imagination: Caprimulges, Coquesgrues, harnessed Oysons, Unicorns, Griffins, Nightmares, the whole menagerie of monstrous dreams trotted, hopped, flew and shrieked through the room: there were trumps terminating in a cloud of foliage, hands opening to become fish fins, heteroclite creatures with feet like chair legs and clock faces for eyes, enormous noses dancing a cachuca on chicken feet; and as for myself, I imagined myself the parrot of the Queen of Sheba, the mistress of the late King Solomon. And, to the best of my ability I imitated the voice and cries of that honest fowl. The visions became so grotesque that I was seized with the desire to sketch them and, in less than five minutes, with incredible rapidity, on the backs of letters, fly leaves, the first scrap of paper I came across, I had executed fifteen of the most extravagant drawings you ever saw. One of them was the portrait of Dr Moreau, as he appeared to me sitting at the piano, dressed in Turkish costume with a sun on the back of his jacket. The musical notes are shown as escaping from the keyboard in the form of rockets and capriciously corkscrewed spirals. Another sketch with the caption An Animal of the Future represents a living locomotive with the neck of a swan terminating in a snake’s muzzle from which clouds of smoke are belching, its monstrous extremities composed of wheels and pulleys; each pair of feet is matched with a pair of wings and on the animal’s tail – you see the Mercury of the ancients acknowledging defeat in spite of his winged heels. Thanks to hashish, I was able to take the portrait from life of an elf. Till then, I had only heard them groaning and bustling about in my old sideboard at night.
But enough of follies! To report a hashish hallucination in its entirety, one would require a thick book and a mere columnist cannot afford to plunge into the recital of Apocalypse!
Charles Baudelaire
Wine and Hashish
Compared as Means for the Multiplication of the Personality
1
A man who is at one and the same time very famous and very foolish, qualities apparently which can readily coexist (as no doubt I shall have the painful pleasure of demonstrating on other occasions) has dared to make the following entry under the heading of WINE in a book on good eating written from the double point of view of health and enjoyment: “The patriarch Noah is said to have been the discoverer of wine, which is a liquid made from the fruit of the vine.”
And then? Then there is nothing at all. In vain will you leaf through the book, examine it in every direction, read it backwards, inside out, from right to left to right. You will not find anything more on the subject of wine in the Physiology of Taste by the very celebrated and highly esteemed Brillat-Savarin: “The patriarch Noah…” and “…which is a liquid…”
I picture to myself a denizen of the moon or some distant planet, exploring our world and fatigued from his protracted journeys, thinking of refreshing his palate and warming his inner man. He wishes to inform himself of the pleasures and customs of our earth. He dimly knows by hearsay of delicious liquids by means of which the inhabitants of the this globe furnish themselves at will with courage and gaiety. To guide his choice, the denizen of the moon opens that oracle of taste, the celebrated and infallible Brillat-Savarin, and there he finds under the heading WINE this precious piece of information: “The patriarch Noah etc…” How comprehensive, how enlightening! After reading that sentence, it would be impossible not to have a correct and clear idea of the range of wines, their different qualities, their drawbacks, their power over the stomach and the brain.
My friends, do not read Brillat-Savarin. “May God preserve those he loves from profitless reading!” – that is the first maxim of a little book of Lavater’s, a philosopher who loved mankind more than all the magistrates of the ancient and modern worlds. No cake has been named after Lavater but the memory of that divine man will live among Christians after our good citizens have forgotten the Brillat-Savarin, an insipid sort of brioche of which the least defect is to serve as a pretext for spewing forth stupid and pedantic maxims drawn from the famous masterpiece.
If a new edition of this false masterpiece were to dare affront the good sense of modern humanity, O wine-drinkers both sad and gay, you who seek in wine remembrance or forgetfulness and who, ne’er finding the heavens quite to your taste, refuse to gaze at them except through the bottom of a bottle,* you forgotten and misunderstood drinkers, would you buy a copy and return good for evil, kindness for indifference?
I open the Kreisleriana of the divine Hoffmann and there I read a curious piece of advice. A conscientious musician should make use of champagne when composing a comic opera. There he will find light, sparkling gaiety demanded by the genre. Religious music demands Rhenish wine or that of the Jurançon. A heady bitterness lurks behind this as behind all profound thoughts. Nevertheless, heroic music cannot dispense with Burgundy which has the earnest fire and the discipline of patriotism. Here certainly we have a better contribution to the subject and, apart from the passionate feelings of a wine-drinker, I find in it an impartiality which does great honour to a German.
Hoffmann has drawn up a singular psychological barometer designed to clarify to himself the various degrees of temperature and the atmospheric phenomena of his soul. One finds the following sort of categories: “Spirit lightly ironical tempered w
ith indulgence; spirit of solitude with profound discontentment with oneself; musical gaiety, musical enthusiasm, musical storm, sarcastic gaiety unbearable to myself, aspiration to abandon my own ego, excessive objectivity, fusion of my being with nature.” It hardly needs to be said that the degrees of Hoffmann’s barometer were fixed according to the order in which they developed, just as in ordinary barometers. It seems to me that an obvious relationship exists between this psychic barometer and his exposition of the musical qualities of wines.
At the moment death came to take him, Hoffmann had begun to make money. Fortune was smiling on him. As with our dear, great Balzac, it was only at the close of his life that he saw the aurora borealis of his first hopes begin to shine. At that time, publishers were fighting each other to get his stories for their keepsakes and would, in order to insinuate themselves into his good graces, add to their remittances a case of French wine.
2
Who has not known you, O deep joys of wine? Whoever has had some remorse to appease, a memory to evoke, a sorrow to drown, a castle to build in Spain, in fact all men have invoked you, mysterious god concealed in the tendrils of the vine. How great are the gala performances of the wine god, illuminated by the inner sun! How real, how fiery the second youth that man draws from him! But on the other hand how fearful his fulminating pleasures and his unnerving sorceries. Yet, confess it, on your soul and conscience, you judges, legislators and men of the world, you whom happiness has made gentle, and good fortune rendered a virtuous and healthy life, confess which of you would have the unbending courage to condemn the man who drinks of the genius?
Besides, wine is not always the terrible wrestler who is certain of victory, who has vowed to show neither pity nor mercy. Wine is like man himself: one never knows to what extent one may esteem or despise him, love or hate him, nor of what sublime actions or monstrous crimes he is capable. Let us not then be crueller towards wine than towards ourselves, let us treat him as an equal.
Sometimes I think I can hear wine speak (he speaks with his soul, the spiritual voice heard only by the spirit) and he says: “Man, my beloved, I would pour out for you, in spite of my prison of glass and fetters of cork, a song full of brotherhood, a song full of joy, light and hope. I am no ingrate; I know that I owe you my life. I know what it cost you in toil, your back under the burning sun. You gave me life and I shall reward you for it. I shall pay my debt in full, for I experience celestial joys when I am poured down a throat which has been parched by labour. The breast of an honest man is a resting place which I prefer to those melancholy unfeeling cellars. It is a joyous tomb where I accomplish my destiny with enthusiasm. I bustle about in the stomach of the workman and from there by invisible ladders I climb into his brain where I execute my masterly dance.
Can you hear stirring and resounding within me the powerful refrains of ancient times, the songs of love and glory? I am the soul of your country. I am half-lover, half-soldier, I am Sunday’s hope. Work makes prosperous days, wine makes happy Sundays. With your elbows on the family table and your sleeves rolled up, you will proudly sing my praises and you will be truly content.
I shall light up your aged wife’s eyes, the old companion of your everyday cares and your oldest hopes. I shall soften her glance and drop into the pupil of her eye the lightning-flash of her youth. As for your dear pale-faced child, that poor little donkey harnessed to the same toil as the shaft-horse, I shall return to him the rosy complexion of his babyhood and I shall be for this boy athlete of life the oil which strengthened the muscles of the classical wrestlers.
I shall sink into your bosom like a vegetable ambrosia. I shall be the seed that fertilizes the laboriously cut furrow. Our close reunion will create poetry. Between us we shall make a god and fly towards the infinite like birds, butterflies, the sons of the Virgin, perfumes and all winged creatures.”
This is what wine sang in its mysterious language. Woe to the man whose selfish heart is closed to the sufferings of his brothers and has never heard this song!
I have often thought that if Jesus Christ were to appear in our time in the dock of a courtroom, some prosecuting counsel would be found to demonstrate that his crime had been aggravated by it being a second offence. As for wine, he relapses into crime daily. Day by day he repeats his blessings. No doubt this is what accounts for the moralists’ bitterness towards him. And when I say moralists, I mean the pharisaical pseudo-moralists.
Let us consider another case, drawn from a lower depth, one of these mysterious beings who live, so to speak, on the rejects of the big cities. For there are strange callings and their number is immense. I have sometimes thought with terrified heart that there existed callings which were entirely devoid of joy and pleasure, toil without solace, pains without compensation. I was wrong. Here you have a man whose task it is to collect the debris of twenty-four hours in Paris. All that the great city has rejected, all that she has lost, all that she has disdained, all that she has broken, all this he catalogues and collects. He classifies the archives of debauch, the lumber room of the rejected. He sorts things out and makes an intelligent selection; like a miser, he collects the muck which, once more digested by the Gods of Commerce, will become objects of utility or pleasure. Here he comes, by the dull light of the streetlamps which flicker in the night breeze, climbing one of those long twisted streets populated by poor families to be found on the hill of St Genevieve. He is clothed in the wickerwork “shawl” and he bears the number 7. He comes shaking his head and stumbling over the paving stones like those young poets who spend their days wandering about chasing rhymes. He is talking to himself – he is pouring out his soul in the cold, dusky air of the night. His is a splendid monologue which surpasses the most lyrical of tragedies. “Forward, march! Division, vanguard, army!” Just like Bonaparte in his death-agony at Saint Helena! It is as if the number plate with its 7 had been transformed into an iron sceptre and the “wicker shawl” had become an emperor’s cloak. Now he thanks his army. The day is won but the battle was fierce. He rides on horseback under triumphal arches. His heart is full of joy. He listens with delight to the acclamations of an enthusiastic multitude. Presently he will be dictating a legislative code to surpass all previous codes. He solemnly swears to make his peoples happy. Want and vice have disappeared from humanity.
And yet his back and loins are galled by the weight of his basket. He is harassed by family cares. He has been through the mill of forty years of toil and trudging about. He is afflicted by advancing age. But wine like a new river Pactolus pours its spiritual gold through languishing humanity. Like good monarchs he rules by his services and sings his exploits through the throats of his subjects.
On the terrestrial globe there is an uncounted, unnamed multitude, whose suffering would not be sufficiently allayed by sleep alone. For them wine composes its songs and poems.
Many will no doubt consider my attitude over-indulgent. They will say: “You are exculpating drunkenness and idealizing debauchery.” I confess that faced with the benefits I lack the courage to count the injuries. Moreover, I have already said that wine can be identified with man and I have admitted that their crimes were equal to their virtues. Can I do more? Something else occurs to me. If wine were to disappear from human production, there would, I believe, ensue in the health and intellect of our planet a vacuum, a lack, a flaw far more appalling than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it so unreasonable to think that those people who never drink wine, be it thoughtlessly or deliberately, are really fools or hypocrites: fools because they are men who are ignorant both of humanity and nature, resembling artists who reject the traditional means of art or workers who utter blasphemies against mechanical science – hypocrites, because they are shamefaced gluttons, braggarts of sobriety who, in possession of some occult wine, do their drinking in secret? A man who will only drink water has a secret to hide from his fellow beings.
Judge for yourselves. Some
years ago at an art exhibition, a crowd of fools thronged in front of a painting which was polished, waxed and varnished just like a manufactured article. It was the absolute antithesis of art; by comparison with Drolling’s “Kitchen” it stood in the relation of madness to folly, of fanatical enthusiasts to mere imitators. In this microscopical painting you could see flies buzzing about. I was drawn to the monstrous object like everybody else, but I was ashamed of my odd weakness for it was nothing but the irresistible attraction to the horrible. At length I realized that I had been attracted without knowing it by a philosophical curiosity, a burning desire to study the moral character of a man who had begotten such a piece of criminal extravagance. I wagered that he must be fundamentally evil. I made enquiries and my intuition was gratified to win this psychological wager. I learnt that this monster regularly got up before dawn, that he had ruined his housekeeper and that he only drank milk.