Hashish, Wine, Opium Page 6

  One or two more stories and we shall be able to draw our conclusions. One day I noticed a large crowd on the pavement and on looking over the shoulders of the bystanders, I witnessed the following scene: a man was lying flat on his back, his eyes open and fixed to the sky; another man was standing in front of him and speaking to him only by gestures, to which the recumbent man replied only with his eyes. The attitude of both men was animated by a tremendous sense of good will. The gestures of the standing man were saying to the mind of the prostrate man, “Come on, happiness is at hand but two yards distant, come on to the corner of the street! We haven’t yet got out of sight of the shores of sorrow, we are not yet in the high seas of reverie. Courage, my friend, tell your legs to make your thought.”

  All this was accompanied by lurchings and harmonious balancings. The other had doubtlessly already attained the “high seas” (he was indeed awash in the gutter) for his beatific smile replied, “Leave your friend in peace. The shore of sorrow has sufficiently receded behind beneficient mists: I have no more to ask of the heaven of reverie.” I believe I even heard an indistinct sentence or rather a sigh vaguely formulated in words escaping from his lips, “One must be reasonable”. This was the height of the sublime, but as you will at once see, in drunkenness there is a super-sublime. The ever-indulgent friend went off by himself to the pub to return bearing a cord in his hand. Clearly he could not bear the idea of sailing by himself and pursuing happiness alone and so he had come to pick his friend up in a carriage. The carriage took the form of the cord which was passed about his waist. The recumbent friend smiled, realizing the maternal love expressed in the thought. Having knotted the cord, his friend trotted off like a gentle well-behaved horse and brought his friend to the rendezvous of bliss. The man who was being conveyed or rather dragged, polishing his pavement as he went, retained his ineffable smile.

  The crowd was dumbfounded for that which is too beautiful, that which goes beyond the poetical forces of man, gives rise rather to astonishment than emotion.

  There was a certain individual, a Spanish guitarist, who had travelled about for a long time with Paganini. This was before the period of Paganini’s great, officially confirmed glory.

  The pair led the grand vagabond existence of gypsies, itinerant musicians and homeless, depatriated folk. The two of them, playing violin and guitar, used to give concerts wherever they went. Thus they wandered for a considerable time through a number of countries. The talent of my Spanish friend was such that he could boast like Orpheus, “I am the master of nature”.

  Wherever he went, scraping his strings, making them rebound tunefully beneath his thumb, he was sure to be followed by a crowd. The possessor of such a secret will never die of hunger. He was followed like Jesus Christ. Who could possibly refuse hospitality and a dinner to the man – the genius and sorcerer – who had made your soul re-echo with his loveliest melodies, most secret, unknown and mysterious? I have been assured that this man from an instrument capable only of producing successive tones, could easily obtain a continuous wave of sound. Paganini held the purse and administered the company’s capital – a fact that will astonish nobody.

  The cashbox travelled with the administrator; it was now up, now down, one day in his high boots, the next between the folds of his greatcoat. When the guitarist, who was a heavy drinker, asked after the financial situation, Paganini used to reply that they had nothing or practically nothing, for he resembled the aged who are always afraid of being short. The Spaniard would believe him or pretend to do so and, his eyes fixed on the line of the horizon, would strum away, tormenting his inseparable companion. Paganini walked on the other side of the road. They had come to this arrangement in order not to be in each other’s way. Thus they each practised and worked as they tramped.

  Then, having come to a place which offered a chance of some takings, one of them would play a composition of his own while the other would improvise at his elbow – a variation, accompaniment or bass line. The joys and poetry of this troubadour-like life will never be known. They left each other, I do not know why. The Spaniard now travelled alone. One evening he arrived at a little town in the Jura. He announced a concert in the town hall and had posters put up. The concert consisted just of himself and a guitar. He had become known by strumming away in a few cafes and some of the town’s musicians had been struck by his strange talent. In the end a lot of people came.

  My Spanish friend had unearthed somewhere in the town near the cemetery, another Spaniard, a fellow countryman. The latter was some sort of gravestone maker, a stonemason who specialized in tombs. Like everybody connected with the undertaking trade, he drank a lot. The bottle and common origin made them bosom friends, the musician never stirred from the stonemason’s side. On the very day of the concert, at the time announced, they were still together – but where? That was the question. They searched all the pubs and cafes in town. Finally he was unearthed together with his friend in some unspeakable haunt, he was quite drunk and so was his friend. Scenes followed which were reminiscent of Kean and Frédéric. Finally he agreed to perform but he had suddenly been seized by a caprice. “You will play with me,” he said to his friend. The latter refused; he possessed a violin but played it like the worst of street musicians. “You will play or I shan’t!”

  Neither admonitions or reasoning proved of avail: they had to give in. There they were on the platform facing the fine flower of the local bourgeoisie. “Fetch us some wine,” said the Spaniard. The carver of gravestones, whom everybody knew but not as a musician, was too drunk to feel abashed. When the wine arrived, they did not bother to uncork the bottles. The rogues decapitated them with their jackknives in unmannerly fashion. Imagine the effect on the provincials in evening dress! The ladies retired and even many of the gentlemen left, scandalized by the pair of drunks who seemed half mad into the bargain.

  However, a rich reward awaited those in whom modesty had not extinguished their sense of curiosity and had had the courage to stay. “You begin,” said the guitarist to the stonemason. It is impossible to convey the nature of the sounds that issued from the drunken violin – it was like Bacchus in delirium cutting stone with a saw. What did he play, or rather, what did he try to play? It mattered little – the first tune that occurred to him. Suddenly, a melody at once powerful and suave, capricious and harmonious began to envelop, stifle, extinguish, disguise the shrill hullabaloo. The guitar sang so loudly that the violin could not be heard. And yet it was the tune all right, the inebriated tune that the mason had attempted.

  The guitar gave utterance with tremendous sonority, it conversed, sang, declaimed with terrifying verve and with an unheard-of sureness and purity of diction. The guitar was improvising a variation on the theme of the blind beggar’s fiddle. It took it as a guide and clothed in splendour and with maternal love the naked starveling sounds. You will realize that this performance is indescribable: I had an account of it from a veracious and serious-minded witness. The public in the end was even drunker than he. The Spaniard was fêted, complimented, saluted with tremendous enthusiasm. But no doubt, the character of the people was not to his taste for this was the only occasion on which he consented

  to play.

  Where is he now? What sun looked down on his last dreams? What ground received his much-travelled corpse? What ditch sheltered his last agony? Where are the intoxicating perfumes of vanished flowers? Where are the magical colours of ancient sunsets?

  3

  I hardly think I have told you anything new. Wine is known to all and beloved by all. If a truly philosophical doctor ever appears (an unlikely event), he could write a powerful study on the subject – a sort of double psychology of which wine and man compose the two terms. He will explain why and how certain drinks possess the faculty of immeasurably augmenting the personality of a thinking being and of creating, so to speak, a third being, a mystic process in which natural man and wine, the animal god and the vegetable god, play th
e parts of Father and Son in the Trinity: they engender a Holy Spirit or a superman who derives in equal measure from both.

  There are persons in whom the limbering effect of wine is so powerful that their legs are strengthened and their eyes become excessively acute. I knew one individual whose weak sight recovered in the state of intoxication all its original piercing quality. Wine had changed the mole into an eagle.

  An ancient author whose name has been lost wrote: “Nothing equals the joy of a drinking man except the joy of wine when it is drunk.” In truth, wine plays an intimate role in the life of humanity, so intimate indeed that I would not be surprised if some national thinkers were seduced by the pantheistic notion and attributed to it a kind of personality of its own. Wine and man give me the impression of being two friendly wrestlers, for ever combating each other, for ever being reconciled. The vanquished always embraces the vanquisher.

  There are evil drunkards; they are persons who are evil by nature. The bad man becomes an execrable man just as the good man becomes a perfect man.

  I shall now discuss a substance which has come into fashion in recent years – a kind of drug which certain dilettantes find delectable and whose effects are far more overwhelming and powerful than those of wine. I shall carefully describe all its effects and then, returning to the various potentialities of wine, I shall compare these artificial means by which man in exacerbating his personality creates, so to speak, a kind of divinity in himself.

  I shall demonstrate the disadvantages of hashish, the least of which, despite the treasures of unknown beneficence it seems to engender in the heart or rather in the brain of man – the least evil of which, I repeat, is its anti-social nature, in contrast to wine which is profoundly humane, I would almost dare say, is human in its action.

  4

  When hemp is being harvested, strange phenomena occasionally occur in the male and female labourers. It is almost as if some stupefying spirit had arisen from the crop and had mounted from the limbs to lodge malignantly in the brain. The harvester’s head is awhirl when it is not full of daydreams. His limbs slacken and refuse to obey him. As a matter of fact, I have myself experienced analogous phenomena as a child while rolling on heaps of lucerne.

  The attempt has been made to produce hashish from hemp grown in France. Up to now all such experiments have failed and those fanatics who insist, cost what it may, on obtaining supernatural joys, have continued to use the hashish which has made the journey across the Mediterranean, i.e. that prepared from Indian or Egyptian hemp. The composition of hashish consists of a decoction of Indian hemp, butter and a small quantity of opium.

  You see before you a green confection with an odour which is so pungent that it repels as would indeed any fine odour raised to the maximum of its strength and, so to say, of its density. Take a quantity the size of a nut, fill a teaspoon with it and you find yourself in possession of happiness: absolute happiness with all its intoxication, all the follies of youth and all its infinite bliss. There it is, happiness in the form of a bit of paste; consume it fearlessly, it isn’t poisonous, your physical organs will not be harmed by it. Your willpower perhaps will be lessened by it, but that is another matter.

  Generally speaking, to give hashish its full force and its effects their full development, it is necessary to dilute it with some very hot black coffee and to take it on an empty stomach. Dinner should be postponed to ten o’clock or midnight and only a very light soup is permissible. An infraction of this very simple rule might lead to vomiting, the dinner disagreeing with the drug, or to inefficacity of the hashish. Many of the unpractised or blundering ignoramuses thus accuse hashish of being ineffectual.

  Hardly have you absorbed the minute dose, an operation which incidentally requires some exercise of willpower for as I have said, the compound is so odoriferous that some persons have their stomachs turned by it, when you find yourself forthwith in a state of anxiety. You have heard vaguely of the marvellous effects of hashish, you have formed in your imagination a certain notion, an ideal intoxication, and you are impatient to learn if the reality, the result, will fully correspond to your preconception.

  I have omitted to say that as hashish gives rise in man to morbid exaggeration of his personality while at the same time conferring a very lively awareness of circumstance and environment, it is desirable to submit oneself to its action only in favourable circumstances and environments. Just as every delight, every feeling of well being becomes excessive, every pain and every anguish is correspondingly profound. Do not undertake an experiment of this kind by yourself if preoccupied by some disagreeable piece of business or if your temperament is confined to the splenetic or if you have to meet a note of hand. I repeat, hashish is not favourable to action. It does not console like wine; it merely develops to an immoderate degree the human personality in the circumstances in which it finds itself at a given time and place. You need, as far as possible, a handsome apartment or a beautiful landscape, a free unpreoccupied spirit and a few accomplices whose cast of mind approaches your own; some music too, if it can be procured.

  In most cases, novices after their first initiation will complain of the slowness of the effects. They anxiously await them and as these do not appear soon enough for them, they indulge in boastful incredulity which greatly tickles the experts who are aware of the way hashish acts. It is sufficiently comic to see the effects appear and multiply right in the middle of their incredulity. First of all, a kind of preposterous and irresistible hilarity takes possession of you. The most commonplace words, the simplest of ideas, acquire a bizarre and novel aspect. You yourself find this gaiety unbearable but it is useless to kick. The demon has taken hold of you; all your efforts to shake him off will only serve to accelerate the course of the disease. You laugh at your own absurdity and folly; your friends laugh at you to your face but you bear them no grudge, for a feeling of benevolence has begun to manifest itself.

  This hesitant gaiety, this uneasiness in enjoyment, this insecurity, uncertainty of the disease generally lasts but a little space of time. It will sometimes occur that individuals devoid of any faculty for wordplay will improvise endless strings of puns, improbable concatenations of ideas capable of nonplussing the most accomplished masters of the absurd art. After a few minutes the links between your ideas become so vague and the threads holding your notions together so tightly stretched that only your accomplices or co-religionists can understand you. Your fooling and your bursts of laughter appear the height of stupidity to anybody who is not in a similar state.

  The sobriety of such an unfortunate will rejoice you beyond measure, his calm will push you to the very limits of irony; he appears the maddest, the absurdist of men. As for your comrades, you are perfectly in harmony with them. Soon you can communicate with them just by a look. It is in truth a tolerably amusing situation – that of men enjoying a gaiety incomprehensible to one who stands outside of their own world. They pity him deeply. From that moment, the notion of superiority rises on the horizon of their intellects. Soon this notion will grow beyond all measure.

  I have witnessed two quite grotesque scenes which occurred during this first phase. A celebrated musician ignorant of the properties of hashish, of which he had perhaps never heard, turned up at a party in which practically everybody had taken the drug. They tried to explain the marvellous effects. He laughed politely like a man willing to pretend for a while out of sheer politeness (he is man of great breeding). There was a lot of laughter, for the hashish-taker is endowed in the first phase with a wonderful sense of humour. The bursts of laughter, the senseless enormities, the inextricable maze of wordplay, the baroque gestures would not cease. The musician declared that such artistic excesses were bad and moreover, must be very tiring for the participants.

  The joy increased. “These excesses may be very well for you, they do not suit me,” he maintained. “It’s enough if it suits us,” egotistically retorted one of the victims. Interminable
peals of laughter filled the room. The gentleman in question got annoyed and wished to leave. Somebody locked the door and hid the key. Somebody else sank on his knees before him, tearfully declaring in the name of all that, though moved by the profoundest pity for him and his inferiority, they were no less animated by eternal goodwill towards him.

  They begged him to play; he gave in. Hardly had he begun to play, when the notes of the violin took possession of various individuals among the victims. It was all deep sighs, sobs, heartrending groans, floods of tears. The terrified musician stopped, thinking himself in a madhouse. He approached one, whose bliss expressed itself in the greatest amount of uproar, asking him if he was in pain and what could be done to help him. A strong-minded guest who had not tasted the beatific drug either, suggested lemonade and bitters. The sick man, in whose eyes one could read the ecstasy, looked at him with unutterable contempt and only spared him the gravest insults out of sheer disdain. Indeed, what could be more calculated to irritate a man who was sick with joy than to wish to cure him?

  I now add what seems to me a very curious phenomenon. A maid, given the task of serving refreshments and tobacco to a party of hashish-eaters, seeing herself surrounded by strange visages and enormously enlarged eyes, feeling herself enveloped somehow by an unhealthy atmosphere, a collective madness, burst into a crazy laugh, dropped the tray, breaking all the cups and glasses, and took to her heels in terror. Everybody laughed. Next day she swore she had suffered from strange sensations for hours, had felt “all queer-like, I can’t say rightly how”. And yet she had not taken any hashish.