Hashish, Wine, Opium Page 7
The second phase is heralded by a chilly sensation in the extremities and by a feeling of great weakness; your hands are as weak as water as they say; your head heavy and your whole person dazed. Your eyes are enlarged, as if stretched in all directions by an implacable ecstasy. Your face becomes pale, livid and greenish. Your lips narrow, contract and seem about to disappear into your mouth. Deep, hoarse sighs are forced from your chest as if your former personality could not bear the weight of your new one. Your senses develop an extraordinary degree of delicacy and acuteness. Your eye penetrates the infinite. Your ear perceives the most imperceptible of sounds amidst the most strident of dins.
The hallucinations begin. External objects assume monstrous forms. They reveal themselves to you in shapes never before witnessed. Then they become deformed and transformed, finally entering your being, or rather you enter into them. The most singular ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of thought take place. The sounds are coloured, the colours are heard as music. The musical notes are numbers and you solve at hair-raising speed enormous arithmetical problems as the music unwinds in your ears. You are sitting down and smoking; you think you are sitting inside your pipe which is smoking you; you exhale yourself in the form of blue-tinted clouds.
You feel well but there is one little matter which is worrying you. How on earth are you going to extricate yourself from your pipe? This fancy lasts for an eternity. A lucid interval enables you to look at the cost of a great effort at the clock. The eternity has lasted a whole minute. Another stream of ideas carries you off; it will bear you away for a minute in its living vortex and this minute too will be an eternity. The proportions of time and existence are deranged by the numberless multitude and the intensity of your sensations and ideas. One lives several lives in the space of an hour. It is really the theme of The Wild Ass’s Skin. There is no longer any correspondence between your organs and your pleasures.
From time to time your personality vanishes. The sense of objectivity that creates certain pantheistical poets and great actors becomes so powerful that you are confounded with external objects. Now you are a tree moaning in the wind and murmuring vegetable melodies to nature; now you hover in the azure of an immensely extended sky. Every sorrow has disappeared. You have ceased to struggle, you are transported, you are no longer your master and little do you care. Soon the very idea of time will disappear. Occasionally, a brief interval of lucidity will supervene. You feel yourself coming out of a marvellous, fantastic world. You retain, in fact, the power of self-observation and on the morrow you will keep the memory of some of your sensations. But there is one mental faculty you cannot apply. I defy you to cut a pen or sharpen a pencil; that would be a task above your strength.
At other times, music will give you infinite poems and put you into terrifying or fairylike plays. It will associate itself with the objects around you. The ceiling paintings, even if mediocre or downright bad, take on a frightening life of their own. The limpid and enchanting stream flows through the quivering turf. Nymphs with dazzling white bodies gaze at you with eyes which are even more candid than the water and the azure. You would take your place and play your part in the most wretched of paintings, the coarsest wallpaper covering the walls of an inn.
I have observed that water acquires a frightening charm for all halfway artistic spirits under the influence of hashish. Running water, fountains, harmonious waterfalls, the immense blue of the sea surge, sleep, sing in the depths of your heart. It would not be wise to leave a man in this state by the edge of a limpid lake; like the fisherman in the ballad he might allow himself to be dragged in by an undine.
As the evening draws to its close it becomes possible to dine, but this operation cannot be accomplished without a certain difficulty. You find you are so much above material things that you would certainly prefer to lie on your back in your intellectual paradise. Sometimes, however, one’s appetite develops to an extraordinary degree; but one would require great courage to move a bottle or a knife and fork.
The third phase is separated from the second by a redoubled crisis, a vertiginous intoxication followed by a fresh attack of malaise, and beggars description. It is what Orientals call “kief” – it is the absolute of happiness. The characteristics of vortex and tumultuousness have gone. It is a calm and frozen beatitude. Every philosophical problem has been solved. All the knotty questions with which theologians have battled and which are the despair of thinking humanity have become pellucid, limpid. Every contradiction is now an identity. Man is a god. Something within you is saying, “You are superior to all men, no one can understand what you are thinking and feeling. Men are even incapable of understanding the infinite love you feel for them. But you must not hate them on this account, you must pity them. An infinity of happiness and virtue has opened itself before you. No one will ever know to what degree of virtue and intelligence you have attained. Live in the solitude of your thought and refrain from troubling mankind!”
One of the most grotesque of the effects of hashish is the fear, pushed to an extremity of meticulous madness, of troubling anyone, whosoever it may be. You would even disguise, if you could, the supernatural state that you are in, in order to spare an uneasy feeling to the least of men.
In this supreme state, love, for tender and artistic spirits, takes most singular forms and lends itself to the most grotesque combinations. Unrestrained libertinism may go hand in hand with ardent and affectionate paternal feelings.
My concluding observation is not the least curious. When on the morrow you observe the light of day in your room your first sensation is one of astonishment. Time had completely disappeared. It had been night just before and now it is day. “Have I slept or not? Did my state of intoxication last all night and, the concept of time having been suppressed, did the entire night signify for me less than the space of a second? Or have I perhaps lain enveloped in the veils of a vision-filled slumber?” There is no possibility of knowing.
You seem to be in a marvellous state of well-being and to enjoy a corresponding lightness of spirit – not a trace of fatigue. But you are hardly on your feet when a residue of intoxication manifests itself. You are unsure of your feeble limbs and you are afraid of breaking into pieces like a fragile object. A profound languor, which is not without charm, invades your spirit. You are incapable of work and of energetic action.
This is the well-deserved punishment of the impious prodigality with which you have squandered your nervous energy. You have cast your personality to the four winds and now you have to reassemble and reconcentrate it.
5
I do not claim that hashish produces all the above-mentioned effects in all men. I have recounted approximately the phenomena which generally appear, certain variations excepted, in artistic and philosophical spirits. There are however, temperaments in which the drug develops an uproarious state of lunacy, a violent gaiety akin to frenzy – dancing, leaping, the stamping of feet, peals of laughter. They
imbibe, so to speak, a purely materialistic hashish. The spiritualists find them insufferable but pity them. It is their ugly personality which is coming out. I once saw a respectable magistrate – a man of honour as rich and fashionable people say of themselves, one of those men whose pretended gravity always overawes others – I saw this man, at the moment when the hashish had taken its effect on him, suddenly begin to dance a most indecent cancan. The true inner monster was revealing itself. This man who judged the action of his fellows, this togaed magistrate had learnt the cancan in secret.
One can accordingly affirm that the impersonality, the objectivism of which I have spoken and which is merely an excessive development of the poetic spirit, will never be found in the hashish of such people.
6
In egypt, the government forbids the sale and traffic in hashish, inside the country at any rate. The unfortunates suffering from this passion go to the apothecary to obtain, under the pretext of buying some o
ther drug, their small dose which has been prepared in advance. The Egyptian government is certainly in the right. No rational government could subsist with the use of hashish. It creates neither warriors nor citizens. In truth, it is forbidden to man, under pain of degeneration and intellectual death, to disturb the primordial conditions of his existence and upset the balance between his faculties and his environment. If there existed a government whose interest it were to corrupt its citizens, it would only have to encourage the use of hashish.
It is said that the substance causes no physical harm. That is true, at least up to the present. I do not know how far one can say that a man who can only dream and is incapable of action is in good health, even if all his limbs are functioning well. But it is the willpower that is attacked, and that is the most precious organ. No man who with a spoonful of conserve is able to procure instantly all the treasures of heaven and earth will bother to acquire the thousandth part of it by means of work. The primary task is to live and work.
The idea occurred to me to discuss wine and hashish in the same article because they do in fact have something in common – the excessive development of man. Man’s frantic desire for every substance, be it healthy or dangerous, that will exalt his personality, is a witness to his grandeur. He is ever aspiring to renew his hopes and to raise himself towards the infinite. But the results must be taken into account. On the one hand you have a beverage which activates the digestion, fortifies the muscles and enriches the blood. Even when taken in large quantities it will cause only passing disorders. On the other hand is a substance which interrupts the digestive functions, enfeebles the limbs and is capable of causing an intoxication lasting twenty-four hours. Wine exalts the will, hashish annihilates it. Wine is a physical support, hashish is a suicide’s weapon. Wine makes one kind and sociable. Hashish isolates. One is, so to speak, industrious, the other essentially idle. What, in truth, is the use of working, ploughing, writing, manufacturing something or other, when you can attain to paradise in a single blow? To sum up, wine is for those who work and deserve to drink it. Hashish belongs to the class of solitary pleasures; it is made for wretched idlers. Wine is useful and produces fruitful results. Hashish is useless and dangerous.*
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I shall close my article by quoting some fine words which are not my own but belong to a remarkable though little known philosopher, viz. Barbereau, the musical theorist and professor at the Conservatoire. I was with him in a gathering at which some individuals had taken the blessed poison, when he said to me in a tone of indescribable contempt: “I do not understand why a rational and intelligent man should make use of artificial means to attain poetic ecstasy when enthusiasm and will-power will suffice to raise him to a supra-natural existence. Great poets, philosophers and prophets are beings who, by the pure and free use of the will, reach a state in which they are at one and the same time cause and effect, subject and object, mesmerist and somnambulist.”
I concur with him entirely.
Notes
p.v, As if to express something of the variable mystery of the drug, it will be found that different authors spell the word differently. Save when the text of this essay resorts to French, the spelling employed here will be that in common current usage today, namely “hashish”. When the writer quoted is English, his own spelling of the word – as in the case here – will be used.
p.xviii, Editor’s italics.
p.66, Béroalde de Verville, Moyen de parvenir.
p.105, For the sake of completeness, one should mention the attempt recently made to apply hashish to the cure of mental illness. The madman who takes hashish contracts a madness which chases away the first, and when the intoxication has passed, the true madness, which is the normal state of the madman, reassumes its empire. Somebody has taken the trouble to write a book on the subject. The doctor who invented this ingenious system is in no sense a philosopher.