Works Of Charles Baudelaire

[synack]

I always remember this quotation, which I have always to some degree concurred with;

"...that hashish gives, or at least increases, genius; they forget that it is in the nature of hashish to diminish the will, and that thus it gives with one hand what it withdraws with the other; that is to say, imagination without the faculty of profiting by it. "

However I had no idea where it was taken from. Well here is the rest of what transpires to be called "The Poem of Hashish".

I am only just reading through it, it does not necessarily reflect my personal opinion....yadayada...just thought some of you may find it a thought provoking read. It is comprised of five chapters - a little long to post in one shot....so I have only pasted the first chapter here.

Source hxxp://cannabis.net/hashish/index.html

The Poem of Hashish.

CHAPTER I

THE LONGING FOR INFINITY

Those who know how to observe themselves, and who preserve the memory of their impressions, those who, like Hoffmann, have known how to construct their spiritual barometer, have sometimes had to note in the observatory of their mind find seasons, happy days, delicious minutes. There are days when man awakes with a young and vigorous genius. Though his eyelids be scarcely released from the slumber which sealed them, the exterior world shows itself to him with a powerful relief, a clearness of contour, and a richness of colour which are admirable. The moral world opens out its vast perspective, full of new clarities.

A man gratified by this happiness, unfortunately rare and transient, feels himself at once more an artist and more a just man; to say all in a word, a nobler being. But the most singular thing in this exceptional condition of the spirit and of the senses -- which I may without exaggeration call heavenly, if I compare it with the heavy shadows of common and daily existence -- is that it has not been created by any visible or easily definable cause. Is it the result of good hygiene and of a wise regimen? Such is the first explanation which suggests itself; but we are obliged to recognise that often this marvel, this prodigy, so to say, produces itself as if it were the effect of a superior and invisible power, of a power exterior to man, after a period of the abuse of his physical faculties. Shall we say that it is the reward of assiduous prayer and spiritual ardour? It is certain that a constant elevation of the desire, a tension of the spiritual forces in a heavenly direction, would be the most proper regimen for creating this moral health, so brilliant and so glorious. But what absurd law causes it to manifest itself (as it sometimes does) after shameful orgies of the imagination; after a sophistical abuse of reason, which is, to its straightforward and rational use, that which the tricks of dislocation which some acrobats have taught themselves to perform are to sane gymnastics? For this reason I prefer to consider this abnormal condition of the spirit as a true grace; as a magic mirror wherein man is invited to see himself at his best; that is to say, as that which he should be, and might be; a kind of angelic excitement; a rehabilitation of the most flattering type. A certain Spiritualist School, largely represented in England and America, even considers supernatural phenomena, such as the apparition of phantoms, ghosts, &c, as manifestations of the Divine Will, ever anxious to awaken in the spirit of man the memory of invisible truths.

Besides this charming and singular state, where all the forces are balanced; where the imagination, though enormously powerful, does not drag after it into perilous adventures the moral sense; when an exquisite sensibility is no longer tortured by sick nerves, those councillors-in-ordinary of crime or despair; this marvellous state, I say, has no prodromal symptoms. It is as unexpected as a ghost. It is a species of obsession, but of intermittent obsession; from which we should be able to draw, if we were but wise, the certainty of a nobler existence, and the hope of attaining to it by the daily exercise of our will. This sharpness of thought, this enthusiasm of the senses and of the spirit, must in every age have appeared to man as the chiefest of blessings; and for this reason, considering nothing but the immediate pleasure he has, without worrying himself as to whether he were violating the laws of his constitution, he has sought, in physical science, in pharmacy, in the grossest liquors, in the subtlest perfumes, in every climate and in every age, the means of fleeing, were it but for some hours only, his habitaculum of mire, and, as the author of "Lazare" says, "to carry Paradise at the first assault." Alas! the vices of man, full of horror as one must suppose them, contain the proof, even though it were nothing but their infinite expansion, of his hunger for the Infinite; only, it is a taste which often loses its way. One might take a proverbial metaphor, "All roads lead to Rome," and apply it to the moral world: all roads lead to reward or punishment; two forms of eternity. The mind of man is glutted with passion: he has, if I may use another familiar phrase, passion to burn. But this unhappy soul, whose natural depravity is equal to its sudden aptitude, paradoxical enough, for charity and the most arduous virtues, is full of paradoxes which allow him to turn to other purposes the overflow of this overmastering passion. He never imagines that he is selling himself wholesale: he forgets, in his infatuation, that he is matched against a player more cunning and more strong than he; and that the Spirit of Evil, though one give him but a hair, will not delay to carry off the whole head. This visible lord of visible nature -- I speak of man -- has, then, wished to create Paradise by chemistry, by fermented drinks; like a maniac who should replace solid furniture and real gardens by decorations painted on canvas and mounted on frames. It is in this degradation of the sense of the Infinite that lies, according to me, the reason of all guilty excesses; from the solitary and concentrated drunkenness of the man of letters, who, obliged to seek in opium an anodyne for a physical suffering, and having thus discovered a well of morbid pleasure, has made of it, little by little, his sole diet, and as it were the sum of his spiritual life; down to the most disgusting sot of the suburbs, who, his head full of flame and of glory, rolls ridiculously in the muck of the roads.

Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while rendering more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium. The analysis of the mysterious effect and the diseased pleasures which these drugs beget, of the inevitable chastisement which results from their prolonged use, and finally the immortality necessarily employed in this pursuit of a false ideal, constitutes the subject of this study.

The subject of opium has been treated already, and in a manner at once so startling, so scientific, and so poetic that I shall not dare to add a word to it. I will therefore content myself in another study, with giving an analysis of this incomparable book, which has never been fully translated into French. The author, an illustrious man of a powerful and exquisite imagination, to-day retired and silent, has dared with tragic candour to write down the delights and the tortures which he once found in opium, and the most dramatic portion of his book is that where he speaks of the superhuman efforts of will which he found it necessary to bring into action in order to escape from the damnation which he had imprudently incurred. To-day I shall only speak of hashish, and I shall speak of it after numerous investigations and minute information; extracts from notes or confidences of intelligent men who had long been addicted to it; only, I shall combine these varied documents into a sort of monograph, choosing a particular soul, and one easy to explain and to define, as a type suitable to experiences of this nature.

Edited February 15, 2010 by Father McPot

[Cosmic Dick]

Trying to save myself an awful lot of typing, I went in search of a particular article, "Concerning Hashish" by Charles Baudelaire, found a link to it on Erowid, but alas "file not found".

This document is not mentioned anywhere else on t'internet, so I am going to have to copy it all out from a book.

Give me a few days, but in the meantime, this may be of interest:

hxxp://www.alchemylab.com/cannabis_stone5.htm

short extract

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5. The Hashish Club

European cannabis use remained quite secretive until the advent of the mid nineteenth century group, the elite “Le Club Des Haschischins,” a name inspired by the nickname given to the hashish using Isma’ilis. The club members would gather together once a month costumed with turbans and daggers. “The prince of the Assassins” would go from member to member of fering a spoonful of hashish with the statement “This will be taken from your share of paradise.” This elite group included some of the most famous and creative artists and authors of that time (Dumas, Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, De Nerval, Balzac, etc.) and was founded by Dr. J. Moreau, an expert on the effects of hashish:

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[Cosmic Dick]

Charles Baudelaire

Concerning Hashish

Sometimes strange things happen among the men and women at hemp harvest. It seems as if some dizzy spirit rises from the harvest which circulates around their legs and mounts mischieviously to the brain. The head of the harvester is full of whirlpools, at other times loaded with daydreams.The limbs weaken and refuse to be of service. Similar phenomena happened to me as a child when I was playing and rolling around in heaps of lucerne.

There have been attempts to make hashish out of hemp grown in France. So far they have all been unsuccessful, and the obstinate ones who wish to procure themselves enchanted enjoyment at no matter what price continue to use hashish from across the Mediterranean, that is to say made from Indian or Egyptian hemp. Hashish is composed of a decoction of Indian hemp, butter, and a little bit of opium.

Here is a green jam, strangely odorous, so odorous that it provokes a certain revulsion, as any fine odour does when carried to it's maximum force and density. Take a piece as big as a walnut, fill a spoon with it, and you possess happiness; absolute happiness with all it's frenzies, it's youthful follies, and also it's infinite beatitudes. Happiness is there in the form of a little piece of jam; take it without fear, no one dies from it; the physical organs are hardly touched. Perhaps your will-power may be diminished, but that is another matter.

Usuallly in order to give the hashish all it's strength and powers of development, it is mixed with very hot black coffee and drunk on an empty stomach. Supper should be taken late that evening, at about 10 o'clock or midnight. A very light soup is the only food permitted. Breaking this simple rules produces either vomiting, as the food quarrels with the drug, or it cancels the effect of the hashish. Many ignorant or stupid people who have broken this rule accuse hashish of being powerless.

No sooner has the little amount of drug been swallowed (an act which requires a certain determination, as the mixture has such a strong odour that it provokes nausea in some people) than you find yourself placed in a state of anxious waiting. You have heard vaguely about the marvellous effects of hashish, your imagination has already formed it's particular idea of an ideal intoxication, and you are impatient to find out if the result will in reality live up to your preconception. The amount of time that passes between drinking the drug and feeling the first effects varies according to temperaments nad also according to habit. People who know their way around with hashish sometimes feel the first effects after half an hour.

I forgot to say that as hashish causes an exageration of the personality at the same time as a very sharp feeling for circumstances and surroundings, it is best to use it only in favourable circumstances and surroundings. All joy and happiness being super-abundant, all sorrow and anguish is immensely profound. Do not experiment with it if you have to accomplish some disagreeable matter of business, if you are feeling melancholy, or if you have a bill to pay. Hashish is not suited for action. It does not console as wine does, all it does is to develop immeasurably the human personality in the actual circumstances where it is placed. As far as possible, one should have a beautiful apartment or landscape, a free clear mind, and some accomplices whose intellectual temperament is akin to your own; and a little music too, if possible.

Novices at their first initiation almost always complain about hos slow the effects are, and as it is not oing fast enough to suit them, they begin boasting incredulously, which is very amusing to those who know about the way hashish works. It is not one of the least comic things to see the first effects appear and multiply themselves right in the middle of this incredulity. First a certain absurd and irresistable hilarity comes over you. The most ordinary words, the most simple ideas take on a strange new aspect. This gaiety becomes insupportable to you, but it is useless to revolt. The demon has invaded you, all the efforts you make to resist only accelerate his progress. You laugh at your own silliness and folly; your companions make fun of you, and you are not angry, for benevolence has begun to manifest itself.

This languishing gaiety, uneasiness in joy, insecurity, unhealthy indecision usually lasts only a short while. It sometimes happens that people not at all suited to word games improvise interminable series of puns, bringing the most improbable ideas togehter, made to mislead the strongest masters of this absurd art. After several minutes the relationships become so vague, the threads which connect your conceptions are so tenuous, that only your accomplices, members of the same religion, understand you. Your folly, your burst of laughter seems extremely stupid to anyone who is not in the same state as you.

The sobriety of this unfortunate person amuses you boundlessly, his composure pushes you to the last limits of irony; he seems to you the most insane and riduculous of human beings. As for your comrades, you understand them perfectly. Soon you will only communicate with the eyes. The fact is that it is a very amusing situation: people enjoying a gaiety that is incomprehensible to anyone who is not situated in the same world as they are, regard him with profound pity. From then on the idea of superiority dawns on your mental horizon. Soon it will increase immeasureably.

I was a witness to two rather grotesque scenes during this first phase. A famous musician who knew nothing about the properties of hashish, and who had probably never heard of it, arrived in the middle of a group where almost everyone had taken it. They tried to make him understand it's marvellous effects. He laughed it off politely, like a man who is willing to pose for a few minutes in a spirit of propriety because he has been well brought up. There was a lot of laughter; for the person who has taken hashish is endowed with a marvellous awareness of the comic during the first phase. Bursts of laughter, incomprehensible enormities, inextricable word games, baroque gestures continued. The musician declared that this 'charge' was bad for the artists, and that besides, it must be very tiring for them.

The joy increased. He said 'This charge may be good for you but not for me'. One of the intoxicated egotistically replied 'It suffices that it be good for us'. Interminable bursts of laughter filled the room. The man got angry and wanted to leave. Someone locked the door and hid the key. Someone else kneeled down before him, and, speaking for the whole group, declared with tears in his eyes that although they were moved by a most profound pity for him and for his inferiority, they would be any the less animated by an eternal benevolence.

He was begged to play some music, and finally agreed. The violin had hardly begun to be heard when the sounds spreading through the apartment took possession of the intoxicated here and there. Nothing but deep sighs, sobs, heart-breaking groans, torrents of tears. The horrified musician stopped, he thought he was in a lunatic asylum. He approached the one whose beatitude was making the most noise, and asked him if he was suffering very much, and what should be done to help him. A down-to-earth person, who also had not taken the beatific drug, suggested lemonade and bitters. The intoxicated one, ecstacy in his eyes, looked at him with unutterable contempt, only pride preventing the most serious insults. Indeed, what could be more exasperating to someone sick with joy than to want to cure him?

Here is a phenomena that seems extremely curious to me: a servant who was aksed to bring tobacco and refreshments to people who had taken hashish, upon seeing herself surrounded by strange heads with enormous eyes, by an unhealthy atmosphere, by a collective insanity, burst into hysterical laughter, dropped the tray which broke with all it's cups and glasses, and fled in horror as fast as she could. Everybody laughed. She admitted the next day that she felt something strange for several hours, to have been 'all queer, I don't know how'. However, she had not taken hashish.

The second phase announces itself by a sensation of coolness at the extremeties, a great weakness: you have, as they say, butter fingers, a heavy head, and general stupefaction in all your being. Your eyes get bigger, they are as if pulled in all directions by an implacable ecstacy. Your face becomes pale, then livid and greenish. The lips withdraw, shrink, and seem to want to enter the interior of your mouth. Raucous and profound sighs escape from your chest, as if your old nature could not support the weight of your new nature. The senses become extraordinarily delicate and sharp. The eyes pierce the infinite. The ears hear the tiniest sounds in the middle of the loudest noises.

The hallucinations begin. External objects take on monstrous appearances. They reveal themselves to you in previously unexpected forms. They then deform themselves, transform themselves, and finally they enter into your being, or else you enter into theirs. The most singular ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. Sounds have a colour, colours have a music. Musical notes are numbers, and you solve with frightening rapidity prodigious arithmetical calculations while the music unfolds in your ear. You are seated and you are smoking; you think that you are sitting in your pipe and it is you that your pipe is smoking; it is yourself that you exhale in the form of blue clouds.

You feel well, there is only one thing that bothers and worries you. How will you manage to get out of your pipe? This hallucination lasts for an eternity. An interval of lucidity permits you to make a great effort and look at the clock. The eternity has lasted one minute. Another current of ideas carry you off; it will carry you for a minute in its living whirlpool, and this minute will be another eternity. The proportions of time and of the being are upset by an innumerable multitude of intense sensations and ideas. One lives several human lives in the space of an hour. That is certainly the subject of Peau de chagrin. There is no longer an equation between the organs and the joys.

From time to time the personality disappears. The objectivity which some pantheist poets and great actors have becomes so great that you confuse yourself with external beings. Here you are a tree moaning to the wind and recounting vegetable melodies to nature. Now you are flying in the blue of an immensely large sky. All pain has disappeared. You resist no longer, you are carried away, no longer your own master and no longer caring. Soon the idea of time will disappear completely. From time to time still a little awakening takes place. It seems to you that you are leaving a fantastic and marvellous world. It is true that you retain the abilty to observe yourself, and the next day you will be able to remember some of your sensations. But you cannot make use of this psychological ability. I defy you to sharpen a pen or a pencil; it will be a labour beyond your strength.

At other times music recites infinite poems to you, placing you in frightening or fantastic dramas.It associates itself with objects that are before your eyes. Paintings on the cieling come to life in a frightening way even if they are mediocre or bad. Clear enchanting water flows. Nymphs with radiant flesh look at you with large eyes clearer than water and the sky. You take your place and your part in the most mediocre paintings, the crudest pictures hung on the walls of hotel rooms.

I have noticed that water takes on a frightening charm for artistically inclined natures illuminated by hashish. Running water, fountains, harmonious waterfalls, and the blue immensity of the sea roll, sleep, and sing at the bottom of your being. It might not be a good idea to leave a man in this condition on the bank of a clear stream; like the fisherman in the ballad, he might allow himself to be carrried away by a water-sprite.

One can eat towards the end of the evening, but this operation is not carried out without difficulty. You find yourself so much above material facts that you would certainly prefer to remain sprawled out in the depths of your intellectual paradise. Sometimes, however, the appetite develops in an extraordinary way, but it takes a lot of courage to move a bottle, a fork, and a knife.

The third phase, which is seperated from the second by a redoubled crisis, a dizzying intoxication followed by a new uneasiness, is something indescribable. It is what Orientals call the 'kief', it is absolute happiness. It is no longer something spinning and tumultuous. It is a calm and motionless beatitude. All philosophical problems are resolved. All the difficult questions about which theologians argue and which make reasonable men despair are clear and transparent. All contradiction has become unity. Man has become God.

There is something in you which says: 'You are superior to all men, no one understands what you think, what you are feeling now. They are even incapable of understanding the immense love you have for them. But you must not hate them for that, you must have pity on them. An immensity of happiness and virtue is opening itself before you. No one will ever know what degree of virtue and intelligence you have reached. Live in the solitude of your thoughts, and avoid harming others.'

One of the grotesque effects of hashish is the fear of hurting anyone at all, which is pushed to the point of the most meticulous folly. If you had the strength, you would even disguise the extra-natural state in which you are in order to avoid upsetting the least important people.

In this supreme state among artistic and tender spirits lovemaking takes on the most singular forms and abandons itself to the most baroque combinations. Unbridled debauchery can be mixed with an ardent and affectionate fatherly feeling.*

My final observation will not be the least curious. The next morning, when you see daylight in your room, your first sensation is one of profound astonishment. Time has completely disappeared. A little while ago it was night, now it is day. 'Have I slept, or have I not slept? Did my intoxication last all night, and the notion of time being suppressed the whole night flashed by in a second for me? Or else have I been buried in the veils of a sleep full of visions?' It is impossible to know.

You seem to feel a well-being and a marvellous lightness of spirit, no fatigue. But as soon as you stand up the aftermath of the intoxication manifests itself. Your weak legs carry you timidly, you are afraid of breaking yourself as though you were a fragile object. A great languor, which is not without it's charm, tkaes over your spirit. You are incapable of work and active energy.

It is a merited punishment for the impious prodigality with which you have spent so much of your nervous energy. You have scattered your personality to the four winds, and now you have difficulty in regathering and concentrating it.

I do not say that hashish produces all the effects I have just described on all men. The phenomena I have described usually took place, with a few exceptions, among people of an artistic and philosophical spirit. But there are temperaments upon which the drug only develops a noisy insanity, a violent gaiety that resembles vertigo, dances, leaps, stamping, bursts of laughter. It can be said that their hashish is entirely materialistic. They are intolerable to those of a spiritual nature, who have great pity for them. The ugliness of their personalities becomes obvious. Once I saw a respectable judge, an honourable man, as people of this type call themselves, one of those men whose artificial gravity is always so imposing, at the moment when the hashish invaded him, suddenly begin to leap around doing the most indecent dance. The true internal monster revealed itself. This man who judged the action of his fellows, this 'Togatus', had in secret learned how to do the can-can.

Thus it can be affirmed that this impersonal quality, this objectivity which I previously mentioned and which is only the excessive development of the poetic spirit, will never be found in the hashish of those other people.

* The hashish jam which Baudelaire ate probably contained cantharides and other drugs.

[Bill Dick]

Baudelaire certainly knew how to write a trip report.

Nice one.