Back in 1999, after I'd first finished The Doors of Perception, I was compelled to tell everyone about it. I just didn't have that many people to talk to, and the majority of that small list didn't much care. I was excited beyond belief because a life goal was accomplished without me even doing anything.
I had been toying with the idea of how to bring an experience of specific kinds of psychoactive substances to the page using words. I didn't want to do this for myself, for fame or money or recognition or whatever, rather I felt it necessary for The World to have those experiences in the written record, for all time.
I was never really sure how I wanted to go about it, but I knew it was important. Then I found Huxley's text and realized I could never have done a better job, and felt relief. Someone had captured the essence of a psychedelic trip. Now it would be up to me to mine the experiences for literature purposes.
It took some time to realize that plan was folly, but nevertheless I was inspired, as I've mentioned before.
If I had found Baudelaire's "The Poem of Hashish" at the same time as Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," my head may have exploded.
**
The text in this tiny pocketbook starts with Gautier's "The Hashish Club," and right away you can tell that this dude could write. Here's an excerpt from the third sentence: "...a sharp wind charged with icy pellets slashed against my face, and its shrill moan sang in concert with the bass notes of the swollen current lapping against the arches of the bridges..."
He's talking about his trek to one of the islands in Paris that live in the Seine River. The cathedral of Notre Dame lives on one of these islands, but his destination is the Hotel Pimodan, what turns out to be a shabby place on a darkened street.
He is fed the dawamesk while lounging in a chair in homely room, and as he begins to feel it, he notices he's alone, or has been abandoned, and a creeping anxiety grips him as he feels the walls come alive.
Gautier writes about being visited by Daucus Carota, a beast made of roots and hair and maniacal laughter. Daucus tells him many things, secrets he doesn't want to know, forecasts of his own impending hashish journey that are borderline threats, and even after Gautier can no longer see Daucus, he continues to hear him.
Theophile is paralyzed in his chair for most of his Daucus conversations, but instead of being terrified and overwhelmed by that creeping anxiety, he is generally overcome with a content mirth and uncontrollable laughter. Daucus, while horrific in nature and claims, is just a silly thing.
I thought I'd missed one of the great mythological figures in letters and did some research on ol' Daucus Carota, research that didn't last all that long: Daucus carota is the taxonomic genus and species name for the common carrot. It turns out Gautier and I find all sorts of places for the names we give characters.
Eventually Theo gets his legs back and goes walkabout at the Pimodan. Stairs seem endlessly long, the shadows and laughter of his Algerian comrades come and go, and finding them becomes a game. Sometimes the age and shabby character of parts of the hotel reveal themselves for Gautier as a vision of the history of the specific piece...all things that sound perfectly natural to an experienced head.
Besides the fanciful Daucus parts, the anecdote---arriving, eating, tripping, coming down, leaving---is a quite spectacular rendition of a consuming-more-hash-edibles-than-possibly-being-ready-for experience.
My interest in Baudelaire's piece was now at a fever pitch: the Gautier piece has been treated like an afterthought, and it was that good?
The "Poem of Hashish" is broken up into five sections, numbered with Roman numerals:
- The Thirst for the Infinite
- What is Hashish?
- The Theater of Seraph
- The Man-God
- Moral
I only give them now, and not for either Huxley or Gautier before, because they help me with my own description of what I took from the piece.
The first section, The Thirst for the Infinite, is basically setting the scene for why anyone would be interested in psychotropic substances: the desire to achieve that fleeting moment when you awake on the rare day when the world feels simply perfect---you feel creative, happy, content, energized, and full of vigor. To Baudelaire, those days are rare, when the infinite joy is present, and that feeling---being in the presence of this infinite "keenness of mind and perceptual ability," is precisely the feeling that users chase.
He puts is much more eloquently and lyrically than I just did, and that's the point. This section is the Why.
His second section, What is Hashish?, is a perfectly competent and condensed history of what was then known about cannabis, complete with an explanation of how hash is made from the buds that seems so effortless that, as a writer, I was blown away by the craft. This is the What section.
The How section is the third section, The Theater of Seraph. After the first two parts I was sold on the method and the writing style, but this was the section that opened my eyes like Huxley two decades before, an opening I didn't think even possible in today's age.
Baudelaire first nails the attitudes and fears of the uninitiated first timers, even lampooning over-confident hash-eaters who claim nothing is---or ever will be---happening. As the trip begins, after the prolonged in-between of eating and beginning, the experience is treated with the precision of a scientist mixed with a head's calm confidence of what will be coming.
He covers the mirth, the uncontrollable laughter, being dumbstruck by normally inconsequential things and then being under near-assault by the uncontrollable laughter again. What really got me, though, was his discussion of what he called "hallucinations."
He makes a point to distinguish what he's talking about with what doctors study when their patients hear and see things that aren't there. Baudelaire is trying to describe the flights of imagination that one on the trip may have a passing control over, the ideas and visions and experiences and lifetimes that all race through the imagination of someone tripping, the trip itself for the most part, and he does an amazing job.
That was really the whole experience for me: I didn't even think it was possible to write up an accurate rendition of the brain's flights-of-fancy while tripping on cannabis, and here it is, written masterfully a hundred-fifty years ago, found by me at some random spot on Willow.
A quick note on the nomenclature: I've used "tripping" and "trip" more than once so far in this piece in reference to being high on this cannabis edible. Those words are typically used for other substances, typically psychedelics---mainly the tryptamines like psilocybin and LSD and the phenylthylamines like mescaline and ecstasy---and occasionally dissociatives, like PCP and dextromethorphan.
I've done this on purpose because it fits. Remember, these guys in Paris in 1845 weren't smoking this stuff, alone or with tobacco. Baudelaire even mentions that some people have taken to smoking it mixed with tobacco, but the effects produced are a weak and sluggish facsimile of the true power of the hash.
Eating a cannabis edible, when it's too powerful or more than you can handle, or on the edge of what you can handle, will produce the same kind of stymieing effect that any psychedelic could or would produce. It is a "trip" of the first order.
Because Charles Baudelaire thought deeply about things that would otherwise have the names of Platonic Forms, his fourth section, The Man-God, tackles his feelings about how these kinds of experiences fit in with Morality. Is it a moral act to continually try and create that feeling of the infinite that only those perfect days guarantee to give you?
He settles on an answer of No, partly because while a person under the influence thinks they're being artistic and awesome, in reality they produce far less material and it tends to be of questionable quality; and partly because a person tends to exalt themselves because they can create those feelings, and they begin to see themselves as a godly creature.
I loved his line of thinking, because you could see him wrestling with himself in the words on the pages. Whether or not I agree with him is not the point: reading a genius junkie fight with himself is worth the time.
In the first section, Baudelaire mentions that the only two substances that are readily available to people that help create that infinite keenness are hash and opium. There's even a passage where the writer states that he respects a man who's battled opium and won more than a man who's managed to abstain from the drug. Knowing that he himself was constantly in a losing battle with opium certainly colored my entire reading, but not in a bad way. It filled in unknown gaps.
And, not to out do himself, his last section, Moral, is a wonderful look at the hangover, the next day after having eaten an obscene amount of hash, how that goes. By this point in reading it, I was ready for him to do an excellent job with the translation from experience to words, and he delivered.
He then uses the after-effects as more evidence for the case he started in the previous section, but, of course, more eloquently than I have.
**
Over the course of the forty small pages for Gautier and sixty for Baudelaire, my world view had shifted. How that shift looks, I'm still working on. I'm not that drugged out kid who discovered Huxley and needed a push. I'm older, having lived a life influenced by Huxley.
Discovering Baudelaire at this stage of my life has inspired me once again, but in a different manner. Different because surely my circumstances are different, but in which direction will this nudging send me? What about my world has changed?
Does the power of writing have equal effect? That is, can anyone be forever altered simply by reading something seemingly specifically designed for them in a perfectly defined set of circumstantial moments?
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