The Poem of Hashish | next
C H A P T E R I -
T H E L O N G I N G F O R
I N F I N I T Y
T
H O S E 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 fine 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 M A N 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.
B E S I D E S 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.
A M O N G 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 immorality necessarily employed in
this pursuit of a false ideal, constitutes the subject of this study.
T H E 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, and 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.
- Charles Baudelaire
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