Hashish, Wine, Opium (edition 2009)

A collection of essays by Theodore Gautier and Baudelaire detailing the experience of addiction to opium, wine and hashish, including Gautier’s famous essay about the Club des Hashishins, and an early precursor to Baudelaire’s Paradise Artificiels.

Both writers get the various phases of being stoned right: the laughter, the heightened sensitivity to outside stimulus, the fragmentation and proliferation of thoughts, the crazy schemes, the amazing flashes of inspiration, the hopelessness of ever fixing anything, of recording anything, the indolence, the weird distortion of time and space and relationships, the stimulated appetites.

Baudelaire is especially good on this. But he appears to be smoking a mixture of opium and hash, which accounts for the hallucinations he describes, which one does not experience on hash alone. Gautier also describes his hash induced hallucinations, which either means that he has forgotten to mention opium in his list of ingredients of the hashish pellet he is smoking, or that his description is more literary than realistic, that is to say, he is more influenced by literary descriptions of addiction, whether of opium, wine or absinthe, and is writing under the influence of the genre.

Baudelaire also is much more clear sighted about the insidious harm of hash, especially when he contrasts it with the effects of wine:

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… Wine is useful and produces fruitful results. Hashish is useless and dangerous.

This is not a moral judgement, but a judgement about the wickedly attractive nature of kief: why would one want to interrupt or prevent such a state of happiness? As Baudelaire writes: what could be more calculated to irritate a man sick with joy than the wish to cure him? For Baudelaire, all art is a reaching after a transcendental happiness, one that is accompanied by the struggle and discipline of creation. If hashish can bring you to this state so easily and painlessly, the need for art is obviated. The danger of hashish for the artist or writer is that it destroys the desire for creation, and the discipline needed to attempt it. Kief is too powerful a temptation to resist in that it offers immediate happiness without all the hassle necessary for creating it.

It is the will power that is attacked, and that is the most precious organ. No man who with a spoonful of hash 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. ( )