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W
H E N I speak of hallucinations the word must
not be taken in its strictest sense: a very important shade of
difference distinguishes pure
hallucination, such as doctors have
often have occasion to study, from the hallucination, or rather of
the
misinterpretation of
the senses, which arises in the
mental state caused by the
hashish. In the first case the hallucination
is
sudden,
complete, and
fatal; beside which, it finds neither
pretext nor
excuse in the exterior world. The sick man sees a shape
or hears sounds where there are not any. In the second case, where
hallucination is progressive, almost willed, and it does not become
perfect, it only ripens under the action of
imagination. Finally,
it has a
pretext. A sound will speak, utter distinct articulations;
but there was a sound there. The enthusiast eye of the hashish
drunkard will see strange forms, but before they were strange and
monstrous these forms were simple and natural. The energy, the almost
speaking
liveliness of hallucination in this form of intoxication
in no way invalidates this original difference: the one has root in
the situation, and, at the present time, the other has not. Better
to explain this
boiling over of the imagination, this maturing of
the dream, and this poetic childishness to which a hashish-intoxicated
brain is condemned, I will tell yet another anecdote. This time it is
not an
idle young man who speaks, nor a
man of letters.
It is a
woman; a woman no longer in her first youth; curious, with
an excitable mind, and who, having yielded to the wish to make
acquaintance with the poison, describes thus for another woman the
most important of her phases. I transcribe literally.
"H O W E V E R strange and new may be the
sensations which I have drawn from my twelve hours' madness -- was it twelve
or twenty? in sooth, I cannot tell -- I shall never return to it. The
spiritual excitement is too lively, the fatigue which results from
it too great; and, to say all in a word, I find in this
return to childhood something criminal. Ultimately (after many
hesitations) I yielded to curiosity, since it was a folly shared
with old friends, where I saw no great harm in lacking a little dignity.
But first of all I must tell you that this cursed hashish is a most
treacherous substance. Sometimes one thinks oneself recovered from
the intoxication; but it is only a deceitful peace. There are moments of
rest, and then recrudescences. Thus, before ten o'clock in the evening I
found myself in one of these momentary states; I thought myself escaped from
this superabundance of life which had caused me so much enjoyment, it is
true, but which was not without anxiety and fear. I sat down to
supper with pleasure, like one in that state of irritable fatigue which a
long journey produces; for till then, for prudence sake, I had abstained
from eating; but even before I rose from the table my delirium had
caught me up again as a cat catches a mouse, and the poison began anew
to play with my poor brain. Although my house is quite close to that of
our friends, and although there was a carriage at my disposal, I felt
myself so overwhelmed with the necessity of dreaming, of abandoning
myself to this irresistible madness, that I accepted joyfully their
offer to keep me till the morning. You know the castle; you know that
they have arranged, decorated, and fitted with conveniences in
the modern style all that part in which they ordinarily live, but that
the part which is usually unoccupied has been left as it was, with its
old style and its old adornments. They determined to improvise for me a
bedroom in this part of the castle, and for this purpose they chose the
smallest room, a kind of boudoir, which, although somewhat faded and
decrepit, is none the less charming. I must describe it for you as
well as I can, so that you may understand the strange vision which I
underwent, a vision which fulfilled me for a whole night, without ever
leaving me the leisure to note the flight of the hours.
"T H I S boudoir is very small, very narrow.
From the height of the cornice the ceiling arches itself to a vault;
the walls are covered with narrow, long mirrors, separated by panels,
where landscapes, in the easy style of the decorations, are painted.
On the frieze on the four walls various allegorical figures are
represented, some in attitudes of repose, others running or flying;
above them are brilliant birds and flowers. Behind the figures a
trellis rises, painted so as to deceive the eye, and following
naturally the curve of the ceiling; this ceiling is gilded. All the
interstices between the woodwork and the trellis and the figures are
then covered with gold, and at the centre the gold is only interrupted by
the geometrical network of the false trellis; you see that that
resembles somewhat a very distinguished cage, a very fine cage for a
very big bird. I must add that the night was very fine, very clear,
and the moon brightly shining; so much so that even after I had put
out my candle all this decoration remained visible, not illuminated
by my mind's eye, as you might think, but by this lovely night, whose
lights clung to all this broidery of gold, of mirrors, and of
patchwork colours.
"I W A S at first much astonished to
see great spaces spread themselves out before me, beside me, on all sides.
There were limpid rivers, and green meadows admiring their own
beauty in calm waters: you may guess here the effect of the panels
reflected by the mirrors. In raising my eyes I saw a setting sun,
like molten metal that grows cold. It was the gold of the ceiling.
But the trellis put in my mind the idea that I was in a
kind of cage, or in a house open on all sides upon space, and that I
was only separated from all these marvels by the bars of my magnificent
prison. In the first place I laughed at the illusion which had hold
of me; but the more I looked the more its magic grew great, the more
it took life, clearness, and masterful reality. From that moment the
idea of being shut up mastered my mind, without, I must admit, too
seriously interfering with the varied pleasures which I drew from
the spectacle spread around and above me. I thought of myself as of
one imprisoned for long, for thousands of years perhaps, in this
sumptuous cage, among these fairy pastures, between these marvellous
horizons. I imagined myself the Sleeping Beauty; dreamt of an expiation
that I must undergo, of deliverance to come. Above my head fluttered
brilliant tropical birds, and as my ear caught the sound of the
little bells on the necks of the horses which were travelling far
away on the main road, the two senses pooling their impressions in a
single idea, I attributed to the birds this mysterious brazen chant;
I imagined that they sang with a metallic throat. Evidently they were
talking to me, and chanting hymns to my captivity. Gambolling
monkeys, buffoon-like satyrs, seemed to amuse themselves
at this supine prisoner, doomed to immobility; yet all the
gods of mythology looked upon me with an enchanting smile, as
if to encourage me to bear the sorcery with patience, and all their
eyes slid to the corner of their eyelids as if to fix themselves on me.
I came to the conclusion that if some faults of the olden time, some
sins unknown to myself, had made necessary this temporary punishment,
I could yet count upon an overriding goodness, which, while
condemning me to a prudent course, would offer me truer pleasures than
the dull pleasures which filled our youth. You see that moral
considerations were not absent from my dream; but I must admit that
the pleasure of contemplating these brilliant forms and colours and
of thinking myself the centre of a fantastic drama frequently
absorbed all my other thoughts. This stayed long, very long. Did it
last till morning? I do not know. All of a sudden I saw the morning
sun taking his bath in my room. I experienced a lively
astonishment, and despite all the efforts of memory that I have
been able to make I have never been able to assure myself whether
I had slept or whether I had patiently undergone a delicious
insomnia. A moment ago, Night; now, Day. And yet I had lived long;
oh, very long! The notion of Time, or rather the standard of Time,
being abolished, the whole night was only measurable by the multitude
of my thoughts. So long soever as it must have appeared to me from
this point of view, it also seemed to me that it had only lasted some
seconds; or even that it had not taken place in eternity.
"I D O not say anything to you of my
fatigue; it was immense. They say that the enthusiasm of poets and
creative artists resembles what I experienced, though I have always
believed that those persons on whom is laid the task of stirring us must
be endowed with a most calm temperament. But if the poetic delirium
resembles that which a teaspoonful of hashish confection procured
for me I cannot but think that the pleasures of the public cost the poets
dear, and it is not without a certain well-being, a prosaic satisfaction,
that I at last find myself at home, in my intellectual home; I mean, in
real life."
T H E R E is a woman, evidently reasonable;
but we shall only make use of her story to draw from it some useful
notes, which will complete this very compressed summary of the principal
feelings which hashish begets.
S H E speaks of supper as of a pleasure
arriving at the right moment; at the moment where a momentary
remission, momentary for all its pretence of finality, permitted her
to go back to real life. Indeed, there are, as I have said,
intermissions, and deceitful calms, and hashish often brings about a
voracious hunger, nearly always an excessive thirst.
Only, dinner or supper, instead of bringing about a permanent rest,
creates this new attack, the vertiginous crisis of which this lady
complains, and which was followed by a series of enchanting visions
lightly tinged with affright, to which she so assented, resigning
herself with the best grace in the world. The tyrannical hunger and
thirst of which we speak are not easily assayed without considerable
trouble. For the man feels himself so much above material things, or
rather he is so much overwhelmed by his drunkenness, that he must
develop a lengthy spell of courage to move a bottle or a fork.
T H E definitive crisis determined by the
digestion of food is, in fact, very violent; it is impossible to
struggle against it. And such a state would not be supportable if
it lasted too long, and if it did not soon give place to another phase
of intoxication, which in the case above cited interprets itself by
splendid visions, tenderly terrifying, and at the same time full of
consolations. This new state is what the Easterns call Kaif.
It is no longer the whirlwind or the tempest; it is a calm and
motionless bliss, a glorious resignedness. Since long you have not
been your own master; but you trouble yourself no longer about that.
Pain, and the sense of time, have disappeared; or if sometimes they
dare to show their heads, it is only as transfigured by the master
feeling, and they are then, as compared with their ordinary form, what
poetic melancholy is to prosaic grief.
B U T above all let us remark that in this
lady's account (and it is for this purpose that I have transcribed it)
it is but a bastard hallucination, and owes its being to the objects of
the external world. The spirit is but a mirror where the
environment is reflected, strangely transformed. Then, again, we see
intruding what I should be glad to call moral hallucination; the
patient thinks herself condemned to expiate somewhat; but
the feminine temperament, which is ill-fitted to analyse, did not permit
her to notice the strangely optimistic character of the aforesaid
hallucination. The benevolent look of the gods of Olympus is made
poetical by a varnish essentially due to hashish. I will not say
that this lady has touched the fringe of remorse, but her thoughts,
momentarily turned in the direction of melancholy and regret, have
been quickly coloured by hope. This is an observation which we shall
again have occasion to verify.
S H E S P E A K S.
of the fatigue of the morrow. In fact, this is great. But it does not show
itself at once, and when you are obliged to acknowledge its
existence you do so not without surprise: for at first, when you are
really assured that a new day has arisen on the horizon of your life, you
experience an extraordinary sense of well-being; you seem to enjoy a
marvellous lightness of spirit. But you are scarcely on your feet when a
forgotten fragment of intoxication follows you and pulls you back; it is
the badge of your recent slavery. Your enfeebled legs only conduct you
with caution, and you fear at every moment to break yourself, as if you
were made of porcelain. A wondrous languor -- there are those who
pretend that it does not lack charm -- possesses itself of your spirit,
and spreads itself across your faculties as a fog spreads itself in a
meadow. There, then, you are, for some hours yet, incapable of work,
of action, and of energy. It is the punishment of an impious
prodigality in which you have squandered your nervous force. You have
dispersed your personality to the four winds of heaven -- and now,
what trouble to gather it up again and concentrate it!
- Charles Baudelaire
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