Website review: Baudelaire, Dumas and cannabis | R...
chaud discovered this in Books
•2 reviews since Aug 19, 2007
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•books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,809...
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chaud discovered 9 months ago- From the page: "Baudelaire says that while hashish certainly enhances the imagination and thus creativity, it is highly dangerous to subordinate all such processes to the drug. For the creative artist to believe that they can create only when "high" is a disaster."
- frenchtwist rated 8 months ago
- Spoonfuls of Paradise The Guardian Book Review In the mid-19th century, French writers including Baudelaire and Dumas met regularly to use cannabis. In this extract from his book, Jonathon Green describes the Club des Hachichins. It was inevitable that Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), author of the 1857 collection of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal, joined the club. He had a reputation for debauchery and a taste for the exotic, which would surely have predisposed him to a new drug, but the truth was that he rarely, if indeed ever, indulged. He wrote on hashish with great acuity, but it was from his studious note-taking, rather than any in-depth personal experience. A century and a half later, Baudelaire's note-taking again rings true: "At first, a certain absurd, irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizarre aspect. This mirth is intolerable to you; but it is useless to resist. The demon has invaded you... Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is colour; in colours there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute. The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call 'kef' it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods." ~ excerpts from the page
