Opium
I travelled to Chiang Mai for the ‘opium eating’. Ever since Thomas de Quincey, that’s been the familiar expression. Notwithstanding that it’s been ages since anyone actually ate opium, ingested it in the form of cough syrup or took it to combat the flu, as was common practice around the turn of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, people smoke it, inhale it, take it on board and let it rampage around; I’m of the view that everyone ought to have smoked opium at least once in their life. Everyone should appreciate what the brain is capable of, and anyone who says: ‘Well, all I need to do is climb mountains, run marathons, dive off cliffs or even just run up the stairs fast’ has no conception of how many dramatic changes the wild beast that inhabits our skulls can undergo.
I travelled to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand by train, crammed into the short box of a bunk bed, which was only separated from the corridor by a curtain. On a note which the conductor gave every passenger to read before the journey began, we were warned not to accept any offers of refreshments from fellow passengers. In many cases, these were spiked drinks, designed to knock us out so we could be robbed more easily. The only narcotic substance I consumed was a bottle of Tiger Beer, which Helen and Mark, two Australians on their honeymoon, got me from the buffet car.
There was also a madam on the train, who, spotting that I was travelling on my own without a female companion, talked me through all the beauties pictured on a brochure she handed me, whom she assured me were already waiting for me in Chiang Mai. She ended up telling me that my moral scruples were a real handicap.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ I replied, ‘but I can do as little to change them as I could a game leg.’
At this, she pulled a face like a wrinkled gherkin and beat a retreat.
When it began, very gradually, to grow dark outside, I pulled the window down and breathed in the air wafting out of the rainforest. At the station stops, people passed us coconuts, mangoes, pineapple and sticky rice through the open windows. I was so happy that I sang ‘Guantanamera’ and then Eric Burdon’s ‘When I think of all the good times I’ve been wasting having good times’.
I took a room in the ‘Je t’aime’ guesthouse, along with the newlyweds. It really was called that, but apart from the complimentary condoms in the drawer of the bedside table, nothing in the place reminded one of love. In the evening, a heavily suntanned Swiss woman with smoothly depilated arms and legs and a garrulous stream of chit-chat sidled over with her brimming glass and latched on to us.
I told her: ‘Your limbs are so beautifully proportioned.’
‘Thanks,’ she replied. ‘What was that again about proportions and whatnot, though?’
Then she started going on about places where we didn’t happen to be right then.
‘We did Singapore last week. We had such gorgeous weather there, it was wonderful. We got tickets for the theatre in the evening. I’ll happily go to the theatre if there’s nothing else on, but it was lovely all the same, we saw Gorky’s Summerbreeze.’
‘You mean Summerfolk.’
‘No, it was definitely called Summerbreeze. Whenever there’s beautiful weather now, I always say: oh look, it’s as lovely as in Gorky’s Summerbreeze.’
The next day, Helen, Stephen and I decided to leave the ‘Je t’aime’. One of the local drivers had pinned a homemade name badge to his chest with a safety pin; he reckoned the name ‘Richard’ suited him. Every day, he could be found waiting for customers on the street in front of the guest house. He offered his services to take us into the jungle, into the more remote ‘tribal’ villages of the ‘Golden Triangle’ and where, he explained, people still lived totally unmolested by the state and according to their own rules.
‘For instance, if they want to have sex,’ he continued, ‘they have to marry the woman. That’s why they often try it out with their relatives first. You can imagine what that produces.’
Hearing this, we called to mind pictures of cephalopods, and it’s true, when we finally got to the villages, we did notice some deformities, children with huge feet, misshapen heads, simpletons who spent hours talking to an insect or dangling their fingers in front of their face like they were pulling the strings of a puppet, who didn’t stop even when you put a coin or a sweet on the back of their hand, and if they were smoking, it was thick cigarettes rolled out of banana leaves.
‘The government even allows them to grow opium. It’s part of their religion and their traditional medicine.’
By the same virtue, Richard regards this as vindicating what he does by lending it some kind of ethnological credibility.
‘At least life expectancy in these villages is twenty years longer than in other parts of the country.’
In the poppy fields, the plants were bursting with sap, their greyish-green, baroque-shaped capsules swollen and ripe. A couple of ill-tempered guards who were patrolling the perimeter of the field with blunderbusses stopped us from cutting diagonally across it.
The next village we visited sat tucked away in a valley bottom between two spurs of the rainforest. In a kind of social mimicry, it had taken on the colour of the surrounding landscape: the huts were made from the same wood as the trees, and were covered with their leaves, standing anchored between their trunks and connected by a network of paths. Chickens and pigs ran free, the men were out in the fields, and the women were sitting around and smoking. There was also a village elder here, with a congenial but still somehow malicious face, which, after mumbling to himself for a while, he would suddenly lift up, gazing straight into the eyes of his interlocutor with a long, searching look.
We drank his tea, listened to his complaints about the distant government in Bangkok, and sought his approval; we were just travellers passing through, but in his eyes we were also transient human beings. We would leave and disappear in our cities, we’d be superseded and swept away ‘like bubbles in a puddle of water’, as someone supposedly says in Gorky’s Summerbreeze. We had his sympathy for being the way we were, but he reserved his self-pity for the eternal man, namely himself. He was subject to another law entirely.
Sitting there in his colourful striped knitted pullover, one hand clutching a long-stemmed pipe and the other resting on the back of a dog, and nestled amongst his blankets and his soot-blackened housewares, completely within his own jurisdiction, he really did turn us into what he saw us as: decadents flaunting their ennui at civilization. The fact that we wanted to smoke opium only confirmed his view: naturally, what else?
We spent the afternoon vainly attempting not to stand out in the village. We walked down to the river and back, settled ourselves into our hut – a pile dwelling that stood several metres above the marshland – skirted round the edge of the forest and smiled at everyone we encountered. The locals instantly recognized us as travellers from the hundreds of little signs in our gestures and clothing that betrayed our essential restlessness and curiosity, but which we ourselves were oblivious to.
In the evening we were summoned once more to the village elder. In the middle of his hut, around a pot of tea, mats had now been rolled out, a corncob lay by the fireplace and the sunken-cheeked, haggard man, who came in alone and sat down, wrapped in faded rags that had been dyed pink, was introduced to us as the ‘medicine man’. Our first glance told us he was a drug addict himself; Richard told us that all the opium in the village was at the medicine man’s disposal, and that he’d got into the habit of smoking around forty pipes of the stuff every day.
The first thing he did was to urge us to go out and relieve ourselves in the undergrowth, since we’d find it difficult later on. Then we took our places in a square around the fireplace. Anyone who wanted to smoke a pipe lay down in the right-hand corner of the hut with the medicine man, who was indulging in one himself. The village elder sat to one side and looked on, watching the opium first being taken out of a small tin, divided into portions, warmed between the fingers, rolled, and then placed as little pellets into the bowl of the long pipe.
After just one or two puffs, each tiny ball, boiling and bubbling, was used up and evaporated off into the evening sky. But its aroma remained, that fresh-smelling, mild and spicy blend of herbs and leaves, which had nothing smoky about it – that aroma clung on and spread out to become a general feeling of well-being, a sense of contentment, nothing more. This particular high wasn’t about to take any hostages, and it wouldn’t announce itself with hallucinatory ravings and phantasmagoria, nor would it ambush our consciousness from behind: rather, it was there in its full force right from the outset – weak, but clear and benign.
The medicine man lay a corncob in front of me and poured me a beaker of tea. I leant back with my arms crossed behind my head – how remote and quiet the world was!
Mark and Helen followed my lead, each of them likewise taking their hit; they were overcome, not overwhelmed.
With the second pipe, your distance from the ground increased and you gained a better perspective on things. We were friends. All the lines of life met under this roof, intersecting at their only possible point of convergence. In this moment, there was no hereafter. All you had to do was to descend into the depths of good vibes and stay there.
Stay.
‘I knew a guy,’ Mark began, ‘who smoked mushrooms and reckoned he could see the world through the eyes of the mushrooms.’
‘Is that a good thing?’
‘Sure; if only for a change.’
‘So, are you about to experience the world through the eyes of a poppy head?’
‘Why shouldn’t I try and see nature from the viewpoint of nature and look at me and you in the same light while I’m about it?’ Mark insisted.
‘I don’t want to be the image,’ I said nonsensically, ‘but the seeing.’
Thus initiated into the mysteries of opium, we kept talking, meaningfully or senselessly, endlessly or not endlessly, since right then we didn’t have the slightest sense of what was sensible or finite.
Richard sat off to one side, fiddling with the peak of his cap and pulling a wounded face. From the dark shadows in the interior of the huts, there were occasional flashes of light from the bright borders of the costumes the villagers wore, kaftanlike robes made from a heavy black cloth and decorated with colourful embroidered hems. The next pellet of opium was burning in the pipe, imploding in upon itself like a planet that was forming.
‘It’s always better at the end,’ one of the villagers from the second row said, smearing a cigarette with opium. Another was chewing betel nuts and spitting out the juice. Women had also come to sit at the rear of the hut and watch us smoke. Tiny children were decked out in silver jewellery, swarms of bees were buzzing in a dead log, and from the forest there came a loud droning and rustling.
‘Don’t be concerned,’ the village elder said. ‘We’ve put up fences to protect ourselves from wild animals.’
We didn’t feel afraid, we just wondered wide-eyed at the sense of spiritual order encapsulated in the idea of ‘concern’.
Hours later, the village elder counted seven corncobs where I was sitting. We hadn’t touched the soup that had been prepared for us in the meantime. The medicine man and the village elder are laughing about this, because lack of appetite is a classic sign of the opium eater; indeed, a number of motor functions are impaired by the drug. We crawled back to our hut on all fours, dragged ourselves up the planks leading to the entrance at a dizzying height of three metres and crashed out on out mats, Helen and Mark in one corner and me in the other.
The most immediate manifestation of opium-induced wellbeing is in the act of smiling. That is, you allow the corners of your mouth to diverge, complete their motion, and as a consequence of this movement you find yourself happy, faintly amused and content that your facial expression is following the sensation you feel; no, rather, okay with the fact that the sensation is following expression; no, that’s not it either, just happy that one movement is following another, for there is no earlier or later, no cause and effect. Instead, everything’s on this amplitude of happiness, which keeps extending farther and farther, driving the corners of your mouth beyond the bounds of your face, so that you’ve now got corners of your mouth outside of your self, which spread beyond the contours of your face and take off until they’re flapping up there all alone in the night air. Ah, the night air! I was already deep in the abyss of a hallucination.
A drug trip is also about stripping away the surface appearance of things. The functional side of life crumbles into dust. How – and more to the point why – was one supposed to operate on this level of existence anymore? Why should one serve any purpose? And what does that mean anyway – a ‘purpose in life’?
Some snatches of music waft over from the village. Music that doesn’t sound like accompaniment. In this moment, the subject of the music is not the musicians, but rather the instruments. They’re singing their inner life out of their bodies.
‘That’s where it comes from, then, the intrinsicality of instruments,’ I say out loud, without me or anyone else remotely understanding what I mean. But has the sentence already left my mouth or is the body of it still stuck in my throat, was it forgotten there?
That’s not the end of it: suddenly, the neglected world begins to crowd in on me. It’s full of rejected objects and thought contents, this overlooked, suppressed, oughtn’t-to-be world, and it’s doing my head in trying to constantly mediate between the state of consciousness and the function of thinking. Now though, in this instant, everything is in a state of transition, in the motionless state of turbulence that is neither consciousness nor activity, but rather conception and creation of the world.
In such a state of swimming receptiveness for creation, and with my gaze trained on the delicate mantle of the universe, which surrounds the earth like a gauzy shroud, and in my rising sentimentality for everything that that creation entails, the smell of the air has a taste, the breath on the skin feels itself, and the forest gently and lovingly inhales and exhales. You find it impossible to walk, to urinate, to get an erection; motor functions are sluggish and superfluous. But it has to be that way, since everything you concentrate on now is becoming so profound – if ‘concentrate’ is the right word, that is, because you’re drifting off and incapable of grasping hold of anything. Tempos shift radically, and an eternity opens up in the twinkling of an eye. But when so many impressions, internal processes and motions occur within minutes, then the tempo during that period, which appears to drag, must in actual fact be quick. So, a lot comes and goes very fast, but in ponderous movements, and people’s faces are all naked and blank like a tree trunk that’s been stripped of its bark.
‘How many pipes can I smoke?’ I had asked the medicine man, and he’d replied:
‘If no evil spirit appears, you can smoke up to ten.’
‘And what if an evil spirit does appear?’
‘Then it will tell you to stop!’
‘And what else?’
‘Take care that you don’t touch the fences, that helps you overcome any anxiety you might have about the spirits.’
I look out into the forest, where the wind is wafting over the treetops in a gentle swell, I see the naked women washing under the jet of water behind the huts, and at the bare-breasted old woman with a headdress. They’re all, without exception, smoking opium, prepared to communally read the world from a skewed viewpoint. Reality viewed as if at first sight.
My stomach’s itching. How original. I take great pleasure in scratching the extensive landscape of my belly with all ten fingers, up and down. The following day, the medicine man will inform me that scratching like this is one of the most characteristic things a person who’s high on opium does.
But what if these images were to coalesce into an infinite loop, if they became a mania, a fixation that trapped a person’s consciousness into the same old routine every time? This is the structure of fear, which resides in being caught in an escapeproof prison of recurrent thoughts and image sequences.
Many internal processes arrange themselves unbidden into a form of mental opera: everything screams, open-mouthed, even trees and molehills. Then they automatically morph into cartoon films, where everything becomes brightly two- dimensional and hectic and loud. Later on the world starts to look like a painting by Carl Spitzweg, and finally it changes into a silent movie. It then becomes a real effort to wrench yourself away from any of these visual idioms, as Spitzweg changes back once more into the cartoon film, and this in turn tries first to transform into an El Lissitzky picture and then a collection of technical modules.
Also, many things undergo a spontaneous metamorphosis into music – the autonomous development of soundscapes composed from the noises coming from outside, which then manage to free themselves and become independent. In addition, these are still accompanied by streams of images, a constant reciprocal association of images and sounds. So, if your imagination conjures up a hill, say, in your inner landscape, the music will follow with a crescendo; if the landscape becomes dramatic, the music grows soothing, transforming it into an Arcadian place with running streams, cows, sheep and shepherdesses: ‘Oh broad valleys, oh hills, oh beautiful green forest, you my solemn place of joy and sorrow…’
An opium high is a form of microscopy, and if fear can be said to be palpable in any form, then it is as a magnification of trace elements, an elevation of trivialities to absolutes. I am already drinking the perfumed moisture of tears, it is already thinning to a foggy mist, already the light is breaking through the night like a tablet being squeezed through tin foil.
Tell me now, head, what was the name of the girl who sat at the far left desk in my first form at school: there was Maria Deussen, then Monika Schmitz, Michael Schlohbohm, Jörgi Longwitz, Anita Heister, Ursula Bartmann and so on ad infinitum: the names come pouring in, one after the other, packed in dresses, trousers, particular patterns of cloth that no longer exist, textiles that have become threadbare, and smells redolent of old fabrics, mothballs and sawdust.
But no, my high wants to generate images, to flush them out of the vaults of my memory and wash them up to the surface and from there back down into oblivion again: Don’t retain me, it whispers, forget me, off you go to your present existence. But if I were to pick up a pen right now to write down the names of my former classmates, the moment the tip of the ballpoint touched the paper, I’d no longer have a clue what I wanted to write. Instead, I’d become completely engrossed in the sight of the tip of the pen, shimmering there in its iridescence like an insect, and an inexhaustible process of entering the here and now would fixate on this ballpoint tip.
I lay in this hut, surrounded as if in a cocoon by the polyphonically rustling forest of northern Thailand, and whenever I rolled over, I found a different world on each side. I flipped over like I was turning over the pages of a book. On the one side my primary school, my route home, and the kitchen smells in the afternoon. On the other an Italian monastery beneath the knoll at Settignano: Don Gabriello in his bed, wearing a mealwormcoloured jersey … but in-between … I felt myself sinking.
First of all, images still kept appearing that were generated by an inner movement, and borne on emotion, then came more tenuously connected ones, between which a miasma spread, an atmosphere, a climate, an aroma, a sound. Soon after, all that was left was this ‘in-between’. The connecting lines from one to the other started to flicker, tautened, and the braces between the modules became soft and flexible; the whole edifice of internal images stood on the verge of collapse.
It is Now: finally, the eye has arrived at a bird’s eye view over the building block system of my own inner life. Nothing like intelligence exists there anymore. All that remains is the construction principle of impersonal connections, which follow their various paths, and in a benevolent act of acknowledgement unhampered by any limitation, it dawns on you: the personal is impersonal, and fear – or something that has been accorded the name of fear – is guiding and directing desire and aversion and instructing you: don’t go from A to B, the most direct route isn’t as the crow flies but the escape route. Everything supposedly inspired is nothing but a way of making detours, of avoiding things.
And so it was that I found myself looking down upon the model, the chemical model of my personal unreason, and I gave birth to the word ‘I’ as the symptom of a dysfunction. What was once called ‘consciousness’ was now nothing but a wound, fascinating in its originality, which had no supporting medium and which also would not heal. Only seven hours later did the phantasms finally dissipate, and I awoke out of a state of ‘it thinks’ and entered the illusory realm of ‘I think’.