Introductory note: One of the first signs that hashish is beginning to take effect ‘is a vague feeling of anticipation and unease; something strange and inescapable is approaching […] Images and sequences of images, long-buried memories loom up, whole scenes and situations enter the mind, generating interest at first, sometimes enjoyment, then in the end, when there is no escaping them, anguish and mental fatigue. Everything that happens, even what a person says and does, astonishes and overwhelms him. His laugh, his every remark – these come at him like events arriving from outside. He reaches realms of experience, too, that resemble inspiration, enlightenment […] Space may expand, the floor start to slope, atmospheric sensations occur: mist, opacity, a heaviness of the air; colours become brighter, more luminous; objects more beautiful or possibly bulkier, ominous […] All this takes place not as a smooth development; instead, typically there is a constant alternation of dreamlike and waking states, a continuous, ultimately exhausting sense of being tossed to and fro between quite different fields of consciousness; a person may be in mid-sentence when such a sinking or soaring feeling intrudes […] All this will be reported by the person who has taken the drug in a form that usually departs very substantially from the norm. Connections become difficult because of the often abrupt cessation of all memory of what has gone before, thinking refuses to take shape as speech, and things may become so compulsively hilarious that for minutes on end the hashish-eater is capable of nothing but laughter […] Recall of the intoxicated state is remarkably clear.’
It is worth noting that hashish intoxication has yet to be studied experimentally. The finest description of the hashish ‘high’ comes from Baudelaire (Les Paradis artificiels).
From Joël and Fränkel, ‘Der Haschisch-Rausch’,
in Klinische Wochenschrift, 1926, V, 37
Marseille, 29 July. At 7 p.m., after much hesitation, took hashish. During the day I had visited Aix. With absolute confidence that in this city of hundreds of thousands, where no one knows me, I will definitely not be disturbed, I lie down on the bed. And yet I am disturbed – by a small child crying.
I have the feeling that three quarters of an hour have already passed. But it has only been twenty minutes… I lie on the bed, then, reading and smoking. The usual view from the window, into the belly of Marseille. The street, so familiar, might have been a slit cut with a knife.
In the end I left the hotel, the effect was evidently not coming or was going to be so mild that the precaution of staying in could be waived. First stop, the café on the corner of the Cannebière and the Cours Belsunce. The right-hand corner, looking from the port, so not my usual. What now? Only a sense of well-being, an expectation that passers-by will give me a friendly hello. The feeling of loneliness disappears very quickly. My walking stick starts to give me particular delight. One becomes so delicate: afraid that a shadow falling on the paper might harm one. The nausea disappears. One reads the flyers on the pissoirs. I should not be surprised to see so-and-so walking towards me. However, when they don’t, that doesn’t bother me either. But it is too loud for me in this place.
Now the temporal and spatial demands made by the hashish-eater begin to assert themselves. These are absolutely sovereign, everyone knows that. Versailles is not too spacious for someone who has taken hashish, nor is eternity too long a time for him. And against the background of these vast dimensions of inner experience, absolute duration and measureless space, a marvellous, blissful mood now dwells that much more readily on the contingencies of space and time. I experience this good mood to a boundless extent when I discover at the Basso restaurant that the kitchen serving hot food has just closed, though my sitting down was for the express purpose of dining till the end of time. The feeling persists none the less that everything is and will remain bright, busy, and bustling. I must record how I found my seat. I was after that view of the old port one has from upstairs. Walking past below, I had spotted an empty table on the second-floor balcony. In the end I never got beyond the first floor. Most of the window tables were occupied. So I approached a very large one that had just become free. However, the moment I sat down the disproportionate nature of my taking a seat at so large a table struck me as shameful to such a degree that I walked diagonally across the entire storey to the far end and sat at a smaller one that I had only just noticed.
But the meal came later. First the little bar at the port. I was already on the point of turning about, baffled, because from there too the sound of a concert seemed to be coming – a wind band, to be precise. I was just able to account for this to myself as being simply the howling of the car horns. And already on the way to the old port that wonderful lightness and resolution of step as the stony, open ground of the big square I was crossing turned, for me, into the smooth surface of a country lane down which I, a sturdy hiker, was striding at night. You see, I was avoiding the Cannebière at this stage of the proceedings, not entirely sure of my regulatory functions. It was in that little harbour pub that the hashish began to weave its properly canonical magic with a primitive sharpness of focus almost entirely new to me. What it did, it turned me into a physiogno-mist, an observer of faces, anyway, and I experienced something quite unique: I literally got stuck into the faces I had around me, some of which were amazingly coarse or repulsive. Faces I should normally have avoided for two reasons: I should not have wanted to attract their attention, nor could I have stood their brutality. It was pretty much a forward position, this harbour drinking-den. (The most advanced position, I think, that it was still safe for me to access but that in my drugged state I had chosen with the same confidence as that with which a deeply weary person is able to fill a glass of water so precisely to the brim that not a drop overflows – something that, with all senses fresh, one could never do.) Still at a safe distance from Rue Bouterie, but even so no bourgeois sat here; at most, apart from the real port proletariat, a couple of lower-middle-class families from the locality. Now, all of a sudden, I understood why a painter (it happened to Rembrandt, did it not, as well as to many others?) might see ugliness as the true reservoir of the beautiful or rather as its matrix, the jagged lump of rock containing the wholly inward gold of beauty that flashes from wrinkles, glances, eyes and mouths. I especially recall a nasty, very animal male visage in which I was suddenly and shockingly struck by the ‘line of renunciation’. It was particularly male faces I was taken with. This was the beginning of that long-drawn-out game where in each set of features an acquaintance of mine appeared; often I knew the name, often I did not; the illusion faded the way illusions fade in dreams: not abashed and compromised but peaceably and in an amicable way, like one who has done his duty. In the circumstances, there could be no further question of loneliness. Was I my own company? Probably it was not as simple as that. Nor do I know whether I could have been as happy then. I expect it was more like this: I was becoming my own wiliest, tactfullest, most impudent procurer, bringing me things with the suggestive confidence of one who knows and has studied his client’s wishes inside out. After that it began to take for ever until the waiter reappeared. Or rather, I could no longer wait for him to come back into view. I went into the room where the bar was and paid at the counter. I did not know whether tipping was usual in such a dive. Normally I would have given something anyway. Yesterday, under the influence of hashish, I felt a bit tight-fisted; for fear of drawing attention to myself by my extravagance, I actually made myself stand out.
It was the same at the Basso. First I ordered a dozen oysters. The man also wanted to have my order for the next course. I pointed to a popular dish. He returned with the information that this was now off. So my eyes went back to the menu, roving around this item, I was on the point of naming one when my gaze fell on the one above, and so on until eventually I reached the top line. Yet this was not simple greed but a very pronounced feeling of courtesy towards the dishes, I was loath to insult them with a refusal. The long and short of it was, I ended up with pâté de Lyon. Lion pâté, I thought wittily, chuckling, as it lay neatly on a plate before me, then with scorn, ‘This tough rabbit or chicken – whatever it is. I could eat a lion,’1 nor would it have struck me as inappropriate to still my hunger on such a beast. Anyway, I had secretly resolved that, directly I was finished at the Basso (it was getting on for half past ten), I would go somewhere else and have a second supper.
First, though, my journey to the Basso. I strolled along the quay, reading off, one by one, the names of the boats moored there. In the process, I was overcome by an inexplicable mood of cheerfulness and grinned openly at each French forename as I listed it. To me, the love that had been bestowed on those boats through their names was something wonderfully fine and moving. Only one name, Aero II, which put me in mind of aerial warfare, did I walk past frowning – much as, in the bar I had just come from, I had had to look away from certain all too distorted faces.
Upstairs at Basso’s, as I looked down, the old games began. The area in front of the port was my palette, on which imagination mixed the local topography, trying out this and that effect without holding myself to account, like a painter using his palette to dream. I hesitated to try the wine. It was a half-bottle of cassis. A piece of ice floated in the glass. Nevertheless, it agreed splendidly with my drug. I had chosen my seat because of the open window, through which I could look down on the dark square. And when I did so from time to time I noticed that the square tended to change with each person who entered it, just as if it were lending weight to that person, which of course has nothing to do with the way the person sees his new surroundings but rather with the look that the great seventeenth-century portraitists, depending on the character of the personage whom they pose in front of a colonnade or a window, extract from that colonnade, from that window. Later I made this note, looking down: ‘From century to century things become more alien.’
Here I must make a general point. The solitary nature of this kind of drugged state has its disadvantages. Talking only about the physical aspect, there was a moment in that dockland bar where heavy pressure on the diaphragm sought relief in humming. And there is no doubt that a truly beautiful, truly illuminating dimension remains unaroused. But on the other hand solitude has a filtering effect. What one writes down next day is more than a simple list of impressions; during the night, drug intoxication sets itself off from the everyday with beautiful prismatic edges; it has a shape of its own and is more memorable. I would almost say, it shrinks and forms a flower shape.
To come closer to the riddle of drug bliss, one would need to think about Ariadne’s thread. The sheer pleasure of simply unrolling a ball of thread. And that pleasure relating at a very deep level to drug pleasure and the pleasure of creation. We walk forward; but in the process not only do we discover the intricacies of the cavern into which we have ventured, our enjoyment of this bliss of discovery rests purely on the basis of that other rhythmical delight: paying out a thread. Such certainty that the ball we are unwinding has been wound with skill – that, surely, is the bliss of any kind of production, at least in the form of writing prose? And in hashish we are pleasure-loving prose beings of the highest order.
A deeply contemplative feeling of bliss that came over me later in a little square off the Cannebière, where Rue Paradis leads to an area of parkland, is harder to grasp than anything that had gone before. Leafing through my newspaper, I come across the sentence, ‘One must spoon the sameness from reality.’ Several weeks back I made a note of another sentence in Johannes V. Jensen that seemed to be saying much the same thing: ‘Richard was a young man who had a sense of everything in the world that was of like kind.’ Those words pleased me enormously. Now they enable me to compare the political and rational meaning they had for me with the individual, magical quality of what I experienced yesterday. Whereas in Jensen the sentence amounted (for me) to saying that, as we know, things are technical and rationalized through and through, and that what is special nowadays lies only in the nuances, the new insight was entirely different. Nuances were in fact all I saw: yet they were of like kind. I became engrossed in the road surface in front of me, which as a result of my smearing a sort of ointment over it, so to speak, might have been one and the same as that of Paris. One often hears talk of ‘stones instead of bread’. Here these stones were the bread of my imagination, which had suddenly conceived an intense craving for the taste of what was the same about all cities and countries. And yet it was with enormous pride that I thought: here I am, sitting in Marseille having taken hashish; who in this city, I wondered, shares my state of intoxication this evening, how few they are. As I am incapable of fearing imminent misfortune, imminent solitude, may there always be hashish. Music from a nightclub next door, which I had been following, played a part at this stage. G. drove past in a cab. It happened in an instant, exactly the way, earlier, U. had suddenly emerged from the shadow of the boats in the shape of a harbour bum cum part-time pimp. But there were not only acquaintances. Here at this moment of deep contemplation, two figures (petit bourgeois, ruffians, whatever) passed me as ‘Dante and Petrarch’. ‘All men are brothers.’ That set off a train of thought I can no longer reconstruct. However, its last link was doubtless far less banal in shape than its first and may possibly have gone on to animal images.
‘Barnabe’, it said on a tram that stopped briefly in front of where I was sitting. And to me the terribly sad story of Barnabas seemed an apt destination for a tram heading towards the outskirts of Marseille. A very beautiful thing was going on around the door of the dance hall. Every now and then a Chinaman stepped outside, wearing blue silk trousers and a shiny pink silk jacket. He was the bouncer. Girls showed themselves in the aperture. I was feeling very contented. It was amusing seeing a young man with a girl in a white dress approach and immediately having to think, ‘She’s just got away from him from inside dressed in her underthings and he’s now fetching her back. I see.’ I was flattered to think: here I was, sitting at one of the hubs of all dissipation, and that ‘here’ meant not simply the city, for example, but the small, not especially eventful spot I currently occupied. Events, however, occurred in such a way that the phenomenon touched me with a magic wand and I lapsed into a dream before it. At such times people and things behave like those props made of pith and little pith figures in a glass-fronted tinfoil cabinet that, when the glass is rubbed, receive an electrical charge and are then obliged, with every movement, to assume the strangest mutual relationships. The music that meantime repeatedly struck up and died away I called the dry canes of jazz. I forget what justification I employed to let my foot mark time to it. That is not how I was brought up, and it did not happen without an internal struggle. There were times when the intensity of acoustic impressions pushed all else aside. Especially in the little bar, suddenly everything (and this was because of the sound of voices, not noises from the street) went under. And the strangest thing about that sound was that all the voices, every one, sounded like dialect. Suddenly, it was as if the people of Marseille did not speak good enough French for me. They had got stuck at the dialect stage. The alienation effect that may underlie this, which Kraus once framed in the splendid sentence, ‘The more closely one examines a word, the more distant the look it returns,’2 seems to extend to the optical in general. At any rate, I find among my notes the wondering words, ‘How objects withstand one’s gaze!’
Things then quietened down as I crossed the Cannebière and eventually entered a little café in Cours Belsunce for an ice cream. This was not far from the other café, the first of the evening, in which the sudden access of love-bliss bestowed upon me by seeing a few strands of fringe ripple in the wind had convinced me that the hashish had begun its work. And recalling that state makes me wish to believe that hashish is capable of persuading nature to set free in us, making us less selfish, that squandering of one’s existence with which love is familiar. If, indeed, at times when we make love our life slips through nature’s fingers like gold coins, with nature unable to hold those coins back but letting them go, trading them for the newborn child, then nature (not in hope, particularly, nor having any kind of expectation) will be thrusting us with both hands in the direction of existence.
[1928]