Druggies
Druggies love their drugs. It is a world that opens up to them in a way that those who don’t do drugs or don’t give in to their addiction can never know. It doesn’t matter if it’s some loser who dies unknown with a needle sticking out of his neck in an alley or if it is major literary figure. Those who indulge find poetry in things that the rest of us either can’t or don’t. What is Baudelaire discussing in this metaphor-laden sentence? Hemp seeds being throw into a bonfire:
“For them it was like a steam bath more fragrant than that of any Greek oven, and the enjoyment was so lively that it drew from them cries of joy.”
The Opium Eater
Birds of a feather do that thing they do and when the birds are drug addicts, you can bet they flock together even more tightly. Baudelaire reaches into his kinship with British author Thomas De Quincy to do a little fancy footwork to take a metaphor created by that author and produce another one of his own. De Quincy wrote: “I am now arrived at an Iliad of woes, for I have now to record The Pains of Opium.” In a nod to his fellow drug abuser, Baudelaire writes:
“For more than three years, our dreamer will be like an exile, driven out of the territory of common happiness, because he has now arrived at “an Iliad of calamities, he has arrived at the tortures of opium.’”
The Closed Doors of Perception
Those who look to drugs to unleash the floodgates of their imagination are usually missing the point: if it takes drugs to get your imagination to work at such an elevated level, maybe it isn’t really your imagination doing the work. But still the justification keep coming. If you can only find that elusive trick of mastering your own subconscious and forcing it do your bidding firmly lodged within conscious intent, the world is your oyster:
“The human mind is full of passions; he has some to spare, to use another trivial phrase for me; but this unhappy spirit, whose natural depravity is as great as its sudden, almost paradoxical aptitude for charity and the most arduous virtues, is fertile in paradoxes which allow it to use for evil the overflow of this passion overflowing.”
Messianic Complex
They say that there is no difference between claiming that you are Napoleon and claiming you are God. Both are delusions and it is pointless to create gradations of craziness. Still, there just seems to be an extra level of insanity to those who claim to be God. Add another level to those who are convinced—truly convinced—that drugs are the gateway to ultimate edification:
“Who is the French philosopher who, to mock modern German doctrines, said: `I am a god who has had a bad dinner?’ This irony would not bite a spirit taken away by hashish; he would respond quietly:`“I may have had a bad dinner, but I am a God.’”
Useful Metaphor
Not all literary metaphors are useful. Sometimes a writer just like the imagery even though it really makes little sense and no amount of urging from an editor can change minds. In many cases with Baudelaire—in many, many cases—the metaphors are useful because they achieve the very opposite effect he intends. Baudelaire expends many words and great energy praising opium and then he writes something like this—probably while under the effect of opium—and if anyone ever needed evidence that mind-expanding narcotics do not expand your imagination about anything but love of drugs, here it is.
“you build on the bosom of darkness, with the imaginary materials of the brain, with an art deeper than that of Phidias and Praxiteles, cities and temples which exceed in splendor Babylon and Hékatompylos; and from the chaos of a sleep full of dreams you evoke in the sunlight the faces of beauties long buried, and the familiar and blessed faces, cleansed from the outrages of the grave.”
Just in case you got lost in all that, remember that the “you” he is addressing here is opium.
