CHAPTER IV
INDIAN HEMP
Notes to serve as a comparison between two hallucinogens
Anyone who takes hashish as an experiment-witness* after taking mescaline leaves a racing automobile or a long distance electric locomotive for a pony.**
He is back in the human state. First of all he is pervaded by a feeling of benevolence. He is filled with an agreeable optimism that warms his heart. He even feels the urge to go out, and he goes out. (He is no longer a kind of invalid shivering in his room between two fires and wrapped in a blanket to boot, curtains tightly drawn, the tiniest ray of light cutting like a razor.) He walks, and he wants to see people. A face opposite him in the bus - he settles down, is happy, would stay for hours if the bus route were long enough . . . Getting home, he feels a bit restless. Then suddenly, though nothing has struck him as any different - he laughs.
At what? Why? No visible reason for laughing. What he wanted was visions, but for that -he doesn't know it yet -he will have to wait for hours. Again he laughs. Again for no reason.
I (to get back to the only witness I have to go by) I,
*There were psychologists and psychiatrists who attributed to Aldous Huxley's subconscious the ruins that appeared to him under mescaline. Actually, they appear to almost everyone who takes the drug. The result -probably -of the tremulous motion of the images of real (or imagined) objects, making them seem to be in ruins or about to collapse. In response to this attitude (for in the name of the psychology of the depths, which has become a veritable catchall, I met with similar contentions) I decided to take another hallucinogen in order to understand more fully the different incitements to seeing and feeling. As it was simply for the sake of comparison and to make sure I was not misjudging mescaline's "originality," my experiment with the second drug was superficial, and what follows does not pretend to be a study of that drug, namely hashish. Besides, hashish does not give itself so quickly. It is very secretive.
** A pony, however, is capable of surprises not to be looked for from a locomotive.
"in ambush" kept watch inside myself because of this laugh, this laugh without a cause.
Vague whirlwinds passed, slowly creating the second state. Whirlwinds and something else. It was as though uniform motions ended abruptly in short jerky vibrations, very short, successively shorter. I should have represented it graphically by a regularly inclined plane ending suddenly in very narrow steps, each step narrower than the one above, narrower than expected ... making you fall. The unexpected, or the successively unexpected, provoking your laugh. A mechanical, or rather vibratory basis for laughter. Also a kind of comic metaphysics, but only after a certain length of time, the subject having been gently shaken, prepared for it.
Thus half an hour later, with an overpowering sense of its absurdity, I found myself contemplating a map of Argentina in a dictionary which in falling had chanced to open at that page.
Prodigiously amused, I sat there enjoying the exhorbitantly comical shape of that country, whose humorousness had escaped me till that moment and again completely escaped me a couple of days later.
Even while savoring its humorousness, I was only vaguely aware of what put this country in a class by itself. Yet I was not thinking of anything specifically Argentinian. I simply, in an ecstasy of absurdity, silently plunged into its ineffably funny shape, an undeserved misfortune it seemed to me, from which this country would never recover.
For a great many people Indian Hemp manifests itself in these outbursts of laughter, although, especially at first, they have not yet noticed anything funny. Then, having been massaged by laughter, by laughter-waves, by a vibratory tickling that is so characteristic, little by little they begin to find things funny, particularly when there is nothing funny about them. The absurdity lies precisely in the contrast between what is non-comical and the person's own overwhelming sense of absurdity, and in the object's perfect seriousness which their own state of hilarity is about to get the best of. A certain kind of seriousness becomes fairly irresistible. It will not, however, be laughter of the back-slapping sort but, true to its origin, it will be a laugh that is delicate, though intense, born of tenuous vibrations, a laugh that is "in the know," that grasps the infinite subtleties of an infinitely absurd world.
Waiting for the visions that still fail to appear, (should I give up hope? Some people who take hashish never have visions and get along very well without them) I begin to kill time.
Looking at photographs, I notice that I have a marked preference for certain zones, much more marked than usual. Naturally, like everybody else, I have preferences, but now they are different. For example, instead of looking at the camel and the head of the camel driver which, as I know myself, I would normally have looked at first, ignoring them. I pause for a long time in contemplation of the jagged peak behind them and farther off the rocky crags of Hoggar. They delight me. I observe with marvelous "optical dexterity," so to speak, all the infractuosities of the rocky mass. I follow them with my eyes. I can see in depth. I feel once more the pleasure sui generis that one experiences in the mountains where the simple fact of seeing is so alluring because of the irregular crests, so agreeably multiple to discern, to touch with the eye, a pleasure photographs have never given me before. Contrary to the general belief (and this might almost be a reason for considering it one of the sources of abstract art) photography is that representation by means of light which is perfect as a spectacle to be looked at, but which you cannot enter, even though people, places, and things are its concern. You pass by. You let your eyes skim over them. Unlike paintings of the past Western, Chinese, Persian ... photography tells you nothing about distances and interdistances, which would have to be felt in order for you to be able to mingle with the people and places represented. It is opaque. You are thrust back from the very place you admire by the meticulousness of light and shade, unfortunate glaze endowed with insulating power. No admittance!
Hashish, dephotographing as it does the places photographed, you can at last get in. The ice has thawed. And so I devoured this colored landscape with a new eagerness. How wonderful just looking is ! How feline ! A new youth came back to me, one of the subtlest, the youth of the eye.
Today I quickly get bored travelling. The feeling of having seen it all before, and perhaps a certain aging even of the eye ! Whatever the reason, enjoyment had returned, the enjoyment of the eye, alone and sufficient. With my tentacles of sight, alert and enchanted, I "fingered" the rocks and the palms.
What disturbance of the ocular apparatus, what subtle movements forward and backward, backward and forward, what vibrations, what infinitesimal variations in the visual adjustment had succeeded in producing this delicate (and discriminating) vision, this stereovision, which mescaline never gives? For the overlapping and the dis-_ locating motions of mescaline do nothing to improve one's vision, they merely heighten the colors.
Was it for the same reason that a little while ago I plunged into faces? For it was more like plunging into them than falling in love with them, or becoming indulgent toward them. I saw too clearly-now that I think of it-their tiny wrinkles ... and appraised them.
But hashish does even more. It makes things stand out in relief, intimately, humanly, giving a sense of presences, psychological space, such as one feels on entering a room full of people who are sitting, getting up, preparing to leave, where some come toward you, some glance at you and others don't, and still others, whom you would like to touch, do not even raise their eyes to look at you.
Together, all these movements, actual or potential, occupy psychic space. Into this space you can enter. This is what makes photographic images, rehabilitated by hashish, so wonderfully real.
I was looking through a magazine at some photographs of those amazing divers of the New Hebredes who, held back (more or less) by long lianas, leap head-first from a rustic tower fifty feet or so high, landing on the ground slowed-down, but not always enough !
I was conscious of the distances, I estimated them as though I were up there on top of the tower, myself the man, or with the man who was about to jump, even having the sensation of dizziness, and even after turning the page, still feeling myself on top of the tower, still at that terrifying height. At the time I did not know that the sensation of floating in the air, of being weightless, was one of the characteristics of hashish. The flying carpet is not just a legend, but an old reality in Persia and Arabia where for centuries Indian hemp made people float on air and travel through the skies.
The third day I took hashish, it was no longer faces that arrested my attention (already blasé, they left me indifferent), but the voice of a girl I passed on the street. I did not even turn around to look at her, but, as she vanished in the opposite direction her voice, as if arrested and hesitating, remained, and I continued to dwell in it amorously - a voice, hardly mature, and genuinely shy, that made you forget everything else, a voice that implored protection, so wary of the phenomenon of speech, advancing so cautiously like a foot at the edge of a precipice, or fingers held out toward the fire. How was it that everyone did not with justifiable emotion retrace their steps in order to follow this exquisite presence? With me decisions are always arrived at too late. I really should have turned back, caught up with her, faced her again, got to know this girl, so elegant in her apprehensions, so touching and distinguished in her tiny boldness, which must have seemed enormous to her, so delicately adventurous in her loss of reserve as she took her first tentative step.
Later on at home I begin vaguely going over in my mind a scene of a motion picture seen a few days before,,. when suddenly the noises and the voices from the episode -"burst out" and violently throw themselves at me. A memory revived, but stronger than the original impression.
I also seem to be hearing in an unusual way. A sound .so faint that I would not ordinarily have heard it at all, is perceptible through three closed doors. I can even follow all its shiftings though very slight, follow them as I would a flying swarm of bees. I am experiencing stereoaudition. I hear as the stags in the underwood hear when they raise, point, and lower the great hairy auricles of their independent pink ears.
* * *
How endless the waiting seems ! I begin to doubt, I leave the house, I walk. I am restless, I exhaust myself walking, I walk and walk, I come back, I go to bed, I fall asleep . . . and suddenly I am awakened by noisy bursts of laughter : children throwing snowballs at each other in my dream. But what laughter ! Apparently right in my room, and the little boys so distinct, the distance between the different groups so appreciable . . . How different from my usual dreams, so vague . . . when I have any.
Quickly I draw the sheet up over my eyes. The visions must be coming ! At last !
Oh, these were no longer the cataracts of Mescaline, the typhoon in the world of images, the oscillations and the ruiniform constructions and the constant disintegration and transformation.
The images were distinct, stayed quietly in place. I had enough time (just enough) to see them clearly.*
It was like a series of very short scenes in color, very well composed, on the sober side, the last one very like a stage tableau, ending abruptly, a tableau like a final word.
As if the whole thing had been composed by an excellent director, by an eccentric gentleman. Preposterous, sometimes witty, a dead-pan comedian. Abruptness causing laughter. (Again!) But they didn't make me laugh at all. First, "prestadigitator" tricks - a bearded knee and things of that sort. But always coming as a surprise. I was surprised every time. They were ambiguous rather than funny, as for instance, a wonderfully white corolla with just a delicious touch of Indian yellow here and there, with one of its delicate petals, as blooming as health itself, attached as if by a tiny chain, by a very very long watch spring. Sometimes they seemed like an apologue, a demonstration, as if someone were trying to signal, and after some preliminary tentatives (gradually adjusting the aim) directing the signal at me - a satanic signal.
At times they were frankly farcical. A rope I was
*After a certain number of extremely fleeting ones about which I could have told nothing at all !
watching, coiling here, uncoiling there, suddenly ended in the red muzzle of a little feline, (a sort of ocelot, it looked to me, not too frightening, its neck being made of rope, although its muzzle was very life-like and menacing). And I had involuntarily recoiled. Another time a complicated assemblage of metal pieces I . am examining suddenly turns into a machine gun pointing at me.
Often the creatures seen were tiny, the men too, twenty centimeters being tall, but there was never mescaline's enormous crowd of mocrobe-men. Not manikins devoid of expression either, but on the contrary, very animated. And curiously, often incomplete - a characteristic of hashish. For example half an arm would be missing, the middle part at that, and completely, no connection at all, yet the arm, not in the least inconvenienced, would do what it had to do; and in a room a table would have only three quarters of its top, the rest of the table in perfect condition and entirely new. In the same way that the too short film I mentioned seemed incomplete, broken off too soon.*
It seemed as if someone, quite the artist and very well informed about me, by means of freakish spectacles (more tricky than laughable) and which one did well to take into account, were introducing himself to me, or rather, before introducing himself, were bent on showing me how knowing he was, knowing in general and about me, in particular. He was really ingenious. He intrigued me, proved to be crafty and treacherous.
He read me like a book, spied on me, would show me the same pictures I had just been looking at after having reinterpreted, refashioned them and turned them into composite monsters - monsters no more terrifying than a newly invented word. But one didn't have to be a great scholar to recognize the allusions in them and the mocking intention.
I begin to be aware of his specialities. He likes things that have an unpleasant consistency, not just to make me uncomfortable - that is incidental - but he really prefers interesting relief, granular, and with multiple irregularities,
* Like the last step of the laugh-producing stairway which receded, unexpectedly cut off.
bark like that of chestnut and cork trees, and the harsh surface of files. He has no use for what is smooth, he wants many little accidents. On a smooth arm he puts chapped spots, or an excrescence like a cockscomb, or he creases it like a knee. To a cheek he will give a disconcerting scrotal texture, the cicatricial surface of an injured tree, or the embarrassing skin of a turtle's neck. At first I took these for jokes. Not at all. He can make better jokes with other means.*
The tendency to elongate objects and men, characteristic of mescaline, which makes everything very long and attenuated, was not very apparent with Hashish, but not entirely absent. It was, however, very much stranger, and, as befits Ha, which is secretive, it was there as if hidden, known only to ones own obscure interior. One has the feeling of prolongation, certainly, but of what? Of time rather than space, and of non-interruption rather than time, of distance above all, of a distance that never reaches its limit.
Lying down, I looked at my leg and was struck by the distance from my head to my leg, a distance that made the idea of going from one to the other seem to me so exhorbitant that I wondered who could ever succeed in doing it or even think of attempting it. And I settled myself in that length, comfortably, I settled I don't know what there (time? space?), I settled it more and more all the time.
In one of my visions, there was a hoopoe on a perch about to swallow a worm. The distance from the end of its beak, where it held its prey, to its gullet, through which the worm would have to pass, threw me into a prodigious brown study, constantly reinforced by that of the motionless bird, and he too meditating in a time that seemed immense, but not immense enough for the resolution of
* Mescaline always started off at breakneck speed without (apparently) taking any interest in me. Ha, on the contrary, seems to keep an eye on me. My Mesc. might work itself into a state, outdo itself, I never believed in anything it showed me. But now, whatever Hashish displays interests me. I follow it all the way. I want to know the end. I want to know where it is taking me.
this problem that kept us both motionless, and both of us, the bird and me, incredibly poised and watchful.
The beak was certainly long, as hoopoes' beaks are, but no longer. Yet the hoopoe, like me, had understood that in a sort of imaginary distortion of its beak the distance to be covered from its point to its base had become practically infinite.
And one can set Hashish to work, too, ask it questions, give it problems to solve. It will find an answer and, what is perhaps most extraordinary, it accepts the given data of the problem. But beware of its solution. It will make you ridiculous, you and your data ! But it never shuns work. It is energetic. A good bone to give it is a photograph. Better still, two, even three. You look at them without thinking of anything-but you have thought of something just the same and Hashish won't fail to show you what it was. Then close your eyes. Now Hashish is bound to get to work.
With mescaline in you, if certain words were spoken, corresponding images would appear instantaneously, stupidly, irresistibly, without intelligence, without the least finesse. With Hashish, it is entirely different. You must give it time enough for preparation, and for destruction (like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly), time enough for scheming, for reconstruction, phases during which more often than not you see nothing. It prefers to present you with the problem solved, that is with the finished picture which is often stupefying, a kind of dream made to order, a dream made "while you wait," in which the given data has been transformed into a monstrous and startling couple (though invariably sober and with a certain elegance in the solution).
Thus it will create a hybrid being to perfection, just as a new word is composed of two others, or as the representations of the gods Ganescha and Anubis were composed, that is a man with the head of an elephant, or a fox's head on a man's shoulders, a unit with contradictory attributes never molded or fused together, but clearly differentiated.
To make women-crocodiles is a simple matter for Hashish because, contrary to frigid mescaline, it takes an interest in women and it is also interested in skins that are rough, wrinkled and tough.
Don't worry about disparities. Hashish will always manage.
With photographs spread out in front of me, I begin by looking at a road for a long time and afterward at a nude woman for an equally long time. Then I close my eyes. Hashish can now make an interesting synthesis. If this is one of its good days it may make me a very curious monster in which I shall find the woman as well as the road, each with its particular style and its genus intact, and the feminine expression will not be lacking. Nothing mechanical about Hashish. Its first moves are always unexpected, but rarely visible. This time is an exception. It is beginning in a surprising manner by making the road longer and longer and still longer, as if afraid that a road were not long enough for a woman ! Finally when the road is very long, when it is lost in the distance, you notice that it is also a woman's leg which goes on- and on (how right Hashish was to make the road long), and is lost in infinity. I should never have expected such a synthesis, but now it seems obvious and "says just what it means."
In a way, too, men's habit of looking at a woman's legs first and going on from there, is intimated and perhaps made fun of.
If, with the woman, I gave Hashish something else instead of a road, the "joining together" response was always appropriate and totally unpredictable. It was as if I saw only the objects and Hashish alone their points of resemblance.
Hashish does not only make pictures. It commits acts. Its pictures themselves are not made up so much of the images suggested to it as of the desires with which you have unconsciously filled them, and by which, unknown to you, they are affected. At this point you feel, you become conscious that you are not alone within yourself. You are lodging someone else, inhabitant no. 2. From that moment everything changes. Everything is a snare. Even in the pictures he was more than just sly or mocking, a cynic seeing too clearly.
He is going to substitute himself for you and will become inhabitant no. 1.
For, unlike you, he dares, he commits acts and what acts ! Acts that are not yours but which you cannot altogether disown either. They come from you, as their elements prove. They are just beyond the point where you halted through fear, not knowing it was through fear, not knowing that you had halted. Now you understand. His act is an invention. To imagine is to offer a new solution. He shows me that I had drawn back. But he did not draw back, and he makes me commit the act. The devil has succeeded. Devil; so the devil really exists? In any case, if you are a person suitably split and oriented (and a "visionary" - for it would never happen otherwise) whoever it is who exists in you, it is someone who discovers your demoniac possibilities.
The devil. Why never an angel? Is there no drug for angels? Apparently not.
However, in these inavowable acts which I commit through him a certain carnality is lacking. The act is there-sight and sound and the sensation of being present make a circumstantial vision-but the succulent contacts, the odors, ignoble accompaniments of real life, are not.
Sometimes in the quiet hours of the great final immobility (Keff in Arabic means rest), when one wouldn't lift an arm even to ward off an imminent disaster, images would appear as in a dream, but never known before even in a dream, images so natural, having the very impact of nature, that I said to myself, it isn't possible that they do not exist somewhere. Sights, furniture, and especially places, common ordinary places where I had no reason to be yet where I was not surprised to find myself - the short flight of steps of a rather cheap suburban villa, a lane, a tiny yard, all of which I not only saw but where I felt perfectly at home and walked around contentedly without thinking, without hesitating, without questioning, opening a door never seen before, which I would someday see perhaps and would then, I hope, recognize.
I, who admit only what is extraordinary and shut out all the things around me, the things right before my eyes, banishing them from my memory as mediocre and beneath my notice, refusing to let myself sink to their level (consequently I know nothing and remain empty and without memories) there I was looking at them with the most simple and whole-hearted accord and familiarity.
There are days when, in a book I am reading, I mistake one word for another. Not once but twenty, fifty times, so many times indeed, a regular barrage, that soon I have no idea of what I am reading and ... I give up.
After I have smoked hashish and even a very long time afterward, when its effect is apparently over (but with hashish, always so whimsical, one never knows) and I begin reading again after an interval, interruptions, errors still occur, not more numerous but more incongruous, more censorious, more aggressive. That is how I recognize them as belonging to Hashish and not to me. Words I now read in place of the right ones do not come as they did formerly. They (those of hashish) come to me headlong, as if prompted at the last moment. The wrong one is thrown, hurled over the right one, but only for a second, the right one reappearing almost immediately, somewhat dazed, I go on with my reading.
When I go out after taking hashish I am a different man. With different eyes. Hashish points out, chooses, observes and penetrates like a rigid sword. Without it I look at things the way oxen do, having like them a slow digestion, an endless digestion of I don't know what. Such being the case, never quite free of this occupation, I can only let my eyes wander circularly, unless occasionally a spectacle more clamorous than usual draws them its way. But never for long, soon hesitant and staring, my eyes begin their circular contemplation again.
With Hashish in me I am a falcon. If I give a circular glance it will be only once, as one makes a general survey, not to be repeated. I am against dispersion. I look for an object in order to follow a trail. If it is a face, then through that face I will follow the trail to the ends of the earth. Nothing can distract me. With a look that thinks, thinks and goes through the other person's head. Without being in the least excited. Perhaps it is that inside of the head, that place of metaphysics, of calculation, which alone makes me regret hashish. For, though known so slightly, I am definitely giving it up. That place which I can only point to on my skull, saying, "it is there, five or six centimeters inside, which existed then and which had never existed before, and which if not a faculty is at least a function, and through which, even weakened by the drug, I know that I am at a center, that this center which exists in me gives me the right (and the facility) to look anyone straight into the eye, for I go beyond the features. As soon as hashish is extinct in me, it disappears, and I am obliged to return to the periphery, to the crust, that other center having gone to sleep for good.
The drawings I made after taking mescaline, either on the following day or one or two weeks later, consisted of an enormous number of very fine parallel lines, very close together with an axis of symmetry and endless repetitions.
The quick vibrating lines I drew endlessly, without thinking, without hesitating, without pausing, by their very appearance gave promise of a "visionary" drawing.
Very different my drawings after taking hashish. They were clumsy, involved, cut up, prematurely discontinued, always showing unfinished portions. The surfaces were composed of squares and polygons. A great deal was always missing.
In the same way the webs of the Zilla spider that has been drugged with atropine, and benzedrine, nembutal and marihuana (experiment made by Dr. Peter Witt of Berne University) are always incomplete, the incompleteness the same for all spiders of the same family, different for each drug used.
Similarly incomplete, as could be expected, are the webs of spiders that have been induced to take the urine of schizophrenics, another proof that the disease is first of all physical, first of all a toxicosis.*
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to try the experiment on the psychiatrists, rather than on the spiders?
*... which would be of an amino nature. Imperfect proof, it is true, since the mental disease might cause, be followed by, the physical disorder, the physical in turn causing the mental.