IJ 232:
'A du nous avons foi au poison.' (We have faith in poison) from Rimbaud's Drunken Morning )
and,
"Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar"
Drunken Morning - Rimbaud
(Illuminations XI: Matinée d’Ivresse)
O my Good! O my Beauty! Atrocious fanfare in which I never falter! Enchanted easel! Hurrah for the unknown work and for the marvellous body, for the first time! It began in the laughter of children, it will finish so. This poison will linger in all our veins even when, the fanfare returning, we are delivered again to the old disharmony. Oh, we now so worthy of such tortures, let us fervently grasp this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! They’ve promised the tree of good and evil will be buried in darkness, the tyrannical virtues will be deported, so we can bring here our love so pure. It began with certain disgusts and it ends – we being unable to seize this eternity all at once – it ends with a riot of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror of the faces and objects here, hallowed be you by the memory of this vigil. It began with all boorishness, behold, it ends with angels of fire and ice.
Little drunken holy vigil! If only on account of the mask you’ve granted us. We endorse you, method! We’ve not forgotten that yesterday you glorified every century of ours. We have faith in poison. We know how to give our whole life every day.
This is the age of ASSASSINS.
1) Director and film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, looks like David Lynch's Eraserhead
3) Michaux wrote a book about his experience with the hallucinogen mescaline:
Once the agony of the first hour is over (effect of the encounter with the poison), an agony so great that you wonder if you are not going to faint (as some people do, though rarely) you can let yourself be carried along by a certain current which may seem like happiness. Is that what I thought? I am not sure of the contrary. Yet, in my journal, during all those incredible hours, I find these words written more than fifty times, clumsily, and with difficultly : Intolerable, Unbearable.
Such is the price of this paradise (!)
This last bit about mescaline reminds me of one of my final experiments with weed. I set out to write the same narrative twice. I would develop a skeleton outline and add the meat once while sober and once after having THC'd up. My intentions were sort of nasty: I wanted to try and alienate the very specific audience of this possible piece (the arts salon) to see how the group would respond to drivel and, well, nasty intentions. This would work because 1.)there'd be no context or explanation and 2.) i don't have a history of responding well to marijuana.
ReplyDeletegot high. was tittering like a bieber fan for about 3 minutes. and remembered i had to write. BUT the notepad I'd swiped from my TX home came with a matching pen that would not write. I spent the feeling of 12 hours scratching thoughts into the paper - trying to make an indent that could be salvageable later. This is pathetic enough, but the speed, to the non-high, observer probably would have made it worse. Also, I was mainly writing things along the lines of 'okay. try to write. i can't write. this is horribly frustrating.'
After the disappointment of this event, I didn't even attempt the rad-sounding suggestion to try the whole thing really drunk. Shame.
[p.s. the guitar player in my high school band played our last show whilst high on homemade mescaline tea, which I was grossly offended by.]
Allow me to add, the above comment is a long quote from someone other than myself, of course. The whole thing came from... what was it?... George Harrison's biography? I'm pretty sure that's it. Totally not me though.
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