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Artificial Paradises: on hashish and wine as means of expanding individuality

by Baudelaire

At first, a certain absurd, irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizzare aspect. This mirth is intolerable to you; but it is useless to resist. The demon has invaded you...

It sometimes happens that people completely unsuited for word-play will improvise an endless string of puns and wholly improbable idea relationships fit to outdo the ablest masters of this preposterous craft. But after a few minutes, the relation between ideas becomes so vague, and the thread of your thoughts grows so tenuous, that only your cohorts... can understand you.

Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises.

The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is color; in colors there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that *your pipe* is smoking *you*; you are exhaling *yourself* in bluish clouds.

This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.

The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call *kef*; it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.

-- Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises: on hashish and wine as means of expanding individuality

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