Browsing
through a shipment of books form my library in London, I found The Pleasures
and Pains of Opium, a booklet from which I had read a few pages some
years ago when I first found it in Oxfam or another charity shop in Beckenham.
I opened it then, turned on, tuned in, but after just a few pages
embarrassingly (it’s only 56 pages long in a baby format published as a Penguin 60s Classic) dropped out. Now,
on seeing it again, my first thought – not the first thought of this type in
recent years, though – was: "O, Lord, how I miss consciousness altering
substances! Or, to be
precise, one of them: alcohol."
I tried some
other stuff too, but nothing ever threatened the supremacy of alcohol in this
aspect of my life. I used to take tobacco in large amounts for a brief period
and, being a person of a rather delicate brain constitution (I don’t think
many other people would be affected by tobacco to the same degree), I noticed
interesting and pleasant effects on my mind, albeit on a very limited scale.
Unfortunately, the effects on my body were far from interesting for a
non-pathologist, quite unpleasant and on a rather large scale, so I grudgingly became
resigned to the fact that tobacco was not my cup of tea (speaking of which: it
goes so well with coffee!).
I have tried
marijuana too, though it was really by default: I never wanted to try it, I
never felt like trying it, I simply didn’t refuse it. So maybe it was due to my
poor attitude that it never lived up to the hype: instead of taking me high, it
always let me down. The first time it produced no result whatsoever (but here was
an informative side effect of its making no effect on me: I could
cool-headedly watch the rest of the inhaling party going absolutely bonkers - and sustaining the bonkers state for an impressively long time - about a
completely unfunny scrap of a comment). The second time I took it I thought the
stuff was killing me, but I was unable to share this important – well, at least
to me – piece of news with anybody else, as my body refused to cooperate and I was not able to speak. I had
to content myself with lying on a sofa, looking thoroughly
chilled out and listening to my heart going through a whole series
of crazy rhythmical experiments in what seemed a preparation for its packing up.
There seemed to be a whole LP worth of it, but to cut a long drum-and-bass number
short, the organ didn’t pack up and there followed, with roughly yearly
intervals, uneventful further few times.
My last, so far, encounter with marijuana was the most spectacular one, but I
have considerable difficulty with the attribution of responsibility here. Because I combined a few puffs of what seemed a very decent and strong stuff with a dozen
beers, it’s impossible to say which substance is to be blamed, or thanked, for
what followed: an eventful two-and-half-day long night, one of the strangest, and most fascinating,
in my life (deserving a separate account).
So it is
alcohol that has always been my spirit-reinforcing staple, my closest mental
pal, my emotional distiller, my intellectual cue. Well,
always was. And now that my
relationship with it has been changed for ever, I can look back and make a sober
assessment: for all the bad things it facilitated in my life, it is the good
things that I will remember, because there were more of them. The comfort, the
insight, the courage*, the tenderness, the forgiveness, the depth, the unity
- and yes, the bliss it helped me experience and receive outweigh all those… never mind, maybe later.
With such
thoughts in my mind, I opened the booklet again and immediately found a moving passage.
So much of what Thomas de Quincey writes about opium-taking, I could enthusiastically repeat about my extreme alcohol-taking. A wave of memories overwhelmed me: oh, how I miss my consciousness altering
substance! But then I remembered a bitter note that still lingers on my palate: besides
the times when it facilitated evil that hurt my close ones, there is something
else that hangs over my affair with booze. It is the fact that I didn’t stop drinking when first
my intellect and then my heart told me to, and gave me the reason why, but
when my body told me to. When I had understood that I’d have to part ways with what
was then my steady partner, I sighed: “God, give me sobriety, but not yet”, and
opened another bottle. I missed an opportunity to show that I cared more about
the Lord of the vineyard than about his award-winning stuff, although I became fully aware, no doubt during some alcohol-assisted philosophico-theological meditative session, that there’s
only one drug that’s good for me in the long run (and I’m only interested in
long runs). I’m talking about a drug that can affect not only a tiny section
of the universe, my mind, and what that tiny section of the universe can in turn take
in and transform: I’m talking about a drug that changes the big picture.
Are you tuned in now? How about this vision then: imagine that what you see with your dull, sober mind – the village or city around you, the people you meet and live with, what you study, what you do for a living, what or who you touch or take – is all eerily twisted in front of you, in a state that belies its true, exciting meaning and purpose. And to unlock the vision that’s hidden in all the stuff, to see the madly happy multi-Technicolor potential somewhere in there, you need to take the only sustainable drug, the daddy of all substances, the psychoactive God.
*yes, you
can laugh at this one: it is funny.
P.S. After
another few pages I am quite tempted to try opium, actually. I
haven’t yet reached the ‘Pains’ section, though.
