Autumnal Vines (Jisei-ei I)

Peeling fog rises
Before a lamplit sunset,
Like silver petals;
The pipesmoker’s summer ends
As dark autumnal vines
Enshroud the tempering bowl.

Rosegold Silk

I want to be washed in the bronzen glint of buttery lamp light, casting fiendish shadows past the doomed pillars of extraterrestrial moons and parroting angelic visions against incense colussi.

I want to be swaddled in puckishly perfumed textiles, rich and dreary cockroach-brown and twilit shades of blue lined in rosegold silk.

I want to meander down to the coffeehouse, where the print publishers still pour over their papers and play checkers on Sundays, and feel the imposter king, tin for a crown and bronze in my pocket.

For, what is opium but golden hatching and the luxurious glow of ancient metals? To live a pauper, but feast a kingly glutton, to seek paradise in a brutalizing apathy.

Reflections on Photography

I find myself, again and again, drawn to this simple image: a man, smoking a paste chandu in the Chinese style, prepares his pipe as he must of done hundreds of times.

However, this modest photograph speaks widely and verbosely about opium and the way it has come to be depicted. When the word opium is muttered the mind of the unacquainted is visited by the stuff of Victorian nickel rags: Chinamen in long silk shirts sit astride glowing lamps, lavish drapery, pristine, gilded accoutrement. Certainly, the experience may have been attainable in a different time and to a select few, but, even still, the realities of opium smoking are far different.

This photograph, for example, shows what one can presume to be the roll of a middle class smoker, perhaps a successful business man. It contains, at the very least, a bamboo or lacquer tray, a bowl stand for back up bowls, a high quality bamboo pipe with a well set saddle, and, most excitingly, a delicate glass lamp, but what one truly sees is the disorder of it all.

This tray has not been curated, neither by a socially conscious owner seeking to curry favor with guests nor a collector. The surface of the tray is visible worn, coated with dirt and specks of dross. The bowl stand alone is a surface on which so much dust has made its way that the smoker’s fingerprint is left behind after reaching for a favorite bowl. Oil stains from the lamp ring the tray’s once polished surface and the lamp itself is stained from hastened filling and repeated use. Perhaps most surprisingly, one can even see the circular piece of waste cloth with a hole cut in the middle, stained with dross, which, although necessary for producing a tight seal when the bowl is attached to the pipe, is so scarcely seen in photos of opium smoking that one would never know that they’re always there.

This candid photograph shows the lived experience and psychological space of the opium smoker, as I know it to be. Concerns such as maintenance fall on the way side as the pipe draws you in again and again. Namely, what is most important about this photo is that it gives voice to the lived experience of the opium smoker over and against the racialized romanticism, impregnated with questionable attitudes on the poise and wisdom of “the cultured by barbaric Orient”. It posits, albeit in a minor fashion, a multi-centric world, as opposed to a eurocentric one.

This speaks to the power of photography, as expressed by Walter Benjamin, to function as medium for social and political change by not only making images politicized but also accessible to a mass audience. In a Heideggerian sense, these images open up a space in which a particular engagement with history and place is made possible in and through the image itself.

Pipe Dreams 7

It may be smoke
That rings my head
Yet nonetheless
These bamboo poles
Frame a cosmic roof
With surgical precision
And it may be smoke
That weaves a hat of thatch
To rub against the rain
And so it seems
It must be smoke
To make me see
A black and orange spider
Come dropping down a silken thread
That’s hanging from the moon
For I have danced through Lahu nights
And beat the stars
With mummy bones
To open the roads of dawn
I have drank and cackled
With shamen of my choice
And smoked my 20 penny pipes
And yes it may be smoke
That brought me to these shores
For I have always been
The jigsaw puzzle piece
Just slightly out of whack
For any kind of fit
I am the month of limember
In a calendar of 13 months
I am that total wierdo
Whose treasure lies
By planetary observation
Not in interest rates
I sometimes with
That like some magic crystals
I too could emerge
From green cacoons
Of my own making
Transmogrify
Into a pale sea horse
Who spends all day
Just browsing along arbors
And fields of strange unholy dreams
-Marty Matz

Pipe Dreams 4

Tray awash in golden lamp light. Image property of S. Martin

The ivory pipe is still warm in the hands of time
the chefing lamp flickers
casting deep shadows on the wall
from the crickets bamboo cage
and everyone can see
by its buttery light
poverty’s tin smile
pasted on the thin lips
of this century’s dream’s betrayed
and every mouth is filled
with the cold taste
of December’s white ashes
just as each of us know
by the empty echo
in our planetary hearts
beating across these barren hills
that no elephant remains
to dance a final dance
beneath the mystic Burmese moon
no ultimate bird is left
to sing a final song
The purple poppies
have all nodded their final goodnights
and the last pill has been smoked

-Marty Matz

1st Waystation

It has been but 8 months since I started writing this and 8 months since an inauspicious shortage of opium gifted me the drive, born of an all too pressing need to do something, to begin writing about opium.

Once again, to speak on the matter of Opium, to pull oneself from the velvet draped drawing rooms and lavish pleasures of a Chinese pipe and allow oneself to toil in the oppressively cold and barren studies of reflection, has come about by way of an absence of it. In a sense, this blog was started to take my mind off that dark and sickly beauty by keeping my mind trained on precisely that: Opium

So here we are yet again: Opium; I write this because there isn’t any.

If anything at all has been here achieved it has been that I’ve caught but a passing glimpse of what may be at work in this alchemy. That man still longingly dreams on both the wretched squalor of the rickshaw driver, who in quiet moments could afford to take pleasure in a dross heavy chandu, and the Mandarin scholar alike, having at last put both the horse hair calligraphy brush and Cao Pi to rest, speaks to the reaching brightness of the nebulous conflagration of the human spirit that Opium is and speaks of. That deep and primal longing, as old as stone, which holds court with the most lavishly triumphed and ruthlessly denounced of virtues.

It has been said that were it not for bards with their songs and poets with their dreams Opium would be forgotten as a drug like any other, for it is commonly held in belief that it is in the nature of every human mind to discover in winged-words and incantation-like phrasing their own concealed and heretofore undiscovered yearning for some uncharted azure, to fall prey to some fabricated and ephemeral romance: a smoke filled fantasy. That is, it is romanticism that keeps this world alive.

Yet, that even the most debilitated slave of the lamp betrays not the pilgrimage but themselves first of all says otherwise. For, the summoning bugles call which rouses the once contented soul to a life of devotion to the pipe is none other than the cries of longing for a not-quite-forgotten Eden: a place of eternal joy and everlasting life, of simplicity and innocence. It is what rouses the metaphysician to their circular systems and observants to prayer.

The desire for opium is not the result of romanticism, but a reflection of the desire for life itself.

Rather, a self-justifying life that would be otherwise impossible and most certainly always will be.

Beyond the River Ping

Pipe Dream I

There are sacrificial whispers
To the North
Beyond the river Ping,
Where elephant dreams
Dress in yellow leaves
And ancient spirits
Wing down the barrel of my pipe
The hills are drenched
With poppy blood
And a red moon
Drowns
At the edge of my molten eye
This is the land
Of the reclining Buddha
The little wheel
The water buffalo’s last dance
This is the place
Of green legends
Of silk and silver teak
Where incense mingles
With a cobra’s breath
And in these hills alone
The chef
With his lamp
Is King

By Marty Matz

Patience of the Poppy

“The patience of a poppy. He who has smoked will smoke. Opium knows how to wait”

(Cocteau)

The Eye of Phoebus

..sleeps in Elysium..

Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,

But, like a lackey, from the rise to set

Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night

Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,

Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,

And follows so the ever-running year

With profitable labor to his grave.

-Henry V, Act IV, Scene I

Murmur to the Wind

Reclining in sweet repose

Oh Opium!

Ebony drought of the ancients, slipped by Helen of Troy, herself the face that sailed a thousand ships, “into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother or father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done…” For there were so many Ionian dead.

Sweet deliverance which snatches me from the brink of the abyss; you are the winter trees about me, like cathedral ceilings soaring, and the windish quivering is the ecstatic trembling of the world, the great dynamism of being. I too, in those hours, am of that earthborne ancient race who live only to cast their twisted, broken limbs toward the heavens as lighting casts its self toward the soil–rooted, aged, and profound am I then; I am at peace on the ground.

But alas, what for a cruel joke! For the “milk of paradise” is the rattling of the abyss and it seems there is no greater malady of the soul hitherto conceived.

Sweet deliverance, deliver me from my deliverance for it keeps me there!

Yet, in those darkest hours, in those moments when the doors on the lights of the world are closed fast and one sees clear as day that the old Gods have forsaken man long before he was ready to forget them, I murmur to the wind: Resign me to my meagre station; I care not. I want only the soft rustling of the woods, the simple pleasures of warm stone on my skin, and pastel skies above my head.

Let each plume of oily smoke be the sooten and ashy breathing of the world industry and every addict down in the dark shoveling opium ash into great, grotesque boilers, for “the vice of opium smoking is the dross”, be the coal stokers buried in the belly of beast, feeding the great iron organs long after a reason or even a care has been forgotten.

Take me there, take me there, down into the metallic gut of Hades. I don’t want to care, I don’t want to care: anymore.

But the pale faces of the leaves mock me:

Opium smoking is a simple joy and a simple pain, but there is never one without the other, and for every step one takes outside of the fast train while it is still moving they hear the queezy queries of life and death all the louder.