Opium is a season.

-Cocteau

Video of Classical Opium Smoking

Film of Old Hong Kong and opium smoking after the turn of the century:

Opium smoking in French Indochina

Close the Door

Soon, I think, I will voluntarily participate in a trial of self-chastisement. I will, temporarily, close the door to my pipe room, staying without rather than within. I will let the smoke clear and, when it becomes to much, return.

Such trial and experimentation is a necessary element of any rigorous opium habit and likely a forgotten element of maintaining proper drug use, whilst also avoiding annihilation.

One needs to reset the pieces on the board, take stock of how things stand.

This world, however, is rather monstrously defeating, even on the surface, and anyone who walks the halls of this world without some quiet place of their own is surely blind or mad.

“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures”
-Freud

Grapeshot

To the lover, whether a lover of a mortal world or a patriot of the eternal ideal, to persevere, to weather the surging waters, in sickness, braving the searing grapeshot and whizzing musketry of hardship, and stand loyally by, come what may, seems romantic, even heroic. One then also hears, now and then, about how those moments of hardship will be the most memorable and important, observed from the warm swathing cloak of age gone by.

But what of the instance of suffering? Such romanticism, such heroic gesturing means nothing as the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fall upon you, as the whips of time inevitable come crashing against your back. No one knows this better than Opium, that seductively sallow spirit that walks with pain in all its emanations: wounds of the hand, burning of the flesh, the ache of loss, and the pangs of loneliness; opium knows them all. Where there is pain there is opium, where there is opium there is pain, being born of the same womb: that arid expanse between longing and satisfaction. Those who come to know that dark beauty, and I mean really come to know it in the fullest sense of intimacy, learn this soon enough as well.

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.

Patience of the Poppy

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

(Cocteau)

Far Away

“..but then we heard such beautiful music”

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.

“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”

-Jean Cocteau