Clarimonde

“The greatest painters, who followed ideal beauty into heaven itself, and thence brought back to earth the true portrait of the Madonna, never in their delineations even approached that wildly beautiful reality that I saw before me.”

(Gautier)

Destroy

There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
– The Picture of Dorian Grey, Oscar Wilde

Greed

by Cecil Beaton,photograph,1930s

Ach! What stupidity!

To lustily lend oneself headlong to the throws of the pipe after nigh several fortnights of abstinence, greedily drawing as if taken by some wicked, archane thirst to the point of illness. What spells death for the hardest of heroin addicts amounts to scarcely more than a tough evening for the opium smoker.

Silber

Raw opium being prepared for smoking

Opium, I love it dearly. Every bit worth the held silver of a thousand ships. At times, it feels like nothing could matter so much.

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come”

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come” -Hamlet

I have not written or smoked for quite some time, a few months at least.

And yet, in the comfort of my bed, my wife resting next to me, opium stole into my bedchamber and found me there dreaming.

It sought me out and with wanton ease recovered its mark, lost though I was in my delirious sleeping head. It took me by the hand and led me to a far off place, where all at once I caught myself laying on my right side, wreathed in darkness save the warming glow of the opium lamp, chefing the perfect pill, soft, glistening cockroach wing brown chandu resting on the bowl’s opening like a crown of shellac. As I pulled the pipe to my lips, I opened my eyes, the rays of the morning sun slicing through my curtains like blades of broken amber launched by the great ballista of Helios.

I could not shake, for all the callings of dawn, the fresh memory of my lover’s eye. Neither that chandu brown iris ring nor the pinpoint pupil set into that pale grey earthenware bowl..

The Freshest of Air

Two opium pipes on a tray

The freshest of air, the deepest of breathes- it has been months now since I’ve drawn down an opium pipe in quiet repose, collected the ever enumerating accoutrements of pipe smoking like so many diverging thoughts, and caught them all in a warm pill, just as a fisherman pulls their vast net into a heavy, budding sack.

And yet, the wasted breathes of this staler air will never taste as fresh, as pregnant with meaning as that last breath, or next breath, from a finely crafted Chinese pipe. For, that air is ripened by the tributaries of time and tradition; it never forgets what has come to pass nor what must be done, but, rather, sees it all reflected in a glassy, blackened mirror, an aleph, and is, like all memory, as much about remembering as it is about forgetting.

It passes through my dreams at distance, as a passing train is felt but remains unseen, and seems a far-off, long-forgotten paradise, an arabesque fantasy or a philologist’s dream, where all the frozen statues of Attica break from their immovable stances and return to their homeland.

I would trade so many moments for a single breath of the freshest air.

Wirkung

Opium! How tender do those moments seem, now that the hefty chains of loneliness no longer weigh upon your memory. Your warm, swathing, floral scented rooms, do they betray a loathing or profound affection for life, that mortal man simply cannot comprehend in their contemptuousness?

A willful fortnight without opium has only let me glimpse into how to live as a scrooge and a miser of feeling, that the quiet openness toward the passage of days be interrupted by an anxious, spurious world, to be ever anew caught in Sartre’s bath drain between the Subject and the Other, it is never so with opium. Opium sands down the sharp edges of time and place, closing that unknowably vast expanse between worlds; that is its work. It is that flattening of the world into a uniform sheet which can only otherwise be found lying with Hypnos and Thanatos.

That said, opium is a great teacher. Opium teaches its student patience; to be poised; to understand each action as an art, fully furnished in all regards, worthy of a rightful practitioner; to cherish and treat each passing breath with all due seriousness and respect; and to, in the very praxis of life, obey ritual as central to the Sammlung of existence. It teaches that ritual discloses the world, where each lighting of the lamp is a breaking of a new foundation and the chefing of each pill is the Wirkung of an artist.

So cast me down upon my rice grass mat, I care not if I must sit alone in some dark perilous hole. I have my lamp in the dark and my pipe is the sweetest company.

The Flower

Once, some years ago, I wandered
In the wilderness, to find
A rose in blooming beauty,
Laughing gently in the wind.
I approached it in all sadness,
Saying, oh like me aggrieved!
You’re a flower that has no meaning
For the loved one’s tresses long;
Nor shall someone’s lovely fingers
Hold you gently and then whispered,
“Khan, why should you thus grieve?
I shall not exchange this wasteland,
For the Persian garden green.
Here I am one of a kind,
There are thousands there like me;
All around me in the wasteland,
Only I am blooming, bright.
Here in this parched, arid land,
I am a flame of blazing beauty
And of colors of all hues;
I am beauty, with no peer,
Of a silent melody;
And the miracle supreme,
Of a timeless space unseen.
In your garden there are myriads
Of red roses kin to me;
In a faceless, flowing river
Of red roses on the surge,
Nameless rose, one of too many,
I shall certainly then be.
And you too, my dear brother,
Do not grieve in your wasteland;
To appreciate your beauty,
There will ultimately come,
From a far-off place a wanderer,
Like some wretched, Ghani Khan!

-Ghani Khan