Le Théâtre de Séraphin
[Translation]
What does one feel? what does one see? wonderful things no doubt?
extraordinary spectacles? Is it really beautiful? truly terrible?
truly dangerous? - These are the usual questions posed with a mixture
of curiosity and awe to the adept by the uninitiated. One detects a
childish impatience to know, like that of people who have hardly
strayed from their arm chairs and then find themselves in front of a
man who has just returned from an unknown and distant place. They
imagine the intoxication of hashish as a prodigious land, a vast
theatre of magic and conjuring, where everything is miraculous and
unpredictable. This however is a cliche, a complete misapprehension.
And yet, because for the community of readers and questioners, the
word hashish includes the idea of a strange and inverted world, the
expectations of prodigious dreams (it would be better to say
hallucinations, which in fact happen less frequently than one
supposes), I should at once stress the important difference that
separates the effects of hashish and the phenomena of sleep. In
sleep, that daily adventure of each evening, there is something
positively miraculous; though the mystery of the miracle is blunted
by its regularity. The dreams of men are of two classes. The first,
full of ordinary life; combined in a fashion more or less bizarre
with objects encountered during the day, which are then
indiscriminately fixed onto the vast roof of memory. This is the
natural dream, it is man himself. But the other field of dreams! The
absurd dream, unpredictable, with no rapport or connection to the
character, life or ambitions of the sleeper! This dream, which I will
call hieroglyphic, clearly represents the supernatural aspect of
life, and because of its absurdities was justifiably believed by the ancients to be divine. As it is beyond explanation by natural causes,
they attributed to it a cause exterior to man, and even today without
talking of oneiromancers, there is a school of philosophy which sees
in the dreams of this type, sometimes a reproach, sometimes advice,
in sum a symbolic and moral tableau, engendered by the spirit of the
dreamer. This is a dictionary that one should study, a language to
which sages can obtain the key.
In the intoxication of hashish,
there is nothing of the sort. We do not leave the natural dream. The
intoxication, throughout its duration, is nothing more than a dream,
which though imposing due to the intensity of the colours and the
rapidity of conceptions nevertheless always maintains the particular
tonality of the individual. Man wants to dream, dreams govern men,
but this dream is nevertheless the descendant of its father. The
idler does his utmost to artificially introduce the supernatural into
his life and thought: but it does nothing more, in spite of the
random energy of his sensations, than augment the man himself, the
same number raised to a much higher power. He is enthralled, but
unfortunately not by anything more than his own self, that is to say
by the dominant part of his own self, he wanted to be an angel, he
has become a beast, momentarily very powerful, if one can ever call
power, without the ability to moderate or exploit it, an exaggerated
sensibility.
What men of the world and the
inexperienced, curious to experience unusual pleasures, therefore
ought to know is that they will find in hashish, nothing miraculous,
absolutely nothing more than nature in excess. The brain and organism
on which hashish operates, give nothing other than ordinary
phenomena, unique and augmented it is true, in their number and
energy but always true to their origins. Man does not escape the fate
of his physical and moral temperament: hashish can act on the
impressions and intimate thoughts of man as an enlarging mirror, but
only as a mirror.
This is the drug before your
eyes: a little green jam, the size of a nut, with a peculiar odour
which at first arouses a certain amount of revulsion and feelings of
nausea, as is normal when any fine and agreeable smell is compounded
to a maximum strength which is to say density. This leads me to
remark in passing that this proposition can be reversed and that the
most repugnant, revolting smell may well turn out to be a pleasure if
it is reduced to the smallest possible quantity and volume. Here
therefore is happiness! It occupies the volume of a teaspoon!
Happiness with all its intoxications, all its foibles, all its
infantilities! You can swallow it without fear; one does not die.
Your physical organs will not receive the slightest effect. Later on
perhaps, an over-frequent use of this sorcery will diminish your
will, perhaps you will be less the man that you were today; but the
punishment is so far away, and the nature of the future disaster so
difficult to define! What are you risking? tomorrow a few tired
nerves. Don't you risk greater punishments every day for lesser
rewards? And so that's it: you have, to maximise the effect on
yourself, dissolved your dose of grass extract in a cup of black
coffee, you have taken it on an empty stomach, at nine or ten o'clock
in the evening, in place of your evening meal so as to give the
poison freedom to act; thereafter you will take a light soup. You are
now adequately primed for a long and singular voyage. The steam has
whistled, the sails are set and in distinction to other passengers
you have the curious privilege of ignoring where you are going. You
wanted it, live your fate!
Another way
of deciphering the mysterious Orient, he thought, remembering how a
universe had opened up, unlocked by a metaphor that chance had placed
before him. A whole philosophy had flashed before his eyes,
explaining everything by the power of that one analogy, that had
spiralled out into the darkness of the night. God is the most
powerful, God is the most powerful...
After the square, he had made his
way down to the harbour, observing how the masts and spires of the
fishing boats had begun to shake and jitter against the sky. That had
been the beginning of the hallucinatory phase. Among the sand dunes,
the tufts of grass had loomed over him, defracted into strands of
red, yellow, green, and indigo, that had swayed evasively in the
evening light. In this secret garden of shimmering glazes and rainbow
contours, everything had quivered in anticipation as he stepped among
the blue and violet shadows...
But the day after! the terrible
day after! all organs distended, tired, slack nerves, the titillating
desire to cry, the impossibility of applying yourself to a task of
any duration, cruelly it dawns on you that you have played a
forbidden game. Hideous nature, stripped of the illumination of the
day before, resembles the melancholic debris of a party. The will, of
all faculties the most precious, is above all affected. They say, and
it is almost true, that this substance doesn't have any physical or
at least no serious after-effects. But can one maintain that a man
incapable of action, and only able to dream, is really in a fit
state, even when his limbs are in good health? For we know enough
about human nature to know that a man who can, with just a teaspoon
of jam, procure for himself immediately, all the blessings of heaven
and earth, will never attain the millionth part of it through
work.
Although
the drug opens the eyes and enlarges an artist's vision, he knew
that, taken regularly, it weakens the will and erodes commitment. The
artist sinks into the security of his hallucinations; which being so
perfect and self-contained, scorn any attempt to render or attain
such visions through an artistic or intellectual endeavour. He
remembered the kif-smokers in the bars, infused in their visions of
the infinite. Was it not better to arrive at such visions through the
use of the imagination and the struggle with an artistic medium? To
praise open the Orient's secrets, without the merit of having worked
or studied, was nothing short of corrupt, degrading the value of that
which was so sacred. What use were art, philosophy, and science, if
they could not realise what the hashish-eater experienced
privately?
"These unfortunates who have
never fasted, never asked and who have refused redemption through
work, expect of black magic, the means to raise themselves up, in one
step, into the realm of the supernatural. Magic dupes them and lights
in them a false happiness and a false light; while we poets and
philosophers, have regenerated our spirits through successive work
and contemplation; through the assiduous use of the will and the
permanent nobility of intention, we have created on our own terms a
garden of true beauty. Confident in the saying which says that faith
can move mountains, we have accomplished the only miracle to which
god has granted us licence!"
