Opium versus Heroin

            I woke up with a sore throat on Monday and had difficulty swallowing. It diminished during yoga but I was worried that I would be hoarse during song practice. For the most part though I had my normal voice.

Whenever I am going to poetry readings or music venues with open stages on a regular basis I tend during song practice to imagine myself performing my songs at those places. Shab-e She’r had been the only reading series I’d attended for quite a while and so I’ve been practicing songs specifically to play at that event. Now that I’m banned I still play the songs but the fantasy element is missing. I don’t think that I’ll go to another reading series for a while, even once school stops. I really want to try to focus on getting my book published and if that happens I’ll start going out again to promote it. Not going to Shab-e She’r will free up almost a week out of every month starting at the end of April.

            I don’t think that women can handle going insane as well as men can. It's tied up with socialization and the need for acceptance on the part of women while for men the sense of male privilege tells men they can just let go of their minds with less stigmatization.

            The weekend rain licked the snow banks down to their icy metal spines, which will take longer to decay.

            On Monday I asked the professor of the class before ours what the major is of most of her students. She said that most of them would become physicians. I asked if she is a doctor but she said only in the sense that she’s a PHD.

            Professor Weisman, as she often does, warned us to be careful outside because it’s icy. I told her that being careful is no fun. She argued that breaking a shoulder is even less fun but I argued that it’s the risk that makes it exciting.

            We learned that our exam will be on April 17 at 9:00.

            We reviewed the enigmatic preoccupations of De Quincey’s contradictory fictionalized selves and how the thematic threads of Romanticism are imagination and solitude. There is also the dark side of Romanticism with the fatal man as the gothic hero and the imagination as an object of terror. This can be seen in the wind of horror in Coleridge’s Dejection Ode. Frankenstein also is haunted by an imagination that he cannot equal.

            De Quincey’s opium is like Wordsworth’s mental landscape with therapeutic palliation that is central to solace. But pleasure turns to pain.

            The professor asked, “In what ways can the opium eater be compared to the poet visiting the rustic?”

            I couldn’t find the passage we’d been reading because I’d done the wrong subtraction for my edition of the book and ended up on the wrong page. It was embarrassing because that’s the first time it’s happened and I usually have an answer.

            As I’ve found the passage now I can say that both De Quincey on opium and Wordsworth felt sympathy for the common man though I think that De Quincey’s engagement was less aloof. They both experienced and drew solace in a mental landscape in solitude, although De Quincey’s mental landscape was drug induced.

De Quincey’s claim that the poor are more philosophical echoes that of Wordsworth. The poor are more permanent to human nature.

De Quincey did later retreat to the country where his contradictory personae meet.

The most famous passage from Confessions of an English Opium Eater is the one written in praise of opium. It paraphrases what Sir Walter Raleigh wrote about death being democratic. It also parallels Wordsworth’s address to the landscape in Tintern Abbey. It reminds me of the song “Heroin” by Lou Reed.

There is an evocation of the internalized landscape. Opium cleans the sin away.

She said that this passage inspired many people to start taking opium and there were deaths that resulted from this. I said a parallel could be drawn with Timothy Leary’s advocacy of LSD. She said “Absolutely!” and added that she thinks that Leary televised his own death. It was videotaped but not televised live. Some of his ashes were buried in space.

Fee simple means full ownership of land to do with as you please.

He describes in words what a painter can describe better. The reader is he painter and he is asking us to do the work. The process of cocooning and the space described is like the lime tree bower. He presents himself as the subject of palliation but with a twist.

He valorizes egalitarianism and democracy amongst the poor. In contemplation he represents himself as a universalist.

The Malay was probably a sailor. There was an orientalist fascination around opium. Edward Said coined the term of “orientalism” to describe the western desire for the exotic as a type of othering.

The pains of opium bring a tormenting return to the primal. The fatal man evokes racism in the nightmare of his own racist fantasies and enters into them. What is De Quincey’s exoticism and what does it become? In the pleasures of opium he depicts opium as democratic. In the pains of opium he subverts the myth of English propriety.

The erect, morally upright and independent servant girl with the beautiful “English” face in her illumination, brightness and innocence has never seen a Malay. De Quincey, in describing the Malay’s visage does not refer to his face at all but rather his “sallow" skin. Sallow in its Anglo Saxon root means darkly discoloured and the French “salir” means “to dirty”. The sleek enamelled neck of the serpent in Paradise Lost. The description of the eyes implies shifty and thin lips were associated with cruelty as was also observed by Victor Frankenstein of his creature. The Malay had “slavish gestures", which are meaningless rituals.

Because of the language that De Quincey does not understand, the Malay is a threat to his authority.

A recommended book: British Romanticism of the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask.

I asked the professor if she agreed with those that argue that De Quincey is not being racist but is rather deliberately exposing racism. She said she goes back and forth on that question. Some argue he is using ironic reversal to expose racism. She says she doesn’t want to sway people with her own opinions.

Gabriel mentioned the racism that some argue exists in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

            I mentioned that an interesting parallel could be drawn between De Quincey’s praise of opium and Lou Reed’s “heroin" but I seemed to be dating myself. The professor had never heard of it and said a lot of comparisons could be made with other works as well. I would argue that “Heroin” has as important a place in popular culture of the late 20^th Century as de Quincey’s praise of opium had for the 19^th Century:

            “Oh! Just, subtle and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man, a brief oblivion for wrongs unredressed and insults unavenged; that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury; and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges: - thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles – beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos: and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep", callest into sunny light the faces of long buried beauties, and the blessed household countenances, cleansed from “the dishonours of the grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!”

           

I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Then I tell you things aren't quite the same
When I'm rushing on my run

And I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I have made the big decision
I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper's neck
When I'm closing in on death

And you can't help me, not you guys
Or all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know

I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sailed the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
On a sailor's suit and cap

Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils of this town
And of himself and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know

Heroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it's my wife and it's my life, ha-ha
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off than dead

Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

'Cause when the smack begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore

Ah, when that heroin is in my blood
And the blood is in my head

Then thank god that I’m as good as dead

And thank your god that I’m not aware

And thank god that I just don’t care

And I guess I just don’t know

Oh and I guess I just don’t know'

 (“Oh! Just, subtle and mighty opium!” ---

“When I'm rushing on my run

And I feel just like Jesus' son”)

(“for the wounds that will never heal” ---

“And you can't help me, not you guys
Or all you sweet girls with all your sweet talk”)

(“for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm” ---

“Because when the smack begins to flow

I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds”)

(“eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath” ---

“Away from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils of this town”)

           

(“to the proud man, a brief oblivion for wrongs unredressed and insults unavenged” ---

“ it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a spike into my vein”)

(“thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles – beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatompylos” ---

“ I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sailed the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that”)

(“cleansed from “the dishonours of the grave.” ---

“when that heroin is in my blood
And the blood is in my head

Then thank god that I’m as good as dead

And thank your god that I’m not aware

And thank god that I just don’t care”)

(“ thou hast the keys of Paradise” ---

“ I'm gonna try for the kingdom if I can”)

            I told Professor Weisman that the passage about the ideal retreat reminded me of an image of Frankenstein's monster that I found online. It shows him sitting contentedly in a comfortable easy chair in a beautiful study with raging fire in the fireplace and reading Don Quixote. She said, “That's really great!”

            I stopped at Loblaws and bought four bags of grapes on my way home.

            I typed out most of my lecture notes.

            For dinner I boiled the last of my potatoes and had them with gravy while watching the first episode of the Rifleman.

            Lucas McCain and his son Mark arrive in North Fork looking to buy a ranch. There's a shooting contest in town and Lucas enters so he can make the first payment on the property. They make friends with Vernon, the young man that is Lucas’s main competition in the contest, but his uncle-manager does not want him to be friendly. The mayor finds out that Lucas is the legendary rifleman and so he bets on him but Jim Lewis, the man who controls the town subtly threatens to kill Mark if Lucas doesn't throw the competition. After Vernon wins, his uncle demands of Lewis half the prize money as was planned for the arrangement but Lewis has him killed. When Lucas hears of this he takes all the bad guys on with a little help from Vernon, who gets wounded in the wrist, which may be the end of his career. The mayor says Lucas and Mark are welcome to stay and so that's the beginning.

            It wasn't much of a story but it was written by Sam Peckinpah and the young gun was played by Dennis Hopper. Lewis was played by Leif Erikson.