Lapham's Quarterly: Intoxication

In Lewis Lapham's “Preamble,” he likens the enigmatic state of intoxication to a “house with many mansions,” of which we are offered the full-scale tour—told through first-hand accounts, from hallucinatory grandeur and theatrical revelry through political protest and crestfallen destitution. Broken into three parts—“the urge,” “the high,” and “the hangover”—the polychoral compilation yearns, awes, and then writhes through a singular experience of intoxication sung by the voice of the many who experienced it.

In “the urge” we hear from Harpo Marx with drinking buddy, John Barrymore:

“No matter where Barrymore stood, you had the illusion that he was under a spotlight. He was every inch, ounce, and fiber a masterful actor. He was also a masterful magician. By the time we sat down to eat, he was fried. He had stolen two drinks from me alone, before I'd had a sip of either one. I was under his spell and didn't know what had happened until it was too late.

During dinner I noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His shirt and jacket were soaked through, and sweat was streaming down his face. I told him to go ahead and take his coat off, if he was too warm. When he found my eyes, he gave me the piercing, pained look of a wounded eagle. “My dear Marx,” he said. “To perspire is a gift of Providence. It saves me the trouble of pissing.”

And what's not to love about Honoré de Balzac's madness for coffee:

“Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quickly march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

Followed by a sober view of the effects of alcohol addiction on Native Americans—Little Turtle, from a speech to the Baltimore Annual Meeting of Friends:

“Brothers, when our young men have been out hunting and are returning home loaded with skins and furs, on their way, if it happens that they come along where some of this whiskey is deposited, the white man who sells it tells them to take a little and drink. Some of them say no. I do not want it. They go until they come to another house, where they find more of the same kind of drink. It is there again offered. They refuse, and again the third time; but finally the fourth time, one accepts it and takes a drink, and getting one he wants another, and then a third and fourth till his senses have left him. After his reason comes back to him, he gets up and finds where he is. He asks for his peltry. The answer is, you have drank them. Where is my gun? It is gone. Where is my blanket? It is gone. Where is my shirt? You have sold it for whiskey. Now, brothers, figure to yourself what a condition this man must be in—he has a family at home, a wife and children that stand in need of the profits of his hunting. What must their wants be, when he is even without a shirt?

This, brothers, I assure you, is a fact that often happens among us. As I have before observed, we have no means to prevent it. If you, brothers, have it in your power to render us any assistance, we hope the Great Spirit will aid you.”

Fredrick Douglas spoke of similar disenfranchisement among enslaved African Americans through the employment of holiday intoxication as a means of crowd control:

“From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation, and woe betide the slaveholder the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling earthquake.”

From “the urge” we move on to the glory of “the high”:

“Now, little by little, I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.” —Albert Hoffman on LSD, 1943

Dennis Covington while investing snake handling in West Virginian churches:

“It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that's why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.”

And even an amputation facilitated by mesmeric trance:

“The operation was now commenced. “Mr. Ward, after one earnest look at the man,” in the words of Mr. Topham, “slowly plunged his knife into the center of the outside of the thigh, directly to the bone, and then made a clear incision round the bone, to the opposite point on the inside of the thigh. The stillness at this moment was something awful; the calm respiration of the sleeping man alone ... Yet, notwithstanding all this, the patient's “sleep continued as profound as ever. The placid look of his countenance never changed for an instant; his whole frame rested, uncontrolled, in perfect stillness and repose; not a muscle was seen to twitch. To the end of the operation, including the sawing of the bone, securing the arteries, and applying the bandages, occupying a period of upward of twenty minutes, he lay like a statue.” —John Elliotson, 1843

One of my favorites comes from Walter Benjamin on the riddle of trance:

“To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein—isn't that the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under the influence of hashish, we are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power.”

In “the hangover,” John Addington Symonds ponders having an actual Experience after the effects of chloroform and laughing gas have worn off:

“To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. Yet, this question remains: is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?”

And from a closing essay by Sven Birkerts on how intoxication helps pierce the veil of superficial experience to taste the underlying essence:

“For Emerson, the intoxication is not escape but access, a means of getting closer to “the fact,” which might, with heartfelt imprecision, be called life itself. What he means by “public power,” I think, is something like what Carl Jung and others later meant by the phrase collective unconscious , the emphasis falling on the unconscious , that posited reservoir of our shared archetypes and primordial associations—that which reason by itself cannot fathom, for it is, in essence, antithetical to reason. Only through this other communion, through short-circuiting of the mediations of the day self—the order-making Apollonian ego structure—can the poet reach what is the truer immediacy. For this to happen, the tyranny of time—the feeling of being trapped in a forward-moving sequence of moments—must be banished. Intoxication is, among other things, the destruction of the timekeeper, a release into the duration state.”

Quite the mix of insight! If you're curious to know more about the lot of the inebriated, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better compilation.