So begins "The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century/Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind" by Clare Bucknell (The New Yorker)(discussing a new book by cultural historian Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind").
April 18, 2023
"More than fifty years before it was isolated as a drug, Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed up cocaine."
"In the early years of the nineteenth century, the poet was increasingly dependent on opium, a 'free-agency-annihilating Poison,' as he called it, which sapped his will and made him despondent. 'A Gymnastic Medicine is wanting,' he wrote in his notebook during the winter of 1808-09, 'a system of forcing the Will & motive faculties into action.' The medicine he envisaged would be a kind of anti-opium, a tonic to kick-start the nerves, restore the mind’s athletic powers, and repair the broken link between volition and accomplishment. It would be a second, health-giving 'poison' to work on the first."
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A more truthful title would be the “unmaking of the modern mind.”
Long before Huey Lewis and the News...
As far as I can tell, Keith Richards never found that heroin did him much good. Cocaine was probably different: it fuelled long, many-day recording and song-writing sessions, always a great joy for Keith. (I think he wrote his book partly to show that it was always about the music for him, and partly to suggest that he was by no means the most excessive drug-taker around). He tried to kick heroin several times before finally succeeding.
I'm a 1956 boomer, and I keep thinking the boomers have tended to exaggerate their own accomplishments, and those of their heroes who were generally a bit older. If drug use is supposed to help with creativity, where are the results? Yes, songs, usually about two minutes long,that are still played endlessly. A greater accomplishment than classical music? Where are the books? Marcuse, in some ways an old-fashioned European guy, joined a few others at being enraged at the complacency of the "bourgeois." The young were taught to share this rage in a somewhat inchoate way. To some extent we now get the woke as a direct result.
A whole lot of words saying very little. Yes, all animals enjoy intoxication. No, it never leads to profound thought. It certainly can feel like it does though. There is scarcely a drug I haven't consumed to excess at one time or another. They all lead to the same place more or less.
Coleridge's "notebook" comprises four large volumes and four equal volumes of notes, almost three shelf feet. Kathleen Colburn devoted her life to editing it.
He liked to try all sorts of remedies and reported the results to himself.
The prayer that is mandated in public schools has been changed into “Lead us through temptation.”
Glorious free will .to enjoy ever sin has become a continuous drumbeat while the Soros installed DAs use their fiat to legalize theft and murder.
Personally I prefer the works of Samuel Coleridge Taylor.
There's DeQuincey's classic "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," very readable for its nice prose, like Coleridge.
“Black Nepalese, it got you weak in your knees
Gonna sneeze some dust that you got buzzed on
You know it's so hard to please
Newcastle Brown can sure smack you down
You take a greasy whore and a rollin' dance floor
You know you're jailhouse-bound“
"uncover the secrets of the mind"
The secret of secrets is that there are many ways to destroy it.
well coleridge didn't dream up cocaine, it came from south america,
fasvinating how david morrell has a whole series about dequincey as an investigator,
"uncover the secrets of the mind"
The secret of secrets is that there are many ways to destroy it.
That was part of what I was going to say. The other part:
You know how when you've had to much to drink, you can convince yourself that you're having an amazing insight, or making a brilliant argument, or (gahrie might remember this one, from my first-ever experience with drunkenness at Model United Nations) writing an incisive essay? And then you wake up the next day and it's all "hogamus higamus, men are polygamous" and stupid?
Well.
i was suprised that both coleridge and De Quincy lived to their mid-60s. Given the low life expectancy of the early 19th century and their drug use, I thought they'd lived fast and died young.
With progress, psychoactive drugs will allow us to see rainbows over the horizon.
There used to be a sometime commenter here called Person from Porlock. I always admired and was amused by the self-critical nature of that nom de blog.
Who knows how far Coleridge would have gotten with Kubla Khan if he had not been interrupted and detained for an hour on business?
Or maybe he made the whole thing up.
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
There are no "secrets of the mind." There are only minds, and substances.
I dabbled in drugs and alcohol when younger. They weren't much use in helping me find the secrets of existence. They occasionally although not reliably improved my mood. In my thirties, I discovered jogging. If you jog, depending on age and condition, five to ten miles, you can reliably put yourself into a good mood, gain a good night's sleep, and not have to worry about weight gain. The secret to a happy, healthy life is running around in a circle for an hour or so. I always thought it would be something more complicated, but sometimes the absurdity and banality of the human condition works in our favor.
Patrick O’Brien has Stephen Maturin chewing on coca leaves, and praising the effects, in the very early 1800s. as well as becoming addicted to laudanum.
A machine used for packing cocaine. It's able produce up to 150.000 packs a day.
via r/interestingasfuck
Adding to Boatbuilder, Patrick O'Brien's Stephen Maturin character starts with an ever-growing laudanum addiction, which he rationalizes in a number of ways, and which almost kills him. He discovers coca leaves on a visit to South America, and they eventually replace his laudanum habit.
A fictional encounter with a... inspired... Coleridge is a big part of one of Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently books (which I'll admit I prefer to his Hitchhikers Guide series)
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