Writing In Grass

In Tucson, most people starting smoking grass early in high school. There was the usual cross-section. Some people used it for intellectual, creative and artistic stimulation. Some people used it for boredom; some to be part of a group. Some people - they would later join frats - used it to take everything too far. This is demonstrated through this population's love of Hunter S. Thompson with his reds and blues in the trunk or the fact that High Times is still published. 

You might not realize that there are actually intelligent writings about grass. The most influential example is Baudelaire and his treatise called Artificial Paradises. Here, we find the lyric poet in the midst of some heady experimentation with a keen documentarian impulse. This is no "Bud Of The Month" centerfold. 

The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is color; in colors there is a music... You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that *your pipe* is smoking *you*; you are exhaling *yourself* in bluish clouds.

This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.

The third phase... is something beyond description. It is what the Orientals call *kef*; it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beatitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful men, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. Man has surpassed the gods.

This is sort of ridiculous, but it's an interesting document because of the resolute insistence on empiricism (and how that easily slips away into poetic flourishes throughout his procedure). How can every philosophical problem be resolved? How can everything become clear and transparent? How can anyone object to any of this?

Walter Benjamin certainly didn't object. He was so inspired by Baudelaire's scientifically stoned existence that he had to undertake his own experiments. The theorist wrote a letter to Ernst Schoen in 1919 after reading Artificial Paradises and claimed that "it will be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of the book." He took it seriously, too. Instead of recreational usage, Benjamin would ingest extreme quantities in one swoop. He didn't want to get high. He wanted "profane illumination." Here are a few of his findings:

1. Oven turns into cat.

2. I'd like to be transformed into a mouse mountain. (followed by "repeated short bursts of laughter")

3. Eating belongs to another world.

4. The subject finds himself inexplicably amused by the dullest of political slogans.

Ok. Maybe not profane illumination, but now we know why all the stoners love Obama.