Opium Groves

Instruction: Mooi Loop [1]

On a hot day, step into a dark room full of nothing. The only thing left here is the silence. Shoot it dead and leave it there, in the cornerest corner of the room. Some thin lights trickle through the curtains still - strangle them quickly. No one will ever notice.

Before you, in the middle of the room, a vessel sits. Its elongated shape reminds you of an erected spaceship or a canoe. But this is just a bathtub. The bathtub is filled with ink, ashes or shadows - whatever you would like there to be.

Come and lie down. Topple your dismal thoughts and beloved pains into this solid cold vessel. Take them inside of you genuinely, the way white paper or skin incorporates the flood of ink. With this ink inside, go back to wild men and pagans. Spread your mind out and depart.

You and your body are the point of enter and exit, departure and arrival. This is sealed and tattooed into the brain. What is trespassing and exists in between the arrival and the departure, is the Opium Groves, a volatile gesture of an abyss.

[1] Mooi Loop means “Walk away beautifully”, in Afrikaans. Used as a farewell expression.

I. EPILEPTOID TYPE

The ritualistic experience created by the shaman exists at the edge of ecstasy; at once mysticism, magic, and religion, in the broadest sense of the term.

According to the original traditions in Central Asia and Siberia, a shaman is a psychopomp[1], and he also may be a priest, a mystic, and a poet. A shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld. The shaman creates an experience but is simultaneously possessed by the experience.

The initiation of a shaman follows a common set of experiences, which may vary from individual to individual: usually sickness ensues; informative dreams and nightmares; a culminating experience of ecstasy out of which the shaman emerges with renewed strength, or in some cases his illness continues as part of the spiritual guidance. These initiating experiences transform the profane into the sacred by leading the shaman through suffering – death – resurrection.

[1] Psychopomp is a term used by Mircea Eliade in relationship to shaman and his image or, spirit. The origin of this word, however, is Greek, and it means a person who conducts spirits or souls to the other world, as Hermes or Charon (www.dictionary.com). Eliade, Mircea, and Willard R. Trask. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. New York: Bollingen Foundation; Distributed by Pantheon Books, 1964.

Starving garden:

Fall has cracked, its generosities split open.

I died a thousand years ago,

My corpse enlaced by airless eternity:

Leaking a gloomy shadow,

Stomach knitted by the sun, split open, in a meadow.

Here I am, in present tense,

The new, alive and poor,

Dense-mouthed,

With a rusted look and plans divine,

Dragging my imagination with me.

Evening shines with pale nietzche rays,

Warming all the earthly things,

The ancient haze

Of the human brain

Spied-up and burned away.

All the abysses curled up by strangers’ flesh and wings

Are waiting quietly for me,

Strangers’ nostrils breathing

Air into mysteries for me:

Blind, unripe wounds in my chest

Hissing greedily like roses

Stuck behind a fence.

II. PAN OPIUM*

Opium has been known to humanity since at least Neolithic times but until some centuries ago it was either eaten or drunk but wasn’t smoked. Europe specifically was reintroduced to opium during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, opium was considered a major panacea in Western medicine, but was also romanticized as a source of inspiration for artists, writers, etc. The ritual of opium use emerged from soldiers using morphine during the Franco-Prussian war, and spread among other social classes (especially during and after Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872).

Europeans adopted smoking opium as an exotic habit from the East. By the 1850s the first opium dens were established in the small enclaves of Asian immigrants in French, British and American harbor cities. The charm of opium dens attracted not only immigrants but also different classes of society regardless of social status level[1].

Smoking instead of drinking or eating opium was a sign of wanton withdrawal from society’s norms. This was followed by the phenomenon of usage for pleasure, hedonism and decadence, which was called “La belle époque” and ended in 1914.

Often in literary and poetic descriptions opium and the process of smoking were created as a portrait: the substance of opium became an integral part of the personalities of those writers.

* In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pan is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. - Wikipedia

[1] Gilman, Sander L., and Xun Zhou. Smoke: A Global History of Smoking. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

Opium merged with a human face.

In Jean Cocteau’s The Diary of His Cure[1] where he describes his opium experience and then his release from the addiction, he draws a whole personality out of opium. In his internal conversation with this creature, Cocteau also creates a very intimate space between himself and the drug.

Below is a mental dialogue between Cocteau (J.C. - a real person) and Pan Opium (P.O. - an inhabitant of the Opium Groves). The lines by Jean Cocteau in this dialogue are carefully borrowed from the book "Opium: The Diary of His Cure", and the lines by Pan Opium are fictional responses.

The conversation between the two became a chess game with its back and forth moves:

J.C. Addiction to opium is not a form of weakness, it is a form of extremism. An addiction seems to be an inevitable part of the human condition.

P.O. Ecstasy is a form of the extreme “self”. Or a manifested narcissism.

J.C. It is the barometer of a diseased sensibility.

P.O. Opium Groves creates a soft tissue touch. Be careful and don’t miss it.

J.C. Imagine a silence equivalent to the crying of thousands of children whose mothers do not return to give them the breast. The lover's anxiety transposed into nervous awareness…An absence which dominates, a negative despotism: now opium stirs up the past and the future, making them a present whole. It is the negative passion.

P.O. When death invades the human body, it negates the whole space that was previously filled by that body. Perhaps, from the point of view of geometry, if life is hills, death is plains. Hence, death is a state when a form becomes equal to the meaning (flatness, or absence).

J.C. Opium is a living substance. It doesn’t like to be rushed.

P.O. Opium is for soothing pain: where would you go if you didn’t want to go anywhere else?

J.C. Now the need for self-expression, for contact with the outside world, disappears with the hedonist. He doesn’t seek to create masterpieces, he seeks to become one himself, the most unknown, the most egoistical.

P.O. Isn’t wasting or “eating” time away and not leaving any traces behind us actually the best win over time? Traces evidence the fact that someone or something existed, but doesn’t exist in this space or a particular time frame anymore. If we don’t leave any traces, results or products of your life, will this guarantee us a victory over death?

J.C. Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing towards death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.

P.O. Don’t rush, catch the momentum. Find an unbalanced state of your mind to live in comfortably.

J.C. The notorious distortions due to opium. Slowness, laziness, inactive dreams.

…a wound in slow motion.

P.O. Opium Groves’s mind isn’t in an active state all the time. It is assumed, that there is a room for nothingness. Opium Groves worships nothingness, whenever it needs to.

J.C. If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

P.O. Opium Groves offers an escape. It is a place for getting comforted by those uncomfortable thoughts that you allow yourself to explore.

J.C. Raw things don’t ask for permission.

P.O. Opium Groves wants to turn your mind into clay in your hands.

J.C. Opium is a season. Opium is really effective once in every twenty cases…the space is experimental and not homogeneous.…the opium eater is himself eaten by opium.

P.O. Opium is a volatile mistress – temporary, ephemeral[2].

J.C. The importance of failure is capital. If one hasn’t understood this secret, this aesthetic, this ethic of failure, one has understood nothing…

P.O. The failure, just as much as the imperfectness – are one of the key substances that will constitute the body of the Opium Groves. Perfectness makes one sick.

J.C. All animals are charmed by opium. Addicts in colonies know the danger of this bait for wild beasts and reptiles. Flies gather round the tray and dream, the lizards with their little mittens swoon on the ceiling above the lamp and wait for the night, mice come close and nibble the dross. I do not speak of the dogs and monkeys who become addicted like their masters.

At Marseilles, among the Annamites, where one smokes with implements calculated to confuse the police (a gas-pipe, a sample bottle of Benedictine with a hole in it, and a hat-pin), the cockroaches and the spiders form a circle in ecstasy.

P.O. Opium Groves welcomes Everyone: people of mind and people of senses, mice and giants, nocturnes and daydreamers. However many legs can bring you to this place.

J.C. Checkmate.

P.O. Checkmate.

[Handshaking follows.]

[1] Jean Cocteau talks about opium as a live substance that creates the user rather than if the user created opium.

[2] Cocteau, Jean, and Margaret Crosland. Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure. London: Peter Owen, 1990.

Who is Pan Opium?

Selfish, Don Juan, decadent, nihilist, Bedouin, vagabond, bastard, Faust, gambler: always hungry and wet, vain and volatile, unbalanced and unfinished. NEVER DONE.

Once he reaches himself at the point of perfection, i.e. catches up with his own image or reflection, he will end right there. For the time being, he will be constantly becoming.

Pan Opium is the inhabitant of the endless Opium Groves.

In shamanistic cultures, the initiation process oftentimes involves dismemberment of the body.

The moment of transformation of the fleshly structures could be seen as a moment of crisis, and thus, a moment of ecstasy: the stitches of your body burst out and immense with the outside world in an endless enjoyment of self-denial.

Anything raw is flexible, unfinished and hence, amoral: like beauty or a newly born child.

MIKAZE, KA

Earth

Nibbling on the human drafts and crimes

And grinding them to crests,

To rootlets, to the freezing nests

Of obliviousness,

Its apathy flattening out a gentle man with softened curls

And a dead man with dissected nerves:

Ground souls, ground words, ground groves.