Sculptural vision, incredible lust (Opium)
Postponement of the concept of time, flying (Henbane)
Etc. etc.
In general, immense treasure lies concealed within the narcotic for the artist. It is an almost untouched land of gold from which the wise and lucky finder can again and again fashion new works of art if they desire.
Admittedly the resources of intoxication in no way facilitate or help the conscious work of artistic creation. On the contrary, the subsequent work of the artist is generally much more difficult, often extremely difficult.
In conclusion the average writer or painter would not be able to fashion these bits and pieces of captured phrases and words into works of art. They would remain cryptic nonsense.
The man on the street says, “Art is not work, it is a pleasure!”
This is the most belittling lie ever invented by the rich, the experts and the great masses that thoughtlessly chatter about it without ever having experienced even a tinge of ecstasy, let alone created a work of art! This ecstasy is always an agony, a suffering; even when- in rare cases the basis of its production was a pleasure.
Intoxication is not some miraculous method that will allow anyone to quickly paint, compose or write magnificent works of art. On the contrary, bringing material out from the subconscious into consciousness and fashioning it into art is something that only a person of high intelligence combined with strong talent is capable of.
Edgar Allan Poe
This booklet is dedicated to
Gustav Meyrink
Drunken Artist, dreamer, he believed dreams are the true reality just as Poe did. He wrote what he dreamed.
In the Alhambra
April 1905
Hanns Heinz Ewers
My feet stride lightly upon the morning stones of the old way that I have so often traveled up through the sacred groves at Alhambra. I long for that vast world behind the jeweled gate where time flies. I wander so lightly in the dreamland, where the elms rustle, where the spring babbles, where a hundred nightingales sing out from the laurel bushes. I can certainly reflect upon my poet there.
You should not do it. Really not. You should not go there and read any book about an artist you love. How can a priest speak about God? You need to be careful, so very careful.
This is what you should do:
You love Firdusi? Don’t you know Goethe wrote about him? Very well, first learn about Goethe before you read what he said about the Persian. Only then after you are convinced that he is qualified to write about your favorite read what he wrote. You will not be disappointed.
It doesn’t matter what the critics write about the artist you love. If the critics boast about him being a star or say he is only a wisp of mist- it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter if the critics are qualified because you are. You are telling the truth about your artist.
I haven’t done it this way. I’ve got a few drops of thick flowing German thoroughness in my blood, a sense of duty.
I thought:
Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me?
I thought:
“Perhaps—”
Many have written about Edgar Allen. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him.
There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum.
Now I need to forget what the others have said. I must forget the horrible Griswold whose poisonous vomit is not a Poe biography.
“He drank too much, he drank too much, such a shame, he drank too much!”
Also I must forget the horrible fool Ingram who would defend my artist’s honor in return by stammering “He did not drink, really, he did not drink”.
Quick, before I forget I’ll put down the dates I have about him:
Edgar Allen Poe, born on 19 January 1809 in Boston. Irish family, long pedigree, Norman, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Italian blood. 1816 to England with his foster parents, a couple of years in a boarding school in Stoke-Newington, 1822 back to America, 1826 student in Richmond, then in Charlottesville, 1827 travel through Europe with unknown adventures, 1830 Cadet Officer at West Point, 1834 Head of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. 1836 married his cousin Virginia Clemm. He wrote. [1]He lived in various places, in New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Fordham. He had a rough time. “He drank too much”, (said Griswold). “He does not drink”, (said Ingram). He died on 7 October in a hospital for the poor in Baltimore, forty years old.
So, these are the all-important dates. Now I can forget.
How difficult it is. For a long time I go along the elm lined avenue up to the royal palace. I turn left and enter the gate to the mighty tower of Justice. I am glad of the hand above that averts the evil eye. I think, this might keep my moralists outside. Now I am above, alone in the familiar spaces.
I know exactly where I want to go. Quick through the myrtle courtyard, through the hall of the Mocaraben into the courtyard of the twelve lions. Enter left into the room of the two sisters and through it to the Ajimeces. Now I’m there in Mirador de Daraxa, where Boabdil’s mother Aicha lived. I sit by a window looking out on the old cypress trees.
How hard it still is to forget! There go my moralists strolling in the garden. Two English hypocrites with round hats, short pipes, black jackets and reviews in their hands.
“He drinks too much”, hisses one.
“Oh no, he does not drink at all”, chimes the other.
I would like to knock their heads together!
“Go away you rats, go away! I’m sitting here dreaming about an artist I love. He sang in your language and you sticks know nothing about him!”
They left all right. Be certain of that. I am alone once more.
He drinks too much. He does not drink. That is how the English argue about their poet. They let Milton starve, they steal Shakespeare’s entire life’s work, they scrabble with crooked fingers in Byron’s and Shelley’s family history, they vilify Rossetti and Swinburne, stick Wilde in prison and point their fingers at Charles Lamb and Poe. Because they drank!
I’m so glad that I’m a German! Germany’s great men are permitted to be indecent. Indecent—Certainly that means not as decent as the good citizens and moralists. The Germans say, “Goethe was a great poet.” They knew he had vices but did not consider them.
The English say, “Byron was indecent, therefore he was not a great poet.”
Only in England could the repulsive moral preacher Kingsley create a household phrase about Heine.
“Do not speak of him. He was a wicked man!”
When no one listens, when people gather round to acknowledge the “indecent” English poet they love, the Englishman is finally compelled to speak and then he will lie. He does not give up on his hypocrisy. He says then, “After further examination he was not at all indecent but of high morals, completely pure and completely blameless!
This is why the English liar could not take it any more and vindicated Wilde’s honor with a Saul to Paul conversion. The same with Poe and Ingram’s reply to Griswold.
“Oh no, He did not really drink!”
The English have only now after all this time officially recognized that Edgar Allan Poe was a decent man!
We however, never make a big deal of middle class and moralistic purity. We love him even if he drank. Still more, we love him because he drank. Even though toxins destroyed his body, great art sprang out of his life’s blood, that was his gift. The layman does not determine how great art originates. It comes from out of the artist himself. No one is permitted a say in this or a derogatory judgement or cut-down.
Only the few whose insight perceives the creative process because they love him, only they are permitted to watch in silence, to comment.
Wilde related the fairy tale of the lovely rose created from the heart’s blood of a dead nightingale. The fallow studen
t looked and wondered, never had he seen such a marvelous blood red rose. But he had no idea how it was created.
by E. Manet
Edgar Allen Poe
We admire the Tiger Orchid. Is the magnificent orchid less beautiful because it feeds on insects by slowly torturing them to death in the narrow way? We are joyed and amazed at the glorious lilies in the Park of Cintra. We have never seen any so large and so white! How does it happen that their exceptional beauty is owed to the clever gardener that fertilizes the ground not with pure water but with treatments of Guano, applied manure?
Sometimes a sympathetic smile comes at the wide country roads our art must travel by chance before it shines meagerly here and there like a lantern piercing the fog of intoxication. There are times when it only comes through the union of intoxication and art. Then it is the only way great inspiration can come out from within and make itself known. When this happens the highest place must be given to the scouts Hoffman, Baudelaire and Poe, who first worked consciously through intoxication to find their art.
Let’s be honest! Is there an artist that can go without stimulation? No one can do without their little stimulants, tea, tobacco, coffee, beer or what ever. Do these things hinder our inspiration of art or help shape its spirit more clearly?
They often help shape it more clearly.
Art is contrary to nature. A man that lives in abstinence keeping body and mind pure and whose ancestors also lived in abstinence for long generations has poisoned blood and can never become an artist! Not even God’s favor in life can awaken the ecstasy. Its spirit has been poisoned.
Nature and Art are the worst enemies. Where one exists the other is not possible.
In the best sense what precisely is an artist? A pioneer of culture in the new territory of the unconscious. In this holy sense how few deserve this proud name! Th. A. Hoffman deserves it and Jean Paul and Villiers and Baudelaire and most certainly Edgar Allan Poe. Griswold must admit to himself that this poet of the soul related in so many of his stories a secret land considered by no one before him and gave us a first glimpse of a new genre of literature.
This powerful land of the unconscious, the land of our eternal desire lies in gray hazy clouds. The beggar lies warm in the sun. The commoner crouches sated by the oven. But there are those whose desire is so immense that their inspiration must come bleeding out.
They must in triple protect their breast when they leave the land of consciousness and steer through the gray murderous flood back toward Avalon.
Many, many get dashed to ground without casting a single glimpse behind the clouds. Very few succeed at this journey. These discover new territory for the culture and the border of the unconscious is pushed back a little further.
The artists are these first great explorers. Then mankind may equip researchers to survey and investigate this new land. They send in officials and civil servants to organize and record-men of science.
It is certain that in addition to other ways the so-called poisons we call narcotics are capable of taking us across the threshold of consciousness. If anyone has success and gets solid footing on the “other side” they can metaphysically in a positive way create new works of art. They are in the finest sense an artist.
Maybe it is necessary to stress the truth that art can never converse naturally with self except while working through frenzy. Some form of stimulation is needed. Or another, that no intoxicant in the world can bring art out of a person that has none inside to begin with!
The Griswolds and Ingrams want less wine drinking, less opium smoking, less hashish eating. If they had their way no more art would be created!
But he who works through intoxication together with narcotics creates suitable conditions where ecstasy can be invoked. This highest level of ecstasy can be invoked in anyone according to his or her intelligence and capability.
Griswold was right. Edgar Allen Poe drank. And yes, he drank too much. His body reacted badly to alcohol. His addiction was hereditary, so he drank a lot. He drank too much. But his actions were deliberate. While in the intoxicated condition things came out in a frenzy that later, perhaps years later, were shaped into new works of valuable art. Such intoxication is no pleasure. It is a horrible agony where awareness is only of the yearning for the art blazing like the mark of Cain upon his brow.
It is a belittling lie of the narrow minded that artistic production is no work, that it is a joy. Those that say so and the large masses with their thankless thought chatter never have a hint or breath of the ecstasy that only the artistic condition produces. This frenzy is always an agony to experience even if the ecstasy at first brings delight.
It is said the mother cat has pleasure bringing her young into the world but they are only poor blind kittens. This may be the weekend chatter of the Buxtehuder Newspaper like the writer of “Berlin at night” who with pleasure puts his lines on paper.
A work of art is never born without pain.
I am going out. Through the enormous palace of the Roman Emperor Karl that led the German Nation. Cross through the mighty columned courtyard and out through the long avenue of white blooming acacia. Through the meadow covered with thousands of blue Irises.
I unlock and let myself into the Tower of the Princesses. The sultan’s daughters, Zayda, Zorayda and Zorahayda secretly listened at these windows to the songs of a captured knight during the time of the crusdades.
Over the valley on the hill I see the boundary where Boabdil gave his last sigh over the lost Granada. From the Generalife gardens I can clearly see the ancient cypress where the last Moorish king’s wife, the beautiful Hamet, brought disaster through her tryst with Abenceragen deep in the shadows.
Every stone here tells a sad tragic legend.
Down at the bottom of the valley the road continues on the long way to the cemetery. A pair of black goats graze on the green slopes. In back, under the prison tower sits a ragged customs agent in front of his filthy den. Long eared rabbits graze close to him and nearby seven cocks battle, pecking the ground or flying after each other, combs and black feathers plucked.
Far in the east glows the snow on the purple-red Sierra Nevada.
A troop of ragged urchins moves slowly across the valley bottom. Two carry a small child’s coffin on their shoulders open in the Spanish custom. Another shoulders the lid. The coffin is very simple, three yellow planks and two plain ones. But a small waxy face and dark hair appear out of the flowers, many flowers, red, yellow, white and blue flowers that have been placed inside.
No Priest, no relatives, no father or mother in the procession, only ragged urchins. Still, the dead child rests in such fresh blooming fragrance among so many colored flowers. How good they didn’t close her eyes! They look around curious at the colored flowers, at the old Moorish Palace and then back to the splendor of her flowers, this small dead maiden, so contented and fortunate to never again be alive.
by H. Crickmore
Poe’s Cottage at Fordham
If only Edgar Allen Poe could have sat here in the Alhambra. How he would have dreamed! How the colorful stories would have flown lightly around his head before landing! With a few quick words he could have built an Alhambra whose thick towers would have withstood the rain and endured for centuries.
Here he might have found another way to reach ecstasy. He might not have needed to drink. But the poor poet’s soul was stuck over there in New England strongly penning realistic prose while
at the same time Washington Irving, the English model of morality, was allowed to dream in the moonlight magic of Alhambra..His Tales of Alhambra have become world famous.
Day by day I see strangers enter this sacred place, in their hand reviews and in their jacket pockets Edgar Allan Poe’s book. This is how they read The Fall of the House of Usher or the Dionysian Last Days of Pompeii!
Can’t you perceive the influence of Lord Lytton or Irving’s spirit within this pair of beautiful stories? No, a whisper from a Catholic cemetery flows through the ha
unted Moorish palace in his soul. Although he was no famous poet, although he was only a common journalist, not Bulwar, not Irving created these beauties. He created Pompeii and the Alhambra in spite of them.
Poe’s ability was not enough for his burning desire. The only method that worked was to gather up everything he had inside using it to awaken and carry him into ecstasy. The entire amount of stimulation he surrounded himself with was barely able to lead him to this condition.
If this unhappy poet only once in his life received a kiss from the Muse it was through his beautiful wife, Virginia Clem. The moralists want to call this intoxication holy and divine while forcefully rebuking the poet’s other ecstasies, those from alcohol and from Opium, as unholy and devilish. They are equal! The valuable art that came forth from them was no less glorious.
The agony from the divinely consecrated ecstasy was scarcely inferior to the devilish! Where another was in paradise he was in hell, a passionate blissful hell whose flames were no less scorching. The hand of the poet was rich and Morella, Ligeia, Berenice and Lenore are all owed to the dying eyes of Virginia before her death was certain. He knew the gleaming red of her cheeks lied, knew it was a deception and that within the depths of her moist, shimmering eyes an unrelenting illness grinned out at him.
In the evening when he stroked her beloved locks he could sense, “She won’t live many more days” and in the morning, “Another day less”.
It was a dying person that his lips kissed, a dying person whose beautiful head lay next to him nights when he rested. When he was awakened by the rattle and laborious wheezing of her hard working lungs he would see the white linen shroud, see the cold drops of death sweat on her brow. The visible long drawn out death of his beloved took years. That was the only “fortune” this luckless poet ever had.
Hanns Heinz Ewers Volume I (Collected Short Stories by Hanns Heinz Ewers) Page 21