Books and Cities

 

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The listless, nocturnal circling and wandering of drunken masses through sprawling, bleak quarters is a frightening scene, similar to those depicted by De Quincey and Jack London in their memoirs. A cheap bar beckons on every corner; people drink on their feet, and the strong potions have an almost violent effect on the weakened constitutions. Swarms of streetwalkers, among them children, drift along in the current with drunk women and homeless people. Lurking between them are the types whose livelihoods depend on the intoxicated and the will-less: pimps, smugglers, pickpockets, and villains of every kind.

They do not drink for nostalgia or to get closer to others here; they drink to escape and to forget, and the awakenings are terrifying. The demon is ever present; with his unsurpassable nose, Dostoyevsky sensed this almost physically. His travel journals are veritable demonologies, the wanderings of a ghost-seer through the world. With the same certainty that a Tocqueville captured the political structures, he captured their boundless backgrounds—as if the one had occupied himself with the musculature, the other with the pneuma of a being. In Paris, Dostoyevsky found a great “stillness of order, so to speak! . . . a colossal, internal, spiritual regimentation having its source in the very soul . . . ,” it could have been a “Heidelberg on a colossal scale.”22London seemed to him the titanic negative image of civilized Parisian humanity, reposing in itself despite all the outward movement. A “fear of something or other” began to seize him during his walks through London, a city in which “on Saturday nights half a million working men and women and their children spread like the ocean all over town, clustering particularly in certain districts, and celebrate their sabbath all night long until five o’clock in the morning, in other words, guzzle and drink like beasts to make up for a whole week. They bring with them their weekly savings, all that was earned by hard work and with many a curse. Great jets of gas burn in meat and food shops, brightly lighting up the streets. It is as if a grand reception were being held for these white negroes. Crowds throng the open taverns and streets. There they eat and drink. The beer houses are decorated like palaces. Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly, gloomily and heavily, and everyone is somehow strangely mute. Only curses and bloody brawls occasionally break that suspicious and oppressively sad silence. . . . Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility . . . wives in no way lag behind their husbands and all get drunk together, while children crawl and run about among them.”23He then describes a walk through a glowing hellhole of lust. Léon Bloy expresses a similar aversion to London, vented in his extreme manner to the point of wishing for a cannon that could finish off the “capitale infâme” with one shot. Bloy comes at it from a different angle: that of a Spanish-flavored Catholicism observing Protestantism, analogous to the relationship between a cat and a dog.

Protestantism, without which our technological new world is unthinkable, finds it more difficult to spread into the wine-producing countries than into the northern ones. Transition zones often bring unexpected manifestations. Think of Geneva.

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Dostoyevsky’s vision, which could penetrate into even the Parisian “stillness,” was nevertheless not confused by the storm of images that frightened and unsettled him in London. He might have called the chapter in which he describes these impressions something like “Splendor and Misery of the Machine World.” He chose a different title: “Baal.” Evidently, he had perceived something more there: a power enthroned in the midst of the crowd.

A person looking for a way out never exits into a void; something is waiting at every possible egress. Fleeing is a fatal movement in itself. We can include suicide in this, with the exception of its stoic forms, which should not be regarded as evasion. “In certain circumstances, exiting life may become a duty for the brave.”24

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From the perspective of intoxication, scenes like those described by Dostoyevsky represent a meeting of narcotic and stimulating effects. Something gets forgotten, like a curtain with graying images painted on it being rolled up and away. Then another world appears behind it where a new master has been busy. The lights become harsher, the colors more vivid. Naked desires step forth. There were glowing embers deep under the ashes—now flames shoot up, as if stoked by bellows. The heart and lungs respond.

The senses also sharpen, for the smell of blood too. The masses scent blood on the wide streets and squares like ravenous predatory fish in a bend on the Amazon. There the river begins to boil; here it is the foaming of yeast. Twenty years before Dostoyevsky, Dickens had witnessed a similar scene: at the execution of the Manning couple who had been sentenced to death for a carefully planned murder and robbery. He presented his impressions in a letter to the Times:

“Sir, I was a witness of the execution at Horsemonger Lane this morning. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so. . . .

“When I came upon the scene at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching, and laughing, and yelling in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of ‘Mrs. Manning’ for ‘Susannah’ and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians, and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.”2579

Nothing good emerges in this spectacle. Yet it cannot be attributed to intoxication, for the altered state only reveals, as if a curtain were lifted or the door to a deep crypt opened. It is one key among others.

In seeking out this event and spending the night there, Dickens obeyed a higher curiosity to which the author is not only entitled but even obliged. When, as he says, he felt shame, that also is part of the course and especially important in an era like the Victorian, during which everything always came up smelling of roses.

Such cannibalism is after all innate in man, and it does not need an execution to express itself. Cruelty is almost anatomically inborn in man, like the blind spot in our eyes, and it is just as little noticed. In every epoch, there is an ostracized element on which the general aversion concentrates. These elements are branded as heretics, it is considered commendable to persecute them, and when something bad happens to them people feel gratified. This kind of gratification is also present in good people, even in Pickwickians.26 It begins as early as kindergarten or first grade.

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Here I need to resist the temptation of a long literary digression. Its theme would be the manner in which the attention of different writers focuses on these ostracized elements. It is significant whether this attention originates from outside—be it sympathetic or even benevolent—or from within. In this regard, the light that Dostoyevsky brings to bear on evil is fundamentally different from that of Dickens, Victor Hugo, or, to name an extreme case, Eugène Sue.

Dostoyevsky enters into Raskolnikov’s inner universe; he thinks, feels, and suffers with the murderer, and he is resurrected with him. He follows the great “Thou art that.”27 This is enlightening in the highest sense since the reader is included in the process of identification; but it does make the reading a purgatory for entire chapters—for instance, in Marmeladov’s confession or Raskolnikov’s plea of guilty.

This book, often described as a crime novel, is actually the opposite. The crime novel is fascinating because a human being is hunted in it; the chase, the clever tricks, the manhunt in the big city jungle: elements of a Great Hunt. Dostoyevsky takes us a floor deeper; the murderer appears as his own persecutor, but also his own self-conqueror. This touches us more intimately.

I also have to restrain myself here from bringing in Joseph Conrad: as a phenomenon of transition not only in East–West relations but also in the moral sphere, where his illumination of the ruined existence is unsurpassable. One might say that the roses begin to lose their sweet smell here. A ruined existence is an ambiguous case—a person no longer belongs to society, but he still recognizes its laws.

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I don’t think we have strayed too far from the theme with this; at worst, it has been a circumscribing of it. The pure observation of man, also when accompanied by sympathy or even compassion, only ever nears its subject imperfectly.

Something entirely different occurs when the author begins to enter into his subjects, to identify with them. Lavater once said that to truly understand someone else one has to imitate their face28—we can agree, assuming that this does not stop at the mask. This is the touchstone that separates the authentic from the simulated—it can also be applied to actors. Blood will always be called for, and the most faithful imitation, the finest character study, will never achieve what passion can. Then art becomes identical with nature, the mask melts into the primordial substance. The distinction can be found in all the arts, including the healing arts, and it always involves what no school or technique can teach.

Raphael said, “Understanding means becoming one.” We should include the animal in this relation; the ancient hunters always knew this. It applies not only to blood forms of hunting but also to the higher hunt with its spiritual, deathless capture of the prey. Here again the religions of the Far East distinguish themselves from those of the Middle East. Many other eras, including the most ancient, were closer to and understood the animal more profoundly than our own, despite all the sophistications of modern-day zoology. And never have there been such shameful ways of treating animals as in our day.

The poet, too, knows the mystery of the Great Hunt. As the ancient hunters invoked the animal with masks and dances, so he invokes it with words that do not stop at impressions of movement and patches of color. Brothers should generally not sing each other’s praise; nevertheless, I cannot ignore Friedrich Georg’s success in this domain—with the peacock, the owl, the snake, the hare, and others.

We return here to early, pre-mythical times, to the transformative powers of the Great Mother. Her dress may have many patterns and pleats, but it is made of a single fabric. This unity becomes clear in fairy tales; poets and artists in general remind us of this. More important than what they make us see and hear is what they help us forget. If they succeed with this One, all else is left behind: the fragmentary, the disputable, the separate—that is, time and its shadings.

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Dostoyevsky apparently saw something reassuring in the looser constitution of Paris and something frightening in the order of London. This attests to his penetrating but humane look. He saw Baal enthroned behind the spectacle on the Thames, and it frightened and fascinated him as it had inspired the portrayals of many others before and after him.

Dostoyevsky was likely thinking of the Bal or Bel who also appeared as a dragon and whom King Cyrus demanded of Daniel that he worship: “Thinkest thou not that Bel is a living God? Seest thou not how much he eats and drinks every day? . . . thou canst not say that he is no living god; therefore worship him.”29 Blake saw a green dragon manifesting in the form of the London Treasury Building.

The enduring reputation of this god Bel is of a hard and merciless master. The name Babylon, its principal seat, became synonymous with the metropolis as such, especially in its night side. Beyond this, Dostoyevsky also saw something specific: the stamp of puritanism in which enormous deployments of energy were coupled with an unwavering conscience. Hence, it is no coincidence that it was precisely in those puritanical zones that machine technology and its related forms of exploitation brought forth the precedents and model cases for critical reflection on these same phenomena.

If we look closely at this picture of London, the night side that is present in every metropolis and even in every small city is particularly bleak here. Like everything on offer in big cities, the varieties of vice are also more specialized and openly marketed. While the streets and quarters used for the purpose are similar in their essence everywhere, there are variations according to time and place: they are different in the capitals than in harbor or garrison towns, different where Hogarth studied them than where Toulouse-Lautrec did. There are cities with the age-old reputation of a Capua, and others that were founded expressly as centers of intoxication, gambling, and the sex trade.

In his Paris days, Dostoyevsky was undoubtedly also in Montmartre, but it was not there that Baal appeared to him to reign. He saw an orderly fabric in the Parisian ambience, in London an obscene disorder. We might have suspected the opposite impression, yet it is precisely here that his artistic incorruptibility is demonstrated—the artist whose gaze penetrates through the social veneer, through the varnish on a masterpiece, to its ground.

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Again, the question arises: why do the altered states produce sadder, gloomier images in northern countries than in the south? There is no wine of course, but that also has its reasons. The same is true for the sun and for the climate in general. Poe is from a southern state, but he is nonetheless the perfect example for all the horrors of the Anglo-Saxon “blackout.” Poe’s hells are different from Baudelaire’s because in Poe the machine appears no longer in its economic but in its demonic power. The enemy of the artist, indeed of man, is mechanical movement; Bosch had already seen that.

In the north, the separation from all that the altered state is supposed to provide is greater; much of the natural, innate cheerfulness is lacking. On the other hand, northerners have a greater talent to reflect this into skepticism; masters of irony, satire, and the grotesque thrive more naturally in the north.

The separation entails greater effort. To forget something, to flee from something, or, conversely, to want to achieve or gain something—the whole problem of intoxication moves between these two poles. The poorer the substance, the wider the gap to be bridged. The way home from a Victorian family dinner passed directly by a brothel. Works and doctrines become “edifying” when the foundations of the edifice have become too weak. What should be is reflected into the mere appearance of it.

The comparison with the desert keeps coming to mind. Nietzsche pondered the matter thoroughly and roamed the oases and mirages himself. His evaluation of crime is part of this picture, along with the historical projection into the Renaissance. But caution is called for here; optical illusions had already crept in with Jacob Burckhardt, a confounding of strengths and weaknesses the consequences of which are difficult to judge. This leads back to Gobineau. “Nostalgia for racial purity is a distinguishing trait of the half-breed”—another of those maxims by which I did myself no favors.

Nietzsche’s relationship with altered states is that of a hyper-sensitive; the sun, the air, even the barometric pressure can have euphoric effects on such constitutions. He shares this with his readers above all in The Dawn of Day. In its preface he speaks of the person who “desires a long period of darkness, an unintelligible, hidden, enigmatic something, knowing as he does that he will in time have his own morning, his own redemption, his own rosy dawn.”30

Here again we are in an approach.

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When the separation has become very great and the supervening element that we depend on very rare, then the intermediary zones and underworlds become more alluring—because things do not become absolutely barren. Now demons inhabit the crumbling altars.

The desolation must be grasped in the depths and not in the symptoms, for our visible world has no lack of outward variety. But this variety is bound to time and place, is dynamic in nature. We fly to the poles and even to the moon, and we bring our wastelands with us. So long as we stay in motion, the flood of images presses upon us. Why is it so insatiable, this hunger for images? It is a sign that the images are ultimately not satisfying. A real deficiency drives us to get beyond time and space.

Only where this hunger is no longer perceived as such can the mere images suffice; there they will seem complete in themselves, lacking nothing over, under, or behind them. They will no longer reveal their secrets to us. At this stage, people enjoy the contentment of the “Last Man” described by Nietzsche and after him by Huxley.

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Where life becomes very impoverished, intoxication is one of the last remaining resources. This is one reason why alcoholism also cannot be dealt with by priests. The alcoholic can be helped neither economically nor morally; it is a problem of being, something theology has become increasingly incapable of resolving.

The alcoholic drinks not only to escape his own misery. Above all, he yearns to approach a place in which not only hisneeds but need as such has been removed, where grief itself does not exist. His euphoria conceals more than comfort and the absence of pain. Dostoyevsky grasped this too with brilliant insight. How else could he have put this sentence in the mouth of his unhappy hero, Marmeladow: “I drink so that I may suffer twice as much.”31

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Natural cycles with their ebbs and flows are opposed to technical monotony: here the beat of the heart, there the cadence of the motor; here the poem, there the machine. The impulse to celebratory self-dissolution operates on both base and sublime levels—as much in those who drink away their weekly salary in the tavern as in the person who wants to say, “Once I lived like the gods!”

The cyclical rhythms are perceived more strongly where people still know the meaning of festivals and their joys; they are thus felt more strongly in untouched, archaic regions than in urbanized ones, more strongly in the country than in the city. The city is a single continuous fairground, it is light day and night. For this reason, the return—the real mystery of periodic cycles—is limited to only very big occasions. A return happens when the unmoving appears in the moving, the invisible in the visible—that is, when it is intimated in them.

There are thus more addicts in the city than in the country. One characteristic of addiction is that it tries to reduce the periodicity of the pleasure to a minimum, or even better, to a continuum. This flattens the peaks.

Cities also conceal addicts better than the countryside. They can live more anonymously, find shelter, change territories; the drugs are also easier to find.

In a small town, the village drunkard or the morphine addict are quickly identified and known to most, even when they try to hide their condition. This succeeds only when the transition from a strong habit to an unconditional addiction is not yet manifest. This is simultaneously the passage from open and approved consumption to a secret and suspect one.

Soon enough there is nothing left to hide; an inevitable loss of reputation and respect follows, apart from the economic, social, and health costs. The degeneration in the subject’s usual social manifestation, observed and suffered by family and friends, is perceived by the sufferer himself in the irrevocability of his demon. This is one of the saddest spectacles, described perhaps nowhere better than in some of E. A. Poe’s short stories.

Approaches : drugs and altered states / Ernst Jünger