Chapter II: Part 2

“Emerson, O you, you were a kid once too, weren’t you? I don’t believe you ever were. If I had a rotten egg I’d throw it at you.”

“There’s a blue phosphorescent light in your face,--.”

“I’d rather laugh than vomit any day.” Strikes the bowl which was placed near him in case the cannabis produced emesis. “But I’m not a dog and I’ll not return to my vomit. That dog was a damn fool. There are a lot of things in the Bible that are damn fool things.”

“I’ve been doing all sorts of laughter. Couldn’t you have a system of prosody, and divide it off into feet like poetry, and have a Laughing Poet whose contributions would be accepted by the comic papers?” Whistles and sings and drums rhythmically with his finger-tips on the bowl.

When I confirm a statement of his by answering “Yes,” he says, “Don’t be butting in, Victor, this is my show.” Points his finger at me and laughs. Sensations must be very acute, for while clearing my throat to say something, but before uttering anything, he hears me and exclaims. “There you go, butting in again. But don’t be afraid, I’m not getting pugnacious; it all ends in laughter.” But for a moment does become quarrelsome.

“I had a good thought, but I don’t know what’s best: to stick to the thought or stick to the laughter?”

“If Chauncey Depew should be wrecked in the New York Central, wouldn’t that be funny? Would it be poetic justice? No, it would be the justice of laughter. Oh, it would be the laughter of the gods!” He raises himself and swings his arm dramatically. Laughter leaps from his insides as if it were a geyser spouting up, and rushes from his lips as if it were a cataract bounding down a boulder.

He theorizes about egoism and Max Stirner, but I can not jot down the reflection in its entirety.

He says I have no sense of humor to sit there taking notes, instead of joining him in laughing.

“Of course you understand why I am laughing. But your old cook--if she hears me, she’ll send for the police.”

“It’s too bad that when I’m having such a good time, I should be troubled by a dry taste in the mouth. It’s another evidence that the world was created by a damn fool or a lunatic. There is always some little thing that interferes.”

Talks sensibly awhile, and then says impatiently: “I want to stop all this talking, and get to laughing again. I’m not complaining about the effects from hasheesh, because I consider it worth everything.”

“Oh, tell me, pretty maiden, why can’t a little canary bird whistle a symphony, for instance, Tchaykovsky’s _Le Pathetique_?” Whistles, waves his hand fantastically. “As damn little as I know about music, not having been gifted by nature in that direction”--twists his arms in a grotesque manner--“I’m able to get a bunch out of Tchaykovsky. I don’t mean Comrade Tchaykovsky, the revolutionist in Russia, I mean Peter Ilitch Tchaykovsky. The itch of that Ilitch--it seems like a personal ailment, it sounds insulting.”

Throws a piece of paper at me, but says, “Don’t be afraid, I’ll break no bones.”

I ask him to tell the time. He gazes intently at the clock, and says, “I want to get it exactly on the fraction of a second. But it changes so quickly, I can’t.” Gives it up in disgust.

Claims a heavy feeling is creeping over him, and wonders if it is due to increased blood-pressure. “But what am I beginning to talk serious for? I could keep on laughing for a couple of weeks, except that I don’t want to keep you up.”

“If Spencer had been more of a sport and had taken some of this stuff, he would have had material for his essay, _The Physiology of Laughter_.” To see a man drugged with hasheesh quoting the profoundest of synthetic philosophers is too much for my gravity, and for a moment my scream of laughter eclipses even his.

“Ah, I’m beginning to get light again. It’s much nicer to be light and delicate. To be a filmy butterfly, and float in fancy,”--his face assumes an expression of poetic beauty, and he speculates whether man should live a life of beauty or of duty.

“Oh, I’m willing to laugh....” Throws off the blankets and cries, “Throw off the bonds of all existence!”

I ask him what day it is. “I hope,” says he, with a melodramatic wave of the hand, “I will express the modest hope, that in accordance to my wishes, and in conformity to my desires, it is Sunday night! Sunday night! Sunday night!”

Sits up, looks at me roughishly and laughs.

“I feel a metalliferous touch within me.” “I’d rather have a cramp in my leg than in my brain. Some people would call this a brain-cramp, wouldn’t they?” Laughs, kicks up his legs.

“If you got erotic while laughing, wouldn’t it be blasphemy? Worse than laughing in church.”

“Have no illusions of death yet. I am still in a position to laugh death in the face, to laugh death in the face, to laugh ...”--and he proves it. He claps his hands together merrily.

Has a lucid moment, looks at the clock, and says simply and correctly, “10 to 3.”

Imitates a Frenchman most admirably, accent, gestures, etc.

The door opens, and my father--who has found it impossible to sleep with a roaring volcano in the house--enters. I ask Mr. Lemon to tell my father about Chauncey Depew and the Grand Central. Mr. Lemon is highly pleased, and repeats the story with intense zest. He enlarges it, and claims Depew has got Elbert Hubbard beat as a hypocrite. He says all who believe Depew deserves to be killed should signify it by saying Aye, and then he himself, as if he were a whole assembly, shouts out, Aye! Aye! Aye! “The Ayes have it,” he announces with the air of a man who has just won an important victory. My father and I laugh heartily. There is no limit to Mr. Lemon’s happiness. “That’s right,” he says, “it’s good, take it down, old man.”

He cannot bear a moment’s abstinence from laughter. “Cast aside all irrelevant hypotheses, and get to the laughing. I proclaim the supremacy of the laugh, laughter inextinguishable, laughter eternal, the divine laughter of the gods.”

My father leaves the room. “Everything has a comic element if you look at it right. It seemed to me that your father went down into the cellar because he couldn’t sleep on account of my damn foolishness.” He wallows in amusement, but at the same time expresses sincere regret that he is preventing my father and me from sleeping, and says next time he will take hasheesh in the daytime.

My father re-enters, and desires to feel his pulse. At first Mr. Lemon objects vehemently to being touched, but then smiles the sweetest of smiles, and with the demeanor of a martyred Bruno marching to the stake, stretches forth his hand, saying, “In the interests of science I am willing.” But after a few seconds Mr. Lemon pulls his hand impatiently away, and exclaims angrily, “You’ve been holding it half an hour.” His pulse is about 100.

“Come on in, the hasheesh is fine! You laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh like an imbecile. Who can laugh in more ways than me? Not any fellow that I can see.”

Begins to philosophize about savages, but loses the thread of his thoughts. I remind him what he was talking about; he thinks a moment, taps his forehead significantly, and says, “There was a laugh there before, and now I’ve lost it.”

“Every tick of the clock is another instant that you’re wasting time over this damn foolishness.”

“Laughter is indisputable and for its own sake. I proclaim the laugh for the laugh’s sake.” The English tongue is insufficient for him; he coins words of his own: “Laughfinity!” he shouts. “Laughinosity!” he screams. “The whole world is a blooming joke.”

“Which is best,” he asks innocently, “the Laughing Goddess, or the Goddess of Laughter?” “The Laughing Goddess,” answers my father. Exultation shines thru the dilated pupils of the questioner, as he responds, “I knew I would catch you. The Laughing Goddess reminds you by the association of ideas of the laughing hyena, and then instead of being the goddess presiding over the divine function of laughter, she becomes a laughing stock.”

I ask him something about figures. “Figures,” he answers, “are intellectually beneath me. In short, I would never be a great mathematician. Yet I appreciate the metaphysics of mathematics. I adore, I prostrate myself before mathematics as long as there are no figures in it.” Hearing our laughter, he explains, “Yet this isn’t so foolish as it seems. Up to a certain point in geometry there are no figures.”

“I would have talked more sensibly if Emerson had not been there.” Bangs his legs against the edge of the bed; my father asks him if he hurt himself. “Not on a material plane; it was a psychic jar of which you cannot conceive.”

Speaks in a declamatory tone: “I am all the time on the borderline between Science and Folly. Which god shall ye follow, young man?”

My father tells him he can stop laughing if he wishes. “No, sir,” comes the emphatic response, “not if you lived in my world. It is a categorical imperative in the world of hasheesh: Thou shalt laugh.”

It is already four o’clock in the morning. I am loath to leave this frolicsome dynamo of blithesomeness, this continuous current of good-cheer, this generator of joyousness, but there is a hard day’s work before me and I need a little sleep, so with a last look at his Mirthful Majesty, I leave him alone in his glory and his giggles.

Four hours later I peep in. The intellectual merry-andrew who criticizes the Concord Transcendentalist and juggles philosophic conceptions even under the effects of dope, is motionless. Lassitude has usurped the throne of laughter.

I cannot tell what effect the reading of this case will produce on others, but in me it awakens such risibility that I hope never to think of it on an occasion when silence or solemnity is enjoined; for if I do, there is danger of my being ejected as unceremoniously as was Washington Irving on the day he laughed at _The Art of Book Making_, in the grave sanctuary of the British Museum.

There yet remains my own case. On March 4th, 1910, I came home, feeling very tired. I found that some cannabis indica which I had expected had arrived. After supper, while finishing up an article, I began to debate with myself whether I should join the hasheesh-eaters that night. The argument ended in my taking 20 minims at 9 o’clock. I was alone in the room, and no one was aware that I had yielded to temptation. An hour later I wrote in my memoranda book: Absolutely no effect. At 10.30, I completed my article, and entered this note: No effect at all from the hemp. By this time I was exhausted, and being convinced that the hasheesh would not act, I went to bed in disappointment. I fell asleep immediately.

I hear music. There is something strange about this music. I have not heard such music before. The anthem is far away, but in its very faintness there is a lure. In the soft surge and swell of the minor notes there breathes a harmony that ravishes the sense of sound. A resonant organ, with a stop of sapphire and a diapason of opal, diffuses endless octaves from star to star. All the moon-beams form strings to vibrate the perfect pitch, and this entrancing unison is poured into my enchanted ears. Under such a spell, who can remain in a bed? The magic of that melody bewitches my soul. I begin to rise horizontally from my couch. No walls impede my progress, and I float into the outside air. Sweeter and sweeter grows the music, it bears me higher and higher, and I float in tune with the infinite--under the turquoise heavens where globules of mercury are glittering.

I become an unhindered wanderer thru unending space. No air-ship can go here, I say. I am astonished at the vastness of infinity. I always knew it was large, I argue, but I never dreamt it was as huge as this. I desire to know how fast I am floating thru the air, and I calculate that it must be about a billion miles a second.

I am transported to wonderland. I walk in streets where gold is dirt, and I have no desire to gather it. I wonder whether it is worth while to explore the canals of Mars, or rock myself on the rings of Saturn, but before I can decide, a thousand other fancies enter my excited brain.

I wish to see if I can concentrate my mind sufficiently to recite something, and I succeed in correctly quoting this stanza from a favorite poem which I am perpetually re-reading:

“Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.”

It occurs to me that it is high honor for Tennyson to have his poetry quoted in heaven.

I turn, I twist, I twirl. I melt, I fade, I dissolve. No diaphanous cloud is so light and airy as I. I admire the ease with which I float. My gracefulness fills me with delight. My body is not subject to the law of gravitation. I sail dreamily along, lost in exquisite intoxication.

New scenes of wonder continually unravel themselves before my astonished eyes. I say to myself that if I could only record one one-thousandth of the ideas which come to me every second, I would be considered a greater poet than Milton.

I am on the top of a high mountain-peak. I am alone--only the romantic night envelops me. From a distant valley I hear the gentle tinkling of cow-bells. I float downwards, and find immense fields in which peacock’s tails are growing. They wave slowly, to better exhibit their dazzling ocelli, and I revel in the gorgeous colors. I pass over mountains and I sail over seas. I am the monarch of the air.

I hear the songs of women. Thousands of maidens pass near me, they bend their bodies in the most charming curves, and scatter beautiful flowers in my fragrant path. Some faces are strange, some I knew on earth, but all are lovely. They smile, and sing and dance. Their bare feet glorify the firmament. It is more than flesh can stand. I grow sensual unto satyriasis. The aphrodisiac effect is astonishing in its intensity. I enjoy all the women of the world. I pursue countless maidens thru the confines of heaven. A delicious warmth suffuses my whole body. Hot and blissful I float thru the universe, consumed with a resistless passion. And in the midst of this unexampled and unexpected orgy, I think of the case reported by the German Dr. Reidel, about a drug-clerk who took a huge dose of hasheesh to enjoy voluptuous visions, but who heard not even the rustle of Aphrodite’s garment, and I laugh at him in scorn and derision.

I sigh deeply, open my eyes, and find myself sitting with one foot in bed, and the other on my desk. I am bathed in warm sweat which is pleasant. But my head aches, and there is a feeling in my stomach which I recognize and detest. It is nausea. I pull the basket near me, and await the inevitable result. At the same time I feel like begging for mercy, for I have traveled so far and so long, and I am tired beyond limit, and I need a rest. The fatal moment approaches, and I lower my head for the easier deposition of the rising burden. And my head seems monstrously huge, and weighted with lead. At last the deed is done, and I lean back on the pillow.

I hear my sister come home from the opera. I wish to call her. My sister’s name is Ellen. I try to say it, but I cannot. The effort is too much. I sigh in despair. It occurs to me that I may achieve better results if I compromise on Nell, as this contains one syllable instead of two. Again I am defeated. I am too weary to exert myself to any extent, but I am determined. I make up my mind to collect all my strength, and call out: Nell. The result is a fizzle. No sound issues from my lips. My lips do not move. I give it up. My head falls on my breast, utterly exhausted and devoid of all energy.

Again my brain teems. Again I hear that high and heavenly harmony, again I float to the outposts of the universe and beyond, again I see the dancing maidens with their soft yielding bodies, white and warm. I am excited unto ecstasy. I feel myself a brother to the Oriental, for the same drug which gives him joy is now acting on me. I am conscious all the time, and I say to myself in a knowing way with a suspicion of a smile: All these visions because of 20 minims of cannabis indica. My only regret is that the trances are ceaseless. I wish respite, but for answer I find myself floating over an immense ocean. Then the vision grows so wondrous, that body and soul I give myself up to it, and I taste the fabled joys of paradise. Ah, what this night is worth!

The music fades, the beauteous girls are gone, and I float no more. But the black rubber covering of my typewriter glows like a chunk of yellow phosphorus. By one door stands a skeleton with a luminous abdomen and brandishes a wooden sword. By the other door a little red devil keeps guard. I open my eyes wide, I close them tight, but these spectres will not vanish. I know they are not real, I know I see them because I took hasheesh, but they annoy me nevertheless. I become uncomfortable, even frightened. I make a superhuman effort, and succeed in getting up and lighting the gas. It is two o’clock. Everything is the way it should be, except that in the basket I notice the remains of an orange--somewhat the worse for wear.

I feel relieved, and fall asleep. Something is handling me, and I start in fright. I open my eyes and see my father. He has returned from a meeting at the Academy of Medicine, and surprised at seeing a light in my room at such a time, has entered. He surmises what I have done, and is anxious to know what quantity I have taken. I should have answered, with a wink, _quantum sufficit_, but I have no inclination for conversation; on hearing the question repeated, I answer, “Twenty minims.” He tells me I look as pale as a ghost, and brings me a glass of water. I drink it, become quite normal, and thus ends the most wonderful night of my existence.

In the morning my capacity for happiness is considerably increased. I have an excellent appetite, the coffee I sip is nectar, and the white bread ambrosia. I take my camera, and walk to Central Park. It is a glorious day. Everyone I meet is idealized. The lake never looked so placid before. I enter the hot-houses, and a gaudy-colored insect buzzing among the lovely flowers fills me with joy. I am too languid to take any pictures; to set the focus, to use the proper stop, to locate the image, to press the bulb--all these seem herculean feats which I dare not even attempt. But I walk and walk, without apparent effort, and my mind eagerly dwells on the brilliant pageantry of the night before. I do not wish to forget my frenzied nocturnal revelry upon the vast dome of the broad blue heavens. I wish to remember forever, the floating, the mercury-globules, the peacock-feathers, the colors, the music, the women. In memory I enjoy the carnival all over again.

“For the brave Meiamoun,” writes Theophile Gautier, “Cleopatra danced; she was apparelled in a robe of green, open at either side; castanets were attached to her alabaster hands.... Poised on the pink tips of her little feet, she approached swiftly to graze his forehead with a kiss; then she recommenced her wondrous art, and flitted around him, now backward-leaning, with head reversed, eyes half-closed, arms lifelessly relaxed, locks uncurled and loose-hanging like a bacchante of Mount Maenalus; now again active, animated, laughing, fluttering, more tireless and capricious in her movements than the pilfering bee. Heart-consuming love, sensual pleasure, burning passion, youth inexhaustible and ever-fresh, the promise of bliss to come--she expressed all.... The modest stars had ceased to contemplate the scene; their golden eyes could not endure such a spectacle; the heaven itself was blotted out, and a dome of flaming vapor covered the hall.”

But for me a thousand Cleopatras caroused--and did not present me a vase of poison to drain at a draught. Again I repeated to myself: “And all these charming miracles because of 20 minims of _Fluidextractum Cannabis Indicæ_, U. S. P.”

By the afternoon I had so far recovered as to be able to concentrate my mind on technical studies. I will not attempt to interpret my visions psychologically, but I wish to refer to one aspect. Spencer, in _Principles of Psychology_, mentions hasheesh as possessing the power of reviving ideas. I found this to be the case. I spoke about air-ships because there had been a discussion about them at supper; I quoted from Tennyson’s _Maud_ because I had been re-reading it; I saw mercury-globules in the heavens because that same day I had worked with mercury in preparing mercurial plaster; and I saw the peacock-tails because a couple of days previous I had been at the Museum of Natural History and had closely observed a magnificent specimen. I cannot account for the women.

All poets--with the possible exception of Margaret Sangster--have celebrated Alcohol, while Rudyard Kipling has gone so far as to solemnize delirium tremens; B. V. has glorified Nicotine; DeQuincy has immortalized Opium; Murger is full of praise for Caffeine; Dumas in _Monte Cristo_ has apotheosized Hasheesh, Gautier has vivified it in _Club des Hachichins_, Baudelaire has panegyrized it in _Artificial Paradises_, but as few American pens have done so, I have taken it upon myself to write a sonnet to the most interesting plant that blooms:

Near Punjab and Pab, in Sutlej and Sind,
Where the cobras-di-capello abound,
Where the poppy, palm and the tamarind,
With cummin and ginger festoon the ground--
And the capsicum fields are all abloom,
From the hills above to the vales below,
Entrancing the air with a rich perfume,
There too does the greenish Cannabis grow:
Inflaming the blood with the living fire,
Till the burning joys like the eagles rise,
And the pulses throb with a strange desire,
While passion awakes with a wild surprise:--
O to eat that drug, and to dream all day,
Of the maids that live by the Bengal Bay!

APPENDIX

Mr. Courtenay Lemon has written the following memorandum of the subjective features of his experience:

The first symptom which told me that the drug was beginning to take effect was a feeling of extreme lightness. I seemed to be hollowing out inside, in some magical manner, until I became a mere shell, ready to float away into space. This was soon succeeded, in one of the breathless intervals of my prodigious laughter, by a diametrically opposite sensation of extreme solidity and leaden weight. It seemed to me that I had changed into metal of some sort. There was a metallic taste in my mouth; in some inexplicable way the surfaces of my body seemed to communicate to my consciousness a metalliferous feeling; and I imagined that if struck I would give forth a metallic ring. This heavy and metallic feeling travelled rapidly upwards from the feet to the chest, where it stopped, leaving my head free for the issuance of the storms of laughter. Most of the time my arms and legs seemed to be so leaden that it required Herculean effort to move them, but under any special stimulus, such as the entrance of a third person, the vagrant conception of a new idea, or an unusually hearty fit of laughing, this feeling of unliftable heaviness in the limbs and torso would be forgotten and I would move freely, waving my arms with great vigor and enthusiasm.

Thruout the experiment I experienced a peculiar double consciousness. I was perfectly aware that my laughter, etc., was the result of having taken the drug, yet I was powerless to stop it, nor did I care to do so, for I enjoyed it as thoroly as if it had arisen from natural causes. In the same way the extension of the sense of time induced by the drug was in itself indubitable and as cogent as any normal evidence of the senses, yet I remained able to convince myself at any moment by reflection that my sense of time was fallacious. I divided these impressions into hasheesh-time and real time. But in their alternations, so rapid as to seem simultaneous, both these standards of time seemed equally valid. For instance, once or twice when my friend spoke of something I had said a second before, I was impatient and replied: “What do you want to go back to that for? That was a long time ago. What’s the use of going back into the past?” At the next moment, however, I would recognize, purely as a matter of logic, that he was replying to the sentence before the last that I had uttered, and would thus realize that the remark to which he referred was separated from the present only by a moment’s interval. I did not, however, at any time on this occasion, attain the state sometimes reached in the second stage of hasheesh intoxication in which mere time disappears in an eternity wherein ages rush by like ephemera; nor did I experience any magnification of the sense of space, my experiences in regard to such extensions being confined to an intermittent multiplication of the sense of time.

When my laughter began it seemed for an instant to be mechanical, as if produced by some external power which forced air in and out of my lungs; it seemed for an instant to proceed from the body rather than from the mind; to be, in its inception, merely physical laughter without a corresponding psychic state of amusement. But this was only momentary. After the first few moments I enjoyed laughing immensely. I felt an inclination to joke as well as to laugh, and I remember saying: “I am going to have some reason for this laughing, so I will tell a story; if I have to laugh anyway, I’m going to supply good reasons for doing so, as it would be idiotic to laugh about nothing.” I thereupon proceeded to relate an anecdote. Altho I knew that my condition was the result of the drug, I was nevertheless filled with a genuine sense of profound hilarity, an eager desire to impart similar merriment to others, and a feeling of immense geniality and mirth, accompanied by sentiments of the most expansive good-will.

Against the effects of the drug, much as I enjoyed and yielded to it, there was opposed a preconceived intention. I had determined to tell my friend Victor Robinson, who was taking notes of my condition, just how I felt; had determined to supply as much data as possible in regard to my sensations. The result was that I repeatedly summoned all the rational energy that remained to me, and fought desperately to express the thoughts that came to me, whether ridiculous or analytical. Sometimes when I felt myself slipping away again into laughter or dreaminess I summoned all my strength to say what I had in mind, and would lose the thread of my thought and could not remember what I wanted to say, but would return to it again and again with the utmost determination and tenacity until I succeeded in saying what I wished to--sometimes an observation about my sensations, often only a jest about my condition. I believe that this acted as a great resistant to the effect of the drug. The energy of the drug was dissipated, I think, in overcoming my will to observe and analyze my sensations, and it was probably for this reason that I did not pass very far on this occasion into the second stage in which laughter gives place to grandiose visions and charming hallucinations.

After my friend Victor and his father turned out the light and left the room, my laughter gradually subsided into a few final gurgles of ineffable mirth and benevolence, and after a period of the amorous visions sometimes induced by this philtre from the land of harems, I fell into a sound sleep after my three hours of continuous and exhausting laughter.

I awoke next morning after seven hours sleep, with a ravenous appetite, which I think was probably as much due to the great expenditure of energy in laughing as to any direct effect of the drug itself. I was also very thirsty and my skin was parched and burning. Altho I immediately dressed and went down to breakfast, I felt very drowsy and disinclined to physical exertion or mental concentration. And while no longer given to causeless laughter, I felt a lingering merriment and was easily moved to chuckling. I slept several hours in the afternoon and after dinner I slept all evening, awaking at 11 P. M., when I arose feeling very much refreshed and entirely normal, and went out to get another meal, being still hungry. I should say that the immediate after-effect, the reaction from the stimulation of hasheesh, is not much greater, except for the drowsiness, than that following the common or beer garden variety of intoxication. My memory of what I said and did while under the hasheesh was complete and accurate.

Transcriber’s Note:

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=. Obsolete and alternative spellings were retained. Nine misspelled words were corrected; a missing accent was added to “Médecine;” one instance of “DeMuth” was changed to Demuth.