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Opium (excerpts)
by Jean Cocteau
The addict is surrounded with slopes. Impossible to keep the spirit on the heights. It is 11 o'clock in the evening. One smokes for five minutes; one looks at one's watch: it is five o'clock in the morning.
• • •
Picasso used to say to me: The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. The only smell one can compare with it is that of a circus or a sea port.
Raw opium. If you do not shut it up in a metal chest but content yourself with a box, the black serpent will have soon crept out. Be warned! It hugs the walls, goes down the stairs and the floors, turns, crosses the hall and the courtyard, passes through the archway and will soon coil itself round the policeman's neck.
• • •
The slow speed of opium. Under the influence of opium one becomes the meeting place for the phenomena which art sends us to from outside.
The addict can become a masterpiece. A masterpiece which is above discussion. A perfect masterpiece, because it is fugitive, without form and without judges.
• • •
The painter who likes to paint trees, becoming a tree. Children carry within them a natural drug. The death of Thomas the Impostor is a case of the child playing at horses turning into a horse.
All children possess the magic power of being able to change themselves into what they wish. Poets, in whom childhood is prolonged, suffer a great deal when they lose this power. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons which drives the poet to use opium.
• • •
The half-speed of opium makes us pass down corridors and cross halls and push open doors and lose ourselves in a world where people startled out of their sleep are horribly afraid of us.
• • •
I wonder how people can write the lives of the poets since the poets themselves could not write their own life. There are too many mysteries, too many true falsehoods, too many complications.
What can be said of the passionate friendships which must be confused with love, and yet nevertheless are something else, of the limits of love and friendship, of this region of the heart in which unknown senses participate, which cannot be understood by those who live standard lives?
Dates overlap, years mingle together. the snow melts, the feet fly away: no footprints remain.
by Jean Cocteau
The addict is surrounded with slopes. Impossible to keep the spirit on the heights. It is 11 o'clock in the evening. One smokes for five minutes; one looks at one's watch: it is five o'clock in the morning.
• • •
Picasso used to say to me: The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world. The only smell one can compare with it is that of a circus or a sea port.
Raw opium. If you do not shut it up in a metal chest but content yourself with a box, the black serpent will have soon crept out. Be warned! It hugs the walls, goes down the stairs and the floors, turns, crosses the hall and the courtyard, passes through the archway and will soon coil itself round the policeman's neck.
• • •
The slow speed of opium. Under the influence of opium one becomes the meeting place for the phenomena which art sends us to from outside.
The addict can become a masterpiece. A masterpiece which is above discussion. A perfect masterpiece, because it is fugitive, without form and without judges.
• • •
The painter who likes to paint trees, becoming a tree. Children carry within them a natural drug. The death of Thomas the Impostor is a case of the child playing at horses turning into a horse.
All children possess the magic power of being able to change themselves into what they wish. Poets, in whom childhood is prolonged, suffer a great deal when they lose this power. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons which drives the poet to use opium.
• • •
The half-speed of opium makes us pass down corridors and cross halls and push open doors and lose ourselves in a world where people startled out of their sleep are horribly afraid of us.
• • •
I wonder how people can write the lives of the poets since the poets themselves could not write their own life. There are too many mysteries, too many true falsehoods, too many complications.
What can be said of the passionate friendships which must be confused with love, and yet nevertheless are something else, of the limits of love and friendship, of this region of the heart in which unknown senses participate, which cannot be understood by those who live standard lives?
Dates overlap, years mingle together. the snow melts, the feet fly away: no footprints remain.