A PAPERBACK REEFER

Let's mourn the dawning of the age of reason. With clay pipes clenched
firmly between our teeth, a plate full of mushrooms, and a book of poems.
For, it doesn't suffice to be a cheap versifier.

Not when the jingle of gold celebrates poetry. One then has to become, as
French boy-poet Rimbaud said, "a seer; by a long, rational, prodigious
disordering of senses".

Humanity's vanguards - poets, artists and madmen - whenever they have
wanted to push at the seams of reality, have turned literature upon itself
and endeavoured to make it disappear in a torrent of linguistic excess.

Modern western literature, long before Ginsberg and Co dropped anchor on
life's schizophrenic shores, has shared a long, troubled, intimate
relationship with drugs.

The altered states of consciousness that modern writers, particularly on
the Continent, have chased with such masochist abandon, did not merely
bring literature into the erotic embrace of the weed, but in the same
movement transformed words into the greatest intoxicant of them all.

The 'literature of intoxication' didn't exactly have a benign provenance.
The oppression and pain, wrought by the reality of a young industrial
Europe, deformed existence in such a fashion that Reality, which closed in
oppressively on the men and women on the Continent's dank alleys, had to be
challenged if a way out of the dark tunnel of oppression and megalomaniacal
wars had to be found.

So, along came Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and rolled drugs, sex,
evil and poetry into bullets for hunting down man's rational ego.

Indeed, so gut-wrenching was existence during those times - particularly
the inter-war years - that words alone sufficed to shatter the mirrors of
realist drudgery that surrounded them.

The Surrealists of the '30s and the '40s allowed the absurd meaninglessness
of dreams and sleep to invade the wakeful, feel-good lives of European men
and their limp literature.

They made words dance to the dissonant orchestra of insanity. All this, not
necessarily aided by substances.

Most of them, with no help from narcotics at all, conjured realms where
language broke through its boringly coherent boundaries to explode into a
fireball of savage, incoherent freedom.

German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who delved deep into Marseilles' dark
soul after drugging himself 'silly' with hashish, later declared that a
thinker was as much of a pathbreaker as an opium eater.

It's precisely this aesthetic of intoxication that has informed much of
world literature and cinema of the past 50 years. The American Beats are
obviously the first to come to mind.

But the entire modern sci-fi genre in cinema and literature - Minority
Report, Solaris and Matrix - has been inspired immensely by this
freaked-out, surreal and dopey dance of words and images.

This 'druggy poetics', if not drugs themselves, will continue to inspire
fantastic hope in a boringly Real world.