taussig - getting high with benjamin and burroughs

7/27/2019 Taussig - Getting High With Benjamin and Burroughs

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Issue 30 The Underground Summer 2008

Getting High with Benjamin and Burroughs

Michael Taussig

Jean Selz (left), Paul Gauguin (the painters grandson), Benjamin, and fisherman

Toms Var (with hat) sailing in the bay of San Antonio, May 1933.

In the spring of 1932, Walter Benjamin bumped into his old friend Felix

Noeggerath in Berlin. Noeggerath was packing to go to Ibiza to join his only son,

Hans Jakob, who was studying the language and stories of the island, and invited

Benjamin to join him. Ibiza was not only beautiful, unknown, and far from Berlin,

but extremely cheapwelcome news for Benjamin, who had by then been reduced

to abject poverty despite having been born into a rich Jewish family in Berlin in

1892. Thanks to Nazification, he would lose his apartment in Berlin in three

months time for code violations, and his work for German newspapers, as well

as his radio stories for children, would be terminated. His brother Georg, an ardent

communist, would be placed in a concentration camp in 1933. Without hesitation,

Benjamin accepted Noeggeraths invitation, thus beginning an exile that lasted until

his death from what appears to have been a self-administered overdose ofmorphine on the Spanish-French border in 1940 as he fled the Gestapo.

Drugs were doubtless important to Benjamin, who had first smoked hashish
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in Berlin in 1927. They confirmed his approach to reality and revolution, to art and

politicsan approach shaped and sharpened by his experience of Ibiza. He stayed

on the island two months, returning for another six in the summer of 1933.

Wretchedly sad, he buried himself in his remote past, writing of his Berlin

childhood. Yet he also wrote in lascivious detail of his surroundings, that other

remote past, or so it seemed to him, this outpost of Europe apparently

untouched by modernity. Here, he could face head-on his central idea that

modernity atrophied the capacity to experience the world and tell stories. This is

why the Ibizan poet Vicente Valero has titled his as-yet-untranslated book on

Benjamin in IbizaExperiencia y probreza (Experience and Poverty), after the title

of a little-known essay Benjamin wrote under the spell of the island. In the

hallucinatory splendor of Ibiza, with his future cast to the winds, Benjamin

formulated what I would count as his major textson the storyteller and on the

mimetic facultyas well as inventing new forms for the essay as a crossover genre

that linked dreams, ethnography, thought-figures, and story-telling.Indeed, it is when one turns to this crossover genre that Benjamins better-

known writings lose much of their obscurity. To read his famous essay The

Storyteller, for example, is to experience what literary theorist Ross Chambers

once confessed to me: When I read Benjamin I think it is the most brilliant stuff I

have ever read. When I finish reading, I cant remember a thing. But if you read

Benjamins own stories, like The Handkerchief or his fictionalized account of

taking hashish in Marseilles, then in a flash we understand The Storyteller.Valeros book unhurriedly presents us with Benjamins development of

atecnica de viaje (a technique of travel), which involved collecting and creating

stories through a mix of thought figures governed by a galloping interest

in mimesis, a hypertrophied sensitivity to similarities. This is not dissimilar to what

Proust was getting at with mmoire involontaire, but this tecnica de viaje was

historical and cosmic as well as personal. This Ibizan Benjamin, this storytelling

Benjamin, finds himself beached like a whale, a storyteller out of history, practicing

what he himself said was dead.To read Benjamins own forays into storytelling is to engage with the

excitement of crossing genres and seeing the critic become a practitioneras with


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the tales he absorbed traveling third class on the ship Catania for eleven days from

Hamburg to Barcelona en route to Ibiza in 1932; tales fertilized by the monotony of

ship life, then recreated in another form by Benjamin. There are also the story-like

ethnographic episodes that appear in his letters from Ibiza to Gretel Adorno and to

his heartthrob, the sculptor Jula Cohn. One letter to Cohn, written on Benjamins

fortieth birthday and entitled In the Sun, was singled out by his friend Gershom

Scholem, a life-long student of the Jewish Kabbalah, for its mysticism and

poetry:It was evident that the man walking along deep in thought was not from

here; and if, when he was at home, thoughts came to him in the open air, it was

always night. With astonishment he would recall that entire nationsJews, Indians,

oorshad built their schools beneath a sun that seemed to make all thinking

impossible for him. This sun was burning into his back. Resin and thyme

impregnated the air in which he felt he was struggling for breath. A bumble-bee

brushed his ear. Hardly had he registered its presence than it was already sucked

away in a vortex of silence.This stranger walking along deep in thought was the man who had earlier

recruited intoxication for the revolutionary cause on the grounds that it could

open up the long-sought image sphere and thereby innervate the collective

body. This was the man who in that same essay (Surrealism: The Last Snapshot

of the European Intelligentsia), published in 1929, two years after he first tried

hashish, had warned against the spell of mysticism and drugs, arguing instead for a

profane illumination that recognized the mysteriousness of the everyday, the

everydayness of the mystery. Does In the Sun pull this off? Was it actually

written on drugs, as Valero suggests, or is it a metaphorical and not an actual

intoxicationand does this distinction matter? The counterpoint to the sun was the moonlight, as in Benjamins 1932 note

On Astrology: In principle, events in the heavens could be imitated by people in former

ages, whether as individuals or groups. ... Modern man can be touched by a pale

shadow of this on southern moonlit nights in which he feels, alive within himself,

mimetic forces that he had thought long since dead, while nature, which possesses


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them all, transforms itself to resemble the moon.Mimesis was fundamental to Benjamins theory of language, just as it was, I

believe, to his theory of history. In Ibiza, Benjamin fought cat-and-dog with his new

friend, the painter Jean Selz, about certain aspects of this theory. Benjamin had

recruited Selz to help him translate his Berlin childhood essay into French, despite

Selzs not knowing any German. When Benjamin claimed that the shape of a word

was connected to its meaning, Selz exploded: If the wordsaucepan looked like a

cat in a given language, you would say it was cat. You could be right, demurred

Benjamin, but it would only resemble a cat insofar as a cat resembled a

saucepan.Even in our time, when according to Benjamin we have lost so much of the

capacity to perceive similarity, the mimetic faculty survives vigorously as the most

consummate expression of cosmic meaning, given to the newborn infant who

even today in the early years of his life will evidence the utmost mimetic genius by

learning language. Mimesis is no less crucial to history itself, as testified in his

oracular Theses on the Philosophy of History, written shortly before his death in

1940, which combined an anarchist spin on Marxism with Jewish mysticism: The

past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be

recognized and is never seen again. The trick is to retain that image of the past

which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.

In his two essays on the experience of (just) one night smoking opium with

Benjamin high above the port of Ibiza, Selz recalls that Benjamin even coined a

special termthe French mmitefor all of this and points out that for Benjaminthis was linked to a feeling of happiness that he savored with particular care.

(Suchjouissanceis a significant, no less than puzzling, facet of Prousts mmoire

involontaire, and we might note that Benjamin co-translated two volumes of Proust

in the late 1920s.)What is important about reading Benjamins texts written under the

influence of drugs is how you can then read back into all his work much of this

same drug mind-set; in his university student days, wrangling with Kantsphilosophy at great length, he famously stated, according to Scholem, that a


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philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee

roundsand cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy. That was in 1913, and

Scholem adds that such an approach must be recognized as possible from the

connection of things. Scholem recalled seeing on Benjamins desk a few years

later a copy of BaudelairesLes paradis artificiels, and that long before Benjamin

took any drugs, he spoke of the expansion of human experience in hallucinations,

by no means to be confused with illusions. Kant, Benjamin said, motivated an

inferior experience. Benjamins signature idea ofcolportage, implying a unity between film

montage, walking the city in the style of theflneur, and drug experiences, was

exactly this hallucinatory sense of space-time travel so enthusiastically worked up

by Sergei Einsenstein as plasma and by William Burroughs as a style of writerly

decomposition. For Burroughs, this idea owed much to taking the

hallucinogenyag (pronouncedya-heh; also called ayahuasca in Quechua)

administered to him on some seven occasions in 1953 by Indian shamans in the

Putumayo of southwest Colombia and in Pucallpa in the Peruvian Amazon. It is

the most powerful drug I have experienced, he wrote Ginsberg. That is, it

produces the most complete derangement of the senses.Yag provided the seed

forNaked Lunch, explained Allen Ginsberg in 1975 in what must be one of the

most spirited and generous invocations of Modernism as montage, Burroughs-style,

ever made. (see BurroughsLive, Semitotext(e), 2001)In the fall of 1953, Burroughs, who had recently returned from South

America, stayed with Ginsberg on East 7th Street in New York City. Looking out

the back window onto courtyards and back windows of apartments, criss-crossed by

fire escapes and clothes lines, Burroughs suddenly saw those amazing composite

cities he had seen when taking yag, cities that leap at you from all angles and

heights throughout his lifes work, as inCities of the Red Night. What is wonderful

is that Ginsberg opens the shutter on thatmoment when it all came together: New

York,yag, and the wild imagination of William Seward Burroughs, performance

artist. He acted it out completely, said Ginsberg, which he always did with his

routines.As Ginsberg recalls, there on East 7th Street, Burroughs suddenly had a


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vision of the racks, the great city of iron racks rising hundreds of feet into the air

with hammocks swinging and people climbing from one level onto the other. Over-

populated city of racks, where people are stored, just making a living, like they are

now in the megalopolis of streets covered with garbage, blocks of ruined buildings,

bums living in motorcycle gangs, muggers and policemen and junkies and the CIA

stealing out of hallways and blackmailing each other.Looking out the window, Burroughs was transformed into a woman

reaching out from the upper balconies for her laundry, which became a flayed

corpse. Burroughs lunged. Sometimes he fell on the floor, Ginsberg continued,

he was so possessed with the total slapstick humor of his imagination, the images

that were coming to him almost as a movie picture, automatically.In the recent The Yage Letters Redux (Yage spelled without an accent in the

title) by Burroughs and Ginsberg (first published by City Lights in 1963 and now

meticulously set in time and place by editor Oliver Harris), we find a parallel to

Benjamins exploration of drugs and Ibiza. How incredibly exciting it must have

been to chase down this awe-inspiring medicine, prepared, sung over, and

administered by Indian shamans in the Putumayo forests of South America where,

unknown to Burroughs, that other famous homosexual, Roger Casement (later

hanged for treason in the Tower of London), had in 1912 gathered testimony as

British Consul for his blistering reports on the rubber boom atrocities partially

funded by British business. Ginsberg, whose trip occurred in 1960, some seven

years after Burroughss, comes across as dewy-eyed, nave, and loving, with tender

feeling for his shaman, Ramn, while Burroughs, as American as he is anti-

American, is always catty, defensive, offensive, laconic, and absolute master of the

put-down. What a pair!


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William Burroughs surrounded byyag vine in the jungle outside Mocoa,

Colombia, 1953.

How profoundly different was the courage of this crazy couple compared

with today, when yag, then virtually unknown outside of its forest locale, has

become commercialized and tourists are flown in to spend a few days with a

shaman. The terrible irony, of course, is thatThe Yage Letters no doubt

contributed to the mystique ofyag and its consequent fate at the hands of peddlers

of kitsch experience (a substitute for precisely the kind of genuine experience that

Benjamin saw as imperiled by modern life).The first edition ofThe Yage Letters came out of the blue with no

explanatory notes whatsoever. What fantasies the reader had to project into it! And

now all that has been reversed as the secrets of its origin are revealed when Oliver

Harris tells us that these famous letters were not letters at all, but largely made up,

except for a knockout piece of writing by big-hearted Allen Ginsberg, discovered


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miraculously by City Lights editor Lawrence Ferlinghetti in London in 1960. In

many ways the anchor to the collection, this letter includes Ginsbergs drawing of

the demon Death, and another of the eye of God transforming through Nietzschean

Becoming into a holy vagina into which Ginsberg is Dionysically sinking. Help,

Bill! Help! the un-cool letter from Peru cries out. To which Bill coolly responds

from London (in a surprisingly short time) that the way out is the cut-up method

and remembering that Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Last words of

Hassan Sabbah. The Old Man of the Mountain. But what does made-upas in not realbut made-up lettersmean for the

writer, the cutter-upper, the drug-taker, or the shaman administeringyag, if reality

itself is conceived of as really made up? Isnt reality what these writers love to

tease? And on the other hand, dont real letters provide the voice and intimacy,

casualness and realness, that the fiction writer thrives upon? Theyagletters (like Benjamins letters to Gretel Adorno and Jula Cohn,

which use the form to compose ethnographic sketches) owe something vital to

Burroughss real letters to Ginsberg from Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and

Peru. As any ethnographer has to admit, the letter form offers powerful advantages

in making the strange less strange, thereby turning attention to the strangeness of

the known. Burroughs himself insisted elsewhere that the task of the writer is to

make readers aware of what they already knew without being aware of it.In contrast to Benjamins drug experiences, the body and death are

strikingly present in The Yage Letters. Yet it was Benjamin who was to die in Port

Bou, probably by his own hand. It was Benjamin who often contemplated suicide,

that old friend with whom he was to take a glass of wine in Nice for his fortiethbirthday, the same birthday for which he wrote about the Ibizan sun to Jula Cohn.

As with Benjamins images of Arabs and Ethiopian hands in his hashish

memories, there is in Burroughs orientalism galore, conducive to, or at least

mixed in with, violent bodily transformations. Blue flashes passed in front of my

eyes, wrote Burroughs to Ginsberg regarding his first effectiveyagtrip. The hut

took on an archaic far-Pacific look with Easter Island heads, while the shamans

assistant was sneaking around to kill him. Hit by nausea, he rushed to the door butcould barely walk. He had no coordination. His feet were like blocks of wood. He


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vomited violently and then felt numb as if covered with layers of cotton. Larval

beings passed before my eyes in a blue haze, each one giving an obscene, mocking,

squawk. I must have vomited six times. I was on all fours convulsed with

spasms of nausea. I could hear retching and groaning as if I was someone else. On

a later trip, he reports to Ginsberg that his body changed into that of a Negress

complete with all female facilities. Now I am a Negro fucking a Negress.

(This did not make it into The Yage Letters.)Ginsberg strikes a different note, closer to what I understand to be

Benjamins profane illumination, where he actually celebrates the biting of

mosquitoes and the horror of uncontrollable vomiting thatyaginduces. At first

irritated, he later accepts being bitten as it enables him to feel his body extending

into the universe. Along with the barking of dogs and the croaking of frogs, the

whine of the mosquitoes becomes part of the song of the Great Being, announcing

that Ginsberg, too, will have to become a mosquito as meanwhile the universe

vomits itself out.In his last letter from the field to Ginsberg, Burroughs has gotten on top of

things and found the necessary conceptsspace-time travel and the composite

city, along withyag-inspired fragmentation, all of which, like money in the bank,

shall serve him in his highly original but repetitive writings until the end of his long

life. Dated 10 July 1953, this three-and-a-half-page letter pretty much gets it all

down, including the last paragraph where he evokes a place where the unknown

past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. Larval entities

waiting for a live one.This vibrating, soundless hum made me think back to Benjamins

philosophy of history in which he wrote that the tradition of the oppressed teaches

us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.

We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. The

more poetic Burroughs puts the tension of the state of emergency in another mode,

that of the vibrating soundless hum.Both Benjamin and Burroughs wrote from this state of emergency, yet as

far as I know, Burroughs never read a word of Benjamin. In fact, it would be hardto imagine two more dissimilar people, the one so cultured and polite, so


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quintessentially European, the other an irascible, sarcastic, hip, and quintessentially

American bad boy. But then both WBs dressed in suits and were massively curious

about drugs, mysticism, revolution, film, and cut-up as a method for producing

literature no less than for writing history. And then there was color, in which they

reveled. Barely a page in Burroughs is not saturated in color, which for Benjamin

was what took the child into the image, exactly where Burroughs wanted to be.

There was so much they seem to have agreed upon. Yet it makes you laugh and roll your eyes to think of them having a

conversation, perhaps on one of Burroughss color walks starting off from the

Beat Hotel in Paris in the early 1960s. I can see them both now, Benjamin and

Burroughs, momentarily stilled, half-way between black-and-white and color in

those photographs in my imagination taken by the likes of Giselle Freund and Man

Ray. Whoa! The hourglass has not yet run out. Jean Selz has turned up just as we

are saying goodbye. For yes, I am there too! I can see myself with an idiotic grin as

time and memory pull me this way and that through the different color slides. Such

a pleasure to be here with them as they emerge from my pages that, like illustrations

in a childs book, draw me into the scene I depict. Now Selz has our attention. It is getting dark. The day is fading, as is

Benjamin. Time is running out. Selz wants us to remember his friend from Ibiza.

He wants us to remember Benjamins prose asthat truly unique medium, he says, in

which poetry and the science ofhistory merge as the truth of the world. Whatmedium is that? I ask. Is it hashish? Is it opium? Is ityag?

But it is getting dark. There is no reply.As Benjamin disappears into twilight and Burroughs wanders back to the

Beat Hotel, Selz answers my question indirectly, saying that of all the people he

knew, Benjamin was perhaps the only one who gave him the impression that there

does indeed exist a depth of thought where historic and scientific facts coexist with

their poetic counterparts, where poetry is no longer simply a form of literary

thought, but reveals itself as an expression of the truth that illuminates the most

intimate correspondences between man and the world. I like to think that Allen

Ginsberg and William Burroughs would, as they say, dig that.


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Michael Taussig in a garden withyag vines with Don Pedro, an Indian healer.

Colombia, 1977.

Michael Taussigis the author of numerous books, including Shamanism,

Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing(University of

Chicago Press, 1987); The Nervous System (Routledge, 1992);Mimesis and

lterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge, 1993);Defacement: Public

Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford University Press, 1999);Law in a

Lawless Land(The New Press, 2003); andMy Cocaine Museum (University of

Chicago Press, 2004). He is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.

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