Diary of a Drug Fiend

Vedere Napolt epoi—pro patrid—mori 105 Granada, of the fanatical frenzy of the religious Moorish ‘rioters chopping at themselves with little sacred axes till the blood streams down their bodies, crazily crimson in the stabbing sunlight, and making little scabs of mire upon the torrid trampled sand. I thought of the mcenads and Bacchus; I saw them through the vivid eyes of Euripides and Swinburne. And still unsatisfied, I craved for stranger symbols yet. I became a Witch-Doctor presiding over a cannibal feast, driving the yellow mob of murderers into a fiercer Comus-rout, as the maddening beat of the tom- tom and the sinister scream of the bull-roarer destroy every human quality 1in the worshippers and make them elemental energies; Valkyrie-vampires surging and shrieking on the summit of the storm. I do not even know whether to call this a vision, or how to classify it psychologically. It was simply happening to me—and to Lou—though we were sitting decorously enough in our compartment. It became increasingly certain that Haidée, low-class, common- place, ignorant girl that she was, had somehow been sucked into a stupendous maelstrom of truth. The normal actions and reactions of the mind and the body are simply so many stupid veils upon the face of Isis. What happened to them didn’ t matter. The stunt was to find some trick to make them shut up. I understood the value of words. It depended, not on their rational meaning, but upon their hieratic suggestion. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-house decree.” The names mean nothing definite, but they determine the atmosphere of the poem. Sublimity depends upon unintelligibility. I understood the rapture of the names in Lord Dunsany’s stories. I understood how the “ barbarous