by Baker, Phil
where one can say, without thinking oneself
a madman, that one is loved by one’s mistress.
Absinthe, your fragrance soothes me…
Gustave Kahn
Joséphin Péladan (1850–1918) was a key figure in the nineteenth-century French occult revival, and founded his own mystical order, the Salon de la Rose-Croix. A man with a taste for exoticism and ritual, he was known for hosting “aesthetic” evenings. The subject of the following poem is Félicien Rops’ picture, La Buveuse d’Absinthe, of which J-K. Huysmans wrote “the girl bitten by the green poison leans her exhausted spine on a column of the Bal Mabille and it seems that the duplicate of Syphilitic Death is going to cut the ravaged thread of her life.”
To Félicien Rops
Ô Rops, je suis troublé. Le doute m’a tordu
L’âme! – Si tu reviens de l’enfer effroyable,
Quel démon t’a fait lire en son crâne fendu
Les éternels secrets de ce suppôt du Diable.
La Femme? Tu l’as peint, le Sphinx impénétrable;
Mais l’Énigme survit devant moi confondu.
Parle, dis, qu’as-tu vu dans l’abîme insondable
De ses yeux transparents comme ceux d’un pendu.
Quels éclairs ont nimbé tes fillettes polies?
Quel stupre assez pervers, quel amour devaste
Mets des reflets d’absinthe en leurs mélancolies!
À quelle basse horreur sonne ta Vérité?
Rops, fais parler Satan, prêcheur d’impiété,
Qu’il écrase mon front sous des monts de folie!
O Rops, I am troubled. Doubt has twisted my soul
If you come back from the frightful hell
What demon made you read in his split open head
The eternal secrets of that tool of the Devil
Woman? You have painted her, the impenetrable Sphinx
But the enigma lives on before me, confusing me.
Speak, tell what you have seen in the plumbless abyss
Of her eyes, clear like those of a hanged man.
What lightning flashes have haloed your nice young ladies?
What perverted defilements, what devastated love
Put the glitter of absinthe into their melancholy
From what deep horror rings your truth?
Rops, make Satan speak, that preacher of godlessness
So he can shatter my brow under mountains of madness.
Joséphin Péladan
Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) moved from an early involvement with surrealism to develop his own more idiosyncratic ideas about the so-called “Theatre of Cruelty”, bringing a primitive and ritualistic element into drama. Meanwhile his life increasingly fell apart in mental illness and drug addiction. This weirdly schizoid early poem invokes an era which was already distant by the time it was written.
Verlaine Boit
Il y aura toujours des grues au coin des rues,
Coquillages perdus sue les grèves stellaires
Du soir bleu qui n’est pas d’ici ni de la terre,
Où roulent des cabs aux élytres éperdues.
Et roulent moins que dans ma tête confondue
La pierre verte de l’absinthe au fond du verre,
Où je bois la perdition et les tonnerres
A venir du Seigneur pour calciner mon âme nue.
Ah! Qu’ils tournent les fuseaux mêlés des rues
Et filent l’entrelacs des hommes et des femmes
Ainsi qu’une araignée qui tisserait sa trame
Avec les filaments des âmes reconnues.
‘Verlaine Drinks’ – Antonin Artaud
There will always be whores on street corners
Lost shells stranded on the stellar shores
Of a blue dusk which belongs neither here nor on earth
Where taxis roll by like bewildered beetles.
But they roll less than in my whirling head
The green gem of absinthe deep in the glass
Where I drink perdition and the thunder
Of the Lord’s judgement to roast my naked soul.
Ah! How the tangled spindles of the streets
Turn and spin the fabric of men and women
As if a spider were weaving her web
With the filaments of uncovered souls.
RAYMOND QUENEAU – THE FLIGHT OF ICARUS
The following little drama is part of Raymond Queneau’s obscurely comic novel in the form of a play, The Flight of Icarus, and it looks back on the all–important ritual of preparing an absinthe properly.
At the Globe and Two Worlds Tavern in the rue Blanche there was only one free table, which seemed to be waiting for Icarus. It was in fact waiting for him. Icarus sat down, a slow but sure waiter came in and asked him what he wished to partake of. Icarus didn’t know. He looked at the nearby tables; their occupants were drinking absinthe. He pointed to that milky liquid, believing it to be harmless. In the glass he was brought, the beverage appeared to be green; Icarus might well have thought this was an optical illusion had he known what an optical illusion was; he also brought a strangely shaped spoon, a lump of sugar and a carafe of water.
Icarus pours the water on the absinthe, which assumes the colour of milt. Exclamations from the neighbouring tables.
FIRST DRINKER: Disgraceful! It’s a massacre!
SECOND DRINKER: The fellow’s never drunk absinthe in his life!
FIRST DRINKER: Vandalism! Pure vandalism!
SECOND DRINKER: Let’s be indulgent; let’s simply call it ignorance.
FIRST DRINKER: (to Icarus) My young friend, have you never drunk absinthe before?
ICARUS: Never, Monsieur. I didn’t even know that it was called absinthe.
SECOND DRINKER: Where’ve you come from, then?
ICARUS: Er…
FIRST DRINKER: What does it matter! My young friend, I’m going to teach you to prepare a glass of absinthe.
ICARUS: Thank you, Monsieur.
FIRST DRINKER: In the first place, do you know what absinthe is?
ICARUS: No, Monsieur.
FIRST DRINKER: She is our comforter, alas, our consolation, she is our only hope, she is our aim, our goal, and like an elixir – which she is, of course – the source of our elation, it is she who lends us strength to reach the end of the road.
SECOND DRINKER: What’s more, she is an angel whose magnetic fingers hold the gifts of blessed sleep, of ecstatic dreams untold.
FIRST DRINKER: Kindly don’t interrupt me, Monsieur. That is precisely what I was about to say and, I may add, with the poet: she is the glory of the Gods, the mystic crock of gold.
ICARUS: I’d never dare drink that.
FIRST DRINKER: Not that, no! You’ve ruined it by slopping all that tap-water over it in such barbaric fashion! Never! (to the waiter) Bring Monsieur another absinthe.
The waiter brings another absinthe. Icarus stretches his hand out towards his glass.
FIRST DRINKER: Stop, idiot! (Icarus rapidly withdraws his hand.) You don’t drink it like that! I’ll show you. You place the spoon on the glass in which the absinthe already reposes, and then you put a lump of sugar on the aforementioned spoon, whose singular shape will not have escaped your notice.
Then, very slowly, you pour the water over the sugar lump, which will start to dissolve and drop by drop a fecundating and sacchariferous rain will fall into the elixir and cause it to become cloudy. Once again you pour on a little water which beads, and beads, and so on, until the sugar has dissolved, but the elixir has not acquired too aqueous a consistency. Observe it, my young friend, watch the operation taking effect… an inconceivable alchemy…
ICARUS: Isn’t it pretty?
He stretches his hand out towards his glass.
THIRD DRINKER: And now pour the contents out on the floor.
THE TWO OTHERS: Blasphemy!
CHORUS OF WAITERS: Blasphemy!
THE PROPRIETOR: Hell and damnation!
ICARUS: (bewildered) What am I to
do?
This continues until the door opens and a young woman [“LN”] comes in.
first half of the chorus: You shall be the judge!
SECOND HALF: You shall be the arbiter!
FIRST HALF: You shall be our Solomon!
[…]
LN: What’s going on?
THIRD DRINKER: I don’t see why this whore…
LN: That’s what I am, and I’m proud of it. Whore I am and whore I remain. But why a judge, an arbiter, a Solomon?
FIRST DRINKER: Come over here. Look at this young man.
LN: Isn’t he handsome!
SECOND DRINKER: Should he drink his absinthe?
THIRD DRINKER: Or shouldn’t he? But I don’t see why this whore…
ICARUS: Mademoiselle…
LN: Monsieur.
ICARUS: I shall do what you tell me to do, Mademoiselle.
THIRD DRINKER: So young, and already a lost soul…
Absinthism and grisette…
He disappears abruptly.
LN: [indicating Icarus] Who is he?
FIRST DRINKER: I don’t know him, and you can see he’s not an habitué. Just a beginner. He didn’t even know how to prepare his absinthe…
CHORUS OF DRINKERS: Well! Shall he drink it or shan’t he?
LN: (to Icarus) Drink it, young man!
ICARUS: (wets his lips and makes a grimace).
[…]
ICARUS: (putting down his glass) I shall only try it again if Mademoiselle tells me to.
LN: Mademoiselle does tell you to. Have another sip.
Icarus drinks a mouthful. He smiles politely, and then imbibes another mouthful.
SECOND DRINKER: Well, what do you think of it?
ICARUS: (after a third, a fourth, a fifth mouthful, positively). How far away my nurse’s milk seems… how the heavenly bodies are increasing and multiplying… how the night fades into the pale nebulae. It is already blue, the opalescent sea is hushed… how far away I seem from all that… in the vicinity of the star called Absinthe…
[…]
FIRST DRINKER: Ha ha! Well, I’ll stand another round.
SECOND DRINKER: Me too.
LN: Be reasonable. You’ll make the young man ill.
ICARUS: But I’m quite all right; my head feels hot and my liver feels cold, which at the moment isn’t at all unpleasant.
FIRST DRINKER: You see! Waiter, another round!
ICARUS: I don’t know how to thank you.
LN: You can thank him later.
SECOND DRINKER: He must be able to appreciate the third round.
LN: (to Icarus) Will you be able to hold out until then?
ICARUS: I’m floating a little.
The third round is brought.
FIRST DRINKER: (observing Icarus preparing his absinthe). Not too bad. He’s improving.
SECOND DRINKER: He still pours the water rather too quickly.
LN: You’re always criticising! (to Icarus). A very good beginning, pet.
Later in the book we find Icarus in the Globe and Two Worlds bar again. He is no longer a beginner, and he is appropriately ‘high flown’:
ICARUS: (sitting in front of his fifth absinthe). I might compare absinthe to a Montgolfier. It elevates the spirit as the balloon elevates the nacelle. It transports the soul as the balloon transports the traveller. It multiplies the mirages of the imagination as the balloon multiplies one’s points of view over the terrestrial sphere. It is the flux which carries dreams as the balloon allows itself to be guided by the wind. Let us drink, then, let us swim in the milky, greenish wave of disseminated oneiric images, in the company of my surrounding habitués: their faces are sinister but their absinthed hearts absinthe themselves along abstruse and maybe abyssine abscissae.
In due course Icarus has his fall. LN reappears later, and announces that she has given up prostitution to become a dressmaker, making solely bloomers for lady bicyclists. The bicycle, she says, “will give the Frenchwoman the liberty her Anglo-Saxon sisters have already discovered.”
ALL THE DRINKERS Bravo! Hurrah for the Bike!…
They drink their absinthes.
ABSINTHE IN SPAIN
It is one of life’s mysteries why the absinthe revival didn’t come from Barcelona, where the absinthe is better, rather than Eastern Europe.
The Bar Marsella (“Marseilles”) in the notorious Barrio Chino district, described here by British travel writer Robert Elms, was also frequented by Guy Debord during his exile in Spain. Debord liked the louche atmosphere of the Barrio Chino, and his biographer Andrew Hussey writes “Debord’s endless thirst was often slaked in the Bar Marsella on Carrer nou de la Rambla, a dim-lit bar which specialised in a form of absinthe which had long been illegal in France: it is still there…” As for Elms:
Over on the other side, the wild side, of the Ramblas, the barrio Chino is a mysteriously Chineseless China town, a dripping tenderloin where things go on. Secreted behind the huge undercover food market, the Chino is just as maze-like as the Gothic quarter, though it lacks the beauty and the charm of that ancient district. It is a messy and undeniably dark district occasionally punctuated by quiet and quite beautiful little squares – except they tend to be made a little less attractive by the used needles lying on the floor. Still you can’t help liking it, or at least I couldn’t; despite being the true home of the lowest life this city has to offer, the barrio Chino, certainly during the day, has never felt like a particularly dangerous place to be – providing of course you watch your step. For in among its sometimes filthy streets there are some great treasures.
…
I stumbled upon the bar Marseilles on my first ignorant excursion into the barrio Chino on that first weekend in Barcelona. People have been stumbling out of there for years. A black and white television plays noiselessly in the corner of this large, scruffy, barely furnished bar. But then few people bar the huge barmaid are looking. Some are playing an animated game of cards or dominoes in the corner, but most sit alone and stare hard at their drinks. For Marseilles is an absinthe bar.
Absinthe is drunk with dreamy ceremony, a fork placed over the top of a glass with a sugar cube resting on its prongs, water is dripped slowly onto the sugar and the sweet solution runs into the dark green liquid. Despite all the romantic associations with Paris at its peak, the stuff is so toxic and absinthism is so virulent an addiction that the drink has been banned in most parts of the world, but not in the barrio Chino. Here even bad dreams are allowed.
When I finally allowed myself to try absinthe I ended up losing a day which survives now only as shards, but which definitely included sitting with the working women of the barrio who I believe showed me a certain kindness. Later on, in a time not obscured by the green liquid, I discovered in the Chino, on a square lined with lumpy prostitutes, that there is a small plaque celebrating Alexander Fleming, such is the affection of this diseased place for the man who discovered penicillin.
ABSINTHE L.A. STYLE
D.J.Levien’s 1998 absinthe pulp fiction, Wormwood, is a product of the current revival. It features Nathan Pitch, an embittered cog in the Hollywood star machine, who becomes increasingly involved with absinthe after encountering it in an underground club.
Underground clubs were a staple of the city’s nightlife. They ran by word of mouth among a secret, selective network. I had never been a member, while Ronnie, it appeared, was. Usually the clubs, housed in strangely sterile banquet rooms or small, dark, hot holes, offered something that regular bars did not. Nudity, or certain sexual proclivities involving leather or foot worship, was often on the block, on other occasions, designer drugs. Most just stayed open far later than was legal. The clubs issued invitations or employed cryptic password systems governing admittance, and given these parameters, and their shrouded locations, I had never been to one.
Now, entering the ancient hotel’s lobby, my heart was quick with excitement. I walked through the vaultlike entrance and up a cavernous marble staircase that led into the ballroom
housing the club for tonight, or this week, or however long it would be there. The pale stone gave the underlit space a cool, museum-like feel. A threadbare tapestry ran the length of the floor, and I followed it past heavy oak and fabric chairs, to a doorway blocked by several young, vibrant people in high- style clothes who crowded the door, eager to enter. Heavy bass computer-generated music pulsated from beyond them. Conversations were muffled, possibly because of the size of the place, but it sounded as if the walls were hung with wet blankets. A few tried to talk their way through the bulky doormen who wanted none of it, but my name had been left on a list by Ronnie, and I flowed through the bottleneck. My hand was stamped with an ink that made it glow, and I stepped into the main room.
The club room was reminiscent of a marble cathedral, but the lightless air reaching towards the ceiling was filled with smoke. This room was not muffled and cool like the foyer, and the people inside were not pious worshippers. Rather, it was alive and hot, and bodies pressed together on a dance floor. They moved to two different kinds of music – the techno I had heard and also classic disco – coming from separate sound systems on opposite sides of the hall which crashed together and showered down in a cacophony. The fusion, the activity and the humidity were causing condensation along lighting scaffolds which hung from the ceiling, and water drops were falling like noncommital rain. I stared at several seductive dancers gyrating on top of towering speakers, and then I realised they weren’t dancing, but were unclothed and being painted, as they writhed, in neon colours by would-be artists kneeling at their feet.
The room smelled like perfume-sweat and cloves and camphor, and made me want to find Ronnie and dance with abandon. I looked for the bar, where I was to meet her, and where I would have to have a drink, or several, to reach the place these people inhabited. Spotting the bar across the room, I threaded my way through the revellers and chairs as I advanced towards it. I ordered a drink, and just as the bartender delivered, I felt a pair of soft, cool hands cover my eyes. I made a pretence of feeling her rings before yelling above the din, “Veronica Sylvan?” She spun around and kissed me, spun me around again and led me after her.
