After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
~ Oscar Wilde
For me, my glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe.
~ Paul Verlaine
Come, the Wines go to the beaches,
And the waves by the millions!
See the wild Bitter
Rolling from the top of the mountains!
Let us, wise pilgrims, reach
The Absinthe with the green pillars?.
~ Comedy of thirst, Arthur Rimbaud
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
~ Ernest Hemingway
A few genius comments from the old romantics and modernists. I don't actually drink the stuff myself, but the idea of distilling and bottling inspiration has an important meaning for me. The pathway to the Fee Verte is through artemissia absinthium - the very name suggests a lack of presence, a vacancy of directed will, almost like a meditative posture of mind: "no-presence". This is not just about some thujone-laced alcoholic beverage, the poets' counterpart to the pirates' rum. This is about a gap in the teeth of consciousness, an empty space beyond what can be recalled, out of which arises vision and inspiration.Absinthe, like laudanum, would merely be a lubricant to ease the way this space can invaginate the writer's pen and still it. All that remains is the trace. Its scary to look for the trace, it is a ticklish and meaningless sign that is but a placeholder for a nothingness so primordial that it is prior to both presence and absence. Blanchot's Dark Gaze may have found it, I do not know.
loupgarou (email)
guestbook
sign it with your fingers
view it with your eyes
now drift away
loupgarou - situationism renewed