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Narcosis: Reality's Double/Doubling Reality
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present."- Antonin Artaud
"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind."- Rudyard Kipling
"To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread. And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of trance, as to that of creation. We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein- is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under hashish we are enraptured prose-beings in the highest power."- Walter Benjamin
"The freeway experience…is the only secular communion Los Angeles has… Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over."- Joan Didion
"Man wished to dream and now the dream will govern man."- Charles Baudelaire
"Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation."- Tennessee Williams
"Life is a hospital where every patient is possessed by a desire to change beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the stove, and that one believes he'll feel better near the window.
It always seems to me that I will always be well there where I am not, and the question of changing this matter I discuss at no cease with my soul." -Charles Baudelaire
"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."- Aldous Huxley
"We have in fact only two certainties in this world- that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself."- Georges Bataille
"Junk is the ideal product…the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy."- William Burroughs
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."- Karl Marx
"A junky runs on junk time. When his junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junk time to start."- William Burroughs
"…it's later than you think…"- Charles Baudelaire
"Woe to you, my Princess, when I come…you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body."- Sigmund Freud
"Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?- It is almost the history of 'culture,' of our so-called high culture."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic."- Salvador Dali
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