On the Nature of Poison
I have reacquainted myself with the jealous god.
The Latin root venenum, poion, potion, drug, is rooted in love. Proto-Indoeuropean wenes-no, Venus. The Sanskrit cousin, van? Desire. In German, poison is gift, thought to have come to that euphimistic meaning through marriage from the Old English gift, the price which must be paid for a bride or perhaps from Greek: gift, payment, or dose of medicine. We begin with a substance, but we must not end there. We seek the primal poison, the root illness, the prima materia.
On Speed Limits
Reason is temporal. It takes time and has duration. It is a line–not a point. I wonder, is there any coincidence that the Age of Reason coincides with Age of Stimulants? A reasonable universe replaced a rational cosmos. The chronometer. Spacetime curved and closed, and time changed forever, from forever. A new idea, essentially: time in passage, the quantification of duration.
Stimulants surpassed the age of exploration. Speed and destination instead of meandering looking about of a scout in unmapped territory. A closing of the peripery. Merchants. The trading ship captures this. There is nothing to see on the voyage but straight ahead, the destination–the goal.
The new world met the old. The gods mingled. Speed and spice, the great stimuli. Tobacco led the advance, followed by coffee, tea, chocolate and coca. Coffee, tea, and chocolate all arrived in London on the same year. The poisons followed the Hour, like attracting like. They followed the clocks.
Prior to the seventeenth century, the hour made sporadic appearances. The hour was variable–day and night were each 12 hours, regardless of duration. People moved by bells and chimes. The clock was the triumph of abstract reasion, of rationality.
The surest poison is time.
–Emerson
The aristocracy was the first to own clocks and the first to drink coffee. Coffeeshops abounded. By the eighteenth century, prices had dropped enough to allow time and its stimulating servants to be accessible to everyone.
Speed is the essence of modernity. It is our principal and ruling poison.
–Pendell
Straight ahead, fovea centralis, the center of the retina. Losing the periphery: maybe “lack of perspective” is the pearticular distinguishing mark of the stimulants. The periphery is playfulness, a teasing polymorphous perversity: central stimulation is the libido of the merchant.
An intoxicated uality: half-dreaming, reverie usurps the controls, drugs the conductor and the engineer, and thros them off the train. The eyes are open but something is nodding. No “time ou.” Frenetic. Analysis over contemplation, the universe as a great time table, a schedule. The periphery, of course, is the environment.
Too speedy. To have time. To finish a thought.
Snore.No. Wake up now. Have a cup of joe.
Coffee, the restorative. Coffee is the “sober beverage.” it is an anti-inebriant, believed then (as still today), to be abl eto sober up those drunk on spirits. By extension then, to one not inebriated, coffee should make the drinker somehow “more sober” than ordinary sobriety. Coffee was the new way. It was the spirit of the enlightenment and supproted the enlightenment and was supported by it in turn.
A Tendency to Philosophize
The quintessential coffee-shaman was voltaire. he was born into a world where kings were believed to enjoy a special affirmation from god and in which feudal theology was so entrenched that atheism was unthinkable to a serious person. When Voltaire left the world, all of those supposed truths were in doubt. He drank seventy-two cups of coffee a day. He used his lover’s back as a writing desk.
Though early researchers noted coffee’s tendenc to loquacity, it has a remarkable ability to disguise its intoxication as ordinary, as the ground state. Coffee was characterized as businesslike rather than frivolous, as reasonable rather tan impulsive.
I’m slowing down. Give me some more coffee else I might have to reconsider…
IImpulsivity. Sociability. A sense of well-being. Or nervousness, jitters. A subtle strengthening of the monkey mind. Euphoria, especially when nonhabituated. A tendency to rationality and the abstract, to be swept away by the grandeur of an idea. A tendency of linearity. A tendency to verbosity–this is a case in point.
Who or what is coffee not good for? That should be our concern. To find that out, I’ll have to quit. Hmmm, what about trying excess instead? Coffee is our culture in a cup. I’m still waiting to find out, is coffee a good guy or a bad guy? It’s poison: one of the greats.
And now, I feel it wearing off. Coffee is a jealous god–she wrenches my mind when I haven’t stopped by to visit. Coffee doesn’t get me high: it makes me feel like an ordinary person. At first. If you don’t feel like a normal person until you imbibe cofee this is a sing that–well, a bad sign. A sign that you ought to avoid it, immediately. The prognosis of your relationship with this particular god is poor.
I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.
–Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
The craving for immortality is the primal poison, the orginal sin. We feel from paradise, grasping for permanence. We wish to be the gods.
Sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age’s tooth.
–Shakespeare, King John.
Sleep. It’s a good idea. Try some every day.