Eating Drugs with Walter Benjamin
Hashish in Marseilles in Manhattan in the Rain
I’m still trying to figure out how my writing here on Substack should complement my YouTube channel. Should I assume that everyone reading this post has already seen my video on the subject?
To assume anything about you seems absurd. It’s dizzying to imagine you are a real person. Who the hell are you?
So in the spirit of experimentation, what I’m publishing below is the script of my Eating Drugs with My Literary Hero video.
A quick note on the process to create this one, which was a little different than my other videos. First, I read the Benjamin essay Hashish in Marseilles several times and took notes. I drafted a script based on particular passages I wanted to call out. Then I bought some drugs which, in New York City, is a legal and very enjoyable experience. You can’t touch anything, so everything goes through the clerk. She asks what you’re looking for. The less you know what you’re looking for, the more she’ll impress you with her knowledge of the product.
Then, I picked a day. I figured I’d wander the city, true flanuer-style. But it was raining that day. Pretty hard. So I decided to head for the Met, recording some of my experience. The rest of the story is below.
Over the next several weeks I finished the script, recorded the “talking head” part of the video, and then edited for several weeks. I’m working on a companion piece about Benjamin’s other drug experiments, which I’ll link here when I’m done.
Overall I found re-reading Benjamin, who I fell in love with in college, to be more sensually and intellectually pleasurable than getting high and going to the museum. But, to each their own. You don’t have to pick just one. Cheers.
Hashish in Marseille
in Manhattan
in the Rain
In 1928, Walter Benjamin, a writer who possessed one of the great minds of the 20th century, sat on a hotel bed and ate a spoonful of hashish. (Hashish, that gorgeous Arabic word for cannabis resin.) Stoned, Benjamin spent the evening wandering the streets of a Mediterranean port city. As usual, He was searching for something.
He wanted to know if getting high could help him uncover strange truths hidden under all of this… sameness.
Did Benjamin find them? Any insights that could withstand the harsh light the sober world once the drugs had worn off? Or did hashish fill his mind with nothing but goofy jazz age highdeas?
To find out, we’ll dive into his essay Hashish in Marseille. And because I’m such a serious journalist, I decided to make the ultimate sacrifice. To block out a day and enter my own hashish trance in search of Walter Benjamin.
This is Hashish in Marseille in Manhattan in the Rain.
ALONE
It’s 1928. Walter Benjamin is thirty-six. In twelve years he’ll die tragically while trying the escape the Nazi invasion of France. Of course he doesn’t know that. He is alone in his hotel room.
At seven o'clock in the evening, after long hesitation, I took hashish.
With the absolute certainty, in this city of hundreds of thousands where no one knows me, of not being disturbed, I lie on the bed. And yet I am disturbed, by a little child crying… I lie on the bed reading and smoking. Opposite me always this view of the belly of Marseilles. The street I have so often seen is like a knife cut.”
Benjamin starts in the past tense “I took hashish,” and then falls into the present “I lie on the bed,” and we feel a little closer to his experience.
The present tense also matches the drug writing of Benjamin’s hero, Charles Baudelaire the French poet of the mid 1800’s. Baudelaire was a member of a hashish eaters club in Paris, along with Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, and Honore de Balzac. Baudelaire and his buddies would meet in a salon and eat hashish mixed with almond paste, which they washed down with some soup while a string quartet played. I’m making up none of these details.
Apparently they did it at such high doses they actually hallucinated. Or so they claimed.
Baudelaire wrote about his drug experiments in 1860 in the book Artificial Paradises. And even though he assures the reader, “there is nothing of the positively supernatural in hashish intoxication,” he goes on to basically state the opposite.
“The eyes behold the Infinite; the ear perceives almost inaudible sounds in the midst of the most tremendous tumult.”
So Benjamin is chasing Baudelaire, while I, in 2025, am chasing Benjamin. I enter my own trance in a city of millions which, through a magic trick, seems almost deserted. The magic trick is called rain.
It’s lovely to see the city made small and cozy by the rain. It pushes us into fewer places, under awnings, inside cafes, or, in my case, under a cozy little rain-defying dome called an umbrella. In fact i realize immediately that the tiny portable umbrella I’d brought is not sufficient, so I upgrade to a 50 dollar umbrella with a curved wooden handle which threatens to transform this utilitarian object into an affectation, and I’m happy about that.
After all Benjamin has a walking stick.
What now? Only a certain benevolence, the expectation of being received kindly by people. The feeling of loneliness is very quickly lost. My walking stick begins to give me a special pleasure. One becomes so tender… I already had this wonderful lightness and sureness of step that transformed the stony, unarticulated earth of the great square that I was crossing into the surface of a country road along which I strode at night like an energetic hiker.
Susan Sontag says that we take a walk, we convert time into space.
In the present, I’m amazed at the wildness of Central Park, which I always think of as so controlled. I film an advertisement for the city. “Come on down to New York City! We got everything. We got waterfalls!”
I’m walking, wandering vaguely northward toward the Met.
The act of walking, which I do all the time, suddenly conjures a memory.
I distinctly remember in college working on my walk, trying to make it a walk that had a lot of my personality in it. I definitely wanted my walk to be strut-like but not actually a strut because I didn’t want it be too affected. But I wanted you to look at it and be like, “is he trying to do that? Is that natural?” I wanted my walk to be slow. A slow walk feels weirdly revolutionary.
Back to Benjamin:
Now the hashish eater’s demands on time and space come into force. As is known, these are absolutely regal. Versailles, for one who has taken hashish, is not too large, or eternity too long. Against the background of these immense. dimensions of inner experience, of absolute duration and immeasurable space, a wonderful, beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time.
Usually, when I try to consider the vastness of the universe or, like, eternity, my brain doesn't get very far, but I end up a little sad and lonely. Here we are with all our big troubles on this tiny pale blue dot on the inner arm of an unremarkable galaxy amid trillions of other galaxies.
There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on our planet. And there are more grains of sand on our beaches than my brain could ever come close to understanding.
We just weren’t built for contemplating immensities.
But Benjamin greets immensity with “a wonderful, beatific humor.”
And just as I think Benjamin is reaching his lofty heights, and about to get at something deep, he says:
I feel this humor infinitely when I am told at the Restaurant Basso that the hot kitchen has just been closed, while I have just sat down to feast into eternity.
ART OR PEOPLE?
I approach my own Versailles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which like the French palace has rows of over-pruned trees that I hate from a distance but enjoy walking through.
The Met is closed on Wednesdays. I greet this setback with almost no disappointment. Aren’t I on something called Museum Mile? So I make for the Guggenheim, which I’ve never been to before. The museum is a corkscrew, and I correctly infer that it will be more enjoyable to take the stairs to the top and then wander down the curving ramp as I look at the art.
At first this is daunting. Partly because the rail is low and what if I tumble over and die? Also they put similar art in the same place on different levels, and the first time I see this it’s disorienting. Like a glitch in the Matrix.
Another problem: the art is too cerebral. I feel no emotional connection to it. It all feels too purposeful. Like of course this sculpture looks the way it does. The artist wanted it to. Art suddenly seems much less mysterious and interesting compared to… the people looking at the art.
I’m sure I’m inspired by Benjamin. He makes his way to a cafe bar.
In that little harbor bar the hashish then began to exert its canonical magic with a primitive sharpness that I had scarcely felt until then. For it made me into a physiognomist, or at least a contemplator of physiognomies,
Physiognomy is face-reading, it’s when you try infer someone’s character from their physical appearance. The ancient Greeks were into it, and it was revived in popularity during the 19th Century. As like a field of study, it’s awful; it’s a fake science that’s been used for racist purposes. As a game you can play in your mind? It’s pretty sweet.
I underwent something unique in my experience: I positively fixed my gaze on the faces that I had around me, which were, in part, of remarkable coarseness or ugliness.
Faces that I would normally have avoided for a twofold reason: I should neither have wished to attract their gaze nor endured their brutality.
I now suddenly understood how, to a painter—had it not happened to Rembrandt and many others?—ugliness could appear as the true reservoir of beauty, better than any treasure cask, a jagged mountain with all the inner gold of beauty gleaming from the wrinkles, glances, features. It was above all men’s faces that had begun to interest me.
Intellectually, I’m totally with him here. Symmetry is pleasing but boring. There is this annoyingly predictable way in which our beauty standards correlate with reproductive age, as though we weren’t the ones deciding what was beautiful but just our genes.
Yeah. Do we really want to spend our time looking at people with Vidal Sasoon hair? Or do we want to find beauty in the faces of the hardscrabble fisherfolk?
And yeah, as Nathan Fielder says, “women make up some of the prettiest humans in the world.” So if “ugliness is the true reservoir of beauty,” then we must not stare at the women. We must stare… at the men.
So I try to. I attempt to stare at the least attractive men, looking for the true reservoir of beauty. I will be honest with you. I didn’t find it. But I’ll try again, once a year, for the rest of my life.
Anyway Benjamin is hungry and the waiter has arrived.
First I ordered a dozen oysters. The man wanted me to order the next course at the same time. I named some local dish. He came back with the news that none was left. I then pointed to a place in the menu in the vicinity of this dish, and was on the point of ordering each item, one after another, but then the name of the one above it caught my attention, and so on, until I finally reached the top of the list.
This was not just from greed, however, but from, an extreme politeness toward the dishes that I did not wish to offend by a refusal.
Of course the dishes do not wish to be ordered, and we can’t go through life constantly worrying about what the soup wants. But to occasionally allow ourselves to imagine the inanimate objects that surround us are not just props in the play of our lives but fellow actors? Might this nudge us toward living a little more sensuously and ecologically?
Little children do this. They give personhood to inanimate objects. They speak to them. the objects speak back. My five year old said the other day: “I can speak to anything.”
I believe we smoke weed in an attempt to mimic the way our brains worked when we were children, when the world had more magic in it.
For me, in the museum, the faces of the tourists are now too intense. The art is too artsy. Luckily, I fall in love with the water fountains. They are golden and wide. But It’s only when I approach one that I’m transfixed. As I lean down to drink, a blob appears. It’s the shape of my face but larger, as I lean lower to the water, the blob sharpens and suddenly my face is brought into focus, larger than it really is, glimmering in the gold and speckled with water droplets.
I feel like Narcissus looking at his reflection in a pool of water. This is the way the first woman ever sees herself according to Milton in Paradise Lost. Eve too is transfixed.
I’m… thrilled to discover that there is one of these gorgeous fountains at each level of the museum, so as I do my orbit, I return to a new fountain. New but the same.
The drinking fountains step seamlessly into their role as my sidekick. The Pancho to my Quixote. Providing comfort and sustenance after each leg of my journey. They become a trusted friend in an overwhelming world.
It’s not just the fountains that keep me from being alone. I am with myself. As Benjamin says:
Under these circumstances there was no question of loneliness. Was I my own company? Surely not so undisguisedly. I doubt whether that would have made me so happy. More likely this: I became my own most skillful, fond, shameless procurer, gratifying myself with the ambiguous assurance of one who knows from profound study the wishes of his employer.
I love some solitary time. Me and my thoughts. Unplugged from the digital drip feed.
When I’m alone and not attached to my phone, I sometimes shrug loose from the social conventions and let myself talk to myself. I like to treat my ideas as though they were the ideas of someone else and react to them. I extend to myself the warmth and care I’d give to any loved one.
You can flirt with a water fountain, but you can also flirt with yourself a little. In your mind.
But Benjamin says it’s not enough that he’s his own company. It’s not just imagining this other version of himself that he can react to. No. This other version of himself works for the original.
He becomes his own assistant, procuring the perfect thoughts and sensory experiences for his employer, which is also him. And yeah, When you feel your thoughts are being delivered to your brain as if on a silver tray, “loneliness is out of the question.” In fact, the opposite. He wouldn’t be able to this tuned to his own mind if he were with someone else.
In the museum, I don’t have that feeling, but suddenly the art is hitting me. It’s damn good. But I’m also distracted by the fact that I’m trying to vlog this. Which kind of sucks. I’m trying to be some city-wandering flaneur, but nothing has less flaneur energy than holding out your phone filming yourself so you’ll have good B-roll for your nascent youtube channel.
As Benjamin says, “From century to century things grow more estranged.''
One of the reasons I love reading Benjamin is how prescient he was. How applicable his observations are to our current moment. His estrangement from an industrialized world is so similar to my estrangement from our digital world. There is still so much to celebrate. To enjoy. Our world is still so tactile. But it feels like we’re on a conveyor belt, and the future will be bigger, stronger, and more estranged.
ARIADNE’S THREAD
To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance [being high], one ought to meditate on Ariadne’s thread.
Ariadne’s thread comes from the Greek myth where the hero Theseus tracks down the murderous minotaur in the center of the labyrinth and kills him. Beforehand, Ariadne gives her lover Theseus a ball of thread that he can unwind as he explores the labyrinth so that he’ll be able to find his way out again.
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 thread— is that not the joy of all productivity, at least in prose?
I found this passage hard to understand the first couple times, but I think I get it now. If the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth is the truth we’re searching for, Benjamin is saying that the pleasure of finding the truth isn’t just the joy of solving a problem correctly, but also this tactile pleasure: “the rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread.” The sensory experience of the process. He says this is “the joy of all productivity,” at least the joy of writing.
I can’t help read this as a lovely argument against the use of AI as a creative helper. AI can tell you where the Minotaur is in the labyrinth. It cannot mimic the “the rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread.” Which is slow and ancient.
And under hashish we are enraptured prose-beings in the highest power.
I love this but I don’t understand it. What’s a prose being? I have no idea.
OK. We are confronted by a moment of not-knowing, not understanding. I know this feeling from reading challenging philosophers like Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida. When I first picked up Benjamin I thought maybe he’d be like those French theorists.
When we read those theorists, it’s crucial we understand each term they’re using, because they’re going to keep using the term and then we’ll be at a loss for the rest of the essay. But Benjamin doesn’t often write like that. his essays tend to wander. A poet philosopher. A critic who made art.
And indeed, Benjamin never uses the phrase “prose being” again. Please let me know what you think he means by “WE ARE ENRAPTURED PROSE BEINGS IN THE HIGHEST POWER.”
I leave the museum and take the train to the village and order more dumplings than I can eat. I head west. The rain has stopped, and the city is emerging from itself. In a few hours I’ll go to a literary reading at the seaport. I’m filled with an intense longing for my wife and kids. I try to resist this longing. It feels so normie, suburban, boring — I’m with them all the time, here’s my one day in a couple months of not eating dinner with them, and I’m missing them?
I don’t like feeling high anymore. Better than being high is talking to my five year old son, hearing him say “I wish I was a bird so I could fly through the rainbow.” You know what’s even better than flirting with yourself or a drinking fountain? Flirting with your wife at the dinner table subtle enough that the kids don’t notice.
But I resist the urge to catch a train home.
FREE OF ALL DESIRE
Something very beautiful was going on around the door of the dance hall. Now and then a Chinese man in blue silk trousers and a glowing pink silk jacket stepped outside. He was the doorman. Girls displayed themselves in the doorway. My mood was free of all desire.
The music that meanwhile kept rising and falling, I called the rush switches of jazz. I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not happen without inner disputation.
Walter Benjamin has been brought up being taught that it’s not ok to tap your foot to music. This helps me understand the stereotype that white people are bad at dancing. It’s cuz our great great grandparents told their children not to tap their feet to music. Thank God cannabis can loosen Benjamin’s foot a little bit.
So I go to the seaport, to the book launch of Lincoln Michel’s Metallic Realms. In the audience I recognize two of my favorite literary people, neither of whom I’ve ever met. That’s the very smart, always delightful Brandon Taylor. And that’s Erin Somers, co-host of my all-time favorite literary podcast, Mr. Difficult.
The reading is great, and I boldly go up to Erin and Brandon afterwards and they’re nice enough to chat with me for a while. They’re both smart and funny.
Lincoln’s agent comes over with a few young William Morris assistants in tow and she introduces Brandon and Erin to them, and says “and this is Blake, who we just met,” and I feel, for a moment, like I’m part of the literary world I’ve been dreaming of. And I didn’t even need to get my novel published. I just needed to go to a book reading, and chat afterwards.
I ask Lincoln Michel if he wants to appear in a video I’m working on about sci-fi, and he says yes. So that’s coming.
The intoxication subsided when I crossed the Canebière and at last turned the corner to have a final ice cream at the little café.
I too get a chocolate milkshake at Grand Central for the train ride home. The shake is cold, and I’m dreaming of warm arms.
It was not far from the first cafe of the evening, in which, suddenly, the amorous joy dispensed by the contemplation of some fringes blowing in the wind had convinced me that the hashish had begun its work. And when I recall this state I would like to believe that hashish possesses the power to persuade nature to repeat the great squandering of our own existence that we enjoy when we’re in love. For if, when we first love, our existence runs through Nature's fingers like golden coins that she cannot hold and must squander so that they can purchase new being, new birth, she now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls toward existence.
In the end, Benjamin rises to the lofty, poetic and complex, and I’m tempted to try to disentangle his grammar and unpack this metaphor. What do the coins and fingers represent? But if nothing else, Benjamin has taught me that I don’t need to untie every knot. I can close my eyes and feel the thread in my fingers. In my ears are the rush switches of jazz and his words: “Nature throws us, in ample handfuls, toward existence.”
And so we are way up here below the fray.
I love your YouTube videos!! I liked how you provided more information on your research and thought process when creating the YouTube video. I also thought it was such a great and new video idea. I would love to see more of your creative process here on substack.