Hallucinogesis: Thomas de Quincey's Mind Trips (Essay‪)‬

THOMAS DE QUINCEY'S ENTIRE OEUVRE IS PREMISED ON A CONCEPTION OF the lost thing, that which had been held close--a person, a feeling, a vision--as medically and culturally implicated. From his first mature work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) to his late essays on China and India in 1857, he is haunted by the ephemeral. His dreams, hallucinations, and reflections all participate in a kind of nostalgia-laden anxiety disorder that the instabilities of his time fostered, even encouraged, in those who were, or believed themselves to be, sensitive. Losing things, even oneself, becomes a condition of De Quincey's life, a life lived as remediation in the face of loss. De Quincey's sensitivity makes him vulnerable to otherly knowledges despite the vigorous ratiocination of which he believes himself capable, while the remedial work of his autobiographical writing is framed by and understood through a pharmacologically induced dreamworld. Epistemological and visionary knowledges self-contradict in this uncertain landscape resulting in fleeting--sometimes layered--moments of insight I am calling "hallucinogesis." These are the moments of intense almost-knowing resulting from particularly powerful opium dreams. Such dreams, as solitary and isolating as prophetic vision, operate in De Quincey's world like a palimpsest, layered in an intertextuality that does not depend on either the reader's or the authoring dreamer's prior knowledge of subtextual matters. The "sighs from the depths" that constitute his closest look at the potentiality of palimpsest, the "Suspiria de Profundis" (1845), reflect a larger affinity for layered emotions and pre-verbal states, both of which dispose him toward what the rational mind contests but the dreaming mind yearns for. This is the lost thing as a priority, a prior, centering claire on him. It is the knowledge of this unnameable thing that constitutes De Quincey's grappling with nostalgia as a symptom of the disorder, the hallucinogesis that is both pathological and enlightening. If opium facilitates De Quincey's disorder, his sense of loss had already predisposed him toward it.