Coleridge and Opium and Drugs

Thinking about Coleridge and Opium--

A look at The Early Years bio showed me that already in 1797 he used laudanum to treat a severe eye infection (strange to think about, given the Mariner's glittering eye).


Much discussed through the years--how opium played a role in his composing Kubla Khan, other poems. How it may have helped or harmed him or perhaps was not all that significant. How attributing his creative inspirations and his creative failures to opium may be reductive, oversimplifying, unfair. He had certain interests and dispositions--opium simply fell in line with them.


Some unkind biographers used his opium habit to denigrate his character and his writing.


Coleridge himself worried about it considerably. Opium was an affliction, a curse. De Quincey, in contrast, comes to argue for its overall beneficial effects.


The larger question of drugs and other soft technologies of mind--what do we make of a literary text that was or appears to have been written under the influence (and what about that latter phrase?).


In one respect, our bodies already produce drugs--endorphins, etc. And there are the drugs that aren't looked upon as such--caffeine and so on.


Further--iis there something particularly Gothic about drugs inspiring sublime visions, nightmares, deliria and disasters? As if the self is not the self, losing ground, opium or peyote or LSD usurping one's mastery?

And the Faust aspect of the Romantic genius/villain/exile? Melmoth the Wanderer? Victor Frankenstein?


Is visonary paranoia, with its projections of knowledge and sytems, a useful concept to consider here? The I and the eye, Freud's Schreber case, Lacan's accounts?