cannabisnews.com: Green Green Grass of Home  





Green Green Grass of Home  
Posted by CN Staff on April 13, 2003 at 18:28:21 PT
By Yitzhak Laor 
Source: Ha`aretz Daily 
What is so frightening about those green, green leaves to the point where parents who smoke them on Friday, sign the petition against hashish that their children bring home from the school principal on Sunday?  The founding father of Christianity, Shaul Hatarsi - that is, Paul - understood the connection between prohibition and sin when he wrote in the Epistle to the Romans (7:7):
"I had not known sin but by the law," and therefore he based ethics not on prohibitions - that is, not on desires that are forbidden, but on love of a different kind, love without an object, the love of Jesus. In other words, Paul understood the dialectic between prohibition and desire: There is no desire without prohibition and there is no prohibition without desire. Thus far, with respect to the universal. Henceforth, our subject is hashish. Some of the pleasure in smoking it, or eating it baked in brownies, or drinking it as an infusion (and I stress that this is just part of the pleasure, so as not to arouse the ire of the amiable Green Leaf people) has to do with the strange prohibition that society imposes on the use of products from this plant in which this book, wonderfully edited by Dan Daor, takes such delight. And indeed, before we praise this book, a word about the prohibition on cannabis. The proponents of legalization, in the spirit of Paul, say: Why create criminals through a prohibition that is not observed? Many good people in the old and new elites, military and civilians, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, take pleasure in smoking on Fridays, to the sounds of Bach, or Miles Davis, or the Israel Defense Forces orchestra and many other kinds of multicultural melodies. The matter is even more amusing: Former U.S. president Bill Clinton said that he smoked but didn't inhale, more or less like Monica Levinsky, but the top political levels in the West are full of people who, with respect to their age and the circumstances of their maturation - if they were not real alcoholics, like our good friend George W. Bush - did enjoy a smoke. Thus, how is it that these people have not succeeded in changing the laws and the concepts? The answer to this is simple. The thought precedes the thinking. The language precedes the speaker. What you smoked when you were a student, just exactly like what you believed when you were a youngster, goes up in smoke. The question remains: What is so frightening about that green, green grass to the point that parents who smoke on Friday, on Sunday sign the principal's petition against hashish that the children bring home from school? In a very short chapter in one of the versions of "A Thousand and One Nights" (a chapter that cannot be found in the Arabic version and has been translated from the only source that exists - the French), there is the tale of the fisherman and the qadi, who were enveloped in a state of delirious joy, thanks to the green stuff. The sultan and his vizier come along in disguise; the fisherman spins a tale and then says (in Richard Burton's translation): "`Now I want to piss.' So saying, he lifted up his interminable tool and, walking over to the sultan, seemed to be about to discharge upon him. `I also want to piss,' exclaimed the qadi, and took up the same threatening position in front of the wazir. The two victims shouted with laughter and fled from that house, crying over their shoulders: `God's curse on all hashish-eaters!'" This is the nature of the comic: the blurring of the boundaries of hierarchy. Is this the source of the fear of the befuddling substance? `Dream state' According to the reports of some writers, the hashish experience is different from the experience of pure water or black coffee not because of the prohibition, or not especially because of the prohibition, but rather because of a kind of inward illumination. What is common to all the lovers of hashish in this book (and there are also a few articles by haters of hashish) is a kind of profound pleasure in the love of the high as a kind of lift to another, unexpected, unfamiliar place, quite different from what preceded it. This is what Baudelaire wrote about this illumination: "Here is a tree that howls in the wind, playing vegetal melodies to nature." And thus wrote Gerard de Nerval: "And as I spoke I saw her huge eyes light up and flow with streams of spirituality; her transparent arms came toward me and were like rays of light. I felt like I was enveloped in a net of flames, and despite myself I sank from a state of alertness into a dream state." But the book also includes counter-recommendations: "It is a fact that almost every person often craves for some mental stimulant, and, alas!, too many are weak enough to indulge in gratifying an appetite which feeds on that which destroys it. He who conquers his passions and appetites, and brings them into the subjection of whatsoever is pure and lovely, exhibits a greatness of mind. Regular habits, plain food, cheerful and healthful exercise, the performing of charity and the reading of good authors, will impart a cheerfulness of mind and a healthfulness of frame, which no one knoweth but those who follow after these things." This is from The Scientific American, April 13, 1850. In the October 23, 1858 edition of The Scientific American (The Advocate of Industry, and Journal of Scientific, Mechanical and Other Improvements), there is an "anthropological" analysis. "The drowsy appearance and indolent character of Eastern nations is not only due to the climate of the countries, and the almost spontaneous production by the earth of everything necessary for the life of man, thus in a great measure rendering labor unnecessary, but it is aided and increased by the use of powerful narcotic drugs ... The Ottomans, that is the nations inhabiting the north of Africa, the southwest of Asia and a portion of Europe, prefer the intoxication produced by hasheesh [sic] ... The effect on the system is remarkable, and unlike that of opium, tobacco or alcohol. It immediately acts on the brain and nervous system, but does not stimulate the creative faculty, as does opium, and does not produce insensibility like alcohol, but while it allows its victim to be sensible to what is passing around, it intensifies sensations, and enlarges and expands to a most miraculous degree the objects by which the person under its influence is surrounded." And the article ends with a scientific comment: "Persons who are in the habit of using this drug usually terminate their existence as lunatics, and since the French have had Algeria their insane hospitals have been filled with the victims of hasheesh." And this is what Walter Benjamin wrote about his hashish experience in Marseilles: "Versailles is not too great for one who has eaten hashish, nor eternity too long-lasting. And in the background of these colossal dimensions of the inner adventure, of the absolute duration and the immeasurable spatial realm, a wonderful humor lingers with that blissful smile, made all the more agreeable by the infinite dubiousness of all existing beings." This is followed by the lovely description of his wanderings in the port and the adjacent alleys, and then: "Yet, barely had it felt me relaxing than the hashish began to perform its magic with a primitive acuity which I had never experienced before, nor have I experienced since; namely, it allowed me to become a physiognomist. I, who had otherwise never been capable of recognizing distant acquaintances, of keeping facial features in my memory, suddenly became dead stuck on the forms of the faces which surrounded me, and which I generally would have avoided for two reasons: neither would I have wished to draw their attention to myself, nor would I have been able to bear their brutality" (translated from the German by Scott. J. Thompson, 1933). Here, then is one possible explanation for understanding the strange prohibition the law imposes on smoking hashish. Is this not a demand for ownership on the part of the society that exists by virtue of being an experiential control of a clear division between the inner and the outer, the "private" and the "public"? Is this not a fear of the individual's right to temporary insanity, that is - the abandonment of the sanity to which we are commanded on the long route between the cradle and the terminal sanatorium? Forbidden pleasure  Dan Daor, an intellectual to whom a great many Israeli intellectuals owe new angles of observation, insisted for a long time upon realizing an old passion of his: to edit an anthology on that which is forbidden: the consumption of hashish. Daor's introduction is laced with irony: "Like man's other best friend, hashish is infinitely varied. And like the dog, it too has accompanied man for such a long time that it is impossible to find it except in its domesticated form, and more or less everywhere." This of course includes a certain apartment that I intended to rent on Y.L. Peretz Street, in the heart of the old central bus station in Tel Aviv, where the landlady stipulated in the contract that the large plants in the flowerpots on the balcony would not remain after I moved out. The guy who intended to leave me the plants loved the mention of the plants in the contract. This was a large part of that forbidden pleasure. I have no intention of falling into the sociological trap or into a discussion of addiction or non-addiction. Daor writes: "This collection does not include helpful literature for growers, cooks, pharmacists, lawyers and criminologists," and thus knocks the ground out from under all sorts of moralists. Nevertheless, it is important to recall what Haaretz reported about the Green Leaf election campaign when its activists came to Kfar Kassem. There they stood before the leader of the Islamic Movement, who in this context was the mouthpiece for representatives of many sectors, Jews and Arabs. For them the delight of Walter Benjamin or de Nerval is less important than the sights in the alleys where the poor sit and stare with indifferent eyes at their own suffering and the suffering of others. There are those who say that in certain places the regimes turn a blind eye to drugs when they are prevalent among undesirable minorities, a kind of hidden and slow final solution. I heard this conjecture for the first time from an Arab friend from Jaffa, at Tel Aviv University, more than 30 years ago, and as evidence he brought the fact that smoking in Tel Aviv leads to arrests, whereas on 60th Street in Jaffa there was a large public hashish den, he said, back then. In the meantime I have read all kinds of such suppositions by mayors in a very friendly great power, who were not at all bothered by Crack as long as it left the members of certain minorities lying about in alleys, "killing one another." These are observation from the ethical realm, and all of them go beyond the framework of the book - that is, hashish as part of the pleasures of the young middle class in Israel. As this printing will sell out very quickly, I suggest that for the second edition, Daor commission a contribution from MK Jamal Zahalka (Balad), who devoted his doctoral thesis in pharmacology to hashish, and in the introduction to the thesis, give a broad and fascinating survey of the topic from the cultural perspective. He, MK Zahalka, is from the 21st century, unlike most other Knesset members, and he is from here, and he is one of our own.  Note: Green Green Grass of Home  A new book details the connection between the source of Christianity and Hashish.  "Dapei Esev" ("Grass Files") by Dan Daor, Xargol, 207 pages, NIS 69  Source: Ha`aretz Daily (Israel)Author: Yitzhak Laor Published: April 11, 20023Copyright: 2003 Ha`aretz Contact: feedback haaretz.co.ilWebsite: http://www.haaretzdaily.com/Related Articles:Israel Waits for Godothttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15224.shtmlLetter From Israel - Keep on the Grasshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15130.shtmlThe Wrong Drug Front - Ha`aretz Daily http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14851.shtmlDrug Trade Thrived in Biblical Times http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread13663.shtml 
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