The artificial flowers in hashish and opium

Charles Baudelaire discusses in this book the possible relationship between drug use and poetic creativity, referring to many European creative experiences, connected in one way or another to the creative employment of hashish and opium in poetry, narration, and music. Referring to many European creative experiences, connected in one way or another to the creative employment of hashish and opium in poetry, narration, and music, blending a scientific language based on historical research and direct observation; and a poetic style that frees this book from its research nature and makes it one of the books through which we can understand the intellectual and aesthetic backgrounds that will later define some features of his poetic writing. It is worth mentioning that this book is translated into Arabic for the first time. From the book: Introduction One summer evening in 1849, Théophile Gautier sat in the lobby of the Luzon Inn overlooking the Saint Louis River in Paris, waiting for his friend Fernand Poussar, whom he used to meet there at the "Secret Hashish Club" in the company of Alexandre Dumas and Dr. Jacques Joseph Muro. While he was there, Poussar entered bringing with him a new guest to their circle, which they always carefully selected. Gautier stood up, shook hands with his friend, glancing secretly at the man accompanying him: stern features, sharp eyes, a prominent nose like an accusing finger, a faint smile, and a hand reaching out to him: - Charles Pierre Baudelaire. - Gautier... Théophile Gautier. They exchanged greetings, and without wasting much time on introductions, they joined their secret lobby at the inn. This lobby was not just a place where writers met to consume drugs, but it was a real laboratory for their literary experiment and for the discussions they might conduct about their texts and writing projects. Perhaps Baudelaire was aware of the danger of the game he was about to play, which gradually pushed him to develop the gains he could achieve from this laboratory, considering it a space and starting point for direct observation related to what hashish and opium might have in common, possibly linking them to literary and creative writing. This gradually led him on a long journey, during which he composed this book, whose nature seems problematic from the very beginning, lacking a suitable generic classification that would place it clearly within a specific category of writing. This is not surprising from Baudelaire, who would later focus his entire experience on establishing a terminological tension that would characterize French, Western, and Arab poetic modernity (albeit late), and whose theoretical course would be rooted in the concept of prose poetry, or the poem in prose (En Prose), as we prefer to translate it. All sources concerned with documenting the French literary movement in the mid-19th century show Baudelaire's constant desire to play the role of observer when it comes to hashish or opium, which may be linked to moral or health concerns he emphasized in several parts of this book. However, this caution—while not denying his consumption and experience with these drugs—relates to his tendency to emphasize that, like the French elites who formed secret hashish circles at the time, he was not just an ordinary consumer, but rather, through his reflections and research, he linked the use of hashish and various stimulants and drugs to writing and creative creation, in a way that overturns the understanding that might occur in the reader’s mind upon encountering the title of this book. Its primary goal was not hashish or opium, nor the legalization of their use, but rather the creative process itself, and following it in light of that. Such a representation would not have been possible without the cognitive effort he made in exploring his research topics, whether related to cognitive, linguistic, historical, and cultural aspects or sensory, realistic, personal, and experimental ones. Within this multi-dimensional horizon, Baudelaire appears in "Artificial Paradise" with different aspects, where writing styles intertwine between objectivity, as implied by the scientific approach he aimed for when laying the first methodological foundations of his research project; and subjectivity, which the poet within him could not rid himself of despite his many attempts to hypnotize himself, silence his voice, and tame his symbolism in favor of his calm narrative tone. If we want to dissect the elements that formed Baudelaire’s discourse in this book in a way that does not undermine its coherence and literary unity, we can summarize the aspects in which he appeared in "Paradise" in the following four levels: 1- Baudelaire the thinker and writer: Man wanted to dream, and now the dream controls him: this Baudelaire is clearly evident at the beginning of the book and throughout it, but we can strongly assume that he was more present before its composition, that is, in the cognitive hypotheses and methodological controls he relied on before starting to write, which would escape in more than one part of his mental project, not in the subject matter of the writing, but in the form of his approach. In this regard, alongside the etymological effort and the notable historical research related to the word "hashish," and this drug and its various types and uses across different cultures and civilizations, Baudelaire’s work as a thinker and writer focused on studying the phenomenon of dreaming, considering it the imaginative realm within which the drug operates, performing its magical effect, benefiting from the mental structure of the consumer, and employing the elements that make up his personality, memory, and culture. At this level, and within this scientific character of Baudelaire’s writing, he addressed dreaming, striving to identify some of its types, and even linking it in more than one place to childhood, considering it the reference framework within which the subsequent adult personality, fears, anxieties, and complexes are realized (often unconsciously). He says: "And we will find in the notes related to childhood the origin of the strange dreams of the adult. All biographers have understood, in a nearly...