Thomas De Quincey: Confessions of a Romantic Gutter Punk

I spend a lot of time walking through my neighborhood. It is quiet and contemplative, gives me a chance to let my mind wander. The marigny is my own little haven; I know the sounds, the scarred streets, my eccentric neighbor who never wears pants, the feeling of being outside the chaos of Uptown New Orleans but with debauchery just around the corner if I am so inclined to partake. There is, however, a new installation to my habitat that can not go unnoticed: several times a day I trip over young kids passed out in the gutters, clad in denim that was possibly washed in 1981, mangy, malnourished dogs with nope around their necks attached in some way to the owner that attempts to relieve me of my box of left overs, some form of payment that could be exchanged for a tall boy tucked into a brown paper bag, or simply howls into the sky about how difficult it is to live on the streets, strumming a Martin guitar that I know costs at least $500. It is the newly fashioned New Orleans transient gutter punk that so often interrupts my reverie. The young kids that leave their suburban homes in Kentucky, hop on a freight train and end up sucking down whiskey on my front lawn (or stoop rather--alas! I have no yard or grass). It is the exploitation of those that are actually homeless or in need of monetary aid that really pisses me off. These kids ran away from mothers that would love to welcome them back into their brick homes, wash their denims, give them lunch money and tuck them into bed. But this population lives a life of choice poverty, toting expensive musical instruments and bragging about drug and alcohol addiction. It is here that I bring in the charismatic opiate lover himself, Thomas De Quincey.
As stated in biographical information, De Quincey dropped out of school, ran away from an affluent family, renounced his money and took up a life of chosen poverty where he developed a drug habit and enjoyed pretending to be poor so that he could participate in some self indulgent form of what he calls "the pleasures of the poor." The first thirty pages of his confessions talk about squatting in a mansion on Oxford street, struggling to survive from want of food. I understand the fascination with opium that has propelled him to think that this was a sort of romantic idea (not of course in the literary sense), but he simultaneously attempts to convince the reader that his scholarship is his most cherished past time. I would think that it is hard to critically review literature when you are bent over in a gutter begging for your life, or you only feel alive on Tuesday and Saturday nights pumped full of laudanum drifting through an Italian opera. This is not an expansion of mind, it is a rejection of reality for a fantasy life in which nothing becomes of value except desire to continue this fantastic vision of the world.
Not to mention De Quincey's inconsistencies throughout the text in his descriptions of the experience of the drug itself. At one point he claims that opium in no way isolates the user, that it enables the user to more enjoy social settings, yet describes the happiest year of his life as alone in a cottage behind Worsworth during winter with opium and books as his only companions. I do not want to suggest that De Quincey is a complete discredit to the Romantic movement, I just want to claim that he is unlike the others that we have studied in that his habitual reliance upon opium, and the means to which he started this lifestyle, perpetuates a sort of illusion--a role that he condemned himself to that is not transcendence, as Blake or Wordsworth is aching for, but a veil that keeps him from truly experiencing sublime vision. It is an imitation of sublime vision that leaves De Quincey with little more than nightmares, terrible health, and a chronic opium dependency.
So I warn you gutter punks out there, it may be fun to play the starving artist/ musician role for a while, but eventually you are going to wake up one morning pining for breakfast, a bar of soap, and a conversation with someone other than your dog.

O, Confessions of an Opium Eater

De Quincey begins his "Confesssions of an Opium Eater" with lines like grappling hooks, which forced me to read on. I quickly ran my eyes from left to right, left to right, like a typewriter resetting its ribbon repeatedly, and I remember the moment at which they stopped. De Quincey writes, "But I took it: -- and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes: -- this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me -- in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a panacea - a [pharmakon nepenthez] for all human woes..." I pictured him on his knees, the opium allowing his eyes to feel open for the first time with its painful bliss. His words allowed me to see him; the feelings inside him swelling from their deepest point and shooting forward in lines throughout his body. Previous to this description, he goes into great depth about the druggist. In his mind an ephemeral being, sent to Earth solely for the purpose of serving him. When De Quincey wrote, "...returned me what seemed to be real copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer," it brought about such beautiful imagery. This prose reads like poetry throughout. His writing style and words seem to be, themselves, eternally drugged. The "cloudless serenity" of which he speaks, battled with the men "disguised by sobriety," and the brutish drunks all give way into his clear window of logic in recounting his prior actions, feelings, and descriptions of this drug. There is, however, the ever-present and lurking reminder that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This realization comes later in the piece. It was interesting to find that opium led him to be intellectually stimulated, to be seen as a "visionary" and to go about the streets of London at night, inspired. His opium-induced self seems to be the true definition of a Romantic. Opium itself is derived from nature - poppies - and that is where Romantic poets and writers claim to always find true happiness and inspiration. His outings to the Opera-house sent music of all sorts (the singer's soul, tyrannic violins, crowds of people) swirling around him blissfully, and all the more enjoyed by his 'debauch of opium.' He seemed sort of like Hunter S. Thompson, taking drugs and going out into the sufferings of the sober or the drunk; but rarely is anyone else in public on hard drugs, and if they are, they are all too out of sorts to recognize their bretheren. His later realizations fall on solitude and reflection; another definition akin to the true Romantic. De Quincey proves full circle to have experienced the tragically beautiful life of a romantic writer.