Three-dimensional transforming musical linguistic objects.

Helmachines.

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.

And today I'm continuing to fill in some of the historical gaps in the salon's documentation of early psychedelic history.

And it seems to me that a good place to continue this journey

would be with an examination of a true classic in psychedelic literature,

Confessions of an English opium eater.

But not as a book review.

Instead, I thought it would be more interesting to think about what went into writing

this transformative book. So I did some research. It was in the autumn of 1821 that a brilliant

but broke writer named Thomas De Quincey sat in his shabby London lodgings worrying about his

bills. Creditors were at his door. A little brown

bottle of laudanum sat on his desk. He had just been offered a commission to write about his

opium addiction for a major London magazine. What he created would change literature forever.

It would be the first time that we know of when someone wrote honestly

about addiction, describing both the ecstasies and the agonies without moralizing or romanticizing.

However, today's story won't simply be a retelling of that famous confession book. Today,

we are going to look into the story behind that book, the story of how private suffering

became public art, and how a man under intense financial pressures invented a completely

new literary form, and how every word he wrote carried consequences that he could

neither predict or control.

...