Visions From Beyond the Edge

A Lament in Thirteen Voices

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” – Phillip K. Dick

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)


“Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling.”

Addiction: Laudanum (opium tincture)
He saw Paradise in a dream and spent his life trying to return.
The bottle softened his agony but stole his hours.
Poems bloomed, then withered. He walked through fog —
a prophet of despair...

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)

“There is no such thing as forgetting when it has once stamped itself into the soul.”

Addiction: Opium
The elegant confessor.
His dreams — grand, operatic, infinite —
then the rats, the clanging bells, the endless night.
He wandered through visions no man should endure,
yet recorded each one with terrible grace.
His dreams grew ever darker,
but his pen persisted — driven by some black conviction.
He wrote what he feared.
He feared what he wrote.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)

“And lips say ‘God be pitiful,’ who never said, ‘God be praised.’”

Addiction: Laudanum
She whispers revolution through lace curtains.
Pain brought her to poetry. Laudanum like a passport, justified a dalliance in that far country. Every love letter carried the breath of morphine.
She bore unbearable beauty in a trembling hand.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

Addiction: Alcohol
He loved too deeply and drank to silence the funereal
tolling of life's relentless reckonings.
Visions appeared to him like ghosts —
in rhyme, in ravens, in beautiful women buried too young.
He died in rags, dreaming of bells.

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

“You have to be always drunk… with wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But be drunk.”

Addiction: Alcohol, hashish, opium
Il écrivait la pourriture comme s’il s’agissait de velours.
Toujours ivre — de vin, de vertu, ou de vers.
La muse de la mélancolie.
La fleur blessée.

(He wrote of rot like it was velvet.
Ever the drunk — on wine or virtue or verse.
The muse of spleen.
The wounded flower.)

Paul Verlaine (1844–1896)

“De la musique avant toute chose…” — "For those who want the music first...."

Addiction: Absinthe, alcohol
Titubant dans la rue Mouffetard, armé de son pistolet et de son poème.
Il combattait l’amour comme une fièvre — et buvait pour perdre la guerre.
Balbutiant ses prières, sa voix trouble et vacillante — mais ses vers luisaient encore, d’un vert d’absinthe.

(Staggering down the rue Mouffetard, armed with pistol and poem, he fought love like a fever — and drank to lose the war. Stammering his prayers, his voice troubled and wavering, his verse gleamed an absinthe-green.)

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)

"Il faut être voyant, se faire voyant.”
(One must be a seer, make oneself a seer.)

Addiction: Absinthe, hashish, symbolic rebellion
Devinant l’avenir avant même de porter la barbe.
Il se livra à la dissolution volontaire —
les voyelles devinrent couleurs,
et Dieu, une plaie ouverte.
Seul,
il s’avança dans le désert… et ne se retourna jamais.

(Divining the future even in youth, he abandoned himself to dissolution — vowels became colors, and God, an open wound. Alone he went into the desert... and never looked back.)

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age.”

Addiction: Alcohol
Bhí a phaisean chomh láidir is gur leáigh sé iarann.
Ach ba le haon dul síos é a cholainn féin.
Ag tóraíocht Éidin i mbun gloine,
b’fhéidir gur aimsigh sé í — i gcóma i Nua-Eabhrac.
“Ná gabh go séimh,” arsa an Músae.
Ach go séimh,
go séimh, d’imigh sé.

(His passion could melt iron. His body was forfeit.
Chasing Eden at the bottom of a glass,
He found it, perhaps, in a New York coma.
"Do not go gentle", quoth the Muse —
Gently, gently did he go.)

Henry Miller (1891–1980)

“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

Addiction: Alcohol, sex, freedom
He bled hunger onto paper.
Chased women like saints and cities like drugs.
Said everything. Regretted nothing.
Laughed at death, and wrote another sentence.

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Addiction: Desire, analysis, sensation
Aún vivía entre secretos… atrevimiento… diarios —
registrando cada temblor, cada boca, cada trance.
Erigía templos del Deseo sagrado.

(Still living in secrets... daring... diaries —
recording every tremble, every mouth, every trance.
She fashioned temples of sacred Desire.)

Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957)

“The world was a calvary, and the liquor a dulling spear.”

Addiction: Alcohol
Trazando un abismo
con una brújula que no dejaba de girar…
ni el alcohol, ni el mar,
podían calmar
la lava en su alma.

(mapping an abyss
with a spinning compass...
nor drinking, nor the sea
could soothe
the lava in his soul)

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997)

“In the U.S.A. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.”

Addiction: Heroin, morphine, junk
“You see control can never be a means to any practical end... It can never be a means to anything but more control... like Junk.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

Addiction: Amphetamines, paranoia, God
Reality slipped through his fingers like mercury.
Fantastic worlds emerged from common household items.
Riding the pink beam of truth and madness,
Relentlessly.

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005)

"Buy the ticket. Take the ride."

Addiction: Alcohol, cocaine, mescaline, acid, ether, adrenochrome, guns
Roared through the neon underbelly of America with a briefcase full of chemicals and a typewriter set to detonate.

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998)

“A warrior doesn’t seek to know — he seeks to become.”

Addiction: Psychedelics, myth, control
Sorcerer on the mescal plateau.
Reality is a suggestion,
Self, a costume to shed.

Coda: Signal Lost

They dreamed aloud, in fantasy and nightmare.
They wrote with flame and swallowed shadow.
Their dreams like molted skins,
Asked questions that never sleep.

We follow them still.