Opium is the subject of the poem that begins the section of poetic reflections on his time in Asia in his autobiographical Isla Negra (1964). The title is the site-specific “Opium in the East.” This is not Coleridge and Baudelaire’s European drug. The richly written poem opens with the same conceit of exploration seen in his memoirs, written later: “I wanted to know. I went in . . .” He was surprised by the silence. There was only the crackling of pipes. From their “milky smoke” came “an ecstatic joy”:
Opium was the flower of idleness,
immobile pleasure,
pure activity without movement.
Everything was pure or seemed pure,
everything sliding oily and hinged
until it became existence alone,
nothing burned, no one cried,
there was no room for anguish
and there was no fuel for anger.
But at this time of his life, turning fifty, Neruda was projecting himself to be a champion of communism, and he and his comrades condoned such drugs as an escape from reality’s contradictions. From this vantage point, Neruda does not speak of how this “one single existence” became a part of his life and work while he was constantly consuming “Opium in the East” himself. His political posturing never places the onus on himself at that time, but instead lyricizes—idealizes—the notion of the “opiate for the exploited” (by the imperialists, that is):
I looked: fallen poor,
peons, rickshaw or plantation coolies . . .
Here, after their wounds,
after being not human beings but feet,
after being not men but beasts of burden,
after walking and walking and walking and sweating and sweating,
after sweating blood, and no longer having a soul,
here they were now,
alone
With their hunger, each “had bought / an obscure right to pleasure.” After “having searched for it all their lives,” they finally were “in repose,” “respected, at last, on a star.”
In his memoirs, Neruda ends his discussion of his experiment with opium with a radical condemnation and closure: “never again” will he return to the dens or smoke this Oriental venom, for now he knows not to confuse his art with the narcotic, nor mix the poems of the singular poet with that of the junkies. It is not for him; it’s for the others. Writing his reflections in the 1960s, he seems to borrow from Karl Marx’s quote “Religion . . . is the opium of the people,” asserting: “Opium was not the paradise of the exotic that had been painted to me, but rather an escape for the exploited.”
Although Neruda would later champion the exploited people he found in the dens—“the men who pull and pull the rickshaw all day long”—when he was among them in the late 1920s, he saw nothing in them to champion. He reduced the women to sexual objects and the servants to the stroke of a ticking clock, when “every ten minutes a servant like Ratnaigh would come by to fill my glass.” Just after the “escape for the exploited” remark, in the lines that follow it’s as if, even three decades later, he still condemns the den dwellers for not living up to that “exotic that had been painted” to him by European literature: they were not just poor, but “poor devils.” Then, in the same paragraph: “There was no embroidered cushion, not the slightest hint of even basic luxury . . . Nothing sparkled there, not even the smokers’ eyes, barely open.”
Neruda found a disappointing dead end in his experience with Eastern spirituality. He was a curious intellectual immersed in a Buddhist society, a new realm for him, while at the same time immersed in his own spiritual and mental depression—and one can imagine the effect of being surrounded by people working on a path toward the end of their suffering, to enlightenment, to nirvana. He began to learn about the details of the Buddha’s life and philosophy. When he was in Burma, he had ventured to the striking ancient city of Pagan, where he saw perhaps the largest, densest collection of Buddhist temples and monuments in the world. In Ceylon he traveled through the jungle to five “mysterious Sinhalese [ancient Buddhist] cities,” as he wrote in a La Nación chronicle. At Anuradhapura, with the night lit by a full moon, he was struck by the immense pagodas in shadows, “filled by kneeling Buddhists and the old orations returning to the Sinhalese lips.” In a letter to Eandi, he enclosed a photograph of the “strange hungry Buddha, after those six years of senseless deprivation.” “I live surrounded by thousands or millions of portraits of Gautama in ivory, alabaster, and wood”; he adds, “They accumulate in every pagoda, but none has moved me like this one of the thin penitent.”
Facets of Buddhism appealed to him but challenged him at the same time. As he would tell an interviewer many years later, though his mother was devout, his father was an atheist, and this combination gave him a blend of curiosity and skepticism in approaching mystical traditions. There’s a certain honesty in his approach to examining the philosophy and the practice, and it shows up in some of his writing. In “It Means Shadows,” a deep and fascinating poem, probably written in Colombo toward the end of 1929, he shows a good grasp of samsara, the Buddhist idea of a continual cycle of birth and rebirth,* one that would captivate many Westerners in the future.
In the poem, the speaker is enthralled to be in the cycle of reincarnation: attached to “vital, speedy wings of a new dream angel” installed on his “shoulders for perpetual security”:
in such a way that the path through the stars of death
be a violent flight that took off many days and months and centuries ago . . .
It is a cycle reaching back before his birth, deep into the past, and now with the angel, heading forward, toward eternity. He wants, as he writes later, a “reservation” for his “deep place” to last eternally. However, his personalized perception of this concept is in conflict with true Buddhist thought.
