Optics for Madmen, or the True Secret of the "Green Fairy"

At the end of the 19th century, Paris lived by a special schedule. At exactly five o'clock in the evening, L’Heure Verte — the "Green Hour" — arrived. Clerks closed their offices, artists put down their brushes, and the entire city filled with the sound of spoons clinking against crystal.

The official version stated: they were drinking strong alcohol infused with wormwood. The medical version stated: they were poisoning themselves with thujone, a toxin that causes hallucinations. But the truth was known only to the initiated. Van Gogh, Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, and Hemingway did not come to the cafes to forget. They came to see.

Absinthe was not a drink. It was liquid lenses.

The mechanics were simple. Our brain is a filter. It blocks 99% of reality so that we don't go mad from the overload. We see boring grey houses, cobblestones, dirt. We see a stable and understandable world. The wormwood elixir turned off this filter.

The ritual with sugar and ice water was not just a tradition. It was a focus adjustment. As soon as the emerald liquid turned cloudy (an effect the French called louche), the portal opened. A man took a sip, and the grey veil fell away.

Vincent van Gogh was not crazy. It was just that under the influence of absinthe, he saw that the night sky was not actually black, but consisted of giant rotating vortices of energy. He wasn't painting fantasies; he was painting a documentary chronicle. 

Oscar Wilde didn't make up fairy tales. Once, having had a bit too much at the "Café Royal," he saw the tulips on the tablecloth become real and start feeling him with their petals. 

He saw that things were alive.

Absinthe allowed one to see the world as surreal — as it truly is. Matter is fluid, time is non-linear, and shadows live their own lives. People addicted to the "Green Fairy" ceased to be convenient cogs in the system. Why go to a factory or a bank if you see that money is just cut paper and machines breathe like dragons? 

Why fight a war if you see that the enemy on the other side of the trench glows with the same divine light as you?

This became a problem. In 1905, a Swiss farmer named Jean Lanfray killed his family. The newspapers screamed: "It's all the absinthe!" No one mentioned that before this, he had drunk liters of wine and cognac. The authorities needed a pretext. They didn't need poison to kill people. They needed a ban to blind them. The governments of Europe didn't need visionaries. They needed taxpayers. They needed to return people to "normal," safe, boring vision.

In 1915, France banned absinthe. Officially — for the health of the nation. In reality — it was the largest operation of reality censorship in history. All stocks of "liquid lenses" were destroyed. Recipes were changed. Wormwood was neutered — the active ingredient (thujone) was removed, that very "magic" or danger which, according to legend, provided the hallucinations. The world became grey, solid, and understandable again. Buildings stopped dancing, stars stopped spinning, tulips became just a pattern on fabric again. People sighed with relief — it was easier to live this way.

Today you can buy a bottle labeled Absinthe in any supermarket. You can even burn the sugar (a stupid trick invented by tourists — true masters never burned the sugar). You will get drunk. But you won't see the hidden essence of things. The true optics are broken. We are blind again, and only on the old paintings of the Impressionists does there remain an imprint of what this mad, beautiful world actually looks like.