Although the Wu Anthology provides a dead link to a gallery of Piranesi's works, I thought I would begin this entry by adhering to the volume's best intentions. As such, here is a collection of his complete pieces, including the "Imaginary Prisons" which (understandably) trouble de Quincey. More on the art later.
I've located some websites which the aspiring devotee of de Quincey might find useful. Dr. Robert Morrison's de Quincey "Home Page" includes a biography and chronology of the writer's life, and a truly immense bibliography of writings related to him. The Thomas de Quincey Electronic Library compares the writer to Borges (cute), and offers a collection of his writings in zipped PDF format. And the link to the book on the Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish on the right column of the page is, at the very least, eye-catching. Project Gutenberg pulls through once again with a cornucopia of works. Other essays are linked at de Quincey's Quotidiana page. And to prove that I'm not totally Wikipedia-dependent, here are some critical articles on the Confessions, and an interpretation of his life and work by Hugh Sykes Davies, a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge.
I've always been fascinated by narratives dealing with the experience of drug use or addiction, so I was able to navigate this reading extremely smoothly. Indeed, my greatest struggles related to restraining myself from forming connections between the Confessions and the numerous texts similar to it which I read before being given this assignment. At first, de Quincey's surreal descriptions, objective considerations of the addicted mind, and candid portrayals of himself at his lowest reminded me--as if by kneejerk--of William Burroughs's writings, specifically Junk and the (impossible to locate, to my overwhelming consternation) Yage Letters, which document his travels through the Amazon to find and consume ayahuasca, one of the most powerful hallucinogens in the world. Then, because Burroughs was something of an obvious choice--and nobody really reads him, anyway--I started to think of other writers and artists who might be relatable to the Confessions. First up is Aldous Huxley, whose Doors of Perception treats the perceptual changes wrought by drug use in a withdrawn, scientific manner similar to that of de Quincey. Another more recent (and still more unstable) correlative is Daniel Pinchbeck, whose Breaking Open the Head tries awfully hard to keep its distance despite its status as a personal hallucination narrative before digressing into a prolonged contemplation of how hallucinogens are doorways to a shamanic reality which most people (misguided Puritans such as ourselves included) will never contact. Finally, the philosopher and comedian Robert Anton Wilson's (for this class, aptly titled) Prometheus Rising focuses to some extent on psychotropic drugs in its analysis of the inner workings of the human mind, and, as with de Quincey's writings, treats consciousness like a laboratory of sorts, where any number of interesting innovations can occur.
To some extent, these writers all echo de Quincey's pioneering exploration of the fragile, transitory lifestyle of the addict--they treat drug use as an observable state of mind as well as a formal framework which can be described in prose. I'll close by linking to an artist who flawlessly embodies the logical progression of Piranesi's work, who may seem to be an obvious choice considering de Quincey's commentary on space--yet whose work is just too germane to this reading to dismiss: M.C. Escher. Peruse. Luxuriate. There remain spaces unexplored even by the greatest of minds.
