Say what you like about denial, it’s fun. But experience (a comb given to the bald, according to a Chinese proverb) will move you to the next stage eventually, if you’re lucky. And I feel lucky being able to talk to others who, one way or another, also feel lucky.
For some, this proves that I am a member (or a victim) of a cult. Google “A.A.” and “cult” and you will find thousands of pages saying so. (Actually, google anything and you will find thousands of pages on it. I just googled “anything” and got 1 through 10 of 453 million results.)
In the OED, a cult is “worship; reverential homage rendered to a divine being;” “a system of religious worship, esp. as expressed in ceremonies, ritual, etc.;” “devotion or homage paid to a person or thing, esp. a fashionable enthusiasm;” [and] derog. a transient fad of an in-group.” But the A.A.-is-a-cult folks don’t mean any of this when they say A.A. is a cult. What they do mean is something more along the lines of the Branch Davidians, Jonestown, Kool-Aid.
Take Jack Trimpey, Alcoholics Anonymous: Of Course It’s A Cult, since that’s the first one thrown up (almost literally) by the search engine, and since he volunteers, with no prompting, to rigorously apply “the seventeen academic criteria of cultism” to prove his point. A few representative proofs thrown up (almost literally) by the rigorous Mr. Trimpey include the following:
Families split apart based on AA membership, just as religious conflict often disrupts family ties. At least one Methodist church has gone belly-up to ‘those people who meet in the basement,’ who arose to conduct Sunday services with a teddy bear affixed over the altar where the image of Christ had been.
It appears likely that AA has destroyed the economic foundation of more families than addiction itself has.
No cult has succeeded in stigmatizing its members to the extent AA has. Even the HeavensGate cult, requiring uniforms and castration, failed to gain the support of the scientific community to support its bizarre concept of a rescuing UFO hidden in the tail of comet Hale-Bopp … It isn’t much of a stretch to imagine a more highly developed and better organized HeavensGate cult, in which a good number of M.D.’s and psychologists had become devout members. (Heaven knows something more bizarre than that has happened in the “addictionology” field.)
Essentially, AA is a drug-cult which holds various substances to be “desecrating sacraments” which are necessary for eventual cleansing of the soul. It is clearly not an organization devoted to teaching people any means to end substance addictions.
AA now has a faction which believes that Bill W. was Christ reincarnated, that the original Jesus was an alcoholic who authored the 12-steps, that the Last Supper was the first AA meeting, that Old Testament prophecies predict that AA will rise as the dominant world religion during our times, and that the Age of Sobriety, actually the prophesied Kingdom of God, will commence on the year 2000.
If by violence we include intellectual violence, all cults are violent, and AA surpasses most of them … The 12 steps appear to be laced with something that makes people mean and arrogant. The more seriously people take them, the weirder they become, in comparison to their pre-cult personalities. They also appear more inclined to mistreat their fellow beings — all in the name of treatment or recovery, of course. One caller likened the AA cult indoctrination to vampirism, in which, once-bitten, one will go on to bite others.
Sadly, none of this – grammatical error, the teddy bear idolatry, the stigma greater than that inflicted upon uniformed eunuchs, Bill W. fulfilling Messianic prophecy and Jesus coming to believe that a power greater than Himself could restore him to sanity – is misquoted.
Jack Trimpey has an argument – government-mandated A.A. participation is unconstitutional because of the (perceived) religious content of the A.A. program – but he doesn’t appear particularly interested in (or capable of) making it because it is of no real use to him. A.A. has to be madder and badder than that. He needs A.A. to be the invasion of the body snatchers because he wants to sell you a tin foil hat. He has merchandise to shift.
Trimpey is, in fact, the founder of Rational Recovery (“RR”), a for-profit organization offering counseling and guidance on self-recovery from addiction. The key tool of RR is AVRT, or Addictive Voice Recognition Technique, the quality of which is evidenced by the fact that it “has been posted on the Internet since 1995.” A set of five AVRT DVDs is a giveaway at $449, although you may need a booster shot (AVRTune Up, The Beast Came Back DVD, $229) and, if especially hard-headed, at least one further reminder (But I’m A Really Tough Case DVD, $39.95). If you can make your way to California, AVRT: The Class is a mere $2,600 (this does not include air fair or accommodation, of course, but a light breakfast and a full lunch are provided).
Fortunately, you can preview the AVRT Crash Course and join “many thousands of men and women [who] have taken back their lives from addiction and recoveryism solely by clicking through the twenty-eight flash cards” that constitute “Bullets for my Beast.” There really are twenty-eight of them as well, each as witty as the next.
In brief, AVRT identifies your desire for the pleasure of alcohol (and other drugs) as “the Beast®” which is a registered trademark. The Beast® “cannot speak, it cannot see, it has no arms or legs, and it has no intelligence of its own,” but “persuades you to use your hands, arms, and legs in order to obtain its favorite substance.” It is “an animal mentality that can talk in your head.” The Beast® hides in the dark; it fears you because “it knows that you can kill it once you see it … and – you get to kill.”
As if that’s not fun enough, before graduating to killing you get to toy with the Beast® for a while: “First, think of never drinking or fixing again. Now, think of having a drink or fixing right now. Shift back and forth between quitting right now for good and drinking full blast forever. Notice what is happening to you as you shift back and forth. You are teasing your Beast. Then torturing it. Shame on you.”
The voice that says “never say never” drink again is the voice of the Beast®, and AVRT will teach you to recognize it and realize that, although “it is a worthy opponent … humans prevail over beasts.” All you need is “a big plan:” “Make a plan to resume drinking in two hundred years. Decide exactly what you will drink (or use) … to celebrate two centuries of abstinence. See? The Beast is quite stupid so you can trick it this way.” This is because your Beast is “functionally immortal, and doesn’t understand that you will die.” Knowing all this “you are armed for the kill.”
Sadly, having clicked through twenty-eight pages, and been tickled and teased with all this killing business, you don’t actually get to experience the joys of killing the Beast® after all but are advised, instead, to “stay alert for new Beast activity, which may be sudden or gradual,” and which may, presumably, force you to part with a lot of hard-earned money. Possibly, to get to the murder stage, you have to make that California trip, but, as a consolation prize, if you have made it thus far through this drivel, you are given your RR PhD (which is to say, you get to look at a box on a web page that says Phormer Drunk).
As a cult, it has to be said that A.A. isn’t particularly robust: it demands no money, attendance is entirely voluntary, you get to decide if you want to talk or listen, there are no qualifications for membership other than a desire to stop drinking, and I, for one, haven’t seen a teddy bear once. And if you happen to feel that you are a fully-paid-up member of the society of drunks for whom the next drink may be the gateway drink to your last, the majority of people you meet will not be serving up Kool-Aid: they are there, in fact, to avoid drinking the stuff and to help you do the same.
But Mr. Trimpey has a living to make, even at the expense of a life or two, so over again to the man with the plan: “AA is not only a religious cult, it is a radical cult, an evil cult, a widespread cult, and a dangerous cult … an engine of social decay … [and] a cancer on the soul of the nation.”
I would like to say you couldn’t make this up. But of course you could.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Emphasis Added
"For many years we’ve been meeting at this bar every night, and we’ve come to feel like travelers who’ve been sharing a train compartment for a long time when suddenly some strangers come in. In spite of that, one or other of the newcomers manages to win us over, to the extent that, following a brief hostile silence, the conversation is resumed, almost like a piece of music after a pause. Nothing encourages us more than the sudden perception that the gate-crasher, having blundered in from some other quartier to buy cigarettes, would actually qualify quite well for life here with us."
Joseph Roth, In The Bistro After Midnight.
Joseph Roth, In The Bistro After Midnight.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Church Going
Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe (1764-1820), designer of the United States Capitol, is credited also with “one of the first and finest Gothic revival buildings in the country” (Christopher Weeks), Christ Church on Capitol Hill, completed in 1805 but somewhat altered since, and frequented, once upon a time, by Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and (not frequented but attended by) Jefferson. Five or six blocks towards the Capitol is Saint Mark’s, completed between 1884 and 1894, the work of T. Buckler Ghequiere (1854-1910), the first architect Baltimore considered its own. Here, “Romanesque revival details dwell uneasily within a Gothic revival shell” and stained glass from the studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany adorns the clerestory. Past the House side of the Capitol, St. Peter’s Parish was founded in 1820 as the second Catholic parish in Washington (before the District included Georgetown), but the current church dates from 1890, and whoever designed it would be disappointed that only the exterior walls and stained glass windows were saved from fire in 1940.
There are many churches on Capitol Hill, of course, but these are three I have had occasion to stop and look into, when empty, and, like Larkin, wonder what we will turn them into once they have fallen completely out of use. But also, like Larkin, I am pleased to stand in them, in silence - unnoticed, looking around and, most of all, up:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
The dead don’t lie around these churches, in Larkin’s meaning, but they might as well. Anyway, I only look up a little while before I look down, because my purpose there is in their basements - which are stripped bare of any architectural intent above to accommodate tea rooms and church business below. It is to their basements I go to surprise the hunger to be more serious, to try and grow wise in.
There are many churches on Capitol Hill, of course, but these are three I have had occasion to stop and look into, when empty, and, like Larkin, wonder what we will turn them into once they have fallen completely out of use. But also, like Larkin, I am pleased to stand in them, in silence - unnoticed, looking around and, most of all, up:
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
The dead don’t lie around these churches, in Larkin’s meaning, but they might as well. Anyway, I only look up a little while before I look down, because my purpose there is in their basements - which are stripped bare of any architectural intent above to accommodate tea rooms and church business below. It is to their basements I go to surprise the hunger to be more serious, to try and grow wise in.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Lost Mariners
A “clinical tale” I read some time before I started drinking (not before I’d had a drink, not before I’d been drunk, either, but before I’d started drinking) described the case of a “charming, intelligent, memoryless” man who had lost almost everything to an alcohol-related condition. This was The Lost Mariner, Jimmie G., in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and what he had lost, by 1975, was thirty years of memory.
Jimmie G. suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome. He remembered nothing after 1945, when he had been nineteen. His “integral experience of time” had given way to a “world of isolated impressions.” The amnesia was retroactive, but absolute. Sacks writes: “[N]one of us had ever encountered, even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”
After nine years of observation, Jimmie G. remained as lost a mariner, neuropsychologically, as when Sacks first met him. Deprived of moorings in “extensional ‘spatial’ time,” however, Jimmie was “perfectly organized in Bergsonian ‘intentional’ time; what was fugitive, unsustainable, as formal structure, was perfectly stable, perfectly held, as art or will.” He found “continuity and reality” in the chapel, and took to the garden and gardening. But he could never remember isolated items for more than a few seconds, and Sacks wonders “if he was not condemned to a sort of ‘Humean’ froth, a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life.”
Recovering alcoholics speak of insanity and dying out there. There’s another state, perhaps, with a half-measure of each: the diminished self, giving up time to nothing - absolutely nothing, nothing at all. Classical Korsakov’s - “a profound and permanent, but ‘pure’ devastation of memory caused by alcoholic destruction of mammillary bodies” - is a rare beast, but alcoholic stasis, suspending your engagement with anything other than alcohol, turning over years, is common enough. There are blackouts, of course, but before that there is all that time abandoned to meaninglessness, to entirely negligible events and conversations you could guarantee would be forgotten - pre-forgotten, even; dead upon arrival.
I remember many things. But many more are gone with the Guinness and its perfect head, the bishop’s collar, the Humean froth.
Jimmie G. suffered from Korsakov’s syndrome. He remembered nothing after 1945, when he had been nineteen. His “integral experience of time” had given way to a “world of isolated impressions.” The amnesia was retroactive, but absolute. Sacks writes: “[N]one of us had ever encountered, even imagined, such a power of amnesia, the possibility of a pit into which everything, every experience, every event, would fathomlessly drop, a bottomless memory-hole that would engulf the whole world.”
After nine years of observation, Jimmie G. remained as lost a mariner, neuropsychologically, as when Sacks first met him. Deprived of moorings in “extensional ‘spatial’ time,” however, Jimmie was “perfectly organized in Bergsonian ‘intentional’ time; what was fugitive, unsustainable, as formal structure, was perfectly stable, perfectly held, as art or will.” He found “continuity and reality” in the chapel, and took to the garden and gardening. But he could never remember isolated items for more than a few seconds, and Sacks wonders “if he was not condemned to a sort of ‘Humean’ froth, a meaningless fluttering on the surface of life.”
Recovering alcoholics speak of insanity and dying out there. There’s another state, perhaps, with a half-measure of each: the diminished self, giving up time to nothing - absolutely nothing, nothing at all. Classical Korsakov’s - “a profound and permanent, but ‘pure’ devastation of memory caused by alcoholic destruction of mammillary bodies” - is a rare beast, but alcoholic stasis, suspending your engagement with anything other than alcohol, turning over years, is common enough. There are blackouts, of course, but before that there is all that time abandoned to meaninglessness, to entirely negligible events and conversations you could guarantee would be forgotten - pre-forgotten, even; dead upon arrival.
I remember many things. But many more are gone with the Guinness and its perfect head, the bishop’s collar, the Humean froth.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Heraclitus. Me.
Heraclitus and I have a lot in common. Not much is known about either of us and most of what is known is made up. It is not certain, either, that the word “consistency” would come to mind when contemplating our surviving scribbles. More likely, one would be tempted to write “disconnected,” “random,” and “epigrammatic” in the margins of Heraclitus, and, demanding less ink, simply “disconnected” and “random” in mine. We are half-started or half-finished, and independent only to the degree that we don’t belong (or like to think we don’t). Above all, we survive in fragments. That said, his fragments are better than mine. Or are they?
Take the famous waterway footfall: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” Fair enough. There is good reason this is known to the whole of humanity above the age of eight, encouraging, as it does, newly flexible minds to alternate between the inevitable changes in both the river and that “you.” In its simple emphasis on the essential and ambiguous flux of life, it is almost up there in its early lesson of mortality with the death of the pet dog. Brooks Haxton does Heraclitus a considerable disservice in a recent translation, therefore, by trying “to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought” by presenting the epigram (at Fragment 41) in the following distracting, non-startling form: “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone -/ those waters/ giving way to this,/now this.” But Heraclitus, too, over-explaining, perhaps, or simply trying to replicate what may have been a big hit in its day, soon tried out (at 81) another version himself: “Just as the river where I step/is not the same, and is,/so I am and I am not.” We get the point, and hope, as we turn the pages, that no further violence is visited upon this dying horse (“Just as the river and I/are not the same/neither is the foot/with one ingrown toenail/ after another,” perhaps).
There are other gems unrecycled (“The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own” (95)), as well as a relatively undamaged rendering of what remains of Heraclitus’ influential view of nature and the universe: constant change, flux, the underlying order or ‘logos‘ for this change, the coincidence of opposites – “Therefore, good and ill are one“ (57); “[t]he way up is the way back” (69); “[t]he beginning is the end” (70). But Heraclitus has a way of testing the principles of logic as one attempts to reconcile these one-liners with other fragments. “Without injustices,/ the name of justice/ would mean what?” (60) Well, nothing much, you might say, if the two are one and the same. Equally difficult to reconcile are Fragments 35 and 36: “Many who have learned/ from Hesiod the countless names/ of gods and monsters/ never understand/ that night and day are one,” he says in the first, only to find that “By cosmic rule,/ as day yields night,/ so winter summer …” in the other. Well, which is it? Clearer still, perhaps, “Always having what we want,/ may not be good fortune./ Health seems sweetest/ after sickness, food/ in hunger, goodness/ in the wake of evil, and at the end /of daylong labor sleep” (104) doesn’t make a great deal of sense if, as noted above, good and ill are one and there is no daylight between health and sickness, hunger and fullness, labor and sleep.
The loss of almost all of Heraclitus’ work (and, with it, context) is compounded, one quickly suspects, by his translator, who is allowed by his friends at Viking Penguin to condense upwards of two dozen heavily packed Greek words to say (at 78): “Only the living may be dead,/ the waking sleep,/ the young be old.” Haxton is also content to print in its entirety, and without notation, the following microcosm of wisdom: “Silence, healing” (130). But even a good translator might have problems doing very much with “Goat cheese melted/ in warm wine congeals/ if not well stirred” (84), and “Hunger, even/ in the elements,/ and insolence” (24) is beyond redemption. Of the latter, Haxton unhelpfully notes: “The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.” I’m glad that’s cleared up, then.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Heraclitus “has been variously judged by ancient and modern commentators to be a material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or a mainly religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist.” Which leaves out few possibilities other than stand-up comedian. Or, the thought reluctantly crosses one’s mind, that Heraclitus was that guy at the bar.
That said,/looking back over years/ of commonplace books; toiling/ over fragments not lost to illegibility/ or dulled by repetition;/ wondering daylong/ over endlessly cryptic notes;/ reviewing several unwritten books/ the drinker had imagined/ in a darkness of his own,/ with synopses half-drafted and blurbs at the ready;/ puzzling over arbitrary rows/ of words and phrases/ made more mysterious by exclamation points and question marks,/ forgotten reasons to pause or inquire …/ Returning to all this/ as an already-older self might return/ to a remembered river,/ that guy at the bar,/ that wasn’t Heraclitus./ That was me.
Take the famous waterway footfall: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” Fair enough. There is good reason this is known to the whole of humanity above the age of eight, encouraging, as it does, newly flexible minds to alternate between the inevitable changes in both the river and that “you.” In its simple emphasis on the essential and ambiguous flux of life, it is almost up there in its early lesson of mortality with the death of the pet dog. Brooks Haxton does Heraclitus a considerable disservice in a recent translation, therefore, by trying “to clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought” by presenting the epigram (at Fragment 41) in the following distracting, non-startling form: “The river/ where you set/ your foot just now/ is gone -/ those waters/ giving way to this,/now this.” But Heraclitus, too, over-explaining, perhaps, or simply trying to replicate what may have been a big hit in its day, soon tried out (at 81) another version himself: “Just as the river where I step/is not the same, and is,/so I am and I am not.” We get the point, and hope, as we turn the pages, that no further violence is visited upon this dying horse (“Just as the river and I/are not the same/neither is the foot/with one ingrown toenail/ after another,” perhaps).
There are other gems unrecycled (“The waking have one world/ in common. Sleepers/ meanwhile turn aside, each/ into a darkness of his own” (95)), as well as a relatively undamaged rendering of what remains of Heraclitus’ influential view of nature and the universe: constant change, flux, the underlying order or ‘logos‘ for this change, the coincidence of opposites – “Therefore, good and ill are one“ (57); “[t]he way up is the way back” (69); “[t]he beginning is the end” (70). But Heraclitus has a way of testing the principles of logic as one attempts to reconcile these one-liners with other fragments. “Without injustices,/ the name of justice/ would mean what?” (60) Well, nothing much, you might say, if the two are one and the same. Equally difficult to reconcile are Fragments 35 and 36: “Many who have learned/ from Hesiod the countless names/ of gods and monsters/ never understand/ that night and day are one,” he says in the first, only to find that “By cosmic rule,/ as day yields night,/ so winter summer …” in the other. Well, which is it? Clearer still, perhaps, “Always having what we want,/ may not be good fortune./ Health seems sweetest/ after sickness, food/ in hunger, goodness/ in the wake of evil, and at the end /of daylong labor sleep” (104) doesn’t make a great deal of sense if, as noted above, good and ill are one and there is no daylight between health and sickness, hunger and fullness, labor and sleep.
The loss of almost all of Heraclitus’ work (and, with it, context) is compounded, one quickly suspects, by his translator, who is allowed by his friends at Viking Penguin to condense upwards of two dozen heavily packed Greek words to say (at 78): “Only the living may be dead,/ the waking sleep,/ the young be old.” Haxton is also content to print in its entirety, and without notation, the following microcosm of wisdom: “Silence, healing” (130). But even a good translator might have problems doing very much with “Goat cheese melted/ in warm wine congeals/ if not well stirred” (84), and “Hunger, even/ in the elements,/ and insolence” (24) is beyond redemption. Of the latter, Haxton unhelpfully notes: “The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.” I’m glad that’s cleared up, then.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Heraclitus “has been variously judged by ancient and modern commentators to be a material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or a mainly religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist.” Which leaves out few possibilities other than stand-up comedian. Or, the thought reluctantly crosses one’s mind, that Heraclitus was that guy at the bar.
That said,/looking back over years/ of commonplace books; toiling/ over fragments not lost to illegibility/ or dulled by repetition;/ wondering daylong/ over endlessly cryptic notes;/ reviewing several unwritten books/ the drinker had imagined/ in a darkness of his own,/ with synopses half-drafted and blurbs at the ready;/ puzzling over arbitrary rows/ of words and phrases/ made more mysterious by exclamation points and question marks,/ forgotten reasons to pause or inquire …/ Returning to all this/ as an already-older self might return/ to a remembered river,/ that guy at the bar,/ that wasn’t Heraclitus./ That was me.
Humbert Humbert, Toper
Cerveza, light of my life, fire of my mesolimbic pathway. My sin, my soul. Cer-ve-za: the blade of the tongue taking a trip of three steps from the teeth to the palate to tap again, at three, on the teeth. Cer. Ve. Za.
She was lager, plain lager, in the morning, as she stood twelve fluid ounces in her can. She was ale in bottles. She was bitter at the pump. She was stout in her imperial glass. But in my hands she was always Cerveza.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Cerveza at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial brewing and fermentation of starch. In a fishing village by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before I met Cerveza as my age was that summer. You can always count on a suicide for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the maenads and satyrs, the mad raving nymphs and well-pelted thyrsus bearers, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
She was lager, plain lager, in the morning, as she stood twelve fluid ounces in her can. She was ale in bottles. She was bitter at the pump. She was stout in her imperial glass. But in my hands she was always Cerveza.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Cerveza at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial brewing and fermentation of starch. In a fishing village by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before I met Cerveza as my age was that summer. You can always count on a suicide for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the maenads and satyrs, the mad raving nymphs and well-pelted thyrsus bearers, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Pentimenti
“At fifty,” Orwell says in the last entry in his notebooks, “everyone has the face he deserves.” This is true enough: by fifty most have arrived at the point where they wear what they have gone through up front. But “fifty” is otherwise arbitrary: it depends how hard you work at it. Preferable, therefore, is the formulation Camus gives Clemence in The Fall: “Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.” You get the face and you get to answer for it. You are accountable; culpable, even.
So what the hell happened to mine? Well, it might not have been much to begin with, but a lot of things happened. For one thing (the combination of many), there were the brands, and they all show through: Tennant’s; McEwan’s; Smithwick’s; Gillespies; Beck’s; Carlsberg; Furstenburg; Guinness; Mahou; San Miguel; Cruzcampo; Red Stripe; Heineken; Stella Artois; Budweiser; White & McKay; Johnny Walker; The Famous Grouse; Chivas Regal; Jose Cuervo; Smirnoff; Absolut; and so on (and on).
Someone at a meeting, since I had attended some meetings long ago and returned to drinking full time, asked what it was like out there. “It’s terrible,” I said. Well, I would say that, at a meeting. But it was terrible, not on any given day (or not particularly so), but cumulatively, and no matter how often you tried to change tack, mix pigments, start over, the character had been drafted too heavily for him to show up in any other place. And now - out there - they take so much, hand out bruises that don’t clear, and what they take away from you, from your expression, your face, they don’t give back. And this you have to account for, too.
So what the hell happened to mine? Well, it might not have been much to begin with, but a lot of things happened. For one thing (the combination of many), there were the brands, and they all show through: Tennant’s; McEwan’s; Smithwick’s; Gillespies; Beck’s; Carlsberg; Furstenburg; Guinness; Mahou; San Miguel; Cruzcampo; Red Stripe; Heineken; Stella Artois; Budweiser; White & McKay; Johnny Walker; The Famous Grouse; Chivas Regal; Jose Cuervo; Smirnoff; Absolut; and so on (and on).
Someone at a meeting, since I had attended some meetings long ago and returned to drinking full time, asked what it was like out there. “It’s terrible,” I said. Well, I would say that, at a meeting. But it was terrible, not on any given day (or not particularly so), but cumulatively, and no matter how often you tried to change tack, mix pigments, start over, the character had been drafted too heavily for him to show up in any other place. And now - out there - they take so much, hand out bruises that don’t clear, and what they take away from you, from your expression, your face, they don’t give back. And this you have to account for, too.
The Method
You want to know who he is, where he comes from, what he wants, where he’s going. This is not something you’ve had to think about before; you could just go with the flow; but look where that got you.
Now you want to know because you want to share. Sharing is what they do, and you might just want what they have. And sharing stories, narratives, thoughts is the way they give and gain insights into the lives of each other, the best resource each has for understanding and, perhaps, changing his or her own, in light of the possibilities that the differences reveal.
So you should prepare. Who are you? It’s a performance, an act. But it’s a true story, nevertheless.
Now you want to know because you want to share. Sharing is what they do, and you might just want what they have. And sharing stories, narratives, thoughts is the way they give and gain insights into the lives of each other, the best resource each has for understanding and, perhaps, changing his or her own, in light of the possibilities that the differences reveal.
So you should prepare. Who are you? It’s a performance, an act. But it’s a true story, nevertheless.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Imagining Borges
… drunk.
The universe (which others call the Pub) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal bars. In the center of each gallery is a dumbwaiter shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any bar one can see the floors above and below – one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the bars is always the same: twenty shelves, five to each side, line four of the bar’s six sides; the height of the shelves, floor to ceiling is hardly greater than the height of the normal bartender. One of the bar’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another bar, identical to the first – identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Pub is not infinite – if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite … Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs.” There are two of these bulbs in each bar, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.
Like all men of the Pub, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a drink, perhaps the wine of wines. Now that my tongue can hardly make out what I myself have drunk, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the bar where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Pub is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal bars are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular glass that reaches to the wall and is ever exactly half-full with the perfect wine though drunk from by all and refilled by no known source. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That ever half-full glass is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Pub is a sphere whose exact center is any bar and whose circumference is unattainable.
The universe (which others call the Pub) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal bars. In the center of each gallery is a dumbwaiter shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any bar one can see the floors above and below – one after another, endlessly. The arrangement of the bars is always the same: twenty shelves, five to each side, line four of the bar’s six sides; the height of the shelves, floor to ceiling is hardly greater than the height of the normal bartender. One of the bar’s free sides opens onto a narrow sort of vestibule, which in turn opens onto another bar, identical to the first – identical in fact to all. To the left and right of the vestibule are two tiny compartments. One is for sleeping, upright; the other, for satisfying one’s physical necessities. Through this space, too, there passes a spiral staircase, which winds upward and downward into the remotest distance. In the vestibule there is a mirror which faithfully duplicates appearances. Men often infer from this mirror that the Pub is not infinite – if it were, what need would there be for that illusory replication? I prefer to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite … Light is provided by certain spherical fruits that bear the name “bulbs.” There are two of these bulbs in each bar, set crosswise. The light they give is insufficient, and unceasing.
Like all men of the Pub, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a drink, perhaps the wine of wines. Now that my tongue can hardly make out what I myself have drunk, I am preparing to die, a few leagues from the bar where I was born. When I am dead, compassionate hands will throw me over the railing; my tomb will be the unfathomable air, my body will sink for ages, and will decay and dissolve in the wind engendered by my fall, which shall be infinite. I declare that the Pub is endless. Idealists argue that the hexagonal bars are the necessary shape of absolute space, or at least of our perception of space. They argue that a triangular or pentagonal chamber is inconceivable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal to them a circular chamber containing an enormous circular glass that reaches to the wall and is ever exactly half-full with the perfect wine though drunk from by all and refilled by no known source. But their testimony is suspect, their words obscure. That ever half-full glass is God.) Let it suffice for the moment that I repeat the classic dictum: The Pub is a sphere whose exact center is any bar and whose circumference is unattainable.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
A Gross and Brutish Vice
Pausanius of Orestis had one of the most infamous hangovers in history. He had been very, very drunk, of course, but he had the aggravating misfortune of being so in the company of our old friend Attalus (he who had implied that Alexander was something less than a noble heir to his father's kingdom, thereby causing a barney in which Philip would have killed his son had he - Philip - not been three sheets to the wind). Just how drunk had Pausanius been? Well, Montaigne says that he "could not have believed in a drunkenness so deep, so dead and buried" if he had not read about it in the histories.
Montaigne recounts the tale as follows: "Attalus, having invited Pausanius to supper in order to do him some notable indignity ... made him drink so much that he could abandon his body insensibly, like the body of some whore under a hedge, to the muleteers and a number of vile slaves of Attalus’ household.” The good slaves were spared the dishonor, and that was about as good as it got for Pausanius.
Attalus certainly succeeded in his quest to visit a notable indignity on Pausanius. The hangover lasted for years and, setting in motion, as it did, a chain of events that resulted in the early succession of Alexander the Great to the kingship of Macedonia, was of no small significance. The more one reads of the "histories" so beloved by Montaigne, the more one thinks that this kind of thing just happened, causeless, rhymeless, for no particular reason. But on this occasion, the debauchery had a context. It was, in fact, the result of a love story of sorts.
Philip and Pausanias were former lovers; Pausanias was jealous (spurned and vengeful) over Philip’s new lover, also, confusingly, named Pausanias; the new Pausanias was a friend of Attalus; one Pausanias insulted the other Pausanias; the insulted Pausanias died in battle, defending Philip, to secure his honor; Attalus (who, as we know, could be superlatively insulting himself) punished the insulting Pausanias by getting him drunk and having him raped; the insulting, raped Pausanias went on to kill Philip, in part, it is said, owing to Philip’s failure to grant him justice against Attalus; the insulting, raped, murdering Pausanius was then killed, in turn, by Attalus, though, confusingly, not our old friend Attalus, but another Attalus altogether; and the other Attalus, our old friend who would now grow no older, was executed, along with much of his family, at the orders of Alexander.
Greek tragedy would have struggled to pile up the bodies as high. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were all drunk.
Montaigne’s preference was for moderation in all things, and his take on drunkenness is derived mostly from his reading and hearsay, but he clearly loved this stuff - “like the body of a whore under a hedge" is entirely his. His “taste and constitution” were inimical to drunkenness, he says, rather than his reason. He thought “[t]he worst condition of man is when he loses knowledge and control of himself,” so drunkenness, immoderate by definition and fulfilling both conditions for “the worst condition,” seemed to him, among other vices, a “gross and brutish” one: “The mind has more of a part in the others, and there are vices that have about them something indefinably noble, if we must call it that. There are some that involve knowledge, diligence, valor, prudence, skill, and subtlety; this one is all bodily and earthy … The other vices affect the understanding; this one overturns it …” It certainly overturned Pausanius.
A second example Montaigne offers of deep, dead and buried drunkenness also involves “bodily and earthy” matters: “And I learned from a lady whom I hold in singular honor and esteem that near Bordeaux (toward Castres, where here house is) a village woman, a widow of chaste reputation, feeling the first inklings of pregnancy, told her neighbors that she would think she was with child if she had a husband. But as the occasion of this suspicion grew from day to day and finally became evident, she brought herself to have it announced at the service in her church that if anyone would admit the deed, she promised to pardon him and, if she saw fit, to marry him. A young farmhand of hers, emboldened by this proclamation, declared that he had found her, one holiday when she had taken her wine very freely, so fast asleep by her fireplace, and in so indecent a posture, that he had been able to enjoy her without waking her.”
Drunkenness, in the end, is “a loose and stupid vice” for Montaigne, “but less malicious and harmful than the others, which almost all clash more directly with society in general. And if we cannot give ourselves pleasure without its costing us something … I find that this vice costs our conscience less than the others. Moreover, it is not hard to prepare for and find: a consideration not to be despised.”
Easy for the sober man to say. Easy too, perhaps, as it turns out, for the young farmhand and widow of chaste reputation: “They are still alive,” Montaigne wrote, “and married to each other,” living, as it were, happily ever after. But tell it to Paulanius.
Montaigne recounts the tale as follows: "Attalus, having invited Pausanius to supper in order to do him some notable indignity ... made him drink so much that he could abandon his body insensibly, like the body of some whore under a hedge, to the muleteers and a number of vile slaves of Attalus’ household.” The good slaves were spared the dishonor, and that was about as good as it got for Pausanius.
Attalus certainly succeeded in his quest to visit a notable indignity on Pausanius. The hangover lasted for years and, setting in motion, as it did, a chain of events that resulted in the early succession of Alexander the Great to the kingship of Macedonia, was of no small significance. The more one reads of the "histories" so beloved by Montaigne, the more one thinks that this kind of thing just happened, causeless, rhymeless, for no particular reason. But on this occasion, the debauchery had a context. It was, in fact, the result of a love story of sorts.
Philip and Pausanias were former lovers; Pausanias was jealous (spurned and vengeful) over Philip’s new lover, also, confusingly, named Pausanias; the new Pausanias was a friend of Attalus; one Pausanias insulted the other Pausanias; the insulted Pausanias died in battle, defending Philip, to secure his honor; Attalus (who, as we know, could be superlatively insulting himself) punished the insulting Pausanias by getting him drunk and having him raped; the insulting, raped Pausanias went on to kill Philip, in part, it is said, owing to Philip’s failure to grant him justice against Attalus; the insulting, raped, murdering Pausanius was then killed, in turn, by Attalus, though, confusingly, not our old friend Attalus, but another Attalus altogether; and the other Attalus, our old friend who would now grow no older, was executed, along with much of his family, at the orders of Alexander.
Greek tragedy would have struggled to pile up the bodies as high. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were all drunk.
Montaigne’s preference was for moderation in all things, and his take on drunkenness is derived mostly from his reading and hearsay, but he clearly loved this stuff - “like the body of a whore under a hedge" is entirely his. His “taste and constitution” were inimical to drunkenness, he says, rather than his reason. He thought “[t]he worst condition of man is when he loses knowledge and control of himself,” so drunkenness, immoderate by definition and fulfilling both conditions for “the worst condition,” seemed to him, among other vices, a “gross and brutish” one: “The mind has more of a part in the others, and there are vices that have about them something indefinably noble, if we must call it that. There are some that involve knowledge, diligence, valor, prudence, skill, and subtlety; this one is all bodily and earthy … The other vices affect the understanding; this one overturns it …” It certainly overturned Pausanius.
A second example Montaigne offers of deep, dead and buried drunkenness also involves “bodily and earthy” matters: “And I learned from a lady whom I hold in singular honor and esteem that near Bordeaux (toward Castres, where here house is) a village woman, a widow of chaste reputation, feeling the first inklings of pregnancy, told her neighbors that she would think she was with child if she had a husband. But as the occasion of this suspicion grew from day to day and finally became evident, she brought herself to have it announced at the service in her church that if anyone would admit the deed, she promised to pardon him and, if she saw fit, to marry him. A young farmhand of hers, emboldened by this proclamation, declared that he had found her, one holiday when she had taken her wine very freely, so fast asleep by her fireplace, and in so indecent a posture, that he had been able to enjoy her without waking her.”
Drunkenness, in the end, is “a loose and stupid vice” for Montaigne, “but less malicious and harmful than the others, which almost all clash more directly with society in general. And if we cannot give ourselves pleasure without its costing us something … I find that this vice costs our conscience less than the others. Moreover, it is not hard to prepare for and find: a consideration not to be despised.”
Easy for the sober man to say. Easy too, perhaps, as it turns out, for the young farmhand and widow of chaste reputation: “They are still alive,” Montaigne wrote, “and married to each other,” living, as it were, happily ever after. But tell it to Paulanius.
False Analogies
I said, at a meeting, sparsely attended because of snow, that it was like finding a great bar. Someone agreed: “Well,” he said: “We are all alcoholics.” But it was an unfortunate analogy, not least because it was false.
I had earlier read Augusten Burroughs hit an equally flat note: “The room applauds. Applause is a constant thing in A.A. It’s the way we buy drinks for each other.”
It wasn’t the flippancy: Burroughs was discussing a meeting at which a woman reveals that she has terminal cancer (both breasts, liver, stomach, lungs, and lymphatic system – enough cancer to kill off a small village or a large city block). He could have been discussing yet another embarrassing and harmless episode of drunken pubic nudity. It was just that it was wrong.
It wasn’t a hopelessly flat Youtube Nessun Dorma, just instantly untrue, like Barbara Streisand singing My Man (“All my life is just despair/But I don’t care”); like a writer meeting a deadline with the first usable thought.
I am getting close to a half-decent vocabulary to describe drunkenness but sobriety is the harder word. I have an idea of what it is not, though, and applause at an A.A. meeting is no more the way we buy each other drinks than a good meeting is like a good bar.
I had earlier read Augusten Burroughs hit an equally flat note: “The room applauds. Applause is a constant thing in A.A. It’s the way we buy drinks for each other.”
It wasn’t the flippancy: Burroughs was discussing a meeting at which a woman reveals that she has terminal cancer (both breasts, liver, stomach, lungs, and lymphatic system – enough cancer to kill off a small village or a large city block). He could have been discussing yet another embarrassing and harmless episode of drunken pubic nudity. It was just that it was wrong.
It wasn’t a hopelessly flat Youtube Nessun Dorma, just instantly untrue, like Barbara Streisand singing My Man (“All my life is just despair/But I don’t care”); like a writer meeting a deadline with the first usable thought.
I am getting close to a half-decent vocabulary to describe drunkenness but sobriety is the harder word. I have an idea of what it is not, though, and applause at an A.A. meeting is no more the way we buy each other drinks than a good meeting is like a good bar.
A Brief History
In his four great books on world history between 1789 and 1991, Eric Hobsbawm has only two things to say about alcohol. First, in The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, we find the following gem:
“The phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889.”
Some will find this example of the historian’s art - a densely and perfectly stacked sentence, like a completed line in Tetris - wanting in excitement. But try answering the following questions without it: Which infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889? By how much was French wine output cut between 1875 and 1889 as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Between which years was French wine output cut by two-thirds as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Which product of France was affected by the phylloxera infection after 1872? And, who said “the phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889?”
For those who like a bit of interpretation with their facts, the following, on bourgeois values, from The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, may offer more food for thought:
“On the lower rungs of the ladder of middle-class aspiration … heroic efforts alone could lift a poor man and woman, or even their children, out of the slough of demoralization on to the firm plateau of respectability and, above all, define his position there … Indeed, the movement for total abstinence from alcohol, which also flourished at this time in Protestant and puritan countries, illustrates this clearly. It was not effectively designed as a movement to abolish, still less to limit, mass alcoholism, but to define and set apart the class of those individuals who had demonstrated by their personal force of character that they were distinct from the unrespectable poor.”
Temperance movements and their moralizing kin would do well to remember such origins, keep their decisions on what is and is not morally or spiritually significant to themselves, and let the unrespectable poor (among whom I include myself) find their own salvation. For my part, I have as much interest in getting evangelical among normal drinkers with my own realization that I am powerless over alcohol as I have of conditioning friendship on knowing the facts on French wine production in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century.
“The phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889.”
Some will find this example of the historian’s art - a densely and perfectly stacked sentence, like a completed line in Tetris - wanting in excitement. But try answering the following questions without it: Which infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889? By how much was French wine output cut between 1875 and 1889 as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Between which years was French wine output cut by two-thirds as a result of the phylloxera infection after 1872? Which product of France was affected by the phylloxera infection after 1872? And, who said “the phylloxera infection after 1872 cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889?”
For those who like a bit of interpretation with their facts, the following, on bourgeois values, from The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, may offer more food for thought:
“On the lower rungs of the ladder of middle-class aspiration … heroic efforts alone could lift a poor man and woman, or even their children, out of the slough of demoralization on to the firm plateau of respectability and, above all, define his position there … Indeed, the movement for total abstinence from alcohol, which also flourished at this time in Protestant and puritan countries, illustrates this clearly. It was not effectively designed as a movement to abolish, still less to limit, mass alcoholism, but to define and set apart the class of those individuals who had demonstrated by their personal force of character that they were distinct from the unrespectable poor.”
Temperance movements and their moralizing kin would do well to remember such origins, keep their decisions on what is and is not morally or spiritually significant to themselves, and let the unrespectable poor (among whom I include myself) find their own salvation. For my part, I have as much interest in getting evangelical among normal drinkers with my own realization that I am powerless over alcohol as I have of conditioning friendship on knowing the facts on French wine production in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Of Wine and Water
Jesus turned water into wine. It was a miracle. Some also consider it a miracle - they use the very word - that they have managed to turn their wine into water.
The former miracle, during the Wedding at Cana, is recounted in the Gospel of John. It has no place in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. John also differs from the authors of the synoptic gospels by calling this and six other miracles “signs” rather than “miracles,” or “works” instead of “acts of power.” Regardless of what he calls it, for some true believers, this work or act of power in John is a miracle too far.
“Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine?” asks Chuck Northrop, graduate of the Preston Road School of Preaching in Dallas. “The obvious answer to the question,” he concedes, “is yes.” But Mr. Northrop is not one to be deterred by an obvious answer. In fact, he has posed a trick question, because “this question does not usually ask what is meant by it. What is usually meant is ‘Did Jesus make intoxicating wine?’ And the answer is no. Let me explain.” Please do.
“At present, the term ‘wine’ is used almost exclusively of alcoholic wine,” he continues, “but let us never be guilty of interpretation based solely upon modern day definitions.” Indeed not. He notes that the guests at the wedding were able to discern the difference between the wine already served (this is in the text: “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now”) and concludes that “they would not have had such discernment” if intoxicating wine had been served (this is not in the text).
There’s more: “If it is the case that these wedding guests were so drunk that they could not distinguish” – the text has been entirely abandoned at this point – “then the Lord made six pots of alcoholic beverage for those who were already strongly under the influence, and caused them to be even more drunk!” Apparently, the conclusion to be drawn from this extra-textual hypothesis is self-explanatory: “Thus,” he says, without so much as a by-your-leave, “the ‘good wine’ of the wedding feast of Canaan must have been the fresh fruit of the grape.”
So: you can tell good fresh fruit of the grape if you’ve been drinking what you only thought was good fresh fruit of the grape but you can’t tell good intoxicating wine if you’ve been drinking what you only thought was good intoxicating wine, and that it might make sense to serve poorer intoxicating wine (the cheaper stuff) after people are a little intoxicated by having drunk good intoxicating wine (at least until Jesus turns up and complicates matters by producing even better intoxicating wine) is not, under any circumstances, to be considered.
It’s worth pausing here to look at what Northrop is doing to Logic 101:
The first argument can be summarized as follows: (a) “wine” can refer to intoxicating wine or grape juice; (b) the guests are able to determine that good wine follows the bad; therefore, (c) it can’t be intoxicating wine that is served.
If that doesn’t work (and it doesn’t), the next argument simply involves diving headfirst into fantasy: (a) everyone is so drunk that they can’t distinguish between good and bad wine; (b) Jesus makes more intoxicating wine for those already drunk; therefore, (c) He doesn’t.
The number of possible syllogisms is uncountable, but there are two hundred and fifty-six possible types of syllogisms. Chuck Northrop employs none of them. He doesn’t work a single inference, even by accident. He is a miracle of the anti-syllogism. Sadly, the Preston Road School of Preaching, having briefly changed its name to the Center for Christian Education, is now closed, so a quick glance at the qualifications required for entry, or the qualifications required for graduation, is not possible. But (a) Chuck Northrop is a graduate of Preston Road School of Preaching; (b) Chuck Northrop demonstrates an understanding of logic comparable to that of a stubborn, three-year-old child; therefore, (c) either the Preston Road School of Preaching offered no course in logic or Chuck Northrop attended the Preston Road School of Preaching after it had closed.
The pudding calls for still more eggs. There are other reasons why those who believe Jesus turned water into wine are very much mistaken: “Since Jesus produced alcoholic wine (as they claim), then not only would it be morally right to drink it, it would be morally right to produce it, sell it, distribute it, and make a living from it.” At this point, one might feel that Northrop is simply ready to send the whole of France to Hell, but he goes on: “But since that would certainly cause someone to stumble, then it must be morally right to cause someone to stumble. However, the logical consequence of their argument would oppose the Lord's teaching (Luke 17:1-2) [Jesus teaching his disciples of the punishment awaiting those who cause the vulnerable to stumble: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea …”]. No, the reasoning is a foolish argument that has no foundation in scripture.” He means other than the Gospel according to St. John.
For those drawn to a literal reading of a multi-authored, densely metaphorical text who are confronted with a sentence they have no interest in reading literally, the switch from John to Luke is typical, but not as typical as the switch to Habakkuk. “[C]onsider the general context of the Bible,” if you will: “Habakkuk wrote, ‘Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness.’” This, in Northrop’s considered opinion, is the “sin of drunkenness,” although it may look to you and I and the authors of The Oxford Bible Commentary like the sin of getting someone else drunk for your own illicit advantage. Anyway, before we run out of breath: “If Jesus supplied intoxicating wine to the wedding guests at Cana, then He contributed to their intoxication. Not only did Jesus contribute to it, He, also, condoned and encouraged people to get completely soused! Since intoxication is sinful, then Jesus sinned, and the ‘woe’ of Habakkuk would be upon him” and “it would be better for Jesus ‘that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea.’”
And that can't be right.
Northrop has reached a new high here: this can’t even be reduced to a false syllogism. He is also on dangerous ground for a graduate of the Preston Road School of Preaching, flirting with all that “woe” of Habakkuk, and putting Jesus within the range of His own wrath. But it isn’t easy to prove that something means the opposite of what it says.
“What, then, was the miracle of the wedding feast in Cana?” Northrop asks, as well he might. The answer: "The miracle of Cana was that Jesus surpassed or transcended the normal amount of time and the natural process that it takes to produce and harvest grape juice.” You can see why John chose a shorter explanation.
So, Jesus surpassed or transcended the normal amount of time and the natural process that it takes to produce and harvest grape juice, or Jesus turned water into wine. It depends on who you believe, Chuck or John. Either way, or neither way, it is still right next door to a miracle, for some, that they have managed to turn their wine into water.
The former miracle, during the Wedding at Cana, is recounted in the Gospel of John. It has no place in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. John also differs from the authors of the synoptic gospels by calling this and six other miracles “signs” rather than “miracles,” or “works” instead of “acts of power.” Regardless of what he calls it, for some true believers, this work or act of power in John is a miracle too far.
“Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine?” asks Chuck Northrop, graduate of the Preston Road School of Preaching in Dallas. “The obvious answer to the question,” he concedes, “is yes.” But Mr. Northrop is not one to be deterred by an obvious answer. In fact, he has posed a trick question, because “this question does not usually ask what is meant by it. What is usually meant is ‘Did Jesus make intoxicating wine?’ And the answer is no. Let me explain.” Please do.
“At present, the term ‘wine’ is used almost exclusively of alcoholic wine,” he continues, “but let us never be guilty of interpretation based solely upon modern day definitions.” Indeed not. He notes that the guests at the wedding were able to discern the difference between the wine already served (this is in the text: “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now”) and concludes that “they would not have had such discernment” if intoxicating wine had been served (this is not in the text).
There’s more: “If it is the case that these wedding guests were so drunk that they could not distinguish” – the text has been entirely abandoned at this point – “then the Lord made six pots of alcoholic beverage for those who were already strongly under the influence, and caused them to be even more drunk!” Apparently, the conclusion to be drawn from this extra-textual hypothesis is self-explanatory: “Thus,” he says, without so much as a by-your-leave, “the ‘good wine’ of the wedding feast of Canaan must have been the fresh fruit of the grape.”
So: you can tell good fresh fruit of the grape if you’ve been drinking what you only thought was good fresh fruit of the grape but you can’t tell good intoxicating wine if you’ve been drinking what you only thought was good intoxicating wine, and that it might make sense to serve poorer intoxicating wine (the cheaper stuff) after people are a little intoxicated by having drunk good intoxicating wine (at least until Jesus turns up and complicates matters by producing even better intoxicating wine) is not, under any circumstances, to be considered.
It’s worth pausing here to look at what Northrop is doing to Logic 101:
The first argument can be summarized as follows: (a) “wine” can refer to intoxicating wine or grape juice; (b) the guests are able to determine that good wine follows the bad; therefore, (c) it can’t be intoxicating wine that is served.
If that doesn’t work (and it doesn’t), the next argument simply involves diving headfirst into fantasy: (a) everyone is so drunk that they can’t distinguish between good and bad wine; (b) Jesus makes more intoxicating wine for those already drunk; therefore, (c) He doesn’t.
The number of possible syllogisms is uncountable, but there are two hundred and fifty-six possible types of syllogisms. Chuck Northrop employs none of them. He doesn’t work a single inference, even by accident. He is a miracle of the anti-syllogism. Sadly, the Preston Road School of Preaching, having briefly changed its name to the Center for Christian Education, is now closed, so a quick glance at the qualifications required for entry, or the qualifications required for graduation, is not possible. But (a) Chuck Northrop is a graduate of Preston Road School of Preaching; (b) Chuck Northrop demonstrates an understanding of logic comparable to that of a stubborn, three-year-old child; therefore, (c) either the Preston Road School of Preaching offered no course in logic or Chuck Northrop attended the Preston Road School of Preaching after it had closed.
The pudding calls for still more eggs. There are other reasons why those who believe Jesus turned water into wine are very much mistaken: “Since Jesus produced alcoholic wine (as they claim), then not only would it be morally right to drink it, it would be morally right to produce it, sell it, distribute it, and make a living from it.” At this point, one might feel that Northrop is simply ready to send the whole of France to Hell, but he goes on: “But since that would certainly cause someone to stumble, then it must be morally right to cause someone to stumble. However, the logical consequence of their argument would oppose the Lord's teaching (Luke 17:1-2) [Jesus teaching his disciples of the punishment awaiting those who cause the vulnerable to stumble: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea …”]. No, the reasoning is a foolish argument that has no foundation in scripture.” He means other than the Gospel according to St. John.
For those drawn to a literal reading of a multi-authored, densely metaphorical text who are confronted with a sentence they have no interest in reading literally, the switch from John to Luke is typical, but not as typical as the switch to Habakkuk. “[C]onsider the general context of the Bible,” if you will: “Habakkuk wrote, ‘Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness.’” This, in Northrop’s considered opinion, is the “sin of drunkenness,” although it may look to you and I and the authors of The Oxford Bible Commentary like the sin of getting someone else drunk for your own illicit advantage. Anyway, before we run out of breath: “If Jesus supplied intoxicating wine to the wedding guests at Cana, then He contributed to their intoxication. Not only did Jesus contribute to it, He, also, condoned and encouraged people to get completely soused! Since intoxication is sinful, then Jesus sinned, and the ‘woe’ of Habakkuk would be upon him” and “it would be better for Jesus ‘that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea.’”
And that can't be right.
Northrop has reached a new high here: this can’t even be reduced to a false syllogism. He is also on dangerous ground for a graduate of the Preston Road School of Preaching, flirting with all that “woe” of Habakkuk, and putting Jesus within the range of His own wrath. But it isn’t easy to prove that something means the opposite of what it says.
“What, then, was the miracle of the wedding feast in Cana?” Northrop asks, as well he might. The answer: "The miracle of Cana was that Jesus surpassed or transcended the normal amount of time and the natural process that it takes to produce and harvest grape juice.” You can see why John chose a shorter explanation.
So, Jesus surpassed or transcended the normal amount of time and the natural process that it takes to produce and harvest grape juice, or Jesus turned water into wine. It depends on who you believe, Chuck or John. Either way, or neither way, it is still right next door to a miracle, for some, that they have managed to turn their wine into water.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Click
Brick has his “click.” “Somethin’ hasn’t happened yet,” so he drinks and waits for the click in his head that makes him feel peaceful, “like a switch, clickin’ off in my head. Turns the hot light off and the cool one on, and all of a sudden there’s peace.”
BIG DADDY
Boy, you're, you're a real alcoholic.
BRICK
That is the truth. Yes, sir, I am an alcoholic. So if you'd just excuse me ...
I didn’t have a certain point I reached with a certain drink that turned the cool light on. But there was a moment, at the end a daily one, that was similar. It wasn’t on the stoop, locking the front door, because there was still the walk or the metro ride. It wasn’t in the elevator, as the doors closed on work, because there could always be a private party at the bar. It was at the door to the bar, arriving, walking in, sensing no further separation between me and the drink, looking up at the marvelous sepias and thick transparencies bottled up on the backlit gantry, waiting to be served, without having to ask.
It was like being drunk already, and it would feel like that all night, until the opposite moment would arrive and it was time to go back out into the dark, underground, to unlock doors and disappoint others, back to something that hadn’t happened yet.
BIG DADDY
Boy, you're, you're a real alcoholic.
BRICK
That is the truth. Yes, sir, I am an alcoholic. So if you'd just excuse me ...
I didn’t have a certain point I reached with a certain drink that turned the cool light on. But there was a moment, at the end a daily one, that was similar. It wasn’t on the stoop, locking the front door, because there was still the walk or the metro ride. It wasn’t in the elevator, as the doors closed on work, because there could always be a private party at the bar. It was at the door to the bar, arriving, walking in, sensing no further separation between me and the drink, looking up at the marvelous sepias and thick transparencies bottled up on the backlit gantry, waiting to be served, without having to ask.
It was like being drunk already, and it would feel like that all night, until the opposite moment would arrive and it was time to go back out into the dark, underground, to unlock doors and disappoint others, back to something that hadn’t happened yet.
Before the Exit
BEFORE THE EXIT OF THE BAR stands a bouncer on guard. To this bouncer there comes a man from the country who asks to be allowed out of the Bar. But the bouncer says that he cannot let him out at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed out later. “It is possible,” says the bouncer, “but not at the moment.” Since the door stands open, as usual, and the bouncer steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the opening out at the exterior. Observing that, the bouncer laughs and says: “If you are so drawn to it, just try to go out despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the bouncers. From hall to hall there is one bouncer after another, each more powerful than the last. The third bouncer is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.” These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Exit, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the bouncer in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to leave. The bouncer gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed out, and wearies the bouncer by his importunity. The bouncer frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let out yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his adventure, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the bouncer. The bouncer accepts everything, but always with the remark: “I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything.” During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the bouncer. He forgets the other bouncers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing him from leaving the Bar. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the bouncer he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the bouncer’s mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the Bar is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness, he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the Exit of the Bar. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the bouncer. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The bouncer has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. “What do you want to know now?” asks the bouncer; “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives to reach the Exit of the Bar,” says the man, “so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged to get out?” The bouncer recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: “No one else could ever be let out here, since this door was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Twelve Small Steps
Twelve Small Steps For Man
An International Bestseller
“A bravura performance … a delightfully uninformative look at the fall of a man and his attempts at recovery … astute and incomprehensible!” – Kirkus Reviews.
On his way to an A.A. meeting after bottoming-out for the umpteenth time that day, the anonymous narrator is hit by a drunk driver, the first in a series of hilarious, picaresque adventures to befall this Twenty-First-Century Don Quixote. Powerless over alcohol, with a life about as manageable as a bagful of cats, he happily discovers the twelve steps, but soon unhappily realizes he can’t count to twelve. Searching for a power greater than himself, starting with a couple of 3.6 volt batteries and working his way up, our hero flippantly undertakes a wide-ranging, magnanimous, searching, fearless and ultimately pointless inquiry into the philosophical and ethical questions that bear most strongly on the human condition and why so many prefer it dunked in alcohol. Ruminating on addiction, love, revenge, religion, and breakfast (the scene with the bacon is the funniest in literature since Jude the Obscure arrived in Christminster), each episode is characterized by brevity, wit, and a liveliness of mind that recalls the best of Montaigne, Swift, and Hermann Wilhelm Göring. The narrator’s own perspective on these subjects is broadened and deepened by liberal quotations from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Byron, Proust, and William Topaz McGonagall. Can our hero work his way up from nothing to a state of extreme non-existence? Will he be able to correctly identify his defects of character and be entirely ready for God to remove them, or will he, again, find himself downtown without pants and shoes? If you hate How-To books, you’ll love Twelve Small Steps For Man.
***
“The most fun I’ve had with numbers since Snakes and Ladders.” Anon., author of Fun With Relapse.
“Brainwashing at its best.” Jack Trimpey, author of A.A. Sucks and Show Me The Money.
“What do you expect with half a staircase?” A. Sceptic, Atheism Today.
“I laughed, I cried … Can I use this stuff in a court of law?” The author’s wife.
An International Bestseller
“A bravura performance … a delightfully uninformative look at the fall of a man and his attempts at recovery … astute and incomprehensible!” – Kirkus Reviews.
On his way to an A.A. meeting after bottoming-out for the umpteenth time that day, the anonymous narrator is hit by a drunk driver, the first in a series of hilarious, picaresque adventures to befall this Twenty-First-Century Don Quixote. Powerless over alcohol, with a life about as manageable as a bagful of cats, he happily discovers the twelve steps, but soon unhappily realizes he can’t count to twelve. Searching for a power greater than himself, starting with a couple of 3.6 volt batteries and working his way up, our hero flippantly undertakes a wide-ranging, magnanimous, searching, fearless and ultimately pointless inquiry into the philosophical and ethical questions that bear most strongly on the human condition and why so many prefer it dunked in alcohol. Ruminating on addiction, love, revenge, religion, and breakfast (the scene with the bacon is the funniest in literature since Jude the Obscure arrived in Christminster), each episode is characterized by brevity, wit, and a liveliness of mind that recalls the best of Montaigne, Swift, and Hermann Wilhelm Göring. The narrator’s own perspective on these subjects is broadened and deepened by liberal quotations from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Byron, Proust, and William Topaz McGonagall. Can our hero work his way up from nothing to a state of extreme non-existence? Will he be able to correctly identify his defects of character and be entirely ready for God to remove them, or will he, again, find himself downtown without pants and shoes? If you hate How-To books, you’ll love Twelve Small Steps For Man.
***
“The most fun I’ve had with numbers since Snakes and Ladders.” Anon., author of Fun With Relapse.
“Brainwashing at its best.” Jack Trimpey, author of A.A. Sucks and Show Me The Money.
“What do you expect with half a staircase?” A. Sceptic, Atheism Today.
“I laughed, I cried … Can I use this stuff in a court of law?” The author’s wife.
The Secret of Excess
Grayling: “There is a trick in the nature of some things, but especially of those two wild horsemen, alcohol and merriment, that urges one on just when one has already gone too far. That is the secret of excess: it happens when it has already happened.”
Alexander's Bottom
Alexander III of Macedonia was powerless over alcohol, but try get him to admit it. Whenever the subject of life and manageability was broached, he would have a ready reply: “Tell that to the Persians.” On Drunkenness, a treatise long labored over by his tutor, Aristotle, is known to history but has never been found: the circumstances of its theft or destruction remain a mystery, but who more than Alexander had motive and opportunity to steal or shred it? He grew to rival all peers in consuming large quantities of undiluted wine; his drinking bouts became legendary; and no one, but no one, pulled a geographic like Alexander the Great.
In part, at least, Alexander’s behavior with the bottle was attributable to his genes. The value of abstinence was recognized, but rarely practiced, by the Greeks, and Athenaeus and Aelian include the Macedonians among those peoples identified as being inclined to drink with “heroic intensity.” But Alexander was more Macedonian than most, and proud to outdrink the competition. Not long after the defeat of the Greeks at Chaeronea, following a complicated bout of drunken banter (Attalus urging the Macedonians to pray for a lawful heir to a kingdom now ruled by Philip II and his new wife Cleopatra, Attalus’ niece; Alexander, the heir apparent, taking understandable offense – “You villain: what, am I then a bastard?”), Philip rose up with his sword to run Alexander through, but slipped and fell on his face in a drunken stupor, at which Alexander shouted: “See there the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another.” This to his father, who also happened to be king.
Alexander has few defenders among the historians when it comes to drinking. Plutarch, single-handedly, makes up for that. Citing no fewer than twenty-four sources for his ‘Life,’ he draws a conclusion opposite to each and every one, electing to present Alexander essentially as a man of self-control (enkrateia). (What was Plutarch drinking?) While he couldn’t deny Alexander’s reputation for heavy drinking, he could deny the truth of it: it was Alexander’s “love of talking [that] made him delight to sit long at his wine.”
Alexander’s contemporaries were equally (and less culpably) indulgent, mindful as they were of his temper and impulsive nature. Alexander, as even Plutarch concedes, would “fall into a temper of ostentation and soldierly boasting, which gave his flatterers a great advantage to ride him, and made his better friends very uneasy. For though they thought it too base to strive who should flatter him most, yet they found it hazardous not to do it; so that between the shame and the danger, they were in a great strait how to behave themselves.”
Pity poor Clitus, then. “The Black Clitus” had only saved Alexander’s life, goring Spithridates with a spear as the Persian commander, who had given Alexander such a blow with his battle-axe as to cut through his helmet and touch the hair of his head, was about to deliver a second blow. Clitus was apparently as drunk as Alexander when, on a later occasion (the last, for Clitus) he objected to songs sung to disgrace and ridicule several Macedonian captains “worsted by the barbarians.” Alexander accused Clitus of pleading his own cowardice - “giving cowardice the name of misfortune” - at which point push came to shove and Alexander ran his friend (home? No) through with a spear. (There was a lot of running through with spears in those days, but this was a big one.)
Plutarch reports that Alexander’s anger vanished immediately, “and when he saw his friends about him all in a profound silence, he pulled the spear out of the dead body, and would have thrust it into his own throat, if the guards had not held his hands, and by main force carried him away into his chamber, where all that night and the next day he wept bitterly, till being quite spent with lamenting and exclaiming, he lay as it were speechless, only fetching deep sighs.”
Alexander mourned (as did everyone else, for obvious reasons) for three days, refusing food, attentions to his bodily needs, and promising to give up wine forever. What changed his mind were the words of Callisthenes, a philosopher friend of Aristotle (although let’s be fair to Aristotle here: he considered Callisthenes a powerful speaker and a man of “no judgment whatever;” and let’s be fair to Callisthenes, too: he was probably only as terrified as any one else that night, and said what all the others to a man would have said): “Is this the Alexander whom the whole world looks to, lying here weeping like a slave, for fear of the censure and reproach of men, to whom he himself ought to be a law and measure of equity, if he would use the right his conquests have given him as supreme lord and governor of all, and not be the victim of a vain and idle opinion. Do you not know that Jupiter is represented to have Justice and Law on each hand of him, to signify that all the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just?”
It is unlikely that Alexander ever again considered abstinence, and thus a bottom was missed. Nor is he likely to have given serious consideration from that time forth of making amends to anyone he had wronged, or praying to know the will of a higher power (as he understood it). What higher power? The man was a God. Naturally, therefore, he would became “more audacious and lawless” than ever. That night, he consulted his Homer, gave orders for the funeral of Clitus to mirror the funeral of Patroclus, and, as Clitus’ remains burned on the pyre and the bowls of wine were passed, drank until he passed out, and was then very carefully put to bed by very fearful men.
In part, at least, Alexander’s behavior with the bottle was attributable to his genes. The value of abstinence was recognized, but rarely practiced, by the Greeks, and Athenaeus and Aelian include the Macedonians among those peoples identified as being inclined to drink with “heroic intensity.” But Alexander was more Macedonian than most, and proud to outdrink the competition. Not long after the defeat of the Greeks at Chaeronea, following a complicated bout of drunken banter (Attalus urging the Macedonians to pray for a lawful heir to a kingdom now ruled by Philip II and his new wife Cleopatra, Attalus’ niece; Alexander, the heir apparent, taking understandable offense – “You villain: what, am I then a bastard?”), Philip rose up with his sword to run Alexander through, but slipped and fell on his face in a drunken stupor, at which Alexander shouted: “See there the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another.” This to his father, who also happened to be king.
Alexander has few defenders among the historians when it comes to drinking. Plutarch, single-handedly, makes up for that. Citing no fewer than twenty-four sources for his ‘Life,’ he draws a conclusion opposite to each and every one, electing to present Alexander essentially as a man of self-control (enkrateia). (What was Plutarch drinking?) While he couldn’t deny Alexander’s reputation for heavy drinking, he could deny the truth of it: it was Alexander’s “love of talking [that] made him delight to sit long at his wine.”
Alexander’s contemporaries were equally (and less culpably) indulgent, mindful as they were of his temper and impulsive nature. Alexander, as even Plutarch concedes, would “fall into a temper of ostentation and soldierly boasting, which gave his flatterers a great advantage to ride him, and made his better friends very uneasy. For though they thought it too base to strive who should flatter him most, yet they found it hazardous not to do it; so that between the shame and the danger, they were in a great strait how to behave themselves.”
Pity poor Clitus, then. “The Black Clitus” had only saved Alexander’s life, goring Spithridates with a spear as the Persian commander, who had given Alexander such a blow with his battle-axe as to cut through his helmet and touch the hair of his head, was about to deliver a second blow. Clitus was apparently as drunk as Alexander when, on a later occasion (the last, for Clitus) he objected to songs sung to disgrace and ridicule several Macedonian captains “worsted by the barbarians.” Alexander accused Clitus of pleading his own cowardice - “giving cowardice the name of misfortune” - at which point push came to shove and Alexander ran his friend (home? No) through with a spear. (There was a lot of running through with spears in those days, but this was a big one.)
Plutarch reports that Alexander’s anger vanished immediately, “and when he saw his friends about him all in a profound silence, he pulled the spear out of the dead body, and would have thrust it into his own throat, if the guards had not held his hands, and by main force carried him away into his chamber, where all that night and the next day he wept bitterly, till being quite spent with lamenting and exclaiming, he lay as it were speechless, only fetching deep sighs.”
Alexander mourned (as did everyone else, for obvious reasons) for three days, refusing food, attentions to his bodily needs, and promising to give up wine forever. What changed his mind were the words of Callisthenes, a philosopher friend of Aristotle (although let’s be fair to Aristotle here: he considered Callisthenes a powerful speaker and a man of “no judgment whatever;” and let’s be fair to Callisthenes, too: he was probably only as terrified as any one else that night, and said what all the others to a man would have said): “Is this the Alexander whom the whole world looks to, lying here weeping like a slave, for fear of the censure and reproach of men, to whom he himself ought to be a law and measure of equity, if he would use the right his conquests have given him as supreme lord and governor of all, and not be the victim of a vain and idle opinion. Do you not know that Jupiter is represented to have Justice and Law on each hand of him, to signify that all the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just?”
It is unlikely that Alexander ever again considered abstinence, and thus a bottom was missed. Nor is he likely to have given serious consideration from that time forth of making amends to anyone he had wronged, or praying to know the will of a higher power (as he understood it). What higher power? The man was a God. Naturally, therefore, he would became “more audacious and lawless” than ever. That night, he consulted his Homer, gave orders for the funeral of Clitus to mirror the funeral of Patroclus, and, as Clitus’ remains burned on the pyre and the bowls of wine were passed, drank until he passed out, and was then very carefully put to bed by very fearful men.
Three Sheets
Shakespeare, when it came to drink, apparently had a thing about threes:
OLIVIA
What’s a drunken man like, fool?
CLOWN
Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.
OLIVIA
What’s a drunken man like, fool?
CLOWN
Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Anker Man
I know the difference between an imperial pint and one drawn to the meaner standards of U.S. customary units. The difference was even clearer, demonstrable, in fact, without recourse to arithmetic when I was drinking: basically, you can get drunker with imperial pints because they’re bigger. I also knew that two pints on either side of the Atlantic were quarts, and that eight pints made a gallon, although, again - alcohol being an intoxicant which releases its effects in direct proportion to the quantity of it that you pour down your neck – it’s important to remember that the imperial measures are bigger, and one man’s gallon and a quart could be another man’s ticket to the drunk tank.
What I couldn’t have told you is that four flagons of beer turned out to be about my average, daily consumption at the bar - not that I wouldn’t have known the miles to go before sleep, just that I couldn’t have predicted the distance in flagons. Something else I couldn’t have told you is that, adding to those four daily flagons the beer I would suck from regularly recycled and restocked aluminum cans, I would average an anker of beer a week.
Four flagons being a gallon, and ten gallons being an anker, this means that it would take me an average of twenty-one weeks to get through a tun of beer. In 2009, then (and probably in one or two of the other lost years that make up the first part of the Twenty-First Century now known in some quarters as The Naughties), I went through two-and-a-half tuns of beer! (In another century, I would only have managed an even two; but the original two hundred and fifty-six gallon tun was revised to the two hundred-and-ten gallon tun some time ago to make it evenly divisible by small integers, coincidentally, perhaps, also making it easier for drunks to count with their fingers.)
I could readily do the math for rundlets (fifteen gallons), barrels (twenty-six and one quarter), tierces (thirty-five), hogsheads (fifty-two and a half), firkins, puncheons or tertians (seventy), and pipes or butts (one hundred and five) - and if I were drinking, I probably would.
What I couldn’t have told you is that four flagons of beer turned out to be about my average, daily consumption at the bar - not that I wouldn’t have known the miles to go before sleep, just that I couldn’t have predicted the distance in flagons. Something else I couldn’t have told you is that, adding to those four daily flagons the beer I would suck from regularly recycled and restocked aluminum cans, I would average an anker of beer a week.
Four flagons being a gallon, and ten gallons being an anker, this means that it would take me an average of twenty-one weeks to get through a tun of beer. In 2009, then (and probably in one or two of the other lost years that make up the first part of the Twenty-First Century now known in some quarters as The Naughties), I went through two-and-a-half tuns of beer! (In another century, I would only have managed an even two; but the original two hundred and fifty-six gallon tun was revised to the two hundred-and-ten gallon tun some time ago to make it evenly divisible by small integers, coincidentally, perhaps, also making it easier for drunks to count with their fingers.)
I could readily do the math for rundlets (fifteen gallons), barrels (twenty-six and one quarter), tierces (thirty-five), hogsheads (fifty-two and a half), firkins, puncheons or tertians (seventy), and pipes or butts (one hundred and five) - and if I were drinking, I probably would.
The Children's Shelf
Albert Anon's Children's Shelf
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Drinks You Can Drink
Eric Carle, The Very Thirsty Caterpillar
Watty Piper, The Little Engine that Could Knock It Back
Dr. Seuss, One Drink, Two Drinks, Red Drink, Blue Drink
Rev. W. V. Awdry, Thomas the Tanked Engine
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Liqueur
Lewis Carroll, Through the Whisky Glass
Mo Willems, Don’t Let Daddy Drive the Bus
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Hangover
Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dad
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Drinks You Can Drink
Eric Carle, The Very Thirsty Caterpillar
Watty Piper, The Little Engine that Could Knock It Back
Dr. Seuss, One Drink, Two Drinks, Red Drink, Blue Drink
Rev. W. V. Awdry, Thomas the Tanked Engine
Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Liqueur
Lewis Carroll, Through the Whisky Glass
Mo Willems, Don’t Let Daddy Drive the Bus
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Hangover
Judith Viorst, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dad
Friday, February 5, 2010
Kafka's Neighbors
The essential Kafka character lives and works in rented rooms, always vulnerable to trespass. Part of me did, too, while another part was losing the plot, raising Cain. It’s only so long that you can indulge that part of you that feeds at the trough (with appetites “I had long secretly indulged, and had of late began to pamper,” as Stevenson had it) before it becomes the stronger part.
Two of Kafka’s shorter stories come to mind.
In My Neighbor, the businessman, who hesitated until it was too late to rent neighboring rooms, now suspects that his new neighbor is a competitor who can eavesdrop on everything he says: “The wretchedly thin walls betray the honorable and capable man, but shield the dishonest … If I wanted to exaggerate – and one must often do that so as to make things clear in one’s mind – I might assert that [the neighbor] does not require a telephone, he uses mine, he pushes his sofa against the wall and listens … Perhaps he doesn’t even wait for the end of the conversation, but gets up at the point where the matter has become clear to him, flies through the town with his usual haste, and, before I have hung up the receiver, is already at his goal working against me.”
In The Student, another neighbor bursts into the narrator’s room every night to wrestle with him, and the narrator has found himself accommodating this nightly schedule, doing easy work that can be dropped when the neighbor, who wants to fight and nothing else, arrives: “If I wanted to give up this acquaintance once and for all I should have to give up the room, for bolting the door is of no avail. Once I had the door bolted because I wanted to read, but my neighbor hacked the door in two with an ax, and, since he can part with something only with the greatest difficulty once he has taken hold of it, I was even in danger of the ax …Well, in me he has a good opponent; accidents aside, I perhaps am the stronger and more skillful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.”
Drinking often felt like living two lives, and, eventually, these were the lives of rivals. At work it is readily apparent, in retrospect, that the walls between my ambition and my unthinking capacity to work against it have long proven to be wretchedly thin. And elsewhere, perhaps, I took too easily to easy tasks, knowing that something like an antagonist would approach at a certain hour, with endurance to beat the band.
It’s hard work keeping the upper hand; almost as hard as giving in.
Two of Kafka’s shorter stories come to mind.
In My Neighbor, the businessman, who hesitated until it was too late to rent neighboring rooms, now suspects that his new neighbor is a competitor who can eavesdrop on everything he says: “The wretchedly thin walls betray the honorable and capable man, but shield the dishonest … If I wanted to exaggerate – and one must often do that so as to make things clear in one’s mind – I might assert that [the neighbor] does not require a telephone, he uses mine, he pushes his sofa against the wall and listens … Perhaps he doesn’t even wait for the end of the conversation, but gets up at the point where the matter has become clear to him, flies through the town with his usual haste, and, before I have hung up the receiver, is already at his goal working against me.”
In The Student, another neighbor bursts into the narrator’s room every night to wrestle with him, and the narrator has found himself accommodating this nightly schedule, doing easy work that can be dropped when the neighbor, who wants to fight and nothing else, arrives: “If I wanted to give up this acquaintance once and for all I should have to give up the room, for bolting the door is of no avail. Once I had the door bolted because I wanted to read, but my neighbor hacked the door in two with an ax, and, since he can part with something only with the greatest difficulty once he has taken hold of it, I was even in danger of the ax …Well, in me he has a good opponent; accidents aside, I perhaps am the stronger and more skillful of the two. He, however, has more endurance.”
Drinking often felt like living two lives, and, eventually, these were the lives of rivals. At work it is readily apparent, in retrospect, that the walls between my ambition and my unthinking capacity to work against it have long proven to be wretchedly thin. And elsewhere, perhaps, I took too easily to easy tasks, knowing that something like an antagonist would approach at a certain hour, with endurance to beat the band.
It’s hard work keeping the upper hand; almost as hard as giving in.
Latte Update
Re Latte My Arse, I was thinking I’d just try and get away with “Coffee, please” today. I knew what I wanted. But in front of me was a young woman who knew exactly what she wanted, and how to get it: “double top one pump whole milk cinnamon dolce latte.” I remarked upon it. She said it took even longer to order the decaf. Anyway, that’s the record to date.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Between Pools
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays,” begins Cheever’s The Swimmer, “when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’” Vain and middle-aged, Neddy Merrill, on such an occasion, decides to make his way home by swimming an imagined chain of private and public neighborhood pools eight miles from the starting point of the Westerhazys’ pool. He would name this imaginary stream Lucinda, after his wife. “Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way …”
As he swims, and pauses to change pools and drink, it becomes evident that time and fortune are moving ahead of the swimmer at a pace quickly beyond his reach, and the privilege, between pools, of welcoming neighbors quickly fades. “Why, Neddy, what a marvelous surprise,” says Mrs. Graham. “I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.” Enid Bunker finds his appearance no less marvelous: “Oh, look who’s here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come I thought I’d die.” The tone changes at the recreation center – “Hey, you, you without the identification disk, get outa the water” – and at the Hallorans: “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about your misfortunes, Neddy.” (By way of explanation, Mrs. Halloran adds, “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house and that your poor children …”) At the Biswangers, grace disappears with Grace Biswanger: “Why this party has everything, including a gatecrasher.” The penultimate stop is at the home of Shirley Adams, the mistress with whom he has recently broken up: “What do you want?” she asks, and then, “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?” The journey ends at Neddy’s own door, his family gone, the place empty.
For a while there, every day was a midsummer Sunday. As vain as Neddy Merrill, and far drunker, I had my own feelings of pilgrimage. In whose name did I have the nerve to set off? And, as I listen back, what do I hear from the witnesses, the casual observers, the bystanders whose words would take the measure of it? Well, I cheat. At the first chill, I change journeys, and I change people. This doesn’t actually suspend continuity, but it makes it episodic, and, happily, cuts off extended criticism. Truth be told, who cared anyway?
Well, maybe the Lucinda of the story, for the place isn‘t empty yet. Otherwise, it’s only really my own voice I hear saying, “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”
As he swims, and pauses to change pools and drink, it becomes evident that time and fortune are moving ahead of the swimmer at a pace quickly beyond his reach, and the privilege, between pools, of welcoming neighbors quickly fades. “Why, Neddy, what a marvelous surprise,” says Mrs. Graham. “I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here, let me get you a drink.” Enid Bunker finds his appearance no less marvelous: “Oh, look who’s here! What a marvelous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come I thought I’d die.” The tone changes at the recreation center – “Hey, you, you without the identification disk, get outa the water” – and at the Hallorans: “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about your misfortunes, Neddy.” (By way of explanation, Mrs. Halloran adds, “Why, we heard that you’d sold the house and that your poor children …”) At the Biswangers, grace disappears with Grace Biswanger: “Why this party has everything, including a gatecrasher.” The penultimate stop is at the home of Shirley Adams, the mistress with whom he has recently broken up: “What do you want?” she asks, and then, “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?” The journey ends at Neddy’s own door, his family gone, the place empty.
For a while there, every day was a midsummer Sunday. As vain as Neddy Merrill, and far drunker, I had my own feelings of pilgrimage. In whose name did I have the nerve to set off? And, as I listen back, what do I hear from the witnesses, the casual observers, the bystanders whose words would take the measure of it? Well, I cheat. At the first chill, I change journeys, and I change people. This doesn’t actually suspend continuity, but it makes it episodic, and, happily, cuts off extended criticism. Truth be told, who cared anyway?
Well, maybe the Lucinda of the story, for the place isn‘t empty yet. Otherwise, it’s only really my own voice I hear saying, “Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”
The Joke's On Me
I walk into a bar … How many of me does it take to change a light bulb? What do you get when you cross me with me? Take me … please. Why did I cross the road?
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Me.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Me.
Not Applicable
The hospital I’d only heard of as a point of departure. I knew of three people who went in and didn’t come out. Or came out in a box. Once is a black mark.
I’m not superstitious, touch wood, but I’d only gone to the doctor’s for a handful of antibiotics. The second opinion he wanted from the chest surgeon at the ER was quickly spiraling out of control. The first nurse asked if I had a living will. Another asked if anyone had the power to make medical decisions on my behalf.
I’m put into a room adjacent to one in which, according to a plaque on the door, Doctor H. did in September, 2007. Doctor H. happened to be my doctor, until recently. He had retired not long before September, 2007. I thought he’d be fishing up in Michigan.
There were further x-rays. A few more and I’ll be reading in the dark.
It was likely that a thoracentesis was all that would be required. I expressed relief and looked it up when the doctor left. Basically, it’s a pleural tap. I looked up pleural tap. Basically, that’s a thoracentesis. This isn’t helpful except to say to the doctor next time he mentions thoracentesis that that’s basically just a pleural tap, right?
The thoracentesis went well (as did the pleural tap). Omens dissipated. The nicotine patch came off within the hour, but not in front of the nurses. I should have waited until the lung had reinflated, but, what the hell … There was the pleasure of one month sober and filling out forms asking if (and if so how much) you drink, and confidently writing “No” and “Not Applicable,” just like that, capital letters and all.
Touch wood.
I’m not superstitious, touch wood, but I’d only gone to the doctor’s for a handful of antibiotics. The second opinion he wanted from the chest surgeon at the ER was quickly spiraling out of control. The first nurse asked if I had a living will. Another asked if anyone had the power to make medical decisions on my behalf.
I’m put into a room adjacent to one in which, according to a plaque on the door, Doctor H. did in September, 2007. Doctor H. happened to be my doctor, until recently. He had retired not long before September, 2007. I thought he’d be fishing up in Michigan.
There were further x-rays. A few more and I’ll be reading in the dark.
It was likely that a thoracentesis was all that would be required. I expressed relief and looked it up when the doctor left. Basically, it’s a pleural tap. I looked up pleural tap. Basically, that’s a thoracentesis. This isn’t helpful except to say to the doctor next time he mentions thoracentesis that that’s basically just a pleural tap, right?
The thoracentesis went well (as did the pleural tap). Omens dissipated. The nicotine patch came off within the hour, but not in front of the nurses. I should have waited until the lung had reinflated, but, what the hell … There was the pleasure of one month sober and filling out forms asking if (and if so how much) you drink, and confidently writing “No” and “Not Applicable,” just like that, capital letters and all.
Touch wood.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Time's Arrow
I say, “Officers,” because there are two of them. Then I say, “Officer, I’m fine, officer.” I have no idea what I have done wrong, but a policeman is there, pushing me down on the cool grass. I see the flashing light, and close my eyes. I hear the sharp burst of the siren.
When I open my eyes again, a fog has fallen. A few street lights throb in the dark. The hotel across the street tilts in defiance of gravity. I stand up and walk to clear my head, but walking makes it worse. Under the awning of the bar, Brian tells me I’m barred, but he pulls me inside, all the way to the bathroom, where I sit until the walls slow down, the white tiles appear, and the ice in my temple thaws.
I find my way to the bar. I fill a short glass quickly and hand it over to Keith, who hands back ten dollars and an empty glass. I wonder if the second, larger glass is mine, as I fill it half way. I move quickly towards Larry, who acts sober enough, then pretends to be drunker than he is, and then I slowly make my way towards Robbie. Keith gives me more money, a fistful of scrunched bills, and then says my money has run out.
Robbie and I watch, as the sound of glass being remade, a splashed cymbal in reverse, announces Larry’s decision to pacify a rival drunkard at the bar. He over-sways, hands out of sight, faking a drunker self so the headbutt won’t be expected, but he quickly stops swaying, gets back on the stool, and the noise of the bar starts up again.
I look at the crossword with a view to erasing it. Half of it seems to be written in a foreign language, Latin-based, maybe, but even then with the alphabet shuffled, in code, not crossword code, but military code. “So the barman gave her one,” says Robbie.
I put one pint glass after the other onto the bar, and Keith clears them as quick as I can put them there. The crossword clues are difficult. I have two answers for seventeen across – I prefer “fuckwit” to “asshole,” but neither has a “q” in it, and neither will fit in the six blank squares of the grid provided for seventeen across. For a while, I speak to a girl who noisily pulls up a chair to my left. God knows what she’s angry about, but the longer I speak to her the more she seems to calm down.
Robbie comes in with a book. He reads a lot. He’s a good person to drink with because he reads when he’s drinking. Sometimes he can’t help recounting a curious ending and insisting on working you back to the mundane beginning of it, but mostly he is happy to sit beside you and read. Robbie says, “A woman walked into a bar and asked for a double-entendre.” And then he goes back to the book.
The sunlight streams in, refracted by all the crap on the high windows. The crossword clues get easier. Gain nothing for inebriate, four letters. The setter should be working for the tabloids. Keith hands me a large bill. I say, “Let me know when that runs out.”
I give up my place at the bar, as more and more people come in, taking up stools, sending back food. I leave the place, and look on over from across the street. I check my watch. I have a number of options. There's plenty of time.
When I open my eyes again, a fog has fallen. A few street lights throb in the dark. The hotel across the street tilts in defiance of gravity. I stand up and walk to clear my head, but walking makes it worse. Under the awning of the bar, Brian tells me I’m barred, but he pulls me inside, all the way to the bathroom, where I sit until the walls slow down, the white tiles appear, and the ice in my temple thaws.
I find my way to the bar. I fill a short glass quickly and hand it over to Keith, who hands back ten dollars and an empty glass. I wonder if the second, larger glass is mine, as I fill it half way. I move quickly towards Larry, who acts sober enough, then pretends to be drunker than he is, and then I slowly make my way towards Robbie. Keith gives me more money, a fistful of scrunched bills, and then says my money has run out.
Robbie and I watch, as the sound of glass being remade, a splashed cymbal in reverse, announces Larry’s decision to pacify a rival drunkard at the bar. He over-sways, hands out of sight, faking a drunker self so the headbutt won’t be expected, but he quickly stops swaying, gets back on the stool, and the noise of the bar starts up again.
I look at the crossword with a view to erasing it. Half of it seems to be written in a foreign language, Latin-based, maybe, but even then with the alphabet shuffled, in code, not crossword code, but military code. “So the barman gave her one,” says Robbie.
I put one pint glass after the other onto the bar, and Keith clears them as quick as I can put them there. The crossword clues are difficult. I have two answers for seventeen across – I prefer “fuckwit” to “asshole,” but neither has a “q” in it, and neither will fit in the six blank squares of the grid provided for seventeen across. For a while, I speak to a girl who noisily pulls up a chair to my left. God knows what she’s angry about, but the longer I speak to her the more she seems to calm down.
Robbie comes in with a book. He reads a lot. He’s a good person to drink with because he reads when he’s drinking. Sometimes he can’t help recounting a curious ending and insisting on working you back to the mundane beginning of it, but mostly he is happy to sit beside you and read. Robbie says, “A woman walked into a bar and asked for a double-entendre.” And then he goes back to the book.
The sunlight streams in, refracted by all the crap on the high windows. The crossword clues get easier. Gain nothing for inebriate, four letters. The setter should be working for the tabloids. Keith hands me a large bill. I say, “Let me know when that runs out.”
I give up my place at the bar, as more and more people come in, taking up stools, sending back food. I leave the place, and look on over from across the street. I check my watch. I have a number of options. There's plenty of time.
Monday, February 1, 2010
A Man Walks Into A Bar
A man walks into a bar …
… and the dog says, “Should I have said DiMaggio?” … and the duck says, “Yeah, you can get this guy off my butt” … and the man says, “that’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe” … and the barman says, “It’s the peanuts, they’re complementary” … and the woman says, “That’s not my dog” … and the guy says, “They gave me a Chihuahua?” … and the barman says, “I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the duck” … and the guy says, “Beats me. Do you think I asked for a twelve-inch pianist?” …
… He plans only to have a drink or two, but several hours later, fully loaded, he takes a cab home, thinking this (and the hour he shaved off work) will make it seem like he spent less time at the bar than he did. But it doesn't matter: the kids are already in bed, and his wife goes to bed as soon as the doors are locked. So he gets a few cans of beer from one hiding hole or other and switches on a program he may or may not have watched before and drinks himself to sleep right there on the sofa. This way he doesn’t have to reflect on any of the resentments that made him walk into the bar today and adds just enough to his reserves of self-loathing to ensure he will walk back in again tomorrow.
… and the dog says, “Should I have said DiMaggio?” … and the duck says, “Yeah, you can get this guy off my butt” … and the man says, “that’s not a lion, it’s a giraffe” … and the barman says, “It’s the peanuts, they’re complementary” … and the woman says, “That’s not my dog” … and the guy says, “They gave me a Chihuahua?” … and the barman says, “I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the duck” … and the guy says, “Beats me. Do you think I asked for a twelve-inch pianist?” …
… He plans only to have a drink or two, but several hours later, fully loaded, he takes a cab home, thinking this (and the hour he shaved off work) will make it seem like he spent less time at the bar than he did. But it doesn't matter: the kids are already in bed, and his wife goes to bed as soon as the doors are locked. So he gets a few cans of beer from one hiding hole or other and switches on a program he may or may not have watched before and drinks himself to sleep right there on the sofa. This way he doesn’t have to reflect on any of the resentments that made him walk into the bar today and adds just enough to his reserves of self-loathing to ensure he will walk back in again tomorrow.
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