Read Online The Wet and the Dry by Lawrence Osborne - Free Book Online Page B

too well. He is canny about his possibilities. A self-critic, a connoisseur of his own altered states, he knows exactly how to tweak himself upward and downward. He is an amateur alchemist when it comes to the drinks themselves. If he were a writer and wanted to explain himself to strangers, he would write a book called In Praise of Intoxication . No one would invite him to explain his views in public. In America, he would not be taken seriouslyfor a moment. But he would not be taken seriously by himself either: being taken seriously is not necessary to anything truly serious. The drinker is a Dionysiac, a dancer who sits still, a mocker. He doesn’t need your seriousness or your regard. He just needs a little quiet music, and a gentle freedom from priests.

The Pure Light of High Summer
                                       It was the Greeks who defined the subconscious Dionysian aspirations of the modern drinker, who could be imagined as a pagan remnant who has survived the purges of Christianity. Islam, ironically, gave us distillation just as the Greeks gave us fermentation. Distillation and fermentation: they could not be more different. One rational and scientific in origin, the other mystical and organic.
    Dionysus is the god of vegetation, of the theater, of bulls, of women, and of wine. He is the destroyer and the liberator, “the god who crushes men.” But he is the god who also demands that embryos not be harmed. His cult was dominated by women. Its practitioners were primarily female with a reputation for being “raving women,” mainas . He was the god of what the Greeks called zoe , or indestructible collective life, as opposed to mere bios , the life of an individual. He emerged from the thigh of Zeus and was also known as Dios phos , “light of Zeus.”
    The Greeks themselves found him baffling and unnerving,They struggled to find the words to describe him. Was he anthropomorphic, or was he like some element of the universe that could only be sensed indirectly? The poet Pindar, invoking his miraculous relationship to the blossoming of orchards, compared him with hagnon phengos oporas: “the pure light of high summer.”
    The great Hungarian scholar of Dionysus, Carl Kerényi, began his opus Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life , with a remarkable scholarly reverie on the subject of fermentation in Crete. Dionysus, he claimed, arose in some complex and obscure way from the fermentation symbolism of early Crete, where fermented honey and then beer suggested life emerging mysteriously from decay. It was fermentation itself that made Cretans think of the indestructibility of zoe . As things decay, they give off an enigmatic life; they bubble and seethe and self-transform. Like honey and mead, wine suggested zoe and seemed to partake in cosmic life. “A natural phenomenon inspired a myth of zoe … a statement about life which shows its indestructibility.”
    The rising of the star Sirius in July became, as with the Egyptians, the time of ritual fermenting—that is, the height of summer. Fermentation and intoxication must have seemed a mystical unity to the Cretans, who also consumed opium, according to Kerényi. The intoxication must have had religious import to them, and from honey and beer they transposed the symbolism to the richer, more luxurious wine. They called their sacrificial bulls “wine-colored” for no particular reason, and athousand years later Greeks still carried bulls to the altar during Dionysian rites. Around this god many odd symbols crystallized for reasons we cannot now excavate. The bull, the snake, fermented grape juice, and the dolphins one sees on black-figured cups surrounding the ship where Dionysus sails alone under a mast of grapevines. They are the sailors who intended to kidnap him but were foiled and turned, by an act of godly mercy, into cetaceans.
    The Cretans created a core mythology around this god of fermentation that the