Intoxicology: Findings From The Drunken Science

"Rich inner substance": more Soviet anti(!?)-alcohol posters at the Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters.

Bronze is the mirror of the form; wine, of the heart.
- Aeschylus, Fragments

I drink to the trick of a mouth that betrayed me,
To the eyes and the look that lied.
I drink to the terrible world we inhabit
And to God, who never replied.
- Anna Akhmatova, "The Last Toast"

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink;
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by and by,
Or any other reason why.
- Henry Aldritch

The first cup is for thirst, the second for mirth, the third for delight, the fourth for madness.
- Apuleius, Florida

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it - it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking . . . ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
- Charles Baudelaire, "Be Drunk"

In 27 years I've drunk fifty thousand beers & they just wash against me like the sea into a pier.
- David Berman, "Trains Across the Sea"

. . . glazed with mezcal, the tequila is more at ease, like a naked woman in a fur coat.
- Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.
— Charles Bukowski, London Magazine

Wine drinking is a transgression; if you wish to commit a transgression it should at least not be a flavourless one. If you drink wine, let it be the finest – so that even though you may be convicted of sin in the next world, you will at any rate not be branded a fool in this.
- Ibn Butlan, Qabus Namus

There's nought, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion.
- Lord Byron, Don Juan

I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
- Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote of la Mancha‎

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo and when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive drinking of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.
- Cliff Clavin, Cheers

I also recall during the Khomeini revolution substituting vodka for red wine in restaurants so that revolutionary guards looking in believed we were drinking water. A wealthy Azerbaijani friend in Shemiran hired a mechanical digger at that time to bury enough whisky and vodka in his garden to last for the rest of his life (I don't know whether he is still alive!).
- William Dunn

To hell with poverty — we’ll get drunk on cheap wine!
- Gang of Four, "To Hell with Poverty"

Nothing equals the joy of the drinker, except the joy of the wine in being drunk.
- French Proverb

Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.
- Ernest Hemingway

God made Man
Frail as a bubble;
God made Love,
Love made trouble.
God made the Vine,
Was it a sin
That Man made Wine
To drown Trouble in?
- Oliver Herford, "A Plea"

They [Persians] are very fond of wine, and drink it in large quantities. It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.
- Herodotus, Histories

And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
- A.E. Housman, "A Shropshire Lad"

Another prince, when similarly reproached by a Sufi sheikh, replied that he would only abstain from wine-drinking when it became the greatest of his remaining sins.
- Robert Irwin, Wines in the Koran

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. . . . To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life.
- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

For wine is a wet fire.
- Joseph Joubert, Notebooks

I often wonder what the Vintners buy
One half so precious as the stuff they sell.
- Omar Khayyam, The Rubáiyát

One can drink too much, but one never drinks enough.
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Wine is accredited only with the misdeeds it induces: what is forgotten is the hundreds of good deeds of which it is also the cause. Wine excites to action: to good action in the good, to bad in the bad.
- Georg Lichtenberg, Waste Books

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's life!
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

We give you the fruit of the palm and the vine from which you derive intoxicants and wholesome food.
- Mohammad, The Koran

When I drink, I’m dozy but I fancy getting cosy.
- Aidan Moffett, "Meanwhile At The Bar A Drunkard Muses"

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.
- Ogden Nash, "Reflections on Ice-Breaking"

I drink to make other people interesting.
- George Jean Nathan

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Alcoholism is a search for a common language, or at least, it is a compensation for a language that has been lost.
- Octavio Paz, "The Symposium and the Hermit"

Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone, and still drink more;
But drunk is he who prostrate lies,
Without the power to drink or rise.
- T.L. Peacock, "Misfortunes of Elphin"

Vodka is our enemy, so let’s finish it off.
- Russian Proverb

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy fats our cares be drown'd,
With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd:
Cup us, till the world goes round!
- Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies - and as mysterious.
- James Thurber, Collecting Himself

I had no plans to join Black Sabbath. I went out with Geezer and Tony and we got drunk, and I found out the next day that I agreed to join the band.
- Bill Ward

You mustn't mind that a poet is a drunk, rather that drunks are not always poets.
- Oscar Wilde

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.
- Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Gin for executions, beer for birthdays, wine for weddings.
- P. J. Wolfson

Anfechtung

Picture the abyss. But you can't. The mind demands it be filled. People fill it in with religion, sex, art and any number of sublimations and substitutes. But still the abyss keeps peeking through. We even represent death in our own image - as a human skull. But the truth of death is in the sockets of the skull: empty space defined by context because otherwise undefinable. That's where I float around when I can't sleep. I have a good view of the abyss because of numerous personal circumstances. Among them: I was born into a time and social station that gives me lots of free time. People struggling just to survive fill the abyss with their struggle. I have no struggle. Another circumstance: I have few real friends and no lover. When people are drawn together it creates the illusion of depth, an illusion that covers the abyss. I am apart and without the ballast of human flesh. (Probably because of thoughts like this.) The benefit of my circumstances is that I can glean certain insights from my clear view of the abyss. The downside is that my insights will follow me into the abyss - unless I write them down or teach them to my children. A further downside is that none of my insights are really that original; they mostly come from other people who wrote them down before their stay at the Grand Hotel Abyss ended with a plunge. On the other hand, by writing down my not too original insights I do feel a certain empowerment over the abyss; I fill it even by describing it! That is why I write. I have no illusions - not even the illusion that having no illusions makes me better off. Nietzsche writes of the teacher of virtue, "His wisdom is to wake in order to sleep well. And verily, if life had no sense and I had to choose nonsense, then I too should consider this most sensible nonsense." If life had no sense? Herr Nietzsche, ever the eternal(ly returning) optimist. His otherwise sharp view of the abyss was obstructed by an illusion called overman. There is no overman. There is only going under. Sleep is a sensible teaching because of the possibility, perchance, to dream. Even dreams of the abyss are pictures, and any picture is preferable.

Women.

. . . And Sandwiches Will Eat People

Re: BBC headline Africa border opens for Gaza aid

Africa sending aid?!

P.S. I imagine Bono must be getting progressively thinner like in that movie, um, Thinner.

P.P.S. Because of the role reversal.

Radicals In Quarantine

Occasionally I run across articles denouncing the ideological excesses of today's colleges and universities. I completely support ridiculing the multiculturalist inanities that make it to press. However, when I read pieces calling for the protection of "our naive children from these latter-day Chamberlains" I feel I must interject with a note of realism. The logic of the campus crusaders seems to be that we must drive the Marxists from the ivory tower because they are doing damage to society. I would argue rather, that Marxists were driven to the ivory tower so they couldn't do damage to society. Having a coterie of tamed radicals isolated from the real world (and academia is grossly isolated from the real world) while thinking they are making a difference is a brilliant coup for the status-quo.

But what about the children!? the crusaders cry. I have years of university experience under my belt, and I can say with some authority that students are far too apathetic for professors with a political agenda to have any influence. A loud minority makes the situation seem otherwise, but that is because the silent majority simply doesn't give a shit enough to refute them. Most people want to get their degree, get drunk and get out of there. If they're in certain Arts programs, they know to stick to the party line about feminism and the oppressed in the classroom, and completely refute it in their actions outside. Talking to a couple of (female, naturally) Women's Studies students once, I was surprised at how jaundiced they were about what they were taught. They knew the idea that men are responsible for all the world's ills wouldn't help them with their actual problems, but they also knew pretending was an easy way to get marks.

Some students are naive dupes, no doubt about it. But more often than not it is the radical professors being told what they want to hear who are the naive dupes. Further, such radical professors, at least in my schooling experience, are still in the minority and are easy to avoid if you know what to look for in class descriptions (words like "problematizing"). Generally they are relegated to English and things that end in Studies that are as good as quarantined by those students seeking a traditional liberal arts education. Where would status-quo boosters rather have the tenured rebels and aging hippies who populate "Peace Studies": in the halls of government, or in the halls of the Robert C. Miller Arts Building across from the student center teaching Postcolonial Conflict Resolution in West Indies Literature?

Sonar Love

Titanic crypto-phalluses collide in the Mid-Atlantic: it must be love.

The Musical Genre Of M.I.A.

Third world minstrelsy.

People To Expect Moral Perfection From Before Athletes

• Thelemites
• Marxist-Leninists
• Followers of Yahweh Ben Yahweh
• French fin-de-siècle decadents
• Pre-revolutionary Russian landowners
• Kurtz
• Belgian colonials
• Chemical Ali
• Victorian headmasters
• Hedge fund managers
  
• Israeli settlers
• The Palestinians
• Crips
• Bloods
  
• Pakistani madrassa graduates
  
• African "big men"
• College Greeks
• Mediterranean Greeks
• Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
  
• Witches at black masses
• Saudi princes
• Chris Brown
• Serbian nationalists
  
• Hellfire Club members
  
• Mel Gibson
• Thuggees
• Oriental despots
  
• Sports fans
  

Song Of The Day & Question Of The Day

"What one awakens to is not the final truth in the form of a system but rather a question which can never fully be answered."
- Leo Strauss, 1978 letter to Hans-Georg Gadamer

*

"The answer must accept, as its pre-condition, the state of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done."
- Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be

P.J. Harvey - Is That All There Is? [Lyrics by Lieber & Stoller]

I remember when I was a girl
Our house caught on fire
And I'll never forget the look on my father's face
As he gathered me in his arms
And raced to the burning building out on the pavement
And I stood there shivering
And watched the whole world go up in flames
And when it was all over
I said to myself
Is that all there is to a fire?
Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

And when I was twelve years old
My daddy took me to the circus
"The greatest show on earth"
And there were clowns
And elephants
Dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads
And as I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don't know what
But when it was all over
I said to myself
Is that all there is to the circus?

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

And then I fell in love
With the most wonderful boy in the world
We'd take long walks down by the river
Or just sit for hours gazing into each other's eyes
We were so very much in love
And then one day
He went away
And I'd thought I'd die
But I didn't
And when I didn't
I said to myself
Is that all there is to love?

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep

I know what you must be saying to yourselves
If that's the way she feels about it
Then why doesn't she just end it all
Oh no. Not me. I'm not ready for the final disappointment
Cause I know just as well as I'm standing here talking to you
That when that final moment comes
And I'm breathing my last breath
I know what I'll be saying to myself
Is that all there is?

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is

Plight Makes Right

The line between left-fascism and right-fascism gets blurrier every day. I refer to the recent proto-Kristallnacht in Venezuela. I am not of the belief that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous, but there is no doubt that the left has been cheerfully exploiting if not subsuming the latter sentiment under the guise of the former for some time. This shouldn't be all that surprising. The left's attitude to Jews may be summarized by a line from a Leonard Cohen song: "You loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win." Leftism is a Christian heresy, and as such attributes automatic virtue to the beaten party. As the Jews in general, and Israel in particular, stopped being so beaten and learned to do some beating themselves, the left transformed the Jew on the crucifix into the Palestinian on the crucifix; with the added bonus that there was a large cultural mine of Jew-as-crucifier motifs to draw on. That the Palestinian on the crucifix would be happy to crucify the Jew if their places were switched does not affect leftist thinking. For leftists, whoever has more power is automatically in the wrong, and whoever has less power is automatically in the right.

This makes the current alliance between disaffected leftists and disaffected Islamists all the stranger. Leftists back the Palestinians because they are victims; Islamists back the Palestinians because they are Muslims. The Iranian revolution also began as an uneasy alliance of convenience between leftists and Islamists. Yet once the Islamists took power, the leftists were persecuted and exiled. The alliance was always uneasy because one side, the left, opposed the Shah for the sake of being a dictator; the other side, the Islamists, opposed the Shah for the sake of being an insufficiently Muslim dictator. Dictatorship itself was not the problem for them. Similarly, the Islamists don't have a problem with persecution of minorities (Iran's persecution of Bahai's, to give one example), they have a problem with persecution of Muslim minorities. This is particular so because Muslims have traditionally never been minorities in non-Muslim countries, so even the idea of a Muslim minority is offensive to them. Leftists have not been able to grasp the concept that some minorities, some beaten parties, are not content to wear a crown of thorns forever; they don't oppose power, they oppose not having power.

How then does left-fascism arise, when fascism is distinguished by idolization of the strong? The answer can be found in the human capacity for self-delusion. The vandals of the Venezuelan synagogue no doubt thought of themselves as protecting the weak (the Palestinians) from the strong (the Israelis), even though in actual fact they were terrorizing a small and weak group (Venezuelan Jews) from the standpoint of the strong (the ruling party). Similarly, the Soviets imagined themselves protecting weak peasants from strong oppressors as they persecuted the kulaks (in actual fact slightly less poor peasants). The difference between minority and majority, oppressor and oppressed is often a matter of perspective. Israel looks like a powerful oppressor when the map is simply of it, the West Bank and Gaza; when the map is zoomed out to include the surrounding, larger Arab countries, it looks much less powerful. Yet the question of who is comparatively weaker and thus more deserving of sympathy leads to a pageantry of competing victimhoods that does not settle the question of who is in the right, because losing does not equal being right.

I must add that winning does not equal being right either. Rather than might makes right or plight makes right, I prefer the ideal of noblesse oblige. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines it thusly: Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly. From this perspective I may be critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, or France's treatment of Algerians. However, this is because those nations hold themselves to a higher standard than say, Iran does with its minorities. Left-fascists feel normally despicable acts are justified if the aggressor has some claim to be oppressed; right-fascists feel normally despicable acts are justified if the aggressor has some claim to be naturally superior. However, under the ideal of noblesse oblige, it is not that a majority is automatically wrong and a minority is automatically right, but that a civilized majority is marked as such in part by how it treats its minorities. That being said, as Muslim countries have extremely poor records when it comes to treatment of minority groups, regard for noblesse oblige requires one to ask: when the Muslim population of France is bigger than the non-Muslim population, will it conduct itself as nobly?

If the answer is no, this creates a number of political and ethical problems which the left is not equipped to deal with. The sometime feminist view that burqas are actually liberating from the tyranny of the male gaze is one such muddled response. Another is that Islamophobia is equivalent to anti-Semitism; a comparison which is useful up to a point, that point being that Jews were never in a position to become numerically dominant in Christian countries with low birthrates. Since leftists are resentful of all claims to nobility, they are loathe to recognize how dependent they are on the noblesse oblige of the society they criticize. When they lose sight of this they lose sight of the elementary fact that there is always a majority and a minority in any given society, and some majorities treat minorities better than others. Thus a leftism consistent in its concern for minorities would, for instance, criticize Israel while taking into consideration that its checkered noblesse oblige is better than Hamas's complete lack. More typical is Hugo Chavez worship: a left-fascism which is completely different than right-fascist Augusto Pinochet worship because, of course, Chavez is opposed by the Americans and has darker skin.

Rhyming Couplet Of The Day

Those who inflate themselves are cursed
When pricked by a small pin to burst.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Against Airs"

Obsession: An Obsession

This website is the product of an obsessive mind. The amount of effort I put into it versus the amount of reward I get out of it makes that clear. Thus I was interested to hear of a new book, Obsession: a History by Lennard J. Davis, because as well as having an obsessive mind I am interested in (obsessed by?) history. Here are some excerpts of a review of the book from the Daily Telegraph, with my comments obsessively located below.

. . . we ought to recall that our aches are often accidents of medical history, no more (and no less) real than the gripes of our forebears. The modern depressive is kin to the renaissance melancholic; the “nervous” Victorian would no doubt suffer today from an anxiety disorder; the child with attention deficit disorder might once have been diagnosed a compulsive masturbator. We should ponder too the disappearance of the hysteric, with her fits of “uterine furor”, and ask what became of the “nymphos” and “sex maniacs” of quite recent popular imagining.

Most mental diseases are partly psychological, partly biological. I liken them to an erection. An erection occurs as a result of both objective, biological stimuli (the blood flows to the penis) and subjective, psychological stimuli (the fantasy of the masturbator can cause the blood to flow to the penis). The depressive who thinks himself into a depression is similarly a slave and master to his psychosomatic fantasies; he is born with a melancholic mindset that he is capable of activating but not so easily deactivating. On a related note, the hysterics and "sex maniacs" have not gone anywhere; except perhaps to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

In the 18th century, a dismal quartet of ailments — spleen, vapours, melancholy and hypochondria — composed what was known as the English Malady. Alongside a general ennui, intractable sadness and terror, various tics and chronic digestive trouble, sufferers such as James Boswell and Samuel Johnson noted the patient’s tendency to fixate on a single theme or pursue a train of thought until it turned perversely and ruinously absorbing.

I always suspected I was a displaced Englishman.

In 1810 the physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol named it “momomania”: a form of partial insanity that left the patient rational but helpless to stop himself reasoning in the wrong direction. Poets and painters, Esquirol believed, were especially susceptible to this form of heightened but misdirected attention.

A great disco-punk tune by the band Killing Joke, "Tension", describes this phenomenon perfectly:

Sitting in my armchair thinking again and again and again
Going round in a circle, I can't get out
Then I look around, thinking day and night and day
Then you look around - there must be some explanation
And the tension builds

It was once my theme song.

Passionate purposefulness, unflagging loyalty, extreme concentration, tireless attention to detail: how to tell at what point these virtues become vices? An easy answer would be: when they cause pain to the obsessive or those around them. But would we really want to exclude from our lives all the commitments or achievements that seemed “unhealthy” at some point?

Anxiety and doubt are natural symptoms of a growing organism. I am reminded of a supple line from an article by Jeet Heer: "Calmness is a gift possessed only by bovine souls and the odd psychopath." The people who feel most sane, most at ease with their conscience and consciousness, are psychopaths. Their uncanny calmness allows them to commit horrid acts prevented by the anxiety and doubt of the simply neurotic. Yet are they mentally ill if their illness causes them no distress? Their lack of mental distress, like the lack of mental distress among bovine souls, is so healthy it must be considered unhealthy. It is a mantra in today's schools that self-esteem is healthy; yet self-esteem without limits leads to a satisfied hubris that retards the soul-searching required for evolution. My own obsessiveness ranges from aggravating to utterly aggravating, but I fear to amputate it completely would be to also amputate part of what distinguishes me from bovine souls and psychopaths.

In Defense Of Theism

Believing in God saves one the humiliation of having to believe in people.