Drink, drinking and drunkenness

When Lent began, D (a Catholic) told me she was giving up alcohol until Easter. At the time, I decided that if she was going to give up alcohol for forty days, so would I (although it was some weeks before I told her about this decision). I'm not a Catholic, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

Now, we did share a bottle of wine over dinner one night during our Fourth Date last week, but she insisted that it was St. Joseph's Day and therefore all right. As I say, I have no doctrinal attachment to hair-splitting on this issue, so I let her worry about that side of it and didn't argue.

I thought her remarks after the first few days were important in explaining why she chose to give it up:

It's been interesting living without alcohol the last few days. I won't say it's been easy. I actually think there is a path of moderation to be found, but not living alone. It's far too easy to convince yourself that you need a friend and since no-one is around, drinking a glass...or three...of wine seems like a substitute. I've given up almost all serious reading and intellectual engagement outside of what I need to do for my classes and some sort of literacy in theology and politics. I guess the warning that I received was the my feelings of self-pity and blame after three drinks...falsehood and lies to myself seemed true. Time to stop; Lent just offers me a convenient reason. And face it, many times we drink simply to be social. Why not give it up for similar reasons?

Thought you'd enjoy this brief review of Greek drinking. [link]

I wasn't sure I had anything to add to her personal remarks about drinking, but I did do some thinking about the article she referenced. The next day, I replied to her as follows:

An interesting article, but it falters (in my view) by adopting an overly rationalistic view of Greek life; this is a common error, but I think that it (in turn) is a consequence of the accident that we have preserved the writings of Plato and Aristotle almost intact, while there are whole epic cycles which have been irretrievably lost to say nothing of a good 90% of the literary output of EACH of Aeschylus and Sophocles. And there are authors about whom we know only the names, to say nothing of authors whose names we don't know ... to say (in turn) nothing of those aspects of life which were never written down in a largely non-literate society. So most of what we have to describe daily life is Plato (and Xenophon); but I think that there is good reason to suppose that Plato was deliberately changing what he would have seen in the hopes of promoting a better example. For instance, the only detailed account we have of any symposium [drinking party] is Plato's Symposium. But it seems at least possible to me -- and actually rather likely -- that Plato was not describing a typical symposium (which may well have been more drunken and debauched) but rather what he hoped a symposium could become at its best. It is worth noting that in the Laws (also by Plato), Megillus the Spartan and Cleinias the Cretan give the Athenian Stranger no peace over the subject of drinking ... because it is "well known" that the Athenians are all debauched drunkards, and all of Greece has heard disreputable stories about these symposia that rich men hold, where they sink deep into their cups while being entertained with beautiful, scantily-clad serving wenches and female musicians playing flute music. (The flute was well known to inspire passion and madness, as opposed to something more staid and settling like the lyre.) The Athenian Stranger replies that things are indeed pretty bad the way they are handled today, but his companions shouldn't rule out a useful role for symposia if only they were managed better. He then describes a proposal for how an idealized symposium COULD BE managed, if only anybody could be found to take on the job; and what he describes looks a lot like the party in Plato's Symposium.

In general, I have long thought that the true incarnation of the Greek spirit comes a lot closer to Alexis Zorba than to Socrates son of Sophroniscus. Indeed, I think that much of the fascination with Socrates over the centuries has been precisely that he is such an anomaly ... and that the path he marks out is a particularly hard one for a healthy Greek to walk. Maybe harder than it is for us duller, stodgier, less-imaginative people .... (smile) Naturally in saying this I do not forget that -- if you follow my own roots back far enough -- you can probably find men who swilled mead drunkenly from goblets fashioned out of the skulls of their enemies. But be that as it may .... And even Socrates acknowledged the guidance of a divine sign that came to him from time to time.

The Bacchae is a hair-raising play, but also a haunting one. E. R. Dodds introduces a discussion of it in one of his essays by starting with a review of the last three years of Euripides's life: in this year he wrote xxx and yyy (I don't remember); in the next year he wrote nothing at all. "And then, in the very last year of his life, he wrote a play that held the Athenian stage for four hundred years" -- The Bacchae. But to see in it a story about intemperance and alcohol abuse is as flat-footed and pedestrian an interpretation as to see in Hippolytus nothing more than a story about lust. -- or, to use an example I've used earlier -- to see in "Dangerous Liaisons" or "Othello" nothing more than stories about adultery or jealousy. There is something terrifying, awe-inspiring, overwhelming, and totally out of all proportion about all these stories -- something that makes it appropriate to see them as stories about the Gods and Their vengeance, because no story about the Gods can ever be balanced or orderly or temperate or just. The Gods -- and in this reckoning I most certainly include the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts -- are far too wild for that, totally wild, wild beyond all reckoning. We love Them because life is so flat and colorless without Them; but that doesn't mean They might not toss us about the way a hurricane can toss rowboats against sheer rock faces and never notice the difference.

And I think it is indisputable that -- in this sense of the word "divine" (there are others, of course) -- there is something inescapably divine about both alcohol and sex. Both of them are often (a little condescendingly) called "physical pleasures" by people who should know better. But the truth is that alcohol and sex both provide access to profoundly spiritual pleasures -- and this is why they are so overpowering, so compelling ... and so destructive when misused. I read the comment once -- I forget where -- "I will believe sex is a physical pleasure when I see a gourmand sighing wistfully over a fillet mignon, or falling into a jealous rage over a strawberry shortcake." Obviously that will never happen, which proves (as if proof were needed for something so obvious) that sex has an inescapable spiritual component. That is also why meaningless, totally uncommitted sex -- or sex for money, for example -- is so vile: because it is sex with half its nature amputated off. Like those half-children in "The Golden Compass." (I've read the book but not seen the movie; so I don't know if the movie did them justice.)

What is more, alcohol has something of the same divine nature that sex has. Its spiritual side may not be quite as overpowering as is true for sex, but it is still real. And I bet that there ARE those who would feel wistful or jealous over alcohol, under the right circumstances. So this is a "physical pleasure" with at least a non-trivial spiritual component as well; and therefore it is not out of line to see it as something at least partly graced by divinity; and therefore to treat it in terms of trim syllogisms about self-control, the way the Neoplatonists trivialized the Gods into cosmological checker pieces to be pushed around a conceptual board this way and that -- or the way someone like Immanuel Kant treated every single aspect of human life, come to that -- is to miss the wild, howling, madness of the reality, the ecstasy of the dancers with Dionysus and the terror ("pan-ic") spread by Great Pan as he hunts through the forest in the dark of night.

I suspect that all of this falls into the category of material that the author really didn't feel he could explain to his students. It may not make sense till you have lived it. But the upshot is that you shouldn't feel shocked that your wine forces itself into your glass once, twice, three times. Yes, you can make a conscious decision to back away. But that's different from thinking it should be easy.