MODERN NON-EUCIIDEAN THEORIES OF THE AESTHETIC DRUNK

by Gregory Snyder

"No artist tolerates reality.  Nor that 3.2 shit they try to pass off as beer at the 7-1l's."				 --Nietzsche
    
			Brett-Maury Wittgenstein's (sub-cousin of the famous philosopher's half-father) tragic and senseless suicide at the age of 94, cut short what was a burgeoning critical and philosophical career. Driven by voices emanating from a nose-dropper full of petroleum jelly, B. M. Wittgenstein's pioneering work in the linkage between art, philosophy and literature, with its corresponding state of shit-facedness, was like a breath of fresh air in the cloistered stagnation of modern philo-libational thought. Though he completed only four essays in his short career, B. M.'s monomaniacal presence has literally haunted the aesthetic wastelands as no oil by-product driven genius in the last half-hour or so.

                  1908 -- Cubism and the Upside Down Margarita

    The codependence of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (on each other) was responsible for two of the most revolutionary leaps known to art or alcohol: the creation of the first Cubist paintings and the creation of the first Cubist imbibables. By dismantling objects into their various planes and sections, Picasso and Braque disassimilated and revamped the parameters of perception. Rather than imitate an object's three-dimensionality with shading and sizing, these two innovators created not just the effect of the three-dimensional representation, but in fact gave us a view of the whole object -- back, front, bottom, top, side, diagonal -- simultaneously so that the mind could reincorporate its full essence and corporeal integrity in an instant. Not uncoincidentally, they did the very same thing in drink-making. Either Pablo or Georges would lie on his back, while the other would hold the four bottles of margarita ingredients above him (tequila, lime juice, sour mix, triple sec). With a deft flick of the wrists, all four bottles were simultaneously inverted by one and poured into the open mouth of the other who was forced to swallow as quickly as humanly possible. The beauty of this method lay both in its singularity as well as its complexity. There was no delay between artistic 'making' and artistic 'receiving', and the distinctive materials retained their individuality upon dispatch from the artist, to become the art (a margarita) only upon successful reception by the audience's collective stomach. Thus the margarita's completion (like the Cubist painting's object) occurred internally and instantaneously without a glass or straw or the cliched Decadent excesses of a salted rim or any lime slice garnish. The repercussions of this lucid perspectal demi-archy are still touching off raw nerve endings in every painting (exclusive of those sad clown or poker-playing dogs) as well as every free form noveau cocktail that rewards audience ignorance with gluey eyeballs, nostrils and ears.


                  1925 -- Yeats' Gyres as Link to Last as Future

    Yeats' marriage in 1917 to the pathetic lush Georgie Hyde-Lees opened up a whole new symbolic pathway for W. B. that freed him from the Irish folktales and legends that been his meat & potatoes for years. Yeats first noticed Georgie's gifts for automatic writing while on their honeymoon, during the connsumation of the conjugal rites. Amidst the coital maelstrom of this 5-minute roll in the blankets, Georgie wrote an entire novella with a quill pen in W. B.'s armpit while also managing to complete and mail a petition written to the Pope in dog Latin for the immediate annullment of the marriage.
		A request that thankfully fell on blind ears. Yeats quickly learned that he could further facilitate these throes of subconscious creation by hiding Georgie's peat-moss brandy and producing a sort of ur-state of delerium tremens that induced her to scribble out page after page of mystical writings. Through these visions, Yeats was able to transcend the heflian theory of every thesis having its own antithesis inherently implied. The more simple-minded of Yeatsian scholars see this transcendence in the fact that one gyre's apex lies in the base of the other as representative of the cycles of bar-openings and bar closings in Yeats' neighborhood and mirrored in the intricately coordinated stumble back and forth between barstool and urinal. In truth, the metaphor works on a much grander scale, in that the hangover of each drinking binge lies in the seeds of the first drink; and conversely, that the seeds of each binge lie in the first moments of hangover. The complexity of this symbolic hierarchy made some of Yeats' later poetry a tad difficult to understand and yet beneath these drunken insights lay some of the most familiarly Modemistic of inebriated tenets of 20th century experience. Witness the famous "grape" scene from Yeats' stunning "Leda and TJ Swann":

		How can those terrified vague fingers push 
		The bottled glory from her slobbering maw? 
		And how can body, laid in that wine rush 
		But feel the strange tit beat outside her bra? 

And one can truly empathize with Leda's sluttish impulses that the cheap liquor have so easily induced. Likewise, a careful reading of "The Second Coming" can only bring back the all-too fond gag reflex inherent in a too quickly chugged pint of Night Train. Yeats' wants us to return again to these, bilious well-springs, to retaste and reappraise what has ever gone before and, in doing so, realize that the future of the past is never too far from the present.

                 1932 -- The Mint Julep and Faulkner's Time-slips

    Willaim Faulkner's post-Prohibition work gave to the South a representative voice that established the grotesque and violent as mainstays to every southerner's inbred bacchanalian leanings. Whether it was Yoknapatawpha yellow gin, white lightnin', Kentucky bourbon, French Quarter Pemod, or Georgia peach brandy, Faulkner's pioneering into the drunken state was a libation not only to the repressed tee-totalers who had had to relearn how to tie one on again after Prohibition's repeal in 1920, but also to the 'shine-blind veterens who had trouble adjusting to the less flammible legal liquors (or any thing, for that matter, less than 180 proof that didn't taste like kerosene). FauLkner deformalized the purists' dogma of drink connnuity by changing liquors and yet somehow maintaining the integrity of the drink. Thus, while his staid southern compatriots were nostalgically following the one-glass-one brand empiricism of bygone Civil War days, Faulkner was not only pouring Kentucky bourbon onto Tennessee, but pouring Old Fashioneds over Ward Eights! This layering effect of one brand or type poured direcdy into the remnants of another provided both with a constant link to the past (one's first drink) as well as a visionary awareness of one's present cocktail. It was this unflagging attention to detail that Faulkner was to use so frequently in his prose constructions; each of his sentences building and pouring into the next, image into image, until the whole had a sublimitive metaphoric integrity much greater than the sum of the mere parts. Certainly their had been Cumulative Drunks before FauLkner, but never with the awareness and the introspection he brought to it. This broad experimentation wasn't his only youthful adventure. He spent almost as much time in the 1920s on The Sound and the Fury as he did on perfecting the Mint Julep. And the post-Modernist Re-Deconstruction ist unraveling of this drink-reality from prose-blitzedity is still an issue of rankling critical debate today. For is it mere irony that hard core Julepsians still maintain that the recipe the idiot child-man, Benjy, gives on page 62 really does taste much better than Quentin's overly lucid meditative formula espoused near the end of section two?
    Faulkner's Mint Julep experimentation, as well as a previous youthful affectation for poorly made moonshine formed also the psychical framework for such Faulknerian innovations as the time-slip and the development of the radical narrative style he termed stream-of-unconsciousness. In the usage of the time-slip, Faulkner altered the outdated Romantic notion of the Black-Out into a less linear, more fractious reality that imitates the synaptic, hop-scotch incompleteness so prevalent in the post-Freudian Modern psyche. In fact, many inebriation aestheticists read Addie's death in "As I Lay Dying" as Faulkner's heavy-handed symbolic rendering of the drunken state extended into alcoholic coma. The book's sixteen narrative viewpoints imply a paranoic working out some of Faulkner's greatest fears as to what really happened everytime he passed out publicly in his own pool of vomit.

             1952 -- The Bomb and Getting Bombed: The Apex Absurdism

    The aesthetic inebriate knows all too well the impact the utter destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima had on the modern world (beyond the fact that a good fuki or saki drink was hard to find for the next fifteen years or so). It assaulted even the most optimistic and incoherent of the pioneering alkies with the irrefutable knowledge that not only was the world of sobriety fundamentally indecipherable by nature, but thanks to the predominantly tee totaling demeanor of the scientific community, our existence as a race was in doubt from one moment to the next. The recognition of this facet of post-war reality was a god-send of sorts in the resultant wave of Absurdism that swept both sides of the Atlantic. The feelings of bewilderment, purposelessness and loss that the drunk had traditionally associated with his own inability to find his car keys, his wallet or his left shoe in the morning after a binge, now had a context universal in scope. The bitter laughter of the world, he now under stood, was not directed at him, but at human folly and the inscrutability of even the most basic of communications between ourselves. With infernal destruction just an eyeblink away, what good were mere words, mere actions, mere life?


Ionesco's "THE COCKTAIL HOUR" (a play infive minutes):

    BARTENDER standing against backrail polishing shot glasses with a dirty red towel. He holds it up to the light, inspects his work, continues polishing, then when he is done, throws it down to the floor and breaks it. He picks up a new glass and begins polishing. Three men enter the bar.

FIRST MAN: Bar - Tender!

SECOND MAN: Bar - Tender!

THlRD MAN: Dar - Tenber!

    BARTENDER throws down newly polished glass. Takes another glass and starts polishing.

FIRST: Service Please!

SECOND: Pervis Sleaze!

THIRD: Verpis Zees!

    BARTENDER throws down the freshly polished glass, takes another and starts polishing. Holds it up to light. Continues polishing.

FIRST: Gin Martini!

SECOND: Men Gartini!

THIRD: Tom  Collins!

    FIRST MAN and SECOND MAN turn to look at THIRD MAN. THIRD MAN shrugs. BARTENDER throws glass onto floor. All three men look back at BARTENDER. BARTENDER picks up another glass.

FIRST: Two olives and a twist! Shaken, not stirred!

SECOND: Two twists and a olive! Stirred, not shaken!

THIRD: (with gusto) Ten twollives, seven ists.  Spoken, not slurred!

    THIRD MAN crosses his arms emphatically. BARTENDER throws glass onto floor. All three customers look back at BARTENDER. BARTENDER takes another glass and begins polishing it.

FIRST: Well?

SECOND: Well?

THIRD: Well?

(pause)

FIRST, SECOND, & TH[RD MAN: Well!

    BARTENDER throws glass onto floor, takes a step towards men and puts hands on the bar.

BARTENDER: But gentlemen, what will I pour your drinks into?


    BARTENDER folds red rag, carefully, meticulously, into a neat square, then throws it to the ground. (The sound of breaking glass). BARTENDER exits stage right. The three customers stare motionless and mute at the shelf of empty glassware. Curtain.


    Of course, not all the Absurdists shared this relentless pessimism with Ionesco. Both Pinter and Beckett saw nuclear annihilation as an opportunity for ironic optimism. For if the world ended while one was hungover, it would be a merciful ending to that present painful existence. If, on the other hand, the world were to end while one was drunk, it could be seen as a victory over the world. A perfect state of intoxicadon without the nausea-filled aftermath of the morning (or afternoon) after. Beckett's "Waiting" trilogy ("Waiting for Godot",1952; "Waidng for Malt Liquor",1955; and "Waiting for a Liver Transplant", 1957-1964) clearly exemplifies this line of thought.