Wine...

A book of verse, underneath the bough,

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness -

Ah, wilderness were paradise now! 

— Omar Khayyam

One thing that is devastatingly obvious when reading Wilde is how wrong received wisdom is, and also how right it ought to be. Or how the frivolous is serious while the serious frivolous. The abiding lesson, which is Socratic, is how things should rarely be taken at face value and why it is necessary to always question tradition, the consensus, conclusion, bias, even the nature at one's own fingertips. That the only descent object of things, as Algernon poses, is to argue about them. 

Why then should we accept as stone the notion that the object of life is to extend its length? What if in that length there is no extension of pleasure? Or that love is necessary for the happy life? Or that symbolic gestures as the gravestone have any value? Or that university education produces qualification? Or that observance of form leads to result? Or that slavish obeisance to doctrine has moral benefit? Or that simple living is best? Or that having sovereign contempt for mass opinion is evil? Or indeed anything? 

What is needed therefore in our culture is the pre-eminance of the dialectic. Pre-eminance of argument not agreement. The peace that the conclusion is nothing - the method everything. We attach to high a token to equality of mind, to passive agreement where at such a crucial moment sound rebuttal is needed. I understand the impulse, the need to co-operate, the urge to seek pattern, the native impulse to avoid conflict or to quickly resolve it. Society needs common. And it is a bore who is always contrary. Yet consensus is terminal. It soon gathers dust. It quickly becomes moldy. The object is less important than the way, the end less than the means. What is needed is a ready face for argument, a willingness to entertain paradox, a stomach for unpleasant facts, a mind that can know its limits, a heart for irony and courage in the blood. 

Paradise is knowing it doesn't exist; joy is knowing life has a full stop. We smile broadly realizing utopia can't be, that it is an insidious project. We like to know why there is a wilderness in the centre of our civilization and a citadel in the jungle. That truth lies in the contradiction not outside it. The simple mind cannot appreciate such things. The culture is ruled, therefore, by the simpleton if it is governed by reductions. The simpleton, the idiot then is the enemy, yet what latitude and credit he is given. How in great esteem is the stupid held in our culture! How earnestly his opinion is sought! There is nothing wrong with our race producing stupidity, each to his own. But that it is sought out... I say this to criticise one grave fault. The idiot is either a reductionist or an anarchist. Neither is concerned with the means and only ever with the end. Neither knows the argument and both claim the answer. There is a strange respect for idiocy. And there is a parlous desire only for conclusion.

This brings me to wine, itself a culture. Wine, woman and song being the triptych of the pleasant life, the unambitious life, the life that doesn't strive for riches or reputation has been uttered all beyond cliche and is so charred in the marrow that it's as if we are born with such words on the lips of our newborn crying. Perhaps I wax too lyrical. For this trope is also a primitive one. There's much competition where it concerns wine and women, and plenty of argument over song enough. How animals have fought over sex! It's makes the eyes water with incomprehension. Yet wine is the chief of them all. Women for the species, song for pleasure of heart and mind. But wine interconnects, between the corridors of the mind it bleeds. The sum of our culture seen from afar may be no better than the iridescence of bacteria. Beautiful it may be, it doesn't do much. Wine makes folly of our great achievements, and in so doing makes them better.

But I can't leave wine so easily. Because, it is the favored cup of the wordsmith. You could well as ask where would the poet be without the pen as without the wine. What use, ever, was a sober poet? The point of the lyrical was to take you out of the common. Don't therefore be too hard a judge on the poor writer. To boot, if the society's ambition in its culture is set as the tide, then the poet must drink to soar. Vacillating between low and a little less low, what kind of sobriety is the benighted letter-monger supposed to maintain? It's just as well the grape, grain and hop manufacture inspiration by the drop. And by the drop it bleeds into the world.

This essay has not centre nor point. The writer stares out the window perhaps as the monk did in his labour. Only he hopes for serendipity. While he scribbles, perhaps the cosmos whispers. It whispers that grand irony. That we are wild animals, with primitive brains attempting reason and civilization. And that if we were to create us anew, we would want nothing like the humans we see around us. That there are so many things we would want to improve and not be labored with a brain that is a sliver away from murder and rape. So, while we retain the stamp of our primitive past we must feel pity for ourselves. And should there be need of consolation, seek not god's or doctrine, but scribe's thought. For he knows more the he dares tell.