Belly's Wednesday Wine & Food Pairings

Welcome to the new home of Belly's Wednesday Wine & Food Pairings. I hope to use this format to enhance the experience for you, the reader, by making you into a viewer and listener as well. Accordingly, illustrations will be included in an attempt to convey more vividly the sensations I am describing. Also, I will recommend a musical accompaniment to set the mood. This week I suggest "Zeroth Law" by Demokracy, from their wonderfully disturbing EP, Double Star, released earlier this year. And now, allons-y...

Trials and tribulations continue. Days feel as months, weeks as years. (Well, to be exact, a week would feel like seven months by this analogy; still, a long time.) Violence lurks restlessly beneath the surface of my placid demeanor, asking all too invitingly to be unleashed. I feel primal and raw. Hence this week’s pairing:

 

In what will surely be a rarity in Belly’s Wednesday Wine & Food pairings, we have here a red, Pillar Box Red to be precise (a 2008 vintage from Padthaway, Australia; a blend of 66% Shiraz, 25% Cabernet Sauvignon, and 9% Merlot), accompanied by a slab of raw meat, most likely beef.

My imprecision in identifying the meat stems from the disassociation I experience as I rend the flesh with my hands and teeth. Civilization has failed to satiate the unnamable desires that gnaw at my viscera. Thus, I am returning to origins. I reenact the rituals of the great wine god, Dionysos, hoping to find some sort of solace. This god was known in antiquity by the epithet “the liberator,” because he freed his followers, albeit temporarily, from the oppressive restrictions of convention. Consequently, taste matters not here. The sentiment of pairing harmoniously two sources of sustenance is a quaint relic of the polite society I have abandoned. Magnitude and intensity of sensation are the only concerns. I imagine myself as an ancient reveler engaging ecstatically in sparagmos, the ritual tearing apart and eating of a live animal.

(Depiction of sparagmos on an Attic red-figure stamnos, c. 480-460 BCE; London, British Museum.)

Scholars have speculated that, in prehistoric times, this rite may have taken cannibalistic form. Symbolically, sparagmos aligned Dionysian devotees with the Titans who gobbled up the young wine god on the orders of jealous Hera. Such a comparison appeals strongly to me now. Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his children hovers before my mind’s eye.

(Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring his Children, c. 1819-1823; oil mural transferred to canvas; Madrid, Museo del Prado. Upon learning that one of his children would overthrow him, Saturn resorted to the basest savagery and ate them as soon as they were born.)

For Goya, Saturn may have been a metaphor for the disastrous conflicts that wracked his native Spain. At this moment, however, I interpret the work more personally (and, I admit, narcissistically): I am the dismembered child. Ignorance, idiocy, and ugliness rend me asunder. And though, according to the myth, Zeus was able to escape this fate and dethrone the uncouth Titan, such an outcome seems dubious when gazing at Goya’s painting.

The frenzy is subsiding, for good or ill. Actually, it is most decidedly for ill. I probably should not have eaten all that raw meat. Unfortunately, for the second week in a row, I cannot recommend this pairing. Even if you are seized by Dionysian ecstasy and enjoy this primitive feast at the moment of consumption, the digestive aftereffects will undoubtedly be as murderous and messy as sparagamos.

(Published originally on October 26th, 2011.)