This week, there is cause for celebration here at
BWW&FP. It has come in the form of a luminous golden vision, on the right
in the photograph below:
What you are witnessing, my friends, is booze
incarnated in a form so incredibly inexpensive that its existence can be
attributed only to divine providence. Here we have Almaden Vineyards' Mountain
Rhine Wine (Platinum Medal Winner at the 2011 Consumer Wine Awards), from California. The fact that Germany's Rhine River is located
over 5000 miles from California becomes inconsequential when we note that this
bountiful box contains five liters of wine – the equivalent of six and
two-thirds bottles – for the modest cost of only $14.99 (roughly $2.25 per
bottle). I have paired this beverage with a rather curious product: Amnon's Pizza. This foodstuff is apparently the result of
pizza being made traditionally in a shop in Brooklyn's Borough Park, then
frozen and shipped to supermarkets countrywide. (Why anyone would purchase such
an item is beyond me. My mother, while being great and all, is sometimes an
imprudent grocery shopper. More on the experience of this pairing after the jump.)
The combination of the not quite German and the
somewhat Italian call to mind the painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901). Despite
hailing from Switzerland, Böcklin has been claimed by Germany as an artist who
expresses powerfully that country's national identity. This claim becomes more
curious when one notes that Böcklin spent more time living in Italy than he did
in Germany, where he resided for only about ten of his seventy-three years.
Appropriately for our purposes, Böcklin was deeply influenced by Friedrich
Nietzsche's formulation of the Dionysian impulse, which is manifest in
paintings such as this one:
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| Arnold Böcklin, Idyll or Pan Amidst the Ruins, 1875; oil on canvas; Munich, Neue Pinakothek. Böcklin painted this work while living in Florence. He may have met Nietzsche a few years earlier, sometime between 1869 and 1872, when both lived in Basel, where Nietzsche was professor of philology at the university. |
For Nietzsche, Dionysos was not simply the god of
wine, but was the personification of a primal impulse from which originated the
strength of early Greek artistic expression, specifically Athenian tragedy. To
be possessed by the Dionysian spirit is to delight in nature and sensation –
rather than civilization and reason – to the point of intoxication; it is to
embrace all existence, both good and evil (if that dichotomy can even be said
to exist, as Nietzsche would question in his later work). In fact, Nietzsche
goes so far as to assert that a craving for ugliness, brutality, and pain is
characteristic of the Dionysian, as only one truly possessed by the god has the
fortitude to confront the entirety of life’s experiential spectrum.
According to Nietzsche, the early Greeks embraced
the Dionysian aspect within themselves, and this acknowledgement of the
arbitrary, irrational, often terrible nature of existence was the motivation
that prompted their hitherto unsurpassed artistic and cultural achievements:
“In order to be able to live in the face of such horror, the Greeks were
obliged to create.” Later Greeks, however, turned away from the Dionysian in
favor of (foolishly) optimistic faith in reason, whose standard-bearer was
Socrates. Socrates was, in Nietzsche’s view, the archetype of the
theoretical man. He possessed the delusion that, through systematic thought, it
was possible to reach down into the abyss of existence and not simply
understand its horrors, but even correct them.
When Nietzsche first articulated these ideas, in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music (his first book, published in 1872), he did so with an eye toward his
own social and cultural milieu. Nietzsche saw the triumph of the Socratic
worldview in the pervasive positivism of the late nineteenth century. This was
a period in which fast and furious scientific advancements spurred nearly
unbridled faith in man’s ability to solve problems and alleviate hardships by
recourse to empirical knowledge and reason. Nietzsche, with his Dionysian
inclinations, did not see these developments in a positive light, and declared:
“science, spurred on by its delusion [that it is capable of understanding and
correcting existence], is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where optimism
will founder and break – when the scientists reach these limits and view them
with horror, then a new form of knowledge breaks through – the tragic – which
needs art for protection and medicine if it is to be endured.” Essentially,
Nietzsche optimistically predicts the demise of optimism. (Nietzsche’s defense
of pessimism and disdain for optimism – alluded to in this brief, partial
synopsis of the BoT – is a point I will take up and expand upon in a future post.)
As has become habitual, I have ventured far afield from
the wine, food, and art from whence we began. In working our way back, let us
add some music to the mix: “Abrupt Clarity,” a track from This Silence Kills, the debut album of an artist called Dillon, provides
an appropriately disorienting, unabashed immersion in sensation. Plus, she’s
quite fit.
Contrastingly, in Böcklin’s painting, we
find a musician who is decidedly not.
 |
| Böcklin, Idyll, detail. |
Here we have Pan, a minor deity that attends Dionysos,
playing a tune on his trademark pipes, also called a syrinx. Idyll bears the
stamp of Nietzsche’s thought by portraying an oneiric vision that transcends
the empirical observation of nature. In Nietzsche’s description, Dionysian
ecstasy is stimulated by the music of satyrs, goat-human hybrids like Pan, which
causes communion with nature and the obliteration of culture. In Idyll, the tones of Pan’s syrinx seem to
spur the plants to accelerated growth and disintegrate the architectural
structure, a symbol of civilization. Beneath the platform on which Pan perches
(if you will be so kind as to refer to image of the painting in its entirety),
the water’s steep descent to the bottom edge of the canvas prevents the viewer
from being able to situate himself physically in relation to the scene.
Consequently, Idyll presents itself
as a hovering, insubstantial vision, unmoored from the material world. On the
left of the pool, a strangely transparent lilac plant confirms the
hallucinatory quality of the image. Böcklin’s painting depicts
the inevitable triumph of the Dionysian prophesized by Nietzsche.
Just as the Dionysian spirit prevails in today’s painting,
so it does in this evening’s revelries, thanks to this ridiculously colossal
box of wine. The sweetness of this vintage is as absurd as the size of its
packaging, causing me confusion as to whether the phantasmagoric pulsations of
color passing before my eyes are a result of my ecstatic communion with the
wine god, or are due instead to dangerous levels of insulin flooding my system.
Regardless, the visions persist: Looking down at my plate, I believe for a
moment that I see Pan grinning back at me, as the twice-cooked cheese of the
pizza recalls the scalded appearance of the woodland deity’s visage. Though I
cannot decide whether what I have before me is the severed head of a mythical
being or simply a slice of pizza, I decide to take a bite. The only
determination I reach as a result of ingestion is that whatever I have eaten is
as soggy as the marshy environs of Böcklin’s scene.
My stomach is now spinning as fast as my head. I feel
beyond ill; “vile” may be an adequate adjective. However, in solidarity with
Nietzsche and Böcklin, I press on in pursuit of the
Dionysian, wolfing down pizza (or Pan?) and guzzling an absolutely uncivilized
portion of the sweet, boxed liquid. As stated above, this is not a path for
the faint of heart. Thus, I recommend this pairing only to those of you
prepared to abandon the comfort of culture and revel in wretchedness.
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