Dry me a liver...

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, should I give up alcohol?”

1.

Text message exchange with Dr Craig Moyes, 4 January 2024

“If the good lord had intended us not to drink, he wouldn’t have invented the Negroni.”

Despite the good doctor’s rebuke I am, at the time of writing, a week in without the weest dram. And better for it, I think, in Cartesian if not Monty Python terms, for if it be true that I think therefore I am, when I drink, am I therefore not? Difficult to follow, I know; I shall do my best to make this comprehensible.

Dr Moyes is not alone. The French President, Manu le-sac-à-vin Macron, who tipples twice daily, shills for the wine lobby, and downs whole Coronas in a single swallow, has also expressed his disapproval.

As has C., who advocates “moderation”. “Just drink less,” she tells me, as if were five years old.

2.

Those who know me, as she does, poor woman, know that there is little less in me, that I am more and more and more. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, I am large, I drain multitudes, yet here you find me born again, a new man, dry, empty, poured out, ready to be fulfilled, refilled, receptive to the world.

Why? Why what? Keats talked about not needing to know everything, about learning to be content with half-knowledge. I am content with less than a quarter.

“After I took LSD,” Paul McCartney, the Beatle, once said, “it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part. It would mean a whole new world.”

Ten percent, my eye. I have tapped that hidden part. Tapped it dry. And in so doing I have learned to loathe the smart and seek all solace from the ignorant. Indeed, I now seek to be utterly, blissfully besieged by them. To this end, until last week, I used alcohol. I sat in the dark in my third-floor walk-up and hammered back shots and emptied my brain of all thought, disimpacted my mind of all memory, evacuated my consciousness. I ate poorly, processed foods crowded with sugar and preservatives. I did not bathe. If I had an itch, I would ignore it until it became so unbearable it made me scream. Except for my anus. I scratched there incessantly. I sat on my lawn chair in my cold, cold room, surrounded by my garbage, scratching the perimeter and picking the scabs off my hairless scalp. At nightfall, I stumbled out onto the street and picked fights with men twice my size.

Now, I mirror emptiness. I have rid myself of I.

(Me.)

2.

None of that is true. Very little is, it seems. A quarter of Americans think the FBI instigated Jan. 6. One in five below 30 think the Holocaust is a myth. Seven-tenths of the entire population believe in angels.

Glenn Gould, a teetotaller, had McCartney figured. Mixed down vocal lines lost in a wash of rock, confusing invention with the noise made by breaking rules, etc. Cut away the hype and what is left? “A happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism.”

“If what you want is an extended exercise in how to mangle three chords, then, obviously, the Beatles are for you.”

3.

Is this thing on? FDR had recording devices put into the door of the Oval Office. Truman had one in his desk lamp. Jack Kennedy used a manual Dictabelt system, as did Johnson, who also had his bedroom phone and his ranch phone bugged, and the phones in both of his offices and at Camp David. Plus he put microphones in the Cabinet Room, in the office next to the Oval Office, and in that stuffy little cloakroom outside the Oval Office where he did his dirtiest deals. Nixon — who spent seven months in 1960 reciting his six crises into a dictaphone — first thing, had all of LBJ’s wires ripped out.

His was voice-activated, like this one, but not as sophisticated.

No camera.

4.

A whole new world? The window’s evening stream, an effulgent flow. There is more than glass between me and the feeders and breeders dragging themselves through the streets below, the citizens and sailors, the panhandlers and solicitors, the slack tide effluvia of passers-by.

Sunset yesterday, day six of my abstention, the colour of spinach. Three SUVs. A very shiny bicycle. Espresso coffee. Pins and needles in the extremities. No tumescence to speak of, the leguminous root still mouldering forlorn in the bottom of the crisper compartment. No relief around the back either. The Ex-Lax pills are indeed chewable, yes, as advertised, but what besides rocks isn’t? My father could happily work and swallow his way through pure gristle. A Swiss-French artist once ate a Cessna 172, props, seats and all.

The other assurances — gentle, dependable, overnight? Again, promises, when undelivered, become lies.

What does the name even purport to mean? Ex as in out, denoting removal or release, the inducement of a state, or a former state — ex-husband, ex-convict, ex-president. Lax as in sloppy, slack, slipshod, overindulgent, irresponsible.

No need to muck about. Redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe — so said Walter Benjamin, ex-lax post facto, but he was never constipated a day in his life.

5.

Again, no, sorry. I am alarmingly regular and have been since my sphincterectomy.

The brain, however, is entirely intact, thank you. Place names, actors’ names, dates of birth, frequently forgotten, but circuitry up to code. Elsewhere, not so sure. The heart no longer fires properly, atrial currents blasted or blocked, hard to say. Sudden stoppages, flutters. Cruising pulse speed well over 130.

The disinformation superhighway is a périphérique, a ring road accessed by off and on rampages. The experience of experience hums up one and down another. Round and round. Nobody goes anywhere, gets anywhere.

Two-sevenths of our brain? One-ninth?

6.

Napoleon had a slug or two of eau de vie before most battles. His second wife, Marie Louise, was a beer drinker. Josephine, his first, adored champagne. He, however, hated bubbles, which made him feel “gazeux” (“gassy”). He drank wine, whatever was on hand, and being Italian, never to excess. He especially liked Gevrey-Chambertin and Fixin, but his real love was coffee, which, again, being Italian, he insisted on making himself.

“If I governed a nation of Jews,” he once said, “I would re-establish the Temple of Solomon.” Bear with me, this is not just another divagation, as will soon be made clear. Failing in his bid to establish a Jewish home state in Palestine, the Emperor sought instead to create a New Jerusalem on French soil. In a letter written from his General Headquarters in Jerusalem on April 20th, 1799, in the year seven of the French Republic, Napoleon shouts from the top of the ga'ahs: “Hasten! Now is the moment, which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of civic rights among the population of the universe that has been shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Jehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and most probably forever.”

Napoleon freed the Jewish people from bondage in every nation under his control. He tore down their ghettoes, reopened their synagogues, abolished their discriminatory taxes and gave them their first taste of civic and political equality in almost 2,000 years. He made Judaism the third official religion of France and Italy. He stood firm against strong opposition from anti-Semites like Chateaubriand and the Tsar; and, for the first time in eighteen centuries, reconvened by decree the Grand Sanhedrin, the Supreme Assembly of the Jewish nation.

Metternich-Winneburg, the Austrian consul in Paris, said “All Jews look upon Napoleon as their Messiah.”

Special prayers in his honour were inserted into the siddurs of every synagogue in Europe. All Jews attending prayers in these synagogues would recite this berachot: “They have gathered armies to fight against him and against all those who admire him. They have come to our borders, and our master, the Emperor, the King, is standing with the might of his army to confront them. O God, master of greatness, strength, power and beauty, we implore Thee to stand next to his righteousness; help him, support him with Thy mighty arm: guard him as the apple of Thine eye with an abundance of strength and health. Save him from all evil and tell him ‘I am your salvation.’ Send Thy light and truth, that they may lead him.”¹

Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Fesh, told him, “You seek the end of the world with your Laws giving Jews equality like the Catholics. Do you not know that the Holy Scriptures predict that the end of the world will happen when the Jews are recognized as a nation?”

“Faith,” Napoleon responded, “is beyond the reach of the law. It is the most personal possession of man, and no one has the right to demand an account for it.”

7.

That is true. As is this: in 1802, year ten of the French Republic, Napoleon reversed the abolition of slavery, condemning close to half a million people to a life of bondage for another half-century.

The following year, the revolutionaries of Saint-Domingue defeated Napoleon's army, and the year after that, in 1804, they established the free and independent state of Haiti, the world's first republic founded by former slaves.

In 1825, to compensate its former slaveholders, France levied an indemnity of 150 million francs ($21 billion / €20 billion in today’s money) on Haiti. Haiti finally paid this off in 1947.

Elsewhere in France’s colonial outposts — Martinique, Guyana, Guadeloupe, and La Réunion — slavery continued until 1848.

Meanwhile, in 1835, the British government borrowed £20 million ($25 million USD / €23 million — the equivalent of £17 billion today) to compensate British slave owners. British taxpayers might never have discovered that they had finally repaid the loan in 2015 if it weren’t for this bizarre tweet from the Treasury, which briefly appeared on Twitter before being deleted:

Yup.

8.

Teddy Roosevelt preferred coffee to alcohol. A Milwaukee saloon keeper shot him in the chest with a .38 calibre revolver in 1912. He was saved by the 50-page speech folded up in his breast pocket. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he told the stunned crowd. Then he talked for ninety minutes straight.

Ike also drank a lot of coffee. Fifteen to 20 cups a day. And a glass or two of scotch and soda with dinner. He was born a Mennonite but raised Jehovah’s Witness. His family, all but his mother, left the JWs after the final and cataclysmic “great tribulation” of Armageddon failed to transpire in 1914. Still, he hedged his bets and was inaugurated on a Watch Tower bible.

He smoked four packs of Camels a day.

9.

Lobo hambriento no tiene asiento. Do you know this? A hungry wolf doesn’t sit about. I know what I think and why I think it. I know where it comes from and what it means. The world, the so-called world, knows the answers. The world, the so-called world, knows the truth. Drinking made this much easier. Old, sick, forgetful, endlessly drunk, tired all the time — I felt little or no responsibility and said what I pleased. It was a teetering position of dizzying power. Aesop tells the story of the lamb that strays from its flock. One morning it finds itself on the bank of a forest stream. The ever-ravenous Mr Wolf appears upstream, desperate for something to eat. Normally, he would gobble up a tasty morsel like this without a second thought. But this poor little lamb looks so fucking helpless and innocent he feels he has to make some sort of excuse before ripping open its jugular and drinking its blood. “How dare you slop around in my stream stirring up mud!” he snarls. “You will be punished harshly for your impertinence!” “Please, Mr Wolf,” says the lamb. “Don’t be angry. You’re upstream, not downstream. I could not possibly have muddied your drinking water.” “I say it’s muddy, and that you muddied it! Besides, you insulted me last year, told the most vicious lies about my character.” “But I was only born this year.” “Well then it was your no-account brother.” “I have no brothers.” “Then,” growls the wolf, “it was some other verminous member of your villainous tribe. No matter. Enough. I’m not about to let myself be talked out of my breakfast — by my breakfast.” And with no further ado, Mr. Wolf snatched up the poor little lamb, and carried it into the forest.

Moral? Wolves are assholes.

10.

As I talk, I remember all — I remember the Declaration; 
It was read here — the whole army paraded — it was read to us here; 
By his staff surrounded, the General stood in the middle — he held up his 
unsheath’d sword, 
It glitter’d in the sun in full sight of the army. 

Walt Whitman, “The Centenarian’s Story,” from Drum-Taps. The Revolutionary General on the hill, surveying the slaughter, in turn surveyed 100 years later by the poet-historian, witness to another slaughter. Milton played a similar role after Cromwell’s defeat and the death of the Commonwealth, as did Blake after the cataclysmic collapse of the French Revolution, and Pound after the bloodletting of World War One. So too did Robert Lowell in 1946:

There was rebellion, father, when the mock 
French windows slammed and you hove backward, rammed 
Into your heirlooms, screens, a glass-cased clock, 
The highboy quaking to its toes. You damned 
My arm that cast your house upon your head 
And broke the chimney flintlock on your skull.

“Rebellion”, Lord Weary's Castle, 1946.

Now it is my turn.

11.

How can you tell if an alcoholic is lying to you? If his lips are moving. Lowell used to say this. He was a man of letters. A man of drink and demons. A poet. A patriot, and a believer, the last in a long line of flag-waving saps and innocents. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” This was carved on his grandfather’s tombstone. A family of demiurgic vitality — artists, seers and mystics all, troubled visionaries taming horror through words, converting the dross of the personal into golden universals, the numbers of being, the numbering of beings, the deadening of existence.

His classmate’s schoolyard taunt: “Robert Lowell has no soul.”

“I like to write in mania,” he also said, “and revise in depression.” I am modulated to a faster and more constant pitch and therefore lack these luxuries.

12.

A French zookeeper was crushed to death a while back after being rammed by a hippopotamus jealous of his new tractor. The four-ton animal flew into a rage when the 60-year-old keeper went to take it for a walk.

13.

Giraffes have two sets of eyelids. My eyes feel thus veiled, as if a curtain has been drawn across them. A whitish curtain that slides across my field of vision — is it a migraine aura or just another sign of my separation from the rest of the world? Or perhaps I have somehow rehabilitated my nictitating membrane. From the Latin, nictare, to blink, wink, or otherwise signal with the eyes. A whitish or translucent membrane that forms an inner eyelid. It can be drawn across the eye to protect it from dust and keep it moist. A third eyelid, a pliable, sheet-like structure, horizontally drawn and usually translucent — the animal possessing it can see through it when it has been pulled shut. In the case of diving animals — sea lions, beavers, manatees — it is transparent. Mine is more or less transparent, but I know when it has been activated. I don’t activate it. Humans usually have them vestigially — the tiny half-moon fold of tissue on the inside corner of the eye. Useless, meaningless, like goosebumps and hiccups. According to Darwin, these are significantly larger among Africans and Aboriginal Australians. But even theirs are more or less pointless. Only birds actively control them. Nictare. The Romans used it figuratively, to speak of fire, of a fire-like flash. I flash. Or I strive, I make an effort.

14.

eyeless sight, the ability to sense the colors of objects, and sometimes further developed to sense printed matter, through sensitivity of the skin, especially in the fingertips. Also called SKIN VISION. Technical name, DERMALOPTICAL VISION. The term was first used in a more general sense in 1924 in a book entitled Eyeless Sight; a Study of Extra-Retinal Vision and the Paroptic Sense, translated from the French by C.K. Ogden. In the original work, Vision Extra-Retinienne by the French Nobel Prize-winner Jules Romains, there was an account of his research concerning the faculty of seeing without the use of the eyes. When the book was ridiculed by many scientists Romains abandoned his research, but it was taken up again in the 1960s in connection with the field of metapsychology. However, there are much earlier accounts of eyeless sight by Robert Boyle, the English chemist, followed by occasional accounts in the 1800s. In the 1930s there was research in this field in Brazil, and in the late 1950s in Texas and Costa Rica.

— The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English, 1973 [p 189]

15.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is just behind the forehead. It is the last area in the brain to develop. Proteins and phospholipids mix together to create mycelial, a thick whitish insulating sheath that forms around nerve fibres. Mycelial helps increase the speed at which the impulses inside are fired down the line. We learned about this in a roundabout manner. Developmental psychology and biology. Alcohol relaxes the dolorific crispations of the membranes. The main effects of trauma to this region are “flat affect, social withdrawal and ineffectiveness, impairment of goal-related behaviours, inattentiveness, poor motivation, and poor insight.” IQ levels drop. Problem-solving skills disappear.

The process begins thus (I’ll have more concrete examples later). Make an error, the word “blue” written in red, a red-coloured club drawn from a pack of cards, a black-coloured ace of hearts, and a quick squirt of blood splashes against the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue in the brain. Similar events occur when things go missing: phantom pain in a severed limb or a pulled tooth.

16.

Many animals bite their mates during lovemaking. It is thought that the females of certain species require violent stimulus to ovulate. Montaigne, a chronic self-biter (tongue, fingers and fingernails), quoting Plutarch, describes the love bites incurred by Pompey by his lover, Flora. “She never lay with him but that she made him wear the prints of her teeth.”

In New York in 1987, some 8,000 dogs bit humans. That same year, almost 1,500 New Yorkers bit humans, as did roughly 800 cats, 7 ferrets and 3 moonstruck skunks.

17.

This stupid indifference of the present, what are we to make of it? A plow, a field, a cottage, refuge from the taxman, our close ones sheltered from the brigand’s sleaze, this is happiness, yet the tiniest disruption, even just this, a wing flap, the rounding off one point six to two, turning left instead of right, voting or not voting, or not caring, or not eating breakfast, or talking with your mouth full, or not talking at all, sets new wheels in motion, or tips over the cart entirely. Outcomes will diverge yet as predicted the present order is in total disorder, everything up for grabs.

18.

I watched a person shop this morning, an ostensibly sexy blonde with discharging temporal ducts and grim paint insect eyes that darted and flitted up and down the aisles and shelves but never landed, never hooked. You could smell the fuses burning, hear the brain skimming and spiking, gnawing, nagging, worrying at the dendritic knots on the cords, until, suddenly, she spotted it, a power drink or a new-fangled type of cupcake or something, and boom! the lobster-like retinas on their little red sticks wheeled in tandem and locked onto the poor thing, and the fireball shot straight up into the air, and the full naked light of the apocalypse brightened the sky. Want, want, want! O I must have it! O it must be mine!

This apparition, this sexy grim blonde with the beetling eyes, was she not someone’s daughter? Someone’s sister, wife, mother, mistress? Nothing more? Nothing more. Mere words, a compendium of details, a hodgepodge of architectural styles. “A blood clock,” as Richard Mixin’ Nixon used to say. Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? Why must we be fixed in your formulated phrases? The last sun has shone. These are times that dry men’s souls and dip them in the river who loves water. Or some such. A fool sees not the same screed that a wise man sees. Walk the perilous path. Talk the garrulous wrath. Etcetera.

19.

Gentlemen! Generals! There are no more forks in the road or on the table. No exits. No roads less or more. Every direction leads straight here, away from your paltry pasts. Four billion years of shared mutation, seven million years on two feet, and what do you have to show for it? Pop Tarts and personal computers? You still worship animal-headed gods. Your future is unnecessary. Back to the path, the wrath, the road most travelled, the codes unravelled: all kinks otherwise and corners too shaken out like a length of bicycle chain or a beach towel.

It’s a question of role-playing. Seeing oneself as someone else or something else, comparing oneself to those you emulate and admire, or envy and despise; measuring, mirroring, matching, surpassing. Everything else moves forward by internal combustion. Or the current, the wind, is it that? Something naturally occurring, relatively normal, like a fart, like childbirth, like fatherhood, ineluctable, inevitable, embarrassing. The rules of natural right. The invisible hand. Or is it just more sheer stupid blind dumb-ass drunkenness and inertia? Are we thus so thusly formulated, fixed in the phrase, pinned and wiggling on the wall, scrabbling under the pin?

Aesop tells of the fly sitting on the axle of the racing chariot, and saying, “What a dust do I raise.”

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. 

The sun rose dim on us this morning and then disappeared in a black cloud. Normal. Relatively normal, if you have normal expectations, and seek nothing more than the liberty to scuttle towards the next cataclysm, away from the last one. The herd of elephants that trampled the village is going to trample the village again. It is thus the way of the world. What is required is flat, unprocessed. The world is divided into equal portions of pain for all its inhabitants. You are born, you age, you die. The precise details are anecdotal, of no consequence. There have been five mass extinction events so far, caused by volcanoes and meteorites and detonating fireballs, and we are in the throes of the sixth, caused by our own malign indolence. Violence comes from other worlds and happens elsewhere until it comes from us, until we get restless, and then more restless, and the temporin and gin rises to the temporal ducts and the upright and incorruptible strap incendiaries to their bellies and the rest of us watch while the others breed and mix and stir and die.

20.

Can I at least teach you how to coil and snap a beach towel? Grip it in your hand by a corner. Hold it off the ground. Spin your wrist, as if stirring a teaspoon in a cup of coffee, clockwise or counter-clockwise, until its vertical length is rolled to a ballistical point, like the ogival nose cone of a bullet. Now snap-flick your wrist away from your body, towards your prey.

We get old and sick, we die, decay, and disappear. No man nor god can stop this. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” I know what is meant by this but in my mind’s eye it is still a stirring and a mixing, stirring with a spoon, mixing in the cream and sugar, not tiny spoonfuls of coffee grounds day after day, evenings, mornings, afternoons, beneath the music from a farther room. A coffee spoon? The French use this: une cuillère de café. In English it is a very small spoon, smaller than a teaspoon.

Ogive, too, moreover, is French. Indeed. The intersecting transverse ribs of a cathedral vault. The Gothic arch. An Islamic invention. Is not that something? Muslim intelligence, holding up the Christian ceiling, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

The Turing test. The words above, will they pass?

Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” would not “a spring day” do as well or better?

Shakespeare: It wouldn’t scan.

Interrogator: How about “a winter’s day.” That would scan all right.

Shakespeare: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter’s day.

Thank you for reading. I’ll be better next week. I promise.

PS. It was my birthday a couple of days ago. You missed it.

1. Israel Levi, "Napoléon 1er et la réunion du Grand Sanhédrin", Revue des études juives, 1894, tome XXVIII; Ph. SAGNAC, "Les Juifs et Napoléon", Revue d'histoire moderne, 1900-02, tomes II et III.