Alcohol
Together, we drink: mountain flowers, opening.
A cup, a cup, and then, to begin again, another cup!
I’m drunk, would sleep... you’d better go.
Tomorrow, come again, with your lute, if you will.
Li Bai (c.740)
I sometimes think alcohol is, more than any other human invention, the basis for the duration and growth of the Western world. I am quite certain that no such complex, wonderful, and troublesome organiszation of society could have lasted long enough to become conspicuous if a great number of its unhappy denizens did not have this remarkable chemical compound with which to get relief from the intolerable problems of anxiety.
Harry Stack Sullivan (1953)
Alcohol is in all societies so simply procured from free local materials that its hold on humanity is not surprising. The damage it inflicts is monumental. It is highly addictive, highly poisonous (A nights drinking will relive you of the services of some millions of brain cells - don’t worry your natural surplus can last you 30 years of such attrition.) However, the art, creativity and
conviviality
To another Vietnamese group eating together - conviviality.
it engenders is profoundly valuable. As are, for present purposes, the insights the taking of alcohol offers into consciousness as both multifaceted and
temporally
Venturing into the problematic topic of time.
orientated. Other pages have touched on the
multiple
On the diverging persona we all encompass.
persons we seem to be, and the way our tightness of grip on time relaxes with the aid of alcohol. This page lifts a toast to alcohol, the discerning use of which not only multiplies experience, but can evidence what experience is.
Li Bai, also rendered as Li Bo or Li Po, was one of the two greatest T’ang poets, J. P. Seaton’s translation is titled Drinking with a Hermit Friend in the Mountains p.90 of The Shambhala Anthology of Chinese Poetry. The Sullivan quote is from page 272 of his The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, published by W W Norton & Co, New York.
Toasts at the party being held to celebrate the opening of a new cafe in Tĩnh Gia northern Vietnam.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 26th November 2022
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