From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 01:08:52 -0500
Subject: Re. Science and Marxism...Dionysus, not Bacchus!



If you weren't such a drunken fool whenever you address this list,
spouting Spenglerian buffoonery  (leave Fitzgerald alone!) you might yet
come to terms with your secret stalinist nature, and even appreciate the
stalinism of the anti-stalinists - say, a 'non-Marxist' Marxist, like
the good ol' Debord who wrote profound words on that bachanalic delirium
in which you indulge so much:

"After the circumstances that I have just recalled, it is no doubt the
quickly
acquired habit of drinking that has marked my entire life. Wines,
spirits and
beers: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments
when
they returned have traced out the main course and meanders of days,
weeks and
years. Two or three other passions, which I will talk about, have almost
continually taken up a lot of space in this life. But drinking has been
the most
constant and the most present. Among the small number of things that I
have
liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do
best
is drink. Even though I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have
written
much less than most people who write; but I have drunk much more than
most
people who drink. I can count myself among those of whom Baltasar
Gracian,
thinking about an elite distinguishable only among the Germans -- but
here very
unfair, to the detriment of the French, as I think I have shown -- could
say:
'There are those who have got drunk only once, but it has lasted them a
lifetime.' 

Furthermore, I am a little surprised -- I who have had to read so often
the most
extravagant calumnies or unjust criticisms of myself -- to see that a
total of
thirty years or more have passed without some malcontent ever instancing
my
drunkenness as an argument, at least implicitly, against my scandalous
ideas --
with the one, belated exception of a piece by some drug addicts in
England who
revealed around 1980 that I was destroyed by alcohol and had thus ceased
to be
harmful. I never dreamed for an instant of hiding this perhaps
questionable side
of my personality, and it was there beyond doubt for all those who met
me more
than once or twice. I can even note that it has sufficed me on each
occasion a
rather few days in order to be highly regarded, in Venice as in Cadiz,
and in
Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I have met only by frequenting
certain
cafes. 

First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight drunkenness;
then very
soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, when one has
passed
that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the
passage of time.
Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications
to
appear once or twice a week, it is a fact that I have been continuously
drunk for
periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I still drank a
lot. 

An air of disorder in the great variety of emptied bottles nevertheless
remains
susceptible to an a posteriori classification. First, I can distinguish
between the
drinks I consumed in their countries of origin and those I consumed in
Paris;
but almost everything there was to drink was to be had in Paris in the
middle of
the century. Everywhere, the premises can be subdivided simply between
what I
drank at home, or at friends', or in cafes, cellars, bars, restaurants,
or in the
streets, notably on cafe terraces. 

The hours and their shifting conditions almost always retain a
determining role
in the necessary renewal of the moments of a spree, and each brings its
sensible
preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what is
drunk in the
mornings, and for a long while that was beer. In Cannery Row a character
who
one could tell was a connoisseur professes that 'there's nothing like
that first
taste of beer'. But I have often needed, at the moment of waking,
Russian
vodka. There is what is drunk with meals, and in the afternoons that
stretch
between them. There is wine some nights, along with spirits, and after
that beer
is pleasant again -- for then beer makes one thirsty. There is what is
drunk at
the end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. It is
understood
that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is
exactly as it
should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have drunk
for a
long time before finding excellence. 

I have wandered extensively in several great European cities, and I
appreciated
everything that deserved it. The catalogue on this subject could be
vast. There
were the beers of England, where mild and bitter were mixed in pints;
the big
schooners of Munich; and the Irish; and the most classical, the Czech
beer of
Pilen; and the admirable baroquism of the Gueuze around Brussels, when
it had
its distinct flavour in each artisanal brasserie and did not travel
well. There
were the fruit liqueurs of Alsace; the rum of Jamaica; the punches, the
aquavit
of Aalborg, and the grappa of Turin, cognac, cocktails; the incomparable
mezcal
of Mexico. There were all the wines of France, the loveliest coming from
Burgundy; there were the wines of Italy, and especially the Barolos of
Langhe,
the Chiantis of Tuscany; there were the wines of Spain, the Riojas of
Old
Castille or the Jumilla of Murcia. 

I would have had very few illnesses if alcohol had not in the end
brought me
some; from insomnia to vertigo, by way of gout. 'Beautiful as the
trembling
hands in alcoholism,' said Lautreamont. There are mornings that are
stirring but
difficult. 

'It is better to hide one's folly, but that is difficult in debauchery
or
drunkenness,' thought Heraclitus. And yet Machiavelli wrote to Francesco
Vettori: 'Anybody reading our letters ... would think that sometimes we
are
serious people entirely devote to great things, that our hearts cannot
conceive
any thought that is not honourable and grand. But then, as they turned
the page,
we would seem light, inconstant, lustful, entirely devoted to vanities.
And even
if someone judges this way of life shameful, I find it praiseworthy, for
we
imitate nature, which is changeable.' Vauvenargues formulated a rule too
often
forgotten: 'In order to decide that an author contradicts himself, it
must be
impossible to conciliate him.' 

Moreover, some of my reasons for drinking are respectable. Like Li Po, I
can
indeed nobly claim: 'For thirty years, I've hidden my fame in taverns.'
The
majority of wines, almost all spirits, and every one of the beers whose
memory
I have evoked here have completely lost their tastes -- first on the
world market
and then locally -- with the progress of industry as well as the
disappearance or
economic re- education of the social classes that had long remained
independent
of large industrial production, and so too of the various regulations
that now
prohibit virtually anything that is not industrially produced. The
bottles, so that
they can still be sold, have faithfully retained their labels; this
attention to detail
provides the assurance that one can photograph them as they used to be,
not
drink them. 

Neither I nor the people who drank with me have at any moment felt
embarrassed by our excesses. 'At the banquet of life' -- good guests
there, at
least -- we took a seat without thinking even for an instant that what
we were
drinking with such prodigality would not subsequently be replenished for
those
who would come after us. In drinking memory, no one had ever imagined
that
he would see drink pass away before the drinker."

Now, go have a drink and seek your Caesarist fame in the taverns, but
leave the ragged corpse of Nietzsche alone - since he was not your
drinking buddy, but an _assassin_.  He said Dionysus, not Bacchus.

>Once again, what did Nietzsche mean by science being theology's handmaid for
>too long?

Have you been deleting our posts too?

>Is it not a canon of Marxist faith that science is true and religion is false, that they are >opposites?

Yes, that their science of history and their sociobiological Darwinism
are true; but butter-brain, what has that got to do with actual science,
with science as cheerfulness or science as experimentation, or with what
the illustrious Chevalier was saying?  Marx did not invent science, nor
Darwin!  Lamarckism, Nietschean biology, Reich's orgonomy, the
forefronts of molecular biology, etc, etc, have nothing to do with that
kind of science you spend so much time denigrating in your drunken
boutades.  Just thought you were in need of some deep physiognomic
insight, one designed for a gnome with just your size.

Now, be brave! (Since you cannot be quiet.)

LC


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