EXUBERANCE AND MODERATION

Imagine that technology is like alcohol: it is best when consumed in small doses in the company of others. When consumed in massive doses in solitude, life just becomes ugly. This lesson is about knowing what the right amount is. Because the right amount determines the nature of the things in play. The things – alcohol or technology, for examples – doesn’t have an intrinsic meaning on their own, apart from how they are used. But you will note that society teaches us exactly how to use things in accordance with its interests. Its interests can be as banal as selling more of a product, and therefore getting people to really want to use it, or consume it more, or they can be as nefarious as rendering people passive and docile before an object (the computer), whose overuse becomes a refined mechanism of social atomization. Imagine that a healthy society needs healthy people – and this doesn’t mean making everyone over use the gym. It means preserving a sense of balance and proportion in all things. Nothing too much – not even of a good thing, otherwise it will become bad. Not even money, imagine that. In this lesson I want to bring your attention to the way in which the ancient Romans, and the ancient Greeks too, taught people to relate to things. Specifically alcohol. How did the Greeks and Romans conceptualize the best way of drinking? Their point was that if a person learns how to drink properly, they also learn how to do other things properly: according to the same principle of moderation. Because moderation was equivocal with the good itself in these ancient societies. Moderation is in the middle. To one of its sides is the extreme of abstinence, and to the other the extreme of excess. The other word in this lesson’s title, besides moderation, is exuberance. This word we have encountered before, in the lesson regarding mythology. I put these two words together, exuberance and moderation, to form a set of ideas about the relation to alcohol and drugs, which I imagined would be something of relevance to university students. This concept of this lesson is to ask you to think about how you relate to these things, and also how you relate to the feeling that these things provoke, or rather, simulate. Perhaps you can think about these things and feelings as you read what the ancients had to say about them. For they were young once too. Let us go ahead and read the poem “The Sacred Vine” written by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BC. Plant no tree, Varus, before the sacred vine, all around Catilus’ walls in the gentle soil of Tivoli. For the god has ordained that life should be hard for those who abstain, and there is no other way to dispel the worries that gnaw at the heart. After drinking wine, who laments the hardships of war or poverty? Who does not rather talk of you, Bacchus, and you, lovely Venus? Yet you must not abuse by excess the gifts of the moderate God of Freedom. That is the lesson of the drunken brawl between Lapiths and Centaurs that ended in war.

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And that is the lesson of the woe-begotten Thracians, who in their eagerness for sex drew too fine a line between right and wrong. As for me, I shall never stir you, radiant Bacchus, against your will, nor shall I rudely expose to the daylight things you keep hidden under multicolored leaves. Silence now the wild tambourines and the swirling Berecyntian pipes – they arouse blind Self-love and Glory that holds her empty head far too high, and Trust that lavishly gives away her secrets, more utterly transparent than glass. Translation by Niall Rudd What does Horace say? He addresses himself to his friend Varus, who lives in the city of Tivoli close to Rome. You understand, of course, that the sacred vine is the grapevine, which is used to make wine. In the first couplet he says: plant the grapevine first in Tivoli, before anything else. What a statement. Why is the grape, used to make wine, so important? Because something of far-reaching value can be learned from understanding how to relate to this mystical, paradoxical thing, wine, which might be of greater value to people than food itself. What is that something so important that can be learned? How to relate to things. Or more specifically, how to relate to them the right way, which is moderately – which is right, according to our ancient friends, because only moderation leaves you free (and not consumed by nor afraid of the thing in question). “Plant no tree, Varus, before the sacred vine, all around Catilus’ walls in the gentle soil of Tivoli.” – He says: plant the grape vine all over the walls of the city (Catilus’ walls). Decorate the city with the grapevine. Perhaps you have seen a picture of grapevines on the internet, since no walls in Orange County are decorated with them. Perhaps you have seen other parts of the world than this one. Perhaps you can imagine that the grapevine, when hung over head, provides shade from the sun. “For the god has ordained that life should be hard for those who abstain, and there is no other way to dispel the worries that gnaw at the heart.” Here Horace begins to speak about the good parts of drinking. Life will be hard for he who abstains – for he who does not drink at all. What do you make of Horace’s statement? Life will be hard because there is no other way, except through the forgetting that drinking makes possible, to dispel the worries that gnaw at the heart. Regardless of the fact of wine, here Horace indicates the value of forgetting one’s worries and problems. Which implies that the worries and problems themselves can never be solved or resolved. They can only be forgotten for a while. And what do you make of this idea? “After drinking wine, who laments the hardships of war or poverty? Who does not rather talk of you, Bacchus, and you, lovely Venus?” To forget life’s hardships, and most of all poverty, to imagine oneself happy for a while. Bacchus is the Latin name for Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy, more commonly referred to as the god of wine. To talk of Bacchus, and of Venus too (the goddess of beauty) means to feel the spirit of ecstasy (exuberance) and be in tune with beauty. Certainly it means also to be aroused. In this couplet, and also the last one, Horace indicates the good things that wine can do: it can induce a feeling of serenity (the forgetting of

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hardships) and it can induce also longing for bliss (the talking of, or feeling of Bacchus and Venus). But this is not a commercial. It is a poem by a Latin poet. And so now, Horace turns to the bad, or what can wrong if this sacred, mystical object (wine) is not related to properly. “Yet you must not abuse by excess the gifts of the moderate God of Freedom. That is the lesson of the drunken brawl between Lapiths and Centaurs that ended in war.” This first sentence of this couplet is the most important of the entire poem. You must not abuse by excess. But also the moderate God of Freedom. The god he is referring to is Bacchus, the god of wine. Why is the personification of wine (Bacchus) called the moderate God of Freedom? Is Bacchus the god of freedom because wine makes you feel free when you are drunk? – Forgetting all worries that gnaw at the heart, and enjoying instead the spirit of Venus? Or is Bacchus called specifically the moderate God of Freedom because freedom consists in knowing how to master this thing (wine) that has the potential to master you? Is freedom being drunk, or is freedom self-mastery? A self-mastery that is dynamic, and knows how to walk along an edge – the edge over which it might fall into an abyss. The moderate God of Freedom is the one that teaches you how to be moderate and dynamic: the location of freedom is in your conscious decisions, not just in your immediate feelings. But be careful, pulling to one extreme or the other (abstinence or excess) is a drag. Can you stay balanced? We, dear students, are modern yet not moderate. Nothing in our society’s concept of itself establishes moderation as a virtue. Everything is intended to be taken to an extreme today. Even piety. Even its opposite. The second line of the couplet, “That is the lesson of the drunken brawl between Lapiths and Centaurs that ended in war” refers to a mythological episode. The Lapiths and the Centaurs drank too much and ended up fighting, and then going to war. This raises the demonstrable fact that when abused by excess alcohol does not induce a feeling of serenity (alleviating the worries that gnaw at the heart, as mentioned in the earlier couplet) – instead, it induces the opposite feeling of serenity, which is violence. Anger, rage, violence, such ugly things. How is it possible that the same thing, wine, can induce serenity and also violence? It is a mystery whose solution is not to be discovered under a microscope. It is a mystery to be enshrined as a myth, as a form of sacredness. Sacredness indicates something greater than what humans can directly control. Before something sacred, a person is only left to control himself. This sacred object, wine, can induce either serenity or rage – its definite outcome depends not on it, but on you. Do you know when to stop? Do you have self-control? These are age-old questions indeed. Notice that in the clichéd version of university life, which is nothing but a preparation for a clichéd version of working life, the model to follow is to work (because school is regarded simply as work) and to drink (or do something else equivalent to this) excessively. Cramming and binging. Working too much, like a slave, and then obliterating yourself too much, like another slave (a slave to one’s own caprices). So always a slave, only to different masters (work and “pleasure”) – yet lo and behold, these two masters work together and are really just one. How do you find your way out of this labyrinth, dear dreamer? “And that is the lesson of the woe-begotten Thracians, who in their eagerness for sex drew too fine a line between right and wrong.” In this couplet Horace continues to speak about the bad effects of wine’s excessive use. He refers to another mythological story, that of the Thracians, who after having drunk too much had sex that maybe wasn’t so good. “In their eagerness for sex” – this you understand, they “drew too fine a line between right and wrong.” A line that is

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too fine, which means too thin, can barely be seen. In other words, they couldn’t tell the difference between right and wrong anymore, in their drunken state. But you remember from the earlier couplet that wine can make one “talk of lovely Venus.” It can induce a state of desire, it can make you want to have sex. And this Horace retains as a good. But, he adds here, it can also – when taken to excess – lead to unsound actions. Not decisions, but simply actions. So you see, Horace presents both the good and the bad, which is something that people today rarely do, as we are a society of extremes, and coagulate our thoughts around either one or the other: it is as though we are stupid. Something is both good and bad, or both potentially good and bad, depending on you and how you use it. Wine can invoke serenity when drunk moderately, but it can also invoke violence when drunk to excess. Wine can stimulate an amorous mood when drunk moderately, but it can also stimulate rash actions when drunk to excess. But the notion of these statements – which is the notion of moderation – applies to all things. To food, which can be enjoyed, but also drowned in. To technology, which can facilitate certain “forms of communication,” yet can also reduce life to a miserable form of dependency lived in solitude. To everything. Everything can appreciated in moderation, and suffered in excess. What is the secret of living moderately? Perhaps it is to have many things in your life, and not just one or two, so that your attentions and energies are always drawn away from the magnetic abyss of one things’ over use. “As for me, I shall never stir you, radiant Bacchus, against your will, nor shall I rudely expose to the daylight things you keep hidden under multicolored leaves.” He says: I will never drink you, dear wine, when you don’t want to be drunk.” Imagine that wine is intelligent, and knows himself. He knows when he should be drunk. If you drink him “against his will” then you are not listening, you are not respectful. You lose. Listen to wine. This is of course a mythical proposition. Wine knows the right time for it to be drunk, when it can produce the right effects. And this is different from the wrong time, when out of spite – for not being listened to – it will produce the wrong effects. And he goes on: “I will not rudely expose to daylight the things you hide under multicolored leaves.” Grapes’ leaves are multicolored. What does drinking with other people leave in its wake that needs to be metaphorically hidden under multicolored leaves? When drinking people say all kinds of silly things sometimes, don’t they? But that stays between us. Don’t rudely expose to others (to daylight) what is said here, in our ritualistic space. This is another invocation of sacredness and respect for sacredness. Don’t run your mouth, know how to keep secrets, know how to let things be hidden. What do you think of this advice from Horace? It goes contrary to the prevalent notion of making everything known, of always trying to announce shocking things for the sake of superficial attention. And it indicates another form of self-control: knowing when to say what. Perhaps if someone doesn’t possess this form of self-control (knowing when and when not to speak of certain things), he probably doesn’t possess either the self-control to drink in proper moderation. Ditch him, he is an idiot. “Silence now the wild tambourines and the swirling Berecyntian pipes – they arouse blind Self- love and Glory that holds her empty head far too high, and Trust that lavishly gives away her secrets, more utterly transparent than glass.” The final crescendo. He says: turn down that wild and swirling music of the tambourines and pipes (music is never far from wine). Turn it down, he says, because now he is aware that he is about to drink too much. Turn it down means to pull back from the desire to drink more. To pull back. Do you know how to pull back? Horace advices the spirit of wine (music) to stop because it arouses “blind Self-love” – meaning inflated

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ego tripping – and “Glory that holds her empty head far too high.” What a brilliant phrase: to hold an empty head far too high. He is referring here to the stupid things that people say and do when they are drunk. He is indicating the tendencies to arrogance and buffoonery that result from wine’s abuse. And finally, he adds a third error: “Trust that lavishly gives away her secrets, more utterly transparent than glass.” Here again he is regarding what is said in when drinking with others. Previously he had mentioned the need to not disclose to other people what someone told you when they were drinking. Now he advises you (through himself) to not give away all of your own secrets when you are drinking: “Trust that lavishly gives away her secrets.” Why all of these imperatives to secrecy? Ask life this question, it will tell you the answer. Horace’s poem “The Sacred Vine” shows you the spectrum: from enjoyment to regret. From moderation to excess. These same qualities are depicted on the vases that the ancient Greeks and Romans drank from. Kylix is the name for the specific vase that they drank from. It is like a soup bowl with handles, not at all like a glass or a cup. Imagine a soup bowl with two handles, and there you are. At the bottom of kylixes were painted images – images you could only see when the kylix had been emptied, when all the wine in it had been drunk. Here are two images from the bottom of kylixes from ancient Greece.

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That is Dionysus, who sails lightly on a ship like the spirit of gliding that wine can induce. The sacred vine, the grapevine, has sprung from the ship’s mast. This image shows you wine’s enjoyment.

Here we see a drunk man about to vomit into a bedpan, while a woman holds his head. The loosing of self-respect is never a pleasant discovery, and always a bad habit. And there is one more image, from the sixteen hundreds. It is by the Italian artist Caravaggio. The painting is called Young Sick Bacchus.

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He loves the thing that makes him sick. He holds it in a gesture of love. The grape. He is happy to be sick. He is even attractive in his sickness. The artist, Caravaggio, defied conventions and certainly also the advice given by the ancient poet Horace. Yet maybe the young sick Bacchus will grow up one day to be a mature healthy Bacchus. Who knows? Anything is possible when you imagine the afterlife of paintings. You are often told to drink responsibly. But how often are you told to work responsibly? – that is, with the same spirit of moderation? Once upon a time you were told that you, dear young people, look at screens too much. Now you are required to look at them in an obsessive amount. Confusion must prevail in many a mind. My hope is that this lesson may help you walk away from that confusion for a while. Because even confusion is something that is only good in moderation.