Cultivate Inebriation Rather Than Intoxication, Taking Care to Keep Oneself Immersed in the Flow
Epistenology proposes a strategic disregard for intentional, analytic, and optic tasting in favor of attentive, atmospheric, and haptic drinking. In this book I have tried to lay waste to traditional scrubland and cultivate new gardens by creating a different perspective and a new language to talk about the value of drinking with wine. A book whose traces lie in wine may seem of little import. Nonetheless, as you will have appreciated, this medium, the wine, dis-placed in the world, opens up to so much more, even aspiring to secure the ends of the skein or the meshwork of lines in all experience. To conclude this journey, however, it is now necessary to clarify one important point: although epistenology recognizes the importance of alcohol, it does not encourage drunkenness. What we are looking for with wine is inebriation. (I could mention Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin Franklin, and all the other oenophiles, but why do so when they are already so well known?)
Distinguishing between drunkenness and inebriation does not mean supporting a strategy of control or praising the right mean. It is not an invitation to self-restraint, quite the contrary: inebriation instead of drunkenness is consistent with the approach proposed. Drunkenness is in fact optic and intentional; it is embedded in the life of goals and results—or it expresses the opposite, the cruel and desperate failure when such results have not been achieved. Moreover, drunkenness celebrates the vacuity of free time compared to work time, two worlds kept rigidly distinct. Getting drunk, even if every day, is like a month of holidays earned through the yearlong sacrifice of the other eleven subordinate and modest months. From boredom to excitement, from euphoria to depression. In contrast, inebriation is haptic and attentional, free from the yoke of goals and results; it is not free time but time set free, it corresponds with the process and disposes itself to the flow. Latin language suggests another important aspect: ebrius means to be taken with wine. Thus epistenology suggests being bathed in the flow of the river, continuing to swim, remaining aware, and maintaining a haptic and conscious way of behaving (once again, the link between doing and undergoing). Feeling the tasting with wine, then, does not mean getting wet by drowning. Inebriation is not the happy mean. The inebriated are not somewhere between being drunk and being sober (whose Latin root is the same as e-brius: so-brius) but rather literally on a different level. The inebriated wakefulness of conscience is a wisdom achieved each time we are taken with wine, spending time with and taking care of it. There is not a given rule or a recipe: disciplined and attentional anarchy will always transport and lead to swimming in the flow. At the beginning of Pétronille, a novel by Amélie Nothomb, she claims that inebriation cannot be improvised but rather falls into the realm of art—but I concur with only the latter part of this statement. Epistenology is precisely the creative improvisation of feeling and living life as a task and commitment that lies within the realm of art—the art of distributed and diffused attention and of taking care as we go along, as we do when we live.
Some time ago I received an e-mail from someone who claimed to be concerned about my health, encouraging me to look after myself between one epistenology “show” and another. He attached a few statistics about the number of deaths caused by alcoholism every year, making no pretense of concealing his sarcasm, on the contrary adopting a macabre and sinister tone. I initially considered this warning to be a bit of foolishness that had entirely misunderstood the meaning of the approach proposed—and which I continue to advocate. I subsequently realized, however, that a reflection on this matter was opportune. Although global wine consumption has increased slightly since the early 2010s (with the United States the largest consumer country), other alcoholic drinks are usually the cause of these fearsome illnesses. Wilberforce, the main character in Paul Torday’s novel Bordeaux (The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce in the UK), comes to mind. Wilberforce becomes an alcoholic who drinks expensive and very famous wine in order to avoid the anguish of a life in which the emptiness of his achieved and failed objectives suddenly became apparent and overwhelming. Torday’s story is interesting because it highlights something you have probably often noticed: people with culture, competence, and expertise usually consider themselves to be immune from this problem. Expert drinking, including its effects, is held to be different from ignorant drinking, but this is not quite the case; I have known many competent wine experts who were very much like Wilberforce. The same can be true of the champions of natural wine, though the effects are less invasive because of the lower presence or complete absence of some additives that are usually present, such as sulfites. One may say that alcoholism happens when culture and competence are linked to passion and love. However, epistenology proposes being inebriated by love and not drunk with it. To nurture inebriation means to pay attention to the poisoning and psychotropic qualities of alcohol. It means to be taken with wine and to take care of this long and diffused love rather than being at the mercy of its waves, dragged hither and thither, wet to the skin. Inebriation is neither Apollo nor Dionysus but something in-between—another god-to-come is possible where the I is egoless, oblique, without intentions or a stable identity.
Once, during a very intense evening of epistenology, I lost my vigilance after a particular exercise; the window closed, my consciousness darkened, and I drowned in the river, soaked and immobile. I then appreciated that in such situations wine moves away from us and the relationship breaks up—the wine goes one way and I the other; we are separate and distant from each other. The wine that makes you drunk is not drinking with wine but by wine, where you have lost your agency; and, quite paradoxically, it becomes purely a drug, an object with which to achieve a goal. This can happen even if one’s initial approach to drinking was different.
In fact, sometimes our attention wanders and a threshold is crossed. At the time in question I went beyond this threshold, like taking a long jump, beautiful but disqualified because you stepped beyond the line. The vigilance of the inebriated is a disciplined and ongoing education in listening to our own capacity of taking in alcohol, and this is particularly true for those who want to be masters and lead others. There are no fixed limits, but it is important to know how to remain in the flow, to be vigilant in keeping alive and fluid the ties and connections to present experience with respect to the past and the future. This is the ability to move along the subtle line that separates the in vino veritas, where one feels the processes of the world in every single moment, from the drunken moment, incapable of creating images, which severs ties and withers feeling (as explained by Horace, Atheneus, and Erasmus, among others).
We started the journey in Georgia and in Georgia we end. A good tamadà, a supra master who leads the symposium, drinks a lot without getting drunk; if it does happen, he will be greatly ashamed. In Barga, at the event I told you about before, I was a very bad tamadà, because the tamadà must develop the wisdom of drinking as a task to be accomplished time after time in the name of attentive and careful inebriation. In Georgia I tried a fruitful strategy (everything I have written about here has been personally experienced and lived through), which consists in taking care not to immediately double the pleasure of a wine by drinking a second glass too early and, in contrast, to extend the pleasure of that first glass as much as possible. Stretching the pleasure of any glass to the utmost does not mean eking it out or drinking very little, and even less so does it means tasting it. It means experiencing the verticality of the atmospheric act of drinking wine, like a memory, an echo and a flow of images, thereby dilating time in a diffused, spatial format—an atmosphere in which wine distends (itself). The amount of drinking thus depends on how much time it is possible to develop and create, with the lines and knots that each of us must tie and untie.
One of the exercises I often set in order to feel the expansion of time with wine is a parody of a “blind tasting.” In fact, rather than obscuring the wine label, I blindfold the participants, making them blind not only to wine but also to the entire environment. I often play music and lower the lights, subsequently serving the wine in cups to be shared rather than individual glasses. Touching and seeking each other out in order to pass the cups without spilling the wine; slowing down the gestures that bring wine to the lips; disempowering the optic in order to discover the powers of the haptic. All these passages permit us to perceive perfectly the resonance of wine that connects to and simultaneously produces this expansion of time. You enjoy each sip longer not because you are focused on the wine as an object, because this would mean returning to the frontal model and to intent. Rather, because the wine stretches itself along the grain of space and time where attention is diffused and the various elements present now are con-fused (that is, fused together and not able to be analyzed as discrete elements). In this way perception expands, corresponding with the inebriation; they dance together. As with polyphony, the boundaries of identity are lost without being fused, while the individual subjects feel and live their belonging to the common destiny of the only river where we can swim, with compassion. Taking care of inebriation consequently means connivance with the experience of limits, beyond the rational and symmetric ways of optic sobriety and its mirror image—drunkenness. Moreover, how this experience feels changes each time. It is impossible to demonstrate scientifically what we know through experience or, in other words, that every encounter with wine produces different kinds of inebriation effects depending on the wine encountered and the qualities of that particular experience. This impossibility is completely normal: any scientific demonstration is optic and objective, while we are experiencing at the level of haptics, of feeling by thought that avoids rational and analytic arguments.
Epistenology is anarchic but communal and therefore religious (from the Latin re-ligare, a binding together, a connection). It remembers and communicates our ties by creating others in turn, over and above the illusory nature of separate individual existences. Therefore alcohol is not just a neutral and objective given that always performs the same function. The spirit of wine is a subtle fermentation—subtlety is what is essential, the spirit a breath that connects the essences that are dynamic and fluid knots, always entangled, hence con-fused, without fixed identities. The spirit of wine is blown by the wind; it has no boundaries and is not stable. The quality of the inebriation lies in how we ride the crest of the wave of this breath in the flow. Inebriation is a question of air and water. A Chinese proverb expresses this sensation well: “Do not say any one word specifically / realize completely wind and waves.”
Once, at the end of a series of meetings, a young Maasai woman came up and confessed to having initially participated with some reluctance, but, little by little, this approach had seduced her, changing her perspective on wine. Such a confession was one of the best gifts that epistenology can receive, which it contributed to in its own right. The free, unregulated, but disciplined relationship with wine, over and above the discourse, before and beyond any explanations and instructions, was a leap in the dark where she found a sea, a sky, a land where she could swim, fly, and walk. In her culture people do not drink alcohol and wine is forbidden, but nonetheless the breath and the flows of its essence still spoke to her, and thus a new correspondence had been realized and new ties created. This is what I mean when I say that epistenology is not instructive but educative, because in the end what it inspires is the experience of continuously feeling ourselves to be alive, becoming more human every time. With wine, this is possible for all of us.
It’s time to close; the journey has come to an end. And I will not say another sentence of mine, but I fade with a relevant and beautiful quote by John Dewey:
[The role of the educator is] to arrange for the kind of experiences which, while they do not repel the student, but rather engage his activities, are, nevertheless, more than immediately enjoyable since they promote having desirable future experiences. Just as no man lives or dies to himself, so no experience lives and dies to itself. Wholly independent of desire or intent, every experience lives on in further experiences. Hence the central problem of an education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences.1