Organism and the Ontological Hangover
Hangovers are funny things. Funny in all of the usual laughingly lamentable, mind-stripped-bare-by-its-bachelors, wallowing-in-freakish-misery sorts of ways, but also in how they present an opportunity for uncontrolled experimentation with ways of feeling—ways of feeling badly, yes, but ways that sometimes open up new planes of badness, ways of being a body that foreground one’s corporeality with terrific and (if we’re lucky) fascinating immediacy. Kingsley Amis so adroitly gave us the notion of the metaphysical hangover,1 and I have elsewhere written of my own experiences with the sublime hangover;2 here, I would like to talk about what I call the ontological hangover.
I have been afforded the opportunity to explore this phenomenon, I believe, as the result of my perhaps too-avid appreciation for wild-fermented beers and, to a somewhat lesser extent, so-called natural wines. One of the more exciting turns the international craft beer world has taken in recent years is the renewed interest in wild and indigenous yeasts, spontaneous fermentation, and experiments with barrel aging. Most of which is owed to the Belgian tradition, for while we have Pasteur to thank for elaborating the mechanics of open fermentation and laying to rest the idea of spontaneous generation (and ironically, in the process spontaneously generating a world of microbes around us3), pre-Belgian Low Countrymen had been fermenting beer in open vats, aging them in empty wine barrels, and letting all sorts of weird-ass bacteria get involved since the 1500s.4 Now we have all sorts of craft breweries eager to experiment with the old traditions, combining a venerative and curatorial spirit with an almost postmodern iconoclasm (from traditional breweries like Cantillon, Drei Fonteinen, and Boon to newer players like Mikkeller, Crooked Stave, and Le Castor, among others), and coming out with some fantastic beers. It may be pure biophilia (or biofetishism?) to say that these beers taste especially “lively” as a result of their greater microbial diversity (such beers are produced interdependently by pediacoccus, lactobacillus, and various brettanomyces strains as much as by the more common saccharomyces yeasts), because it already takes a certain orientation toward the messiness of life for descriptions like lactic acid, horse blankets, and farmyard to come off as lively as opposed to, say, fetid, in an aromatics context. But blast, I possess such an orientation, and these beers have such a taste.
Now, I realize that there are some very important differences between such beers and natural wines: many modern breweries still inoculate their ferments with selected “wild” yeasts or yeasts harvested from fruits or infected barrels, rather than allowing fermentation to occur in tanks open to the vagaries of the air (the awesomely named Flemish koelship or “coolship”), whereas natural winemakers rely solely on indigenous yeasts already present on the grapes. So, although it could be argued that winemakers tend to accord more importance to a sort of “microbial agency,” what these products share is an engagement with the microbiopolitical world of yeasts and bacteria that differs significantly from the drinks to which many of us are accustomed (and certainly from distilled spirits, which have all such life stripped from them). They often exhibit considerable microbial diversity, which is to say that they, in some cases, are quite literally teeming with life, and they often taste super fuckin’ weird. Weird and cool, refreshing or arresting, even, as I suggest above, vital.
I have often heard it claimed that natural wine does not give you a hangover. I will grant that compared to other wines one might drink, whether crummy corner-store poison or overblown, over-oaked, reverse-osmosed, and micro-oxygenated haut-plonk, more-or-less natural wines in equivalent quantities produce less brutal hangovers. I have never heard a similar claim made for wild beers, thankfully, for to suggest no hangover is a scandalous misrepresentation that actually does disservice to the singularity of the hangovers one can experience.
This hangover is perhaps best described as waking up with the immediate feeling of a balance having been tipped, as if your body is not poisoned but occupied—become home and host to the microflora of wherever, Vichte and the Zenne, Anchorage or Greensboro Bend. There is a taste that seems not so much to linger in your mouth as to be produced in your very saliva; it reminds you of all that you have taken in, drink upon drink, and inspires the suspicion that some perverse innovation in the typical food-to-energy equation might have been achieved, like an internal ferment has begun that might finally coax the self-identity of the flesh out of its jingoistic discretion. It reminds one that, as essential as the notion of the bounded self is to our day-to-day existence, our own organismic unity is something of a phantasm. The human genome is already as much as 8 percent composed of inherited endogenous retrovirus, which is to say viral material that sometime in the course of human evolution infected this or that person, and instead of being stomped by the immune system, incorporated itself into the germ line, in time undergoing sufficient mutations that the body ceased to realize that it wasn’t part of the organism in the first place. Although now and then such proviruses seem to spontaneously regain their pathological bellicosity (a rare occurrence in humans, although there is research to suggest possible links between human endogenous retroviruses and forms of cancer and autoimmune disease), they are also believed to be involved in some essential life-perpetuating processes.5
Similarly, the Human Microbiome Project, which has set out to sequence, catalogue and comprehend the microbial makeup of the human body, has suggested that bacterial cells may outnumber our own cells by as many as ten to one. Even if more recent research has suggested this proportion may be more like 1:1 or 1:1.3, that still works out to our being (in DNA terms) as much “them” as “us.”6 Which to me suggests that some reconceptualization of that us-them schema demands consideration. Beyond matters of quantity and the essential role of gut microflora in our ability to digest and thrive off food, philosophies of embodied cognition have been delivered a conceptual kick in the pants of late by work indicating that these micro-organisms may also play a role in mood and mental health.7 If we are already at the point of speculating that the enteric nervous system might operate as a sort of “second brain,” then what of our clinging obsession to self-identity as a first principle? How do we think this body multiple? Perhaps we have never been (purely) human? Perhaps we have never been whole.
Such are the thoughts that occupied me, sitting on a stool in the dim of a carefully appointed New York gin bar one evening, where after days of deep immersion in the wilds of beer and wine I had begun to feel as if the tastes were tasting me. Following a succession of appropriately medicinal gins and bitters, in an attempt to scour my insides and supplant the ontological hangover with the more familiar and (conceptually) unchallenging regular hangover, I was feeling so much less yeasty and discombobulated; indeed, I was feeling so merely human that I could have sung a song, or kicked a cop. But even this semblance of order so precariously reattained, I couldn’t shake the still-ambiguous lesson—or was it less a lesson than a question?—presented by the ontological hangover. Certainly, I felt fucked up, but was it so bad because I felt physically bad, or just so physically foreign to myself? That perhaps, contrary to the picture that biological individualism has painted for me, with such clean lines, contours well-defined, I am yet a collage of unaccounted-for brush strokes?
1 Everyday Drinking (Bloomsbury, 2008).
2 Food and Trembling (Invisible, 2011).
3 In his 1984 The Pasteurization of France (Les Microbes: guerre et paix)(Harvard), Bruno Latour explores how Pasteur over the course of his nineteenth-century research on fermentation, spoilage, and infection, effectively changed our sense of what entities make up the world. Before Pasteur’s 1864 experiments, Latour claims, microbes simply did not exist. After 1864, however, they had always been there. For more elaboration on this notion, see basically Latour’s entire bibliography, perhaps especially “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects” in Lorraine Daston’s Biographies of Scientific Objects (University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Harvard, 1999).
4 For a very readable and informative tour through the history and techniques of wild fermented beer, see Jeff Sparrow’s Wild Brews: Beer Beyond the Influence of Brewer’s Yeast (Brewers Publications, 2005).
5 See Bhardwaj, N., & Coffin, John M. (2014). “Endogenous Retroviruses and Human Cancer: Is There Anything to the Rumors?” Cell Host & Microbe, 15(3), 255–259; Macfarlan, T. S. et al. (2012). “Embryonic Stem Cell Potency Fluctuates with Endogenous Retrovirus Activity,” Nature, 487(7405), 57–63; Tugnet, N. et al. (2013). “Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERVs) and Autoimmune Rheumatic Disease: Is There a Link?” The Open Rheumatology Journal, 7, 13–21.
6 See the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Human Microbiome Project collection at http://collections.plos.org/hmp.
7 See Bravo, J. A., Cryan, J. F. et al. (2011), “Ingestion of Lactobacillus Strain Regulates Emotional Behavior and Central GABA Receptor Expression in a Mouse Via the Vagus Nerve,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U S A, 108(38); and Coghlan, A. “Gut Bacteria Spotted Eating Brain Chemicals for the First Time,” New Scientist, July 21, 2016.