The Imbibing
The way one and three-quarter glasses of Pinot Gris lacquers his veins with warm, syrupy love for anyone he has ever known. I don’t truly hate anyone — isn’t that worth something? I could die right now and float away knowing that I did my best. It’s not so bad. Actually thinks this to himself. That happy tipping point — he can feel the glow coming on, and once it’s there he wants to sustain it, but every sip now pushes him beyond, into rumination and painful self-critique.
“Another dead soldier.” This his grandfather’s line at the dinner table when a bottle of wine was finished.
He has felt the sober version of this chemical rush while reading, fortuitously stumbling across a line or passage that folds or even wrenches his mind in unexpected directions. The dreamy contentment brought about by a full sensory engagement with a particular time and space. This moment. I was put here to experience this moment. To bring my mind into contact with these ideas on this page.
And he has felt it in the classroom, occasionally, the adrenal rush brought about by proximity to bright young minds at work, eye contact with a student, and there in the ocular sheen he can somehow understand that they aren’t merely listening, but processing the words he speaks, thinking with a tangible eagerness.
And he has felt it while writing, though only rarely. Once when an analysis of ear imagery in Hamlet ballooned into three pages on the facial features of famous actors: the flinty cheekbones of Guinness, the cleft of Olivier’s chin, Gibson’s beard, the beard that had changed the way he thought about the entire play, the beard exploding any possibility of youthfulness and immaturity. All of this just pouring out of him onto the page, a giddy frenzy that culminated in a lengthy footnote on Alan Rickman’s Adam’s Apple as an interpretive tool for rethinking the “rogue and peasant slave” speech. None of this publishable, of course. Delete delete delete.
He wonders if the hunt for these little hits of cloying lifeforce explain everything about the tectonic thrust of human civilization. Art, sex, war. Create, sacrifice, destroy. Every step in human progress explained by way of knowing that someone somewhere was just trying to ride that fleeting surge, know the intoxicating satisfaction of a finely-crafted bone tomahawk with proper heft and balance, the bruising recoil of an AK-47, buffalo jumps, finger smearings in caves, oil paintings, love sonnets, the Garamond font, steam engines, ballpoint pens, ocean freighters, fully hydraulic stainless steel combine harvesters, moon landings, smartphones. Trying to kindle a momentary glow in the darkness.
Everything else — the uncoupling of sweaty limbs in the bed, overpriced sandwiches in the museum cafe, traffic lights, mass graves, tailings ponds, codified legal statutes, styrofoam packaging, abandoned condominium developments, the pile of essays he has to grade — everything else is just the messy byproduct. Everything else is just the come down.
Maybe just the wine talking.
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