Empty the bottle
Some time ago, I did a quick Amazon search for Walker Percy’s “Diagnosing The Modern Malaise,” and the first product to pop up was Sol de Janeiro Brazilian Bum Bum Cream (Infused With All-Powerful Guaraná Extract). The sublime irony of this moment was lost on me, because my mind whiplashed from existentialism to Brazilian bums to Guarnari violins (and the eponymous string quartet whose recordings of Beethoven I prize on the level of aged Bordeaux), and again, naturally, downward to the bums. Where, I wondered, does All-Powerful Guaraná slot into the pantheon? One guesses pretty high given the omnipotence factor. Also, does it lead to everlasting life? I typed “Guaraná + immortality” into Google and found inconclusive results—a 2023 meta-analysis in the journal Nutrients seemed to imply that the Almighty Essence of Guaraná, like coffee (definitely up there among the gods, right next to Bacchus), is nothing but good old-fashioned caffeine. I calmed down after a few days and remembered that the internet mocks anyone who fancies that they deepen their spiritual capacity by submitting to clever marketing technology, much like the populace of Ireland laughs at garrulous tourists who kiss the regularly peed-on Blarney stone.
No one considers himself the naif. Indeed, superficial expertise has spread over the great unwashed like tinea corporis. I’m no different, and I pride myself on some measure of worldly savvy, honed the hard way over a lifetime of screwups. Highlights include asking a Serbian coworker if he was speaking Slovak, asking a bilingual friend in Chiapas for a Spanish word in Mexican-accented English, singing a parodic rendition of Deutchland über Alles to a polite and confused German PhD, silencing an office party with an ill-judged bon mot about my Paris-raised boss exchanging underwear with strangers in a locker room. I’ve been “given the fig” on the road by a Brit and two Frenchmen (separate incidents). And there was that Florentine nonna who simply shook her head while I backed my wrong-way car out of her one-way street. Because I consult the internet on a regular basis, I am now even more aware of certain tripping hazards, or faux pas, that might otherwise humiliate me and bring dishonor to my family, and if I ever reach the Emerald Isle I’m confident I’ll avoid making a fool of myself while sober.
Self-awareness underwent wholesale change twice in human history: first, in the initial shock and shame of our nudity when we ate from the tree whereof we were commanded not to eat; and then through a second perceptual derangement when we started playing with handheld screens. We now seem to occupy a divalent dream state of hypermimesis and unconsciousness; a weird reciprocal of the wholly voluntary yet irresistable stress/convenience chimera of consumerist American life. Internet factoids and videos are fun because they’re anaesthetic and they help smooth out rough edges during travel. But unlike the rich visceral complexities of real life which a healthy mind can apprehend and digest, these quick images threaten to bloat the memory-imagination system and disarm the mainspring of humanity: an Edenic impulse to regain a sense of wholeness. Jim Harrison (not exactly a paragon of temperence but a hoot to read) once claimed, “We want to fully inhabit the earth while we are here and not lose our lives to endless rehearsals and illusions.” I will reconsider these ideas in due course, but right now I’ve got about six hours’ worth of YouTube Shorts to watch…
So what happens in Shortland? A neanderthalish Cockney yells about poached eggs; a mustachioed podcaster yammers into a microphone about AI; a guy flops his jowls around an Italian sandwich; tan plastic-looking people swamp their big speedboat in a choppy channel; Kim Jong Un waddles up like a spherical Caligula to an obsequity of officers; a troop (or troupe) reenacts 17th-century pike tactics. In short, everyone has gotten into the cock-a-doodle-doo business, the louder the better. For the modal tone of mainstream culture, conjure an insensate Jabbalike figure in a rudderless cruise ship yelling surf ‘n turf orders to the trilingual Filipino wait staff in the time-honored moronic alternative to understanding: volume. Meanwhile the ship bobs around in a brownish slick of its own making, way out of its depth.
The Red Vineyard, Van Gogh
It’s always been this way, and schizoid escape from our “human condition” is a universal market. I recently learned how Ugandan women sew little idols out of cloth and hold them in their armpits, talking to them in troubled times. I’m not saying that all people are prone to delusion, but many of us could probably cast our minds back and identify a sort of cradle bipolarity which these devices and their offerings so neatly exploit. My formative years featured a very cerebral Calvinism backing into a somewhat raucous Dutch American earthiness; as such, my mindspace often resembles a buck dancing competition set to the Genevan Psalter. Who wouldn’t need a break from that? My pocket idol consists of aluminum, silicone, and glass; and playing with it is a lot like hooking my poor brain up to a neverending loop of the Burgertime theme song. I now find it necessary to regularly remind myself that I’m an embodied creature in the physical world. For this exercise, I pour myself a glass of Chateau Chasse-Spleen (translation: chase away the blues), queue up a Renaissance gigue on the kitchen stereo, and then engage in a robust gyrating dance to the horror of my teenage children.
If these are all supposedly tame ways to explore different modes of being, they seem embarassing when compared to the One Mode of Being required by Life, which I can only apprehend from the spiritual posture of (Percy’s word) ex-suicide: at certain rare points of heightened lucidity (typically upon finishing a poem or while fasting) I awaken to the null hypothesis of oblivion, appraise the contents of my life, and choose not to kill myself—as I suspect many grownups have done a time or two whether or not they admit it. Those who haven’t simply age in place and retain something of a childish state, in spite of everything. Is that true? And what does it mean? I don’t really know. Maybe I should ChatGPT it. Or maybe that reflex points to the real problem, oozing with irony: we use tech as an instant cure for the pathology of Ease—the fat worm boring out the imagination and parasitising all durable sense of accomplishment. And then we seek relief from the big side effect of this activity—a constantly reinflated mind-perception at odds with steadily aging flesh, a vertiginous state of affairs the well-heeled try to treat with microdose edibles and forest baths.
My family never had money. And owing to a baseline contempt for popularity, I tend to scoff at anything trendy and my reaction to material and cultural surplus often fails to collate neatly into an evolved hierarchy of goods. Rather, it bifurcates into a stark binary of wanton lust and pharasaical misanthropy. The more I see the more I want, and the more I despise those who always seem to have more. More of what? Twinkies in the Transformers lunch box, in my earliest memory. Shortly thereafter, athleticism (although I’ve always considered myself a pretty good athlete mentally, notwithstanding my physical lack of size, speed, strength, stamina, agility, and hand-eye). And in adulthood: charisma, academic talent, wealth, Mediterranean villas, private jets, power. So I find it to be a law that avarice (and all its attendant hypocrisy) lies close at hand and is the physical corollary to gorging one’s brain on “content.”
The tedium of abundance sows discontent which can grow in any landscape (although I submit that a supermajority could repose quite gently among the sun-kissed limestone bluffs and lemon groves of the Côte d’Azur). Not a few of us confined to the ten-minute intervals, plumb-lines, right angles, and cartoon food of the middle American grid develop a nagging sense ex omnia that a radical amputation is required in order to live well. For now, my community and family rely on me being here doing what I do, so off-grid itinerancy is out of the question and amputation breaks down, metaphor-wise. What about field-dressing? Maybe I could run a knife along the linea alba of my mind and leave the putrid worm-ridden guts of it behind…I note that those who set out from a position of deconstruction often wind up militating against humanity; a dangerous tack when discussing any creative endeavor, like Life Herself, for instance. So I struggle to find an escape hatch from all this paradoxical vanity, and every poetic effort is like the old saw about building your own parachute after bailing out of the plane. (I rifle through my pockets. What is that grubby thing? I think…yes, it’s a silkworm…start spinning some lines for both of us, buddy!) Just as I prepare to jump into the flatulent propblast of self-pity, I recall the famous maxim first coined, if memory serves, by Boetheus: The computer-based global economy is like a prison for the mind, but actual prison is way worse. Touché. I live in the freest, wealthiest, and most wasteful society in history, and any complaint I’m tempted to lob hisses like a dud in the garbagey ocean of suffering around me.
Tuesday morning clinic, February. I was flitting between post-op patients, my computer, and my mid-morning cuppa when it dawned on me: Trader Joe’s green tea smells like something beyond umami, like fish food. But I enjoy it. In fact, that might be the reason—an appeal to some primordial aquatic impulse. After all, we begin life with gill slits and floating in a warm amniotic bath. Green tea. Green sea…I sipped my seaweedy brew and was drawn into an unjaded embryonal state; a virgin mind able to be taken hold of. I emptied my teacup and studied the fine leavings. Yes, that’s the point. The emptying. Of what? Of worry, greed, internet clutter, temptations to reprosecute old slights and stumbles, false persona, ulterior motives, of endless rehearsals and illusions.
Dammit, I asked myself, does this mean I have to give my stuff away?
“Well,” I answered, “it’s either let it go now on your own terms, or someone else will take it after you’ve lost continence.”
But what will fill the hollowed out skin of my life?
“Bread.”
Anything else?
“Wine.”
Wine. One lamentable effect of this mysterious heavenly liquid takes the form of a caricature: “I find the 2005 to be an amusing, playful little vintage,” “Like two fauns, twins of a gazelle that graze among the lilies,” “Oh, but you must let it breathe, my dear,” “Percival, Lucretia, attend; he said he liked it because it was so smooth—oh ha ha ha!” and so on. An equal and opposite embarrassment (perhaps a result of the first) is wine used as a mere cocktail beverage, to be drunk (in every sense of that word) while standing and awkwardly milling about a room full of other Machiavellians, a sort of nuclear reactor core for the social embarrassments of youth (see paragraph two). In this context, wine amounts to indifferent plonk, or the liquid analogue of a one night stand. Three glasses and an evening of transactional conversation leaves one destitute and divorced from virtue, with no more inheritance than a mouthful of ashes, a headful of anvils, and medium- to long-term regret. So the Lush is simply the microcephalic natural child of the obtuse and culturally ravenous Snob. Both are perversely co-dependent, and yet the two add up to total erasure.
By contrast, the Pharisee has nothing to do with wine, or with anything truly rich. His life is engineered without curiosity, is managed by a list of agendas, and he operates under the illusion that rehearsals of the thing are The Thing. The Pharisee crabs about fat on a feast day…a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head…and they scolded her.
The Snob, the Lush, and the Pharisee are the spawn of Control, whom we all know from committee work (requiesce in pace, Mr. LeCarré). Control is the “Swiss bureaucracy” of killjoys; the understaffed joie de vivre secretariat was dissolved long ago after failing to meet efficiency benchmarks, but at least the trains run on time and even the gravel pits look tidy. Control’s obituary reads like a dishwasher’s user manual, and everyone wears gray gray gray to the funeral. A practical effect of this character is the hijacking of a great meal, not dissimilar to an actual act of terrorism—the logical endpoint of a gross misapprehension of beauty. I think of a mind as receptive as rubber, eyes unmarked by genuine good humor, lips pursed like a little anus dilating only to drop pelletlike turds of disapproval on the dinner table.
If green tea helps to purge the spiritual constipation caused by runaway tech and self-absorption, well-aged fine wine from the Bordeaux region of France refills. It is a wholesome, restorative beverage, never mind the health nannies. Properly used, wine does not puff up; it allows a free flow of goodwill. Note the implicit progression—wine will only work as intended on a mind at least temporarily unencumbered by our typically squalid way of life and its effect on the eternal balance sheet. We all have a schedule and a little Lush, Snob, Pharisee, or Control lurking on a shoulder, waiting to seize up the mood with banality, critique, or murmured objection to extravagance. One must shelve them along with the smartphone, and then healing may take place. More to the point, Bordeaux is a serene and irreducible Thing, its telos unaffected by the same threadbare prejudice, aloofness, and ridicule often besmirching American perceptions of France, terroir, or really anything deserving more than a hot take. Real wine comes from a vineyard, not a drive thru. Real wine is costly, not necessarily haute, like most things requiring sacrifice. The Eucharist completes this line of argument, so that’s about all there is to say. Except that Concord grape juice offers a suitable alternative for cirrhotic toddlers, and those who serve chips and coke at “Communion” deserve to remain right where they are with precisely those things, forever.
Which calls to mind another dreary mundane tableau. Michigan creates its own version of the Truman Show skydome from late-November through March; not an artificial projection of brilliant sun and deep azure; no, we get a very real lowdown matte gray for four months. It strikes me as an example of what Hilaire Belloc called “a strange effect of nature copying man’s art,” the art in question being the bleakest of Rothko. The lights of Christmastide dim, and my mood slouches away from Bethlehem. I put down my phone, recall my wine cellar, lope downstairs and unlock the door, and inhale the cool scent of must and case wood. It is the aroma of the marriage of history and potential. I select a bottle. I lift the bottle from its terracotta manger, taking care not to scrape the label. It is a 2018 Chateau Malescot St. Exupéry (motto: semper ad altum). It is young and needs more time to mature; I lay it down again and grab a fitting Chateau Cantemerle (translation: blackbird song), standard-issue claret which is like a liquid sigh of relief. Two years ago a good friend and I slowly shared my one and only 2009 Malescot through an evening and into the wee hours. It isn’t the most expensive, oldest, or most prestigious bottle; we make do with the hand we’ve been dealt, and with a modicum of care and patience we can pull out a decent thing. And while I lack the panache to capture the evolving range of flavors over our three-hour conversation, it remains memorable because of its sheer uplifting honesty, as honest as the gravel soils in which those vines struggle year by year.
Struggle is axiomatic to the oenophile. The triune gift of complexity, accuracy, and balance is only delivered by vines which dig deep into poor rocky soils unjuiced by artificial fertilizer and irrigation. This scandalizes a post-industrial consumer for whom any variation, any palpable risk, is anathema. In our neo-Gnosticism we’ve grown suspicious and apathetic and blind toward important things like the dirt underfoot and horseshit and cloudcover. We devote much time and money to process ephemera (feelings) while we hermetically seal ourselves off from the world in our airtight houses and cars. A few stubborn reminders (toiletpaper, piles, the doctor’s gloved and lubricated index finger) still ground us, but we’ve largely disintegrated our embodied unity and severed our primal connection to physical auguries. Our ancestors certainly knew how to read the birds of the air—the snow will come late this year, a storm will come next week, the herds will move next month so we must harvest our meat now… I suspect that most of us sitting at a computer all day see primarily through pixels and have all but choked off the direct conduit between an inner life and the natural world, precious and unique to humans. The “environment” is just another agenda and its phenomena are politically co-opted on the one hand, dismissed as daffy superstitions on the other. Earth has become an annoyance, a problem to fix or to abandon.
The empty bottle offers its lowly corrective, where in the dregs we can finally get a handle on the dirty work of the vintner. Wine bottle sediment symbolizes a life lived well; the wine goes forth beyond its immediate boundary and the spent husk of it remains as a visible encomium to the physical vineyard, a sort of Urtext of the wine. And unlike the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum we can taste and see what it says without AI. So to the reader I offer this humble terroir-based guide to identifying and interpreting wine bottle sediments:
Champagne: trace Bisquick batter. High and Low orbit the same Sun, whose course is unaltered by capital. Beware of all news broadcasts, the product of which is universal obstinacy.
Alsace: whitish crystals. Contemplation will ennoble your life. Beware of political rumination which can lead to impotence, the seed of persecution.
Burgundy: fine snuff. It is unnecessary to set poetry to music. Beware of unexpected pregnancy, but welcome children to the table and dip a finger for them to taste.
Bordeaux, Rhone, Tuscany, Rioja: large black wads of shredded Cavendish. You should personally kill, clean, carve, and eat an animal at some point in your life. A fish counts. Beware of cultural imperialism.
Sauternes: manna. Deus providebit. Beware of the nightcap.
You are invited to imagine trying to outrun an avalanche of lava. Now apply this sense of urgency to clearing your head of all petty to-do lists. Open a well-aged good wine with loved ones, converse without taking yourself too seriously, and finish up by sitting and pondering the bonus gift left in the glass or bottle. We were out to dinner recently with friends, and following Sarah’s lead I ordered a brilliant and cheap Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. I held my empty glass up to the candlelight and smiled at the residue, a largeish glob of black sediment stuck to the inner wall of the bowl. It looked clotlike, even vaguely placental. I whispered a prayer of thanks and blessing for the wine grower and excitedly showed it to my friend. “Eew!” she exclaimed, “What’s that?!?” I answered, “A good sign.”
It is possible to go through an entire life firing blanks—by working, scrolling, watching, eating, drinking, traveling, even “serving,” purely to fulfill some onanistic agenda. It could be done unconsciously (leading to scenes of late paralysis like the elderly couple in an Applebee’s who never quite grooved together but lacked the initiative to figure it out, and thus sit proximally apart and silently chew their insipid cud and stare past each other toward some unarticulated yet horrific and ultimate disintegration—all conjecture, of course; I’m sure they both save the last pour of Monbazillac for each other…) or in a calculated way, which is even worse. So I pray for a measure of curiosity and generosity, two streams eddying together whose mystery swells the river of longing. And the idea is for all of it to channel into the ocean of meaning by learning how best to fill and let go, learning how to die to this world, and then by actually rehearsing it from time to time before hitting the Final Bottleneck, the awful constriction through which our souls are cold-pressed into the expanse of eternity.
These moves seem risky only in the sense that they mean relinquishing an illusion of control—you might lose “followers” or miss a Facebook Marketplace deal, the wine might be corked, your soulmate might prefer a canned daiquiri, the children might turn out lousy, the money might be wasted by others, it might all run out before you die, the rhythm of fasting and feasting might be hazardous to your health. Maybe, maybe not. What’s guaranteed is the diminuendo. My grandmother's last year of life was confined to a one-room apartment where she made it her vocation to meditate, pray, and take pleasure in the birds outside her window. Following her death and the settling of her “estate,” my father described her provision for us, her grandchildren. “Well, after covering the funeral and other expenses, your inheritance might end up touching even the mid- to high three figures.”
Jim Harrison claimed to have seventy-seven wine epiphanies. To a teetotaler this might sound excessive, but it definitely beats a heap of pragmatical rust and a ledger of numbers which inevitably add up to zero. I’m not suggesting we all develop a bad habit. The very worst precedent in middle American food culture was established round about two hundred years ago when someone unironically called “Marm” or “Paw” began to harass their poor bloated beanfed kid with the words “clean your plate.” We should never pressure someone to drain a bottle, which typically necessitates opening a second. Let us simply acknowledge that The Winemaker literally commanded us to drink the stuff, and it’s in our best interest to follow through. Our years are three score and ten, maybe closer to five score thanks to modern medicine. I don’t know my time, and much of the time I’m too occupied to explore the fullness of my own imagination. Do I want to be so distracted? Do I really want to live to a hundred? Or do I desire a life so arranged that I can accept my capacity, pause for an evening, and daydream about the wine at Cana? Am I more interested in chasing lures, or do I cultivate the spirit of generosity and courage required to pour out my life? Do I attend to the quiet voice that says drink it, and remember me?
