The Magic Ball of the Green Fairy Godmother

Last night I had occasion to dance with the green fairy at Dalva, in the Mission District. Absinthe has lately been made legal here, and though I believe that real wormwood again now contributes the peculiar taste, there is either very little or no thujone in it; in any case, nothing like it had been when the concoction was the muse of Bohemia back in the Belle Epoque, a role dramatized nicely in Moulin Rouge. Given that the glory days of absinthe were some hundred years ago, Dalva became for me Wells' Time Machine, and drinking absinthe for real pleasure seemed tinged with a hint of impossible anachronism; it felt a little like flirting with Ellen Terry. Absinthe is said by the experts to have effects not much stronger than those of alcohol, if stronger at all, but its effects are certainly different: it produces a kind of energetic bouyancy and warm ebullience in the body and spirits, and a glassy , kaleidoscopic clarity of color in one's vision, with reflected lights seen in sharper relief from their darker surroundings, as if lights in their own right.

Back in the day, the wormwood ingredient did some injury, being a fairly strong poison; the amount is not only less now, but in general more predictably proportioned than seems to have been the case when Yeats and Strindberg thought that the stuff would cure them of their mothers' aniconic Christianity. Drinking the cloudy with that end in mind would require it to be strong indeed. I had sampled absinthe before, but never in the amount I had last night. I was a little worried: would I begin to write eerie Symbolist poetry? Convert to French Catholicism? Catch the consumption? But the peculiar effects of absinthe, which I can only attest from personal phenomenology and not the standpoint of Science, aren't very strong: it's the alcohol which is doing most of the work, and the thujone, although certainly there when it is there, is just along for the ride. I couldn't really detect any in last night's cloudy, but then, it probably has none. But I would like to know more. I have read Conrad in passing on the chemistry of this, and will consult Pendell on it at first opportunity.

But it was so strong as to be a danger in the 19th c. Though the risk of wormwood's poison was nothing like that, say, of the fugu delicacy, where a tiny slip in preparation can lead to the diner's death within hours, it was strong enough, and variable enough, to pose a serious threat.

The legends of the evil effects of the toxic, unstable element in absinthe reminded me of the rumors surrounding a sort of mead I had once in France, in a small town tavern awaiting the results of a municipal election in which my drinking mate had stood for minor office, having returned from overseas not long before for that very purpose. He was a Breton: I could tell right away by his unusual surname when he introduced himself; it began with the filial "Ab-" prefix, corresponding to "Map-" in Welsh. At some point in our convocation he mentioned a strangely Chinese-sounding but actually Breton drink called Chouchen, which he said was illegal because it made men fall backward rather than forwards when very drunk, resulting in many a cracked head, the floor being farther than the bar from a stool. He said that bee parts entering the mix somehow, whether accidentally or intentionally he left undiscovered to me, were the cause of the unbalancing effect. I thought he was likely making it up. It is true, though, that he had to ask the bartender several times whether Chouchen could be gotten there, most of which inquiries were met with denial, before the bartender finally looked both ways, and then pulled a bottle out from behind the counter. We drank it, and I was suspicious but interested; it tasted like mead, and didn't make me feel especially like I'd been punched in the head and knocked backwards. The free corps of scholars at Wikipedia, however, confirm something like my friend's story; but it seems that bee bits, like thujone, are a thing of the past.

Whether the catalyst be alcohol, bee bits, or wormwood, we drink these things for a reason: they alter our bodies such that the possibilities we wish to bring forward can do so more easily than otherwise. Since Deus est veritas, the old proverb in vino veritas contains within itself an entire history and philosophy of entheogens. We use drink to elicit or heighten or help along movements of our souls. Last night, I was first and foremost celebrating the end of a good weekend with friends, but (Griselda's down in the archives, so I can say it) I was also working out the end of my recent griefs. We often drink to either forget or forgive, the two ways we have of trying to extricate ourselves from unhealthy habits of relating to our world which have detained us too long in one place along our itinerary toward happiness. You can usually tell the forgetters from the forgivers in a bar: the forgetters are slumping forward, but the forgivers are sitting up, as people ought to. Wilfull forgetting is the attempt to erase sections of our history which we think too painful to bear easily. The problem is that it never works: there is a deeper memory than the archive of images readily accessible to recall, inscribed into our the life of our bodies. This is the central theme of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: do what you will with the conscious habits of imagination, the engraving of experience has traced itself deeper than that, and forms coordinates of action- habits in the Aristotelian sense- which continue in operation as the "impresarios of our experience." The authors of A General Theory of Love describe these, in their clinical way, as "limbic attractors," scripts in the brain which exist deeper than consciousness and dictate the shape of our desire, attraction and repulsion.

As I looked down into the milky absinthe, it seemed to a me perhaps a kind of whiteout, interior rather than topical, and to be applied by the swallowing tongue to all the texts of the mind which one can't stop reading and wants to wholly erase. But that kind of erasure never works, as the protagonists of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind discovered (but perhaps only half-realized).

Forgiveness is a different thing. The word has become a little too fraught with particular pseudo-religious connotations, and often suggest something unilateral, where resentment and self-righteousness loudly enunciates its accusation in the very act of supposedly waiving it. But it is still a beautiful word for the idea: it is related to "forgo", to let go, to ungrip, free up. Forgiveness is where, having realized that the strategy of staying and insisting on absolute justice for every complication in our itinerary is useless, we rather move in solidarity with all our itineraries, our one human itinerary, and say that we are, so to speak, placing no one under arrest, since we have to keep moving: everyone, including ourselves, is free to go. This is not to deny the necessity of personal and social justice: we can and should confront each other and stop each other regarding acts of unkindness. But forgiveness assumes the primacy of the itinerary, assumes that it is of the essence of being human that we all move forward. I'm reminded of Lawrence Durrell's Keepsake:

To increase your hold
relax your grip
exploit the slip twixt
cup and lip

And forgiveness is redemptive, meaning, that rather than trying to annul or erase the past, it recapitulates it in a new shape which is useful rather than hurtful or a hindrance. The past can't be changed, but we have difficulty translating that knowledge from proverb to real principle, and we often put all the energy meant for our itinerarial hike into running about the ghostly landmarks of the past as if we were still in it. Since this is immensely frustrating and painful, we often seek recourse to the drastic measure of erasure: but that, of course, doesn't undo anything, and only makes resolution less likely. But it is an imperative of human life to do nothing which will prevent the truly happy ending. Forgiveness, by assuming movement, and looking ahead to rest of the way, points memory, even the saddest kind, in the right direction: toward the new horizon. And drink at its best heightens conviviality, which is the deepest principle of forgiveness. Thus, as one can drink to help forget, one can also drink to help forgive; and I was sitting up straight at the bar last night. So, Cheers.


About the very end of the evening: let me just say that until you've (literally) waltzed with mad abandon down the aisles of a supermarket at midnight with a laughing beautiful girl (only a friend, Griselda: my attention is undividedly the firm's), you really haven't lived. That sudden caprice was the cap of a happy weekend, and spun away my recent griefs for good: there are probably little grey scraps of them still on the floor by the broccoli. I had thought they would be with me much longer, but that's what magic is for, to effect the apparently impossible. A little shimmering emerald dust from the green fairy godmother's wand helped turn the supermarket floors into a magical ballroom where grief- though not regret- could be whirled away, and for that, your Balt. van H. is a grateful godson.