Tag Archives: Dionysus

Dionysus and the Food Revolution

04 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, The Ethics of Eating

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The_Rites_of_Dionysus_-_geograph_org_uk_-_374265

The Rites of Dionysus

Life is suffering and then you die, according to the wisdom of Silenus, the mentor of Dionysus in Greek mythology. Nietzsche argued that art was invented as a response to this pessimistic view of human life. We dream, invent, seek rational order and symmetry so that we can escape the dark night of this terrible vision. A world of suffering is redeemed by a world of illusion, reality wrapped in a veil of beautiful appearances.

But art that embodies only these Apollonian elements will be merely pretty, superficial, what we today call Kitsch—a deliberate avoidance of the realities of existence. For Nietzsche, a genuine affirmation of life must involve the judgment that what is terrifying and painful in life can nevertheless be good—a celebration of reality’s incessant process of creation and destruction into which the individual disappears in moments of intoxicating ecstasy, taking pleasure in the sheer changeableness of things.

Genuine art requires both beautiful illusion along with an ecstatic affirmation of suffering life, via Dionysian revelry. There is something right about Nietzsche’s merging of the Apollonian and  Dionysian because great art is not merely pretty but involves taking pleasure in what is painful,  overwhelming, horrific or fearful.

This Dionysian element is an obstacle to the notion that culinary preparations can be works of fine art. We will eat only what tastes good. We don’t want food that is horrific or fearful. We cover up the fact that food originates in death, destruction, and endless toil and prefer to dine while entertaining Romantic fantasies of far-off exotic places, in happy, conflict-free communion with family and friends. A good meal is a sensuous delight devoid of thoughts of pain and suffering. It partakes of the Apollonian only, unless Dionysus arrives with an excess of wine.

The artist Zev Robinson’s new project (h/t Elatia Harris) promises to disrupt our exclusively Apollonian approach to eating.

In collaboration with local chefs, caterers and Spanish restaurants, tapas and sit down meals would [be] consumed surrounded by art, photography and video installations that gives the experience a cultural and geographical context – the faces, hands, toil and plants and animals that enable us to eat. Traditionally, it has always been that way when people produced their own food, and only in modern urban life have the two – food and agriculture – been separated. The Art and Politics of Eating is an experience in bringing the two back together. It may be somewhat disconcerting to some, but it is a thought provoking experience and glimpse into a reality to which urban living makes us oblivious.

Nietzsche’s idea is not that art must be ugly or painful to view. Rather, his idea is that the illusion that is the work of art must be presented in a way that dissolves the illusion, that reveals its rootedness in the creative destruction of the material world, and that allows us to experience the joy of absorption in that world. As Robinson points out, our modern way of eating obscures that relationship. Recent attempts to reconnect food and agriculture through farm-to-table dining and locavorism are attempts to pay homage to Dionysus, and Robinson’s project is an interesting way of reinforcing that connection.

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Wine and Spirituality

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Dionysus,_God_of_WineEdible Arts is on a brief hiatus. Meanwhile, enjoy this post from the past.

The spiritual dimension of wine has a long history. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was said to inhabit the soul with the power of ecstasy—the Ancient Greek word ekstasis meant standing outside the self via madness or artistic expression.The Romans called the same God Bacchus with similar associations.

The Judeo/Christian world tames the ecstasy yet still acknowledges the virtues of wine. Judaism has long included wine in its rituals for which it incorporates a specific blessing, and of course, for Christians, wine represents the blood of Christ and gets a number of mentions in the Bible.

Other alcoholic beverages have existed for as long or longer than wine, but none have its spiritual connotations.

Today, wine is just one among many alcoholic beverages consumed in great quantities. Yet it sustains its sacramental role—as status symbol, fashion statement, a sign of class, refinement, or sophistication, a source of intellectual delight, the object of a quest for a peak experience, or the focal point of social life—all contemporary renditions of “spiritual” some more debased than others.

Why does wine have this spiritual dimension? It isn’t because of the alcohol. Cheap whiskey doesn’t have it. It is not because it tastes good. Lots of beverages or foods taste good, but they lack wine’s power to move us.

Spirituality is about inward transformation. Dionysus was a gender-bending, shape-shifting God who entered the soul and transformed the identity of the one afflicted. Go with Dionysus and achieve ecstasy by escaping the confines of one’s identity; resist and be torn apart by conflicting passions, according to the myth.

Wine too is about transformation–the grapes in the vineyard, the wine in the barrel and bottle, the drink in the glass as its volatile chemicals release an aromatic kaleidoscope of fleeting, irresolute incense. In turn, the drinker is transformed by the wine. But not merely by the alcoholic loosening of inhibitions or the ersatz identity appropriated through wine’s symbolic association with status.

Instead, the wine lover, at least on rare occasion, is transformed by the openness to experience she undergoes when gripped by sensations whose very beauty compels her full attention. For unlike any other drink, wine has that ability to arrest our habitual heedlessness and distracted preoccupation and rivet our attention on something awe-inspiring yet utterly inconsequential, without aim or purpose, lacking in survival value,  monetary reward, or salutary advance in our assets.

When we are so transfixed by the sensory surface of the world, we stand outside that nexus of practical concerns and settling of accounts that makes up the self. Shorn of that identity we drink in the flavors seduced by the thought that there is goodness in the world—whole, unadulterated, without measure. This is part of the attraction of great art and music—a moment of ecstasy. So it is with wine.

No other beverage has the depth, complexity, and textural refinement to create that momentary mutation of the self.

Not by Bread Alone: Morality and Wine

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Tom Wark’s blog post,”The Moralist the and Wine Blogger” struck a nerve, in part because I’ve had this debate with myself.

Wark, a wine publicist and widely-read blogger, summarizes a conversation he had with someone who insisted that time devoted to drinking, promoting, or writing about wine is wasted time.

It’s just that the consequences of selling wine and wine blogging don’t really play an important role in anyone’s lives. It doesn’t help people. People’s lives aren’t bettered and they don’t really flourish more because you write press releases and go on about wine ratings or wine laws or natural wine…Let me put it more bluntly: If you are not working to improve the well being of others then you are missing the opportunity to live a good life and wasting the most precious commodity we all possess—a life lived in close proximity to other conscious, living beings.

In response to the obvious rejoinder that wine gives some people great pleasure and many wine lovers find wine writing to be engaging, Wark’s critic accused him of selfish rationalization.

The claim that moral concerns ought to outrank any other consideration is not new. In fact the dominant moral theories in our moral tradition—Kantian and utilitarian theories—both entail that we have categorical duties to help others in need that invariably outweigh the satisfaction of personal desires or the pursuit of personal pleasure.

But such moralism (whether theoretical or practical) is just a load of bunk.

There are saints among us, people who seem capable of genuinely taking up the cause of humankind, of sacrificing everything personal for the sake of the common good. It is an odd psychology, worthy of understanding and celebrating.  But most people are not like that. For most of us , if we are to be effective, if we are to get up each day full of motivation and drive, we must do what we love. But we cannot love everything or everyone. There is no love without discrimination. To love something is to hold it in higher regard in comparison to what is unloved. If you love your spouse, other people are less deserving of your attention.

And a life without love is not worth living.

The difficulty with moralists is that their demands are infinite. There are simply too many people in need, so to take up their cause is to crowd out all personal satisfaction from one’s life in a never ending and ultimately failed attempt to alleviate human suffering. The moralist’s demand is thus a demand to blot out what one loves—in a word, nihilism. (With all due respect to The Dude and his cohorts, it is best to avoid nihilism.)

Now, of course, from the fact that I cannot serve everyone, it does not follow that I should serve no one. But it does follow that only the piecemeal serving of individuals is possible and a general prescription to serve everyone is incoherent. So how do I choose who to serve? The only coherent answer is to serve those you love first and everyone else can get in line. (Which is not to say we aren’t traumatized by the destitution of those we cannot love)

Which brings us back to wine, because for Tom Wark and his readers (of which I am one), it is wine they love. Perhaps this is the crux of the moralist’s argument. She may be on board with my prescription to serve those you love as long as we’re talking about people. But wine is just a beverage, a commodity, not worthy of serious concern.

And now the moralist’s problem is becoming clear. She simply does not drink enough wine having not had that moment of revelation that unites wine lovers, that finds extraordinary beauty in, say, a cuvée from the hills behind Beaune.

But more seriously, artists, artisans, writers, musicians, actors, intellectuals, and, yes, winemakers, are engaged in creating something all human beings desperately need—culture. Human beings do not live by bread alone, we seek meaning and we are always in danger of losing it.  Through culture we transform the organic, physical, instrumental, impersonal flotsam and jetsam of experience into symbols that express and sustain meaning. It is where the creation or destruction of what we value is enacted, where we decide what has significance and what does not.

So nothing is more important to human flourishing than to keep culture alive.

We especially need beauty in our lives, for beauty arouses the desire to draw things near, it impels love and a thirst for knowledge. The loss of beauty is like the loss of love. Without it, everything is reduced to a forgettable, discouraging sameness that is another road to nihilism.

An acquaintance with beauty will not by itself make a person better, but pervasive ugliness will surely make her worse.

Moralists have every right to censure the vicious; but they should leave the creators of culture alone (if indeed they are not vicious) because they are as necessary to human flourishing as food and water.

The Yoga of Wine and Food

05 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by in Art and Food, Art and Wine, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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yoga of food Among the many interesting comments made in the discussion after my talk last week on food and meaning, one keeps reverberating and growing in stature the more I think about it.

The commenter was expressing skepticism that food could be art because, he argued, genuine art was inherently contemplative and meditative, drawing the viewer or listener into a deeper understanding of the meaning of life. By contrast the flavors in food inhibit contemplation and meditation. When flavors become the focus of attention we are less likely to find deeper significance  in what we are eating.

I’m not persuaded that art and music are inherently contemplative or meditative. I don’t find Picasso’s Guernica or the music of Ellington, let alone Hendrix, to be contemplative or meditative. But I think with some minor tweaking, the objection has some force.

Great art, it seems to me, enters our consciousness and eventually achieves recognition, by being felt more than seen or grasped intellectually. A great novel, although perhaps lacking any distinct quality we can put a finger on, can nevertheless move us in subterranean fashion, drawing us subconsciously into the world of the narrative until it becomes hard to distinguish the imaginative world from the real one. Painting and music can have a similar epistemology. Aesthetic form can work its effects on us without our being aware, without critical judgment or the conscious acknowledgment of meaning. We get absorbed in the activity of reading, looking, or listening and the work draws us in.

Although it occurs less readily with painting because vision tends to keep the object of attention at a distance, music, narrative, and some paintings do tend to reduce the distance between subject and object. It is not unusual to feel “at one” with the music, so caught up in the rhythm or unfolding dynamic tensions of the music that we feel merged with it; or to feel so empathic toward a character in a story that we struggle to distinguish our own feelings from those we imagine are felt by the character.

It was this absorption in the work that the commenter was alluding to. The question is, does food and wine afford a similar experience or does flavor somehow interfere with this subterranean movement of the mind?

Of course, we have Proust’s encounter with the tea-soaked petites madeleines as evidence supporting the capacity of flavor to offer a similar absorbing experience.

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

Most of us who love wine have had comparable moments where we are so transfixed by the elegant cascade of flavors, textures, and aromas that we stand outside the practical concerns that preoccupy the self and revel in moments of joy and ecstasy. There is after all a reason for the legends of Dionysus. The best food writers report similar experiences.

No doubt flavors are capable of inducing these transformative experiences. Are such experiences rare and atypical—exceptions that prove the rule that food and wine lack the capacity to absorb us as music or narrative does?

Are such experiences more typical of art, music, and narrative than of food and wine? That has not been my experience, but as they say data is not the plural of anecdote. I’m not sure how rare such experiences are but if they are atypical that perhaps tells us more about us and our eating habits than it does about flavor and its possibilities.