In the Afterlife Every Night is Wine Wednesday
As a child I imagined blood leaving the body, streaming, spurting from the wounds at his feet, his palms, the spear at his side, the crown of thorns gripping his forehead. It was always the image of nails being hammered into his feet, crashing through talus bones, that made me cringe most. During communion at our small church in the basement of a YMCA, we passed around plastic thimbles of grape juice, and I believed I was partaking in the death of Christ. Drinking his blood, like a vampire.
When I was in my teens, I started to wonder why we didn’t get the real stuff. Why this saccharine substitution? Why broken saltines instead of salty knobs of sourdough? Jesus didn’t convert water into Welch’s at the wedding at Cana. The sacraments felt like empty signifiers.
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Fermentation is its own miracle—a discovery that predates Jesus of Nazareth by at least 4,000 years. Imagine how it might have first happened: clusters of crushed grapes in a cellar, rotting, oozing juices in the bottom of a clay jug, invisible yeast diving in, gnawing the sugars, alchemizing the sweet, fuming liquid into ethanol. Imagine the brave, curious human who first put the jug to their lips. Imagine the revelation, the gradual lightness building behind the eyes, the mind moving like honey. Particles of dust floating in a slant of cellar light, the world swimming with meaning.
By and by, the ancient world starts imbibing. And beyond the buzz, these alcoholic beverages become the far safer alternative to water. Armies of microbes and pathogens evolving to destroy humans are rendered innocuous in that musty jug of beer, those clay amphorae of wine. Fermented drinks literally keep you alive.
But the ancients realized that you can say some dumb shit when you’re drunk. You can trip on your sandal straps. And, if you drink enough, you can even suspend the making of memories. Religion had to reckon with this. Call it blood and maybe people will drink less of it.
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Though Islam strictly prohibits the consumption of alcohol, Sufi poets embrace wine and drunkenness as symbols of divinity. And not the obvious metaphor of blood. In the poem, “Who Says Words With My Mouth,” Rumi declares, “We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups. / That’s fine with us. Every morning / we glow and in the evening we glow again.” Weekends of binge drinking at Isla Vista in Santa Barbara come to mind. But Rumi also says, “This drunkenness began in some other tavern. / When I get back around to that place, / I’ll be completely sober.” That other tavern is the heaven in which he existed before life, the pub to which he will return after death. The drunkard’s state of bliss is an echo of the mystic’s divine ecstasy. But there is a key difference: whereas the wino gets an easy fix, the Sufi understands that he will wait his whole life before he gets good and drunk. There is an entire canon of this kind of poetry, goblets overflowing with wine, bar crawls across the desert, and yet, none of these poets, nor their devotees, will ever drink a drop of alcohol.
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At a bar I worked at called The Press, every Wednesday was Wine Wednesday, half off all bottles. College dudes would order a Sauvignon Blanc and when I’d bring it to their table, they’d say, “Hey, I thought I ordered red wine.” Girls with beet-purple teeth would slur into my ear as I pulled the cork out of yet another bottle, the label facing them, as if that mattered. A piano player named Joe would hammer the keys and trot out a mixture of trite classics like “Piano Man,” “Sweet Caroline,” “Benny and The Jets,” and to the relief of the waitstaff, some Prince, Radiohead, TV On The Radio. A dozen wine glasses would break some nights. Sorry, but these glasses are like, so fragile. It wasn’t infrequent to find a puddle of lilac vomit hidden in the corner of the dining room under a wad of linen napkins. After closing, we’d pour shots of whiskey, plastic cups of beer. By the end of the night, we’d be just as drunk as those undergrads, but with the feeling that we’d at least earned it, wandering home under a southern California sky sparse with stars.
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Sometimes, when I drink good wine, I feel a sense of the otherworldly. Inclusion in something metaphysical, a sacrifice. I offer up my worries and my money in exchange for a few hours of levity. I like to make it more than it is, which is only fermented grape juice. Look to the Bible, to the Sufis, I say. Look to Dionysus, his feverish flock of Bacchae. Look to the studies that extol the benefits of one glass a day. I look, and I look, because there has to be more than just riding a buzz Lethe-ward, toward sleep, a loosening of the lips, a breaking of ice. There must be some redemption here because this drunkenness surely began in another life. Let us taste numinous meaning in a blood-dark glass. Let us swirl like dervishes. Lord, Allah, whoever—I beg you. Bless our bad habits into ritual.