Moon-bright Faces in the Jaws of Ants, & Other Drugs

I haven’t had a drink in thirteen years. The euphemism for this narrow omission is sobriety. Shamefully, I have often solicited and received the respect afforded to recovering addicts. I stopped drinking not because alcohol would ruin my life, and not after hundreds and then thousands of days of work and commitment and discipline, but instead because I started to feel moderate pain while my otherwise diseased guts absorbed the stuff. Lately I’ve been wondering about my lack of boozing and its strange form of stolen valor.

We respect sobriety and its pursuit because we recognize the destructive qualities of addiction, principally one’s enthrallment to a given substance. We tend to look at the disease like depression or psychosis, as an interior derangement which transforms its host into something improperly, or uncoordinatedly, animalistic. We know the pursuit of drunkenness isn’t unique to our species, but this knowledge accidentally entrenches the ennobling of our abstinence. We are the only creature capable of sustained self-denial by way of general principles, and we see in this capacity the thumbprint of a higher order. We regard the ascetic as the resolution of the tragedy of the drunk, and the drunk a story we shape out of the senselessness of animal suffering, and all the rest—those who inconstantly moderate their cravings—the swarming substrate above which true morality rises. At least that’s how the mythologies of abnegation favored by over half of humanity would have it.

Omar Khayyam, the eleventh century Persian mathematician and poet, seems free and clear of such delusions. His chief recommendation: get drunk and stay drunk. Khayyam’s four-line poems, the ruba’iyat, advance a vision of life defined by pursuing simple pleasures and avoiding the traps of intellectualism, self-aggrandizement, and despair. Beyond the beauty of its constituent lines, such a vision might seem useless to readers now, caught as we are in an era whose centralizing economic product is addiction itself. But there’s something special about Khayyam’s portrayal of intoxication. Instead of causing it, can drunkenness solve the problem of self-destruction? Is inebriation the best response to theodicy? And what does poetry have to do with any of this?

To answer these questions, we have to develop a sense of the beliefs Khayyam evinces in his poetry. Life is a confusing, constrained process whose purpose is unknown, if not unknowable. All ontological or existential accounts are speculations, tales meant to blind and soothe, and whose origins are not rigorous discernment but the peculiarities of whoever is speaking. Worse, God is an incompetent craftsman, cruel overseer, or both, having made with this world an engine of “malice” and “injustice.”1 Pleasure is possible, and yet “we are creatures of a single moment” for whom “Time’s brutal potion” is always lethal, and for whom the magnitude of even a supernaturally long existence would be vanishingly small and negligible compared to the permanent and silent eternities before and after our deaths. Set astride our razor-thin lives, we may reasonably say that it is better “not to be.” The ontological premise upon which all ethics are constructed is firmly rejected by Khayyam’s epitaphic poems. We are left to wonder and suffer among ourselves, unconsoled among “the departed and the unborn.”

Thirsty yet?

Khayyam lived in a culture defined by Islamic practices and prohibitions, including the injunction against drinking alcohol. But in poetry he is free of the crystalline rigor of religion or mathematics; he needn’t adhere to any rules or appeal to any grand principles in order to justify the pursuit of “half a loaf,” “a tulip-cheeked girl,” and some wine. Yet his poetry is enduringly strange for a few reasons. While we tend to expect poems to reveal the hidden specificities of being, Khayyam is stingy with descriptions of experiencing such pleasures. His quatrains sometimes seem to imply that drinking is a good in itself, as though the effects of intoxication were incidental to the magical naming of wine as “liquid ruby” and “heart’s blood”; Khayyam often writes as though transubstantiation occurs in us between the imperatives “drink” and “be merry.” In his defense, we could assert that the realities of drunkenness are incommunicable, but this would ignore many thousands of pages of world literature. So, stranded as we are in an otherwise worthless and hostile world, our wellbeing seems to depend on understanding what intoxication enables us to feel, know, and do.

Drunkenness, alongside other satiations of our simplest desires, creates a true form of equality. In our attainment of sustenance, we are “no man’s master and no man’s slave.” This pleasure reveals the falsity of hierarchy. Khayyam disproves the legitimacy of social strata and nations with a geometer’s concision: “One sip [is] worth the realm of China.” Further, we are all “images revolving on [the wheel of heaven’s] walls”; drunkenness reveals the dreamlike projection of reality.

Drunkenness reduces life to its immediate presences: “Here we are with wine, music and this broken-down corner, / Heart, soul, the cup, clothes stained with wine-dregs[.]” Carnality restored, the drinker may easily rejoice in the beauty of a woman, the brightness of a song, or the softness of a patch of grass. But drink’s distillation is more fundamental, as we become “Void of hope of mercy and fear of punishment, / Free from earth, air, fire and water.” This is a kind of oblivion. One that may be reached in life, too, thus outmoding suicide with respect to escaping “existence’s narrow straits.” (When Khayyam subjunctively pines, “If only I could find the door to oblivion,” little did he anticipate the ubiquity of Barefoot Cellars and Two Buck Chuck.) But this reduction is also a break from the “prison of workaday reason,” a freeing of the “captives of intellect and of the nice distinction”; rather than the permanent darkness of death, an event whose consequences we cannot detail, burnt up as we are in a fire without smoke, one can enter and exit drink’s oblivion at whim, and better yet, this collapse of categories rids one of “a thousand sicknesses.” Both men enamored of barrels, Khayyam concurs with Diogenes the Sinope: “To escape from the learned schools is best[.]” The moral exemplar of Khayyam’s poetry is “a waster sitting on a patch of ground, / Heedless of belief and unbelief, the world and the faith – / No God, no Truth, no Divine Law, no Certitude: / Who in either of the worlds has the courage of this man?” The question is rhetorical: a brave life is one lived without regard for judgment—even one’s own.

But drunkenness is not just a process by which the uncaring cosmic clockwork’s extraneous pieces are gutted and cast aside. Khayyam’s essential insight is that to drink and be drunk is to synthesize, to sense and immerse yourself in the constant connecting of seemingly disparate things. A review of Erowid or familiarity with psychedelia affirms the strong correlation between inebriation and the conviction, often transmitted wordlessly, of the interrelation of all with each and each with one and back again. But Khayyam’s strict pessimism, his assessment of the meaninglessness and badness of reality, is contrary to the hippie’s satisfaction with their lack of distinctions. Or, plainly: Khayyam knows death denies us answers because silence denies us meaning. For him, “all that is” is “loss and ruin.” So what communion is possible when thinking and speaking merely “lay bricks on the face of the seas?”

Strangely, Khayyam’s poetry is its most intimate, its most exquisite, when it describes the relations between the living and the dead. “Creative Reason” presses “in tenderness a hundred kisses” on each brim of the cups of our lives; that this same potter destroys us does not eliminate the truth of each kiss. “So many delicate legs, heads, hands” are joined together in love; hate may undo the joining but not the having-been-joined. Khayyam’s poetry establishes again and again the fact of intimacy, the fact of union. And generously, Khayyam’s lines extend that union between the living and those from whom we feel so interminably far, those we say we have “lost”: “Every particle of dust on a patch of earth / Was a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star; / Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully – / That too was a delicate, fair face.” We should be careful with the dead, even in their dissolution: “Tread roughly on no plant, / For it has sprung out of the dust of the tulip-cheeked.” Contrary to the prevailing conservatism of in-group religions, this is practically a Jainist Ahimsa, a primum non nocere based in a sensitivity and magnanimity to the everpresence of life. Though we finally are clay and dust, we may yet protest for the sake of better treatment. With an unparalleled tenderness, Khayyam invites us to see his “father’s clay in every potter’s hand.”

But this intimacy is not limited to family. Those we love and treasure above all, those subjects and objects of shared desire, are guaranteed a kind of immortality, and are guaranteed it almost because of the unceasing impartiality of the cosmos: “Before you and I did, night and day existed, / The revolving heavens were busy; / Where you set your foot on the face of the ground / Was the pupil of the eye of a sweetheart.” At least in the dimension of poetry, we remain desired, seen, by those who have passed on. Their love for us remains; we are beckoned in by the dead, upheld by them, even in our ignorance: “The dust under every fool’s foot / Is a darling’s upturned hand[.]” That same sweetheart presents to the fool her cheek. The presence of the dead in the dust of the living is an offer of love.

This is true, too, of those deemed superior during their brief empowerment, those supposedly beyond the petty ending of earthly death by way of fame, fortune, lineage. In Khayyam’s swaying sight, a “king’s head” is embraced by a “beggar’s hand,” and we can only imagine the beggar holding him “gently, gently.” Even phyla are an illusory obstacle: “See moon-bright faces in the jaws of ants[.]” This is a kingdom properly understood.

Drunk all the way awake, we can say confidently of the loneliness and solitude of hell: “there is no indication but the name.”

We so often hope for our distinction from the other; this is the premise of dominant moralities, at least as long as law has cast the world in its lithic image. We so often fear our separateness from each other; this is the engine of heartbreak. Khayyam’s drunkenness allowed him to grasp the “precious stone” within the breast of the “wheel of heaven.” In becoming drunk, one “abandon[s] selfhood / Freely, like the pure whose hearts are consumed away.” To drink is to consume, but to be drunk is to be consumed. Yet such simultaneity isn’t limited to wine. In sensing the ultimate union of the living and the dead, and in feeling the care with which all are cohered, Khayyam achieves in his poems that “flash from the stage of non-belief to faith”; the quickness of his quatrains allows for such a leap—and leap we must. Though the orders of obedience and prescription, those grim faiths of the rod and ledger, seem to separate us, a simple intimacy is “life’s only fruit.” And that is a truth worth reciting in the trenches.