The night sky sits pretty on all horizons. My mind’s image of it is particular, a memory used as a placeholder for the sky’s unknowable dimensions, literally and rhetorically. The memory likely took place in July or August some years ago, postmarked by the Kitchener skyline. We could see downtown Kitchener very clearly from the spot; the pharmacy school wasn’t there yet. Before I had my own place to drink comfortably, before my good friend was old enough to drink in bars, on nice nights we would sit with a case of beer by the train tracks, obscuring it from sight with a jacket or our backpacks. Drunkenness and obscurity mixed to create the impression we could say and do anything; youth are outside of time, granting them a reckless gall that diminishes each time something besmirches their soul with responsibility. We’d talk about the usual things drunks like to, but every so often a polished opal came rolling off a tongue and landed before our astonishment and wonder.
“Cities are misunderstood mothers,” my friend once said. “Right here I can see the skyline as a wide-armed embrace.” We both let the words register for a minute, I don’t think either of us knowing exactly what they meant but being impressed by them all the same.
“You should write that down,” I said, finally.
“Nah.” My friend nonchalantly shook his head. “Fuck it.”
He stood up, walked with an impressionistic sway a few meters in front of us and began to piss. And that: Jason urinating with Kitchener rising up before him, far enough off that it could be personified a mother instead of experienced as the frightful sounds of people, the dirty swaths of worn asphalt, the barrage of expectation’s cruel reminders, as the strange physical projection of time’s dialogue with humanity - and look! a full moon laughing above it all - that’s the image that first comes to mind when I ponder the sky.
When not approaching consciousness in too technical of a sense, reserved perhaps for the neurologists and psychologists, it’s helpful to think of it as a person’s awareness of their environment, circumstances, peers, and self. Given that this is subject to rapid change, describing consciousness in this way only gives us insight into the feelings and perspectives of specific moments.
If you’re reading this, it means that you possess some kind of particularly human consciousness: comprehending the marks on the page as units that form communication, understanding that communication to the ability that you’ve learned the language it’s written in, a little more or a little less dependent on your familiarity of the subject matter. The way you’re understanding this would also depend on what lens you’re filtering your immediate environment through; that is, are you sober, drunk, high on something, angry, sad, ecstatic?
People in all places and times have found ways to modify consciousness, and the methods they’ve used have produced differing understandings of what reality is, and how individuals as selves relate to it.
Its naive to claim some kind of objective knowledge about “normal, everyday consciousness” for several reasons - perhaps because what that means is bound to differ from person to person, or even with the same person at different points in their life. If we created, for rhetorical purposes, a “normal,” mentally sound individual, we would have to acknowledge a continuum of consciousness in their life. We’ll name this continuum “sobriety” and say it includes all waking states that aren’t under the influence of alcohol, narcotics, yogas or “shamanic” practices that bring about very deep changes in how reality is perceived. This vast sobriety still includes: morning grogginess, hunger, arousal, anger, sadness, excitement, boredom, pleasure, anxiety, hope, and more in many combinations, but perhaps most tellingly it has the perception of self operating according to certain rules of society and time.
Classical Chinese poets would drink a prescribed amount of wine before picking up their brush. About two cups was thought to remove any ego that might interfere with the stillness required for poetry. What survives of Li Po’s (701-762 C.E.) barely legible calligraphy, and the mythic history that sounds him, indicates that Li Po liked to drink more than was traditionally considered correct. In a long praise of wine, he wrote: “Three cups and I’ve plumbed the great Way, a jarful and I’ve merged with occurrence appearing of itself.”
He allegedly lost a position in the Emperor’s court for daring the most powerful eunuch to address the Emperor without his shoes on. Li Po thought this was funny. Enraged, the eunuch narc’d on Li Po, denouncing him for showing up drunk. The Emperor conceded to his adviser’s wishes and relieved Li Po from service, although not without bestowing gifts upon him.
Li Po’s life mostly consists carefree wandering in the lovable Taoist sense. Although he held government positions at different times in his life, he maintained a laudable distrust of humanity’s institutions, choosing to spend his time embracing the spontaneity of nature.
His legend and historical shadow shaded countless poets: he won praise from many of the poets of his day, including poems and dedications by Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.), who is widely considered China’s most gifted innovator in poetic voice and form; Charles Bukowski wrote that Li Po “could say more in one line than most could say in thirty or a hundred”; even those who hate Ezra Pound’s obtuse pretension love his interpretive translations of Li Po; Gary Snyder, and many others have tried their hands at interpreting his works.
My favourite of his poems goes like this: “Birds have vanished into deep skies./ A last cloud drifts away, all idleness./ Inexhaustible, this mountain and I/ gaze at each other, it alone remaining.”
Islam has its own brigade of wine loving mystics. Sufism emphasizes the experiential dimension of loving God in a direct way, focusing on immediacy. Drunkenness is the perfect metaphorical way to describe their understanding. How often, when drunk, do you let an intuitive notion grab hold of you, whether you have the rational basis for it or not? Overcome with feeling -- with the present -- drunks can easily feel themselves slip outside of the sober world that operates according to the rules dictated by society and time. Alcoholics become unkempt, losing awareness or care for maintaining the appearance of their person to others; their homes fall into shambles; they talk loudly, planning impossible things; the world as they understand it operates according to the rules of their intoxication. I’m not saying that Islam’s revered mystics are alcoholics: that’s their metaphor for their longing for and intoxication with the ways of the mysterious, transcendental and all-powerful.
The poet Sinai cautions drunks: “Don’t wander out on the road in your ecstasy. Sleep in the tavern.” Rumi elaborates that the world is full of children, and they cruelly follow, taunting the drunk “not knowing the taste of wine, or how his drunkenness feels.” These comments are likely referring to the fate of the mystic al-Hallaj who declared himself to be “the truth” - one of the many names of Allah - in a marketplace, with many scholars and clerics present. He was beaten, lashed, crucified and burned for the crime of “shirk,” which is equating anything with God. Only other drunks ever know what a drunk is talking about.
The allure of drunkenness is similar to the romantic allure of wanderers. The wandering sages, the troubadours, even the Beatniks, possess an image of freedom and truthfulness. It seems as though they are not bound to the laws of ordinary life, of time as it applies to humanity; not forming bonds with one place or position in society, they are directed by an inner compass, and directed to live according to a higher order. When we drink, we attempt to free ourselves from the ordinary view of ourselves sobriety asks we take seriously. We become possessed by the immediate, and escape from time.
There is a legend of how Li Po died. He was boating at night whilst drunk on wine. Seeing the reflection of the moon in the water, he was overcome by the urge to embrace it, an attempt that drowned him.
During a rebellion, the Emperor went into hiding, and the prince declared himself the Emperor. An order came from the new ruler accusing Li Po of associating with the rebels, sending him into solitary exile. After the turbulence, the old Emperor learned about Li Po’s fate. He sent an emissary to the mountain to retrieve Li Po and give him a ranking position in the government. This being the age before speedy travel and telecommunication, the emissary discovered once he arrived there that Li Po had been dead for some months. It was likely disease that killed him. History and myth frequently contradict one another.
There is an artful tact to the legend Li Po’s death, beautifully summarizing his life. His itinerant life and poetry is drunkenness, not only in the literal sense, but in the beautiful Sufi sense. Pervading all stories of him is that he refused to take the world of society seriously, he could gain and lose positions on a drunken whim. Could it be he saw the reflection of the transcendent reflected on the world, so it didn’t matter what position he occupied?
All these stories, of course, hang on the drunken notion I hold dear, that what I see in the tales of the numinous can be seen in the world all around me. No, it’s not directly the similarity to the Sufis I find in Li Po’s lines: “Wine’s view is lived: you can’t preach doctrine to the sober,” although that’s very interesting. Nor are the shared drunken roots of Jason’s maternal skyline mingling with Li Po’s staring contest with the mountain the fascinating thing. It’s that Jason, pissing by the train tracks, has converged in my mind with Li Po on the mountain, drinking with the moon: together sharing the drunk’s free-form expression of existence on the outside margins of time.
"Drinking With the Moon" was written by myself and originally appeared in Highbrau Magazine #3 "Drinkin'" 2011.
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