Danse Macabre

In Lu Tong’s Seven Bowls of Tea, each successive bowl is a higher level of ascension into the clouds, until retirement bringing one gently back to Earth. In the same narrative, alcohol accumulates. The teetotal narrative is that of an arc of pleasure and an ascent of quantity. One begins innocent before they enter into the wide trajectory of the bottle, to the heights of the lifestyle afforded to one by partying, then down from the tipping point at the peak, until rock bottom or death - either way, stylized as a desert awakening, before a tundra or upon a mesa, looking out in brutal sobriety upon the unforgiving beauty of the sun, realizing, like a teenager on their first LSD trip, the beauty and horror of the world. “I’m high on life” isn’t an exaggeration, as every former alkie and addict says it, but is a life only afforded to by ascending and descending a lethally perilous arc of addiction. The living addictions, pornography or gambling, can never compare to this, as they do not have the key factor here of the arc, where one kisses Heaven, falls into Hell, awakens back into the Earth and sees the sun like the day they were born, but now with clarity - they appreciate life truly, after devoting decades to a slow dying, coming back to the world after the “rock bottom” encountered them with true darkness.

The inverse is shown in the episode of It’s Always Sunny where the gang discovers they truly are alcoholics. By temporarily going off a daily habit of drinking, they become violently ill, suffering from withdrawals that last until Charlie opens bottles of whiskey he had secreted away as cleaning supplies. The gang takes their sips, is instantly cured of their deathly illness, as they confess their own addict’s stashes of boozes hidden throughout the bar. For many an addict, the drug becomes like this - not the high/low arc, but a steady, proletarian foundation. The office worker’s coffee, the tradesman’s cigarettes, the businessman’s liquor, the doctor’s morphine.

This isn’t to debunk the former, but to provide a counter-narrative to it. There would be no sense trying to disprove either, the Michael Aligs and the ten thousand silent drunkards puttering away in your local office park all attest to both. Rather, it’s to compare interestingly, what happens in both, the relationship one has to the bottle.

Every drug is a silent death. Puritans will always bemoan the bottle over this, really anything that takes its general shape, for being the true le petit mort, drawn out and slow more than an orgasm’s instant starsight. We all know it too, sucking on cigarettes, sipping down firewater, snorting a line… it even feels like death, the body rejecting it in its own way, nosebleeds, vomiting, injection scars. If your hypertrophic instincts were anything to go by, you’d avoid it entirely.

In an early season of Mad Men, Pete is mocked for bringing up the Freudian Thanatos in reference to ideas for cigarette ads. The message of the scene is clear, when a stern German woman is told off for her strange ideas compared to Draper’s intuitive poetics. The only issue here though, is Pete’s clumsy, equally American, execution of the concept. The Marlboro man stands over the Evening Redness of the West, proclaiming the same concept. Man is alone. I sometimes drive far out into the oil hills west of Bismarck and marvel at how desolate the winds of Choco Mountain really can be. The Judge was alone, a man of nothingness that acted as a companion to the grotesques the cowboys made. The boys too, were as grotesque as the mutilations they carved up, hairy legs, dirty bodies shoved into rotten leather, gangly boys firing guns that dislocate their shoulders to rend flesh of innocents in the low sun of a harvest season where nothing grows. No one dies in the west, no one is enough for there to be a meaningful termination. The Judge is the only one who could make that happen, the wilderness of mute flesh is ensouled by the presence of the demiurgic child. The Judge surveys all things and makes them true, in order to give names, souls, lives, to the wilderness of meat.

The Marlboro Man watching the bloody sun set sucks on a cancer-stick. He knows it’ll kill him. Maybe he has one of those Australian packagings, made for shock value, where they print across the entirety of the box, a horrific cancerous injury inflicted by the product. The only question here - why? Why bother with this?

Death. We all know death when we inhale or take a sip. Yet at the same time, death is required for flight to occur at all. Lu Tong didn’t write Seven Bowls of Tea about healthy moderation, he wrote it regarding a drinking ritual that has more caffeine than most energy drinks. An It’s Always Sunny fanfic, L’Appel Du Vide by sewerkingcharlie writes of death, at the end of substances. Charlie under the bridge, rescued barely back to life, off grain alcohol and gasoline. The void always “calls” - resting at the corner of the mind, growing day by day. Shadows blossom, yet, what could we see if not for darkness?

Shadows are the absence of light that forms a presence of void. Somehow, negativity always has a shape, an inky corrupting smoke that billows into the room and seizes stability. Alcoholics dissolve day by day, vomit, shit, piss, their body disintegrating from the inside. Memories are destroyed in every blackout, consciousness becomes a hot, uncontrollable soup of movement without order. The void tears apart like a mystic’s whip, slicing apart the flesh, blood flowing out, skin turning ashen as the flesh is made a soup of putrefied vitality.

Countless examples could be given in alchemy for this process, of violence purifying the saturnine leadenness. Zosimo writes of ritual dismemberment, the limbs severed, drained of the black bilious blood of Earthly life, and then, white as ash, purified in flames. In one text, Aurora Consurgens, an illustration shows the black bird burning in a cauldron as a figure looked on holding a sword. In another, Atalanta Fugiens, the king is devoured by wolves, the wolves incinerated on a pyre, and the King reborn in purity and wholeness from the flames. The point doesn’t bear repeating, Roob’s Museum that I take these images and words from does more than a good job of presenting countless pieces of evidence. Evola speaks of the same, in his texts on alchemy, of mercury, the dissolving horizontal of waters - the triangle symbolizing pointing downwards, as water flows, turns all liquid. When God renewed the Earth, it was done through the same process as the Earth was first formed - the chaos of the dark ocean was recreated first of all, the flood being sent in order to begin the alchemical process from the only possible starting point - absolute infinity.

So many initiations take this to heart. Long bastardized, fraternities don’t make binge drinking and sexual violence their ritual practice for sheer sadism - it serves the same function. Mortification is a dissolving action, to reduce the living shit of the world to a state where it can be freed, melting ice cubes to be poured into a new tray. Every little ritual makes it - we enter as a contract with our lover, the explicit language used across the globe to describe these dissolving agents. The grand three part Pharmako series of books covers this in exhaustive detail, a number of suitors all vying to be the one we enter into the dance with. The one we use as our choice of partner in rituals of spiritual rhythm.