Drinking Through our Sorrow

(This re-post is for Regiedor who pimped to his imaginary friends that it's all authentic, organic, and sexy without being scandalous here. Most of all, for being savagely loyal).

“Drinking in order to feel
Thinking, reinventing the wheel”
-Elbow, “Picky Bugger”

As much as I heed on endorsements of strangers to listen to or watch this crap, I did not keel over Dave Matthews’ stupendous rant over George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye” several years ago. Describing his near-dementia while reading the book: “You have to stop every once in a while and have a cold shower, drink a couple shots of whiskey or masturbate,” I avoided Bataille at all cost. Until now, he remains a blind date that I never got to meet.

The cold shower, I have no problem with. The masturbation, in deference to my mother who’s gone to the Other Side, I will be non-committal about. But the drinking part – what perverse power does this writer wield to drive his reader to uncork a bottle? Not that I need and excuse to drink but I am a cheap drunk – a few swig and I will admit to anything.

Ideas and words have tremendous, immeasurable impact. My insensitivity at times, my penchant for flippant statements offend some people which is never really my intention. On my part, I need to learn circumspection and believe me, you can’t fault me for trying. I wish I were friends with Bataille, got a question for him. Does he even care how people take his words and ideas? He seems to be a kick-ass fellow, someone you want to be on your team.

I am not quite sure if it was he who said: “Your unhappy philosopher needs a drink like your working man needs soap”. I find this oddly funny on several counts. First, is the generalization that philosophers are a miserable lot. Second, the hope they harbor that philosophy would bring sobriety and contentment into their lives. Third, the sharp observation that the working man gets dirty, he needs to wash up. And lastly, the accepted truth that it’s the philosopher that needs a drink more than the working man.

The philosopher in his isolated lighthouse cooks up prescription after prescription how the working man ought to think and live his life. The philosopher is intoxicated on his own abstractions, his rootlessness, his state of exile.

To the philosopher, the revolution can be reduced to words and ideas. To the pragmatic working man, the revolution is a way of life. “To live is to struggle and to struggle is to be among men.”

The working man does not need the philosopher as much as the philosopher needs him as a subject, as an inspiration for his ideas. No matter how the philosopher exhorts that the revolution is now, “the only revolutions that are worth anything are the ones that we discover ourselves, within ourselves, and for ourselves.” (V. Havel)

So the philosopher can forget about his prescriptions. The working man will find his own.

In the meantime, I shall find me a working man who is a closet philosopher. When he comes to my senses, I shall invite him in the manner that Dave Matthews seduces - “Crash into me.”

Oh, boy.