Part I:
Poets were the earliest
wine writers. In China, where there is a long and vibrant history of poetic and
drinking culture, the influence of wine in poetry is hard to miss. Wine was a
favorite subject of perhaps the most famous Chinese poet, Li Po, who is rumored
to have drowned when he fell from a boat trying to embrace the moon’s
reflection while drunk. In his book Chinese
Wine, researcher Li Zhengping writes, “Chinese people traditionally viewed
poetry as the wine distilled from the mind, and many of the great poems are
indeed as aromatic, tempting and exquisite as wine.” Wine and poetry in ancient
China were intrinsically related in a symbiotic relationship that extended
beyond the mere corollary of pleasures we recognize today. Drinking wine and
writing poetry was common, and even today, people retell the stories of Chinese
writers who played drinking games, floating wine cups downstream and composing
a formal poem where the cup landed, drunk on the language of the land.
Much
more than an intoxicant, wine in ancient China was believed to have medicinal
properties, and was a central part of religious life. Drinking wine was not
only an accepted form of socializing, it was an important tool to keep one’s
body and mind in balance, as long as frugality and moderation were practiced. In
his book Ancient Wine, Patrick McGovern
contends, “The history of civilization, in many ways, is the history of wine.
Economically, religiously, socially, medically, and politically, the
domesticated grapevine has intertwined itself with human culture from at least
the Neolithic period and probably long before that.” The same, of course, can
be said about poetry, though that is a vine of another varietal. Each time we
pick up a poem from centuries earlier, or drink a wine grown from a plant
that’s been cloned and transplanted for hundreds of years, we recapitulate that
history, pulling past values into the present.
McGovern goes on
to claim that wine is possibly the greatest legacy left by ancient humans; the
psychotropic effects and medicinal value of alcohol explain its central role in
society, religion, and the economy; fermented wine was more nutritious than fresh
grapes; and finally, wine’s preeminence in history is largely due to the chemical
compounds that delight our senses. “Widespread use of wine by a population,
however, was a two-edged sword. Persons who indulged in wine were likely to
carry genes that predisposed their descendants to alcoholism” (McGovern). This
duality contained within wine—the nourishing and destructive qualities of
alcohol—are evident in the works of poets such as Li Po.
In his book The Art of Chinese Poetry, James Liu examines
some common concepts and ways of thinking and feeling found in Chinese poetry:
Nature, Time, History, Leisure, Nostalgia, Love, and Rapture with Wine are all
discussed. In the last section on wine, he writes, “Again, as every reader of
Chinese poetry must be aware, there are constant references in it to drinking
and becoming tsuei, which is usually
translated as ‘drunk’, though actually it caries rather different implications
and associations.” Liu goes on to cite the Shuo
Wen, a philosophical cornerstone of Chinese etymology from circa 100 AD,
which explains the composite character as a whole means “everyone reaching the
limit of his capacity without offending propriety.” Liu explains that because tsuei does not mean the same as “drunk”
or “inebriated” in English, he prefers to translate tsuei as “rapt with wine” because it focuses less on the notion of
intoxication and more on the notion of “being mentally carried away from one’s
normal preoccupations.”
According to the
scholar and translator Burton Watson, “Nearly all Chinese poets celebrate the
joys of wine, but none do so as tirelessly and with such a note of genuine
conviction as Li Po. Though he wrote in a poetic tradition that condoned, even
demanded, the frank expression of sorrow, and he himself often gave voice to
such feelings, one imagines that he could never have been entirely desolate so
long as he had his wine” (Chinese
Lyricism). Sorrow and wine seem linked in a dialectic union in his poetry.
Life’s brevity breeds sorrow, yet Li Po seems to suggest that wine enables him
to see beyond his own sorrow and appreciate a larger sense of existence. We can
find a subtle expression of this idea in Li Po’s poem “Something Said, Waking Drunk
on a Spring Day,” where he writes:
Overcome,
verging on sorrow and lament,
I
pour another drink. Soon, awaiting
this
bright moon, I’m chanting a song.
And
now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why.
Here we can see how wine sooths the
mind, stripping it of the sorrows and laments that usually rattle in our skulls
like death chants. After another drink, when the song has ended, Li Po has
forgotten the sorrow that caused him to sing. Wine not only relaxes us
physically, it eases us into new perspectives, and it helps release us from
worry and desire. There is cruelty and hatred everywhere, Li Po seems to
suggest, but wine can dispel these evils of the heart. This sentiment is
perhaps best exhibited in Li Po’s poem “Drinking Alone,” which ends with the
lines, “Out beyond this jar of wine, its all longing, longing—no heart of mine.”
An ardent Taoist,
Li Po’s poems reveal that he studied Buddhism early in his career before
converting to Taoism. An excellent example of Li Po’s Taoist disposition with a
Buddhist bent can be seen in the third of his poems titled “Drinking Alone
Beneath the Moon.” The poem begins with a description of April blossoms, and
opens in a somber tone typical of Li Po. He writes, “Who can bear spring’s
lonely sorrows, who / face it without wine? It’s the only way.” This is a concession
by Li Po that wine prevents desolation. He goes on to say that no matter who we
become, our life is fated from birth:
But a single cup
evens out life and death,
our ten thousand
concerns unfathomed,
and once I’m
drunk, all heaven and earth
vanish, leaving
me suddenly alone in bed,
forgetting that
person even exists.
Of all our joys,
this must be the deepest.
We cannot escape our fate, but wine
has the power to help us shed the concerns that bind our minds and make us
servants to our own desires. Alcohol, Li Po suggests, leaves us raptured,
released from the bounds of heaven and earth, released even from one’s own
sense of individual existence. This feeling, this rapture with the world that
wine induces, which hinges on the release of the ego, of one’s sense of
singularity, this, claims Li Po, is life’s deepest joy. From the poem above, we
can see how this enjoyment and inspiration were inseparably linked, and that
the greatest joy Li Po gets from drinking wine is a lucid understanding of
existence and a heightened spiritual perspective.
Part III:
A good wine, like
a good poem, makes us focus on its qualities. When we read a beautiful poem, or
drink a special bottle of wine, we cannot help but be made aware of our
experience, of the balance, intensity, complexity and distinctive personality
captured on a page or in a glass. In The
Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty and Intoxication, Cain Todd
claims that by drinking fine wine, “We learn more about our multifarious
interest and pleasures, the nature of appreciation, and the meaningfulness and
emotional expressivity that objects in the world can attain for us. And we
become aware of our own powerful and subtle capacities for discriminating and
evaluating.” Just as when we experience a great wine, brilliant poems force us
to exercise and expand our perceptual and imaginative capacities. By trying to
understand and appreciate wine we come to a deeper appreciation and
understanding of our own existence. I think this is what Li Po meant in his
second poem titled “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” when he ends with these
lines:
Three cups and
I’ve plumbed the great Way,
a jarful and I’ve
merged the occurrence
appearing of
itself. Wine’s view is lived:
you can’t preach
doctrine to the sober.
