Today a liquor store opened up two blocks from my house, I picked something up on my way home from work. So now I'm sitting at my desk drinking a Fonseca Bin #27 Port, straight from the vinhateiros of Porto, Portugal. I burned my mouth yesterday when I taste-tasted some reheated borscht, so I feel a little sad I'm kind of wasting it.
But it's still pretty excellent. Here's a little something about wine, from the Chinese.
Third Poem on Wine
Li Po
Third month in Ch’ang-an city,
Knee-deep in a thousand fallen flowers.
Alone in Spring who can stand this sadness?
Or sober see transient things like these?
Long life or short, rich or poor,
Our destiny’s determined by the world.
But drinking makes us one with life and death,
The Myriad Things we can barely fathom.
Drunk, Heaven and Earth are gone.
Stilled, I clutch my lonely pillow.
Forgetting that the Self exists,
That is the mind’s greatest joy.
One thing I appreciate about a lot of Chinese and Japanese poetry is that there's a real absence of self in the poem. It makes for far less pretension and grandeur. Compare that verse proselytizing drunkenness to, say, Baudelaire or Beat poets. There it's all about what incredible geniuses they are for drinking themselves to a stupor.
Here, it's not about the self. It's about removing oneself from the self. Can't say it's a goal I admire particularly, but it does prove an interesting diversion.
Na zdorovye!
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