Yes, that's what it is, you know: he hates all us sunlovers like dogs hate squirrels. He loves the night, that rascal, he loves prevarication, Ariadne, and that's about it. He loves his thyrsus, too of course, and his leapin' leopards (or whatever those damned animals are pulling the thing he rides everywhere in--a definitely unOlympian fellow, we may be sure)--and his fawnskin coat. Yes, yes. Well, Apollo may be known for his moderation but he also has his Sacred Precincts, he also--a blooded one from Olympus Supreme--one of the Head Nachos-- Apollo also has his votives, his Friends, his Lovers.... He took Ariadne, who really loved Theseus (who abandoned her on that decrepit island where Dio found her, all cast off and wed-able), for his wife. It is said they do not live in bliss but in bluster: a Plutonic arrangement. His cult is from Phrygia, you know, by way of lower Yugoslavia or somewhere. They call him twice-born, but, hah, coming out of male deity's thighbone is hardly a nativity. I am sure you've all heard the stories, mostly lies, many unfounded, several started by Dionysus and his votaries themselves, some by the Maenad Press, which publishes from Athens and Naxos on pure Babylonian papyrus, quite expensive paper, terribly costly books but stored at Alexandria where we know they'll be safe forever. His cult is of blood; mine is of law. His cult kills coldbloodedly, tearing animals apart with their hands-- oftentimes live animals: the weaker ones struggle with their food before consuming it...and then they say it is Dio's blood/wine that they drink, Dio's flesh that they gnaw.... And while there may be killings done in Apollo's name, they are always legal killings, condoned by all appropriate authorities and executed in the most objective and dispassionate fashion available. No hacking and chopping and gnawing of live creatures. We simply flay them, burn them, whatever the judgment calls for. The majority of Apollo's followers are not women.The majority of Dionysus's followers are women. When that priest toots his flute, it's each to their own daemon. You should see what they do, and often in broad daylight. Why, it's like a slaughterhouse out there in the woods! Just terrible! The priest plays his flute, everybody gathers together in some place they've decided on--a special place--and I think they are mimicking our rites somewhat here, parodying them perhaps to anger me. Yet Apollo does not anger easily; it is injustice and illegality, the deviant departure from normality, the straying from social bondage that whets Apollo's anger. Apparently Dionysus has no choler whatsoever--he punishes no one for anything and is content to let everyone do whatever they want to do at all times. Anarchy, chaos, disorder, dirt and nasty blood. That's why they must be defeated. [Dionysus, Pan and couple of Satyrs move across the suburban Athenian landscape one cool, windy day in what Greece calls the cool season, December. Leopards, panting heavily, pull his cart and he is accompanied by some scrawny, mange-eaten deer (one doe and two yearlings). He has a cup and a thyrsus in his hand, trying to hold them both and guide the cart without falling; Dionysus is darkhaired, bearded, with sharp lines on either side of his nose crinkling often in reaction to his fleshy-lipped mouth's gestures, which seem to be directed at no one of the company present.] DIONYSUS: This is getting old. PAN: What do you mean, this? DIONYSUS: This wandering around from Greater Dionysia to Lesser Dionysia...the ecstasy, the--the whole thing, Pan. It's becoming a routine, don't you see...? Ecstasy was never meant to be day-in, day-out--continuous... FIRST SATYR: Man, you sounding like Apollo. SECOND SATYR: He does, he does. DIONYSUS: Shut up, shithead lechers. [They giggle a little together] PAN: Where are we having the festival this year? DIONYSUS: Ariadne's summer house [sighing, dropping thyrsus] Get up, you slow-ass cats! Bastards...gah... PAN [to SATYRS]: He's kind of horny this season... [SATYRS titter] He found her all lovelost and torn there on the island; always it was on an island--Dionysus as Prospero--dismembered, he puts down, at last, his books and attempts at art and Art and ART. The aged goat- bearded magician, poised somewhere in the middle of Atalanta, hears that old-time Thracian threnody, those delicious dithyrambs, and he starts slobbering after fresh goat blood, singin'-- [off key] Art is just another noun for Nothing left to create The skies over that part of the world are a deep, deep, Mighty Mouse blue, "incredible, fantastic" lights popping and hissing everywhere-- that blue the color of many of the more protected and thoughtlessly privileged creatures of the U.S. Dionysus sits in that sand, writes, with a straw from a plastic cup, Amor fati amen Om padme Jones-- Pines. That's it, then. We will have the holy pine tree, we will have the minor deity, as Dionysus of course is, holding a wand of it up like one about to swat a policeman-- Pines. T.S. Eliot, he wasn't much on pines. Few people have ever seen symbolic value in a gaunt, ubiquitous evergreen like the common red, yellow, loblolly; though Bible Belt paper magnates have drawn lots of cash in through seeing pine as paper, pulp, as a product to be made into sheets of paper. My father liked pines, he cried the day the Thracian beetles came to chew up our native trees--it was a harsh summer, a rainy rainy season, that year, long long ago-- Old men made up songs about the dead pines, and for years it was common to refer to certain senile persons as dead pines: pinus mortus. Pines. From high above the earth, as we demimen fly on certain Occasions, that big blighted forest of dead uncut loblollies looks absolutely porcupineal. Once, from high in those green and leafy trees, golden crows swept down and attacked some of my Sileni, pecking at their genitals, so we know who sent them, don't we? Dionysus drinking his amanita coffee early in the morning. Bearded, looking not at all boisterous, this Dionysus Placidus represents, in postmodern art's representations, the god of the tender ecstasis and the deity of demystification. His father is off playing a stick game somewhere, undaunted by this season's rain, hiking cheerfully in if it gets too wet or too dangerous. Dionysus combs the thin hair of his massive feline attendants. It is a Thursday night. Winds through the trees sound like some kind of dark fire, promising no relief from the heat. Dionysus does not drink anymore; that is not his mode of intoxication. On Naxos, with Arrie, he learned new methods, a whole fine way out of the strictures of common consciousness. It has nothing to do with consuming meat, like everyone thinks. It is as normal as everyday life: he wants everyone to become as filled with the numinous fires of imagination as he is, he wants those deadened by the daily dull to be resurrected into a new life somewhere not beyond the ordinary but, well, more deeply into it-- He pats the leopards down, drops his fawnskin trousers, and sleeps in the nude. ...how to affect this change in the world? How effectively to transmit compassion from great distances? We have to worry about these things. These are the sort of dealings between quote-unquote Oh- limp-us and the rest of us. Partaking of the fried bullmeat-- But Arrie works all night on her threadwork the kids go off to study stories & fables. I sit at home wishing I could allow myself one little tiny drink of sweet Thracian wine...but I know I must not. I work on the amanita coffee, it helps a lot. "Arrie, remember when we were young--at Naxos?" Silence. "Remember?" She can remember some of it, she does not say. Thin, blonde. Apollo Dreams of Worshipful Nymphettes: And Dionysus, in his dreams, sleeps interminable centuries to wake, freshened by the consumption, in sleep, of 540,000 years of time. A small dog, black with scalped hair, stands near him... Dionysus is represented here as Dionysus Placidus, Dion of Restfulness... A vaguely unsettled placidity broods over the figurine before us, here... Orpheus Dreams of Throat Cancer: And his wife wishes he'd get rid of that damnable set of strings tied tight across a wooden hickymadoojer--wastes so much time playing, when he ought to be out there advertising for a better place at the Olympian Circus--but eh, he just lies back, playing all the time, singing his disembodied songs... Animals no longer come; his wife ran them off... Ariadne Encounters Web Demons: Merely spiders, really, but they get caught in my hair they twist and turn in my hair's turns and twists, baby spiders, tiny snakelike spiders with head like cats, feel like mules, sans genitalia yet hallucinatorily perfect in formation: I must work; I must work; I must work-- Dionysus' Statement There's nothing you can do about it; people will have their intoxicants, they always have and they always will: if you think you can legislate, with your Sun-like badges and seals, an end to human intoxication...you labor under heavier delusions than any of my (admittedly) goofy maenads. No, my friend--and you are my friend, my brother--no. What is needed is this. Introduce or institute times--holidays?--when unacceptable behavior is not frowned on, when being away from one's normal consciousness is both safe and undisturbed by stigma attachments. Such, of course, is the intent of the Dionysian cult. If such institutions were made, there would be no drug problem in the Greek city-states, nor anywhere else. Apollonian Rebuttal This could not be done; the state cannot sanction even ritual intoxication, for if it does, a message is sent that is not a proper message. Lack of proper consciousness cannot be endured at any time--do we not dream, consciousnessless, nightly? Is that not enough time spent in the chaotic tumbling and jumbling? We must keep all thoughts in the bright daylight glow of reason, rationality, and common-sense (though some exceptions may be made in the case of entertainment, i.e., certain comical absurdities)--else all of us will die dabbling in darkness, unwary, conning our own minds (by means of substances quite foreign to the bodies we need to keep pure and temple-like) into beliefs unreal and feckless.
Back to The August 1995 Issue Table of Contents
Back to the Scroll
Updated Thursday, 04-Mar-2004 14:58:28 PST