Dawn at Delphi. Goat bells clustering in
\nthe air like fruit and the whir of doves in flight
\nwere as loud as bees\u2019 buzz in the dried-out shrubs.
\nSo much sensation, sans revelation.
\nTwo days later in Naupoli arak
\ndrew me through antic night and into day.
\nPenitent, I threaded the sun\u2019s eye at noon,
\nstaggering dazzled up eight hundred worn
\nsteps through the shrill of cidada, squinting
\nat light warped into waves broken over
\nbleached stone slabs. Nausea unparalleled!
\nYet I clutched at the notion I might strew
\nmy tidings, which would flourish like the clumps
\nof weeds whose seeds have fallen into cracks.<\/p>\n
*** Alcohol is a toxin, as professional busybodies remind us everytime they have a chance, as if anyone with a smattering of self-consciousness were not fully aware of this, and from an early age\u00a0<\/em>….<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n What the puritans do not want us to understand and then say aloud is that the dislocation of experiences and values alcohol wreaks is also sacred in impact, wine and the gods\u00a0having been linked from ancient times.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Alcohol etches into memory simulacra of the sacramental and nepenthic gestures humans seek in their most vaulted religious and communal rituals, but this potion is readily available on a daily basis, and in portable containers. Though we seek out and pay for alcohol, we do so gratuitously, for no good reason, not because a doctor says it is good for us, as we do compulsively, addictively with the copious output of the pharmaceutical industry, but because we just don\u2019t care about what makes sense, nor what might be the right thing to do.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Dawn at Delphi. Goat bells clustering in the air like fruit and the whir of doves in flight were as loud as bees\u2019 buzz in the dried-out shrubs. So much sensation, sans revelation. Two days later in Naupoli arak drew me through antic night and into day. Penitent, I threaded the sun\u2019s eye at noon, … <\/p>\n
\nSummer of 1966, touring for the first time with my college buddy and erstwhile room-mate Howard, we made it with Eurorail passes through Italy and on down to Greece. We left the hostel early one morning to visit the oracular site at Delphi, full of beauty but sadly absent of mystery. It was only a couple of days later, after a bout\u00a0of frenetic drinking, that I had something of a vision, one wrqpped\u00a0in an awful hangover for which I paid due penitence by ascending under a July sun to the old Ottoman citadel at Naupoli. Let me quote a passage from an older blog<\/a>\u00a0on the <\/span><\/em>psychedelic<\/span> powers of alcohol:<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n