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Nov 27, 2022Liked by Justin Smith-Ruiu

Really liked this. Thanks! As a Muslim I've never drunk so I haven't got much to say here but İ like what someone said: Muslims are outwardly sober, inwardly drunk, the exact opposite of modern westerners.

Was hoping you'd have written on intoxication ('love is the wine').

What you say about the second stage of life reminded me of Rohr's Falling Upwards (a bit new agey but interesting..similar, İ think, to the idea in the Muslim tradition that at the age of 40 you need to be spiritually mature and put away childish things). This constant craving for "experience" is surely a sign of boredom or childishness?

Lovely- if that's the right word- thoughts on the preparation for death. To "die before you die" is, i think, being open to the world in a different way- not a foreclosing of possibilities or being a 'ghost'.

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Holy jumping Jehoshaphat ! I always read you with great attention. Most of the time, I am looking forward to what you will teach me. Sometimes, I confess, I find it difficult to follow you, sometimes I get a little bored. Most of the time it is a pleasure. But you have never depressed me. Now, you did. I am down. You spit out the mussels broth in Ostende ! Poor you.

I hope your sober humor will win me back soon.

"Drinking is, in the end, a vain effort to break out of all the immanence and predictability I have attempted to describe, and to secure a bit of transcendence." Bullshit ! Never in a million years. I don't give a damn about transcendence, no more than my first diaper. Transcendence sucks. There is something morbid in the fundamentalist condemnation of all exploration or even abandon into altered states of consciousness. Absolutes are morbid. To abstain imperatively from what, in the name of what ? According to what morality? I remain firmly in solidarity with brothers Noah, Omar Khayyām, Rabelais, Baudelaire and Henri Michaux et al. In this kind of field, like the Greeks, I do not condemn the use, I condemn the excess, in the name of epimeleia heautou.

Life also grows off limits, in the margins. Well worth exploring.

On the other hand, I am fully behind you in kicking the stupid bucket of stupid bucket lists.

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I admire your pushing away from the brink of several ideas, but not so far as to no longer see the view. I had the fortune to experience several really unpleasant (nothing permanent or life-threatening) drunks early in life and have never felt the urge to get high though I enjoy wine with meals and a couple of beers with friends at a bar. Ditto, "experiences," but not to find awe and transcendence, but feel a little closer to the civilization or the God that created the genitors.

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Thank you for sharing such a personal disclosure. Congratulations on your two years of sobriety. It’s important. I’ve seen my portion of good people loosing their battles with addiction. As it’s a physical illness with clear physiological mechanisms, denial of the problem or self-blame is never permissible. In cultural spaces that sneak alcohol in with a million innocent little nothings, zero tolerance is the only path, once addiction has taken hold. So it’s great to see you with such strong resolve and self-knowledge, and great to see your will-power with those drunken mussels. Your social surrounding must give you its full support. It’s nothing to make light of. One drop is all it takes to end up in the middle of a room full of empty bottles, until someone finds you cold. So hold strong, and disregard any plea for the culturally accepted poison.

This said, I’m not making a case for pleasureless asceticism. Medical cautions aside, I believe very much in Spinoza’s pleasure principle. I don’t believe joy is to be found in “Thou shalt visit 100 destinations before thy demise” or any of its infinite kindred incarnations. After all, received religion of any hue has only one essential purpose: power. The capitalist commandments are no better suited for individual happiness than those of the Old Testament. But I do believe in the joy of living: before and after the “Midlife Crisis” - especially as I deeply doubt the reality/ existence of the “Midlife Crisis” beyond modern cultural coinage, just as you noted regards the concept of race in early modern philosophy and science.

The joys of soberly seeing & embracing the world, from Romantic love of nature, to the (romantic) love of another (consciousness), to the endless surprises of beauty that take your breath away - in all things large and small - in things that we experience via our senses, emotions, or via our reason (or all three at once), are so intoxicating already that I can’t imagine wanting anything more. There are moments in life where you think: this is so good, this alone already makes life worthwhile. One of those moments was when I was flying my paraglider on a brilliant summer day over the Alps for hours, at 4,000 meters above sea level, looking at the panorama below me and the small buds of thermal clouds I was flirting with above. A falcon and a buzzard soared in the rising column of warm air with me, and sunshine shimmered like crest of waves over emerald patches of vegetation clinging to grey and white outcrops of the northern Alps. I felt so minuscule and creaturely up there, full of awe, admiration, and a thrill of vitality that is the deep knowledge of the ephemeral boundedness of life. But oh what a moment! And many such moments still, not always so grand, but no less powerful. It could be an intoxicating smell, a harmonic progression, a flash of color on the wings of an insect, a taste that encapsulates the mineral language of the terroir (in fruits, in tea, in milk, in foraged delights). It could be flashes of truth and beauty in poetry, philosophy, literature, science, and art. It could be the generosity of heart or beauty of mind in people you encounter or read, living, dead, or fictional. It could be finding the love of your life. All these experiences, however fleeting or lasting, make it worthwhile to live and cherish the moment in time we are conscious of being.

Who knows what was before or what will come afterwards. But the moments I have to be me, I want to experience unadulterated, unpunched, pure, and straight. Fermentation can come after I am no more. There will be an eternity beyond for altered states of consciousness, me thinks? Breathing through leaves, traveling down rivers, thinking inside a whale, shooting with the stars. No less than infinity itself, actually. Mind-boggling!

Have a great start into year three of unpunched experience. It’s so full and over brimming , who needs alchemy? Enjoy & all the best!

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I appreciate the depth and candor of your writing. Thank you for telling it like it is

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Mushrooms are far better for attaining transcendence and far less likely to damage your liver.

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Thanks Justin. I know exactly what you mean! I wish I could stop drinking. But I convinced myself that I’m already dead. Somehow “to drink and leave the world unseen” was the road I chose. I keep going back to Ian Hacking. It’s a way for a person to be. I’ve slept on the beach for the last two nights. My partner has locked me out. I know I’m a horrible person but it feels glorious to be alone, drunk, with the strange vertigo of death nearby. A 40 year old woman with a child at home. But I can’t stop. I can’t change. It feels bigger than me and I don’t know what to do. The people in the water, and jogging and with dogs. I can’t imagine doing what they do. I wish I was a real person but only alcohol brings me to life.

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I did get a bit of transcendence out of a glass of wine once. A glass or two, and maybe some other substances; who knows? I was in my kitchen drinking wine while a party was going on in the apartment, and I looked at a wall clock, and I realized I could stop the clock by willing it to stop. And I did. Someone wandered by and I told him about it and how I had done it. "You shouldn't do that," he said, "or time might start to run backwards, and you won't know how to handle it."

"All right", I said, and I let the clock run. I looked out the window and I could see the bulbous Moon hanging over the Lower East Side. "I could melt the Moon," I said. I started to do so, but my killjoy companion told me not to. "You don't think you need the Moon, but other people do," he said. "Leave it alone."

I looked around at the various people wandering about, and it was clear that they did, indeed, need the Moon. So I refrained from melting it.

I staggered out of the party and into the street and down to the river. The Moon was there. "Okay for now", I told the Moon. "Okay for now."

Today I live just on the other side of that very river. The Moon is still okay but I do drink a little wine now and then.

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Perfect. I swoon.

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Well, this wasn't what I'd call an uplifting read, and I am personally very grateful for social drinking and terroir and learning about wines from all over France and Italy since I've lived here. (My personal favorite wine region is the Piedmonte in Italy.) But your decision to stop drinking all alcohol or even eating anything that once had wine cooked in it is one you've embraced and I hope, on the other side of post-severance depression, you will be happier for it.

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Thanks so much for that. I keep wondering why "moral" (and "formal") keeps being written, particularly outside of philosophical discourse—but also in it. Sometimes, or often (to me, anyway), it seems to be a tautology or pleonasm, as if the author using it were not sure of being human, or of being about to be taken seriously: this adjective will do the trick.

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Why "morally certain" and not "certain"?

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The contemporary use of "experience" is also something that has irked me for a while, although I haven't been able to articulate why. Thanks for that. Would also love to read more about how "the meaning of life...is a preparation for death, and...the meaning of death...is the all-surrounding horizon of a mortal life."

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Wonderful piece. Thank you for this.

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Excellent, especially the brutal and accurate takedown of the "bucket list.'

https://stangoff.medium.com/quibble-fde9e7d9f32f

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Nov 27, 2022·edited Nov 28, 2022

I survived a severe case of food poisoning this week - I have just now had my first normal, albeit bland, meal *5 days* after eating the Fateful Pintxo. Yes, life is fucking good and a goddamned miracle. I won’t miss it when I’m dead but I missed it a LOT while I thought I was dying.

So glad you gave up the ’good life’. We get to read wonderful pieces like this because of it. Btw I think it’s perfectly sensible to not have eaten the fermented pomegranate. Not sure about the wine broth though!

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