Quitting drinking

sniffson wrote:

"A Drunkard’s Sleep"

Drunkenness, whatever else might be said of it, remains the notable exploit it does if for no other fact than that, in promising rest, it on the contrary leads instead to the opposite, and hence, as those who follow its path to the bitter end know, disappointment. In staging the allure of rest, it delivers only restlessness. Does it not, in ensnaring those it does with the tantalizing promise of a peace perpetually deferred, lure the swindled into restless sleep? The snores of a drunken somnolence evince a characteristic fragility that can only reinforce the impression, for those awake in the room listening, that the rest the sleeper so coveted still only eludes him. Indeed, that sometimes we cannot wake the drunken from their sleep, far from contradicting it, in fact simply underscores the fact of the sleep’s fitfulness. Even unresponsiveness can conceal a fury. It is this fitfulness that in part explains why no one, not even the one who becomes accustomed to a life of overindulgence’s subtle charms, has ever awoken from a night of inebriated slumber really refreshed.

Is it then sheer coincidence that here, in reflecting on what drunkenness signifies, we should find ourselves led to a consideration of sleep? What might this curious affinity between sleep and drunkenness, first appearing in the guise of an apparent antagonism, exactly reveal? Could it be that drunkenness, or more precisely the restlessness of the fitful sleep it brings, maintains a secret? In short, in recognizing the conspiracy between drunkenness and sleep, are we not perhaps groping toward, no matter how absurd a suggestion it initially seems, what must ultimately amount to an issue of faith? Or better, as the case may be here, its very absence?

The first noteworthy thing about this immediate connection between drunkenness and fitful sleep is that, while evident to all, so many nonetheless disregard it, a fact which only makes it all the stranger that they should plunge themselves as they do into the former knowing full well the futility of the latter. If we are willing to take every necessary precaution against a bad night’s sleep, exercising every ritual we have been taught does so, why then is avoiding drunkenness the stark exception to the evening’s preparations? Why are there so many who, ready to do everything else within their power to avoid a bad night’s sleep, go out of their way to finally get drunk just before nodding off? That a stupor leads to a poor night’s rest hardly deters their contradictory resolve. Here thus once again, the intriguing connection between sleep and drunkenness is unmistakable even if, or rather exactly because, a night’s heavy drinking eventually impedes the function of the same sleep it induces.

That sleep and drunkenness bear an unmistakable kinship to one another is again apparent, this time all the more, when one additionally notes that drunkenness is capable of ushering in a kind of insensibility totally unrivalled by everything save dreamless sleep. This is why the sober melancholic, for instance, is as prone to drowning his sorrows in too much sleep as the drunkard is drowning his in the bottle. Sometimes, in the cry for help of a despair that has been brought to orchestral perfection, one achieves an almost continual condition of insensibility, drinking by day, then sleeping at night, the one form of escape allowing for a seamless transition to the next. If the escape of an ordinary night’s sleep is insufficient to dull the ache of living, the drunkard knows the consolation of always being able to turn to the supplementary comfort of the bottle. The bottle becomes a wayward panacea, quelling the tremors and soothing the burdens of day that a dark slumber, however satisfying, never will. Drinking, in short, becomes a way of sleep walking through one’s day.

For this reason, drunkenness itself becomes a kind of dreaming. And many times, as we know owing to the familiar experiences that have taught us so, the dream is collective. No less than the drink itself, essential to sustaining the illusion of the drunkard’s happiness is some presence that consoles by confirming, without ever challenging, its pretence. This is why nothing can be more beguiling than the drinking buddies who form a permanent fixture at the local watering hole.

The scene, one as dejecting as it is universal, of Osbert’s Drunkards in a tavern (1640) captures the profound sadness lying beneath the revellers’ protestations to the contrary. Is not the fact that none of them can stand to be alone with themselves itself sufficient evidence to confirm it? No one will deny that misery indeed loves company, but it often goes overlooked that this is especially true of the misery that dedicates itself to convincing anyone who will listen to it that it is in fact happy. Such drinkers become actors, hoping their rehearsed merriment will pass for an uninhibited joy they wish they really knew.

Thus, when one looks closely, a crack in the veneer will always appear. For despite their best efforts (the varieties of which Osbert here shows beautifully), the boisterousness of their laughs and wisecracks in no way conceals the secret of its inner sorrow. In point of fact, do the very faces of these free-spirits not unabashedly confess it? If it remains possible for one to perhaps rehearse just about anything, even for drunkards there is nevertheless no controlling, much less faking, the depths revealed in the glassy sheen of a distant stare. Far from concealing it, the eyes only accentuate the presence of the overpowering halo of sadness there to be seen. The man at the foreground’s far right, for example, sitting momentarily disconnected from the drama of the room’s surroundings, attests to the reality of a despondence his two friends are still busy silencing. In an unguarded moment of honesty that reveals its listlessness, he cannot even muster a smile.

If the fact of the man on the right’s dejectedness is so easily detectable in part because of a posture that underscores its solitude (elbow on knee, the gaze fixed on nowhere), the manner in which his two friends choose to carry themselves appears all the more striking. Take the man on the far left’s gestures which produce, in virtue of their strict reversal, the opposite image of those his solitary companion’s do. Rather than staring into oblivion, he’s devised a strategy, directing his gaze on a distraction, one all the more effective since, in this case, the object of amusement is the gaze of a friend whose own eyes are searching to do the same. In swapping the glance they do, they forget what an inventory of the room around them would impress. That only constant distraction will do to conceal from view the sadness of the situation is underscored by the man’s outstretched arm. In clutching the hem of the center figure’s shirt, is he not just clutching for anything, but in particular something that will keep him from falling into the clutches of the despair that has already overtaken the man on the right? Sometimes, when in dire straits such as these, something as unremarkable as a friend’s shirt can serve the role of a life line.

But if a diversion is to remain effective, it will only inasmuch as it is proves capable of sustaining itself. It is a production that requires constant direction, which is why there must always be someone who is willing to stage things. And who else is the conductor of our little scene but the man fittingly positioned in the middle? Standing tall, he presides over the fleeting affair with a bravado not unlike the conductor over the orchestral pit. No doubt noticing that he has lost the attention of the man to his left, and thus sensing that at any moment the man to his right might be next, he redoubles his efforts to keep the latter under his spell. It is a challenge he welcomes, because it relieves him of having to descend into the solitude that would otherwise grip him. So long as he remains the center of at least someone’s attention, he won’t be reduced to any of the unwelcome thoughts that are waiting to intrude. In the game of play-acting that results, each knows as much as the other that it is always easier to sustain an illusion with help. In a tavern as the theater stage, the most challenging of performances to carry off is the soliloquy. And so, in an unspoken cahoots rooted in the mutual recognition of their shared cause of not having to face up to the sorrow that plagues them, both of our two “happy” drunkards plays his part, reassuring the other that all is well. There is every reason to surmise, as Osbert himself intentionally but subtly suggests in the blotted faces of those relegated to the background, that this momentary spark of euphoria will shortly wane. Eventually, whether it be a minute or perhaps an hour, there will be a silence that overcomes them, just as it already has the man on the right, and our subjects will be left confronting a reality that rises into appearance as the preceding illusion correspondingly recedes. Inevitably, facts spoil any imaginary dalliance. Is this not why Osbert, in deciding to cast them in lighting akin to the spotlight of a stage, in effect emphasizes the inner theatricality of the scene unfolding before us? This, we see, as if peering through the tavern’s door before choosing to instead pass on by, is a place that is not nearly as wonderful as our drunkards pretend that it is.

Bearing this all in mind, though it is not the explicit theme of Osbert’s piece, how can seeing the state of those it depicts not inevitably evoke thoughts of a spiritual crisis? That it should is hardly surprising when one calls to mind the biblical depiction of drunkenness as a paradigmatic case of sleep, where sleep itself is used as an archetypal representation of faithlessness. The tavern, when appreciated in light of these near associations, turns out to be the scene of an unholy vigil. Waiting on exactly they know not what, the men remain lost. For in the last analysis, what are they seeking in each other’s company and that of the bottle but a rest neither ever supplies? The liquid on tap at the tavern is unable to quench a thirst that only living water could, which is why, in even denying the very existence of this thirst that afflicts them, the drunkard on the right is so inconsolable. If it is difficult enough to be tormented by a thirst that remains in principle temporary (no one likes the feeling of being parched, but it’s a comfort to know that such unpleasantness is only fleeting), so much the worse for those who suffer from a thirst of the spirit that will always remain, no matter how much liquid one drinks. The ale, they know though they dare not admit it for fear of scorn, cannot solve the predicament they are facing.

It is thus a testament to the genius of Osbert’s vision that he knew to accentuate the theatricality of the spectacle by saturating our figures in a shroud of light replicating conditions not actually realizable until centuries later with the invention of electricity. That the interior’s light, appearing precisely where it shouldn’t, highlights the theatrical insincerity of the tavern’s patrons is clear enough. But does it not indicate more still? Our first clue that it does is one we already noted, if only first in passing. Strictly speaking, the light’s shining where it does depicts what in effect remains an impossibility, given the natural surroundings of the room itself. It descends upon our figures, illuminating them in a spotlight, without any discernible candle (much less lightbulb!) to which we can attribute its source. What, then, is its source? We must conclude, if for no other reason than a lack of any equally convincing competing hypothesis, that the light, shining miraculously as it does, attests to the presence of heavenly heights. Even in the humblest and most wretched of places, Osbert has shown, the Light shines. That those who live enshrouded in darkness should fail to notice so in no way changes the fact, nor less the fact that they stand underneath it. And far from their obliviousness to it being something unexpected, that the three men should remain ignorant of its presence in fact reinforces its presence all the more. In a setting as seemingly innocuous as the lowly tavern, we see, in Osbert’s rendering of it, what on the contrary proves to be an extraordinary event owing to the biblical dimension of the facts determining it. The setting in which the drunkards move is in reality nothing short of supernatural though they know it not: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5).

That the plight confronting them should prove spiritual comes into view the moment one sees the thirst from which they suffer as a need for rest. This rest, to the extent we all have received clues of it, would consist in a kind of total contentment nowhere available on this earth, much less the tavern. This is why no amount of travelling can produce it; there is no destination, however remote or exotic, that boasts it. The rest in question is heavenly in nature, a fact clearly confirmed by the undeniable futility of trying to manufacture it in all the ways people have. In this, the drunkard is not at all the exception, but rather an exceptional reminder of it. He wants a rest that nothing, least of all the temporary relief of drunkenness, provides. If Osbert magnificently shows us that drunkards are looking to quench a thirst that no tavern can, it is only because we all suffer from a thirst that nothing on earth ever will.

A large part of daily existence, whether we realize it or not, is a struggle to bear the crushing weight of this yearning in ways that won’t in the process destroy us. The danger is heightened by the fact that, though our vices are our own, it remains the case that devils tempt us. That the life of drunkenness must sometimes invariably boil into violence attests to it. One can trace the drunkard’s behavior to a worldly anger stoking the unquenchable thirst for peace he cannot find. Every drunken fight thus might remind us, if we are honest about the powerful emotions swirling beneath the seeming banalities that incite it, that drinking all too often will render those who play with it unable to control ourselves. If strong drink will sometimes make a man rage, is it not for the fact that its occasional irruption goes to show that the rage was always already there? This is why the simplest frivolities, as Adriaen Brouwer’s Peasants Brawling over Cards (1630) illustrates, can elicit the fiercest of actions in those who, first giving into the temptation to drink, find themselves equally succumbing to whatever the occasion next presents. The trigger, Brouwer shows, could be something as silly as a game. In effect, drunkenness serves to exacerbate the carnality of a wrath, already present, it imbibes.

Who cannot notice that today, perhaps more than ever before, it is tempting to attribute the shame one experiences upon coming to after a drinking spell to the unseemliness of what one did while under the influence rather than to the inherent shamefulness of the drunkenness itself? But this is pure fantasy. Even if it must be conceded that alcoholism is a disease, the act of drunkenness itself remains a sin. Biblical vignettes, so frequently today ignored by those who think they know better, time and again demand that we not sweep aside this fact of conscience. Here we can recall the scene of Noah’s wine-induced mishap, the episode of which is chronicled in Genesis 9:21, and reproduced in Bellini’s 1515 Drunkenness of Noah below:

When Noah’s sons discover him asleep in the naked condition they do, the shame they experience has less to do with any straightforward embarrassment (admittedly great) owing to seeing their father exposed. For more to the point, the shame of the situation consists in their disappointment with a father, who, until then, had remained righteous to the point of complete spotlessness. The sordidness has less to do with the fact of the resulting nakedness as it does the drunkenness itself which brought it about. Indeed, in emphasizing the shame of the nakedness, does not the narrative only underscore the severity of the calamity by attributing it to drink, rather than some other cause? It is not that Noah bears too much in the sense of nakedness, as it is that he bears witness to the sin conditioning it. We do not know precisely how Noah himself met the dawn (the narrative does not say), but there is nothing illicit in our imagining that the grief he doubtless experienced less concerned the simple fact of being found naked (or even who might have happened to see him) than it did the fact that, at bottom, the spectacle in which he figured was simply the natural consequence of a decision to plunge himself there. Noah, in keeping with his character, would have mourned over the shamefulness of the very drunkenness itself, not so much any of the subsequent infelicities (bad as they were) to which it led.

The intrinsic ignominy in which drunkenness is enwrapped is borne witness by the fact that there is nothing more that bothers those swept up in a night’s revelry than the sudden, unwelcome reminder that not everyone does the same. The sober other, even if no words or even a passing glass is exchanged, convicts them. What makes Ham’s reaction to his father’s plight so distasteful, then, is not so much the cruelty of his choosing to ridicule someone he loves in a moment of the beloved’s weakness, but instead that he revelled in the knowledge that Noah, who was formerly spotless, was in fact perhaps really no better than he. Ham’s response to Noah’s fall remains instructive, then, if for no other reason than the work it does in revealing a truth too often unacknowledged: though it is sometimes said that everyone secretly hates a do-gooder, it’s only so because those who do already don’t like themselves.

As it stands, our analysis to present might be accused of being little more than empty moralizing. Drunkenness perhaps leads to a host of misdeeds, but that, it might be said, merely goes to show that what one does while drunk is worthy of our disapproval, though drunkenness itself deserves no similar censure. To then insist, as we shall, that drunkenness is not only a moral failing, but a spiritual one, strike’s the modern sensibility as too much. And in any case, though surely no one will deny the undeniable connection between drunkenness and anger, sexual indiscretion, or depravity (I once witnessed an elderly man in a nightclub, reduced to underwear, being led around the neck by a leash), have we gone any way toward showing that we are in fact dealing with a crisis of faith?

The words of the Apostle Paul suggest as much, even if many are sure to challenge the veracity of the connection they assert. In telling the recipients of his first letter of the power the hope of Resurrection unfurls, Paul presents the Corinthians with two stark alternatives. The first, known to all, lies outstretched before those who choose to lay their hope in nothing besides the paltry comforts which the time that leads to death will provide. This path, we read, and as all who follow it know already, is really just one of a hedonism that furiously nurses the despair of its underlying hopelessness. All there is to do is eat, and, in the end, drink: “If after the manner of men I have fought with the beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). Far from merely entailing a morning headache or drowsiness, a night’s drinking murders the spirit. In dulling its sensibility to a life that would otherwise remain intolerable, one simultaneously exhausts the fire of the inner thirsting for anything higher: “Who hath woe? Who hath sorrow? Who hath contentions? Who hath babbling? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes?” (Proverbs 23:29). Bitten by the serpent, stung by the adder, those who indulge the cravenness of drinking culture stoke a dependency, not just on a chemical substance, but a despondency from which they see no escape. This fact is borne witness by what we read in the same proverbs just a few lines later: “Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast” (Proverbs 23:34). Directionless and adrift, one is thrown back upon the same bottle that never delivers.

Since today, more than ever, people are willing to ignore any truth, however profound or incontestable it might be, when it is the Bible that declares it to them, it bears emphasizing that others have noted the vanity at the heart of worldly pleasures. On the subject of earthly delights, Seneca cast the same verdict as Paul: “if they could ever satisfy us they would have done so by now.” It being shown that drunkenness is a path to hopelessness and hence in fact spiritual numbness, it would remain to be established that there exists an alternative open to those who, first being willing to seek it, in turn prove willing to follow it. Against the possibility, a natural doubt inserts itself: is not the apparent futility of a life reduced to food and drink, a futility which the drunkard knows perhaps better than anyone, final? That Paul should choose to characterize what separates the way of hope from the path of despair as one of choosing between resigning oneself to earthly drink, or else not, is thus instructive. If nothing else, this juxtaposition he draws implies, if not the actuality, at the very least the pure conceivability, of a kind of drink’s existence besides the only one the drunkard knows.

It is this hypothesis, if one may be forgiven for putting it this way, which the words of the gospel according to John, attributed to Jesus Christ Himself, confirm. In answer to the woman at the well’s wish to no longer thirst, Christ tells of waters that give without ceasing, waters that give life, and thus the rest for which she (and no less the drunkard) yearns: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again/But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a water springing up into everlasting life” (John 3:13-14). Thirst-quenching drink, water that gives life. Waters that stir, rather than depress or stagnate, the spirit. The mere mention of these waters immediately provokes a question: if there are indeed such waters, and if such waters alone are able to quench this singular thirst that no other fountain possibly could, then why do so many reject them? Why, indeed, do so many simply deny even their very reality?

In order to meet the challenge this question poses, must we not return exactly to where we began, when we noted the curious connection between drunkenness and sleep? To taste Life’s waters, one must first awake from the slumber that otherwise forbids all access to them. To drink them would require one to give up sleeping and wake, to no longer be drunken, but to be sober-minded. In short, it would demand a faith whose very lucidity drunkenness clouds. Thus, if, just as the words in Paul’s epistle to the corinthians caution, drunkards will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven, is this not so precisely because here drunkenness ultimately signals a profound faithlessness? Yes, and without question, for what else could resorting to drunkenness conceivably signify besides what it so plainly does? Above all, the drunkard’s weariness is born of a spiritual refusal responsible for unfurling it. To go this way, to prefer the cup of drunkenness, is one those who, living a life of natural sobriety, but nonetheless never knowing faith, are as guilty as the drunkards wallowing away down at the bar in spirits and liquors. What explains this existential equivalence between the faithless who drink and those who abstain, one the worldly sober are sure to contest? What explains the extraordinary truth that it is perhaps in fact the drunkards who, in at least no longer suppressing the true extent of their despair, stand a step closer to health than those who, content in their insensibility, find no need to drown the sorrows of a hopeless heart? By way of our analysis of drunkenness, have we thus not in fact approached the border territories of a great decision?

Without a doubt we have, for at last we’ve run up against the choice between faith and disbelief. Though there are countless examples one could enlist to illustrate our point that drunkenness is biblically associated with sleep inasmuch as each in turn represents the same faithlessness, we shall restrict ourselves to just one. The setting is depicted in the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel where Christ, having commenced his earthly ministry to the cities, responds to the accusations of his critics who dispute his claim to be the Son of God. And interestingly for us, of all things, he chooses the issue of drunkenness to do so. In the case of John the Baptist, he reminds his audience, the prophet’s righteousness was indicated in part by the significance of a sobriety (indeed a total abstention from drink) the Pharisees only dismiss: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil” (Matthew 11: 18). Just as the angel of the Lord had told Zacharias would be the case, his son John “shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb” (Luke 1:15). And still, sobriety in the eyes of doubt is not enough to convince that the Baptist was who he said he was. That some accuse the Baptist of unrighteousness despite his sobriety is our first tell-tale indication that, as the gospel narrative goes on to confirm, if sobriety is not enough to establish righteousness, it is only because drunkenness turns out to involve more than intoxication, but offense. We see so when we read as we do in the very next verse that drinking can just as much be used as a convenient excuse by the unbelieving to dispute someone’s genuine righteousness. For this is exactly the strategy the Pharisees employ against Jesus: “The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” (Matthew 11:19). What concerns us, thus, is not so much the issue of whether Jesus himself was in fact a drinker (or whether on the contrary he was simply repeating the false rumours that were being circulated of him), but rather the fact that the words he is recorded as having said place drunkenness in the same context we have been saying all along it properly belongs.

Drunkenness is a question of sleep precisely insofar as it is one of unfaith. For if some, like John, are accused of unrighteousness despite their total sobriety, while others such as Jesus himself are equally accused of unrighteousness for simply having associated with those who do drink, then in hurling these accusations which refuse to see drunkenness as anything besides an issue of straightforward intoxication, the Pharisees only indict themselves, being unable to see in it the figure of faith. The narrative in Matthew reveals that righteousness, when taken in the strictest sense, is not merely a matter of whether or not one drinks. The reason it isn’t, said another way, is that drunkenness itself signifies more than a state of natural intoxication. It in fact signifies a spiritual condition of unbelief, one in principle as capable of afflicting the teetotaller as much the winebibber. Transposed from a territory defined in terms of an opposition between natural sobriety and intoxication, drunkenness is here reassigned to another, and deeper, pairing. What decides the status of John’s or Jesus’ righteousness is not their individual handlings of alcohol, but the invisible commonalty that unites them: each drinks of the same Spirit the unbelieving don’t.

More than mere intoxication, drunkenness turns out to be a supernatural stupor. It is thus in this sense, and it alone, that the natural drunkard is said to sleep. To see why, one only has to see that the fact explaining it holds just as well of the one who, perhaps doing well by not drinking alcohol to excess, nevertheless does comparatively worse by abstaining from Holy waters. In the end, nothing of essential consequence separates the drunkard from the sober unbeliever, for both sleep the same sleep of faithlessness.

The unmistakable but mysterious connection between drunkenness and sleep, evident to all, as we noted at the outset, therefore conceals within itself an incredible secret, one of literally biblical proportions. For in the last analysis, drunkenness signifies a set of stakes decided, not simply according to whether one lives indulging strong drink or else as a teetotaller, but by more. Hence, in the end, true sobriety signals nothing less than salvation itself: will one prefer the restlessness of sleep, or the rest of faith’s great awakening?

whujhwqtu wrote:

sniffson wrote:

"A Drunkard’s Sleep"

Drunkenness, whatever else might be said of it, remains the notable exploit it does if for no other fact than that, in promising rest, it on the contrary leads instead to the opposite, and hence, as those who follow its path to the bitter end know, disappointment. In staging the allure of rest, it delivers only restlessness. Does it not, in ensnaring those it does with the tantalizing promise of a peace perpetually deferred, lure the swindled into restless sleep? The snores of a drunken somnolence evince a characteristic fragility that can only reinforce the impression, for those awake in the room listening, that the rest the sleeper so coveted still only eludes him. Indeed, that sometimes we cannot wake the drunken from their sleep, far from contradicting it, in fact simply underscores the fact of the sleep’s fitfulness. Even unresponsiveness can conceal a fury. It is this fitfulness that in part explains why no one, not even the one who becomes accustomed to a life of overindulgence’s subtle charms, has ever awoken from a night of inebriated slumber really refreshed.

Is it then sheer coincidence that here, in reflecting on what drunkenness signifies, we should find ourselves led to a consideration of sleep? What might this curious affinity between sleep and drunkenness, first appearing in the guise of an apparent antagonism, exactly reveal? Could it be that drunkenness, or more precisely the restlessness of the fitful sleep it brings, maintains a secret? In short, in recognizing the conspiracy between drunkenness and sleep, are we not perhaps groping toward, no matter how absurd a suggestion it initially seems, what must ultimately amount to an issue of faith? Or better, as the case may be here, its very absence?

The first noteworthy thing about this immediate connection between drunkenness and fitful sleep is that, while evident to all, so many nonetheless disregard it, a fact which only makes it all the stranger that they should plunge themselves as they do into the former knowing full well the futility of the latter. If we are willing to take every necessary precaution against a bad night’s sleep, exercising every ritual we have been taught does so, why then is avoiding drunkenness the stark exception to the evening’s preparations? Why are there so many who, ready to do everything else within their power to avoid a bad night’s sleep, go out of their way to finally get drunk just before nodding off? That a stupor leads to a poor night’s rest hardly deters their contradictory resolve. Here thus once again, the intriguing connection between sleep and drunkenness is unmistakable even if, or rather exactly because, a night’s heavy drinking eventually impedes the function of the same sleep it induces.

That sleep and drunkenness bear an unmistakable kinship to one another is again apparent, this time all the more, when one additionally notes that drunkenness is capable of ushering in a kind of insensibility totally unrivalled by everything save dreamless sleep. This is why the sober melancholic, for instance, is as prone to drowning his sorrows in too much sleep as the drunkard is drowning his in the bottle. Sometimes, in the cry for help of a despair that has been brought to orchestral perfection, one achieves an almost continual condition of insensibility, drinking by day, then sleeping at night, the one form of escape allowing for a seamless transition to the next. If the escape of an ordinary night’s sleep is insufficient to dull the ache of living, the drunkard knows the consolation of always being able to turn to the supplementary comfort of the bottle. The bottle becomes a wayward panacea, quelling the tremors and soothing the burdens of day that a dark slumber, however satisfying, never will. Drinking, in short, becomes a way of sleep walking through one’s day.

For this reason, drunkenness itself becomes a kind of dreaming. And many times, as we know owing to the familiar experiences that have taught us so, the dream is collective. No less than the drink itself, essential to sustaining the illusion of the drunkard’s happiness is some presence that consoles by confirming, without ever challenging, its pretence. This is why nothing can be more beguiling than the drinking buddies who form a permanent fixture at the local watering hole.

The scene, one as dejecting as it is universal, of Osbert’s Drunkards in a tavern (1640) captures the profound sadness lying beneath the revellers’ protestations to the contrary. Is not the fact that none of them can stand to be alone with themselves itself sufficient evidence to confirm it? No one will deny that misery indeed loves company, but it often goes overlooked that this is especially true of the misery that dedicates itself to convincing anyone who will listen to it that it is in fact happy. Such drinkers become actors, hoping their rehearsed merriment will pass for an uninhibited joy they wish they really knew.

Thus, when one looks closely, a crack in the veneer will always appear. For despite their best efforts (the varieties of which Osbert here shows beautifully), the boisterousness of their laughs and wisecracks in no way conceals the secret of its inner sorrow. In point of fact, do the very faces of these free-spirits not unabashedly confess it? If it remains possible for one to perhaps rehearse just about anything, even for drunkards there is nevertheless no controlling, much less faking, the depths revealed in the glassy sheen of a distant stare. Far from concealing it, the eyes only accentuate the presence of the overpowering halo of sadness there to be seen. The man at the foreground’s far right, for example, sitting momentarily disconnected from the drama of the room’s surroundings, attests to the reality of a despondence his two friends are still busy silencing. In an unguarded moment of honesty that reveals its listlessness, he cannot even muster a smile.

If the fact of the man on the right’s dejectedness is so easily detectable in part because of a posture that underscores its solitude (elbow on knee, the gaze fixed on nowhere), the manner in which his two friends choose to carry themselves appears all the more striking. Take the man on the far left’s gestures which produce, in virtue of their strict reversal, the opposite image of those his solitary companion’s do. Rather than staring into oblivion, he’s devised a strategy, directing his gaze on a distraction, one all the more effective since, in this case, the object of amusement is the gaze of a friend whose own eyes are searching to do the same. In swapping the glance they do, they forget what an inventory of the room around them would impress. That only constant distraction will do to conceal from view the sadness of the situation is underscored by the man’s outstretched arm. In clutching the hem of the center figure’s shirt, is he not just clutching for anything, but in particular something that will keep him from falling into the clutches of the despair that has already overtaken the man on the right? Sometimes, when in dire straits such as these, something as unremarkable as a friend’s shirt can serve the role of a life line.

But if a diversion is to remain effective, it will only inasmuch as it is proves capable of sustaining itself. It is a production that requires constant direction, which is why there must always be someone who is willing to stage things. And who else is the conductor of our little scene but the man fittingly positioned in the middle? Standing tall, he presides over the fleeting affair with a bravado not unlike the conductor over the orchestral pit. No doubt noticing that he has lost the attention of the man to his left, and thus sensing that at any moment the man to his right might be next, he redoubles his efforts to keep the latter under his spell. It is a challenge he welcomes, because it relieves him of having to descend into the solitude that would otherwise grip him. So long as he remains the center of at least someone’s attention, he won’t be reduced to any of the unwelcome thoughts that are waiting to intrude. In the game of play-acting that results, each knows as much as the other that it is always easier to sustain an illusion with help. In a tavern as the theater stage, the most challenging of performances to carry off is the soliloquy. And so, in an unspoken cahoots rooted in the mutual recognition of their shared cause of not having to face up to the sorrow that plagues them, both of our two “happy” drunkards plays his part, reassuring the other that all is well. There is every reason to surmise, as Osbert himself intentionally but subtly suggests in the blotted faces of those relegated to the background, that this momentary spark of euphoria will shortly wane. Eventually, whether it be a minute or perhaps an hour, there will be a silence that overcomes them, just as it already has the man on the right, and our subjects will be left confronting a reality that rises into appearance as the preceding illusion correspondingly recedes. Inevitably, facts spoil any imaginary dalliance. Is this not why Osbert, in deciding to cast them in lighting akin to the spotlight of a stage, in effect emphasizes the inner theatricality of the scene unfolding before us? This, we see, as if peering through the tavern’s door before choosing to instead pass on by, is a place that is not nearly as wonderful as our drunkards pretend that it is.

Bearing this all in mind, though it is not the explicit theme of Osbert’s piece, how can seeing the state of those it depicts not inevitably evoke thoughts of a spiritual crisis? That it should is hardly surprising when one calls to mind the biblical depiction of drunkenness as a paradigmatic case of sleep, where sleep itself is used as an archetypal representation of faithlessness. The tavern, when appreciated in light of these near associations, turns out to be the scene of an unholy vigil. Waiting on exactly they know not what, the men remain lost. For in the last analysis, what are they seeking in each other’s company and that of the bottle but a rest neither ever supplies? The liquid on tap at the tavern is unable to quench a thirst that only living water could, which is why, in even denying the very existence of this thirst that afflicts them, the drunkard on the right is so inconsolable. If it is difficult enough to be tormented by a thirst that remains in principle temporary (no one likes the feeling of being parched, but it’s a comfort to know that such unpleasantness is only fleeting), so much the worse for those who suffer from a thirst of the spirit that will always remain, no matter how much liquid one drinks. The ale, they know though they dare not admit it for fear of scorn, cannot solve the predicament they are facing.

It is thus a testament to the genius of Osbert’s vision that he knew to accentuate the theatricality of the spectacle by saturating our figures in a shroud of light replicating conditions not actually realizable until centuries later with the invention of electricity. That the interior’s light, appearing precisely where it shouldn’t, highlights the theatrical insincerity of the tavern’s patrons is clear enough. But does it not indicate more still? Our first clue that it does is one we already noted, if only first in passing. Strictly speaking, the light’s shining where it does depicts what in effect remains an impossibility, given the natural surroundings of the room itself. It descends upon our figures, illuminating them in a spotlight, without any discernible candle (much less lightbulb!) to which we can attribute its source. What, then, is its source? We must conclude, if for no other reason than a lack of any equally convincing competing hypothesis, that the light, shining miraculously as it does, attests to the presence of heavenly heights. Even in the humblest and most wretched of places, Osbert has shown, the Light shines. That those who live enshrouded in darkness should fail to notice so in no way changes the fact, nor less the fact that they stand underneath it. And far from their obliviousness to it being something unexpected, that the three men should remain ignorant of its presence in fact reinforces its presence all the more. In a setting as seemingly innocuous as the lowly tavern, we see, in Osbert’s rendering of it, what on the contrary proves to be an extraordinary event owing to the biblical dimension of the facts determining it. The setting in which the drunkards move is in reality nothing short of supernatural though they know it not: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5).

That the plight confronting them should prove spiritual comes into view the moment one sees the thirst from which they suffer as a need for rest. This rest, to the extent we all have received clues of it, would consist in a kind of total contentment nowhere available on this earth, much less the tavern. This is why no amount of travelling can produce it; there is no destination, however remote or exotic, that boasts it. The rest in question is heavenly in nature, a fact clearly confirmed by the undeniable futility of trying to manufacture it in all the ways people have. In this, the drunkard is not at all the exception, but rather an exceptional reminder of it. He wants a rest that nothing, least of all the temporary relief of drunkenness, provides. If Osbert magnificently shows us that drunkards are looking to quench a thirst that no tavern can, it is only because we all suffer from a thirst that nothing on earth ever will.

A large part of daily existence, whether we realize it or not, is a struggle to bear the crushing weight of this yearning in ways that won’t in the process destroy us. The danger is heightened by the fact that, though our vices are our own, it remains the case that devils tempt us. That the life of drunkenness must sometimes invariably boil into violence attests to it. One can trace the drunkard’s behavior to a worldly anger stoking the unquenchable thirst for peace he cannot find. Every drunken fight thus might remind us, if we are honest about the powerful emotions swirling beneath the seeming banalities that incite it, that drinking all too often will render those who play with it unable to control ourselves. If strong drink will sometimes make a man rage, is it not for the fact that its occasional irruption goes to show that the rage was always already there? This is why the simplest frivolities, as Adriaen Brouwer’s Peasants Brawling over Cards (1630) illustrates, can elicit the fiercest of actions in those who, first giving into the temptation to drink, find themselves equally succumbing to whatever the occasion next presents. The trigger, Brouwer shows, could be something as silly as a game. In effect, drunkenness serves to exacerbate the carnality of a wrath, already present, it imbibes.

Who cannot notice that today, perhaps more than ever before, it is tempting to attribute the shame one experiences upon coming to after a drinking spell to the unseemliness of what one did while under the influence rather than to the inherent shamefulness of the drunkenness itself? But this is pure fantasy. Even if it must be conceded that alcoholism is a disease, the act of drunkenness itself remains a sin. Biblical vignettes, so frequently today ignored by those who think they know better, time and again demand that we not sweep aside this fact of conscience. Here we can recall the scene of Noah’s wine-induced mishap, the episode of which is chronicled in Genesis 9:21, and reproduced in Bellini’s 1515 Drunkenness of Noah below:

When Noah’s sons discover him asleep in the naked condition they do, the shame they experience has less to do with any straightforward embarrassment (admittedly great) owing to seeing their father exposed. For more to the point, the shame of the situation consists in their disappointment with a father, who, until then, had remained righteous to the point of complete spotlessness. The sordidness has less to do with the fact of the resulting nakedness as it does the drunkenness itself which brought it about. Indeed, in emphasizing the shame of the nakedness, does not the narrative only underscore the severity of the calamity by attributing it to drink, rather than some other cause? It is not that Noah bears too much in the sense of nakedness, as it is that he bears witness to the sin conditioning it. We do not know precisely how Noah himself met the dawn (the narrative does not say), but there is nothing illicit in our imagining that the grief he doubtless experienced less concerned the simple fact of being found naked (or even who might have happened to see him) than it did the fact that, at bottom, the spectacle in which he figured was simply the natural consequence of a decision to plunge himself there. Noah, in keeping with his character, would have mourned over the shamefulness of the very drunkenness itself, not so much any of the subsequent infelicities (bad as they were) to which it led.

The intrinsic ignominy in which drunkenness is enwrapped is borne witness by the fact that there is nothing more that bothers those swept up in a night’s revelry than the sudden, unwelcome reminder that not everyone does the same. The sober other, even if no words or even a passing glass is exchanged, convicts them. What makes Ham’s reaction to his father’s plight so distasteful, then, is not so much the cruelty of his choosing to ridicule someone he loves in a moment of the beloved’s weakness, but instead that he revelled in the knowledge that Noah, who was formerly spotless, was in fact perhaps really no better than he. Ham’s response to Noah’s fall remains instructive, then, if for no other reason than the work it does in revealing a truth too often unacknowledged: though it is sometimes said that everyone secretly hates a do-gooder, it’s only so because those who do already don’t like themselves.

As it stands, our analysis to present might be accused of being little more than empty moralizing. Drunkenness perhaps leads to a host of misdeeds, but that, it might be said, merely goes to show that what one does while drunk is worthy of our disapproval, though drunkenness itself deserves no similar censure. To then insist, as we shall, that drunkenness is not only a moral failing, but a spiritual one, strike’s the modern sensibility as too much. And in any case, though surely no one will deny the undeniable connection between drunkenness and anger, sexual indiscretion, or depravity (I once witnessed an elderly man in a nightclub, reduced to underwear, being led around the neck by a leash), have we gone any way toward showing that we are in fact dealing with a crisis of faith?

The words of the Apostle Paul suggest as much, even if many are sure to challenge the veracity of the connection they assert. In telling the recipients of his first letter of the power the hope of Resurrection unfurls, Paul presents the Corinthians with two stark alternatives. The first, known to all, lies outstretched before those who choose to lay their hope in nothing besides the paltry comforts which the time that leads to death will provide. This path, we read, and as all who follow it know already, is really just one of a hedonism that furiously nurses the despair of its underlying hopelessness. All there is to do is eat, and, in the end, drink: “If after the manner of men I have fought with the beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? Let us eat and drink; for to morrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). Far from merely entailing a morning headache or drowsiness, a night’s drinking murders the spirit. In dulling its sensibility to a life that would otherwise remain intolerable, one simultaneously exhausts the fire of the inner thirsting for anything higher: “Who hath woe? Who hath sorrow? Who hath contentions? Who hath babbling? Who hath wounds without cause? Who hath redness of eyes?” (Proverbs 23:29). Bitten by the serpent, stung by the adder, those who indulge the cravenness of drinking culture stoke a dependency, not just on a chemical substance, but a despondency from which they see no escape. This fact is borne witness by what we read in the same proverbs just a few lines later: “Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast” (Proverbs 23:34). Directionless and adrift, one is thrown back upon the same bottle that never delivers.

Since today, more than ever, people are willing to ignore any truth, however profound or incontestable it might be, when it is the Bible that declares it to them, it bears emphasizing that others have noted the vanity at the heart of worldly pleasures. On the subject of earthly delights, Seneca cast the same verdict as Paul: “if they could ever satisfy us they would have done so by now.” It being shown that drunkenness is a path to hopelessness and hence in fact spiritual numbness, it would remain to be established that there exists an alternative open to those who, first being willing to seek it, in turn prove willing to follow it. Against the possibility, a natural doubt inserts itself: is not the apparent futility of a life reduced to food and drink, a futility which the drunkard knows perhaps better than anyone, final? That Paul should choose to characterize what separates the way of hope from the path of despair as one of choosing between resigning oneself to earthly drink, or else not, is thus instructive. If nothing else, this juxtaposition he draws implies, if not the actuality, at the very least the pure conceivability, of a kind of drink’s existence besides the only one the drunkard knows.

It is this hypothesis, if one may be forgiven for putting it this way, which the words of the gospel according to John, attributed to Jesus Christ Himself, confirm. In answer to the woman at the well’s wish to no longer thirst, Christ tells of waters that give without ceasing, waters that give life, and thus the rest for which she (and no less the drunkard) yearns: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again/But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a water springing up into everlasting life” (John 3:13-14). Thirst-quenching drink, water that gives life. Waters that stir, rather than depress or stagnate, the spirit. The mere mention of these waters immediately provokes a question: if there are indeed such waters, and if such waters alone are able to quench this singular thirst that no other fountain possibly could, then why do so many reject them? Why, indeed, do so many simply deny even their very reality?

In order to meet the challenge this question poses, must we not return exactly to where we began, when we noted the curious connection between drunkenness and sleep? To taste Life’s waters, one must first awake from the slumber that otherwise forbids all access to them. To drink them would require one to give up sleeping and wake, to no longer be drunken, but to be sober-minded. In short, it would demand a faith whose very lucidity drunkenness clouds. Thus, if, just as the words in Paul’s epistle to the corinthians caution, drunkards will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven, is this not so precisely because here drunkenness ultimately signals a profound faithlessness? Yes, and without question, for what else could resorting to drunkenness conceivably signify besides what it so plainly does? Above all, the drunkard’s weariness is born of a spiritual refusal responsible for unfurling it. To go this way, to prefer the cup of drunkenness, is one those who, living a life of natural sobriety, but nonetheless never knowing faith, are as guilty as the drunkards wallowing away down at the bar in spirits and liquors. What explains this existential equivalence between the faithless who drink and those who abstain, one the worldly sober are sure to contest? What explains the extraordinary truth that it is perhaps in fact the drunkards who, in at least no longer suppressing the true extent of their despair, stand a step closer to health than those who, content in their insensibility, find no need to drown the sorrows of a hopeless heart? By way of our analysis of drunkenness, have we thus not in fact approached the border territories of a great decision?

Without a doubt we have, for at last we’ve run up against the choice between faith and disbelief. Though there are countless examples one could enlist to illustrate our point that drunkenness is biblically associated with sleep inasmuch as each in turn represents the same faithlessness, we shall restrict ourselves to just one. The setting is depicted in the eleventh chapter of Matthew’s Gospel where Christ, having commenced his earthly ministry to the cities, responds to the accusations of his critics who dispute his claim to be the Son of God. And interestingly for us, of all things, he chooses the issue of drunkenness to do so. In the case of John the Baptist, he reminds his audience, the prophet’s righteousness was indicated in part by the significance of a sobriety (indeed a total abstention from drink) the Pharisees only dismiss: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil” (Matthew 11: 18). Just as the angel of the Lord had told Zacharias would be the case, his son John “shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb” (Luke 1:15). And still, sobriety in the eyes of doubt is not enough to convince that the Baptist was who he said he was. That some accuse the Baptist of unrighteousness despite his sobriety is our first tell-tale indication that, as the gospel narrative goes on to confirm, if sobriety is not enough to establish righteousness, it is only because drunkenness turns out to involve more than intoxication, but offense. We see so when we read as we do in the very next verse that drinking can just as much be used as a convenient excuse by the unbelieving to dispute someone’s genuine righteousness. For this is exactly the strategy the Pharisees employ against Jesus: “The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.” (Matthew 11:19). What concerns us, thus, is not so much the issue of whether Jesus himself was in fact a drinker (or whether on the contrary he was simply repeating the false rumours that were being circulated of him), but rather the fact that the words he is recorded as having said place drunkenness in the same context we have been saying all along it properly belongs.

Drunkenness is a question of sleep precisely insofar as it is one of unfaith. For if some, like John, are accused of unrighteousness despite their total sobriety, while others such as Jesus himself are equally accused of unrighteousness for simply having associated with those who do drink, then in hurling these accusations which refuse to see drunkenness as anything besides an issue of straightforward intoxication, the Pharisees only indict themselves, being unable to see in it the figure of faith. The narrative in Matthew reveals that righteousness, when taken in the strictest sense, is not merely a matter of whether or not one drinks. The reason it isn’t, said another way, is that drunkenness itself signifies more than a state of natural intoxication. It in fact signifies a spiritual condition of unbelief, one in principle as capable of afflicting the teetotaller as much the winebibber. Transposed from a territory defined in terms of an opposition between natural sobriety and intoxication, drunkenness is here reassigned to another, and deeper, pairing. What decides the status of John’s or Jesus’ righteousness is not their individual handlings of alcohol, but the invisible commonalty that unites them: each drinks of the same Spirit the unbelieving don’t.

More than mere intoxication, drunkenness turns out to be a supernatural stupor. It is thus in this sense, and it alone, that the natural drunkard is said to sleep. To see why, one only has to see that the fact explaining it holds just as well of the one who, perhaps doing well by not drinking alcohol to excess, nevertheless does comparatively worse by abstaining from Holy waters. In the end, nothing of essential consequence separates the drunkard from the sober unbeliever, for both sleep the same sleep of faithlessness.

The unmistakable but mysterious connection between drunkenness and sleep, evident to all, as we noted at the outset, therefore conceals within itself an incredible secret, one of literally biblical proportions. For in the last analysis, drunkenness signifies a set of stakes decided, not simply according to whether one lives indulging strong drink or else as a teetotaller, but by more. Hence, in the end, true sobriety signals nothing less than salvation itself: will one prefer the restlessness of sleep, or the rest of faith’s great awakening?

i should have known that when this thing started droning on repeating itself, the bible verses were right round the corner...

Repetition is good wrote:

I disagree. The notion that if it was good for you, then you could be satisfied i.e., not need to keep repeating is stupid. How about air? Water? They are both earthly delights and you need to repeat that all day, every day. I've never been satisfied enough to think I don't need to breathe air ever again. I love that sh*t.

Some people have addiction problems, they shouldn't drink. It's a super easy concept that doesn't require supernatural intervention. Addiction is hard, quitting is hard, but complicating it with all your crap is ridiculous. Just man up and accept reality and stop being pathetic and weak. If you are an alcoholic so you can't drink and can never drink again. There isn't anything else you need to know or focus on.

I'm going to dedicate my whole weekend to earthly delights - running, breathing, drinking water, sex, sleeping...so many delights, so little time.