To the Initiate by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
TO THE INITIATE
An autobiographical prose poem
Dionysus cries out in the streets. In the squares he raises his voice. At the entrance of the city gate he speaks:
“How long, O foolish ones, will you love being foolish? How long will sufferers continue in their suffering and refuse to hear my words of wisdom? Listen to what I have to say. I will make my thoughts known to you.”
Secrets will be revealed to you—secrets known, forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again by those who have ventured beyond the boundaries of ordinary life. As the old initiates said, and Plato set down in the Phaedo: “For many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the bacchoi.”
Many carry the staff.
Few enter the mysteries.
Fewer still return from them.
There are forces within us that civilization cannot entirely contain. We construct laws and institutions, prisons and churches, schools and bureaucracies. We learn to discipline our bodies, postpone our pleasures, regulate our desires, and make ourselves useful. We become reasonable and productive. Sometimes, somewhere along the way, we become things.
There is a fascism of everyday life—not merely the fascism of governments and armies, but what Foucault called “the fascism in us all”: the small authorities through which we police ourselves and one another, the demand that unruly bodies become orderly bodies and dangerous desires acceptable ones.
Yet desire does not disappear merely because it has been disciplined.
The body remembers.
Dionysus waits.
There is another economy moving beneath the respectable economy of ordinary life, an economy Bataille understood as expenditure as well as accumulation, excess as well as production, sacrifice as well as preservation. Life does not merely conserve itself. It spills over. It wastes itself magnificently. It destroys and creates extravagantly.
On one side stands Apollo: order, measure, form, beauty, boundary.
On the other stands Dionysus: intoxication, tragedy, ecstasy, dissolution.
Not one or the other—
but both sides now.
We have become extraordinarily good at Apollo. We measure, calculate, diagnose, classify. We build institutions to regulate institutions that regulate institutions.
And still something in us howls.
Something wants to tear off the mask, forget the clock, step outside the assigned role, and experience existence before existence has been categorized.
Nietzsche understood that hunger. The Dionysian is not simply drunkenness or disorder but the terrifying and ecstatic possibility that the boundaries separating self from world are not as permanent as they appear. The principium individuationis trembles. For an instant the isolated self loosens and the world rushes in.
Before professor and prisoner, consumer and addict, citizen and outcast, there is the animal astonished to find itself alive.
That animal wants more.
Desire has never been impressed by moderation. There is an enjoyment that exceeds ordinary pleasure, the jouissance that presses against the boundary where pleasure becomes pain and still demands more. That which brings us joy can also wound us. That which makes us suffer can become the thing we cannot imagine living without.
Dionysus will break out somewhere.
And now, initiate, I owe you the secret I promised.
Look what happened to me.
I tore off some of my chains.
Then I tore off some more.
I examined my desires and pursued them. I crossed boundaries respectable society told me should not be crossed. I sought pleasure, intoxication, sex, freedom, transcendence, escape. I imagined myself a liberated nomad exploring a thousand plateaus, decoding flows, deterritorializing everything in sight.
I wanted out.
And for a while, getting out felt remarkably like freedom.
Some of it was.
There is a warning buried in Deleuze and Guattari that I should perhaps have read more carefully. Not every dismantling liberates. There are disastrous experiments, emptied bodies, drugged bodies, bodies that travel so far toward dissolution that they lose their capacity to create anything new.
I learned this less elegantly.
Exploring is a good thing.
Falling off cliffs is a bad thing.
Unfortunately, one sometimes learns the difference while falling.
I had believed that liberation meant escaping repression. I had not understood that desire itself could become a prison. There are chains imposed upon us by society, and there are chains we manufacture ourselves. There are prisons built from concrete and steel, and others constructed from appetites that once promised to set us free.
I learned something else as well.
Apollo is not always the enemy.
Sometimes Apollo is the road home.
I write these words knowing what it means to lose nearly everything. I write them knowing imprisonment, knowing the strange journey by which rebellion becomes compulsion and the pursuit of freedom delivers a person into another form of captivity.
But I will not lie to you.
I do not regret dancing with Dionysus.
I regret injuries. I regret suffering I caused and suffering I failed to see because I was consumed by my own hunger.
I regret cliffs I mistook for roads.
But I do not regret discovering that another country exists beyond the borders of respectable consciousness.
I have been there.
It is beautiful.
It is dangerous.
Anyone who tells you only one of those things has not told you the whole truth.
How many people spend their lives standing at the edge of their own existence because someone else has taught them to fear what they desire?
How many die without ever having danced?
I cannot answer those questions for you. Nor can I tell you how far to go. That is part of the danger of initiation: nobody can hand you a map with the cliffs already marked.
I know only that I went farther than I knew how to return from.
And somehow I returned.
I have become, in some sense, a wounded healer. I do not mean that suffering automatically produces wisdom. Sometimes suffering merely wounds. A wound becomes knowledge only when we can look into it without worshipping it.
I have known desire when it opens the world and desire when it closes the world around you. I have known institutions that crush people and institutions that keep people alive. I have known order as oppression.
I have also known order as mercy.
So I no longer trust anyone who tells me simply to obey.
Nor do I trust anyone who tells me simply to transgress.
Apollo stands at one side of the gate.
Dionysus stands at the other.
“Give it form,” says Apollo.
“Set it free,” says Dionysus.
“Remember yourself.”
“Forget yourself.”
Apollo builds the cup.
Dionysus pours the wine.
So take the thyrsus if you must.
Enter the forest. Question the boundaries. Examine the desires you have been taught to fear. Dance. Love. Create. Transgress what deserves transgression. Let yourself be astonished by the fact that you exist at all.
But do not worship the wine.
I still hear Dionysus crying in the streets. After everything, I still love the sound of his voice.
And somewhere at the edge of the dance Apollo waits, holding open the gate.
Many are the thyrsus-bearers.
Few are the bacchoi.
Fewer still return from the mysteries carrying something worth giving away.
Dionysian wine.
Apollonian cup.
Not one or the other—
but both sides now.
[Editorial note: An earlier version of this piece was written during a period (2006-2008) when my exploration of Dionysian life was considerably less theoretical—and considerably more dangerous. I have returned to it years later without attempting to make my earlier self speak entirely in the language of my present Dionysian Religious Naturalism. The tension between those voices is part of the piece: this is a dispatch from someone who entered the mysteries, went farther than he knew how to return from, and lived long enough to reconsider what he found there. This prose-poem was initially posted on Doing Modernity on 11-21-2011. It was dedicated to my former student Noe Flores from Ventura College].
.png)
Comments
Post a Comment