DIONYSUS
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The juice of the vine is his, and likewise the many juices of life. 'Sovereign of all that is moist',
Dionysus himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us.
Clement of Alexandria speaks [in malice] of Dionyus as choiropsales, 'the one who touches the vulva', the one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre.
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Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together,
but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies.
Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will leave their looms
and dash off after him into the mountains.
~~~~~~~
Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away;
then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things,
the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.
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Roberto Calasso from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The juice of the vine is his, and likewise the many juices of life. 'Sovereign of all that is moist',
Dionysus himself is liquid, a stream that surrounds us.
Clement of Alexandria speaks [in malice] of Dionyus as choiropsales, 'the one who touches the vulva', the one whose fingers could make it vibrate like the strings of a lyre.
~~~~~~~
Dionysus is not a useful god who helps weave or knot things together,
but a god who loosens and unties. The weavers are his enemies.
Yet there comes a moment when the weavers will leave their looms
and dash off after him into the mountains.
~~~~~~~
Dionysus is the river we hear flowing by in the distance, an incessant booming from far away;
then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things,
the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roberto Calasso from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
