Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (58 page)

I think we can. While we were altering the
genome of
S. cerevisiae
, it was altering ours: Our ancestors evolved the
metabolic pathways to detoxify ethyl alcohol in order to make use of its prodigious
energy (and, conceivably, some of its other benefits). Even today, not all humans
possess the required genes, and some ethnic groups, lacking the ability to produce the
necessary enzymes in their liver, have more trouble metabolizing alcohol than others.
For them, alcohol remains more toxin than intoxicant. Yet the proportion of the human
population that carries the genes to metabolize alcohol has almost certainly increased
in the time since our species has been seriously drinking,
in much the
same way that the number of humans who can digest lactose as adults increased in places,
such as Northern Europe, where cow’s milk was widely available. In both instances,
those who carried the genes needed to take advantage of the new food source produced
more offspring than those who didn’t.

Yet the changes that alcohol wrought in our
species
have not been confined to the human genome or the human liver.
S.
cerevisiae
exerted what may be an even more profound, if somewhat harder to
pinpoint, effect on the plane of human culture. Precisely where genes leave off and
culture begins (or vice versa) is never an easy line to draw, since eventually useful
cultural practices and values influence reproductive success, and so leave their mark on
our genes. And though we don’t yet know everything we would need to in order to
write a comprehensive natural history of such important human traits as sociality, or
religiosity, or the poetic imagination, when we do, there seems little doubt that
S.
cerevisiae
(along with a few of the other species that produce important human
intoxicants) will play a starring role. This little yeast has helped to make us who we
are.

Alcohol is probably the most social drug we
humans have. It takes cooperation to produce it, and it is commonly consumed in the
company of others. In ancient Sumerian depictions of beer drinking, groups of people are
shown sipping from the same gourd through straws. (Early beers would have been covered
with a thick layer of dead yeast, foam, and floating debris, so were commonly sipped
through straws.) In most cultures, anthropologists tell us, drinking alcohol has been a
social ritual, and, much like hunting large animals and cooking them over fires, the
practice helped foster social cohesion.

True, drunkenness can also lead to
aggression and antisocial behavior, which is why drinking in many cultures is carefully
regulated. But as paradoxical as this might sound, the very fact that alcohol
inspired the need for such rules is another way in which it has
contributed to our socialization.

This paradox points to one of the challenges
of generalizing about alcohol’s effect on us and our species: Almost anything you
can say about it is true, and so is its opposite. This same molecule can make people
violent or docile; amorous or indifferent; loquacious or silent; euphoric or depressed;
stimulated or sedated; eloquent or idiotic.
^*
Perhaps because it affects so
many different neural pathways, alcohol is remarkably plastic in its effects, person to
person, group to group, even culture to culture. As Griffith Edwards, the English author
of
Alcohol: The World’s Favorite Drug
, puts it, “Cultures can
differ profoundly in their modes of drunken comportment.” (A delicious
phrase!)

Edwards suggests that this plasticity could
explain why alcohol is so widely accepted as a recreational drug: “Intoxication
with this particular substance is remarkably susceptible to cultural prescriptions and
proscriptions, all the way from Bolivia to Tahiti.” When you compare alcohol with
other drugs—think of LSD or crack cocaine—it becomes clear that societies are better
able to channel and regulate the response of individuals to alcohol, making the drug
more socially useful and less threatening than some others.

So a natural history of human sociality would
have to take account of the influence of alcohol in all its complexity. As would, I
believe, a natural history of religion. “Wherever we look in the ancient or modern
world,” archaeologist Patrick McGovern has written, “we see that the
principal way to communicate with the gods or the ancestors
involves
an alcoholic beverage, whether it is the wine of the Eucharist, the beer presented to
the Sumerian goddess Ninkasi, the mead of the Vikings, or the elixir of an Amazonian or
African tribe.” Alcohol has served religion as a proof of gods’ existence, a
means of access to sacred realms, and a mode of observance, whether solemn (as in the
Eucharist) or ecstatic (as in the worship of Dionysus or, in Judaism, the celebration of
Purim). The decidedly peculiar belief that, behind or above or within the physical world
available to our senses, there exists a second world of spirits, surely must owe at
least a partial debt to the experience of intoxication. Even today, when we raise and
clink glasses in a toast, what are we really doing if not invoking a supernatural power?
That’s why a glass of water or milk just doesn’t do the trick.

In
The Varieties of Religious
Experience,
William James placed alcohol at the very center of the religious
experience. “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power
to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature,” he writes, which are
“usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says
yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the
Yes
function in man.”

James is being perhaps a bit too
unambiguously sunny here about alcohol, playing down the drug’s potential for
destructiveness. The ancient Greeks worshipped the wine god Dionysus, but always in the
full knowledge of alcohol’s paradoxical nature, how the same drug could make
angels of us or beasts, confer blessings or bring down a curse. Indeed, that paradox
goes to the very heart of the cult of Dionysus.
^*
Wine “enters the world as
a miracle,” the classicist Walter Otto wrote in
Dionysus
, but the drunken
worship of Dionysus devolves
into a kind of madness that is itself
paradoxical. For it holds within it at the same time (here he quotes Nietzsche)
“the power to generate and the power to destroy.”

Otto’s own sentences eventually fall
under the Dionysian spell: “All earthly powers are united in the god: the
generating, nourishing, intoxicating rapture; the life giving inexhaustibility; and the
tearing pain, the deathly pallor, the speechless night of having been.”
(You’ll recall that the Dionysian rapture ends badly, with the drunken revelers
finally turning on the god to tear him limb from limb and then feast on his flesh.)
“He is the mad ecstasy which hovers over every conception and birth and whose
wildness is always ready to move on to destruction and death.”

Have another?

To drink the wine of Dionysus is to dissolve
the clear sunlit distinctions of Apollonian sobriety, muddying the bright lines between
destruction and creation, matter and spirit, life and death—in fact, smearing the very
idea of distinction itself. Commanding “the powers of earth,”
Dionysus’ gravitational force pulls us back down into the primal mud. And yet: It
is precisely here in the mud that creation begins, breeding the beauty of
flowers—forms!—out of the dead ground, new life from death’s rot.

“Just like fermentation,”
I
scribble madly in the margins of my Otto. The Greeks had no scientific understanding of
the process—that would await Louis Pasteur and the discovery of the responsible
microbes—but it seems to me they deeply understood fermentation just the same. They had
crushed grapes and watched great urns of blackish must begin to seethe and breathe and
come to life, under the influence of a transformational power they ascribed to Dionysus.
And they had felt what that same force did to their minds and bodies when they drank its
creation, the way the liquid seemed to ferment them: shifting the mind’s attention
from the physical to the spiritual,
italicizing everyday experience,
proposing fresh ways of seeing the most familiar things—new metaphors. The Dionysian
magic of fermentation was at once a property of nature and of the human soul, and one
could unlock the other.

“Nature overpowering mind” is
how Nietzsche described Dionysian intoxication, but for him, as for the Greeks,
intoxication is no mere trifle or indulgence. Rather, it is the wellspring of a certain
kind of creativity. Which brings me to the third natural history in which
S.
cerevisiae
will surely loom large: the natural history of poetry.

That alcohol can inspire metaphor is
something the poets themselves have been trying to tell us for centuries. “No
poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers,” as Horace wrote
two thousand years ago. So why don’t we take the poets at their word on this?
Perhaps because, as the heirs of Descartes, we’re troubled by the idea that a
molecule manufactured by a single-celled yeast could have anything to do with something
as exalted as human consciousness and art. Matter should stay put over here; spirit over
there.

“For art to exist,” Nietzsche
wrote, “for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain
physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” One could argue that
he’s speaking metaphorically here, that intoxication is a mental state that
doesn’t necessarily depend on a molecule. Let’s grant that there are other,
non-chemical ways to achieve an altered state of consciousness.
^*
But, then, why
is it we always use
that
particular metaphor—intoxication—to describe it?
Probably because it is the model for the state of altered consciousness, or one of them.
(Dreams would be another.) And because the fastest, most direct route to altered
consciousness is an
intoxicant, the most widely available one for most
of human history being the molecule manufactured by
S. cerevisiae
.

The poet, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaks
“not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.”
Put another way, new perceptions and metaphors arise when the spirit of Dionysus breaks
Apollo’s tight grip on the rational mind. “As the traveller who has lost his
way throws the reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instincts of the animal
to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this
world.” Reins are useful, even necessary—like poetic meter—but the poet
doesn’t get very far without the animal instinct. “If in any manner we can
stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature. … This is
the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of
sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procurers of animal exhilaration.” To
the poet endeavoring to trope the prose of everyday life, a molecule like ethyl alcohol
offers a powerful tool.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a hero of the young
Emerson’s with a notorious drug habit, described a mental operation he called
“secondary imagination” that he believed was the wellspring of a certain
type of poetic creation. Secondary imagination, Coleridge wrote, is the faculty that
“dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” This notion of
imaginatively transforming the givens of ordinary perception through a process of mental
distortion is an idea that would go on to shape Romanticism in all the arts, from
abstract painting to improvisational jazz. Can Coleridge’s transforming
imagination really be understood without reference to the experience of
intoxication?
^*
Whether by means of a flowering plant or a microbe invisible to the
naked eye, letting nature overpower us is a way to break down stale perspectives and
open up fresh ones, or so the poets have always believed. We may not be able to tally it
with any precision, but can there be much doubt that the poetic imagination owes a
sizable debt to this yeast?