Dionysos.
"Now you have died, and now you are born, three times blessed, on this
very day. Say to Persephone that it is Bakchios himself that has
redeemed you."
Tomorrow is looming.
I don't want to go at all.
I feel intimidated.
When I think about it I see a cave hidden inside a warehouse in a dingy Midland's street, filled with implements of torture.
Why should I go.
Why have I done this to myself?
At this moment I am seeing this whole bondage thing as deeply repellent. It is a total inversion of feminism. A ritual of un-becoming, of undoing, of loss of self...of making myself into a thing; empty of myself.
But I am first and foremost uninterested in politics and the objective patten, or what the world says; my subject is subjectivity itself: how I feel and what it means to me. The collective dreams and nightmares of my culture wash around me, images and feelings clash and stop making sense.
I seek only the gold.
The understanding being alive gives.
Dionysos tastes of fear, which is proper. His cult was always associated with the collective mind, the submerging of ones word-making/symbol-using self, into the murky depths of experiential existence. Intellectuals and the rational- things I am not, but my culture expects me to be- always look on Dionysos as a force to be moderated.
I am being immoderate by daring to see and to feel...
The Romans, perhaps because they were such a diverse lot, unsure of their commonality, were fearful of foreign cults, and especially cults begun by foreign women, hence the banning of his cult in 186 B.C.
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Their nightmares of what Dionysos means worked through the centuries down to us in the works of the Marquis De Sade and Pauline Réage. In the song, Love will Tear Us Apart, and the old conflation of the meaning of the phrase, 'I die,' with orgasm.
Ultimately Dionysos is spirit, the flow of zoe. His wine loosens the soul. I imagine that suspension is like that too.
Dionysos is Zagreus, the hunter, the one who takes down.
I cannot hold onto this earth or this life.
