Up Betimes

Listening to a Stamitz clarinet concerto--Had we not Mozart, this would be the model.  Never have I heard the clarinet written for more idiomatically: leaps, noodlings, and expressive cantabile.  

Up, as I say, betimes.  Perhaps too betimes.  I dreamt, just as I awoke, of Beethoven piano sonatas, of using them as a painless (well, not that painless) Gradus ad Parnassum...which morphed into a little Sylph-driven tutorial on how to clean the female-inner parts of my espresso machine:  running vinegar through it; then flushing with a little soda water, then plain water.   Woke, with scant moments to spare, having wickedly to piss; which accomplished, I set forthwith to, flushing, flushing, and re-flushing my precious espresso machine--drinking Darjeeling the while; which, when it is gone, I will replace with fresh-ground "Zaragosa" or Nicaraguan (I haven't decided which) coffee.

Now that my inner vie intime is on the table, I should like to expatiate on a couple of matters that have been in the news lately.  First: that Arabian dhow which sailed from Canton (Guangzhou) in the summer of 826 a.d., destined for Samara (Basra), laden with incredible T'ang dynasty treasures, and was wrecked off of Sumatra:  Among those salvaged treasures is a bowl (see picture), whose image, for some reason, enraptures me:  Plain, simple, cereal bowl that it is, like billions since made--somehow I am bewitched by its grace, purity and delicacy.  Something in me is so glad to see it still whole and flawless after so many cataclysmic centuries.

Now: speaking of other, much older bowls--as reported in the TimesOnline by the Science Editor, Jonathan Leake--archaeologists from University College London, and North Carolina State University have discovered ceramic bowls, plus tubes used to inhale drug fumes or powders, on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, dating from 100 to 400 b.c.  "The use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known but the age was a surprise."   

So far so good; but Mr. Leake thinks we need to know a little background on this surprising subject, so he gives us a gobbet of authoritative opinion from Richard Davenport-Hines, a former history lecturer at the London School of Economics (yes, they need them there, too), and author of The Pursuit of Oblivion, a global history of narcotics:  "[I believe that] humans have been using drugs for thousands of years....Drug use became widespread in many early agricultural-based societies simply [!] because it was the only way people could cope with spending long hours working in the fields, often in horrible conditions like baking sun." 

When they would so much rather have been playing cribbage in the shade!  But Mr. Leake thinks we should also understand that "many archaeologists [with knowledge of their subject, no doubt, exceeding even that of Mr. Davenport-Hines--but, still, which archaeologists?] believe [that is to say, they have no empirical evidence, but they think so] that religion and spiritual beliefs must also have played a part, with drugs being used to induce spiritual or trance-like states."  How--shall we say?--brilliantly intuitive!  Have these many dip-shit archaeologists ever heard of Occam's Razor [Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity]?  Maybe--but it's obviously never occurred to them that it could apply to any beliefs other than those of 14th Century Roman Catholicism.