The Double Refuge 🍷 Prologue
Nishapur Wine
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However enticing the other world of spirituality may be, it can’t trump or eclipse this world we live in, this heaven, hell, and purgatory of sense and idea that we call the human condition. At it’s best, this world is Heaven on Earth:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!* *enough
Of course, this world is also full of suffering and angst. Yet tears of angst and joy are part of the same mechanism and the same dynamic: our human body and the way it fits into the world as we live it. Any spirituality that separates us from that, and that makes the physical seem low or unreal, is bound to fail. Any religion that doesn’t allow the concept of love to take every form it will, will be found wanting.
In the following poem I suggest that the wine Khayyam writes about isn’t just the wine shared by lovers on a grassy bed. It’s also the wine of experience, of living 🔺 without filtering or codifying the impact of the world around us, 🔺 without hiding from the urges and desires deep within us, and 🔺 without distorting the memories that are sad or beautiful yet always inseparable from who we are:
~ background image by my wife Ruby, based on a Chinese print ~
(I ought to confess that there’s a fair amount of poetical theft going on in my poem: Shakespeare writes of “ruby lips” in “Sonnet 116”; he also writes about the “baseless fabric of this vision” and says that “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on” in The Tempest; in “To His Coy Mistress” Marvell tells his lover, “I would / Love you ten years before the flood”; and in “Bright Star” Keats yearns to be “Pillow'd upon [his] fair love's ripening breast, / To feel for ever its soft fall and swell.” Ferridium and Zhirass, on the other hand, are fictional — a metal and a river meant to indicate the far-off future and other worlds.)
I sent this poem, that I called “Nishapur Wine,” to my friend Kent Lewis. He returned the favour with a poem of his own, one that had a different aesthetic yet a similar point. Kent’s poem makes a case for the value of sensual experience and spiritual flight, and it also recognizes the damage, and the need for escape, created by the world around us — in this case the fascist drift of early 2026, with its headlines about Putin, Trump, ICE, etc.
In Kent’s poem, wine serves multiple aims: it’s 🔺 a ground vehicle to the world we normally shun — the grottos beneath a drunkard’s grin, and it’s 🔺 an air vehicle to the world we desire — the wanton muse, the hospitality of the abyss, and wandering in the mist. (Because of this wandering in the mist, I set the poem on a naturalistic Chinese background, a decision that my favourite drunken Daoist poet Li Po might appreciate!) In the poem, wine is also 🔺 a vehicle of escape from the present political nightmare — the thousand faces and jagged truths.
The reason I underscore this political aspect of Kent’s poem is that politics is a key feature of the double refuge. I operate on the assumption that we’re most free to explore different ways of thinking and living if the culture and society we live in allows us to read, think, and do what we want. The same freedom that eclecticism and mysticism offer in religion, liberal democracy offers in the State. Or, to put it in negative terms, just as we’re more likely to choose our own direction as a society if we’re not forced (or manipulated) to vote for a single party, so we’re more likely to explore different religions and to choose what we really want from religion if we’re not threatened or otherwise manipulated by a single doctrine.
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Next: 🍷 The Bridge