I say this a lot, but the best way to describe my home is as a place that was ripped straight out of a Robert Frost poem, which is funny because we recently got a Facebook message from someone asking about the very first cocktail I ever invented (if you can call it that) – and this is way before Modern Bar Cart when our website was Embittermentdc.com. This drink was called the “Stopping by Woods,” after Frost’s famous poem, and it was basically just a dark rum Old Fashioned with rosemary muddled in with the sugar and bitters. Rum because it was a staple in New England early in our country’s history, and rosemary to mimic the piney scent that one might encounter in the woods on a mid-winter night, because “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is, at its core, a solstice poem.
My little horse must think it queer / To stop without a farmous near / Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year.
So my mind was already on Frost as I walked through my woods like I tend to do this time every year. But like you, and like all of us, I was keenly aware that this year was just different. It was a lot. It took a toll on us all, each in our own way, but also collectively. So as I was taking time to recuperate personally, I was also thinking about what it might mean for us all to recuperate collectively from a year that threw so many unexpected challenges our way, and how excellent spirits and cocktails might play some sort of role on that path to recovery.
One podcast that I mention a lot – The Speakeasy – has been making some really great points recently about bars and hospitality venues as being really important “third spaces” – not home, not work, but a third type of place where connections can be made and nourishment of different sorts can be found. I like this. I think it’s important, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have a good timeline for when we can expect bars to reopen again in any way that resembles what we’ve come to know in the past, so instead of focusing on these third spaces right now, I want to offer you my wish for better drinking at home, since that’s what most of us are going to be doing for quite some time to come.
And the vision I want to present is of drinking as an act of nourishment, since, after all, most spirits and cocktails arose out of a medicinal tradition. In 2021, I hope that you can approach the things you drink with gratitude and even a little bit of reverence; gratitude for the fact that we’re able to even source ingredients during these difficult times and reverence for the physical and psychological relaxation that our spirits and cocktails can offer as forces beyond our control rage right outside our doorsteps.
Lessons from Robert Frost’s “Directive”
This is the sort of thing that Robert Frost wrote about in what I consider to be one of his greatest works, a poem called “Directive,” which rarely makes it into textbooks. So I thought I’d share it with you here. It begins with the phrase “Back out of all this now too much for us,” which is just about the most fitting set of words I can imagine to describe what so many people are craving at this very moment.
In “Directive,” the speaker encourages us to imagine walking through a New England landscape and coming across the cellar hole of an abandoned farmhouse and imagining what sort of life might have thrived there just a few decades before. In the end, he presents an image of drinking as both sacred and rejuvenative – a private act of reverence that rescues something from the ravages of time and difficulty. So without further prelude, here’s “Directive.” I hope you like it.
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
The thing about “Directive” that most people gloss over is that it was published in 1946, one year after twin mushroom clouds appeared over the island nation of Japan. A year that saw evil men put on trial in Nuremburg for atrocities that most people could scarcely have dreamt just months before.
So just like earlier in the episode when I mentioned Harding’s campaign slogan in the wake of the Spanish Flu as an ominous warning against repeating the mistakes of history, I think there are also opportunities to look to other people in other times who found ways to recover a bit of dignity and mental fortitude in the wake of war or sickness.
The next time you make yourself a drink, I’d encourage you to think about it as an act of self care, and I hope you can think back to Frost’s speaker, who hid a little goblet from a child’s abandoned playhouse in the instep arch of an old cedar so that he could scoop up some clear, cold spring water and somehow find a little distance from all this that is now too much for him.
So wherever you are, and whatever grail you fill, just remember:
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you in 2021.
