Categories
Whisky Books

Dialogos

I have grown up. My maps are out of date.

Lanark, Alasdair Gray

[This piece deals with mental health struggles – if this isn’t something you’re in the right place for currently, return next week for more carefree drinks chat.]

When the WHO fired the starter’s pistol for the Pandemic Steeplechase, I was already running on fumes. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that, although it felt like it at the time.

By October 2019, I had survived nine months of a weekly Glasgow-to-London commute. However, a pincer movement of debilitating whisky festivals and a successful proposal generated turbulence I simply could not withstand. A deep-seated instinct urged me to contain and control my future; instead, the knotted needs of my mental health violently resisted arrest.

A handful of sessions with a counsellor and I believed the problem had been fixed. I could think again and, while I still felt like a social leper around most humans most of the time, seemed to be functioning. By the time COVID-19 overtook us all, I shuffled into lockdown and, like most people, hoped for the best.

April was the cruellest month. I didn’t so much come apart at the mental seams as implode. Whatever meagre foothold I thought I had in my own sense of self was washed away by a surging, unseeing public health cataclysm – solid ground, and the map by which I navigated it, was gone.

In post-lockdown issues of Noble Rot – an exemplary liquid text if ever there was one – I read how many regained a sense of happiness via their wine fridges. Uncorking special bottles, during that agonising phase where paranoia tangoed with tedium, was a self-sustaining act – a route to meaning and joy.

I can’t credit a 3cl sample of Octomore 9.3 for getting me through the pandemic’s early stages, but what it did do was restart a dialogue with the world beyond my febrile mind. Long after the sample was finished, I started asking why a barley-based distillate occupied so much of my psyche. I’m still engaged in this process. That with which we most closely identify – the elements we have taken to be fundamental to our self-concept – is often the last to be cross-examined and exorcised.

The 9. series of Octomores bears the subheading ‘Dialogos’; Bruichladdich have never shied away from provoking conversation, but this trilogy of heavily-peated whiskies makes it explicit. Conversations were mortally dangerous things to me when I opened my Drinks by the Dram bottle on a humid, rainy afternoon in May – I didn’t need others doing greater harm to the concept of who I was, and all those industry Zoom hangouts passed me by. I was, however, desperate to connect again with flavour of a pronounced and divisive kind.

How to describe tasting the 9.3? As I assessed nose, palate and finish, it was as if I summarised the purest and most visceral sensory memories I had gathered through my life to that point. More than that, it made me hopeful for sensory experiences I would have in future.

The concept of a ‘complete’ whisky occurred to me on that day. I marvelled at the fearless suffusion of flavour it represented: it smelt of peaches, rockpools and sourdough starter; the taste was of smoked shellfish served beneath a broth of strong black tea. The finish was endless and profoundly emotional.

I coveted a bottle instantly. However, when you’re furloughed and unable to face the future, dropping nearly £200 on a whisky still feels wantonly irresponsible. Octomore 9.3 did encourage a reappraisal of my priorities, though. When I purposefully sought to change conditions around me and moved to London, I began examining the bedrock of my character. As the internal dialogue progressed, I became increasingly enamoured with the voice that spoke back to me. Crucially, I realised that the whiskies I bought, tasted and made did not define me.

When I was developing the idea for Liquid Texts, creativity and imagination kept cropping up as key themes. I knew I wanted to write about my encounter with this Octomore, and the question became which text to bring it into conversation with.

Lanark, published 41 years ago this week, is one of my top-3 favourite books. The novel aims at a kind of totality – the text, the image, then the playful commentary on both – and is an example of the creative daring I have always admired. When I re-read Lanark in 2017, I noticed further themes of self esteem and kindness. In spring 2020, creative daring, self esteem and kindness were even harder to find than hand sanitiser, and time was needed to show me how intractably I was locked in my own fear. Alasdair Gray wrote Lanark to ‘tell the world what he thinks of it’; gradually, some of this spirit has been fostered in me.

I also see Octomore 9.3 as a kind of totality. PPM geekery rubs up against borrowed Ancient Greek-ery; the absurd bottle is an erect middle finger as well as container for the wilful genius of the spirit. The learning, the imagination, the fits of madness and desire – Gray’s text and Adam Hannett’s composition are both marvellous in the truest sense of that word.

The Epilogue to Lanark is a dialogue between the author and his creation. Many would call this onanistic – Gray certainly does: “The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don’t care.” It is a joyous and subversive chapter, where socio-economic history is interwoven with petulant, wry swipes at sci-fi endings. As Gray/the author/the conjuror goes on to write: “I faced the fact that my world model would be a hopeless one. I also knew it would be an industrial-west-of-Scotland-petitbourgeois one, but I didn’t think that a disadvantage. If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.”

Seeing beyond whisky to the creative contributions we all can make has enabled me to grow out of the pandemic. I am more hopeful than Lanark‘s author says he is. If I proceed with greater assurance towards myself and warmth towards others, though, it is in part thanks to the artistic adventurousness of people like Gray. Liquid Texts is not a Lanark – obviously! – but it is my vehicle for expressing my weirdness and wonder. To inhabit a better world – or even a self – we must first imagine it.

“One if to five ises! That’s an incredible amount of freedom.”

Please visit https://www.grayday.info/ for more details on how the genius of Alasdair Gray is to be celebrated this year.