Absinthe is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, September 17, 2002. It is part of Memories.
A gastronomic adventure.
All the literati know Absinthe, the powerful green liqueur that drove poets mad and favored the great ones with inspiration, be it divine or diabolical.
Absinthe Rebette, Henri Privat-Livemont, c. 1900
Voltaire said, “The first month of marriage is the honeymoon, and the second is the Absinthe moon.”
The temperance movement was able to outlaw Absinthe in most of Western Europe shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. Small batch production continued in Czechoslovakia, and consumption continued in seedy bars in Portugal, but gone were the long, sweaty nights of verdant fever in the bordellos and brasseries of Paris.
Oscar Wilde said, “After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that’s the most horrible thing in the world.”
The green demon has returned to the City of Lights, where I first tasted it shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century; a dead fashion risen from its grave to celebrate the centennial of its passing. The illegal potion arrives in small batches, under cover of night, from Prague.
Ernest Hemingway traveled to Madrid to buy the potent green concoction during the Spanish Civil War.
I stood transfixed as the bartender positioned the couliere d’absinthe over a half full glass of water, dropped a sugar cube on the spoon’s grate and began pouring. The Absinthe, green as a jealous djinni, flowed languidly over the sugar and into the glass, turning the water milky white; poetry and alchemy united. When the glass was full, he lifted a candle to the sugar atop the spoon and it became a halo of pale fire.
Paul Verlaine said, “My glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe.”
The flavor was like Pernod mixed with bitters, or, rather, like bitters slightly diluted with Pernod. The taste of anise, normally powerful itself, was almost completely eclipsed by the wormwood.
Absinthe Parisienne, P.Gelis-Didot and Louis Maltese, c. 1900
The word Absinthe is derived from the Greek absinthion, meaning “undrinkable.” It is from the powerful bitterness of the wormwood that this name comes.
I drained the glass in slow, measured sips, the way Hemingway described the process in For Whom The Bell Tolls. The poisonous flavor subsided and was replaced by a warm glow that crawled down my throat and into my bowels.
The Revelation of John said, “And the third part of the waters became wormwood, and many men died of the waters because they became bitter.”
There’s a great deal of alcohol in Absinthe, but not enough to explain its entire catalogue of effects. There was a faint glow to my surroundings, small flashes at the edges of my vision, and a softness to my consciousness. There was a feeling that my mind was loosening, stretching, coming unwrapped.
It was during an Absinthe binge that Vincent Van Gogh made a love offering of his left ear.
The evening progressed through the stages of a slow, managed European drunk. I awaited enlightenment in a seedy bar in a dilapidated Paris neighborhood, like so many had done before, but there were no visions, no sudden poems realized in full form, nor did I spontaneously start my first novel.
The Russian word for wormwood is chernobyl.