Fernet-Branca
Fernet-Branca! Brute beauty! That dark horse few dare break!
To think something so wild could attain such a civilized title as "The Bartenders' Handshake." (There's a firm handshake! The other hand clapping you on the back. Wrapping around your shoulder. Knocking you off balance as it pulls you in for a robustious sidehug.)
It's an acquired taste, to put it gently. I might have enjoyed those first bitter barspoons in a Toronto or a Hanky Panky, but those first few drams of it neat...whoa! Nowadays, of course, I find myself wishing I were a bartender among bartenders, inhabiting a world in which people commonly greeted one another with cordial glasses of fernet. Which is not to say that familiarity tames the flavor! Therein lies, at least in part, the power of its use as a token of recognition: however habitually one drinks fernet, it never ceases to dazzle. Call it the gustatory equivalent of "darkness visible"—or of "dark with excessive bright." Each sip saturates the limits of sensibility. Whether one likes it is really beside the point. The liquid demands respect.
Now, this post is not ultimately about fernet, del famoso o del senza nome. (That's right, fernet is not limited to Fernet-Branca, but rather names a particular style of strong amaro. To be sure, Fratelli Branca have earned their metonymic position within the category, Fernet-Branca being to fernet what Coca-Cola is to cola. Speaking of Coke, did you happen to know that over 75% of all Fernet-Branca is consumed not in Italy, but in Argentina, by dint of the cult status of fernet con coca? ¡La posta! A dark horse meets its gaucho.) But I mean it now, enough fun facts. What I aim to explore here is what fernet—in no way exclusively—exemplifies: sublimity in flavor.
And to further exhume the buried lead, this inquiry into the gustatory sublime is itself on the way to a grander and more difficult end: to illuminate what I shall provisionally call the taste-image.
Clarifying Concepts
Straightaway I must distance myself from discourses of aesthetics that dichotomize the beautiful and the sublime as fundamentally discrete phenomena or affects—beauty pertaining to light, proportion, and pleasure/sociability, sublimity to shadow, vastness, and terror/self-preservation. As descriptors for styles of presentation, emphasizing respectively adornment and austerity, these distinctions have admittedly had their use.1 Yet ultimately, these variations are more richly contemplated as tonalities or aspects of the beautiful in its highest sense as a transcendental—the beautiful (tò kalón) understood as a condition of reality in which all entities participate, desirable in itself and convertible in principle with the good and the true, being and oneness. In disclosing the glory or fullness of the cosmos—its character as a gift—beauty transcends any terminology for pictorial technique or value-neutral perception. So let there be no misconstrual of the sublime, in any sense, as a quality opposed to or beyond the horizon of the beautiful. There is the radiant and the penumbral, the embellished and the stark, the harmonious and the plangent; there is the interplay of these and other such dyads; all may be forms of tò kalón. What affirms them as such abides in the graced manner of their manifestation. For the beautiful appears more radically in appearing itself—in one's experience of an appearance as an event. We find beauty in a being when the sheer wonder of its being, unbidden, strikes us. And insofar as any being at any moment may so strike us, beauty is not to be classified as a property of some beings rather than others. It is the look or face (prósōpon) of being—the way in which being turns to face us. (Consequently, seeing the beautiful often carries with it the experience of being seen or found—and with that encounter, the exposure of one's character or condition.)2
Which brings us to the concept of the image and the unique place it holds between being and appearance—a "between" that at once distances and relates. Here we must follow Thomas Pfau in distinguishing "the image (imago, eikōn)" from "its historically and materially contingent instantiations as 'picture' (Gk. eidolon; Lat. pictura; Ger. Gemälde, Kunstbild)."3 The metaphysical concern in making this distinction is the capacity of the visible to mediate reality rather than to simulate it. To speak of an image is not to speak of an object or an instrument, even as images remain entangled with the physical conditions of their presentation. Nor is it to speak of a representation, mimetic or mental, the image being irreducible to any similitude or phantasma. As a medium, an image operates in and through intuition, bearing form and meaning that exceed the compass of any finite thing or intellect. An image is thus never mere appearance, but appearance of a being, making known in appearance a plenitude of being that does not itself appear.4 "ὄψις τῶν ἀδήλων τὰ φαινόμενα" (Anaxagoras, Fragment 21a).5
One might well have noted at this point the centrality of sight and insight (visus and visio) to these concepts. The semantic root structures here run deep—the Greek for form (eidos) deriving from the act of seeing (eidō), the Greek for appearance (phainómenon) deriving from the acts of showing, shining, or giving light (phainō). Accordingly, there is a long history in philosophy of categorizing vision as the prime "intellectual sense" in concert with hearing (logos signifying at once reason and word, that which is said and that which is thought). Touch, smell, and taste in this hierarchy become the "bodily," sub-cognitive senses. Sight and sound require distance; touch, smell, and taste, closeness, contact, and absorption. Hence vision and hearing are likewise elevated as the "aesthetic senses," supposedly in their readier affordance of "disinterested" pleasure—i.e., pleasures beyond the needs and drives of embodied life.6
Perhaps you can sense a bit of eagerness to refute the rationale behind this ranking system. But let us tread lightly lest we underestimate the degree to which these distinctions have become embedded in how we think (in how we think about how we think—in our "pictures of cognition"). And frankly, let us tread swiftly lest we become mired in an abstract dispute and lose the thread. The crucial operation of the image with which I am concerned here is the analogical tension it maintains between the sensible and the supersensible, the contingent and the absolute. Committed as I am, then, to making the case for gustation and olfaction as conduits for form (even for forms of that which is formless), I need not elide the particularities of our senses to do so. Though for that matter, nor need I contrast any of these particularities. For our senses are ever acting as a crossmodal unity. This is the lesson of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. The body, akin to the image, is fundamentally a medium—not a mere object or vessel with sensors here for measuring sonic data, ports there for receiving optical data, and so on, but the gestalt of all that a person can do in sense—in movement, space, and community. Our lived bodies just are those "threads of intentionality," those habits and practices, that weave us into the world. And as an organic form or dynamic image (in Merleau-Ponty's words, un schéma corporel), there is no "part" of one's body that does not involve or envelop every other.7
It is for this reason that I employ the term "taste-image" provisionally—as a placeholder or as a signpost that this inquiry must ultimately leave behind. My aim is not to describe gustatory and olfactory counterparts to visible forms, but rather to show how meaningful, intelligible form is never an instance of isolated visibility. We do not simply see a landscape, any more than we simply taste a cocktail. We go on hikes; we look out from balconies. We meet at bars; we sit at kitchen islands. We come face to face with beauty, with being, with truth, at the chiasmata or intertwinings of our whole bodies or selves with(in) superabundant hermeneutical situations. Thinking the image in this way means thinking beyond its etymological focus on the visible—perhaps even to the point of rethinking that most integral telos of the Neoplatonist tradition, intellectual vision. It means approaching a visio intellectualis or visio mentis that enfolds the (un)hearable, the (un)touchable, and the (un)tasteable as much as the (in)visible—entering the sacred darkness or silence of contemplation not just through our mind's eye, but through the fullness of our flesh.
Two Faces of the Sublime in Flavor
Sublimity resists definition. On one hand, this resistance is by de-finition, as the term describes a sense of in-finitude or boundlessness. On the other, its indefinability is a product of intellectual history, as different thinkers have used the term to describe different qualities. Without slipping into this vortical conceptual history from Longinus, through Burke, to Kant, and beyond8—without weighing, for instance, whether sublimity is a property of matter or of mind, pertains to form or formlessness, may be further distinguished as mathematical, dynamical, or even moral, etc.—we can roughly discern two basic sets of aspects that have dawned on perceivers as features of the sublime: those of the expanse and those of the welter, of void and of mass, of endless emptiness (or openness) and of endless density (or fecundity). (One wonders whether there is any coincidence in how these contrary aspects of the sublime correspond with the dual visions of primordial chaos in western creation myths—namely, the abyss that yawns or gapes (chaínō), and the jumble that pours or spreads out (chéō) in mixed abundance.9 The connection would conceivably reside in how encounters with the sublime can be accompanied by intuitions of an ineffable origin—of an all-encompassing simplicity, prior to any differentiation or alterity.)
Under the first aspect—that of the bare, the pure, the templar—no candidate for sublimity in spirits and cocktails can outstrip the Martini. It calls in crystal silence. Impossibly cold, the rime of one's coupe dissolves to reveal a limpid pool, pellucid snakes of glycerine dancing in the barlight. The surface, save for the stippling of expressed lemon oil, is glass. Over it, the lemon twist bends, curving in on itself as if it were Narcissus thirsting for his reflection.
To inquire into the sublimity of the Martini's taste, one reaches naturally for visual metaphors. Indeed, we often describe flavor in terms of light and dark, color and line. And again, there's nothing out of order in doing so, so long as we maintain our Merleau-Pontian attitude to the body as a unified medium. Along these lines, one could just as well begin with the tactile. It's said, after all, that the most important "ingredient" in a well-made Martini is cold. Concomitant with this is the drink's velvety texture. (Hence the cruciality of stirring.10) As these opening tones harmonize with the resinous juniper of the gin, the sipper is spirited away to a montane forest. And just as the sun peeks through the canopy to dapple the forest floor, so the citric and herbacious vermouth makes its gentle presence known. This is the flavor of a Martini: crisp alpine air, conifers washed in Olympian light. It is the taste of clarity—of the diaphanous.
Under the second aspect of the sublime—that of the tempestuous, the intensive, the profuse—we return to Fernet-Branca. Those burnt caramel hues, reposing in the dainty bulb of that cordial glass, may allure one as to a piece of Belgian chocolate, but something more chthonic lieth in wait there. One sip ravishes you into a selva oscura in which you can hardly see the forest for the trees. 27+ herbs, spices, barks, and botanicals join in a circle dance on the palate—"Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth / Mirth of those long since under the earth / Nourishing the corn." The moment you think you've caught the savor of one, another has leapt into its place.
Peppermint, aloe ferox, myrrh, saffron, bitter orange, chamomile—with the exception of the menthol, which acts more as a kind of vanishing point than a base, not a single note dominates. Each alone is as a shadow or a trace. Yet the layering of these traces, akin to the peculiar effect of scribbling and gesture drawing techniques, overwhelms one in the manner of geologic time, with deep palimpsestic sedimentation. This is the flavor of Fernet-Branca: prickling dark roots, mentholated vapors rising from a fumarole. It is the taste of form's emergence—of the tension, "as the storm is imminent in the clouds,"11 before a figure stands out against its background.
Beyond Imagery
Enargeia and metaphor are noble techniques for giving voice to the phenomena of touch, smell, and taste. But to articulate flavor qua image, the critical inquiry to pursue is the degree to which the relation between the tasteable and the visible is not metaphorical, but metonymic—a relation of being grounded in a single reality of intelligible form, and at that order of being and mind, mutually incorporated. As an image is a medium, what Thomas Pfau calls "writing the image"—fulfilling the intuitive import of phenomena in "discursive and creative speech" (logoi)12—implies disclosing that of which it is the image, that which the image mediates.
That which we apprehend as an image is form. Caricatures of Platonism picture form as a kind of denuded outline or schema lodged in a remote empyrean realm. What these partial readings miss is the dialectic of separation (chorismos) and participation (methexis) in Plato's dialogues. A thing is intuitable in its specificity and particularity—as an x or y, and as this x or y—insofar as it participates concurrently in an intelligible form and in the source of being's formal intelligibility as a whole (the world qua reason or logos). Yet this participation remains radically analogical—form being a mental reality that transcends the senses even as it is experienced through them, that transcends our finite minds even as it remains responsive to and reflective of them. The form of a table, to recall a well-worn philosophical example, is not just a pattern or shape in geometrical space. Rather, it is the dynamic, disclosive principle that conditions the reality of every table—the reality of all that we do at tables and all that a table can mean to any one of us.
The history of the Martini and its present moment alike are instructive on this score. As august as it is in its classic proportions, few if any drink orders are more frequently personalized: two to one, three to one, five to one; on one extreme, just a dry vermouth rinse, on the other, 50-50; twist or olive; bitters or no bitters; experimentation with non-conventional gins and vermouths… If a guest should refrain from such specifications, bartenders will serve up the "house specs." And now we witness the resurgence of the "Martini Menu"—riffs without end. Today, kelp and pasta water are in the mix. Tomorrow, who can say? However skeptical one may be in the face of these "innovations," one can trust that the form of the Martini will remain incorruptible. For it is capacious enough to absorb every variation. Far more, in fact: capacious enough to absorb all that can make a Martini the revelation that it is—the propitious time of day and surroundings, one's company, the grace of the bartender, and so on. And expansive enough to enfold yet other forms: juniper, coriander, mountain streams…
Not every image is equal, of course. Some participate more fully in the forms than others. Nor is this participation fundamentally within our control, something we can engineer or predict. This is why the image, as distinct from its material scaffolding, retains the quality of an event. What we experience through the image's participation (methexis) is its self-surrender or self-suspension (kenosis)—its making a clearing for the inexhaustible outpouring of the logos.
For only the glass that is ever self-emptying is ever full.
Prosit.
It's worth noting, however, that when it comes to ornamentation versus restraint, the discernibility of either side of this distinction tends to arise from the dynamic tension of both, such that it is not so much "sides of a distinction" in question as poles on a continuum.
These reflections on beauty shamelessly recapitulate the work of David Bentley Hart. For Hart's most sustained articulations in this vein, see The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). For a more compact statement, see his essay "Beauty, Being, Kenosis" in Theological Territories: A David Bentley Hart Digest (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 245-256. The key figure behind any theological aesthetics such as Hart's, it has to be acknowledged, is Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), xiii.
See ibid., xiii-xiv, 27-47.
Or as Heidegger recasts this ancient insight in Being and Time §7: "Appearance, as the appearance 'of something,' thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something which does not show itself announces itself through something that does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself. But this 'not' must by no means be confused with the privative not which determines the structure of semblance. What does not show itself, in the manner of what appears, can also never seem."
See Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3. For a touchstone defense of this hiearchy of the senses, see Hans Jonas, "The Nobility of Sight," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14.4 (1954): 507-519. I should further take this occasion to register my distaste for—or at least my uneasiness with—the synonymy of "aesthetic" and "disinterested" apprecation. To be sure, there is a critical correctness in disentangling our responses to the beautiful from our interests, insofar as interest tends to carry instrumental and economic connotations—insofar as our interests tend to predetermine our perspective or posture toward phenomena that rather call for our undesigning attention. As Pfau is fond of recalling, "We are said to 'take' an interest in something or other, whereas attention is something we can only 'give.'" ("On Attention," Salmagundi 194 (Spring 2017): 145-163, quotation at 149). Still, we must be wary of confusing disinterested judgment with a kind of neutrality or indifference. Finding something beautiful—luminous in its sheer gratuity, in its "thereness" and "thisness"—remains a modality of value and desire, just as attending to someone or something implies caring for someone or something.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, trans. Donald A. Landes, Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 2012), cf. 73-74, 100-105, 137-139.
Not that this body of writing is so abstruse as to permit one's disregard. On the contrary, it's required reading for any study of the sublime. But fear not! Longinus' treatise, Burke's Enquiry, Kant's Critique—each is far more intelligible and engaging than many tend to credit. (Even Kant, I swear! His third critique in particular. Skip the introductions; read the first part; a little patience goes a long way.) For those who seek an aperçu and just can't help doing things in reverse, I might also recommend two essays on the sublime by Schiller—an initial treatment published in 1793, and a fuller reflection published in 1801.
I borrow this double etymology of chaos from Emmanuel Falque, trans. George Hughes, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), §2, who in turn adduces Reynal Sorel, Chaos et éternité (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2006), 16-17.
Sorry, Bond fans. A Martini must be stirred. Shaking generates far too much aeration and dilution. Now, this is as technical as I intend to wax. The demands of doing justice to the art of Martini-mixing are simply too great to be met here. I'll further confess, even with good tools and good ice, I always fall short of what I have received from the stick of an expert bartender. Mastering that subtlest of thresholds—maximally chilling without overdiluting—is no small feat. Consequently, at home, I've taken to batching and freezing.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 18.
Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty, 30, 42.