This is a new phase of our wine tasting. It’s, like, esoteric wine. Wine that isn’t obvious. It’s a complement to us that she’d move us on to this. That she’d think we were ready for this.
Complement!? Fuck, you have some version of Stockholm syndrome.
It’s a joke. It’s a trick. She’s waiting to see whether we have the courage to see through it. To just say, it’s shit!
Well, do we?
Nothing happened by accident, with Cicero – you know that. Everything was planned, even if it didn’t seem like a plan. It was her Eastern Europeanness planning. It was her behind the iron curtain ways.
The iron curtain fell long ago.
Not in Cicero’s head. You had to think ahead. Of the authorities! Of the apparatchiks! It was a question of survival, over there. And over here! Everything had to be planned.
Anyway – the wine.
The wine! What did she want us to taste.
She wanted us to be revolted, maybe. To spit it out. To reject the wine – just like she said we should reject the world. She wanted us to be disgusted in general, didn’t she? Like, viscerally. To viscerally reject everything – the whole world. Everything that existed.
She wanted us to know what was better than being – otherwise than being.
What did she mean by that?
Something very Jewish. Deeply Jewish. And deeply Eastern European.
It was to do with the Jewish Law.
The Jewish Law is about disgust?
About what comes from elsewhere. Opening beyond the world. All the natural cycles. Like, transcendence. Antinomianism.
Didn’t she call herself a Gnostic? I’m confused.
Sure – a Jewish Gnostic.
But back to the wine … So she wanted us disgusted, and she disgusted us. With wine.
Exactly.
Work in Progress 