The Barley Whisperer

Whisky has character. Since Shakespeare and the early moderns, people have dreamed of autonomy. Though lived through drives and desires they do not comprehend, they insist that universals go hang and that they are autonomous souls—unique, eccentric.

Only whiskies are autonomous, the true fire stolen from Heaven and given to man. Under their influence man glimpses singularity, like Bottom in his intoxicating dream or Falstaff riding hard to court on hearing Hal crowned. Man glimpses singularity under the influence, but that confused and clumsy glimpse is all we receive. The character of whisky occupies our souls but as long as the distillate flows in our blood. Cruelty of cruelties, we piss it out. Divinity enters our mouths, occupies for a short space our molecular makeup, alters there the human code into a momentary arrangement of lucidity, singularity, possibility—the god moment, truly conceived—and exists the host through the whisky-erect penis the next morning. As a man pisseth against the wall indeed!

Something exists of the mystery of transubstantiation here, I'm convinced!

Christ converted water into strong, fortified drink—the Bible calls it wine—and later commanded us to imbibe in remembrance of Him.

Mankind was not yet ready for whisky.

It took the poor suffering Gauls to gather sympathy from the gods for the plight of man before such fire should be stolen. It was metamorphosed, en route, to a special strain of barley and given, in a divine revelation, to Saint Patrick.

We sometimes quibble about the origins of whisky—Irish or Scottish or what have you. The origins are Heaven's gardens, you daft lot, and political geography be damned. There simply wasn't the demarcation to separate peoples before geo-political divisions of place. The islands and outposts of the Gaelic wilds were one place, not many, where the Spirit led Saint Patrick on a secret, sacred mission of whisky. (I almost said Christianity!)

Whisky transcends place.

. . .

How do I know such things? O yea of little faith. Revelation, of course. I tend barely and daily I watch it grow and listen to its mysteries. It tells me things.

In the DNA of today's barley is the code of an otherworldly, sentient life. Most of us need the code distilled before its Heavenly language will converse with our own. The barley whisperer alone hears.

And the barley whispers autonomy. And that autonomy is distilled into the individual character of each whisky.

Is it not perhaps odd that Theophrastus' characters were Englished at the exact moment that whisky first drenched the palates of our region? And those characters—of Hall and Overbury and such—were different in texture from their classical forebears. English-language character attempted to articulate autonomy, the singularity of selfhood, to peoples of Post-Reformation Europe.

Bullocks! (Though there are strange and interesting conflations here.) The Reformation advanced its split from the past by attempting to destroy the mystery of the Eucharist. It held the miracle to be metaphor only, not a literal hosting of the God by the believer or initiate into the mystery. And this, my friends, at the exact moment when whisky—a stronger-than-fortified-wine distillate—put the God back in residence with such vigor and presence!

I tell you, for what it's worth, the study of autonomy or self or self-fashioning in the north is a study of whisky's Godly influence on the newly initiated. Is it a wonder that the earliest literary mention of whisky and the first autonomous characters in literature both occur in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales? Or that Chaucer and Shakespeare were both initiates into the Order of the Barley? (I speak now of secret histories!)

I tell you, it can hardly be coincidental.

. . .

T'other day upon finishing a few bottles of Glenkinchie, I hoisted my whisky club chair over my shoulders and set it down, plunk, in my barley field. That night the moon would be full and the excited barley would be more than usually loquacious and telling.

A pleasant breeze had already set the grain to dance, and I knew from long experience that such ritual movement would bode well when the moon sat high and the breeze subsided in the middle stillness of the night.

I wasn't mistaken.

As luck would have it, I had set my chair amongst the earliest sown, and a group of bearded elders within easy earshot set up such a ruckus of cross-chat that I counted my lucky stars and unnibbed my pen.

The last bottle of Kinchie was long expired, but I had still a half-full Mortlach 16 and an unopened Springbank 21. I was strong in the Spirit and expected to be stronger still. I was not disappointed.

About the hour when the gibbetted dead leave their graves, I heard a chorus of lamentation from my bearded friends. A Greek Chorus lamentation, I tell you, and I felt transported to Epidaurus or some forgotten theatre cut in Bog before the sacrifice of the worthies.

The barley knew that harvest was near and spoke of the mysteries of resurrection. My notes on the subject run to forty-three pages, and one day perhaps I will transcribe them for you.

After the lamentation of pending death and the hopeful celebration of metamorphosis, my neighbors began on a new topic. They spoke of the evils of chill-filtration and manipulation of ABV. They discoursed learnedly on the miracles of barley oils and looked back to an era when such viscous liquids were not discounted as impurities but floated freely in the new make and went to the long sleep with something like purpose and function.

(Barley, by the bye, speaks an ancient variant of Old Gaelic, and I'll translate for you here, though I preserve the original in my notes.)

The spirits of today suffer too many grievances. I niff distillations on the air which, in the time of our ancestors, would have been dismissed with the feints. Whiskies today lack chew and essential, life-bestowing oiliness. Men of years gone by lived—literally lived—on our forebears, with maybe a sausage or flit of bacon during carnival but nothing else all the year but Uisge Beatha. Those were headier times.

The ancient ones spoke of a godless age when oils would be stripped from Spirit and men would drink weak water and piss with greater frequency and carry a limp member beneath his kilt and get more wenches than bairns between the sheets. Barley oil would be denied and commerce and hollowness would rule the last age. (Again, the Chorus of lamentation sounded!) Some of us then should go down for the long sleep and never be awakened, should live beyond the strength of cask and turn weak and fusty with age. Though I say better to sleep on and feed the angels to the last evaporation than be awakened and so cut down that our powers diminish and our followers drink milk freed from substantial meat.

The times are diseased, when whiskies today would blush to self-identify to a dram of years gone by, where indeed a triple today would fall impotent to a tipple of times past. Not whisky but spring water washed scarcely o'er the grain.

A lament again that deafened me and cost me some minutes of chat between the still strands.

'Tis end of days, sure, when man cares so little about his spiritual wellness that he will pay many times the going rate for many degrees the inferior make. Days ago the whiskies now would not compete with the bairn's water that first inspired vitality in the heroic ages.

Will man not demand the return to barley oils in his dram? I fear me the worst. I fear me we may be the very generation to lay in oak and never be waked. And why, think you, do the angels live forever? Because they glean the best o' the make, and it sustains them time out of memory.

But man, silly man, turns a small profit and counts his blessings; drinks a weak dram and calls it money well spent. Perhaps it's for the best. Perhaps this weak age must needs pass and with it the generation of least worth to call itself God's own.

The lament now gave way to rejoicing, but of a most peculiar sort. It sounded trump-like and again it deafened. It rose further in tenor, and I left the awful ruckus with fingers in my ears and a message to convey. Pray God I am not too late.

Say no to chill-filtrations and 40% ABV.