Blowing Up the House
Morgan Meis’s highly unusual collection of essays upends expectations in precisely the right ways.
Review by J.C. Scharl
A lot of the craft of reviewing a book is artfully describing that book in terms of other books. The reviewer says, “So-and-so’s debut is equal parts This Book and That Book,” or “This-and-Such’s book bridges the gap between You-Know-Who and Who-The-Heck,” and that helps readers decide if they want to read the book or not. The reviewer writes lots of other things too, but it’s often the references to other books that guide people towards buying (or not buying) a book. That’s because part of what we want a book to do for us to make us feel simultaneously at home and on an adventure; we want the book to tie in to the places we already know and love while expanding the walls and opening up new windows to see from.
It’s difficult to imagine a reader whose literary “home” has a place prepared for The Drunken Silenus, the first book in Morgan Meis’s “Three Paintings” trilogy. This book doesn’t do the things we usually like books to do. It doesn’t make us feel more at home, and it doesn’t expand our imaginative dwelling place. Instead, it blows it up—and proves to us that this explosion is exactly what we needed.
The Drunken Silenus does not fit comfortably into a genre. It is a series of essays that circle around the central spectacle of the eponymous painting by Peter Paul Rubens. The circles are sometimes vast, sweeping back to 1200 BC before arcing back to Silenus the god as depicted in Ruben’s painting of him, and sometimes so small they seem more like singularities than circles, as when Meis dwells at absurd length on the personal history of Jan Rubens, father of Peter Paul. If I had to choose a core question, or theme, or notion, or image, I would say that the book is about Silenus’s answer to King Midas’s question, “What is the best thing for man?” Silenus, the tutor of Dionysius, the teacher of the gods themselves, replies that the best thing for man is not to have been born. That moment—a philosophical moment? historical? mythic? religious? all of these?—is a rock thrown. This book tries to trace the ripples before they fade.
These essays are closely linked; they overlap and intertwine, sometimes uncomfortably so.
These essays have a poetic immediacy. As with poems, it is impossible to explain what any particular essay in The Drunken Silenus is “about,” because the words themselves are the meaning. Just as Robert Frost, when asked what one of his poems was about, simply reread the poem from start to finish, The Drunken Silenus is its own best summary.
All I can offer is a little guidance. These essays are closely linked; they overlap and intertwine, sometimes uncomfortably so. At times, the author repeats himself with the earnestness of a college sophomore at a party. It makes readers nervous; it made me nervous with, at least, the nervousness of the audience when an actor in a play forgets his lines and looks up blank, straight into the lights. We want our writers, our actors, our mythmakers and story-tellers to be poised, and when they seem to crack, we crack with them; when they implode, they bring us down with them.
Of course, the repetition, the stumble, the earnestness, is part of Meis’s art. That doesn’t mean it is fake; rather, it is part of the experience of the whole that Meis is trying to represent. The Drunken Silenus has cracks in it because it wants the reader to crack; it feels like it is moments from imploding because it wants the reader to implode. That is the whole point, because cracking and imploding are part of reality. That is, really, the theme of the book: reality, all of reality, which includes the cracks. The subtitle is, after all, “On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality.”
Meis writes about Nietzsche, but not like most people write about Nietzsche; he writes about Nietzsche not with awe, nor with rancor, but with tenderness and a reasonable amount of pity. You might even say he writes about Nietzsche with love. He writes about King Midas, not as a myth but as a historical figure at a terrible moment in time, a champion of civilization who fails. Meis spends a lot of time with Peter Paul Rubens, but even more time with Jan Rubens, the painter’s father, who with one passionate mistake wrecked his whole life but also maybe saved it. He writes about Dionysian cult practices, not as curios of the past, but as exhibitions of longings that persist in each one of us.
These are difficult sayings; to begin with them is to reduce them to platitudes.
Every subject Meis handles, he transforms. He turns his subjects over and over, showing them from side after side until we are dizzy with the turning, stumbling, disoriented. Only then are we somehow ready to attend to Meis’s claims, such as when he says, “Rubens painted the way that Silenus existed. It is a lament about eternity and death. But not just a lament. A promise. Death is the only answer. Death, somehow, is an answer.” These are difficult sayings; to begin with them is to reduce them to platitudes. But to stumble upon them without warning somewhere in the dizzying universe is to behold them as revelations.
It is difficult to compare The Drunken Silenus to other books. So instead, let me offer a few examples of the chapter titles, which can be savored in their own right as aphorisms.
- “Older Nietzsche upbraids Younger Nietzsche for not being crazy enough. That’s to say, Nietzsche goes all in on being Nietzsche and then goes to war.”
- “All cities hide their horror. Civilization itself can be seen as the ongoing strenuous effort to conceal shame.”
- “Silenus, the deathless one who yearns for death, is thus the truth of all art. It’s just funny that this truth comes in the form of a drunken fat man.”
These give a sense of Meis’s style, his silly humor, his delight in philosophical paradox and slapstick antics alike. And that is the last thing a reader should know about The Drunken Silenus: it is funny. It is laugh-out-loud funny, read-aloud-to-a-friend funny. I think at one point, I found it to be slap-your-knee funny. It is funny like a child thinks it’s funny to knock over a block tower or smash a Lego house. Because, after all, existence is funny—not in a nihilistic way, but in a real, meaty, slappy, tripped-over-nothing way—and Why is anything here at all? might just be the best joke ever told.
Reviewer’s full disclosure: Morgan Meis is a friend of mine, which of course compromises my critical judgement but in the opposite direction from what you might expect, because in real life he is more absurd even than his marvelous book.
J.C. Scharl is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Her work has appeared on the BBC and in the New Ohio Review, American Journal of Poetry, Plough Quarterly, The Hopkins Review, Fare Forward, and many other journals. Her verse play Sonnez Les Matines, published by Wiseblood Books, debuts in New York City in 2023. She lives in Detroit with her husband and children.
The Drunken Silenus was published by Slant Books on April 9, 2020. They undoubtedly would have provided our reviewer with a copy, but she already had one. You can purchase a copy of your own from their website here.
