Go Down, Dionysus

On Michael Clune's 'Pan'

Pablo Picasso, Minotaure blessé et Naïade, 1938, Oil and charcoal on canvas

In 307 B.C., a young Macedonian in the mold of Alexander named Demetrius appeared with a large fleet in the sea before Athens. And this charismatic and beautiful young man made a name for himself, capturing cities and winning battles throughout Greece, becoming king of Macedon. And when he returned to Athens in 295 B.C., Demetrius, who had earned the nickname The Besieger, gathered the Athenian people in the Theatre of Dionysus to give a performance of himself as demigod. According to historian Tom Holland, “Stars embroidered on his cloak identified him with the sun. Dancers adorned with giant phalluses greeted him as though he were Dionysus. Choirs sang a hymn that proclaimed him a god and saviour.”

And while Demetrius eventually died in the prison of a rival after years of disappointing harvests, I want us to think about what that moment of ecstasy must have felt like; I want you to return to that moment, Reader, in your imagination: the dancers with dildos sewn to their costumes, singing choirs, Demetrius himself with stars embroidered on his cloak. The only equivalent to this is the twentieth-century rock concert — at Zeppelin, or the Stones, or maybe Michael Jackson at the height of his fame or the Beatles at Shea Stadium. But there's something tame and sanitized about these late distant echoes of Dionysian ritual. A better, though more disturbing example, might be the assembly of the evil apparition of the Nazis at Nuremberg Stadium in 1936 — but more modern, electrified and amplified, with all the famous Nazis on amphetamines.

The appearance of Demetrius the Besieger as Dionysus — after Alexander, after the fall of Athens at the hands of Sparta, after the plague, after the great run of tragic poets — stands out to me as the last instance of authentic Dionysianism: the last merging of the state, the priest, the warrior, the artist, the god in one man, in a stadium carved from rock, designed so that even a whisper could be heard from far away within sight of the sea, in the purple Aegean dusk . . . the Western world still believed, still felt it to be true . . .

This convergence (of priest, performer, and sovereign) haunts our firmly secular age. Apollo (order, reason) contains Dionysus (chaos, sensuality); civilization is a shock absorber for not only the Dionysian impulse — but the Dioynsian body, the Dionysian face; the king in the arena, dressed in the cloak stitched with stars. And this, the latent presence of Dionysus and Dionysianism, intensifies pleasure. Kings (or rockstars or athletes) can no longer merge all of the functions of the city and state in a divine orgy, as Demetrius the Besieger did, but this impossibility is itself erotic, frictive. We are post-Dionysian, post-pagan, post-modern, but only because the possibilities of Dionysianism are now evenly distributed, possible everywhere, marking every social ritual. If we no longer believe in, or see Dionysus, we still want to be him; Dionysus is aspirational.

If Demetrius the Besieger was the last Dionysian pagan, he was also the first modern individual, or rather, the first individual at all.

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Pan is older, more primal than Dionysus. A half-goat, half-man deity of the wilderness, shepherds, and rustic music. He embodies our instincts: the disturbingly sensual experience of isolation in nature. His music (pipes) entrances and unsettles. He is not a god of cities or of cults with priests and temples. He appears, disappears, invokes pan-ic. If our repression of Dionysus is half-hearted (we secretly invoke and implore the return of that God), our repression of Pan is total: he is clinical, a panic-attack, a textbook term, and not a God at all, not a presence.

Pan is a deeper, darker figure whose effect on the history of Western culture — whose presence, I would argue — has been subsumed by or folded into that of Dionysus. Dionysus is the human face of the natural world in all its mystery, danger, violence, beauty, sensuality, and of the pre-civilizational human world. Pan has come down to us as a cartoon character, a flute player, the Peter Pan of the ancient pantheon.

Essayist and memoirist Michael Clune’s debut novel, Pan, attempts to redeem, discover, and unveil the flute-playing god, and bring him into the modern world. In Pan, the God Pan lives inside the body of Nicholas, a teenager from a divorced family living in the suburbs of Chicago in the 1990s who has panic attacks; Nicholas’ experience of the God is not pleasurable, it’s not Dioynsian, not exciting repression at work; his panic is far more primal, more urgent and overwhelming. There is no dialectical tension between civilization (Nicholas’ suburban subdivision) and the God within him (Pan); when he panics, all comfort and pleasure disappear, and only terror remains.

The theory that Nicholas is Pan comes from his friend Tod’s older brother, Ian, a sort of local Jim Morrison figure (who is himself Dionysian). Ian’s Dionysian qualities make him a charismatic individual; Nicholas’ possession, by contrast, by Pan de-individuates him: makes him one with a primal, oceanic nature. Nicholas, or Nick, as his friends call him, participates in what are essentially sex-magic rituals that Ian conducts in his family’s barn (known as the “Barn”).

Ian needs Nick and Nick needs Ian; Dionysus needs Pan: Nick’s primitive, natural, experiences of deep, fathomless animal terror lend authenticity to Ian’s experiments in the Barn — sometimes referred to as the “The Second Church of Pan.” In this way, Nick, Ian, and their friends act out the history of the ancient West in suburban Chicago. Dionysus is a dancing, laughing, humanized transformation of Pan: a bridge between nature and civilization.

The ceremonies and experiments serve a dual purpose for Nick; his friends at the “Church” introduce him to sex, poetry, philosophy, classical music, but also help him sharpen (what he thinks is) his Pan-consciousness: the strange, unsettling, totalizing point-of-view of everything “all at once” — in which the “substance” of all things becomes the “substance of thought.” Because Nick believes he is Pan, rather than a shy teen who has panic attacks, he develops a native capacity for philosophizing; we are meant to question whether Nick is really a reincarnation of Pan, or just a young philosopher in a Romantic mold — a natural pantheist who will grow up and become a normie philosophy major.

Clune, I suspect, is interested in representing the adjacency between the philosophical and the mystical or divine, in how ordinary perception always borders on something else: the hallucinatory, the mad, the raw, the Godlike. I read Pan, in this sense, as a sequel to Clune’s 2013 memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin; in White Out opioids serve the same function that Pan plays in Pan: dangerous catalysts for a shy, anxious, Midwestern male protagonist’s self-transcendence; ways of actualizing and transforming a philosophical young man’s perceptions into vivid, waking dreams. Heroin is a God; Pan is a God. Michael needs heroin; Nicholas needs Pan.

Ian, Tod, Sarah — Nick’s Second Church of Pan crew — play the role of Clune’s druggy friends, dealers, and girlfriends in White Out; the Second Church of Pan, not coincidentally, resembles the Baltimore flophouses in Clune’s earlier memoir. In White Out, Michael is a grad student in English; in Pan, Nick is a student at a big public high school. Heroin creates a feeling of simultaneous oneness and emptiness, literally, whitening out perception; Pan, similarly, when he inhabits Nicholas, produces this massive and sudden loss of self.

The strongest, sustained periods of writing, in the opinion of this reviewer, occur in the final third of the book, as Pan-consciousness gradually takes over Nick’s mind, or as Nick surrenders or sinks into, rather, the most primal, inhuman parts of his own mind.

There’s a sudden shock when one realizes the visibility one has lain suspended in with one’s eyes open is not true visibility, is in fact closer to dreams. The colors and textures — and above all the angles — revealed by the physical light show one with heartbreaking clarity I was actually much closer to sleep than I relayed, perhaps I was actually sleeping! There have been nights when actual tears formed at this revelation. But this night I was too intent on verifying my suspicion.

Ian, Tod, and Sarah (who Nick loses his virginity to) fall away, and Nick becomes more immersed in philosophizing and self-education (Nick engages with Bach, Liszt, Giotto, Bellini, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde in this course of the novel). The ordinary world of the suburbs is still there — video games, his parents’ divorce, Sarah, school — but they matter less and less. We are left to wonder if Nick has become Pan, or if his panic attacks, and the instability of his family life, have driven him into an unstable, hallucinatory state of his own mind; or if the distinction matters at all.

For Clune, I think, there is no meaningful distinction between a clinical state and state of divine rapture; there is a thread of Wittgensteinian mysticism that runs through this novel that asks: What does it matter what the substrate of our experience is if it is our experience? What does it matter what we call it? Pan or psychosis or white out.

As a cultural anthropologist, Clune, moreover, is interested in the roots of culture, the unnameable experiences that precede the names, the tropes, the archetypes we attach to these experiences; he is interested too, in their primacy, how they rise up our gullets like nausea and seize us, and how no one is safe — especially not in the mild-mannered Midwest, which, maybe more than any culture on earth, has tried to move to the flat, the modern, the ahistorical, the disembodied. Nick is surrounded by the most prosaic American landscape possible (the subdivision), but the force of what is inside of him is so much greater than what is without.

Clune suggests that theology and psychiatry may describe the same phenomenological terrain: the moment when something beyond the self takes hold; we may call this moment a disorder or a god and the choice is not insignificant — nor is the choice of God if we choose the latter. The magic of Pan is that Nick, and by extension Clune, not only rejects the clinical (schizophrenia), but the Dionysian (making oneself the individual at the center of the ritual — the party God); Nicholas chooses (to believe he is) Pan: a force beyond human individuality, closer to music or poetry, some pure, vast otherness.

Ian, a Dionysus, the founder of the Barn, can perform versions of a two-thousand-year-old ritual, but he builds his ceremonies around Nick and Pan, sensing, intuitively, that what Nick can do, with and within his own mind, is much older: ten thousand years or more. Ian, like Demetrius the Besieger, is a late pretender, a modern man; Nick, a young shaman, is truly ancient.

Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic. He founded the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research and his novel The Sleepers is available now through Arcade Publishing.