johnbyronkuhner.com

http://smragan.com/2011/08/ I was astonished on Friday night by the floats of the “Mystic Krewe of Hermes,” a krewe which prides itself on its traditional, secret, and indeed hermetic ways.  The parade was dubbed “The Retinue of Dionysus,” but I expected mythology from the parade about as much as I would expect a presentation on the Homeric Question at a USC Trojans game.  It’s not a crowd favorite, I don’t think; no one ever recommended the parade to me.  But now I wish I had found myself a better place to observe the parade (I had selected a spot for observing people more).  The floats were beautifully crafted mythological images, from the ugly Socratic beauty of “mentor Silenius” to the ravishing Catullan desperation of “Ariadne on the Beach” to the triumphant “Ariadne Among the Stars.”  And floats like “the Madness of King Lycurgus,” “Dionysus Crosses the Euphrates,” and “Dionysus and Pallene,” sent me scrambling home to my reference books.  The overall parade was, eis qui legere possint, a kind of moving catechism on the virtues of the vine; this was in Greek style, and in mythological tableaux; but the lesson was no different from the celebrations of the water of Hafiz which you might find in Rumi or Omar Khayyam.  It is a divine symbol.  It unites: it is Dionysus who first builds the bridge between East and West at Zeugma on the Euphrates; it elevates, as it did Ariadne; and the curse of its refusal is the madness of individualism and disintegration.