CYCLE FORTY-THREE

1. Cans stand to bottles as man to woman, or materialism to realism, with purgatorial (lunar) and mundane (planar) implications. For the can is masculine while the bottle is feminine, and one could argue that whereas drinking straight from a can is homosexual, drinking straight from a bottle - say a small bottle of beer - is lesbian. To pour the contents of a can and/or bottle into a glass, however, and drink from the glass ... would suggest an heterosexual compromise between the two drinking extremes, a compromise never more literally heterosexual than when both cans and bottles are simultaneously utilized by, presumably, members of the opposite sex, so that can-to-glass on the male's part and bottle-to-glass on the female's part, the glasses of identical construction, signifies a coming together of the two genders in a common meeting-point. Yet men are not invariably purgatorial, any more than women are invariably mundane, since ethnic and class correlations also have to be borne in mind, which suggest that while some men prefer bottles to cans, there are women who prefer cans to bottles, and drink accordingly, with or without a glass.

2. Parallel to the above, one could argue for a sort of naturalistic/idealistic antithesis, with regard to drinking, between the use, on the one hand, of a tankard and, on the other hand, of a lidded-beaker with straw - the former of the Devil and the latter of God, with, obviously, diabolic (solar) and divine (stellar) implications. For the tankard, whether made of metal or glass, is generally a centrifugal entity with a ring-like handle, whereas to drink from a lidded-beaker via a straw is much the most centripetal mode of drinking, and the contrast is so great that one is obliged to think along the lines of an alpha/omega basis, the basis of noumenal objectivity on the one hand, and of noumenal subjectivity on the other hand.... This rather contrasts with the vertical axis, so to speak, between the phenomenal objectivity of cans and the phenomenal subjectivity of bottles, whose correlations, as already noted, are with man and woman respectively.

3. Yet if there is anything anterior to the tankard, such that connotes with alpha divinity, then it can only be with regard to the keg, tank, barrel, or whatever, from which the tankard's contents are drawn, so that the publican who, for instance, pulls beer for his customers effectively functions in a Jehovahesque role from which the tankard, or use thereof, constitutes a sort of Satanic fall. Hence where the publican functions as Alpha God, those of his customers who favour draught beer are obliged to become Alpha Devils, and at no small financial and moral cost to themselves!