Addiction

When we become addicted, addicted to whatever–addicted to a drug, to a person, to a lifestyle, to a book or an author, to a meal, to a movie, to a manner of speaking; but then again, all of these others become modulations of the first when we are addicted–we lose ourselves, lose sight of ourselves, lose sight of the world surrounding the addiction, lose the world in a closedness unbefitting a being wondrous enough to recognize the addiction as addiction, wondrous enough to become addicted to begin with–a being such as we are.  The world closes in around us in a vivid fog, the faces and expressions of even our greatest loves on this earth lose their capacity to shine forth, everything is covered with the aching, hankering shadow of craving and looking in all things for one thing, or of asking that it at least accompany all things as a background, or a goal, or an intermission between one thing and the next.

            Without some form of narcotization, life is–impossible.  Life is always and ever after some buzz or other, buzzing after the buzz…and it’s understandable.  Throughout human history in particular, we noticed that this plant does such and such to us while this other plant does something else, we discovered that this brew, when left awhile to sit and ferment in a vat, gives quite the impression to the nervous system, that if you swallow the bulbs of this particular cactus it might make you sick, even unto retching and having your insides feel as though turning inside-out, yes, there is all that, but if you make it through this sickness you will learn something about yourself and about the world you otherwise could not have, you will see differently, and from then on out, if you take this particular psychedelic as a gift, experience differently and live differently.  For learning, for relaxation, for pain management, or for sheer adventure, for risk and daring, for the pursuit of the edge, of life at the edge, narcotics, drugs of all sorts, have been an indelible stamp on our lives, an accent to life on earth, whether to enhance its joys or to soothe and distract from its drudgery and woe.  We must thank these plants and the earth from which they spring.  We must be thankful for narcotics, and not thankful in part; thankful through and through.  Thankful for the ease and distractions they have given us, thankful for the lessons they have taught us, thankful for the way they might have led us through an otherwise unbearable time.

            But addiction is something else.  With addiction this attitude of gratitude is struck down; or, if you are grateful for everything, even your addictions, these addictions, on some occasion, some day or night, challenge the overwhelming gratitude for life you might otherwise have.  Addiction swells and charges like a bull in the playpen with your children, the precious dear ones, and sweeps everything into its disarray and its chaos.  Addiction is careless, reckless beyond imagination, and hopeless as well; hopeless because it only has one hope, the hope to continue in its addiction, to preserve itself within it, to continue in its ways, which is no hope at all.  The tremendous depths and expanses of our species, of you, addict, are winnowed down to the narrowest image of yourself, cut down to a pebble and a small enterprise, and the risk or gamble became the loss, the lesson became the lesson of disaster, the pain management became the dependency, the distraction became the oblivion.  So we have made a wrong turn in expressing our powers, in becoming the utmost, the maximum, of our powers, in giving back to life what it has given us, power and more power, ever-expanding and ever-growing power.  We have become, instead, addicted–addicts; we’ve turned our backs on life in order to become helpless and wayward representatives of life’s grandeur and splendor.  We’ve turned life into a spoiled image of itself, and the tarnish seems unerasable, seems like a thick, viscous covering over life’s energies, like a straight-jacket, like a portable prison, portable because it follows you everywhere; addiction knows no borders–it will follow you into the desert, into the wasteland, into a cell, a real, hard, barren prison cell.

            But life is so hard!  And what is freedom anyway?  We shout these cries from within and cries from without to those about us who have taken to worry about us, who have seen us changed, different somehow, who think maybe we might need a little help, or more than a little help, and we shout the same to our helpers as well: what is freedom anyway?  But life–life is so hard!  Since we now have time to ask these questions, and we stand at a certain distance from running after the next fix at least for the time of these ruminations, let us ask these questions, or turn the first into a question and ask the second as well.  Let us ask first: Is life–hard?  Yes, we rush to respond, but there are also fountains of delight and ease, also softness and rich pleasures.  There is softness in the company of hardness, lightness in the company of heaviness, and they have come to you as their vessel and residence; you contain both, undeniably and irreparably.  In fact, the entire issue of addiction can be seen as: the relation of softness to hardness, of lightness to heaviness.  The difficulty of balancing these two aspects of ourselves, of becoming light when the world is light, heavy when the world is heavy, of staying in tune with the world in this way, is so much of what the treachery of addiction comes down to.  Rather than flowing on with life as it goes, or rising up like a mountain when we have to, we demand of our lives that they be light and gay and godlike when they are heavy and pathetic, that they be hard and uncaring when their is so much to care for, so much to commit ourselves to.

            And what of freedom?  The possibility of addiction, in any of its forms or in whatever way you conceptualize it, seems obviously to thwart freedom in at least its most intuitive and commonly-accepted sense.  Addiction comes like a scourge to the free and independent life.  But as we said above, not only are we able, free in a sense, to look at our addictions, to look at it from within or to look back on it; not only that, but we are also capable, with the strangest capacity, to become addicted.  How strange, and, like a negative image of freedom, but with a power of its own, lessons and risks and hells, perhaps even heavens, of its own, it shows us our true colors, shows us in our proper light, as much as any freedom.  It shows the possibility, indeed the probability, of failure, without which freedom would be meaningless.  That we can uproot ourselves from the mud of addiction is an open question, but we discover something profound about ourselves and about the world nevertheless: that the greatest can be brought down and low by the stupidest cravings, by a dumb and dumbfounded snatching after the next bag, or the next bottle, the next puff or the next injection.  At least if nothing else, such a travesty, such a disparity in the worth of the contestants in this match, inspires a battle in us.  Whether the battle itself is healthy or not is another matter, to be decided only in the process of undergoing it, falling and getting up, doing this again and again–because the snares are all around; as long as you live, the traps shall be set for your steps.  

            So what are we to do with these addictions, what should be our course of action–how are we to recover?  We have turned our backs on our lives, on its proper strength, on life–what now?  A meeting with fellow addicts, a resolution, a promise you swear to yourself alone or before others not to continue in your ways, a program, meditation, a retreat, a religion–salvation?  Where do we turn for help, after having become addicted, after having turned back on life?  Where else do we turn but back to life, back to its flowing gifts, back to its expansiveness, without promises or assurances, but alive, full of that good steady high with its tempo of vicissitudes, its rhythm of regret and achievement, of peaks and valleys, of pinnacles and abysses?  Life, like a god, but ungodly, will have us back, will accept us into the folds of life like a prodigal son.  In fact, life has been whispering to us all along, whispering when we thought all was lost.  And now–now her whisper is right in your ear, still a whisper but the beating of it along the ridge of your ear and into the delicate mechanics inside is clear enough.  She keeps whispering the same, and it’s hope enough, even if a hope beyond hope: Come back to me!  We have become addicted, we have turned our backs on life; but it is never, never to late–to return to life, to wake from our torpor.