Category: Addiction

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Adam Phillips Addiction Enid Blyton Escape

The Magic Faraway Tree

I am an Enid Blyton baby. I don’t know if children read Enid Blyton these days, their parents having perhaps seen the less than hagiographic biopics (Enid, with Helena Bonham Carter: an especially acidulous Blyton). Or maybe they’ve read the “nightmare mother” exposés online [1]. But for me, Noddy and Big Ears, The Secret Seven, Famous Five, and perhaps above all The Magic Faraway Tree shaped the contours of my childhood.

The Faraway Tree series, published very early on in her writing career (1939), is about a magic tree inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated Blyton as a child. The idea of the Yggdrasil tree, placed at the center of the cosmos and rising through a number of worlds, is found in northern Eurasia and forms part of the shamanic lore shared by many peoples of this region. This seems to be a very ancient conception, perhaps based on the Pole Star, the centre of the heavens, and the image of an omphalic tree in Scandinavian myth. Among Siberian shamans, a cardinal tree, often thought to be an Ash, may also be used as a ladder to ascend the heavens.

According to Blyton’s daughter Gillian, the inspiration for the magic tree came one day when she was trying to create a new story “and suddenly she was walking in the enchanted wood and found the tree. In her imagination she climbed up through the branches and met Moon-Face, Silky, the Saucepan Man and the rest of the characters. She had all she needed.” As in the Wishing-Chair series, these fantasy books typically involve children being transported into a magical world in which they meet fairies, goblins, elves, pixies and other mythological creatures.

But instead of the dragon Níðhöggr or the stags Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór, Blyton populates her mythical tree with a hodge-podge of oddballs who her child characters (stand-ins for the children readers) visit whenever they like. There’s Moon-Face, a man (?) possibly afflicted with neurofibromatosis or Proteus Syndrome. Think Joseph Merrick, aka The Elephant Man. Moon-Face’s rotund face is never referred to as an oddity though, rather it serves as an identity marker. His house inside the tree is also round and filled with curved furniture. Two other larger than life roomies accompany the children on their adventures: The Saucepan Man and Mr Whatzisname. The Saucepan Man is covered with pots and pans, and perhaps for this reason is partially deaf. He lives with Mr Whatzisname, who cannot remember his own name (!?) although Wikipedia informs me that “during a particular story at the Land of Secrets, Mr. Watzisname discovers that his name is ‘Kollamoolitumarellipawkyrollo’. This is forgotten by the end of the story (even by the man himself) and he goes back to being Mr. Watzisname.”

There is also Silky The Fairy, who seems to identify as female, and perhaps for that reason, isn’t supplied with any salient characteristics, existing instead as a somewhat bland, almost sexless Barbie doll cipher. Anti-social elements pique the plot via The Angry Pixie, who lives in a house with a tiny window and has a habit of throwing cold water, or any liquid, at hand over people who dare to peep inside. Also Dame Washalot, who spends her time washing her clothes and throwing the dirty wash-water down the tree. If she has no clothes to wash, Washalot washes the dirty laundry of other people and even the leaves of the tree.

What is it about the Faraway Tree series, I have often wondered, that struck me so forcibly as a child, so that returning to the books now more than 40 years after a I first read them, I am still completely bowled over and enchanted by the adventures they contain?

I think it’s the promise of escape to alternate worlds. Books for a child, or for the inner child, are an objective correlative of this kind of escape. No doubt cannabis and other intoxicants and dissociatives work this way too. Re-reading these books, it is clear that the children go on a series of “trips” whenever they climb the tree, as we do whenever we vape cannabis flowers or eat magic mushrooms.

Reading these books now, I recognise how archetypally escapist they are, and also how as a child, I mainly read to escape. To escape the constant bickering of my parents, and other anxiety-provoking dynamics of family life, to escape boredom and the constraints of this particular conscious Self growing up in that particular culture at that time. I still read to escape, to some degree, although for this reason I am puzzled by the fact that I am not especially interested in the outskirts of escapist literature: fantasy and science fiction. Maybe because I don’t find the linguistic texture of these books as satisfying as a broadly-speaking “realist” literary novel. Or maybe because I do still like to be tethered in some way, rooted (like the Magic Tree in Enid Blyton’s book itself)  in this world, even whilst exploring alternate/escapist realities. Which is perhaps why I fear trying psychedelics, even whilst feeling comfortable with cannabis; I still fear the hallucinatory power of LSD or psilocybin. Maybe I don’t really want escape in that way, maybe what I want is just a different way of seeing and being in this world, let’s call it The Enlightenment Model, where the essence of reality is perceived and understood with regard to its depths and riches in ways that we don’t normally have access to.

“The founding and fading myth of Adam and Eve is a great escape story,” Adam Phillips reminds us, taking us, as all good psychoanalysts must, to the mythical foundations of the stories we tell ourselves both as individuals, as well as a culture. “[It’s] the story of a failed breakout,” he goes on to suggest. “Transgression is the attempt to find out exactly what it is that is impossible to escape from. In seeking forbidden knowledge about God’s creation they discovered just what there was to fear about God. The biblical story dramatizes, whatever else it does, the link in our minds between curiosity and release –how our ideas of freedom depend upon our finding out what we have to fear. We find out what the world is like by testing it, by testing ourselves against it.”

Later, he writes in this, one of my favourite Phillips’ books, Houdini’s Box:

“Addicts –to work and money, to drink and drugs, to political ideology and fundamentalist religion –are the heroes and anti-heroes, the spirits of the age, because they (we) enact and dramatize our dilemmas about freedom and memory. About what kind of freedom is possible, and about how this is bound up with what any given society (any education) persuades us is worth getting away from; or, indeed, worth abolishing so that it is no longer there, apparently, to affront us. If we happen to live in a society that prefers artists to drug-dealers, then either we won’t think of good art as escapist, or we will have more or less tacitly agreed that whatever the art in question has released us from is unacceptable. That the lives we want depend upon avoiding, say, poverty, or ugliness, or guilt, or complexity, or frivolousness, and so on. Our negative ideals –what we are not supposed to desire, to like or to be like –are the materials from which we make our positive ideals. Our values are born out of perceived threat.”

I like this idea a lot. It feel it’s something I’d like to think more about, maybe by reading a later book of his, Unforbidden Pleasures, which I think he explores this notion in greater depth.

The escapist myth of this Faraway Tree, is that its very highest branches poke through the clouds via holes, maybe a metre across in diameter. Every few days, as if on a neverending carousel, a new world with unique aspects special to it, comes to rest above these holes. One can climb up the branch, and then onwards via a ladder through the hole and beyond into an entirely new setting where all the strictures of our lives are upended. These Lands might be classified into spaces that are either facsimiles of childhood anxieties or panaceas of a sort.

Take the Land of Topsy Turvy where everybody walks on their hands and everything is upside down. Or The Land of Dreams which works more like a Bunuel film, or a Dali painting: distorting or manipulating reality in weird and woozy ways. And also in anxiety-provoking ways as often the characters get stuck in these lands, as when the Sandman throws sand in the children’s eyes to make them sleep. And yet, like all good (children’s) literature, these lands, as fantastical as they seem at first,  mirror in some essential way our earthbound dimension. For don’t we all crave for things to remain the same (especially if they’re enjoyable), but fear their fixity if they’re not? As in the Land of Tempers where everyone rages and fumes on a Trump-like scale. This might be a dramatic excursion for those visiting, but if  losing your temper means you will have to stay in this land forever, as it seems Orange 45 (as Greg Proops calls him) has had to do, the Land of Tempers might quickly become a kind of hell realm, where the only anxiolytic comes in the form of raging against Jews, and Trans people, and immigrants, and the media.

Then there are those lands that are therapeutic, useful, and seem to work as some kind of panacea, including The Land of Spells, inhabited by witches and wizards, and The Land of Magic Medicines which the children visit when their mother is ill to buy her medicine.

My favourite Lands as a child (no surprise there) were those of pure wish-fulfilment: The Land of Do-As-You-Please, The Land of Toys, The Land of Goodies, and The Land of Presents. Last night, a little stoned on Durban Poison, and very much enjoying a Tea Pigs Redbush/Honeybush cuppa with soya milk that drank like condensed milk at times, I snuggled in bed with Max and read the second Magic Faraway Tree book, marvelling at the twists and turns that Blyton orchestrates, ultra-prolific potboiler of a writer that she was, her plot twists often worthy of a Netflix series, always keeping you reading on and turning the next page.

There is something at once deeply sensual and restrained about her writing, which often comes out in her descriptions of food. Take this description of Google Buns for example [2]:

“The buns were most peculiar. They each had a very large currant in the middle, and this was filled with sherbert. So when you got to the currant and bit it the sherbert frothed out and filled your mouth with fine bubbles that tasted delicious.”

Currants, sherbert, froth? Yuck, but also enticing. Here’s a description of another Blyton delicacy I dreamed of tasting when I read these books as a child: Pop Biscuits.

“As soon as you bit them they went pop! And you suddenly found your mouth filled with new honey from the middle of the biscuits.”

Or how about a Toffee Shock: “A Toffee Shock gets bigger and bigger as you suck it, instead of smaller and smaller – and when it is so big that there is hardly any room for it in your mouth it suddenly explodes – and goes to nothing.”

Gathering together a larder of Blyton delicacies for this essay, I am struck by how all of them involve a kind of surprise in eating, perhaps the child’s surprise in discovering a taste experience for the first time: like the ultra-salty deliciousness of a piece of anchovy sitting in the milky gloop of mozzarella on one’s pizza, or jam filling in a donut. But also the surprise of non-food related experiences: one’s first kiss, or other early sexual experiences for example. Also the surprise of a plot-twist itself,  a word used in an electrifying and unanticipated way – a linguistic hallmark of all good writing, I think.

Barbara Stoney describes Blyton’s descriptions of food in a story called ‘Mother! Mother!’ as being “more reminiscent of an orgy in an Edwardian emporium than a modern child’s idea of a good ‘blow-out’. Enid Blyton writes of tongues, ham, pies, lemonade and ginger-beer. This is not just food, it is archetypal feasting, the author’s longing for the palmy days of her own childhood.”

Michael Woods also tries to deconstruct the psychosocial ingredients of Blyton’s formula: superior social status, the absence of anything that smacks of the work-a-day world, the high fantasy level, and a strong animal interest.

“For most adults who write children’s books, once the communication barrier has been largely overcome, the main problem is to write what children want to read and yet remain intellectually honest to themselves in presenting the world as it really is. For Enid Blyton it seems unlikely that any such dilemma raised its head; she was a child, she thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is essentially pre-adolescent. Piaget has shown us that children tend to make moral judgement purely in terms of good and bad and that it is only with the advent of adolescence that the individual is able to accept different levels of goodness and to judge the actions of others according to the circumstances. Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas and her books satisfy children because they present things clearly in black and white with no confusing intermediate shades of grey.”

There is something in this that I need to think about in relation to cannabis. It is captured well in this Liesl Mueller poem too:

SOMETIMES, WHEN THE LIGHT

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles
and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion
completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks
and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,
under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,
so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,
you would die, or be happy forever.

This “something secret going on,/so marvelous and dangerous//that if you crawled through and saw,/you would die, or be happy forever” energises the motivation for psychoactive substances, poetry being one of these substances. It is not just about turning away from the humdrum everyday into something strange and magical and enchanting, where trees (and plants) present opportunities to explore entirely new worlds, or worlds that function as simple but potent thought experiments. A more sophisticated version of this, albeit more high-tech is HBO’s Westworld television series.

Rather than physically travelling to strange and iconoclastic worlds though, some of us choose to read: novels, short stories, or poems saturated with dense dream-logic. All taking us in unforseen ways to somewhere different, or someplace other than our everyday conscious experience.

[1]  “The truth is, Enid Blyton was ­arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind and without a trace of maternal instinct,” writes Imogen Blyton of her mother. “As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult, I did not hate her. I pitied her.” https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/230862/Enid-Blyton-the-nightmare-mother

[2] Yes, this is 1943, and yes that’s what she called them. A lot of Blyton’s writing has been “cleaned up” and bowdlerised, but Google Buns remain untouched.

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Addiction Feel Better Living A Valued Life Strategies and tools

Meeting Cravings with Kindness

Because we are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures, for most of us, there is going to be something in our lives, maybe even a series of things that we develop a somewhat addictive relationship with.

For the sake of simplicity, by addiction here, I’m not necessarily talking about that especially dramatic or tragic addiction narrative that me might associate with the word ADDICTION in capital letters, associations in our minds pointing to Hubert Selby Junior’s Requiem for a Dream, or Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – these being the outer limits of that pain-avoiding/pleasure-seeking dynamic we all experience as human beings. What I’m primarily talking about here are our everyday addictions.

My definition of addiction, caps or small-case, would simply be: that moment in the day when the thing you want, or the the thing you want to do, feels so strong, so compelling, so fused and necessary to your well-being that you would score the following statement very, very high if asked to give it a number out of ten:

“If I don’t get [whatever it is I want at this moment] into my system, I’m not going to feel OK.”

also

“Only eating/drinking/doing [whatever it is I want at this moment] will satisfy me or make me feel better, or just alright.”

If you’re scoring six to ten on these statements for anything, pleasurable or painful, it would be fair to say (in my book) that you’re somewhat addicted to that thing. I have never felt this way about cabbage, or watching Question Time. I suspect some might be addicted to the latter, but not me! Also important here is that a feeling of remorse after doing the activity, a feeling of perhaps having let yourself down (which is to say your Core-Valued Self). Again, I never feel that way after eating cabbage or watching Question Time. But I do after watching a couple of episodes of the latest binge-fest on Netflix for example.

Here are some of the things I have an addictive relationship with (you might want to create your own list as I bet at least some of these come up for you too):

  • sugary and refined-carbohydrate foods (ice-cream, biscuits, cake, crisps and other snacks, bread, crackers)
  • rich and satisfying foods, also comfort foods: cheese, peanuts, peanut-butter, mashed potatoes, chips
  • intoxicants (booze, especially wine; weed; I’d also include sugar, tea and coffee here; music can also be an intoxicant, but I never feel bad about listening to Forever In Blue Jeans on repeat, so I guess at least I’m not addicted to Neil Diamond – whew!)
  • mental stimulants: Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Bumble, downloading new books/music/films
  • Have-To or Need-To-Do urges: an overwhelming need to reply to a message to someone, or some other form of communication that feels as if it can’t wait, or to send a message or an email (the content of the message could be positive or barbed)
  • and probably a whole bunch of other behaviours that I haven’t thought about whilst writing this post

Our remorse when following through with our addictive behaviours, like all emotions can give us a really valuable clue as to what the addiction is trying to say to us. And also perhaps one way in which we might be able to start working with the addictive parts of us. Here’s one idea of how to do that.

MEETING CRAVINGS WITH KINDNESS

The next time you are assailed by an addictive thought, or urge (“If I don’t go and get a glass of wine in me as soon as I finish work today, I’m done for!”) here’s something you might like to try.

Imagine that Addicted Part of your mind is one of your more reckless, but also gregarious and fun friends who has just sent you a text saying: “Hey Steve, fancy doing […] this evening! I know you want to! 😉 PLUS you deserve it – you’ve worked hard today! Give yourself a treat mate. All work and no play makes Steve a pretty dull therapist etc.”

OK, time to ask “Pat” to just give you 15 minutes and you’ll get back to him with your response.

I call my Craving Mind Patrick, by the way, after someone I knew at University who was pretty much 24/7 on the lash. If you were wanting to go out for a piss-up, or any other intoxicating or pleasure-seeking pursuit, Pat was not only ready and willing, but deeply committed to the two of you having as much fun as possible. Yes, the evening would invariably end with him puking or shitting himself, or needing to be carried home, but when you’re young with a full of head of hair, there is a kind of romantic splendour to these sorts of shenanigans. (You might want to help yourself defuse a little from your craving mind by giving it a name too. Even if you don’t try anything I’ve written below, just recognising when your craving mind is sending you an “invitation” as Patrick/Cruella/Milly doing so, can be a really helpful and defusing start.)

OK, you’ve now got 15 minutes to reconnect with your core caring self and your core value system.

If you were a parent, this self would come to the fore if your son or daughter told you they were going out with Pat to get hammered on whatever was available, or he might score from the local drug dealer when out. Equally, you might feel sad if you saw a close friend or family member pursuing a substance or activity (food, work, drink, whatever) that you could see was only intermittently providing them with pleasure, but than anything else: a good dose of suffering.

So what are you going to do in the next 15 minutes? You’re going to listen to this guided meditation which leads you through a kind of heart-and-soul boogie, designed primarily to top-up your levels of self-care and kindness, but also to send some of the overflow out to other people: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xndq9j00b8zpoqa/Kindness%20Practice.mp3?dl=0

That’s not my voice you’ll hear, but the mellifluous tones of Russ Harris, and the practice can be found on his ActCompanion app, which is also worth a gander.

You’ll notice when doing the meditation that you use some of the following phrases when sending kindness to yourself and others:

  • May you be peaceful.
  • May you be healthy.
  • May you be content.
  • May you experience love.
  • May you experience kindness.
  • May your life be rich, full and meaningful.

I think these phrases can also be used as a kind of compass for us to decide whether we really want or need to join “Patrick” on whatever he’s dreamt up for us that day or evening. Big or small. Last night, I used the exercise below to decide whether I wanted to send a WhatsApp message to an ex-girlfriend, as well as whether I would have a glass of wine or two rather than a mocktail with my pistachio nuts whilst cooking. You can use these for anything you have an addictive relationship with.

EXERCISE: A FEW KIND WAYS OF GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR CORE VALUES

Think for a moment about the thing you’re feeling compelled to do. Now really get in touch with the urge. Feel it in your body and as an almost insistent command. You will also be able to get in touch with this a kind of “craving” frequency in your mind. You might even want to put your hands into the “shape” of that craving. Altogether now, Strike a Pose!

Now work through the following six reflections:

  1. MAY YOU BE PEACEFUL: Will this thing you want to do at this very moment lead to greater peace of mind? If it will, will that peace of mind extend to how you’ll feel tomorrow when thinking back about your behaviour? If not, what is it you could do right now that would fit the above criteria and help you to feel more peaceful?
  2. MAY YOU BE HEALTHY: Bring to mind an image of yourself at your healthiest – emotionally and physically. Will the thing you’re craving to do at this moment promote and add to that healthy-you? If not, is there something else you could do right now, that would also perhaps be pleasurable, or stress-reducing, even if not as pleasurable as the thing your Craving Mind wants you to do. But instead will certainly contribute to acting, and thus feeling more healthy?
  3. MAY YOU BE CONTENT: Notice, the word is not “happy” or ROTFLMFAO. That last phrase is very “Pat”, btw. The origins of the word “content” are more to do with feeling satisfied and “contained” in some way. Like we feel when we’re doing a meditation such as the one I provided above. Would doing this activity help you to feel genuinely “content”? Would you feel content tomorrow, or later on, knowing you’d done it? If so, go for it! If not, what could you do right now that might help you to feel content in a “satisfied” and “contained” way?
  4. MAY YOU EXPERIENCE LOVE? Does your “Patrick” love you? Mine doesn’t. He’s just the part of my pleasure-seeking/pain-avoiding brain that wants to do the activity he’s been “programmed” to do by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution: head for the yummy stuff (booze, sex, dancing, whatever), and avoid the yucky stuff (essays, reading, meditation). What would a loving friend suggest the two of you do/eat/experience? Maybe you can be that friend to yourself at this moment?
  5. MAY YOU EXPERIENCE KINDNESS: Again, is this the kindest thing you can do for yourself at this moment. Is Patrick motivated by kindness? If the word kindness doesn’t sit well with you, perhaps has some kind of religious or religiose overtones to your critical-judging mind, try a word like “helpful”? If doing the thing Patrick wants you to do is the most helpful thing you can do for yourself at this moment, go for it! If not, maybe you might want to send a text to him saying “thanks, but-no-thanks, Pat!”, and do something kind for yourself right now. 
  6. MAY YOUR LIFE BE RICH, FULL, AND MEANINGFUL: Again, you might want to spend a moment thinking about what a rich, full, and meaningful life for yourself might look like in the here and now, without changing your job, or your flat, or anything else for that matter (though change might be part of this process too). If the thing you want to do is aligned to that vision you have of yourself, go for it! If not, is there an activity you can do right here and now that will add to the richness, fullness and meaning of the next ten minutes of your life, the next hour of this finite timespan we all have allotted to us. 

You don’t have to go through all of these steps to benefit from this defusion technique. Even just getting into the habit of imagining that every craving you have (to go on Twitter or Instagram, to check your phone for a text message, to eat another biscuit, whatever) is a text from your Craving Mind, and then just very quickly ask yourself if following-through with the urge would be kind or helpful? This is a great first step. And may be the only step you need to take in order to unhook yourself from your craving thoughts and urges.

You might want to follow this by a second step of simply saying aloud, maybe two or three times, something like: “Thanks Pat, I’d really love to [and meaning it, because you really would love to do this], but I can’t today/tonight.” And then getting on with something else that is meaningful to you.

Even if we did this one out of ten times that our craving minds hooked us into their desires (not actually your desires, your value-driven desires, but our pleasure-seeking/pain-avoidant brain’s desires), we’d be 10% freer than we are at present.

And that would feel good, wouldn’t it?

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Addiction Adrienne Rich Poetry Koan

Poetry Prescriptions for ADDICTIONS & COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOUR

Recently I’ve been self-prescribing poems to learn by-heart for my own addictions and compulsions: to food, to drink, to my phone; to the constant stimulating stream of social media I now can’t possibly live without; to poetry; to YouTube videos; to television series and the week-long binges they necessitate; to certain kinds of interpersonal attachments, both “real” and virtual.

For days I’ve had that 80s schlockmeister Robert Palmer intoning his insidious little mantra into my limbic system: “Your lights are on, but you’re not home / Your will is not your own… / Might as well face it you’re addicted to love.”

Truth is, we are all now addicted to something or other. Maybe it’s always been that way, or maybe we’re facing a rampant new strain of a very old problem, outlined as far back as Plato and The Prophets. As Kaveh Akbar writes in another poem that expores this, one I’ve been by learning by heart recently:

I blame my culture       I blame everyone but myself     
intent arrives like a call to prayer and is as easy to dismiss   

Wherever we sit on the spectrum of compulsive behaviours, are these not the justifications we all use on a daily basis? I know I do.

Here are some poems you might want to self-prescribe (learning by heart?) for whatever compulsive behaviour has got its claws into you at the moment.

THE DAY YOU STOP

One day will be tomorrow. The day of truce
and socket and beaten. The day
you shrink into stopping, the day threadbare and pain-
shamed and limit. Until then,
you might be continuing
because that is what you do until the last moment
when you must stop.
Still everywhere the shiver
is slow on the tongue, insistent. You will stop
for some weeks,
your body taking body
from your blood
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers
you stoop to collect. You will be diligent
because you have paid good money
to be taught how to stop, slanting off
from queasy transgressions, those
clutches and source. Even so,
we shouldn’t fool ourselves;
resolve cannot liquefy need.
You will probably start again soon after
you have completed the stopping,
the unwashed swell of rapture
taking your face through teeth to heartbeat,
every beaten moment on the couch.
Every relief: have hereafter and clamor.
Have nothing worse.
You’ll follow the mumble through
that ache that is tincture. Is rule
and bundle. Is famished inside you
and thrumming. You understand
there are two types, and you are
the type to release. If you had to choose
between settle and suture, you know what you’re after.
You’d pour yourself hitches
and battery. Pour yourself each subsequent time.
It will become impossible to believe
you will ever stop for good.
Stopping is not counter or suspect,
but easing back is all that is left,
the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives.

-Lauren Camp

—

RECOVERY

You have decided to live. This is your fifth
day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat,
the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you,
my own mouth moving.
Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor
a mess, the garden ruined,
the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?
So much work to be done.
The sodden dresses. Houses to be built.
Wood to be dried and driven and stacked. Nails!
The muddy roses. So much muck about. Hard walking.
And still a steady drizzle,
the sun like a morning moon, and all of them grumpy
and looking at each other in that new way.
We walk together, slowly, on this your fifth day
and you, occasionally, glimmer with a light
I’ve never seen before. It frightens me,
this new muscle in you, flexing.
I had the crutches ready. The soup simmering.
But now it is as we thought.
Can we endure it, the rain finally stopped?

-Marie Howe

—

I HAVE ROADS IN ME

winding within my arteries
into distant hills
of memories,
where dreams float like dandelion fibers
on bright, chill, breezy
mornings under a canopy
of cottonwood branches.
Where leaves glimmer
sunlight
roads turn.
I have roads in me
where drums pound a sacrifice
and beckon
to again believe in life’s wonder,
where I learn the intense passion,
seeing the sparkling, dewdripping
leaves upon moist, pine-needled ground.
My heart restored,
I am guided
by stars
and a raging desire to live.

-Jimmy Santiago Baca

—

LOUDMOUTH SOUP

Vodka, whiskey, gin. Scotch, Red wine, cognac,
brandy—are you getting thirsty yet?—ale,
rye. It all tastes good: on the rocks, with a splash,
side of soda, shaken
not stirred, triple,
olives, one of those nutritious little pearl
onions, a double, neat,
with a twist. Drink
it up. Let’s have a drink: dry beer, wet beer,
light, dark and needled beer. Oh parched,
we drank the river
nearly to its bed at times, and were so numb
a boulder on a toe
was pleasant pain, all pain
was pleasant since that’s all there was, pain,
and everything that was deeply felt, deeply,
was not. Bourbon, white and pink wine, aperitif,
cordial (hardly!), cocktail, martini,
highball, digestif, port, grain
punch—are you getting thirsty yet?—line them up!
We’ll have a drink
and talk, we’ll have
a drink
and die, grim-about-it-with-piquancy.
It was a long time on the waiting list
for zero
and I’m happy
for the call out of that line
to other, less predictable,
more joyful
slides to ride on home.

-Thomas Lux

—

THE IRREPARABLE

Can we stifle the old, the lingering Remorse,
That lives, quivers and writhes,
And feeds on us like the worm on the dead,
Like the grub on the oak?
Can we stifle implacable Remorse?

In what philtre, in what potion, what wine,
Shall we drown this old enemy,
Destructive and greedy as a harlot,
Patient as the ant?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine?

Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this spirit filled with anguish,
So like a dying man crushed beneath the wounded,
Who is struck by the horses’ shoes;
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,

To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches,
To this broken soldier! if he must despair
Of having his cross and his grave,
This poor, dying man whom the wolf already scents!

Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Can one tear asunder darkness
Thicker than pitch, without morning, without evening,
Without stars, without ominous lightning?
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?

Hope that shines in the windows of the Inn
Is snuffed out, dead forever!
Without the moon, without light, to find where they lodge
The martyrs of an evil road!
The Devil has put out all the lights at the Inn!

Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the irremissible?
Do you know Remorse, with the poisoned darts,
For whom our hearts serve as targets?
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?

The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth
Our soul, pitiful monument,
And often he attacks like the termite
The foundations of the building.
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth!

— Sometimes I have seen at the back of a trite stage
Enlivened by a deep-toned orchestra,
A fairy set ablaze a miraculous dawn
In an infernal sky;
Sometimes I have been at the back of a trite stage

A being who was only light, gold and gauze,
Throw down the enormous Satan;
But my heart, which rapture never visits,
Is a playhouse where one awaits
Always, always in vain, the Being with gauze wings!

-Charles Baudelaire, tr. Aggeler

—

THE HEAVENS

From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
It is all one intolerable war.
I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
like the drowned out of our shirts…

-Denis Johnson

—

AMERICAN RIVER SKY ALCOHOL FATHER

What is pornography? What is dream?
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
forty years ago, four lifetimes ago,
brown as bourbon, warm, you said to me,
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
Then: “You’re killing your mother.”
And she: “You’re killing your father.”
What do men want? What do fathers want?
Why won’t they go to the mothers?
(What do the mothers want.)
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
your warm hand. Your glass. Your bedside table gun.
The dock, the water, the fragile, tough beach grass.
Your hand. I wouldn’t swim. I wouldn’t fly.

-Jean Valentine

—

BREATHINGS

i checked him every night
mixing the landing light
with the slow mucous of his snores

if he was quiet I would press
two fingers on his arm
until he breathed again

children need so little air
but i wake every hour
gasping for yesterday

choking on the things
i did not do
the times i did not listen

i check him still
opening his old room
like a tin beneath my bed–

–Dom Conlon

—

CORRESPONDENCE

I leave it there
For a while
Like some jagged thing
Until foolish hope
Overcomes hollow experience

And I am told
That the beating heart
I stuffed with the unbroken spiral
Of a small, round apple
And glazed all over
With dark, sticky blood
Was not quite right

I leave it again
Until I tire of the tiny nicks
Each time I pass it by
Then reconcile it
To the rejection heap
Along with the others
That also taught me nothing

And I take up my blade

-Anne Casey

—

DELINQUENT HEARTS ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS 

Eat the shrooms and desire me. We tag
the car, our tailing Fs and Ss rising
off the rusted side. You say the paint cans
hiss like the king snake curled up under your porch.
I laugh and jake, vodka gunning. The highway
is a distant thrum. When you smash the caboose window
with a rock in your fist I know the drugs are working.
We nimble along the tracks back to stashed
bottles filled with gas and oil. When the train
rolls by we toss and laugh and streak as fire
consumes the side of the cars. It’s a dragon
you brag, and high we rise up over crappy
lives we knuckle drag. We drink and smoke and tag
and dodge the railroad cops bobbing for our necks.
It’s just after midnight and the laughs still come.
I’ve got a scheme to avoid being caught.
When you touch me I know you want me forever.

–Stephen Scott Whitaker

—

DREAM SONG #57

In a state of chortle sin—once he reflected,
swilling tomato juice—live I, and did
more than my thirstier years.
To Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,
and gripe of retail loss? I dare say not.
I don’t thínk there’s that place

save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight
retrieving her whole body, which I need.
I recall a ‘coon treed,
flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,
and something can (has) been said for sobriety
but very little.

The guns. Ah, darling, it was late for me,
midnight, at seven. How in famished youth
could I forsee Henry’s sweet seed
unspent across so flying barren ground,
where would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?
I fell out of the tree.

-John Berryman

—

IF THERE’S A GOD

If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
wrecked lives, and it’s only he who can explain how my doctor
father, with the gift of healing strangers and patients alike,
left so many intimate dead in his wake.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
recklessness, and I ask him to answer.
He’s the god of thrills, the god of boys riding bikes down
steep hills with their hands over their heads.
He’s the god of holy and unholy chance, the god of soldiers
crossing a field and to the right of you a man falls dead and to
the left also and you are still standing.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of diet pills,
who is the god of the Fifties housewife who vacuums all day and
whose bathroom is spotless and now it is evening as she sits
alone in the kitchen, polishing her chains.
He’s the god of the rampant mind and the god of my father’s
long monologues by moonlight in the dark car driving over the
dusty roads.
He’s the god of tiny, manic orderings in the midst of chaos,
the god of elaborate charts where Greg will do this chore on
Monday and a different one on Tuesday and all the brothers are
there on the chart and all the chores and all the days of the
week in a miniscule script no one can read.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was his hopped-up
acolyte who leapt out of bed one afternoon to chase a mouse
through the house, shouting, firing his .38 repeatedly at the
tiny beast scurrying along the wall while Jon wailed for help
from the next room.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of subtle
carnage and dubious gifts who lives in each small pill that
tastes of electricity and dust.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was its high
priest, praising it, preaching its gospel, lifting it like a host
and intoning: “Here in my hand is the mystery– a god alive
inside a tiny tablet. He is a high god, a god of highs– he eats
the heart to juice the brain and mocks the havoc he makes,
laughing at all who stumble. Put out your tongue and receive it.”

-Gregory Orr

—

GRAVY

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.

-Raymond Carver

—

POETRY COLLECTIONS:

  1. William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind
  2. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf

If you have further suggestions for poems or collections on this theme, could you please leave a note in the Comments box below. Thank you!

 

Categories
Addiction By Heart Poetry Koan

By Hearting UNBURNABLE THE COLD IS FLOODING OUR LIVES by Kaveh Akbar

[Read Kaveh Akbar’s poem HERE]

the prophets are alive but unrecognizable to us
as calligraphy to a mouse      

I sometimes think about the relationship between poems and stand-up comedy, especially those comedians who structure their acts around an artillery of one-liners. The one-liner is a very particular kind of comic vehicle, where the space between set-up and payoff might be as swift and devastating as a kidney punch. In both cases, we either yelp in sympathetic pain, recognition, or laughter.

There is something addictive about this style of aphoristic comedy and poetry, as there is something addictive about Kaveh Akbar’s work, which is fitting when considering the nature of a collection that explores how the poet reached a kind of truce with his addictions, as well as how he still withstands them, Jacob wrestling the angel on a daily basis.

I chose the poem Unburnable the Cold is Flooding Our Lives to learn because it seemed to have, line-by-line, the kind of payoff that classic comedy routines give us. I wanted to learn it by heart the way my 11 year old schoolfriend Dimitri Yiannakis would memorise large chunks of the then-still-kosher Cosby (we’re talking 1984) from his parents’ LP collection and then regale me with these at break time, as if they were his own. I wanted to have these one-liners on the tip of my tongue as Yiannakis, a stout kid, had had Fat Albert riffs to ward off too much reality. I wanted to feel like Oscar Wilde, or Kaveh Akbar, if only for a few minutes.

for a time they dragged

long oar strokes across the sky        now they sit
in graveyards drinking coffee forking soapy cottage cheese

into their mouths     

The poem begins with some great one-liners. There’s that zinger about prophets and calligraphy and mice, which has the ambivalence of rodents as well as our USB-connected critters. Calligraphy, the writing we envisage prophetic utterances being delivered in, is of course now banged out on laptops in Portcullion font for Rumi Instagram feeds. A prophet on Twitter is no longer Shams Tabrizi setting pages alight with just a thought, but secular dudes or dudesses with boilerplate profiles releasing pithy one-liners to their virtual followers (Rupi? Melissa?).

For all his Beyonce and Oprah validated recent renown, Rumi now functions predominantly in our culture a as series of gifs and mystical sidebars for self-help books and mindfulness sites: predominantly pink and decorative, detoothed, declawed, de-Islamified. And certainly in Coleman Barks’ adaptive hands, most likely “a mistranslation”. Akbar hits on the bathos of this spiritual downturn, both personal and cultural, in the specificity of the dethroned prophets’ food choices: the insipid but also slightly nauseating “soapiness” of their cottage cheese, the “forking” of it into their mouths suggestive of both monotony as well as mindless automaticity. It tastes of nothing, but it’s low in calories, so we continue to shovel it down. Is this not the sum and substance of our cultural moment?

There follows a series of deadpan, anhedonic epigrams:

I envy their discipline but not enough to do anything about it

intent arrives like a call to prayer and is as easy to dismiss

the addictions / that were killing me the fastest were the ones I loved best

Rumi said the two most important things in life were beauty
and bewilderment     this is likely a mistranslation    

Like the stand-up comedians who have become our emissaries of authenticity, the childlike ones who point out on Late Night TV shows that The Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, these aphorisms are designed to re-present, whilst at the same time problematize the earnestness of our most noble aspirations: discipline, prayer, beauty, bewilderment. Akbar delivers them to us with the zing and sting of humour, as well as a kind of poker-faced earnestness, which from within the architecture of the poem helps to lodge the lines deep into our psyches like tiny foxtail grass arrowheads burrowing their way into animal fur.

Similar to the stand-up comedian’s unvarnished truths, these lines also speak to our inner-teenagers, our inner-sloths and addicts who know exactly what we should be doing in order to get our shit together, but can’t quite hang onto the golden thread of virtue and social responsibility to pull us out of our entropic states.

The fantasy of the enlightened being or prophet as alluded to at the end of the poem “light upon the earth / … steel bent around an endless black” is one we all have in whichever way it manifest for us, one which more often than not gets eroded with “and yet” iterations of despondency. Our across-the-board consumption of anxiolytics and antidepressants bear this truth out.

Think of how this functions for poetry. Poetry is fundamental to the human soul, and yet hardly anyone reads it. By and large it has little monetary worth. We will always have poets (and prophets) singing, writing, preaching for us and to us, and yet an algorithm now decides what we get to see on our social media feeds at any given moment. The stand-up comedian as well as a certain kind of poet is willing to give it to us straight. The effect when we read it or hear it is one of relief. We feel relieved of our almost fetishistic attachment to performance and continual improvement.

Compare the machinery of these initial lines to the professional one-line merchants we call comedians. Here a few from Jimmy Carr:

I know a couple who get on like a house on fire; they both feel trapped and are slowly suffocating to death.

Swimming is good for you… especially if you’re drowning.

If we’re all God’s children, what’s so special about Jesus?

In his book “Only Poetry” Carr writes: “We write poems because human existence is an unforgiving slog; we write them in the face of overwhelming odds and despite the ravages of time and fate…Wherever human beings are oppressed—by corrupt government, poverty or merely the specter of disease and death—poems thrive.”

Of course the book is not called Only Poetry, but Only Joking, and I have replaced the word “poem” for “joke” in the quotation.

Akbar’s one-liners have a similar resonance, but they also have an added weight beyond the pleasurably unsettling cognitive dissonance of jokes and poetry, language working to deliver both pleasure and pain, but also a kind of uncanny recognition, laughter in the dark. If this poem can be compared to any stand-up’s routine, it is probably to someone like Neal Brennan’s 3 Mics where Brennan moves between three microphones, each set seven feet apart from the other. He starts off on the first mic with 10 minutes of standard stand-up (guns, aging, race relations), then a blackout, followed by a spotlight onto the next mic for five devastating one-liners, ( “The irony of the word ‘Palestine’ is how much like a Jewish last name it sounds”); another blackout, and then 10 minutes of more “emotional stuff” like depression, addictions, failed relationships. This continues on rotation throughout the set. “It’s a fuller picture of myself,” is how he describes the paradigm. Brennan creates a kind of poem onstage, as the finest stand-ups do. Akbar creates a kind of searing stand-up routine on the page: poetry that is both pleasurable, moving, and thought-provoking.

**

About halfway through learning the poem though, I get stuck on these two lines.

how many times are you allowed to lose the same beloveds
before you stop believing they’re gone

The first time I read the couplet I gloss over it, yoking the notion, with a little associative leap from “my father now dreams in English” to losing “dead relatives”, to presumably the same “beloveds” referred to here. But when I start learning the poem by heart, the strange logic of these lines trips me up. I keep on saying: “How many times are you allowed to lose the same beloveds before you start believing they’re gone (for good). Or: before you stop believing they’re coming back. But “to stop believing they’re gone” bamboozles me. I finally get the words memorized but they still don’t make sense.

I think this poem hinges to some extent on who we take the beloveds to be. They might be the friends and family we lose through emigration, or some other form of loss. But maybe, as the second part of the poem suggests, the beloveds are also those substances who are there for us in our times of greatest need. When we are lonely, does not a cigarette, burning quietly away feel like a friend? When we are in despair, tired, desolate, bored, does not the drink, the spliff, the line of coke function as a lover or a some other caring being, gently taking us into their arms for consolation? Seen through this lens, we maybe stop believing the beloveds are gone, because these ersatz beloveds, the psychotropic substances are always on hand to rescue us, always just a phone-call away.

How to live without our “beloveds”, those people or things which numb or transfigure our pain? Deflective self-harm might be an option (“turning the chisel toward myself”) or taking the AA route, strongly allied to the ethics of self-mortification (“STEP FOUR: “make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”, cf. also STEPS 5-10) but is this the answer?

one way to live a life is to spend each moment asking
forgiveness for the last         it seems to me the significance

of remorse would deflate with each performance  

At the end of the poem, an alternative solution is being posited, a kind of mindful stance, but also perhaps a poetic one:  “better / to sink a little into the earth and quietly watch life unfold / violent as a bullring”.

There is also, as there often is in Akbar’s work and life, the importance of gratitude, a theme that is picked up in other poems in the volume like “Portrait of The Alcoholic Three Weeks Sober” and “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude”:

 I was comfortable
in my native pessimism               not this spun-
                       sugar fantasy               last night I made actual

                                    cake               there were no worms in the flour no
                   bloody whirls in the eggs               afterwards the minor
                                   holiday below my waistband remained festive
                 as ever               when I touched two breasts               each one

                 was my favorite

In “Unburnable The Cold Is Flooding Our Lives” we find the gratitude of someone who perhaps realises they have survived self-annihilation through an over-reliance on their “beloveds”:

I am glad I still exist      glad for cats and moss
and Turkish indigo             

But even so, we don’t tarry too long in the realms of sentiment or sentimentality, as the poet brings us back into the more knotted and ambivalent territory of authentic unknowing, a stance shared with the stand-up comedian, spun out in a litany of and-yets:

and yet       to be light upon the earth     

to be steel bent around an endless black      to once again
be God’s own tuning fork        and yet      and yet

I don’t read these and-yets as hopeless, nor do they cancel out the gratitude and its accompanying vision of engaging with the world like a poet-prophet “quietly watching” from the margins of our culture, but neither are we pawned off with a resplendent flourish. As Akbar writes in the final line of the final poem in this volume: “The boat I am building will never be done”.

To have it any other way would feel like a kind of bad faith. As G.K. Chesterton noted many moons ago: “the reason angels can fly is that they take themselves lightly.” 

Categories
Addiction By Heart Hot-Cold Empathy Gap Poetry Koan The Day You Stop

By Hearting THE DAY YOU STOP by Lauren Camp

[Read Lauren Camp’s “The Day You Stop” HERE]

One day will be tomorrow. The day of truce 
and socket and beaten. The day 
you shrink into stopping, the day threadbare and pain-
shamed and limit. Until then, 
you might be continuing
because that is what you do until the last moment 
when you must stop. 

Of course it is like this. Always. The Planning Self, the Conscientious Self, the Fantasy-Stopping Self: all too often separate from the one required to carry out the behavioral change. Let’s call her The Stopping Self: that walking-the-talk part of us intent on carrying all our good intentions to fruition, or in this case, termination.

This poem also alludes to the mind games that we play with those other parts of ourselves, our cognitive biases, which get in the way of the simple causal reasoning of “This is really not good for my well-being, so why don’t I just stop doing it?”

Take my/our ongoing struggle to regulate our consumption of food and drink. Writing this piece on a Saturday morning, somewhat foggy-headed from a bit too much of a Friday night treat-yourself tipple, I am sipping my second cup of Assam tea with soy milk, and I have no inclination at this moment whatsoever to drink wine or beer for the rest of the weekend. Maybe not for the rest of my life. Certainly not this evening. Nor to eat processed food or sugary snacks like biscuits or cake. Assam tea, Lauren’s poem, and my thoughts after learning it by heart this week, are all I require of the moment to make it good enough to exist in and for. And yet this is not a Friday Night or Saturday Evening Self thinking and writing.

This is the self that in Schema Therapy is known as The Healthy Adult, which some might say is a Core Self, but others might recognise it as just another entity from the Carousel of Selves: The Stopping Self, The Impulsive Self, The Woebegone Self, all the visitors to Rumi’s Being-Human Guest House.

You will stop for some weeks,
your body taking body 
from your blood 
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres 
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers 
you stoop to collect. You will be diligent 
because you have paid good money 
to be taught how to stop, slanting off 
from queasy transgressions, those 
clutches and source.

Welcome to the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap where we disremember the fact that pretty much everything we do, feel, or think is state dependent. My current slightly-hungover mode is good for “cold” conscientious note-taking and unprofaned, clean-living forecasts for the day. As soon as I have written about learning this poem, I will go and work in the garden, and maybe do some yoga, and tidy and declutter, and plough through the rest of that Sapolsky tome I’ve been trying to read for the last week, struggling to concentrate long enough to stay with it for more than a few chapters.

Our Carousel of Selves, can also, broadly speaking, be mapped onto neural networks. The hero of the piece, the Healthy Adult /Stopping Self is a probably a more metaphorical way of talking about the Frontal Cortex. Sapolsky gives us a handy job description for this member of our inner team:

“Its list of expertise includes working memory, executive function (organizing knowledge strategically, and then initiating an action based on an executive decision), gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, and reining in impulsivity.”

And here’s Camp on Impulsivity, that moment when we give way to our desires:

the unwashed swell of rapture
taking your face through teeth to heartbeat, 
every beaten moment on the couch.
Every relief: have hereafter and clamor. 
Have nothing worse. 
You’ll follow the mumble through 
that ache that is tincture. Is rule 
and bundle. Is famished inside you 
and thrumming.

The Stopping Part, the frontal cortex, to return to Sapolsky for a moment “makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.” The Stopping Self finds resourceful ways to override, dodge, or ride out the wave of desire that seems to come out of nowhere, building at times, to tsunami-proportions: “the unwashed swell of rapture / taking your face through teeth to heartbeat”.

The Stopping Self is a right old party-pooper. But also perhaps it is this age-old tussle between those Platonic horses of desire and reason, with us feeling quite often like the poor old Charioteer trying to keep these conflicted nags on the same course.

The Frontal Cortex/Stopping Self turns out to be the most recently evolved brain region, “not approaching full splendor until the emergence of primates; a disproportionate percentage of genes unique to primates are active in the frontal cortex. Moreover, such gene expression patterns are highly individuated, with greater interindividual variability than average levels of whole-brain differences between humans and chimps.” (Sapolsky)

I remember some years ago, going to see Jonathan Safran Foer talk about his book Eating Animals and him saying in response to a question suggesting that it is in our nature as omnivores to eat meat that in fact we are most human when we’re struggling with our impulse to chew down on a nice juicy beefburger as opposed to going for the ethically more sound lentil alternative.  I think this poem makes these questions particularly alive for us, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to learn it by heart.

If you had to choose
between settle and suture, you know what you’re after.
You’d pour yourself hitches
and battery. Pour yourself each subsequent time.

I still have no idea what behaviour is being targeted in this poem for cessation. As I spend the week learning it by heart, taking it into my lungs and belly, I sometimes think we’re discussing an eating disorder, or maybe it’s smoking, perhaps even narcotics. Or is it alcohol?

In many ways, all our addictions are interchangeable. In the Brahmajāla Sutta, Siddhārtha Gautama (aka the Buddha) gives us a role call of his society’s addictions, big and small, which still reads today, for all its elephants, buffaloes, bulls, and rams, as thoroughly contemporary listicle:

“Some ascetics and Brahmins…remain addicted to attending such shows as dancing, singing, music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy shows;…combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, rams;…manoeuvres, military parades;…disputation and debate, rubbing the body with shampoos and cosmetics, bracelets, headbands, fancy sticks…unedifying conversation about kings, robbers, ministers, armies, dangers, wars, food, drink, clothes…heroes, speculation about land and sea, talk of being and non-being.”

I think of alcohol more often than not as I learn the poem, but perhaps that’s my projection of choice. But there are some indicators in the language of the poem, in its talk of “liquefying” resolve, and “pouring”, perhaps in the sense of both losing control as well as in the enactment of the compulsion. Or maybe it is some other addiction altogether. I like the fact that I don’t really know either way, and nor do I need to know because it is the process and function here of our compulsions that are being explored, and we readers will read ourselves and our own struggles with these unruly selves into the poem. This is why we read poetry, isn’t it? This is why I read poetry: to inhabit that perimeter where parts of “me” intermingle and amalgamate with parts of you.

Still everywhere the shiver
is slow on the tongue, insistent. You will stop 
for some weeks, 
your body taking body 
from your blood 
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres 
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers 
you stoop to collect

This is certainly how my Monday-Friday often works. Sometimes only Monday to Wednesday. And even on a Friday night, because I cannot trust The Addict, I will stand in the liquor aisle of the supermarket and wrangle with compulsive Steve.

“Now you know the deal, you cannot be trusted with a bottle of wine, as you will drink the whole thing, so we allow you two small 187ml single-serves”
“But I don’t like the wine in the single-serves.”
“Too bad, it’s that or nothing.”
“Harumph. OK, two single-serves. And what about getting two more for tomorrow while they’re on special offer?”
“Are you sure you won’t drink all four tonight. Because that would defeat the whole thing.”
“Of course.”

Even so, 
we shouldn’t fool ourselves; 
resolve cannot liquefy need. 

Of course. We shouldn’t fool ourselves, even though The Addict manages to do just that. One. More. Time.

What is it to be addicted? I think we can all recognise those moments in our life that adhere to this channnel of desire:

You’ll follow the mumble through 
that ache that is tincture. Is rule 
and bundle. Is famished inside you 
and thrumming. 

Having read a good amount of the addiction literature for my dayjob, as well as having talked this through with hundreds of patients and myself, I think I’ve now got a better understanding what the need is. It’s not particularly arcane. It’s a need to shift from some state of discomfort or suffering into a less aversive one. We might be talking Big D&S (Discomfort & Suffering), or one of the small itchy varieties we may all experience at the end of a working week: a tiredness, an emptiness, some low-grade discontent which spurs the yearning to be soothed, satisfied, liberated from these feelings of not-feeling-ok, not-being-ok. Which is why, unless we officially class ourselves as Alcoholics, or Sex, or Food Addicts, Big and commit ourselves to a Twelve-Step program in line with our falling off, we will probably find ourselves living the hot-cold see-saw described in Camp’s poem over and over and over again.

It will become impossible to believe 
you will ever stop for good. 
Stopping is not counter or suspect,
but easing back is all that is left,
the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives.

The wisdom of the poem seems to suggest that maybe one can find through an act of self-acceptance some peace with whatever addictive swing or see-saw we happen to be playing with.

Or is there a more explicit moral stance being played out here, suggesting that unless we find a way to get on top of our impulses, we lose some intrinsic part of our humanity: “the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives”. The Addict, as she’s quite happy to do, takes over and runs the whole show.THE DAY YOU STOP

One day will be tomorrow. The day of truce
and socket and beaten. The day
you shrink into stopping, the day threadbare and pain-
shamed and limit. Until then,
you might be continuing
because that is what you do until the last moment
when you must stop.
Still everywhere the shiver
is slow on the tongue, insistent. You will stop
for some weeks,
your body taking body
from your blood
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers
you stoop to collect. You will be diligent
because you have paid good money
to be taught how to stop, slanting off
from queasy transgressions, those
clutches and source. Even so,
we shouldn’t fool ourselves;
resolve cannot liquefy need.
You will probably start again soon after
you have completed the stopping,
the unwashed swell of rapture
taking your face through teeth to heartbeat,
every beaten moment on the couch.
Every relief: have hereafter and clamor.
Have nothing worse.
You’ll follow the mumble through
that ache that is tincture. Is rule
and bundle. Is famished inside you
and thrumming. You understand
there are two types, and you are
the type to release. If you had to choose
between settle and suture, you know what you’re after.
You’d pour yourself hitches
and battery. Pour yourself each subsequent time.
It will become impossible to believe
you will ever stop for good.
Stopping is not counter or suspect,
but easing back is all that is left,
the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives.

-Lauren Camp

—

RECOVERY

You have decided to live. This is your fifth
day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat,
the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you,
my own mouth moving.
Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor
a mess, the garden ruined,
the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?
So much work to be done.
The sodden dresses. Houses to be built.
Wood to be dried and driven and stacked. Nails!
The muddy roses. So much muck about. Hard walking.
And still a steady drizzle,
the sun like a morning moon, and all of them grumpy
and looking at each other in that new way.
We walk together, slowly, on this your fifth day
and you, occasionally, glimmer with a light
I’ve never seen before. It frightens me,
this new muscle in you, flexing.
I had the crutches ready. The soup simmering.
But now it is as we thought.
Can we endure it, the rain finally stopped?

-Marie Howe

—

I HAVE ROADS IN ME

winding within my arteries
into distant hills
of memories,
where dreams float like dandelion fibers
on bright, chill, breezy
mornings under a canopy
of cottonwood branches.
Where leaves glimmer
sunlight
roads turn.
I have roads in me
where drums pound a sacrifice
and beckon
to again believe in life’s wonder,
where I learn the intense passion,
seeing the sparkling, dewdripping
leaves upon moist, pine-needled ground.
My heart restored,
I am guided
by stars
and a raging desire to live.

-Jimmy Santiago Baca

—

LOUDMOUTH SOUP

Vodka, whiskey, gin. Scotch, Red wine, cognac,
brandy—are you getting thirsty yet?—ale,
rye. It all tastes good: on the rocks, with a splash,
side of soda, shaken
not stirred, triple,
olives, one of those nutritious little pearl
onions, a double, neat,
with a twist. Drink
it up. Let’s have a drink: dry beer, wet beer,
light, dark and needled beer. Oh parched,
we drank the river
nearly to its bed at times, and were so numb
a boulder on a toe
was pleasant pain, all pain
was pleasant since that’s all there was, pain,
and everything that was deeply felt, deeply,
was not. Bourbon, white and pink wine, aperitif,
cordial (hardly!), cocktail, martini,
highball, digestif, port, grain
punch—are you getting thirsty yet?—line them up!
We’ll have a drink
and talk, we’ll have
a drink
and die, grim-about-it-with-piquancy.
It was a long time on the waiting list
for zero
and I’m happy
for the call out of that line
to other, less predictable,
more joyful
slides to ride on home.

-Thomas Lux

—

THE IRREPARABLE

Can we stifle the old, the lingering Remorse,
That lives, quivers and writhes,
And feeds on us like the worm on the dead,
Like the grub on the oak?
Can we stifle implacable Remorse?

In what philtre, in what potion, what wine,
Shall we drown this old enemy,
Destructive and greedy as a harlot,
Patient as the ant?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine?

Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this spirit filled with anguish,
So like a dying man crushed beneath the wounded,
Who is struck by the horses’ shoes;
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,

To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches,
To this broken soldier! if he must despair
Of having his cross and his grave,
This poor, dying man whom the wolf already scents!

Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Can one tear asunder darkness
Thicker than pitch, without morning, without evening,
Without stars, without ominous lightning?
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?

Hope that shines in the windows of the Inn
Is snuffed out, dead forever!
Without the moon, without light, to find where they lodge
The martyrs of an evil road!
The Devil has put out all the lights at the Inn!

Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the irremissible?
Do you know Remorse, with the poisoned darts,
For whom our hearts serve as targets?
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?

The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth
Our soul, pitiful monument,
And often he attacks like the termite
The foundations of the building.
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth!

— Sometimes I have seen at the back of a trite stage
Enlivened by a deep-toned orchestra,
A fairy set ablaze a miraculous dawn
In an infernal sky;
Sometimes I have been at the back of a trite stage

A being who was only light, gold and gauze,
Throw down the enormous Satan;
But my heart, which rapture never visits,
Is a playhouse where one awaits
Always, always in vain, the Being with gauze wings!

-Charles Baudelaire, tr. Aggeler

—

THE HEAVENS

From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
It is all one intolerable war.
I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
like the drowned out of our shirts…

-Denis Johnson

—

AMERICAN RIVER SKY ALCOHOL FATHER

What is pornography? What is dream?
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
forty years ago, four lifetimes ago,
brown as bourbon, warm, you said to me,
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
Then: “You’re killing your mother.”
And she: “You’re killing your father.”
What do men want? What do fathers want?
Why won’t they go to the mothers?
(What do the mothers want.)
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
your warm hand. Your glass. Your bedside table gun.
The dock, the water, the fragile, tough beach grass.
Your hand. I wouldn’t swim. I wouldn’t fly.

-Jean Valentine

—

BREATHINGS

i checked him every night
mixing the landing light
with the slow mucous of his snores

if he was quiet I would press
two fingers on his arm
until he breathed again

children need so little air
but i wake every hour
gasping for yesterday

choking on the things
i did not do
the times i did not listen

i check him still
opening his old room
like a tin beneath my bed–

-Dom Conlon

—

CORRESPONDENCE

I leave it there
For a while
Like some jagged thing
Until foolish hope
Overcomes hollow experience

And I am told
That the beating heart
I stuffed with the unbroken spiral
Of a small, round apple
And glazed all over
With dark, sticky blood
Was not quite right

I leave it again
Until I tire of the tiny nicks
Each time I pass it by
Then reconcile it
To the rejection heap
Along with the others
That also taught me nothing

And I take up my blade

-Anne Casey

—

DELINQUENT HEARTS ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS 

Eat the shrooms and desire me. We tag
the car, our tailing Fs and Ss rising
off the rusted side. You say the paint cans
hiss like the king snake curled up under your porch.
I laugh and jake, vodka gunning. The highway
is a distant thrum. When you smash the caboose window
with a rock in your fist I know the drugs are working.
We nimble along the tracks back to stashed
bottles filled with gas and oil. When the train
rolls by we toss and laugh and streak as fire
consumes the side of the cars. It’s a dragon
you brag, and high we rise up over crappy
lives we knuckle drag. We drink and smoke and tag
and dodge the railroad cops bobbing for our necks.
It’s just after midnight and the laughs still come.
I’ve got a scheme to avoid being caught.
When you touch me I know you want me forever.

-Stephen Scott Whitaker

—

DREAM SONG #57

In a state of chortle sin—once he reflected,
swilling tomato juice—live I, and did
more than my thirstier years.
To Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,
and gripe of retail loss? I dare say not.
I don’t thínk there’s that place

save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight
retrieving her whole body, which I need.
I recall a ‘coon treed,
flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,
and something can (has) been said for sobriety
but very little.

The guns. Ah, darling, it was late for me,
midnight, at seven. How in famished youth
could I forsee Henry’s sweet seed
unspent across so flying barren ground,
where would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?
I fell out of the tree.

-John Berryman

—

IF THERE’S A GOD

If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
wrecked lives, and it’s only he who can explain how my doctor
father, with the gift of healing strangers and patients alike,
left so many intimate dead in his wake.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
recklessness, and I ask him to answer.
He’s the god of thrills, the god of boys riding bikes down
steep hills with their hands over their heads.
He’s the god of holy and unholy chance, the god of soldiers
crossing a field and to the right of you a man falls dead and to
the left also and you are still standing.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of diet pills,
who is the god of the Fifties housewife who vacuums all day and
whose bathroom is spotless and now it is evening as she sits
alone in the kitchen, polishing her chains.
He’s the god of the rampant mind and the god of my father’s
long monologues by moonlight in the dark car driving over the
dusty roads.
He’s the god of tiny, manic orderings in the midst of chaos,
the god of elaborate charts where Greg will do this chore on
Monday and a different one on Tuesday and all the brothers are
there on the chart and all the chores and all the days of the
week in a miniscule script no one can read.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was his hopped-up
acolyte who leapt out of bed one afternoon to chase a mouse
through the house, shouting, firing his .38 repeatedly at the
tiny beast scurrying along the wall while Jon wailed for help
from the next room.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of subtle
carnage and dubious gifts who lives in each small pill that
tastes of electricity and dust.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was its high
priest, praising it, preaching its gospel, lifting it like a host
and intoning: “Here in my hand is the mystery– a god alive
inside a tiny tablet. He is a high god, a god of highs– he eats
the heart to juice the brain and mocks the havoc he makes,
laughing at all who stumble. Put out your tongue and receive it.”

-Gregory Orr

—

GRAVY

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.

-Raymond Carver

—

POETRY COLLECTIONS:

William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind
Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf
If you have further suggestions for poems or collections on this theme, could you please leave a note in the Comments box below. Thank you!

THE DAY YOU STOP

One day will be tomorrow. The day of truce
and socket and beaten. The day
you shrink into stopping, the day threadbare and pain-
shamed and limit. Until then,
you might be continuing
because that is what you do until the last moment
when you must stop.
Still everywhere the shiver
is slow on the tongue, insistent. You will stop
for some weeks,
your body taking body
from your blood
and the back of the throat,
and those weeks will be thank-you-God acres
of erasure and resurrection and the clabber of other small prayers
you stoop to collect. You will be diligent
because you have paid good money
to be taught how to stop, slanting off
from queasy transgressions, those
clutches and source. Even so,
we shouldn’t fool ourselves;
resolve cannot liquefy need.
You will probably start again soon after
you have completed the stopping,
the unwashed swell of rapture
taking your face through teeth to heartbeat,
every beaten moment on the couch.
Every relief: have hereafter and clamor.
Have nothing worse.
You’ll follow the mumble through
that ache that is tincture. Is rule
and bundle. Is famished inside you
and thrumming. You understand
there are two types, and you are
the type to release. If you had to choose
between settle and suture, you know what you’re after.
You’d pour yourself hitches
and battery. Pour yourself each subsequent time.
It will become impossible to believe
you will ever stop for good.
Stopping is not counter or suspect,
but easing back is all that is left,
the impulse has got you, it’s all that survives.

-Lauren Camp

—

RECOVERY

You have decided to live. This is your fifth
day living. Hard to sleep. Harder to eat,
the food thick on your tongue, as I watch you,
my own mouth moving.
Is this how they felt after the flood? The floor
a mess, the garden ruined,
the animals insufferable, cooped up so long?
So much work to be done.
The sodden dresses. Houses to be built.
Wood to be dried and driven and stacked. Nails!
The muddy roses. So much muck about. Hard walking.
And still a steady drizzle,
the sun like a morning moon, and all of them grumpy
and looking at each other in that new way.
We walk together, slowly, on this your fifth day
and you, occasionally, glimmer with a light
I’ve never seen before. It frightens me,
this new muscle in you, flexing.
I had the crutches ready. The soup simmering.
But now it is as we thought.
Can we endure it, the rain finally stopped?

-Marie Howe

—

I HAVE ROADS IN ME

winding within my arteries
into distant hills
of memories,
where dreams float like dandelion fibers
on bright, chill, breezy
mornings under a canopy
of cottonwood branches.
Where leaves glimmer
sunlight
roads turn.
I have roads in me
where drums pound a sacrifice
and beckon
to again believe in life’s wonder,
where I learn the intense passion,
seeing the sparkling, dewdripping
leaves upon moist, pine-needled ground.
My heart restored,
I am guided
by stars
and a raging desire to live.

-Jimmy Santiago Baca

—

LOUDMOUTH SOUP

Vodka, whiskey, gin. Scotch, Red wine, cognac,
brandy—are you getting thirsty yet?—ale,
rye. It all tastes good: on the rocks, with a splash,
side of soda, shaken
not stirred, triple,
olives, one of those nutritious little pearl
onions, a double, neat,
with a twist. Drink
it up. Let’s have a drink: dry beer, wet beer,
light, dark and needled beer. Oh parched,
we drank the river
nearly to its bed at times, and were so numb
a boulder on a toe
was pleasant pain, all pain
was pleasant since that’s all there was, pain,
and everything that was deeply felt, deeply,
was not. Bourbon, white and pink wine, aperitif,
cordial (hardly!), cocktail, martini,
highball, digestif, port, grain
punch—are you getting thirsty yet?—line them up!
We’ll have a drink
and talk, we’ll have
a drink
and die, grim-about-it-with-piquancy.
It was a long time on the waiting list
for zero
and I’m happy
for the call out of that line
to other, less predictable,
more joyful
slides to ride on home.

-Thomas Lux

—

THE IRREPARABLE

Can we stifle the old, the lingering Remorse,
That lives, quivers and writhes,
And feeds on us like the worm on the dead,
Like the grub on the oak?
Can we stifle implacable Remorse?

In what philtre, in what potion, what wine,
Shall we drown this old enemy,
Destructive and greedy as a harlot,
Patient as the ant?
In what philtre, in what potion, what wine?

Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,
To this spirit filled with anguish,
So like a dying man crushed beneath the wounded,
Who is struck by the horses’ shoes;
Tell it, fair sorceress, O! tell it, if you know,

To this dying man whom the wolf already scents
And whom the crow watches,
To this broken soldier! if he must despair
Of having his cross and his grave,
This poor, dying man whom the wolf already scents!

Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?
Can one tear asunder darkness
Thicker than pitch, without morning, without evening,
Without stars, without ominous lightning?
Can one illuminate a black and miry sky?

Hope that shines in the windows of the Inn
Is snuffed out, dead forever!
Without the moon, without light, to find where they lodge
The martyrs of an evil road!
The Devil has put out all the lights at the Inn!

Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?
Say, do you know the irremissible?
Do you know Remorse, with the poisoned darts,
For whom our hearts serve as targets?
Adorable sorceress, do you love the damned?

The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth
Our soul, pitiful monument,
And often he attacks like the termite
The foundations of the building.
The Irreparable gnaws with his accurst teeth!

— Sometimes I have seen at the back of a trite stage
Enlivened by a deep-toned orchestra,
A fairy set ablaze a miraculous dawn
In an infernal sky;
Sometimes I have been at the back of a trite stage

A being who was only light, gold and gauze,
Throw down the enormous Satan;
But my heart, which rapture never visits,
Is a playhouse where one awaits
Always, always in vain, the Being with gauze wings!

-Charles Baudelaire, tr. Aggeler

—

THE HEAVENS

From mind to mind
I am acquainted with the struggles
of these stars. The very same
chemistry wages itself minutely
in my person.
It is all one intolerable war.
I don’t care if we’re fugitives,
we are ceaselessly exalted, rising
like the drowned out of our shirts…

-Denis Johnson

—

AMERICAN RIVER SKY ALCOHOL FATHER

What is pornography? What is dream?
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
forty years ago, four lifetimes ago,
brown as bourbon, warm, you said to me,
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.”
Then: “You’re killing your mother.”
And she: “You’re killing your father.”
What do men want? What do fathers want?
Why won’t they go to the mothers?
(What do the mothers want.)
American River Sky Alcohol Father,
your warm hand. Your glass. Your bedside table gun.
The dock, the water, the fragile, tough beach grass.
Your hand. I wouldn’t swim. I wouldn’t fly.

-Jean Valentine

—

BREATHINGS

i checked him every night
mixing the landing light
with the slow mucous of his snores

if he was quiet I would press
two fingers on his arm
until he breathed again

children need so little air
but i wake every hour
gasping for yesterday

choking on the things
i did not do
the times i did not listen

i check him still
opening his old room
like a tin beneath my bed–

-Dom Conlon

—

CORRESPONDENCE

I leave it there
For a while
Like some jagged thing
Until foolish hope
Overcomes hollow experience

And I am told
That the beating heart
I stuffed with the unbroken spiral
Of a small, round apple
And glazed all over
With dark, sticky blood
Was not quite right

I leave it again
Until I tire of the tiny nicks
Each time I pass it by
Then reconcile it
To the rejection heap
Along with the others
That also taught me nothing

And I take up my blade

-Anne Casey

—

DELINQUENT HEARTS ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS 

Eat the shrooms and desire me. We tag
the car, our tailing Fs and Ss rising
off the rusted side. You say the paint cans
hiss like the king snake curled up under your porch.
I laugh and jake, vodka gunning. The highway
is a distant thrum. When you smash the caboose window
with a rock in your fist I know the drugs are working.
We nimble along the tracks back to stashed
bottles filled with gas and oil. When the train
rolls by we toss and laugh and streak as fire
consumes the side of the cars. It’s a dragon
you brag, and high we rise up over crappy
lives we knuckle drag. We drink and smoke and tag
and dodge the railroad cops bobbing for our necks.
It’s just after midnight and the laughs still come.
I’ve got a scheme to avoid being caught.
When you touch me I know you want me forever.

-Stephen Scott Whitaker

—

DREAM SONG #57

In a state of chortle sin—once he reflected,
swilling tomato juice—live I, and did
more than my thirstier years.
To Hell then will it maul me? for good talk,
and gripe of retail loss? I dare say not.
I don’t thínk there’s that place

save sullen here, wherefrom she flies tonight
retrieving her whole body, which I need.
I recall a ‘coon treed,
flashlights, & barks, and I was in that tree,
and something can (has) been said for sobriety
but very little.

The guns. Ah, darling, it was late for me,
midnight, at seven. How in famished youth
could I forsee Henry’s sweet seed
unspent across so flying barren ground,
where would my loves dislimn whose dogs abound?
I fell out of the tree.

-John Berryman

—

IF THERE’S A GOD

If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
wrecked lives, and it’s only he who can explain how my doctor
father, with the gift of healing strangers and patients alike,
left so many intimate dead in his wake.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s also the god of
recklessness, and I ask him to answer.
He’s the god of thrills, the god of boys riding bikes down
steep hills with their hands over their heads.
He’s the god of holy and unholy chance, the god of soldiers
crossing a field and to the right of you a man falls dead and to
the left also and you are still standing.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of diet pills,
who is the god of the Fifties housewife who vacuums all day and
whose bathroom is spotless and now it is evening as she sits
alone in the kitchen, polishing her chains.
He’s the god of the rampant mind and the god of my father’s
long monologues by moonlight in the dark car driving over the
dusty roads.
He’s the god of tiny, manic orderings in the midst of chaos,
the god of elaborate charts where Greg will do this chore on
Monday and a different one on Tuesday and all the brothers are
there on the chart and all the chores and all the days of the
week in a miniscule script no one can read.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was his hopped-up
acolyte who leapt out of bed one afternoon to chase a mouse
through the house, shouting, firing his .38 repeatedly at the
tiny beast scurrying along the wall while Jon wailed for help
from the next room.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, he’s the god of subtle
carnage and dubious gifts who lives in each small pill that
tastes of electricity and dust.
If there’s a god of amphetamine, my father was its high
priest, praising it, preaching its gospel, lifting it like a host
and intoning: “Here in my hand is the mystery– a god alive
inside a tiny tablet. He is a high god, a god of highs– he eats
the heart to juice the brain and mocks the havoc he makes,
laughing at all who stumble. Put out your tongue and receive it.”

-Gregory Orr

—

GRAVY

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. “Don’t weep for me,”
he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man.
I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure Gravy. And don’t forget it.

-Raymond Carver

—

POETRY COLLECTIONS:

William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind
Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf
If you have further suggestions for poems or collections on this theme, could you please leave a note in the Comments box below. Thank you!

Threaded through my thoughts I’ve included some pictures from one of my favourite photographers, Claire Martin, taken from her Downtown East Side photo essay. Even if you have never seen these pictures of destitution and addiction before, I’m sure they are painfully familiar to us as a type. And here lies a certain comfort, but also another kind of nefarious “fooling ourselves”. Most likely our socioeconomic privileges keep us on the “right” side of social respectability, and yet the machinery of addiction is exactly the same, whether your compulsive behaviour is checking your Twitter and Facebook updates in ways that disrupt the flow of your day, or shopping for classical music in a compulsive manner, as Gabor Maté admits in another classic of addiction literature In The Realm of The Hungry Ghosts:

“Addictions are often interchangeable—a fact that further buttresses the unitary theory that there’s a common addiction process. Although my addictive tendencies are most obvious in my compact-disc-buying habit, I can shift seamlessly into other obsessive activities….I have thrown myself equally blindly and avidly into political work and other pursuits. I’ve even had several of my addictions up and running at the same time. That is, the addiction process was active and looking for more and more external trophies to capture. For all that, the anxiety, ennui and fear of the void driving the whole operation rarely abated.”

I love this book by Maté because at a certain point in the book, he takes off the distanced, expert MD jacket in which he starts the book, the doctor’s coat he wears each day as he carries out his work in harm reduction clinics in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, assisting many of the people Claire Martin photographs in her essay, and becomes one of us flawed mortals. Maté, the wounded healer, identifies very strongly with his patients who struggle with mental and physical health issues alongside their addictions. What separates them he realises is more a case of systematic racial and economic inequality as opposed to the willpower myth, that if you try hard enough, you can overcome anything — abuse, poverty, hardship, and the most destructive of our addictions. Camp’s poem doesn’t buy into this willpower idea either, and neither should we.

Even so, 
we shouldn’t fool ourselves…

Or if we do, at least let’s do it with some of the kindness and understanding midst the frustration and struggle that this poem embodies.