Hot-Cold Empathy Gap – Steve Wasserman

[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

-Lauren Camp

—

RECOVERY

-Marie Howe

—

I HAVE ROADS IN ME

-Jimmy Santiago Baca

—

LOUDMOUTH SOUP

-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?

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

-Charles Baudelaire, tr. Aggeler

—

THE HEAVENS

-Denis Johnson

—

AMERICAN RIVER SKY ALCOHOL FATHER

-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

-Stephen Scott Whitaker

—

DREAM SONG #57

-John Berryman

—

IF THERE’S A GOD

-Gregory Orr

—

GRAVY

-Raymond Carver

—

POETRY COLLECTIONS:

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.