I have been involved with A.A. for many years, and I wrote this essay because I am concerned to find new language, to describe and inform the things that are most important to me, the things that really matter, the things that in relation to life-crushing behaviors, are truly a matter of life and death.

I would like to hold A.A. to its professed declaration of not being allied with religion or politics; a thing which in many meetings seems not to be true, and which seems to interfere with the need to tell the truth at all costs.

The agnostic A.A. groups would like to provide people who are looking for help and answers, who are looking for new ways of living, a place where they can freely speak their personal truth, and not have the temperature in the room drop forty degrees because they have done so; a place where they can get to the business at hand with as few distractions as possible.

No one finds A.A., or something like it, because everything is fine in their lives. Everyone who walks through the doors of an A.A. room is searching for something; searching for the solution to the mystery of their life's meaning, and how what at first seemed to be salvation — inebriation — has become the author of their unhappiness, if not their destruction.

Here is what Baudelaire says about this: "Always be drunk. That is all: It is the question. You want to stop Time crushing your shoulders, bending you double, so get drunk — militantly. How? Use wine, poetry or virtue, use your imagination. Just get drunk."

Hemingway: "In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on a grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know I had something to write about."

Faulkner: "God damn! Why do I do it?"

Yes, why do we do it?

Why hell-bent to reverie and bliss, to peace?

Running away from life's problems, I've heard it called; drowning the sorrows. I have even heard it called survival. Survival of what? What is this thing inside of us so zealously guarded, so thoroughly guarded and hidden away? Is there a crafty genie inside the heart who knows we can't cope, who protects us until we are older and wiser, or stronger, or ready to face ourselves? Or are we inhabited by a malevolent demon that lives to keep us off balance and drunk, a parasite that feeds on misery and failure?

One hears the idea that drunks and addicts of various sorts are so gifted or hurt that they must dose themselves to alleviate the pressure, to survive their genius, or intolerable social or family conditions. Do we drunks and dopers feel more pain than civilians? Do intoxicants transport us to a place from where no one would willingly return? Do they open the door to a room of one's own, the special place that Virginia Woolf advises us is so important to the creative process? Are we special, made sensitive by our bodies' chemistry? Are we gifted with qualities that separate us from the common run, the so-called normal humans? Or do we in fact have a defect, some aspect of the healthy organism which is broken, or at least out of practice, that constitutionally inclines us and impels us to prefer degradation, infirmity, loneliness and despair to facility, health and hope?

These questions are offered as a catalyst to our discussion, as I do not feel qualified to answer them. For clarification I can only offer that everyone is not the same. All the hearts don't speak the same language. What is wise for one is foolish for the other.

"The party is over," someone said; and this is wise. One hears that you can tell when an addict lets go of something by the claw marks on it. For some people, being sober assumes the proportion of the last walk to the gallows. For them it means resignation, sensible shoes, settling for what one can get. Is this a realistic, sober view — a mature coming of age? Or is it killing the dreams, so as not to be killed by the dreams themselves?

If thwarted, the dreams and secret passions are gadflies; they are tortures. Yet so many times in A.A. meetings one hears people bragging of dousing the embers, the bitter memories of when their dreams flew high on hope, when they dared to dream of what one dreams of doing; bragging of acquiring a taste for sour grapes, exhibiting with due ceremony the sad tale of the funeral with pride.

We often hear it said, that if we could apply just one tenth of the energy to our life's purpose that we did getting drunk, there would be nothing we could not accomplish. There is no doubt that dedication to getting shit-faced no matter who gets hurt, which limbs are lost, whose heart is trammeled, which lives are broken, is a singleness of purpose that betokens great strength. Some call that genius when the goal is something other than getting bombed. A genius is the thing inside which guides and inspires us, often in spite of ourselves. Our purpose in A.A., and in life, upon coming to a crossroads or an impasse, is re-inventing ourselves — the most creative work of all. There is no blueprint, no recipe for this that exists outside of ourselves; each of us must discover and implement our own plan. I do not mean that help of all sorts is not required, only that the decision to change is an individual exercise. No one can clean your heart for you.

Upon the walls of almost every A.A. room are two sacred tablets implying that if I do not invent a mysterious helper, or accept the ready-made store-bought brand (the one named God), I would end up in jail, institutionalized, or dead.

"If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it..." is a phrase from "How It Works" read at many A.A. meetings. These words produced a crisis of conscience in my heart. I felt like I was being threatened. I raged at being told what to do, and yet it seemed ungrateful to pick and choose among the advice being given to me by people who did not know me from Adam, yet who enfolded me in a loving aegis, took me out for coffee, listened patiently to me for hours, and told me things would get better.

"If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it..."

For a long time the washed-out, soulless imitations of robust life, the doom merchants, people who weren't destroying their lives with alcohol but who certainly did not have anything else I wanted, kept me away from A.A. meetings. They drove me to the agnostic A.A. meetings, and to value what I had and who I was. It was a long hard lesson that taught me to value A.A. as an adjunct, not a dogma in learning about life, and about realizing my potential.

The crushing emotions and indecision, the doubt and worry, the depression and procrastination which flood into consciousness upon getting sober are the shadow side of the promises of A.A. These things are a hard sell to the besotted mind still in the grip of the driving thrust to get fucked up, out of itself, blind drunk; they are poor replacements for the magic kingdom that drinking transports one to; they are a hard sell to the juggernauts who courted and won the hand of rack and ruin; or who suffered the even more ignominious fate of still having a roof over one's head, a body more or less whole, and only a bottle and sorrow for company. And I haven't forgotten the teetotalers who watched the clock turn five PM to the clinking sound of ice cubes, who had the facade of prosperity surrounding a crumbling desolate wasteland masquerading as a personality; or even seemingly less dire, those who just knew something was terribly wrong, who still had the trappings of a life, but who somehow ended up on what I have heard referred to by someone a little more evil than myself (and with an ax to grind, I daresay) as a bridge back to a room full of whining losers; a place where you can actually brag about being a failure, and display your scars with smug one-upmanship.

This is the cynic's view of A.A., I think. Or even of advice given by concerned witnesses to the plight of drunks in trouble. A rabid bite on the loving hand that extends more than halfway — no, bends over backward into the pit where one cowers, indignant and argumentative.

The truth hurts sometimes, but it is as necessary as rain and sunlight. Moribundity and sot, self-serving pity, melodramatics and melancholia, being drunk and sloppy are states which comprise being unworthy and unready to stare into the blinding opening of the undared hopes and dreams — the true self.

An old A.A. saw states that: "You can turn a cucumber into a pickle, but you can't turn a pickle back into a cucumber."

I am neither of these vegetables. A pickle yearns not to be free of the withering brine, aspires not to be more than the moral equivalent of disappointing oneself in bed. A pickle dreams not of being something else, something more. A pickle is content to be perfectly what it is, and at that it excels.

What makes people offer themselves up to the god of inebriation (the other higher power)? This is not an easy question to answer. It is like asking for the recipe for someone's personality. To try to change that recipe, the prescription of the psychological lens through which we perceive life is a really tall order. A.A. is an organization that attempts this in a democratic manner rarely seen elsewhere. Where have we been trying to go when we get drunk? The price of entering heaven is after all, your life.

For my money, the wisdom and the folly one hears in A.A. rooms boils down to this (and the pity is that so few people, drunks or no, ever get to consider it): The universe cares for you no more than it does for an oyster; both are wonders of creation. For the most part your aches and pains are of passing interest to humanity at large, the majority of whom would as soon see you paralyzed. While in relation to the cosmos you are small, your life is precious and significant. This is not humiliating; it is graceful. It is the boasting bombast and arguing that is petty and embarrassing, perhaps ungrateful.

When, if ever, this realization dawns, it forms a duty comprised of recognizing that somewhere there exists someone or something much smarter and more accomplished than yourself, finding it or them, opening your heart and allowing yourself to be willing to learn.

To be taught, not brainwashed; to learn to be excited about finding creative solutions to life's problems; to be willing to come to your own conclusions; to be taught to listen to your inner voice; the part of you that directs the economy of the body, and the dynamics of the personality to trust the instincts and the passions, and not be destroyed by them.

 

(c) 2004 by Marco R.

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