Wednesday, April 22, 2015

The doctor, my therapist, showed me a chart about the effects of drinking.  She had it out the session before, but we'd gotten distracted by my coming trip to New York, which then veered off into several of the many episodes with what's her name and that how she probably was simply too busy with all her duties to keep blogging, to keep in touch not that such a thing would be possible anyway, being a mother, a writer, and all that, up in the city.  But we did not discuss the chart that time, and so when I reminded her she she said, oh yes, stood up and went over to her desk, and there was the piece of paper with a sinuous curve, one up, showing the effect while drinking, and then crossing down below, showing the after-effects the next day.  A depressive slows down the synapses, and that's why we feel some relief, by slowing everything down.  But if we keep on drinking, the mood does not get any happier, in fact the good feeling wanes, and then we probably finally go off to sleep, and the next day the effect is that familiar down depressed anxious feeling.  As tolerance builds, the high of the initial curve lessens, and the depth of the secondary curve deepens.  On the chart was a diagonal rising, as if more would make you feel better, the sine curve below it.

"This I read in Buddhist literature, that if more made you feel better than it was a good thing, but of course, more does not make you feel better," I offered.

Well, that's why I drink wines like Chinon and Beaujolais, the twelve percent wines.  That's why I don't drink any hard alcohol at all.  Guinness is reasonably safe, too.

Monday night was a pain in the ass.  The downstairs server, V., who controls all the incoming calls for reservations sent everyone upstairs, really pushy about the fact of there being live jazz.  Monday night is not the A Team.  Nice guys, but bumbler of a bus boy, and the waiter, he's gone in two weeks, because of V. being a person few people like to work with.  Server V. was content leaning against the cooler with her phone out, Facebooking.


But Tuesday, wine tasting night, and better help.  And a sense returned of how I really do derive satisfaction from waiting on people, helping them out, being friendly and hospitable.  I like a barroom, people eating good food, having some wine to go with it.  A beautiful thing.  I only wish as a young man I'd started out in New York, I mean, if I'm going to be in this business, as it makes some sort of basic sense, understandable, recognizable, if not profitable, for me.  I like it.  I'm good at it.  I hold it down pretty well.

And it takes my mind off of her, basically.  It's like a cacoon, a bubble, a safe place away from my mind, in which I don't have to think about her, because I'm too busy to think, because I'm engaging, assessing, telling, asking, and finally, with the customers, talking.  All the way up to giving the guys in the kitchen a round of wine, the locker room talk...  And I do try to control what I do when I get home, to get to bed, or take a bath with epsom salts and lights down low...

And the next day I wake up tired all over, because the body has been hustling for eight hours plus.  The bike ride home...

And yes, as in accordance with the chart I wake up very sad, feeling tired, thinking about her, thinking about all my fool mistakes, not wanting to get up out of bed, getting up finally when I have to, shower at 2:30, cook breakfast, etc., because you can no longer count on what they feed us for a family meal...  Shower, fold a shirt in a notebook, get my courier bag and go...  Trying not to think about it too much, and off I go to do it all over again.  Me and my liberal arts educated English major ass...


But I can totally get the pull of literature.  It's the work of a whole field of depressives, the ones who stay at it long enough to get good at it.  I mean, Cervantes, the unhappiness he went through...  It's palpable in poor old gentle Kerouac, the elegiac quality, the things he remembers, poor sick little Gerard, the little saintly brother who dies, the rest of Lowell, his dying father, the emptiness of the wandering life, and all that Buddhism.  Emily Dickinson.  Hemingway.  Look at their lives, you can plainly see...  Charles Dickens, Blake, Shakespeare, of course, these are people fighting a battle they can never win, a grim one, against time and lost love and the ultimate lack of meaning in the world for whatever reasons...  Are they a happy lot, with contented love lives and professional lives?  No, I don't think so, I see them as strugglers...  Particularly in memoir form, and all literature is a disguise of such, the elegiac sad quality leads us to experience the beauty of things, perhaps because to read such things turns on our empathetic qualities, as if we would know that we were indeed all doomed, or all idiots as in Dostoevsky, or however you'd want to say it.

It's like it's the only recourse, the only place left in the world to live in, a fantasy life, yeah, but at least you're trying to get meaning out of life, or looking for it...  Can't blame folks for doing that.

That's why I write.  Because of all the stuff that gets swept over, not communicated, not expressed, not put into the world when it was there so vividly and fully in the heart.  You get cut off, lord knows, in the cacophony of humanity.  The fact that people die, what can you do, they die and you can't tell them you love them anymore, and people die to each other because of the practicalities of life and all the 'choices you make.'  Cold dry people look at it that way, choices, and I can see what they mean, but there are other things that effect people, sensitive, stubborn, hurt, human, fallible, foolish, drunk with whatever, caught in attachment to ego...

And all this stuff of higher consciousness, of writing, yes, it is like being born, or giving birth.  It's painful.  Is that what I was trying to do, to give birth to a higher peaceful passive consciousness, something we don't have a full set of terms for, that show us more in the light of the Sermon on the Mount and Corinthians long suffering love...  The "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" of Eliot's "Preludes," the consciousness of the Universe looking back upon itself through its own minerally human-eye windows, wishing for a great peace to come over the gentle earth.  We look through tears, we look hopefully, expressively, and our great loves can come to nothing at least in the old understandings of lower consciousness we're trying to rise above, to a place where our true loves are indeed appropriate, where the heart calls the shots, the primary reality.  The peace of appropriateness spreading, no one questioning it, no one picking it apart.

If there is such a thing, yes, it probably is highly painful.  And it must somehow rise above all the noise of the old empires, through little pricks of light we don't know much what to make of, like Jesus and the Buddha...  And mortals like the poets and Kerouac to kind of nudge toward...  People who admit to not knowing much in the way of final answers or moral decrees, but who take the raw material of life and their own personal experiences.

But the more you hear it, the more you listen to Beethoven or Billy Bragg, 'and the love that we spoke of forever, on St. Swithin's Day,' or read Emily Dickinson or Hemingway or Shakespeare, the sort of worse, 'worse,' you become, the more passive, stubborn, the less you communicate in culturally conventional ways, (finding them increasingly awkward, and yourself less capable of the dance, no longer stomaching them as truth), the more you communicate through musical notes and gestures and lines of poetry and brain waves and all the other ways infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering of communicating.  It comes out of your face, your eyes...

And these things are worth putting down because, to me anyway, they represent the core of human experience, the main vein of it, such that I feel familiar and comfortable with the sorrowful mode, seriously, and this maybe why we, as I see it, are only truly ourselves with the funereal, when the funeral train decked out in black, passes us by, on the way to a final resting place for a man, and on one side of the tracks one kind of people, the poor let's say, and on the other, the somewhat better off, but all brought together in the peace of mourning someone who said some good stuff.

And maybe the most entirely 'messed-up' thing about it, is that people would take it as weakness, that they would shun the mournful mode of remembering a brotherly kind.  No, don't be sad, we're all old.  Like, why don't you stand up for yourself and say it out loud or make it happen, be aggressive, be male...  But Jesus H., that is the thing, you are standing up, you are standing up for a thing on its own terms.  You are standing up.  And you're a realist, pretty much.  Because somehow the lens of the mode lets you in on an understanding of the rest of human nature, the petty vanities, the selfishness, the protectiveness, the willingness to shut out and shut down...

But for your leadership call, you kind of get ostracized.  You almost get pushed off the ridge at the end of town, or almost get stoned, feeling animosity in the unprotected heart.  You fall into a tough time.  People have all their little rules, their hardened sense of how to play the game.  To other people trying to live their lives as best and as comfortably and as well as they can, to them, the writer's general attitude is a skewed thing.


Every shift I've ever gone off to, I've done it with some sort of sense of Christian duty, in some form of depression, which then in turn increases my sense of humor, my kindness toward people, but with that nagging lack of satisfaction of the heart's personal stuff, as if it were not allowed me.  Yeah, I know what Jesus is saying when he pours them wine and tells them that they're, in essence, drinking his blood.  Drinking his blood yeah, to say nothing of the body, that bread which is broken.   A good repast with some ceremony, a feast even, is not that far away from the final laying in the ground, the thing that's always there in the background.  Viewed in linear time, yes, how ephemeral, like June bugs, our brief lives are...

But they (the writers, I mean) they all had it, they all had some person, some girl back there in time who broke their hearts, thus all the music...  As if they needed to be inoculated with the cancer in order to live a full and healthy life, good feelings and conventional happiness set aside.  And the writing got easier once they admitted it, making it easier on themselves, to just let the truth, unspeakable as it may be, awkward to normal society, to come out.  Like a sense of injustice that people have sometimes, the sense when something is not right.

It's like Irish music.  Simultaneously about love and justice, freedom, sorrow.  "Oh, Kitty, my darling, remember..."


1 comment:

Johnnie Smith said...

Too much drinking of alcohol can harm people, both physically and psychologically. It’s good to be educated about the effects of drinking through that kind of therapy. Most people think that drinking is the solution to their problems, but they don’t know that it can only lead to depression and anxiety. Your post will serve as a reminder and warning to everybody. Thanks for sharing that! All the best to you!

Johnnie Smith @ Ranch Creek Recovery