Enough

Recovery, writing, reading: feat. Midwinter Break, Depeche Mode, Count Orsino, Robert Browning and some nearly cloned corgis

I went on a rare trip to the cinema¹ this week to see the excellently acted new movie Midwinter Break. Lesley Manville and Ciaran Hinds play a couple of Irish-born empty-nesters in their late sixties going on a not-very-jolly to Amsterdam. Difficulties, over the course of the trip, emerge in their marriage. It’s a slow, tender, and thoughtful piece of work, and it made me think.

Hinds’s character has a drink problem. Manville’s character has a religion problem – an unsatisfied yearning for a closer connection to the Catholic spirituality she still cleaves to even though her husband mocks it. What it made me think was: are these two different problems, or different versions of the same problem?

That is: is there a connection between the cravings of addiction and the cravings of the spirit? Can an addict’s relationship to the substance be seen, in some way, as a mangled reaching for transcendence? Certainly, the suggestion is there in the literature. One of the aspects of twelve-step programmes on which any number of agnostic or atheist addicts have barked their knees is that insistence that recovery requires a spiritual² experience: the help of a “higher power”. The “g-word”. I find that aspect of it all distinctly tricky myself.

But I think there’s something in it, and I do so without believing in God. The using addict, after all, already has a higher power: the substance. Here is something outside yourself, something which overmans your feeble willpower and comes to give a purpose and direction to your days. Anybody who has watched themselves, with mild bemusement, trudging to the off-licence or the drug dealer despite every intention of not doing so³, will recognise that.

This space is very much not intended as a recovery blog, by the way. I’m not proposing to make a habit of posting day-counts and scattering #odaat hashtags, though all strength to those who do. But I’m thinking a lot about addiction, and I see no reason not to do some of my thinking aloud. In that respect I have to write personally a bit. My instinct is to resist doing so, but that’s the data I have available and you can’t understand this stuff from the outside. Addiction is, as Hanna Pickard argues in the book I wrote about in this previous post, a puzzle.

If you’re looking for eyestretching war stories, though, you’ll be disappointed. I never went for a swift half after work and woke up in Malta, or came to with blood up to my elbows and no memory of where I was, or tried to saw off my own foot with an electric carving knife⁴. Those stories are widely available in your local A A meeting.

My own drinking was, by the end, grim and furtive and relentless and depressive – I was what I’m told is sometimes nicknamed a “wine glum”. Stashing bottles, smuggling empties, compiling an encyclopaedic mental map of the locations and stocks of local off-licences, memorising the unit counts of this drink and that like log tables – I did all that. I’m not a complete amateur. But most of the damage, as far as I got, was invisible.

Still, the structure of the illness (or condition, or allergy, or psychiatric disorder, or whatever you want to call it), the feel of it, is something that very many of us (per Pickard, I don’t want to make totalising claims) have in common. The engine’s the same: the rest of it is just more or less spectacular damage to the bodywork.

Stripped down, it’s this: as Depeche Mode put it, you just can’t get enough. The cliches say the same thing: “No off-switch”; “one drink is too many; a thousand isn’t enough”. You always want more, and when you’ve had some of whatever your substance is, the desire for more is increased. Addicts use whatever they use, be it a substance or a behaviour, because they have an itch that can never quite be scratched. “Want” can be parsed as desire, but also as lack. Another cliche from the rooms: “A hole in the soul.”

But what is it that this desire is directed at? It isn’t a normal sort of wanting. Towards the end of my drinking I would experience, on taking a drink — be it a slug of warm vodka or a deliciously cold tin of extra-strong cider to start the day — a tremendous but very temporary experience of relief. Fifteen minutes, maybe, when all would be right with the world and I found myself in a condition I came to think of as a glassy calm. Equipoise: the stillness after the first line of coke or the first rush as you come up on a pill, when you think: “Thank fuck for drugs.” But if I attempted to locate what was going on, it was hard to discern any very positive effect.

I hadn’t had enough to be impaired in a significant way. None of the warm fuzzies, none of the boisterous exuberance I associated with the sociable drinking of my earlier life (and which, like many of us, I tended to chase like an ignis fatuus long after it had been replaced by something else). I was still glum. I was still sober, or near as dammit. The relief I was getting, I realised, was relief from the need to have a drink. That’s a very pure, almost contentless, expression of desire. And, of course, the desire itself is rekindled, like blowing gently on a flame, by the fact of having had a drink.

After the equipoise, motion again. The marble, balanced at the top of the hill, starts to roll down. What starts as a slight, nagging lack — from which you can be distracted by work, a conversation of intensity and interest, or a repetitive physical task — in relatively short order morphs into craving. Not for the proper alkie Orsino’s hope that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die. Quite the opposite applies.

There was maybe something in the internal feeling: proprioception is the fancy name for it. The experience of the using addict, as many will testify, travels in the direction of isolation and the inward turn. I had the sense of using alcohol to escape the outside world and turn inward towards myself – even as that self was quietly slipping out the back door with mumbled apologies. As you might, in a dream, catch sight of yourself in a mirror and turn your face towards the mirror only to see the face in the mirror turning away. What can I say? The whole thing is riddled with paradox. You are escaping from yourself into yourself and you are answering an abstract need with something concrete that adds to the need rather than sating it.

For me, at least, the whole thing was very much bound up with the death-drive. Every blackout is, after all, a small suicide. Ek-stasis, aka getting out of your head⁵. Perhaps you are, as many of us are, plagued by the existential heebie-jeebies (or as David Foster Wallace, one of us, called them, the howling fantods). Using puts a brake on them. You are medicating the fear of death with something that will, sooner or later, kill you. Go figure. It has always struck me with a sort of fellow feeling that Philip Larkin – also, probably, one of us – was the author of ‘Aubade’, with its “furnace-fear” at “unresting death, a whole day nearer now”; yet also the author of ‘Wants’: “Beneath it all, desire for oblivion runs.” We must travel, as another poet put it, in the direction of our fear.

In more lowbrow fashion, I picture it in terms of the movie Sniper. There’s a scene I remember, or perhaps misremember, in which, to distract the enemy sniper on the other side of the river, Tom Berenger dangles a medallion that winks and catches the sun as it rotates. One side, wanting to check out; the other side, being terrified to check out. Round and round it goes. Wink, wink.

This shape of experience – the unfulfillable desire, the reaching for something you can’t quite ever quite catch hold of, the feeling of “enough” retreating from you like a rubber mouse being twitched away from a kitten as it pounces... all that stuff. That’s everywhere, isn’t it? And isn’t it, especially, baked into our religious feelings? In the post-lapsarian world we can apprehend (I guess from Plato via the Church Fathers) the presence of God only in a distorted and imperfect way, but it doesn’t stop the yearning. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” asks Browning in ‘Andrea del Sarto’.

It’s suggestive, I think, that recovery orthodoxy is that you shouldn’t start dating in your first year of sobriety, and that — at least for twelve-steppers, who have the endorsement of Carl Jung in this — the solution to an addictive relationship with a substance or behaviour is held to be a religious one: a benign cross-addiction, as you could see it. When we fall in love with somebody, or when we kneel in prayer, we are reaching to find a meaning in something, even serving something, outside the bounds of self; and it’s something that we can never quite get hold of.

In this respect, recovery looks a bit like a substitution game. You don’t need a higher power. You need a different higher power. And, be it noted, reaching for the numinous can exist, as an evolved capacity or a property of our culture, whether or not the numinous we reach for actually exists. Man can be a being-towards-God, as it were, whether or not the big man is really up there. And that part of his brain can also make him a being-towards-Smirnoff.

Perhaps this seems a highfalutin hypothesis to float. But along with opposable thumbs, one of Hom Sap’s superpowers as a species has been our prosocial nature – our willingness to surrender individual agency to something bigger and more abstract; to the needs of the tribe, or (later) to a set of ideas or stories or even ideologies. Self and other is a big part of the game – maybe the whole game -- in psychology, in sociology, and in much else besides. Go to your Lacanians and they’ll mumble about the breast, or something. Go to your Nietzscheans or your Hegelians and they’ll talk about masters and slaves. Is it too much of a stretch to see the phenomenon of addiction as a malign mutation of, or reaction to, that baked-in part of our condition?

After all, there’s a lot of this stuff, this grasping for something that’s ultimately unattainable, in our day-to-day lives. Even the normies are trudging away on the hedonic treadmill. Look at your phone, with its limitless promise of a number – likes, retweets, subscribers – going ceaselessly up. Look at the almost-too-obvious-to-mention gamification of everything (gambling addicts really have it tough these days). Our economies are predicated on the idea that there’s no such thing as “enough”. Late capitalism, it’s almost a cliche to say, is not about satisfying needs but about manufacturing new ones. And doesn’t Derrida’s notion of différance tell us that meaning is perpetually, maddeningly, being carried away from the very words we use?

There again, if everybody is an addict nobody is an addict. Grandiosity: another twist in the pathology. Anyway, I enjoyed Midwinter Break⁶, and I commend it to your attention.

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Since we’re on the topic, anyone tried Naltrexone? I’m not using or proposing to use it myself, but a sobriety-seeking friend asked me what I knew about it. The answer: not as much as I’d like. My understanding is that it blocks all those lovely reward chemicals and therefore takes the fun out of drinking, so prevents the craving cycle getting underway. You have glass of wine and think, uncharacteristically and some will think miraculously: “That’ll do.” Does it have any effect on psychological cravings, though? I’d assume not but I’d be interested to know.

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My column for the Spectator this week, taking a break from raging at Donald Trump, was about Fergie’s plan to clone two of the late Queen’s corgis. Slightly lawyer-nibbled, but here it is anyway

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This week’s Book Club podcast was with Stefan Fatsis. His wonderful Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble is 25 years old this year. My copy is still the one I bought in New York in 2001, and rereading it was such a pleasure. Anyway, he’s great on the joys of the game and the lovable strangeness of the community around it. My old Scrabble pal Jenny Colgan was very disappointed that I couldn’t include her in the conversation but I hope she enjoys listening to it. SOWPODS ftw.

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I reviewed (very briefly) Resident Evil: Requiem, which was a stroll down memory lane with a chainsaw swinging jauntily at my hip.

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I did something for the Telegraph on its discovery that the so-called elites are even more unlikely than anyone else to read for pleasure.

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I was honoured to be a guest poster in Mathew Lyons’s excellent Substack series The Writer’s Bookshelf, which gave me the chance to plug Michel de Certeau and Richard Lanham, as well as Jeffrey Archer and Cerebus the Aardvark

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I have an upcoming event, too: on April 28^th I’ll be talking to Elizabeth Garner about The Haunted Wood in Oxford. Do come!

1. “I seldom go to films. They are too exciting,/ said the Honorable Possum.” -- Dream Song 53

2. I don’t love that word — it makes me think of hippie grifters selling healing crystals in Totnes — but find I can make peace with its use if I just accept it to mean something non-material. We do, even the most materially-minded of us, live in a world of feelings and ideas.

3. The fungus cordyceps, which infests an ant’s brain and causes it to march helplessly to the top of a stalk of grass where it dies and perpetuate the fungus’s lifecycle, doesn’t half pack a wallop as a metaphor. Well done, The Last Of Us.

4. I did once made a bit of an arse of myself in front of Nick Clegg, but not more, I comfort myself, than Nick Clegg would subsequently make of himself in front of the country and, after he joined Meta, the world.

5. cf Allen Ginsberg in ‘America’: “I can’t stand my own mind.”

6. Some slight quibbles, though, from a drink-problem verismo point of view. The Ciaran Hinds character is seen slugging surreptitiously from the bottle of duty-free in his suitcase when his wife is our of the room. Really? It will be immediately apparent to Lesley Manville if she peeps in his bag that the bottle is half empty. He’s either going to have to do something fiddly with some cold weak tea to refill it, which, also, yuk, or — if he’s doing it right — he’ll have a live bottle his wife doesn’t know about stashed elsewhere in the hotel room and leave the duty-free unopened as a decoy. Plus, at one point, left to his own devices, he goes to a record shop rather than a bar. If he really were one of us, he might go to a record shop eventually but he’d go to a bar first.