My Life in Pink

I believe in three things.  Like Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, I believe in Sleep.  Like the ancient Greeks, I believe in Fate.  And like the Sex Pistols (see below), I believe There is no future.

These beliefs, the last one in particular, raise a question:  Where is hope?  Because all of my life I, and everyone I know of, have located the realization of all hope in the future.  If there is no future, as I have come to believe, where then is hope realized?

A long long time ago, in a depression far far away, I sat in a therapist’s waiting room reading and article in the New Yorker on the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and their then recently released statement on the prospects for peace in the nuclear age.  I dont have the exact quotation at my fingertips, but the bishops defined hope, more or less, as the capacity to continue to live under conditions that seem to render existence impossible.

My understanding is that these are the conditions of everyday life; and always have been.

I work the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, and have not had a drink in a little over 30 years.

Overwhelmingly, the members of Alcoholics Anonymous with whom I’ve been acquainted have all been members of the American bourgeoisie.  AA was founded in the 1930s by a New York stockbroker and an Akron, Ohio, doctor, that is, alcoholic members of two bourgeois professions.

The Good Bourgeois conceives of life as a series of problems.  He has a problem — which he may or may not call a challenge or, even more optimistically, an opportunity — and he applies himself to its solution.  He reaches into his toolbox, gets out the Yankee Know How, the positive attitude, the can of Can Do, and he sets to work, nose to the grindstone, using the old elbow grease as necessary, and he solves that problem, by God.

Every morning, he has another problem, and repeats.

This way is the way of progress, in which all Good Bourgeois firmly believe.

And this language is sprinkled throughout the book Alcoholics Anonymous, as in the passage in which it states, “We believe in spiritual progress, not spiritual perfection.”

When the Good Bourgeois has alcoholism and comes to AA, he is, typically, introduced to the bourgeois way of sobriety.  He learns that he has a problem, alcoholism, but that he also has a solution, sobriety one day at a time.  He has a choice.  “If you want what we have . . .”

But it will not be easy.  There will be “a price to pay,” no matter which alternative — sobriety or inebriation — he opts for.  “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

After all, he is reminded, “everything has a price — even the Good Stuff.”

I’ve had all these quotations directed at me repeatedly during my tenure in AA.  They constitute the prevalent metaphor of sobriety and of life in the Fellowship, if not in the AA literature:  the metaphor of a mercantile culture.  The metaphor of the exchange, the deal, the sale, the purchase, the contract, the binding agreement, the limited partnership, and so on, ad infinitum.

As a metaphor, this one works well.  It aids in producing sobriety among a group of people who are primarily bourgeois.  To this accomplishment, I proclaim, along with the aspiring novelist in Camus’s The Plague: “Gentlemen, hats off!”

The metaphor is detailed:  sobriety means certain things, such as definite, concrete, realizable goals.  It means a job, at which one “shows up” (“Ninety percent of life is ‘showing up’”) on time.  It means faithfulness in relationships.  It means stick-to-it-ive-ness.  It means not-blaming-others.  It means taking out the garbage, being regular, early-to-bed and early-to-rise.  It means being realistic.  It means being reasonably happy.  It means submission to authority, as OPPOSED to the defiance which, the literature says, “is the outstanding characteristic of the alcoholic.”  It means, in a word, responsibility.  But it also means much more.

Should the neophyte loathe some of these goals, he will be reminded that their achievement will make it easier to focus on his real, and hardest, goal:  staying sober.  Which is true.

My problem all along in AA — not my challenge, nor my opportunity, but my problem — has been that I am not bourgeois.  I was not born bourgeois, I was not reared in the bourgeoisie, I do not aspire to bourgeois goals.

Still and all, the argument that posing as a bourgeois would make it a bit easier to become and stay sober made sense, so I followed the recommended course.  “Fake it till you make it.”  I had Good Bourgeois sponsors and, superficially at least, led a Good Bourgeois life.

If an alcoholic stays sober long enough — if he does not drink and does not die — he becomes conscious of himself; which is a different thing from self-consciousness (a condition that might more accurately be termed self-centered consciousness).

This happened to me gradually, and announced itself in the form of A Big Breakthrough, to wit, I kicked out my parasitic and abusive wife and her drug-using daughter, and divorced them.  My Good Bourgeois sponsor said to me that he could only understand divorce in terms of the pattern of the sick alcoholic who blames other people — or places or things — for problems entirely of his own making and futilely tries to solve such problems by ridding himself — of other people, places, and things.  That is, the alcoholic has no valid reason for divorcing anyone or anything.

(The rationale for this attitude is contained in the story of Dr Paul O, longtime member of AA, who writes, “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems . . .”  Note that acceptance means one thing, and passivity, the actual course advocated by the Good Bourgeois in AA, another thing altogether.  And passive resistance is yet something else!)

Next, I hit bottom with my father’s narcissistic abuse and wrote him  a letter, in which I detailed our life together and made plain to him that, if he expected to ever speak again with his only son, he would have to change.

My Good Bourgeois sponsor said this letter was “crazy” (his exact word).

And I began to notice that my Good Bourgeois sponsor said these things, and other things just like them, without betraying the slightest consciousness that his Propositions For Living were grounded in anything other than the principles of AA, principles which we, as sober members, “practice in all our affairs.”

Such absence of awareness is common.  I’ve heard hundreds of AA’s say, “I am sober by the Grace of God!” and seen most of them draw a complete blank when I talk about Jonathan Edwards and his classic sermon from the days of the Great Awakening, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he says that this same Grace is what preserves the safety and well-being of all people, everywhere, and without any of their (perverse) “awareness.”

It is an absence of education, really, leading to an absence of awareness, rooted in the delusion of Having Found All The Answers.  This delusion is the foundation of the Good Bourgeoisie everywhere; for instance, the Soviet Communist Party was lousy with it.

But as I said, I am not by nature (alcoholic nature and sober nature) a Good Bourgeois.  I am, by nature, drunk and sober, an artist.

And I put the proposition to myself (and share with you, offer to you) that an artist has no problems.  No challenges, no opportunities.  Nothing to solve.

What the artist has, even when anchored firmly in the safe harbor of AA, is chances. He may, or may not, take risks.

Lest anyone think I am excluding myself from the Fellowship by way of an ego-inflating evasion, I cite, as an example of an artist taking risks, Ian Fleming, a Good Bourgeois.

In Alcoholics Anonymous I’ve heard uncountable discussions of fear and faith.  But how many AA members have the sheer guts needed to do what Ian Fleming did — to write down their private fantasies of sexuality and power and paranoia and then show them, not to a sponsor or a mentor or a best friend or even a therapist, but to the world? Not only show them to the world, but propose that the world pay him money to let it see them!

Pay him money, in other words, to watch him take risks, and take the biggest risk of all, namely, being himself.  (See Kim Gordon’s remark along this same line in the liner notes to the CD package of Daydream Nation.)

In my experience, very few have this sort of guts.

(And I choose Ian Fleming precisely because his art, such as it is — and it is not the art of Euripides or Dante, who also dared to expose themselves thus publicly, and also asked for money for their shows — satisfies the Good Bourgeois’s main criterion of art — it made piles of dollars.  Dollars which Fleming spent on fast cars, houses, and other property, all things respected and lusted after by the Good Bourgeois.

I purposely do not use as an example, say, Fyodor Dostoevski, because he wrote, for Christ’s sake! not only about murderers but even about parricides and child molesters. Terrorists!  Weird dreams!  Well, what can you expect from some epileptic freak, an ex-convict who had a compulsion to gamble?

“A compulsion to gamble.”  Yes.  To take chances.  To run risks.  This is what Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, and Ayn Rand all have in common with Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevski, and Samuel Beckett.

And me.)

And I use Ian Fleming, and I mention Spillane and the others, also because I respect them.  I respect them because for years I wrote for money.  I have done, in my small way, the same thing they did in their great ways.

And I respect the Good Bourgeois.  I don’t use him as a guide, because he doesn’t create art.  But I respect him, and for the same reason I respect the best-selling authors.  Because I have done what he does:  I have Walked That Walk.

I have done The Job.  I have obeyed The Boss.  I have Toed The Mark.  I have Lifted The Bale, Toted The Barge.  I have Paid The Rent, I have Paid The Price, I have Paid The Bills.  I have Balanced The Checkbook.  I have Done The Laundry.  I have been Late To Work and I have been On Time.  I have Put My Nose To The Grindstone and Followed The Directions.  I have Suffered The Consequences and Enjoyed The Rewards.  I have Taken Out The Garbage and Brought Home The Bacon.  I have Rolled Up My Sleeves and Gotten Down To Business.  I have Faced The Facts.  I have Played Hardball with The Big Boys.  I have Accepted The Unacceptable.  I have Kow-Towed and Eaten Shit.  I have been Fearless And Searching.  I have had the Two Cars.  I have made The Big Money.  I have lived within The Richest Zip Code In Atlanta.  And I have, in the words of Confucius, “Et cetera.”

And — surprise! — I have Sobered Up.

And I find that all these things — the Job, the Bank Account, and the et cetera — have been, for me, a tactic, useful to soften (only a little bit) the hardship of overcoming a depressed, drug-addicted, alcoholic brain — my own — and finding beneath all the morbid mental illness my own personal equivalent of Pinocchio-as-real-live-boy — my self.  That is, the self that has sat in AA meetings for literal decades and insistently said to itself, through all the fog of multiple insanities, “My name is Ed Boggan, and I am an alcoholic.”

And that self, that speaker of the profoundest truth, doesn’t want A Job, et cetera, except as a tactic employed to avoid a fate worse than the bourgeoisie, i.e., madness, jail cells, dark alleys, asylums, and death.  These places no longer posing my only alternatives to The Job, I no longer have one.  As my father, a career man in the U. S. Army, would have put it, I do not confuse a tactic with a strategy.  Nor do I tell myself that I have won a war because I have achieved an objective, or even a series of them.

One example:  fear of financial insecurity.  The Good Bourgeois AA avoids the fear of financial insecurity by, in essence, managing well:  he watches his spending, balances his checkbook, saves on a regular basis, invests only conservatively.  Et cetera. And this works 99 times out of a hundred.

On the hundredth occasion, the Good Bourgeois AA freaks out, calls his sponsor, goes to extra meetings, prays like a son of a bitch, and, in the words of my first Good Bourgeois sponsor, “gets through things.”

Pretty good odds, 99/100.  But of course, the Good Bourgeois is not playing the odds; he’s living sober.

I play the odds.  That is, I say I’m sober by God’s Grace every day, and I believe it. As William James says, my belief can be seen clearly in what I do. That is, I depend on inspiration.  I remain on Square One, because I see clearly that there is no Square Two, and I try not to manage well; in fact, I try to not manage at all.

Because I am not interested in being unafraid 99 times out of a hundred.  I am interested in being fearless — all the time. And I am interested in this, not because I’m The One Good AA Who Really, Truly Understands The Program And Has Alone Survived To Tell You All.  I’m interested in being fearless all the time, because when I’m unafraid I’m in the present, in this moment; and if I can stay in the present, unafraid all the time, that is timelessness.  And I prefer timelessness to eternal life, i.e., to being Ed Boggan, with all his defects of character, fucking neuroses, awful habits and alcoholism immortalized like a line of cancer cells in a petri dish at the NCI, forever.

And, also, I’m interested in fearlessness because it interests all artists, everywhere and across all time.  Because a person who is afraid does not write a good novel, or make any kind of art well.

Which is what I believe, that is, what I want to do, badly enough to risk my life by spending it on the chance.

(Of course, my Good Bourgeois former sponsor would say that there will be a heavy price to pay for such an undertaking, a heavy burden to bear on such a path.  And there is.  Just like all the other paths.)

The Good Bourgeois Moral Of The Story

“I’m only interested in results,” says Simon Oakland as Steve McQueen’s Good Bourgeois boss in Bullitt. So here are some results:

• I am now in the sixth year of the best marriage I’ve ever been in, the foremost of many pleasant aftereffects of the worst divorce (and worst marriage) I’ve ever been through.
• I saw my father a year before he died, and he had changed, and changed in a way acceptable, and gratifying, to me.  Last March, during the last week of his life, I told him that I loved him.  Of course, if I hadn’t loved him, his treatment of me wouldn’t have mattered.

The actual results, though, were what my Good Bourgeois former sponsor objected to in the first place:  I changed.  This was and is the actual and ongoing result of the AA program itself.

“Gentlemen, hats off!”

Literature consists of those pieces of writing, usually referred to as books, which people have brought with them over the years as they fled burning buildings.