Since You Asked

Let me quote for you something from a book I am reading with great interest, called “Writing Alone and With Others,” by Pat Schneider. These are the five principles on which Schneider has based the writing workshops and the associated movement known as Amherst Writers and Artists.

1. Everyone has a strong, unique voice.
2. Everyone is born with creative genius.

3. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level.

4. The teaching of craft can be done without damage to a writer’s original voice or artistic self-esteem.

5. A writer is someone who writes.

Apply these same principles to music. Music is an art form that belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or education. A musician is someone who makes music. If you write you are a writer. If you make music you are a musician. And if you make music, you are not required to know the quality or the meaning of what you do, because you are giving voice to something full of surprise and mystery. You are not required nor even able to judge what you do because you are not in control of what you do. You proceed knowing only that you are giving voice to something that deserves to have a voice. And why does it deserve to have a voice? Because it is there in your body yearning to be born, trying desperately to become.

You become the body of the violin played by unseen hands.

OK, so that is a bit dramatic. But is it any more dramatic or unbelievable than the naked facts — that we humans will bang on things, blow into things, strike things and build things to make music of such complexity, order, symmetry and power that we cannot even adequately describe or analyze what we ourselves have done? Is what I am saying any more startling than the naked facts?

All I can conclude is that we are not in complete control of what we create.

It is by thinking about it in such a way that you find the courage to do it — indeed, that you find the necessity of doing it. You become as it were the handmaiden of your own desires.

For what is music? Music is banging on a can. Music is screeching pain. Music is silence, as has been demonstrated by eminent musicians celebrated by the wealthy and the fabulous. Music is a frame placed around sound. Music is the decision to listen. Music is a gathering.

And am I talking highbrow? Decidedly not. I am talking punk.

Punk was a revolutionary phenomenon in which many people who did not know each other personally came to the same conclusion at the same time: If we say we are musicians we are musicians. If we go onstage and perform we are performers.

That was the genius of the punk explosion: You do not need permission. Because no one owns music. A person may own a club, or a record company, or a stage or venue or concert promotion corporation. But no one owns music. And no one needs permission. And yet I am giving you permission. Why do I need to give you permission even though I say you need no permission? Because punk is apparently not operating in a vital and visible way in your area of Vancouver. You need the culture to say, Yes, come on, do it! If the culture is not around you, visible, exploding out of the bare brick walls of clubs, then people who ought to be punks look around and say, Where is my gathering? Where are my people? What do I do with this deafening sound in my head?

You go and play.

To play an instrument you need an instrument and you need hands. You put your hands on the instrument and make sounds come out. You listen to the sounds and make more of the sounds you like and less of the sounds you don’t like. You let it speak. It may speak in an angry voice, or a frightened voice; it may speak first in a disorganized way; it may be hard to understand what it is saying. But you let it speak. You put your hands on the instrument and you let the sounds guide you to the voice. The voice will increase. It will say things that surprise you. It will thank you for allowing it to speak. It may also say things that you don’t like. It may say things others don’t like.

Soon you will find there are things the voice wants to say that you don’t know how to make the instrument do. So you will seek instruction. But seek it on your terms. Say, This is what I want to express; how do I make this instrument make these sounds? You might say, This is what I want to say! and in demonstrating what you want to say you must leap around like a frog, flapping your arms like a chicken, or lying dead in a ditch, or flying. You say: This is what must come out of the instrument! How do I find this in the instrument? Where is it hidden? You might pay for this instruction or you might find it by forming principled relationships with other people who make sounds come out of instruments. If you like the sounds they make, then find out how they are made.

Some sounds are pure machine, stark and godlike. For instance, a Fender Stratocaster is a musical machine that makes a certain sound. A Marshall stack is also a musical machine. If a Stratocaster is leaned up against a Marshall stack and both the Stratocaster and the Marshall stack are set to maximum volume, a certain sound will emerge. This is the sound of the machines. It is terrifying and overwhelming and glorious, like a thunderstorm. You stand back a certain distance and watch it rain. Then you step in and begin to manipulate the sound these machines are making; you become a respectful intermediary between the machines. The sound belongs to the machines. You serve to shape their anarchic, joyful interaction.

On the other hand, you can bang on a can.

Punk allowed people who had the spirit and the intense desire to express themselves to express themselves in a way that did not require formal practice and training. Punk created a language and a method, and thus encouraged those who otherwise would have been discouraged. I was lucky enough to observe punk in the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s, and to participate as a musician and later as a journalist in the eclectic avant-garde or new wave that surrounded it and in a sense followed it, took courage in its advances.

We repurposed what we could scavenge from the culture in order to create for ourselves a world of glamor and danger that reflected back to us our visions, sometimes dark and surreal, sometimes silly, always essentially private in origin and thus mysterious and full of danger. It was an amazing time, to see a small, disenfranchised group of people expose their private nightmares on the public stage and find recognition: Yes, we all feel mostly mad, yes, we are all going insane with frustration and anger, yes, we all feel impotent to change the government. It had much in common with other spontaneous and intoxicating artistic movements. One is very lucky to have been there for it. It is one of those things one takes to the grave, clutching to the chest with gratitude.

So you need a rehearsal space and you need a culture. If you begin to do it, people will recognize what you are doing and they will come around, curious, tentative, like cats. Like cats, they may act dismissive. But they will be watching, and listening through the walls.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

What? You want more?

I like to do things that are stressful to the kidneys such as drink coffee, get drunk now and then, trip on plants that are metabolized by the kidneys and liver (this is part of my spiritual practice). Do I say nothing and hope that, come March when she’s testing possible donors, we are not a match? Or do I strain the friendship by admitting to her that I have misgivings about my promise?

Willing Initially

Dear Willing Initially,

You did a good thing. You offered to help.

You may or may not be a compatible donor. But you said these words out of a genuine spirit of generosity and kindness. This is a pretty amazing thing about human beings — that we are inclined toward helping each other. It’s a good thing.

It may turn out that you are a match, but it’s statistically unlikely. “In the case of cousins, your chance of being identical is 1 in 16. In the case of a friend, then your chances vary depending on how common your HLA is,” according to this helpful booklet from Stanford’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

In either case, having second thoughts doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. To donate a kidney is a big thing and it’s natural to have second thoughts. So wait until it’s time for all the potential donors to be screened, and get screened, and then deal with it once you know if you’re a potential donor.

This question and answer page from the University of Maryland Medical Center is very informative. As is this one. 

Give yourself some credit. You spoke out of an impulse toward compassion and selflessness.

If you are indeed a match and you can’t go through with it, no one will fault you for it. But your initial impulse shows you have within you the capacity to help. It’s a precious thing. Think of the worldwide effect of such impulses, if they were carried out millions of times over. Think of the things we could solve if we honored these selfless impulses and our societies were organized to realize them. Think how much needless suffering could be stopped.

You say you use psychedelic plants as part of your spiritual practice. Perhaps one of these trips you can inquire of your spirit guides what is the right thing to do. But you needn’t decide yet. Wait. More will be revealed.

I am very eager to have babies with the man I love. With us now moving, kids are on the back burner because we won’t have health insurance until one of us lands a job with benefits. We had been trying to get pregnant until the decision to move was made because I have decent benefits with my current hateful job. (One of the reasons I haven’t quit, the other main one being that I’m trying to hold this job out till we can move.) I really want kids soon; I have wanted to be a mother since I was 5. But the stress of life and my failing body seem to want other things for me. I had injured my back at work and now am in physiotherapy to heal it, yet I’m still obligated to work my full shifts. Those eight-hour shifts literally drain me. I haven’t had a period in 3.5 months (my doctor insists it’s stress-related). And most recently, my pap test came back with abnormal cells on my cervix. No further tests have been done, but my doctor thinks my back, lack of period and abnormal cells are at least partly because of too much stress. Hard not to be stressed when all these symptoms have made me worry and fret even more about never being able to have children! The more that I worry, the more stressed my body becomes. The more symptoms of the stress I experience, the more I worry. (A huge catch-22.) One of my worst fears is to end up being barren.

On to my other issue. My fiancé and I both smoke marijuana regularly. I will note here that we do not smoke cigarettes at all, nor do we drink alcohol very often. Although I have heard that it can prevent couples from conceiving, I only “slowed it down” when we were trying to get pregnant. My fiancé seems to have his usage under control. He is able to use on a part-time basis and not every evening and every weekend. I am a different story altogether. I use (abuse) marijuana for stress. I rush to get home after work to have the bad memories of the day dissolve into higher thoughts. I am not high at work, but evenings and weekends are full of my usage. It’s the way I’ve taught myself to deal. Although I don’t think marijuana is an “evil drug” that “leads to other drug usage,” I know that I am misusing it. I have never felt the need to try any other drug (besides alcohol and caffeine). But I barely even notice the effects any more. Despite that, I can’t imagine quitting it altogether. I know that if I were pregnant I would not smoke at all, because there is another human being involved who would be affected by it.

But without marijuana, how would I deal with life’s stress? Plus there is some part of me that feels like marijuana is not bad. You ought to know that in my family, a few other people smoke marijuana. My aunt and cousin probably use it once daily, and my mom and brother once or twice a week, and my dad on occasion. While they never permitted any drug usage as a teenager, I found out and smoked with family after turning 19. Obviously this is a huge part of the reason why I can’t seem to convince myself that marijuana is “bad.”

This new city will not have any marijuana contacts for my fiancé and me, and it is my plan to stop smoking when we move. But really, I don’t want to stop at all, and I feel like I’m lying to myself by thinking that a new city will stop me from finding a way to do it. Plus, my fiancé is moving first, and we will be apart for a month (we’ve never been apart for longer than 10 days in the past four years). I know that with him gone, I will want to smoke even more. Especially because I feel like I want to get as much smoking in before I “can’t” anymore.

I know several people who use marijuana more than I do and who firmly believe that no one can get addicted to it. I guess I’m not so sure about this, but I would like to believe it because then I’m just a hippie and not an addict. I worry about the usage affecting the physiotherapy on my back, but since we aren’t trying to get pregnant, I still smoke whenever I want to. My fiancé knows that I smoke too much, he knows that I KNOW that I smoke too much too. But month after month he still brings it home for us. I have tried to quit before, asking him to keep it all hidden and out of sight. This always fails, because I will find it and sneak some or bug and bug him to get it out of hiding for me.

I don’t think I can stop until he stops bringing it into the house and we get rid of all the marijuana paraphernalia that is around our place. If my fiancé doesn’t want to quit with me, I would be disappointed. But as long as he kept everything out of our house and cars, I think I could do it. I really do want children in the long run and better physiotherapy results in the short term. What do I do?

Moving and Shaking

Dear Moving and Shaking,

You are using marijuana to relieve stress.

Stress is your problem. Whether you stop smoking marijuana or not, you need to learn more and better ways to relieve stress.

Start doing tai chi; start doing yoga; meditate; take naps; breathe deeply a lot; do biofeedback. If you are doing any of these activities already, don’t conclude that since you’re doing it a little it must not work. Instead, do it more.

You may need higher doses of yoga to get relief. Also, if you are consuming lots of caffeine, see about cutting back. Try substituting some herbal teas for caffeinated beverages now and then. Notice the difference. Especially in the afternoon, cut out the caffeine so you can get a better night’s sleep.

You will notice things about yourself this way. You will notice the different qualities of consciousness that arise from various techniques. It will be entertaining and interesting. You will notice a gradual improvement in your ability to go through life in a relaxed, worry-free way. Unpleasant activities like work and dealing with power-hungry blockheads will go more smoothly.

During this time, you might want to experiment with not smoking for a time. Pick an occasional time when you are stressed out, and instead of smoking, do 15 minutes of meditation, or some tai chi or yoga.

Don’t try to quit all at once, especially not on your own. Just learn some better relaxation techniques. Take it easy. Look for gradual improvement.

Once you’ve found other ways to relieve stress, you may not feel so fearful about the idea of quitting marijuana for good. Try going without for a few days at a time and see how that goes. You can always smoke. But experience what it’s like to handle life without it. Try to get accustomed to that feeling. You may feel slightly on edge, but take a deep breath of fresh air instead of a hit of weed.

The thing is, whether you call yourself an addict or not, changing habitual behavior is hard, and it’s especially hard to do alone. It’s hard to do without a program. It takes time, effort and support, and there are ups and downs. So I wouldn’t recommend trying to stop smoking marijuana on your own, or just with your fiancé.

As you say, for a variety of reasons, you are going to want to quit. So what I’m suggesting is that you prepare, in these ways, for the day when you will need to quit. I’m sure marijuana gives you other things besides stress relief; it probably gives you a heightened sense of the beauty of life, of tastes and sounds, and of general well-being. These things you may need to seek out in life; I find that there are other ways to feel these momentary highs. Seek them out.

For quitting things, as you probably know, I favor the 12-step method because it has added benefits: It helps you get your life together and is a lasting program of living. It is a community. It works for a lot of things.

When and how you quit is up to you. I can say that based on experience, it is definitely possible. You can quit and lead a normal, happy life, when you’re ready to. My bottom line is just that A) You should acquire new stress-relief methods first, before trying to quit, and B) what was B? Oh yeah, B) Don’t try to quit on your own. If and when you do decide to quit, do it with a group or a program behind you.

And, hey: Good luck. You sound like really nice people and I wish you the best in life. And say hello to the kids when they come. And say hello to the mountains.

Yeah, I know this isn’t all my fault, that it takes two to make a bad relationship, and all that. And certainly there are women — most of them — who wouldn’t even look my way. Great for them. But for those who are willing to look my way, don’t I have a basic human obligation to keep them safe from my horribleness and inevitable failures? Without exception I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or just collapse.

So. Given that I contribute nothing to the world but disappointment and misery, and I can’t control my desire for companionship and attention, shouldn’t I just kill myself? Isn’t that the moral thing to do at this point?

A Dangerous Nothing

Dear Dangerous Nothing,

You, my friend, are exactly perfect the way you are. You’re not a moron!

Look on the bright side: You have a technique. Don’t wait to show her your bumbling, fumbling, weak and incompetent side.  Spill your soup on her now! On the first date. Roll your car over your own foot and have her take you to the emergency room. Come out of the bathroom with tape all over your face. Why? Because a person with tape all over his face looks funny!

It’ll break the ice. She’ll thank you for it!

Pour it on  about what a loser you are! That’ll get her going about how you just have low self-esteem and you’re being too hard on yourself.

If you are asking women to marry you and promising to fly them in your private jet to your villa in Portugal and saying you’ll pick them up at 8 o’clock sharp the next morning and then you are not showing up, then women are going to bed thinking about your private jet and then not getting to ride in it. That’s bad.

You should slap yourself in the face once very hard if you are doing that. Then you should force yourself to sell your imaginary private jet at a loss of millions of imaginary dollars.

But killing yourself wouldn’t make any sense at all, and it wouldn’t make anyone happy, not even you.

Besides, there are worse people.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

I do want to marry and have children. Thus I’ve spent a fair amount of time on self-reflection, either on my own, in a therapist’s office, or on the phone with my sister. I’ve spent several years sifting through the finer details of my relationship with my father — yep, he’s emotionally distant and critical, has an on/off problem with alcohol, you know the drill. So now, I have all this knowledge about me, about my relationship with my father, about why I play the role that I do in my relationships, etc., etc. I’m grateful for this knowledge. However, I want this knowledge to do something for me, because, frankly, I’m really starting to bore myself.

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.