Just as I was about to go to bed last night, book and mug of Milo set aside, I recalled a sentence from the sci-fi author William Gibson.
‘The future is already here, but unevenly distributed.’
Immediately I went to my desk, opened a notebook and wrote 4 000 words of a new fiction. That will no doubt take 18 months or longer to percolate down into publishability. But that sudden fierce impulse to write, and having the story make and unmake itself under my pen, is the best part of the whole enterprise, a kind of chilly ecstacy.
On the other hand, my word count the day before yesterday was negative. Minus 480 words. I wrote them, read through them, couldn’t go on. A dead end. Read them again yesterday and deleted them. Another false move on the chess board of characters and imperfectly free will, what they choose to do, what I choose for them to do, what doesn’t work out. The red knight, the black queen, the awkward pawn. The chess board swept clean, the game over for now.
On various blogs, there is an ongoing debate and questioning about what we blog, why and when. Issues to do with privacy and self-disclosure, what we suppress, what we write about instead of what we choose not to tell. How many taboos can be broken? With what consequences? How can we talk about honesty when so much is not revealed, hidden away in private notebooks, not even broached in emails or letters? For example — I don’t write about local controversies because readers who live here might deduce my real identity. I also don’t write about local controversies because it would take too much time to explain and contextualise them for overseas readers.
Is blogging a service to readers? I honestly don’t know. It may encourage someone to realise how relatively sane and ordinary life can become in sobriety. Certain posts may shed some light on the nature of alcoholism and recovery, or depression or living with PTSD. I hope so, and I am always touched to think a post has helped or encouraged a reader. We all need to feel useful to others.
But I write because writing is just what I do. I’m not a great talker, not really someone for the phone or any kind of public speaking. I’m an erratic listener, sometimes better than at other times, well-meaning but often unskilled. I don’t gossip, even if I enjoy hearing about scandals and secrets as much as the next person. Privacy and silence matters to me: my life is shaped by discretion and protectiveness of those I care for, those who trust me. What I am at core is a writer, that is how I express myself and that is where the impulse to blog arises, not primarily altruistic but in hopes of joining a neighbourhood of fellow bloggers and writers, a conversation, in the hope of discovering more about life and sober living as I write.
And fiction is another kind of territory, more random and indirect, another kind of displaced telling and hiding. If you are a close friend of mine, you may read my innocuous little fictions and find your fondness for a wrist tattoo or habit of saying, ‘And your point is?’ given to a completely unrecognisable character who has just run away from her husband with a bisexual gym instructor, or a retrenched librarian who has moved into a haunted house to encounter a long-dead airman who smokes Camel cigarettes and sulks under the stairs. There is a character in a sci-fi novella who drinks wine but is not alcoholic: he originates in an old university friend who likes a glass of unwooded chardonnay on the odd occasion. I give some quirk of my personality to characters from time to time — a liking for homemade ravioli or quoting Wittgenstein — but my characters go on to bear and raise children with troubled dispositions, or develop allergies to cats, or to show an callous and charming facility for murder, and they are not me.
Emily Dickinson: ‘Tell the truth/but tell it slant.’
And to end on a controversial note: here is Damian Thompson in the Guardian arguing about the rightness and wrongness of Alcoholics Anonymous. And looking again at what neurobiology might reveal to us about the mystery of addictive behaviours. Questions and opinions to make us think, think, think on a sleepy Thursday morning.
If its disease model is wrong, why does it work so well? There’s no mystery. It takes drunks who want to stay sober and surrounds them with like-minded souls. The “programme” doesn’t manage disease: it creates an environment in which the temptation to drink ebbs away.
As you know, I am struggling with how to blog – I appreciate your thoughts on this. I think for me the root of it is the fact that I have always wanted to write and blogging allows me to do it – and people actually read what I’ve written! My old blog had a mission, but I don’t feel I can keep it up right now.
I laughed out loud at the description of the librarian!
Ah yes, the librarian and the airman. Mary Christine I sometimes post what i think of as corrective or educative posts to do with sexual violence or women’s rights or alcoholism, but most of the time I just write the kind of newsy and chatty posts I would write in letters to friends.
That is where I am hoping my new blog leads me. Chatty and newsy.
Is blogging a service to readers? Oh yes! A great service to this reader in particular.
You are the most highly skilled and intuitive listener. In fact your blog has for me the feel of a great conversation. Your intellectually creative thoughts swirl in the ether, touching on this issue or that experience and we are gently pulled away from the shores of our own well-worn thought patterns and into that larger galaxy of possibility. Uncanny how often your posts resonate deeply with something I have been thinking about or experiencing.
I think it’s magical.
I feel inspired to tear myself away from my all-consuming focus on caregiving (and caretaking!), to pay attention to my internal narrative and to honour my thoughts by expressing them.
What a lovely comment, Invisigal — and that focus on caregiving and caretaking sounds very demanding. Take care.
Blogging saved me at a time when I was on the brink of self destruction. I was years into my sobriety but l felt so completely disconnected from my fellows and simply didn’t have the time to forge close relationships in my home town. It was January of 2008 and I found blogging. First through the blog of a Buddhist priest in California whom I read to this day, then some others, then even more others, then Pam, Syd, et al….
The disease model…
I don’t know. Even after all the years that alcoholism has been on the brain, I still don’t know if I agree with the disease concept. What I do know is that it is a condition that, for me could not be reversed no matter how hard I tried. And, oh honey, I tried. I tried like hell to find a way to drink like a normal human. It simply wasn’t in the cards for me.
The end of this month I will be going to Dr. Bob’s house in Akron for another visit. The Chef has never been there and he celebrates 10 years on June 1. I am grateful to AA for what they have given me.
Thanks Kristin — that sounds like a great trip. I don’t think the disease model is ‘flawed’ but perhaps incomplete and not to be taken too literally in comparison with, say, diabetes.
You are a gifted writer, but for me blogging (this time around) is a place to write because I enjoy it. I don’t have anything important to say (although I obsessed at one point I was doing a “great service”), but I really enjoy the camaraderie. No big secrets anymore in my life–and for this I’m grateful!
Lou, that is a good pl;ace to be. From time to time I look at why I am doing something and whether I could communicate more effectively or talk about deeper issues. The service aspect is there, but incidental.
My blog has changed over time. I find that just writing about events of the day is okay. I have no advice to give, no agenda really. In fact, yesterday went by with no thought to the blog. It was just a full day of living.
I have seen MRI’s of the brains of those who have addictions and certain portions of their brains become stimulated when in the presence of drug or drink. The “normal” brain does not. I believe that there is a genetic component to addiction. And that there was also some co-occurring condition such as depression, bipolar disorder, ADD, etc. that alcohol soothed. There are studies which indicate such but the thing that remains important is that millions of people have gotten sober when sobriety seemed impossible. That is a miracle of God’s grace.
I liked this Syd — and I agree wout the studies and the co-occurring conditions, the predisposition. But the crucial factor is that people do get sober in meetings — I think of the participation in AA or other recovery groups as more active than described in the article, and I think service is key for unlearning certain patterns of self-absorption and selfishness.
Blogs are like anything else, there are good blogs and bad, blogs that meet a need and blogs that are just a waste of everyone’s time. My benchmark for everything I do is that it should be meaningful. Occasionally it veers more towards the entertaining than the educational but there is a place for both. That I choose to reveal relatively little about my personal life is purely a matter of choice; my personal life is not very interesting and I suspect that’s the case with most writers whose days are spent bent over a keyboard: Monday – Got up, wrote, lunched, wrote some more, had dinner, wrote for another hour and then vegged out in front of the TV before going to bed. Tuesday etc – ditto. I don’t think that one needs to be open to be honest which is why I’m a fiction writer rather than an autobiographer. Lies—made up stuff—are the perfect setting for truths; they simplify and reduce the real world and make it digestible. I’m actually working on a long article on privacy at the moment. There is a lot written about the various kinds of privacy and the various reasons people choose to isolate themselves or a part of themselves but not so much about the benefits of alone time but I’m not finished my researches yet so who knows what I’ll come up with.
Like you I’m a writer which I define as a person whose natural response to life is to write about it; that doesn’t mean I keep a journal or a diary and record everything factually but everything I write about comes as a result of things I’ve personally experienced, witnessed firsthand, heard about from witnesses or read about and all of these form the basis of what I end up writing. I was listening to a photographer talking about his craft recently and he said something very interesting: “The product is a by-product.” The photographs are a record of an experience. Were he not a photographer he likely would never get into the kind of situations where he would experience these things but the experiences trump the record of those experiences.
Let me leave you with this poem I wrote a few years back.
READER PLEASE SUPPLY MEANING
Writers are all liars. We all are.
But at least they are honest liars.
They write down those necessary lies,
the kind that move men to leaps of faith
or excuse us when we fail to jump.
In the end it doesn’t matter that
they let us down in the cruellest ways.
August 18, 1996
I write/read blogs because I like to connect with people that I otherwise would not know.