“O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Does it make sense for someone for whom this phrase of Jonah’s was a regular refrain, even up to not so long ago, to propose a path to redemption?
I don't know.
But it's either this or I go Bartleby. And since I'm not ready to prefer not to, I'm going to talk.
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But why redemption? Why not stocks and bonds, technology, politics, or (god forbid) culture? Why not something one can speak about with technical precision, that does not involve dreams but the cold comforts of numbers and polls and contemporaneous quotes and prognostications? Why not indeed write about something popular?
These questions have a familiar ring to them, for I have a tendency to wander and sometimes bewilder others. In particular, I'm reminded of the questions a professor once asked me while sitting in her office with the charge of plagiarism over my head.
Why couldn't I have written a normal “relevant” paper on the kinds of things other people were working on, than a weird topic like addiction and identity? Why waste my time on this fuzzy subject which virtually nobody had written about at that point? Why not write about something useful, that helps people? Were her exact words.
Because of course fuzzy equals bullshit to large swaths of modern intelligentsia - if one can even call them that with a straight face. If one can't measure it easily, it doesn't exist.
I didn't answer her that day because I could scarcely believe I was being asked the question. I was so pissed at being accused with absolutely no evidence and zero grounds - and an effrontery and disregard for basic courtesy that was breath-taking, I couldn’t think straight.
But the proper answer would have been: fuck you.
Anyone who's ever been accused of something, even if innocent, knows it's a miserable process. You feel helpless. You just have to wait for other people to decide if you are innocent or not.
But do I trust these people? What about those five words in a row that are identical to my source, but the words of which are so simple that it cannot be reworded without going into convulsions?
This may seem like a neurotic reaction, and perhaps it was, but my situation already was a bit shaky as it was, without this kind of bullshit threatening to blow up near everything I had busted my ass for years after getting out of prison to build up.
And the episode brought back all my experiences with the courts pre-prison and all the waiting and uncertainty that entailed. I thought I had put all that shit behind me, but this time despite having done no wrong it was being thrust back at me again and it opened and rubbed raw an old wound.
And there was nothing I could do about it but wait.
I got absolved, though it took a while. Plagiarism software came up with nothing, plus I had written the paper on Docs so you could see me write the paper, see me struggle with wording and composition with time stamps and see there was no copying and pasting.
I launched a complaint afterwards but at every step of the process I was treated with skepticism and as a second class citizen. She was a tenured professor and I a mere grad student. Her actions unnecessarily caused me pain and wasted huge amounts of my time, but she had a suspicion. And apparently that's enough, and no communication is required because it was break. End of story.
But there are ways to do things, and there are ways not to do things. There are ways to treat people and ways not to treat people. It appears - based on her questions - I at least partially got caught up in this because I decided to write a difficult paper. To do something different, that actually interested and challenged me. Which I thought was supposed to be the point? But in modern education, that's apparently the aberration. Genuine curiosity is so unusual as to be cause for suspicion.
Anyways, back to the question at hand. Why am I writing about redemption rather than about something sensible?
I'm writing about it for the same reason I wrote about addiction and the role of identity in overcoming it - because I've experienced it, and it changed my life.
As a former addict who quit heroin and nicotine - two of the more addictive substances on the planet - cold turkey, the subject cuts close.
Of course I nearly killed myself in the process by swallowing dozens of whatever pills I could grab one night to kill the pain of withdrawal, but that was just a bump in the road. The ole' tummy could use a pump or two every once in a while.
But I knew a primary reason I was able to quit was because the way in which I regarded myself shifted. I looked at and defined myself in a different way.
And so a decade later in graduate school in a course on addictions I decided to explore that issue, to dig into the journals to see if I could find some clues as to what happened and how. To render the course and assignment personally useful.
To this day I remember that professor teaching that section on post-addiction life and speaking of the difficulties addicts typically have replacing their drug buddies, of forging some kind of meaningful social ecosystem afterwards.
And all those memories were loosed upon me.
Good times, but once they're over you don't want to go back. You can't go back - there's nothing there. And a yawning chasm lies now between you and those friends. An unbridgeable one.
And so one is left to try to figure out how to form new friends from nothing, when one is a little weird, a little wary, and not very adept at that sort of thing.
Which was perhaps a good part of the reason for the drugs - it provided a subject of joint attention and a relaxing activity in which one is free to focus on the drugs or the people, or some mix of the two. There was just something about that set up that felt right, passing the joint around, watching each person as they in their unique way imbibe the smoke and pass it along.
I’ll never forget those scenes: watching the smoke drift up, laughing about stupid shit because you're high - it's okay, and welcome. Be stupid. No one gives a shit. You can remain silent, you can talk about nothing, you can delve into the philosophical or the intensively personal at the drop of a dime, and it's all good. Everyone is game. The airs are gone. Just people, smoke, the night. And the weird journey you're all on, that suddenly feels properly weird. The amnesia and anesthesia of everyday life has dulled and dropped away and a kind of clarity and curiosity emerges.
The requirement to look busy drops. You can just be and be-with. And be-with with the kind of intensity which is usually discouraged in everyday life, where a certain air of partial detachment is socially prescribed. Intense and yet relaxed.
Good times.
So when she talked of all that, I realized my struggles were not just personal, that it was a common pattern. Which was a certain comfort, if a short lived one.
She talked so bluntly about addiction and incarceration that for the first time I told someone I didn't know well I was an ex-con. It sounded like she had lots of experience in the field, and like she would be cool and non judgmental.
But she didn't respond the way I expected. She acted sort of aloof and didn't provide much information.
But whatever, I brushed it off.
Then a few weeks later she gave me an F and (many weeks later) falsely accused me of plagiarism.
Did it have anything to do with my earlier admission to her?
I have no idea. But fuck that bitch. That was a miserable, anxious time in my life made several times more anxious and miserable by her treatment of me. Not just the accusation, but the lack of and manner of communication. It was like it was designed to inflict pain. Or maybe I was just too unimportant to even be given any kind of basic human consideration. Too busy on her fancy Christmas vacation (which is when I indirectly discovered the accusation via a failed mark on my report card) in her plum tenured job which she barely showed up for most days.
But yes, that's why I talked about identity. And I talk here about salvation for the same reason. I've experienced it, I know it in my bones. A shift of being, a qualitative turn. One is the same, and yet in some fundamental level one is different. The ground is firmer under one's feet. One talks from a more solid place. The negative urgency falls away.
I went from high school drop out to drug addict to convict to graduating college with honors, followed by a few more degrees for good measure, and then entered the profession I had aimed to those years earlier in prison.
But that's all external shit. "By your fruits you shall know them" but my fruits were most importantly of the spirit.
I will talk more about it in future posts, approaching it from various angles. Like the sun, it's difficult to look directly at and chances are it will always remain a bit fuzzy.
But that's what this paper is all about - the fuzzy stuff. I'll talk about it but honestly and hopefully a touch of intelligence. I won't sell you a guaranteed 2 step path to anything or set myself up as some kind of transcendental guru (not because I don't have a big enough ego, but because both would be a chore and a bore and for anything this complex there is never going to be a simple, universal, set-in-stone process for it). At best some lesser version of John the Baptist, crying out from the wilderness, preparing the way for those who may come after me.