IV. Grain of Sand, Meet Infinity

Violent Confrontation with Difference and the Possibility of Turnaround

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.

Even now, some 20 years later, I still hear this line from Vanilla Sky in the voice of Josh.

Josh, who moped around the corner store I worked nights at in my early 20’s, often waiting for my co-worker John P. to finish smoking and/or selling weed in the back room. Josh with the rich parents, who did who knows what for work, and was soft-spoken and aloof.

Josh, who had a habit of inserting that line whenever it was remotely relevant, always emphasizing “it alllll”.

And who suddenly disappeared after John P. showed up to the corner store one week with a large bandage on his eye to pick up what was to be his last check.

Rumors swirled that they got beat up trying to jack the electrician shop John P. recently got an apprenticeship gig with. And some time later word reached us that John had escaped to the swamps of Florida.

But all was silent on the Josh front.

Did he ever turn it around? Did he hold on to the dream of change, of being a different Josh? One maybe not addicted to heroin, one maybe not spending his days driving around scamming Best Buy’s by returning unbought DVD’s?

I knew him for maybe 5 years. 5 years of minutes with the potential to turn things around never fulfilled.

————————-

And he's not alone.

For long stretches prior to hitting bottom both times, I knew I was on the wrong path.

So I flailed about - in a way that always felt reactive and too little too late - to find out what was wrong and what was required to fix it. 

And obviously our age has no shortage of "solutions" for every problem under the sun, not to mention the relics of ages past. I turned to philosophy and psychology, to self-help and religion, to psychiatry and street drugs, to asceticism and hedonism, to workaholicism and leisure, to aestheticism and acquisitiveness, to relationships - old friends, then new friends, the company of women, the company of men - to groups, and solitude, to knowledge and empty-headedness, to charismatic personalities and dullards, to superstition and science, to new experiences and old experiences. I fetishized relationships, I became solipsistic. 

And behind every door was yet more disappointment. I was the less luxurious and materialistic version of Huysmans protagonist in "Against Nature" - but for the purpose not of sensation itself, but salvation. At the end of which all I could say is meh.

Why? Why can’t any passing minute be the one that one turns things around? Why this discrepancy between will and outcome?

——-———-

“God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

This take from Jung suggests that rock bottom experiences are just as much an experience of the Divine as that of the Numinous.

But is this a justifiable claim?

On one level, who knows. On another, yes. Its fruits tend in the same direction. They are both experiences which have a tendency to throw a gauntlet down - that divide one’s life between before and after.

And both seem to cultivate the possibility of doing something other than just watch one’s minutes pass one by.

Why?

I want to suggest that the key is difference. Emotionally charged, sometimes violently so, experiences of vast difference, accompanied by surprise, shock, awe, fear and other gut-wrenching affects.

In the case of the numinous, experience of the difference between myself and the Other and in rock bottom the difference between where I was and where I am now. And in both, the experience of powerlessness in the face of the incomprehensible.

——-

Difference, as it is well known, is the fount of all thought. I started thinking after my assumption that life was all fun and games was shattered when my heart was broken.

While this was an emotionally charged experience of difference - the contrast here is on another level. That experience was more akin to that of the difference between ordering a Boston Cream donut and getting a frosted one than to what we’re talking about.

And not only the degree of difference, but also how it’s suggestive of the greater-than. The wrong donut merely informs me of the possibility of miscommunication and/or indifference. A broken heart informs me of the possibility of emotional rupture, of divergence of feeling and desire over time. Both suggest something of the unknowability of the other.

But the other in these cases is another of my kind. A human like me doing human things, which provokes in some a wandering through the realms of certainty and uncertainty and how one knows which is which. A move slightly away from people and more towards things and Knowledge.

The experience of God is on another level of contrast, and contains within it the seeds of a more profound change.

——

There’s a common moment in many stories where the protagonist begins in some static narrow world, and suddenly he’s thrust into a journey and a vista opens up, of a teeming world filled with movement and scope - with an accompanying sense of wonder and awe.

That’s this, but multiplied some inestimable number over.

This storytelling technique works because most of us have experienced this at some level. I remember going on a vacation during college from my small room in my run-down neighborhood and coming back and realizing how shabby it really was. I had grown accustomed to this narrow scene that being transported out of it was almost a high.

We as humans easily get used to almost anything, and we forget - in any embodied real sense - that we’ve ever been anywhere else and that there is anything else, at least beyond the realm of the abstract. We too easily mistake “our small corner of the world for the world, and our little tribe with all of humanity.”

And that’s why “violently and recklessly” is so apt - experiences that open up the possibility of change have to shatter, have to destroy. In some ways, the degree of its violence is the degree of the possible change (unlearning is always a the more difficult necessary prior to learning).

So after getting my heart broken my habits of reading shifted from mindless sci-fi and fantasy to philosophy, and my conversations from who knows what to the same. After getting back from that vacation I rearranged my room, got some new furniture and whatnot, started looking for a new place and going out more.

These are shifts, and not unimportant. But incremental changes after relatively minor experiences of difference - and ones that aren’t suggestive of larger forces - lead to minor improvements, which generally fizzle out before too long. The momentum is too minor, the provoking experience too tame and/or circumspect.

——-

The degree to which the divine is an experience of the larger-than goes without saying, but what of rock bottom?

The name itself gives it away: invariably the moment entails a cracking of one’s skull against the hard surface of Reality. It is that destructive force mentioned earlier, which does violence to narrow conceptions of the self and the universe and the relation between the two. One is at last near forced to acknowledge, just as with the Numinous experience, that “non-egoic powers exist in the psyche” and that in turn that our fates are aligned with what surrounds us.

Why? Because bottom is always the result of failure, and based typically on a false model of what is. What the hell is the person trying to avoid succumbing to temptation fighting against? What is the person attempting to fight their fate fighting against, and what are their odds of succeeding?

It is a surrender - the visceral realization that in a battle with yourself and with your environment no one ever wins. Followed by/intermingled with the realization that there is little to no meaningful separation between the two.

Gregory Bateson, speaking of the bottom experience in alcoholism, gives the analogy of telling a driver to stop while driving over ice. The results are predictable, both for the driver and the car: panic and a crash. But not just any panic, but

the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly finds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is.

That is what my years of wandering from one “solution” to another eventually led to. Not only was I not making any progress but as I began to note my descent and as it got more and more rapid I gave up trying to “turn it around” and instead focused just on stopping - and I couldn’t.

By the time those sirens pulled up behind me I was long past having hope - I didn’t care enough to panic. When I jammed my foot down that was the final public declaration that I was bankrupt. Which led to yet more downward turnings until finally I had my magic moment(s) of panic.

But why this panic was effective and what specifically it did to finally initiate the process of change - or at least the forward momentum part - requires investigation into why some people, including myself, find themselves in such straits.

———

The rock bottom discourse is most readily discussed in alcoholism, so I'll start there.

In particular I want to focus on alcoholic “pride” - which is not based on past accomplishment, but rather on the ability to do something in the face of perceived accusations that one cannot. It is the “obsessive acceptance of a challenge” - which gets turned towards not drinking when drinking becomes a problem.

Often, this challenge is initially met successfully.

However, succeeding at not drinking destroys the challenge that was the initial motivation.

And so the alcoholic tends to relax their “will”, risking a drink to test their ability to not get drunk, and then proceed to go on a bender. Bateson puts it thus:

“We may say that the contextual structure of sobriety changes with its achievement. Sobriety, at this point, is no longer the appropriate contextual setting for ‘pride.’ It is the risk of the drink that now is challenging and calls out the fatal “I can. . . .”

This state of being is one in which risk becomes an addiction:

The principle might be put in words: “I can do something where success is improbable and failure would be disastrous.” Clearly this principle will never serve to maintain continued sobriety. As success begins to appear probable, the alcoholic must challenge the risk of a drink. The element of “bad luck” or probability of failure places failure beyond the limits of the self. “If failure occurs, it is not mine.”

Alcoholic “pride” progressively narrows the concept of the “self,” placing what happens outside its scope.

The principle of pride-in-risk is ultimately almost suicidal. It is all very well to test once whether the universe is on your side, but to do so again and again, with increasing stringency of proof, is to set out on a project which can only prove that the universe hates you.

This pride-in-risk was very much present in me. Let me give a brief personal example:

I’m an introvert. And yet I have vivid memories of moments from my teen years where I was able to summon the more extroverted aspects of my personality. It transformed me for a moment or a day from a sometimes loner-esque figure to someone immersed in the lifeblood of the action, in the flow of the give and take of good feeling.

But this experience was seemingly randomly distributed - I had no idea prior which “me” would emerge in a given context. And this frustrated me (and sometimes others) to no end. Sometimes ironically the more I willed myself to be extroverted, the more introverted I became.

When I discovered drugs however, that became the cudgel to whip this alien half of myself into shape. However, this seemed to fade over time and so mine became a search for the right drug or combination of drugs (and/or situation or philosophy or experience) to enable my “authentic” self.

In some ways, and perhaps most ways, my effort to “turn it all around” over that period was in fact an effort to summon extroversion with regularity. Although the more I tried, the more I did battle with myself, the more I fell apart, and the further and further my ideal fell out of reach.

So what I had in common with the above picture of the alcoholic is that “pride” in being able to “overcome” this split-off part of the self, and the constantly putting myself in situations where I’m testing my will.

Which led to increased risk-taking over time, until finally I hit bottom.

But - and this is where it really gets interesting - Bateson proposes that this pride is not some fluke - it’s the fruit of a particular overarching way of looking at oneself, other people and the world and one’s relationship to each. A pride, he says, that “always presumes a real or fictitious ‘other.’”

In other words, this is at essence a relational pride.

What does this mean?

— — —

Relationships, according to Bateson, can be roughly divided into two (not uncommonly overlapping but still conceptually meaningful) types that are fateful for individual outcomes: symmetrical and complementary:

If the behaviors of A and B are regarded (by A and B) as similar and are linked so that more of the given behavior by A stimulates more of it in B, and vice versa, then the relationship is “symmetrical” in regard to these behaviors.

If, conversely, the behaviors of A and B are dissimilar but mutually fit together (as, for example, spectatorship fits exhibitionism), and the behaviors are linked so that more of A’s behavior stimulates more of B’s fitting behavior, then the relationship is “complementary” in regard to these behaviors.

Common examples of simple symmetrical relationships are armaments races, keeping up with the Jones, athletic emulation, boxing matches and the like. Common examples of complementary relationships are dominance-submission, sadism-masochism, nurturance-dependency, spectatorship-exhibitionism, and the like.

Individuals/monads in simple symmetric relationships have a tendency to see everything from the relevant other as a challenge. One country increasing its nuclear arsenal is pretext for the other to do the same but even further, a neighbor getting a yacht is pretext for buying a harbor and a whole fleet and so on. 

In what we’re examining, overwhelmingly it is characterized by perceived symmetrical relationships (real or fictitious) between the “will” and the self, between oneself and others and oneself and the universe). In alcoholism, it begins typically in the common social scenario where individuals match drink for drink. 

Then as he tries to stop, he avoids social gatherings. “As things get worse, the alcoholic is likely to become a solitary drinker and to exhibit the whole spectrum of response to challenge. His wife and friends begin to suggest his drinking is weakness, and he may respond, with symmetry, both by resenting them and by asserting his strength to resist the bottle. But, as is characteristic of symmetrical responses, a brief period of successful struggle weakens his motivation and he falls off the wagon. Symmetrical effort requires continual opposition from the opponent.”

There’s a tendency for his whole world to be organized around the defiance of “I will not drink”, which is half a self-negating statement. Which, like “I will change” is a miserable state to be in. One makes movements towards progress, then gets tempted to testing if one has really changed. Which leads inevitably to “failure”, which perhaps was the wished-for state all along.

And the “upside” to both alcohol and heroin is that they contain the “answer” to just this state. “With this complementary surrender, which the alcoholic will often see as an act of spite—a Parthian dart in a symmetrical struggle—his entire epistemology changes. His anxieties and resentments and panic vanish as if by magic. He self-control is lessened, but his need to compare himself with others is reduced even further. He feels the physiological warmth of alcohol in his veins and, in many cases, a corresponding psychological warmth toward others. He may be either maudlin or angry, but he has at least become again a part of the human scene. …In a very literal sense, alcohol supposedly makes the individual see himself as and act as a part of the group. That is, it enables complementarity in the relationships which surround him.”

What alcohol is to the alcoholic is what the extroverted state was to me: a means of gaining access to a different way of being and relating, the kind often represented in song and verse as that in which the partaking of wine stands for “the social aggregation of persons united in religious 'communion' or secular Gemutlichkeit.”

But alcohol and endless efforts at self-overcoming provide at best only a momentary reprieve. Is there another more tenable path out of this endless loop of symmetrical one-upmanship? 

I don’t know. All I know is the one that lies in repeated experience of failure that over time reveal the “bankruptcy of the epistemology of ‘self-control’”, in the visceral realization there is no will vs. me. One sees oneself more broadly and locates oneself within a broad system, and recognizes - however dimly - that change happens within that system, and in a confrontation with it. Our fates are aligned, our roles complementary - “an organism that destroys its environment destroys itself”.

Bottom is that final breaking blow to that epistemology, that way of looking at the world. The experience of that potent mix of emotions in the face of the larger-than destroys any possibility of symmetrical response, of one-upmanship. One is as it were forced into a complementary role, which provides the seed for extending elements of complementarity to other relationships.

And because there is no meaningful separating of epistemology and ontology, to change one’s way of looking at the world is to change oneself. This was the radical (to me) insight. One which we shall revisit as these vague rumblings in the more inaccessible circuits of my mind came closer to consciousness as my journey continued.

——-

As for Josh, perhaps the minute in which those fists of fury bore down on him was the moment he had coveted for so long. Perhaps in the midst of that bloody haze he caught a glimpse of the hand of God and was granted the grace to be able to feel the terror of his speckness in the face of infinity.

And maybe, just maybe, he was able at long last to turn it all around.