Closer

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

-From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Ophelia.

From Hamletmachine :

(enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock.)

Ophelia:

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I'm alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.

When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you'll know the truth.

Gratitude.

"When I’m suffering too much, when I have to change the way I feel right now, I find that gratitude works for me the same way drugs did. Gratitude puts everything in perspective. Gratitude makes things right. It’s easy enough for me to forget where I came from or justify some feeling of entitlement or jump into what seems to be a bottomless well of self loathing and self pity. In those times remembering the things I am grateful for and expressing that gratitude to those around me and to my Higher Power has never failed to place me back in the presence of the serenity and grace which I have come to rely on to keep me sober."

-from Methed Up

I thought this post was a really interesting, honest look at the power of gratitude in our lives in recovery. One characteristic of the addictive personality I've learned about is a tendency to be self-absorbed and obsessed with feelings. This tendency is something I struggle with in myself, but it's damned near pathological in my husband. When he is having a bad day, it is consuming. Everything has to stop so that he can rant and feel sorry for himself. If he is sick or otherwise in physical pain, he is unable to do anything except feel sorry for himself. It's as if he isn't able to see past the moment he's in, which often leads to using.

The suggestion of remembering all the things you have in your life to be grateful for is really wise. There are some posts that I find when I'm reading recovery stuff that make me so glad I found them...they're like shortcuts on my own life trip. That's real wisdom...

Past and future.

“There is only one real tragedy in a woman's life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.”

-Oscar Wilde

Where is love?

"Where Love is, no room is too small."

-Talmud

Wuthering Heights

Today we watched the 1992 Wuthering Heights film. It was great...for years, he's been my Heathcliff. Here's that priceless quote from the book:

'I think that's the worst motive you've given yet for being the wife of young Linton.'

'It is not,' retorted she; 'it is the best! The others were the satisfaction of my whims: and for Edgar's sake, too, to satisfy him. This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable; and—'

And then this one:

'This is nothing,' cried she: 'I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'

From Zadie Smith

I found this quote in Zadie Smith's book On Beauty. It's beatiful, and it reminded me of my man...his beauty, his charm, his charisma:

"And all the time, while he spoke, and she tried, bewilderedly, to listen, his face was doing its silent voodoo on her, just as it seemed to work on everybody passing by him in this archway. Zora could clearly see people stealing a look, and lingering, not wanting to release the imprint of Carl from their retinas, especially if it was only to be replaced by something as mundane as a tree or the library or two kids playing cards in the yard. What a thing he was to look at!"

Delicious Ambiguity

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity."

-Gilda Radner

Horror.

I'm working on a new article for work on an artist who does a lot of work with Horror imagery, and I'm doing some research to find quotes on horror. I've found several that seemed relevant to my state of junky's wifeliness, so I though I'd post them here.

“The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable.”

-Aldous Huxley

“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”

-Lewis Smedes

"...why I'm so sympathetic to the monsters. The answer is simple. Because I am one."

-Laurell K. Hamilton

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience by which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

"He who fights monsters should should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you."

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Dead Addict Of The Day

Today's dead addict of the day comes again from the annals of the heroes of my adolescence. There is some unresolved conflict over whether or not the death of Jim Morrison was really related to his drug use, but the unofficial explanation of his bathtub death is that he died of the complications arising from the interaction of heroin and alcohol.

Here's a quote of Morrison's describing himself and his work from the Doors official website:

You could say it's an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I am doing. It's the feeling of a bowstring being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go. I am primarily an American, second, a Californian, third, a Los Angeles resident. I've always been atrracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom--external revolt is a way to bring about internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside--reach the mental through the physical.

He is one of the great junkies of the 20th century, and it's sad that he's dead. There could have been a lot of interesting music...

Morrison is also one of the great champions of drug culture. That's certainly why I became interested in him...all that quoting of William Blake and talk of finding inner truth through physical manipulations certainly appealed to me when I was using.

And he was right, in many ways. I did grow from my experiences with drugs. I'm stronger, smarter, and I have a different perspective than a lot of folks. Especially from my experiences with psychedelics, I think I've become more creative, developed more interesting and rich relationships, and become more compassionate. Maybe these kinds of growth would have happened anyway, but I found a shortcut through experimentation with drugs.

I am having a hard time remembering all of this now, after watching so many people wreck themselves with drugs and alcohol. The line is so fine to walk, but I'd be hypocritical if I didn't acknowledge at least some of the things that I learned from my early drug experiences.

I guess that's also something I'm learning from Nar-Anon, though, is the difference between someone who can dabble (although at the time, it certainly didn't seem like dabbling) and then grow out of it and someone who is an addict struggling with a life-long disease. I learned lessons from using, and then I moved on. He didn't learn lessons. He hasn't moved on. Our experiences of the world and our interactions with drugs are very different, and it's hard for me to understand sometimes. I thought I got the whole addiction business because I thought I'd been through it.

Boy, was I wrong.

Love Conquers All

Meagan sent me this. It's amazing.

For centuries upon centuries, we have been misinterpreting this framed trio of words. The uninvormed masses breathlessly held up this dwarfish phase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swarms of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations--when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The Latin poet wrote "Amor vincit omnia" or "Love conquers all." He did not write, "Love frees all" or "liberates" all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely, this cannot be a positive thing. And then, he wrote "conquers ALL"--not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but ALL, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil's words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including our sense of self.

Quote

"Just because you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town"

--George Carlin