The Other Side of Addiction

Now What?

Reading Sabbath’s Theater has gotten me started on the subject of addiction again.  I’ve read books about sex maniacs before, I’ve even written one, but never have I come across a character like Mickey Sabbath[1], who masturbates on his mistress’ grave, showed up at her house (when he was alive) with an erection already poking out from his pants, listened hungrily as she recounted her transgressions with other men, tried to pick up a young woman at his wife’s drying out facility by plying her with vodka.  The list goes on and on.  I won’t say I found Sabbath unbelievable.  Roth was writing about something real in men’s lives.  I assume that’s why such critics as Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom thought this one of the great novels of the 20^th century.

The bitterness of the novel puzzled me.  Sabbath was an artist who couldn’t practice his art, I get that.  He may reflect some periods in Roth’s life when Roth had health problems and wasn’t able to write.  But Sabbath’s bitterness seems to stem from something other than frustrations about his work.  In a weird way his art doesn’t seem that important to him.  He’s a man in his sixties whose beloved mistress has died (they had a rather sick relationship, it’s true, but she was his perfect mate, and she’s gone); he’s no longer sexually active with his wife[2]; he’s not a terribly attractive man, and doesn’t seem to have anything going on since his mistress died.  There’s some question as to how he would function at this point.

I don’t mean to minimize his plight.  He’s an old man who can no longer do the things he loved.  It’s possible in that situation to move on to other things.  (Roth himself in retirement settled into a life of reading a great deal and attending various cultural events.  Watching movies on television.  There are worse lives.)

I remember someone telling me that one of the primary problems for recovering alcoholics is that they’ve spent their whole lives trying to get booze, and drinking it, and recovering from it.  If they can’t do that, how do they fill the time?  What do they think about all the time?

In Buddhism, we say there are three barriers—called kilesas—to a clear mind: greed, hatred, and delusion, or passion, aversion, and confusion.  In Theravada Buddhism we used to say that everybody had a characteristic kilesa, and you could see what yours was if you sat there on retreat.  If you thought about sex all the time, or kept wondering what they’d be serving for lunch, you were greedy.  If you sat there criticizing everybody you saw, or thinking nothing about the retreat was right, you were aversive.  If you were constantly out to lunch, as some people seem to be, you were confused.

Yet all those situations conceal the real problem, which I would call fear.  You’re obsessed with sex, or food, or you’re obsessed with pointing out every flaw and problem you can find, because you’re afraid to open up to the broad bright world as it is, the present moment in all its beauty.  The real kilesa, our teachers used to say, is always delusion.  We don’t see that we’re at one with everything, and that everything is fine as it is.  If we saw that we wouldn’t crave things, and we wouldn’t reject them either.  We’d sit there in bliss, like Ramana Maharshi.

In Infinite Jest, the great novel that understands addiction if any novel ever did, recovery is valuable not just because it gets people off of booze, but because of what it shows them about the world.  It’s often the old crocodiles, the ones who have really been through hell to recover, who understand the most.

“Gately . . . remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. . . .  Feeling the edge of every second that went by.  Taking it a second at a time.  Drawing the time in around him real tight. . . . An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat.  And he’d never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. . . .

“ . . . He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what Ferocious Francis and the rest want him to walk toward . . . tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now. . . .  Ferocious Francis’s own sponsor, the nearly dead guy they wheel to White Flag and call Sarge, says it all the time: It’s a gift, the Now; it’s AA’s real gift.”

The most infuriating part of Sabbath’s Theater for me was when Sabbath mocked his wife during her recovery from alcohol, mocked the things she said as platitudes and banalities.  They were banalities because they were deeply true.  But when you see them for the first time, they’re not banal.  They’re astonishing.  They’re beautiful.

That was the thing Sabbath never saw.  He never got past his greed, never got past his bitterness, never even seemed to see his fear.

[1] A few other Philip Roth characters come close.

[2] His pattern with his wives seemed to be that he found them enormously attractive at first, eventually wore out the thing that attracted him, after that felt nothing but contempt for them, as if they were of no use.  He wasn’t interested in them as people at all.