Portrait of the Artist as Partially Rat-faced
In later years he would wonder how close he’d been to death, that afternoon
when, home early from school and to a Jerry Garcia soundtrack, he’d downed the
full bottle of Gordon’s and three cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, dappled by the
fidgeting tree-shadows of a suburban bedroom. There were no explicit suicidal
intentions behind Project Drink-Myself-into-a-Coma, but equally, as he
remembered it, his adolescent consciousness was burdensome enough for its irreversible
cessation to seem, at the time, a risk scarce worth examining and easily worth
taking.
Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a lifetime later, the horror that engulfed his mind once it was clear that his entire sphere of consciousness and sensation had been reduced, under the influence of alcohol, to a puddle of dread, impotence and claustrophobic disconnectedness. Paradoxically, it was in the centre of this near-total impossibility of thought that he had accidentally encountered the three realizations that, later in his life, would become the axioms of a kind of morality.
1. There is nothing more important than the relief of suffering, groaneth the Sufferer. We live in a world furnished with distraction and misdirection. We are sold the lie, among other lies, that suffering is a personal thing, that the pain you experience is somehow yours, like a dreadful sonnet, like a wart: yours because you brought it on yourself, perhaps, and also because it somehow bears the stamp of your individuality, of your circumstances, of your moral status. In reality, I now know, pain has no identity, and destroys identity. It is an overgrown well into which any and all may one day stumble. Far from feeding off your personality and your history of blunders, it annihilates both. It is anecdotally caused, yes, and there is moral accounting to be done there, but from the moment it takes over, it transcends its causes. In the nest of experience, it is cuckoo-brood: anything placed beside pain, where the pain is real, is elbowed out. Hence, revenge and malice, the desire to cause pain, presuppose ignorance of what pain really is: that which cannot be knowingly desired, for oneself or for anyone. That person we wish ill, past the baggage check of pain, the pain threshold, ceases to be the person we wished ill, and we are foiled. (The sadist, therefore, needs something oddly like compassion, in order to keep alive that spark of thinking, reasoning, feeling humanity which he seeks to torment.) When the camouflage is torn away, the world is a hospital: there is the role of nurse and that of patient, and beyond that, forgetfulness. If we are not helping or hurting, we are smiling dinosaurs picking over some crepuscular carcass.
2. I am a spotty lower-middle-class teenager in a wealthy nation: this does not predict pain. I am in a house: this does not predict pain. The curtains billowing over the window do not predict pain. The adverts for Gordon’s Gin, dangling tatty at the end of the Spar minimarket aisle, do not predict pain. My cleanish bill of health (could do better) does not predict pain. I have no cuts or bruises. If I cry out, no one will listen. I am groaning on the carpet, yes, but only because it’s the seventies, and fashion dictates rat-arsedness be worn prone this season: if I were a medieval Pope, I would now be sitting in a wooden chair, clinging to its ornate arms amid echoing granite, and my scrotum would be dangling apologetically through a hole carved specially, and my mouth, rather than groans, would be issuing the odd Bull: yet still, pain. In short, pain has no fixed address, and is a master of disguise. We cannot know who is in it, nor out of it, save if they tell us, and even then we don’t know, unless there be a watchword, which there doesn’t seem to be. We must therefore assume all are in pain, all the time. There is undoubtedly a way of acting, of being careful with people, that assumes this. In short form, Do No Harm. Pain being the slippery customer it is, doing anything other than No Harm is probably a fool’s errand.
3. Something in me wants to let go, and sink into whatever is under me, which I cannot see – possibly oblivion, possibly forever - and this pain is in part the struggle not to. I would do anything to end this sensation – I would even gladly swap it for a visit to the dentist’s, for ten thousand visits to the dentist – anything except what I am being invited to do, which is relax, close my eyes, give up the struggle and plummet. When I commit suicide, I will ask a force of nature – gravity, perhaps, chemistry, hydraulics – to force upon me what I cannot force on myself. Buddhists, reputedly, train themselves to stop thinking: I cannot be a Buddhist. And I cannot murder who I am now - only him who I fear I may become, seconds from now, or a year from now. Because, it turns out, fear is the soul of pain. I must therefore find a place where there is no fear, and live there whenever I can, and notice the hummingbirds there, and the snails, and the ways in which time doesn’t pass.
Strange, though, that forty years on, he could so clearly recall this accelerated descent into the carpeted Hades of paralytic inebriation, at least from the point at which he found himself, finally, lying on the floor, surrounded by vinyl silence, unable to move a single useful muscle. Strange because the paralysis that had overtaken his body might be expected to lead, as drinking often does, to amnesia: yet he could still remember, a lifetime later, the horror that engulfed his mind once it was clear that his entire sphere of consciousness and sensation had been reduced, under the influence of alcohol, to a puddle of dread, impotence and claustrophobic disconnectedness. Paradoxically, it was in the centre of this near-total impossibility of thought that he had accidentally encountered the three realizations that, later in his life, would become the axioms of a kind of morality.
1. There is nothing more important than the relief of suffering, groaneth the Sufferer. We live in a world furnished with distraction and misdirection. We are sold the lie, among other lies, that suffering is a personal thing, that the pain you experience is somehow yours, like a dreadful sonnet, like a wart: yours because you brought it on yourself, perhaps, and also because it somehow bears the stamp of your individuality, of your circumstances, of your moral status. In reality, I now know, pain has no identity, and destroys identity. It is an overgrown well into which any and all may one day stumble. Far from feeding off your personality and your history of blunders, it annihilates both. It is anecdotally caused, yes, and there is moral accounting to be done there, but from the moment it takes over, it transcends its causes. In the nest of experience, it is cuckoo-brood: anything placed beside pain, where the pain is real, is elbowed out. Hence, revenge and malice, the desire to cause pain, presuppose ignorance of what pain really is: that which cannot be knowingly desired, for oneself or for anyone. That person we wish ill, past the baggage check of pain, the pain threshold, ceases to be the person we wished ill, and we are foiled. (The sadist, therefore, needs something oddly like compassion, in order to keep alive that spark of thinking, reasoning, feeling humanity which he seeks to torment.) When the camouflage is torn away, the world is a hospital: there is the role of nurse and that of patient, and beyond that, forgetfulness. If we are not helping or hurting, we are smiling dinosaurs picking over some crepuscular carcass.
2. I am a spotty lower-middle-class teenager in a wealthy nation: this does not predict pain. I am in a house: this does not predict pain. The curtains billowing over the window do not predict pain. The adverts for Gordon’s Gin, dangling tatty at the end of the Spar minimarket aisle, do not predict pain. My cleanish bill of health (could do better) does not predict pain. I have no cuts or bruises. If I cry out, no one will listen. I am groaning on the carpet, yes, but only because it’s the seventies, and fashion dictates rat-arsedness be worn prone this season: if I were a medieval Pope, I would now be sitting in a wooden chair, clinging to its ornate arms amid echoing granite, and my scrotum would be dangling apologetically through a hole carved specially, and my mouth, rather than groans, would be issuing the odd Bull: yet still, pain. In short, pain has no fixed address, and is a master of disguise. We cannot know who is in it, nor out of it, save if they tell us, and even then we don’t know, unless there be a watchword, which there doesn’t seem to be. We must therefore assume all are in pain, all the time. There is undoubtedly a way of acting, of being careful with people, that assumes this. In short form, Do No Harm. Pain being the slippery customer it is, doing anything other than No Harm is probably a fool’s errand.
3. Something in me wants to let go, and sink into whatever is under me, which I cannot see – possibly oblivion, possibly forever - and this pain is in part the struggle not to. I would do anything to end this sensation – I would even gladly swap it for a visit to the dentist’s, for ten thousand visits to the dentist – anything except what I am being invited to do, which is relax, close my eyes, give up the struggle and plummet. When I commit suicide, I will ask a force of nature – gravity, perhaps, chemistry, hydraulics – to force upon me what I cannot force on myself. Buddhists, reputedly, train themselves to stop thinking: I cannot be a Buddhist. And I cannot murder who I am now - only him who I fear I may become, seconds from now, or a year from now. Because, it turns out, fear is the soul of pain. I must therefore find a place where there is no fear, and live there whenever I can, and notice the hummingbirds there, and the snails, and the ways in which time doesn’t pass.
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