Ona and I scrape, scam and seduce our way through the world of H, and lately we’ve been bartering a double act for a Harley-riding dealer in exchange for junk, and passing the wee hours some nights with a lonely humanities professor who likes to talk and who pays us for our time.
If you’ve suffered childhood trauma, you’re 4600% more likely to become an injecting drug user than if you haven’t. (Open Democracy)
Some days scoring is hard, exhausting work, in an ever-shifting network of acquaintances, friends and frenemies, but when we’re holding and it’s just the two of us, and the rush spreads through me like a summer storm surge, we soften down on my bed, her creamy thighs against mine.
I get sick (I mean sicker).
Addiction tribute #2: Skateboard Danny. I hardly knew you but saw you often, on Victoria Street, at the coffee shop, where we gathered in those early days, when our de-medicated bodies shook with wakefulness and we’d shield our eyes from the brightness of life with perpetual sunglasses. I heard you went back for more and then I read you had been murdered, a small-time dealer fatally stabbed in a botched robbery. Your killer was an addict, no doubt known to you, ravaged by ice and H. So was his girlfriend, the messed-up daughter of a retired politician, who will always be known as the messed-up daughter of a retired politician, and their accomplice who went at your flatmate with a hammer. A petty plan hatched by addicts that escalated to horror. In a letter to the court your killer wrote of the drugs: they just have a hold on me. I know you know exactly what he meant. You’re a tragic figure now, perished on the cross of toxic patriarchy, but know this: there are those who remember another you, the you when life was winning.
Ona and I touch toes on rock bottom and take turns trying to get clean. One of us is always avoiding the other, drying out, determined to quit. We disappear, reappear, drift, reunite, sink lower, change tactics. No H. No drinking before six p.m. Only one hit a week. Only wine. Only every three days. Only if bestowed by a friend in a generous mood.
I get clean for days, weeks, even months at a time, but then I ‘bust’, as they say in addict parlance, sometimes nudging the line between life and death. I OD on the floor of a friend’s place, surrounded by records. I OD in the flat of the muse of a famous musician and her new dealer boyfriend. I’ve befriended their flatmate, a slight, silent country boy, the better to be near the white. They carry me around the apartment to wake me, splashing cold water on my face, and I come back. I OD on the bed of the hovel and my five-minute friend phones an ambulance before taking off in case I cark it. One minute Charlie Parker’s ‘Salt Peanuts’ is playing in the background; the next, the smack and benzos get the better of me and I’m lights out on the bed with my outlaw companion leaving the door ajar for the paramedics. I come to, groggy, on a trolley in a hospital hallway. As I try to sit up a nurse appears. I ask what happened, my words slurring. You’ve had your stomach pumped, she says; because there are indications of attempted suicide, I am to see a hospital social worker. As soon as she leaves I get up and stagger the three blocks home in nothing more than a T-shirt and undies as first light tips the city skyline.
Meanwhile, the Hep C was busy eating away at my liver. I’d been infected at twenty, the second time I injected. There was no treatment for what was then called ‘Non-A, Non-B Hepatitis’, though a concerned addiction specialist I’d been referred to did offer a course of methadone, which I declined. It would be close to two more decades before successful treatment would declare me cured. In the meantime, there would be stigma, around both the drugs and the Hep C. There would be judgemental doctors and nurses (always wanting to know how I got it), and hypocrisy – stones thrown by those who lived in alcohol-fuelled, prescription-drug-run glass houses. Stigma/stigmata.
Addiction tribute #3: Christine. You came from Melbourne to get off H. We counted clean days together. Sharing our shit lists. Gossiping. We never did drugs together, but we did get drunk one time, making a pact to keep our ‘bust’ secret. I buckled and confessed. I don’t know if you ever did. You took up with a rock star and now you run a cafe and you seem to be doing well. The eldest of your four daughters, whom I remember as a quiet child of five or six, is now older than we were back then.
I recall the children of friends I used H with, kids who saw stuff they shouldn’t have seen, the daily desperations, amateur dramatics and sordid deals of addiction, and I know I’m part of their traumatic memories.
My body breaks down. The constipation from the H gives me haemorrhoids. The liver groans in pain. Ona and I hardly see each other. Our paths cross less and less. I resolve to try a new strategy: a respectable boyfriend. I get together with a close friend of The Idol’s. The Businessman runs an indie record company from a huge terraced house in Paddington. This means I’m okay, right?
I’m thinking with the deluded mind of an addict in decline. I am incapable of original thought; worse, I’m incapable of any thought, only circular self-hating mantras, justifications, rationalisations, self-deceptions and self-obsessions, careening into and around each other like cars in peak-hour traffic, sparking along the dying cells of a shrinking brain.
… treatment for women’s addictions is apt to be ineffective unless it acknowledges the realities of women’s lives, which include the high prevalence of violence and other types of abuse. A history of being abused increases the likelihood that a woman will abuse alcohol and other drugs. (Dr Stephanie S. Covington)
The Businessman doesn’t approve, so I try going straight, but I’m sneaky. I think I can have it both ways, think I can fool him, fool myself. He picks me up for dinner. I have a hit stashed away. Shoot up on the sly before we leave. Nice courtyard garden. Try not to look stoned. Gulp down the wine. Force myself to eat. He talks about work: this errant band, that dodgy venue. We leave and as he opens the car door in the breaking spring breeze I hurl my undigested dinner up in the gutter before him. By now he’s put two and two together, and I look up, eyes pinned. I’m trying. He deposits me at the hovel, says not to call till I clean up my act. I sit and snivel and drink, but as I get more and more maudlin, a subterranean struggle of almighty magnitude ensues.
The breakthrough comes as I’m walking down Darlinghurst Road at dawn, morning unfolding between the buildings, light changing around me, glowing rose-gold and settling on trees and surfaces, sharpening everything, as if it were the atmosphere of another planet. I stop inexplicably at the church I walk by daily without so much as a glance (I know what you’re thinking; rest assured, I won’t be claiming to have been saved by the Lord). I shake the gates, but they’re locked. I don’t know what I might want in there. More than anything, it’s a sign of desperation, the longing for a moment’s repose among the candles and dark wood and silence. I cross the road and a heel snaps off one of my stilettos. I fish out my key and hobble inside like a walking metaphor. Inside, my all-consuming despair is interrupted. I am visited by a lucid moment, a crossroad. Something shifts, as if the track my life runs on has switched and I’m compelled to go in another direction. I phone a detox for the last time.
I debouched into a future met by many: a multitude of convalescing addicts and helpers; nurses on nightshifts in detox; understanding doctors; therapists whose cornball sayings bemuse me, who out shame when my eyes dart from theirs or when I laugh or smile while disclosing something unfunny. And the counsellor who uttered the words that reached me at the right time.
I had been clean some weeks in the safety of a rehab for women. It was all the platitudes rolled into one: it was touch and go, a daily grind, a close call, one step forward and five steps back, hard-going but worth it, etc., etc. I wanted the new life they spoke of, but I held back till the day I let my guard down and reached my yes.
The counsellors, two women who were themselves ‘recovering addicts’, had taken us away for the weekend, a little holiday. I don’t recall enjoying it and I’ve forgotten where we went. I can’t picture all of the women. I can’t visualis
e the beach. But I do remember the moment I confessed my reservation to the counsellor I was closest to. We were standing in the kitchen. We were alone. It was very quiet. Leaning against the bench I told her I was scared I couldn’t write sober, that I worried I’d never write again, that life would be boring and predictable without drink and drugs. She locked her eyes onto mine and spoke: everything is possible. You’re not being offered the old life polished up, she said. This will be a completely different life, and its future and potential are unimaginable from where you stand.
It’s spring now. Bees buzz round the crabapple tree. A fierce, warm wind blows, and butterflies and wasps bat at the windowpanes in frenzied flight. Eucalyptus oreades, Blue Mountains ash, are clustered in a far corner of the yard, stripped to their skirts of ribboned bark. Their misty pale trunks stand tall with green-grey leaves and buds awaiting the white flowers of summer. In turn, they will become the woody fruit of the gumnut. A pair of rosellas feast on the wisteria, and the garden’s fecundity commands reverence: the inexplicable genius of everything knowing how to do what it does, how to be what it is.
I don’t know why I’m still here when other lives were cut short. I don’t believe in the word ‘God’, though I sometimes catch myself using it as empty shorthand. I can’t abide an anthropomorphic God of fear or wrath or bargains, a God who kindly arranges parking spaces and other miracles of convenience for adherents of the New Age while signing off on genocide in West Papua and turning a blind old-man-in-the-sky eye to clergy raping children, but if I did I would say it was a deity of terrible games and unconscionable riddles.
My father has a theory about time. He thinks the reason it seems to pass so slowly in childhood and so quickly as we age – speeding up with every year – is metabolism. For a fast metabolism, time moves in slow motion; the slower the metabolism, the swifter the passage of time.
I remember the way a day stretched on, and the endless wait between one birthday and the next. Galaxies formed as the summer surf tossed me in its liquid folds, but now I grow older as a spider weaves its web.
You want to know where this book has taken you and if there’s a happy ending to this story. I’m thinking about how to respond.
The question is: are we powerless over the toxic effects of a history of patriarchy, powerless over the addictions we distract and medicate ourselves with, powerless over traumata and its symptomology? The answer is yes and no.
When Nietzsche, the German philosopher, became ill, he was taken into the care of his sister Elisabeth, who also took control of his unpublished work. The Will to Power is a collection of his thoughts and writing that was collated, contaminated and published by Elisabeth after his death. Elisabeth was a Nazi and she actively established an historical association between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the Nazi regime that most contemporary scholars agree would have mortified Nietzsche. (I proceed with caution.)
The ideas about power in Nietzsche’s allegorical novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pre-date the less-than-reliable material in The Will to Power (though educated guesses can be made, it is impossible to know which words are Nietzsche’s and which were added or rearranged by Elisabeth). In the novel, Macht (power) is related to Nietzsche’s notion of ‘self-overcoming’ and his vision of the Übermensch (‘the Overman’, embodied in the character of Zarathustra) as the highly evolved person who dares to become an individual. The Overman is radical in defining their own values and rejecting inherited authority and conditioning, and as such exemplifies a higher order of humanity. Such a person represents an alternative to entrenched ideologies and they naturally serve as a beacon to those enslaved by what Nietzsche controversially called ‘the herd instinct’ (especially prevalent in institutionalised religions). The Overman is, above all, an artist, but not necessarily or merely in the sense that they produce art, though they are quite likely to. The Overman is an artist in that they live creatively, actively, rather than reactively: they are life-affirming rather than life-negating. In Nietzsche’s view, religions that cast this life as sinful and the afterlife as heavenly are life-negating – rather, if there is a divinity, if there is salvation, it must be found and exercised in this life, here in the imperfect realm of sentient being in which he declared he could only believe in a God who dances.
This is not power sought for personal gain – money, social status or scheming political influence – but, for want of a less loaded term, a kind of spiritual awakening. It comes from breaking free of ‘herd’ morality and its repressive institutionalised gods, coupled with the energetic release of having also challenged the doctrine of rationality, that God of the Enlightenment, by engaging with emotions and other orders of experience consciously. Nietzsche envisioned the Overman as a historic figure, in that such a person is destined to shape history, to be, in a sense, immortal, in that they are likely to reappear again and again through the thoughts and values and works of others. Nietzsche saw the Overman as a future potential, and not one that all people could fulfil. This attracted accusations of elitism (and also seemed to give weight to those associations with Nazism). Some view the figure of the Overman as the fantastical ramblings of an unbalanced albeit supremely intelligent man, but if ever there was a time in which such an emergence is needed it is now, at the brink of catastrophic human-induced global warming and the widespread meltdown of the political and economic systems – the consequences of aeons of patriarchy.
Nietzsche’s thinking on the will to power builds upon Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept of the ‘will to live’, essentially a vision of universal vitality, and it perhaps in turn informed what Freud later called the ‘life force,’ an expression of which is ‘libido’. Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ does not necessarily equate to obvious manifestations of power and it is not defined by dominance. ‘I have found strength where one does not look for it,’ wrote Nietzsche in one of his notebooks (translated by Walter Kaufmann), ‘in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule.’ Nietzsche adds, in a statement that seems to predict Trump: ‘conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.).’ Following on from Schopenhauer’s ‘will to live’, viewed as driving both the desire to live and procreate, and the avoidance of death, Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ recognises that threats to one’s ability to live to the utmost and avoid death don’t always come in the form of rampaging bears; the tendency to avoid challenge, pain, conflict, to conform at the cost of integrity, to give in to all manner of human weaknesses are life-denying formulae for shrinkage and decline.
The Overman has achieved a state of ‘self-overcoming’, and if most of us fall short of the zenith of self-realisation, Nietzsche declares that many of us can lay claim to having achieved a degree of self-overcoming, which he conceived as an impassioned, proactive will to live. For Nietzsche, self-overcoming is redemption, and if there is redemption in my story, it is in my summoning, somehow, and with a great deal of support, enough of that will to live, those flashes of self-overcoming, which over time have fused into a radically re-inscribed sense of self. But it is far from absolute and I’m still plagued by unanswered questions. Are we doomed to be divided and fighting? Can we transform the traumata of patriarchy (from the outside in and the inside out) in time? Can we transform it at all? Can enough of us make not just art, but artists of ourselves and art of our communities? Nietzsche wrote:
My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (‘union’) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on …
Thus the noble, natural life force of the will to power has
two potentials: it can become corrupt, divisive, political, during the process of ‘coming to an arrangement’; or it can form unities that remind us what we are and, at best, who we can be. Trauma and the will to power jostle side by side, agitating for attention, racing each other to the surface, riding on waves of energy emanating all the way from the Big Bang. ‘This world is the will to power,’ Nietzsche pronounced, ‘and nothing besides!’ The question is, what wave will you ride? Which potential?
Do you think it odd this recourse to dead men of the western canon? Unseemly? Does it make me a ‘bad feminist’?
Two centuries before Nietzsche’s rise to prominence, Baruch Spinoza first borrowed from and then challenged other Enlightenment philosophers, including the influential René Descartes. A Dutch Jew, Spinoza was declared a heretic and excommunicated from Jewish society at the age of twenty-three because he dared to suggest that God didn’t make us in ‘His’ image but that we made ‘Him’ in ours. His radical notion of a non-institutional God was equated with blasphemous atheism in a society not long emerged from the Dark Ages. Spinoza rejected the tenets of Judeo-Christian theology, controversially questioning the received authority of the scriptures in favour of a philosophical and impersonal God. He described God as one substance, encompassing the universe and everything in it, manifesting as infinite attributes (or evolving over time into different entities, as Darwin would later scientifically clarify), but let’s not imagine Spinoza a monotheist or pantheist – he was less religious than that.
In a move crucially shifting away from Descartes’ dualism, Spinoza ‘denies that the human being is a union of two substances. The human mind and the human body are two different expressions – under Thought and under Extension – of one and the same thing: the person’, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it. For Spinoza, it made no sense to speak of a ‘mind–body split’. Patriarchal societies tend to put a great deal of stock in the conviction that the lofty mind is superior to the lowly body, but to Spinoza that was a reductionist fiction, a falsehood. He was concerned with exploring the complex ways in which these expressions and operations could correspond and behave either productively or destructively, intelligently or reactively. Enter Spinoza’s theory of the affects in Ethics, his posthumously published magnum opus (he died aged only forty-four). Postulating power as beingness, he argued that power/beingness is either increased or decreased by a given action. His move vis-à-vis ethics is stunning in its simplicity: that which increases the well-being or power of a being is ethical; that which diminishes it is unethical. It’s here that Nietzsche’s will to power, expansive rather than domineering, comes to mind.
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