“The soul lusts to be wet, and to die.”
– Heracleitus (Translated by Guy Davenport)
Oblivion, obliterate…
What great words! Both go back to the Latin ob-litera – literally, to cover over a letter (with ink, presumably – as we might do today when blacking out a sentence with a marker). Both words are also associated with the idea of being forgotten. To obliterate is to erase from memory.
I myself associate the words first and foremost with – not surprisingly -- drugs and drinking. To get obliterated, to me, means to get so intoxicated by whatever substance one is taking that one is no longer there. Take the right drug and boom! You’re history.
Why on earth would someone WANT such an experience? After all, to be blacked out, erased, forgotten, is terrifying. Psychologists tell us that most – or all – of the things people do in life are aimed, consciously or unconsciously, at preserving our sense of who we are, at keeping ourselves from being erased from the world. If being erased is the one thing we all – secretly or openly – most fear, why do addicts like me have such a deep longing for precisely that experience?
I suspect it’s because what we really crave is PARTIAL obliteration. The part of me that I want wiped out is the part that is plagued by anxiety and consumed with desire; the part that is never satisfied with what it has or with where it is in life; the part that always feels empty and imperiled.
I want to wipe this part of myself off the stage because deep down, I’m well aware of the fact that this part isn’t the real me. And that it’s only when this part is gone – or at least momentarily bound and gagged – that the real me, my better self, can come into the picture.
Poets, of course, have been writing about this experience for centuries. My favorite lines on the subject were written by the twentieth-century Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jiminez (translated, here, by Robert Bly).
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And whom at other times I forget;
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk where I am not,
The one who will remain standing when I die.
I used to have a junkie friend who told me that when he shot up a speedball – a mix, that is, of coke and heroin – the feeling he got was like that of being run over by a train. POW! And he was gone. Or rather, gone and not gone. The anxieties, the desires, the endless noise of the smaller self were gone, because that self had been temporarily run over.
Of course, this kind of experience, ecstatically pleasurable as it is in the short term, is a disaster in the long run. Blasting the smaller self off the stage with the aid of drugs and drink is like dynamiting for fish. It works great the first couple of times. But before too long, there aren’t any fish left in the water. Everything’s dead.
Not that you can kill off the larger self. That – at least if you listen to the poets and mystics – is impossible. But you CAN fall so out of contact with it that you might as well not have one at all.
That, if you ask me, is the feeling of late-stage addiction. When I walk past a drunk or a junkie in the street these days (not an infrequent occurrence in New York City), I often feel like I can actually SEE this condition – this absence of spirit. The person has been spiritually dynamiting himself for so long that he or she really has become a body and nothing more. To quote another poet – Dante this time – these people have “died as men before their bodies died.”
All of this has a lot to do, I suspect, with why so many spiritual teachers down through the ages are so fond not only of fishing analogies, but gardening ones as well. Spiritual growth is about cultivating the good plants – our true and authentic qualities -- and weeding out the bad – our shallow, inauthentic ones. But separating the two – as any gardener knows – isn’t easy. To do it right, you have to get down on the ground and get your hands dirty, working row by row, plant by plant.
Total obliteration just isn't an option.