Books, Becoming, and the Devils of Dependency

“That book changed my life.”  If my adolescent and young adult years had a motto, this would be it.  Friends from those eras know the books after whose mention this tagline would come, and they’d smile and tease me for my predictability.

I wanted to start this next paragraph with: at first, it was books about knights.  I loved knights, and wanted to be one when I grew up, and if being a knight were a real career possibility, I’d still give it serious thought.   However that, in its turn, had come from my Father’s bedtime stories—he blatantly plagiarized bits of Arthurian Legend and scraps of Tolkien in the service of trying to get me to do what more adult bedtime reading later made explicit: Go the Fuck to Sleep. Mind you, I always fucking did.  From sleep’s darker corners, battle noise made my dreams loud. 

Eli Weisel’s Night changed my life.  All of my reading about chivalry and the sharp edges of principle-driven quests collided with the realities of high school.  Unaware at the time, I was intrigued and repulsed by what the Shoah argued was possible--for the human family, and consequently, for me.  And it was books that I looked to, attempting to work through the upwelling angst of those years with something that felt like order.  Depression found and flirted with me then, and I flirted back, with moon eyes and intent fixed enough to still, at 37, feel its diminished but real pull.

Underneath the surface, I shared the concerns that had made Jews throughout history call into the abyss for a champion:  where is God?  I suppose it’s because my parents divorced during my later high school years, but scripture and Church sources became obsessional objects for me.  Had I not been in complete denial, I might have told you, at that point, that those sources were helping me discover and unravel my need for security and structure.  But I was in denial, and in fact those sources tied the knots tighter.

I was about 17 then, and until I was 32 I read nothing but theology.  Dry as the subject may seem, two books are worth mentioning.  One was Hostage to the Devil by Malachi Martin.  It scared me deeply and personally shitless.  That an evil, intelligent and personal force could make a moveable meat suit of my mind and body was exactly the kind of thing that, living alone in my dark apartment, I didn’t need to hear.  The fact that he gained entrance to a bloke through the normal turns of psychology—piss poor choices and unhealthy perspectives—well, this didn’t put me at ease in the least.

I’d studied theology in college, so the ancient renunciants—men and women whom whom ancient sexists had dubbed “The Desert Fathers”—became formative for me.  Their battles against the “demons” who vied for control of their heart, head and hands were a source of a hope so needed that I ultimately visited a monastery to acquire it.  Later I sold my car, gave away my possessions and joined up, in hopes of committing, lifelong, to the place.

In the monastery, I developed a personal flaw: by personifying evil and good with my thoughts about God or the Devil, I could offload onto those figures the responsibility for my choices.  I saw myself favorably when I did good, but blamed “evil” when I, myself, cooperated with it.  And so I had built an inflatedly positive self-concept, out of a struggle made more valiant by what I thought was at stake.  On a scale of “Kung-fu master” to “Yoda-calibre Jedi” I gave myself a solid 9.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous changed my life.  As I “battled” with myself, I began to notice emotions: after failures, I was full of resolve to change.  I was full of insight about causes and effects, and then full of resentment about the perceived double standards in the monastic community.  A memoir of an alcoholic priest—read aloud during meals to encourage silence—exposed similar patterns in his own life.  A read-through of the Big Book turned up testimonial after testimonial with whose authors I felt a kinship.

I spent the next several years getting to the bottom of that kinship.  In a letter to a fellow monk, himself a recovering alcoholic, I identified my addictive tendencies.  He wrote back with words that I took too many years to hear for the warning they were:  “Make sure your addictive tendencies don’t become an actual chemical dependence.”  Hindsight was 20/20, he said, and he’d lost his glasses once while stumbling drunk, only to find them in the same street the next day.  Speeding past, the traffic had ground them to powder.

The day I identified my emotional patterns as those of an addict, I stopped reading.  I had been using the Scriptures to whitewash patterns of resolve, overwork, spree, failure and resentment for years.  I had been reading to self-diagnose.  I had been identifying with whatever words were comforting.  But I’d never graduated to reading myself. 

“That book changed my life.”  More aptly put, my life was becoming my book, as it changed.

https://youtu.be/Lyz2RQErc6U