Der Zuschauer

“It is stated that, in a public market-place, sodomy was committed by a woman with a goat. Juvenal relates, that human flesh was eaten and human blood drunk out of revenge.”
GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History.

There is snow on the ground. Ice, sand, salt. This morning a man next door was tossed from the shelter. It’s not always nips or needles; he had missed a second meeting with his case-worker. It could have been an unmade bed, a racial slur, evidence of human sexuality. It wouldn’t have been for speaking in Arabic. Eating chocolate in his room would have done it, smoking in the wrong outside smoking area at the wrong assigned time would have done it. Not being properly clothed in the television room, a pungent odor emanating from foul bed linen. They, the ones who are constantly thrown out, are, like all of us, constantly under suspicion, and when the infractions occur you are tossed immediately.

If you have ever sinned in substance abuse you are under suspicion for the rest of your life. You can never recover. You can never regain the spiritual Lebensraum that accrues to those who are capable of Moderation. “I don’t know, once I have that second pint, I just never want another.” And we on the outside believe everything you say. Shelters are always littered with AA meeting booklets, yellow, red; and copies of the Big Book, and various 12-Step tracts. It is also very important that you take Recovery very seriously. And the point of Recovery is that you never recover. “Hello, my name is Maxim Gorky, the 3rd; Ja, Ich heisser Maxim Gorky and I am being an alcoholic. I am being happy to be an alcoholic and I am being proud to be in Recovery, and thus humble and feeble-minded, because I know and you know, I will never be cured of this addiction, this genetically inherited disease; I will never stop suffering from this deplorable weakness of character. I am being lost and you are being saved.”

One is not allowed to look at pictures of naked people in a shelter. You can read biographies of Leon Trotsky or Mother Theresa, God is not Great, but it is not kosher to be sarcastic or skeptical about Recovery or AA meetings; people get very angry about that. And since we are all under suspicion and will always be under suspicion because we can never actually achieve Recovery, well, that is us in a nutshell, that is us in a pie. Reading Hegel’s Philosophy of History won’t do. Reading the Big Book will at least pass for a sign that your brain is fried by substance abuse, and that you know this is so, and that you are accepting this state of humble mental activity, and that you will never be able to manage your own affairs, or indulge in Moderation. “You are moral, ethical scum of the earth, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

One can be tossed from a shelter for many things. You can be tossed for even appearing to be under the influence of anything. But it all gets confusing. You can smirk at the seriousness of Sobriety or Recovery and get disappeared. You can also be a convicted accomplice to murder, and shoot up heroin in the shelter bathroom, high and happy on the hopper, and then suddenly die pitching forward so your ass is on the toilet and your head is in the trash can, and no one will bother your privacy for four and a half hours while rigor mortis sets in and you end up being carried out like a victim of Vesuvius in Herculaneum. You can wear kilts in a shelter but no Nazi armbands. Best not to be scathing about the food; never swear at staff. Smoking marijuana is easier to get away with than vodka or crack or Oxycontin. And yes, if you’re into barbiturates, simplest of all is to wait until late, midnight, and do your stuff in the toilet, and if you don’t die outright, go to sleep happy and high, and hope you can wake up in the morning, because you can also be tossed or banned for not leaving the shelter on time.

Now if your answer to Recovery and Sobriety is the modest, polite remark of Bartleby, the scrivener: “I’d prefer not,” you are in a lot of trouble, even when you secretly and earnestly get away with Moderation. Because getting away with Moderation when you’re trapped forever in Recovery and Addition is a Crime. You are bad, you don’t care about other people, you don’t want to help your fellow-man, you don’t want to make something decent of yourself. And all those books you’ve read are criminal in intent and in fact. In fact you are going to be dropped, tossed, thrown out, abandoned. You are going to be left to your own devices, so you’ll bottom out and realize finally what a true amoral scumbag you actually are.

One can’t prefer not to be in a pauper’s grave. Fire is too costly for you. Raining down lava, fire, and ash? I think not. One can’t help but notice at AA meetings (I have to go six days a week just to keep the bed), that those 8,11,41 year sober men have all been fluttering around the coffee pot like stoned gnats or drunken fruit flies for years and years, and that the only genuine hope of Sisyphean Recovery is dim-witted passivity and ultimately, vacuity.

So, this morning it was one tall man still in his 20s who was tossed for not hooking up with his case-worker. Next week it will be some man in his 40s with a Walpole record and rats gnawing at his face. Or the guy with the kilt will be found to have beer cans between his legs. Homeless? Unemployed? What was it? What was that one thing that caused the failure and the breakdown? Why is ice-beer so terrible? And Zoloft, Viagra, and Seroquel are all right? Then there are the cigarettes and the confessions of Zeno. Why allow that in institutions? Is it because smoking is a quicker and surer way to the pauper’s graveyard? Still, let the smoker be. Let them continue to swallow smoke and fire. Leave them, at least, in peace. Who would have ever imagined so hopeful a word as Recovery would have all the ramifications of a chain-gang?

“If Death thus haunted the minds of the Egyptians during life, it might be supposed that their disposition was melancholy. But the thought of death by no means occasioned depression. At banquets they had representations of the dead (as Herodotus relates), with the admonition: ‘Eat and drink–such a one wilt thou become, when thou art dead.’ Death was thus to them rather a call to enjoy Life.”
GWF Hegel, The Philosophy of History.

Maxim Gorky, the 3rd.
Copyright 2012 Der Zuschauer.