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October 12th, 2005

With all the catastrophic natural disasters we’re seeing–the quake in Pakistan, the floods and mudslides in Mexico and Central America, hurricanes in the Gulf states, and so on–Rebecca Solnit’s “The Uses Of Disaster: Notes on bad weather and good government” essay in this month’s Harper’s seems uncannily well-timed for such a beleagured world stage and also for my own personal drama. Let me pull a line that strikes me as perhaps the next phase of my get-it-together transfo:

[People affected by disaster] enjoy the disruption…of their own grinding self-absorption.

If there’s one thing that hippies and Christians agree on, it is–and I’m paraphrasing–that there is a time for everything and everything in its time. So, it would be foolishly hasty to think that ignoring myself for a headlong interest in others (and others’ problems, by implication) would magically solve my own problems. Quitting drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, moving to a new state, and starting a new career all at once–that might be a good time to indulge some self-absorption.

But, and here’s the catch, let that go on too long, and you’ve set yourself a trap that will bring you back down again only harder the second time around. I think that a key trick to pull-off in making these changes–so far so good–lasting and natural, is to transition at the right time and pace into a less narcissistic mode. Narcissism, after all, is not an insignificant component in the Quikcrete upon which self-destructive behaviors are founded. Not now, not yet, but I think I need to be on the lookout so that I can spot that day on the horizon.

…disaster can be understood as a crash course in consciousness.

Solnit goes on to make the case that carnival is the human-induced equivalent to disaster, the harmless (or more harmless) version of the effector of presence in time, space, and relationships. I’d like to take it a step further and equate drugs as the portable inducer of both personal and public, both large- and small-scale, episodic-but-consistent carnival, bringing us full-circle, back around again to the notion that drugs are a disaster EXCEPT this time with a greater understanding of disaster as a silver-lined (we’re stopping short at necessary notice) evil, i.e. ultimately lamentable but doing some unique and too-rare good along the way. This is one of my major drug theses! Let me substitute ‘drugs’ for ‘carnival’ in an extended passage and see how it plays out:

[Drugs], to paraphrase William James, [are] the moral equivalent of disaster. No one dies, but [drugs] [beget] the same sense of release from the conventions and categories that bind and isolate us. There is spectacle, noise, chaos. You dress up or don a mask so that you are no longer yourself, confined to your everyday role. You go out in the street, you dance, you talk to strangers. Covert new erotic unions are a staple of old stories about [masked] [drug-usage], but the public union of each to each is its point. Everyone is welcome to join in one way or another; eveyone becomes a participant rather than just a member of the audience. The status quo is inverted, particularly in traditional festivals from medieval Europe to contemporary Latin America, where kings go begging and beggars rule.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous definition of [drug-usage] fits disaster as well: “[Drug-usage] celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. [Drug-usage] [is] the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. …People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.”

Considering a disaster as a carnival [as drug-usage] of sorts answers another questions: Why is the paradise generated so temporary? It’s a labor and a rite, an occasion when society produces itself, something that should be renewed regularly but could not be practiced at all times. It’s a peak moment, and you don’t spend all your time balanced on the peaks, but what you see from the peaks stays with you while you traverse the plateau of everyday life. [Drug-use] punctuates routine, relieves the ongoing low-grade crises of isolation, indifference, and obliviousness; it mixes things up and connects them back together. The lack of real carnival in most parts of our society may be why its contents surge forth in unexpected places.

[Drugs’] message that anything can happen is not so different from revolution’s exhortation that everything is possible. And the outbreak of revolution or insurrection begets a similar moment when the very air you breathe seems to pour out of a luminous future, when the people all around you are brothers and sisters, when you feel an extraordinary strength. Then the revolutionary moment of utter openness to the future turns into one future or another. Things get better or they get worse, but you are no longer transfigured, the people around you are no longer quite so beloved, and the private life calls with its small, insistent whisper.

Louis Barron, a minor functionary in the 1871 Paris commune, mused afterward in words like those of many veterans of revolution: “In these solemn ceremonies, these festivities, these battles joyously fought, are born the reat and sublime movements that cause people to break out of their habits and set their sights on a new ideal. The educated and positive-thinking, the skeptical and the spirtually inclined, all find themselves involved in spite of themseles, carried along with the common multitude. One returns from such exalted experiences as one would awake from a dream, but the memory remains of a brief moment of ecstasy, an illusion of fraternity.”

More than a century later, Ariel Dorfman reported something similar from the dawn of the Allende administration in Chile. He spoke of people told they were powerless all their lives grasping this moment of victory and said that he himself “felt life quicken and accelerate, I felt the giddiness of thsoe few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible, that anything is possible. I felt as if I were the first man on Earth and this was the first day in history….” The poet and former Sandinista Gioconda Beli says something similar about the outbreak of revolution in nicaragua in 1979: it was “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.”

In some sense all revolutions[/drugs] fail, although the brief interval of true revolution, like carnival and disaster, can lead to substantial change.

Of course there are small stretches where it doesn’t hang, but there are those others where it sticks! It becomes a question of degree, finding that sweet spot where it all comes together, and holding it, before it all falls apart. This is the drama that is played out on the whole–at the macro level–and also with every high within every recreational user and addict–that precarious, momentary suspension between two vertical wafers of perfection.

One other quick note: Gioconda Beli is one of my all-time top favorite heroes, thinkers, and sex symbols. God bless her.

Entry Filed under: Lifin