50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Having stepped away from the drink, or the food, or the drugs, or the gambling, or the internet addiction in the first fortnight of 2019, you may also be interested in writing a book. Or painting a picture. Or embarking on some such creative endeavour, perhaps because you have been inspired to do it, by reading about someone else doing it.

In these days of renewal and rejuvenation, we can gorge ourselves on all the positive vibes we are getting; we can devour the messages of encouragement from those who have changed their lives in some profound way, or who are just doing something they always wanted to do.

After weeks of doing stuff that we think is bad for us, we embrace with equal fervour things that we think are good for us — whether they are or not, is entirely down to the individual, in the sense that there are some individuals who really should get around to writing their book, and there are other individuals who really shouldn’t be doing that at all.

But literary criticism or art appreciation are not what we’re about here; instead, we are fascinated by the attraction of these opposites, by the way that a period of debauchery can lead naturally to this longing for a higher state — how the impulse to destroy ourselves can eventually turn into this desire to conceive some wonderful thing.

We’re not just talking about the number of artists who have also been addicts, we are looking at these deep connections between the actual processes of addiction and creation; between the piss-artist, if you like, and the actual artist.

It was the never-less-than-excellent Carl Jung who suggested that alcoholism involves a form of low-grade spiritual research — one that is misguided, obviously — but one that does involve this pursuit of the kind of completeness that is sought by anyone attempting to write a good book, or to paint their masterpiece. As was said of Hemingway: “He believed that if he could see himself clear and whole, his vision might be useful to others who also lived in this world.”

And in order to approach this state of being, Hemingway, or any other creative person, has to do some extremely strange things, the most notable of which is the act of sitting in a room, usually alone, day after day, and basically making things up — yes, even the things that are clear and whole, even the sentences that are totally true, did not exist before someone conjured them into being, brought them out of the void, made them up.

If you look at a person sitting on a barstool, babbling away to himself — making things up, as it were — and you think that’s a crazy way to live, you have to admit that the person who’s doing something very similar, without any help from intoxicating liquor, is not exactly your regular citizen, either.

Isolation is the key to much addictive behaviour, and isolation is also essential to the working practices of the majority of artists. You are on your own, kid. Which perhaps explains why a writer might sometimes get fantastically drunk when he is released from confinement, or even before he is released.

So there is hardly the width of a Rizla paper separating certain acts of wanton destruction from those of meticulous invention, yet there is this: when you choose the path of invention, you may be the loneliest person in the world, but your voice may yet connect with the multitudes. You are doing a version of Jung’s “spiritual research”; going deep into yourself, not to disappear into the vortex of self-pity, but to defy it. And yes, we all hate a blank page, demanding that we fill it with something good and true. But we love it, too.

“The impulse to destroy ourselves can turn into this desire to conceive some wonderful thing”