A few months after I did my third step, I stood in front of a group to read my answer to their questions as part of the program designed for relapse prevention. We are given about 20-30 questions that are alleged to address our “defects of character.” One of my questions was about my understanding of God. I told the group, “Santa Claus God and Harry Potter spirituality are never going to work for me.”
This was the nail in the coffin of God and my understanding of God as far as 12-step was concerned. That guy who found the quarter in the soft drink machine can have that God. I am a madman. Giving up what I know to be true is giving up myself. But in doing this, I gain access to something else. “One of the ruses of the self: to sacrifice the empirical self the better to preserve a transcendental or formal I; to annihilate oneself in order to save one’s soul (or knowledge, including un-knowledge).”1 This is to give up the self in order to retain the essence of a kernel of the self.
“Santa Claus God and Harry Potter spirituality are never going to work for me.”
That moment in which I completely capitulated to the disaster, to the end, in which there was nothing left of all those narratives, connections, others that define a self, I came to a place in which I had only the most elemental self (which is to say, not a self at all but a passive and dissipated self)—this “end,” as I have called it, is where that which remains begins to encounter the space in which the writing of a self from what is already written can begin. Moments of refusal did not constitute a moment in which I stood up for myself. Quite the contrary, these were moments of refusing the way of being that would become a new way of being myself. I told everyone, “Nuts.”
On the one hand I learned the language of recovery and regurgitated it as needed. On the other hand, a completely different space was carved out that came from outside of me. But in coming to this outside, I found, or maybe invented, my inside, my interior, my Self. The encounter with the words of others, no matter the conventional line on those words, became pieces of another self.
While the language that was handed to me, indeed, the language that was to be my sole salvation and one true way to regaining my sanity, was always foreign to me, I found the language of others to be a space of being myself that relieved me of the self that I had buried and lost in the end. And rather than approach the language and words of others as I had in my former days, in the days that are now dead and gone, I scoured that language less like a scholar and more like a rat. Like Templeton the rat who found discarded words to save a pig, I took the words I wanted and needed as I found them, as they found me.
Rather than read to find my way toward sanity, I read to swim downward into insanity, and in doing this, I found another way.
I read what spoke my self. In essence, I deliberately read in the wrong ways. What was in those things I read amounted to a secret language meant only for me. Rather than read to find my way toward sanity, I read to swim downward into insanity, and in doing this, I found another way. “To write: to refuse to write—to write by way of this refusal. So it is that when he is asked for a few words, this alone suffices for a kind of exclusion to be decreed, as though he were being obliged to survive, to lend himself to life in order to continue dying.”2 This is an exchange. I will give up—surrender—and in exchange I will be given, or I will create, a form of a self that is both new and an amalgam of what was, all of this detoured (detourned) into something unknowable in advance.
Without ever being fully aware of what was happening, I found myself in the places where I am not. If the House provided a place removed from places and made it possible to insinuate myself into a temporal plane removed from the march of the world, the end, the disaster I encountered at my end dislocated my sense of myself to an extent where I met myself in the words of an other, of multiple others, and that “I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that” allowed me, made it possible for me, to go on, to “Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes;” it being the I that is myself.3
Transformed into an impersonal other, I say I. Where was I casting but in the worlds created by others? Rather than read these things for understanding, much less mastery, I read to find something that created me before I got there. To tap that vibration that precedes language, that unnamable absence that is my own absence.
Notes
1 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: U of NE P, 1995), 12.
2 Ibid, 10.
3 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, (New York: Grove P, 1958), 291.
Michael Templeton is a writer, independent scholar, barista, cook, guitar player, and accidental jack-of-all-trades. The Chief of Birds: A Memoir will be out soon from Erratum Press. He lives in Cincinnati. Twitter: @Templeton1963
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