No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Coming Down Again

Coming Down Again This essay is dedicated to the memoryof Vic Dyer. hat Blakeline," said my friend—for the purposes of this article I'll call her Faith, a semi-ironic name, since she is a devout exCatholic —"It's always quoted as 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.'" "That's not right?" I said. "It's 'The roads of excesssometimes lead to the palace of wisdom.' Very different!" I looked it up. There it wasin "The Marriageof Heaven and Hell," the "Proverbs From Hell" section, directly following "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead": "The road of excess leads to ..." etc. No matter, I realizethe poet isplayingdevil's advocate ; anyway I'm willing to concede that Faith is more of an expert on the subject than I (or, possibly, Blake). Not that I haven't had my moments, but Faith's are somehow more—metaphoric. I think, for instance, of the time that, drunk and in the middle of her period, she engaged in a highly baroque night of passion and woke up in the morning to find herself, the man, and the bed covered with gore, a bloody handprint on her wall. Twoyears ago Faithjoined Alcoholics Anonymous.When she told me, I wasdoubly surprised. First, becauseI had neverthought ofmy friend ashaving"a drinking problem"—a condition I associated with nasty personality traits and inabilityto function in daily life, certainly not with the all-night pleasure-and-truth-seeking marathons that had seemed to define Faith's drinking style.The other surprise was that AA was evidently not the simpleminded, Salvation Army-typeoutfit I had imagined; somewhere along the line it had become the latest outlet for the thwarted Utopian energies of the '6os counterculture. Faith's AA group, which included cocaine and heroin junkies as T E X I L E O N M A I N S T R E E T 2.56 well as alcoholics, functioned (or so I inferred) as a kind of beloved community. Within that community one's alcohol or drug problem was a metaphor for human imperfection, isolation, confusion, despair . True sobriety—not to be confusedwith compulsive abstinence or puritanical moralism, which were merely the flip side of indulgence —was freedom, transcendence. The point was not self-denial but struggle: confronting the anxietyand pain indulgence had deadened . AA, in short, was a spiritual discipline that, in its post-'6os incarnation, had much in common with that most secularof spiritual disciplines, psychotherapy. Among the welter of feelings I had about Faith's new projectwas envy: I was frustrated by the lack of community in my own life. Having first begun livingwith aman and then decided to haveababy, I had plunged into the pit of urban middle-class Nuclear Familydom and its seemingly inexorable logic—an oppressively expensiveapartment , an editing job (more lucrative than writing, less psychically demanding), a daily life overwhelmed with domestic detail ("moving sand," the therapist I was complaining to, a fan of Woman in the Dunes, called it), a Sisyphean struggle to keep a love affair from dissolving into amom-and-pop sandmovers' combine, and a disquieting erosion of other human relationships. Those of my friends who did not have young children lived in another country, of which I was an expatriate, while other NFs of my acquaintance seemed either content to stay on their own islands or, like us, too exhausted from sandmoving to have much time for bridge-building. My life asa mother did haveadimension of transcendence, marked by intense passion and sensual delight; yet while I'd always insisted that real passion was inherently subversive,my love for my daughter bound me more and more tightly to the social order. Her father and I had remained unmarried, as a tribute to our belief in free love, in the old-fashioned literal sense, and our rejection of a patriarchal contract . But the structural constraints of parenthood married us more surely than a contract would have done. If there was spiritual discipline involved, it had nothing to dowith changing diapers or getting up at night—that was just putting one foot in front of the other, doing what one had to do—but rather with the attempt to maintain an ironic ("Zenlike," as I thought of it) detachment from our situa- Coming DownAgain 2,57 tion, to think of Nuclear Familydom as an educational experience, an ordeal...