A DRUNKARD’S PROGRESS

AA and the sobering strength of myth By “Elpenor “

off something like it in me, their secret sharer. I For souls it is death to become water, for felt buoyed up as if on the gentle swells of the water it is death to become eafth; from eafth sea they’d been taking about: the old oceanic water comes-to-be, and from water, soul’ feeling, you might say, but in my condition, rather poignant. Then the couple went on to talk A man when he is drunk is /ed like an of other things (police brutality, as I recall) and I unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing went back to my bourbon and water. where he goes, having hrs sou/ moist. There are more synonyms for “drunk” A dry sou/ is wisesf and best- than for any other word in the English language. -Heraclitus Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang has to resort to an appendix to cover them Of all the things that happened on my all. There are 313 words in it. Most of us could last binge before going to Alcoholics add one or two to the collection. I like misiudged, Anonymous, I remember clearly only one: a for example: a splendid equivocation by which powerful, somewhat surprising surge of fellow the drunk manages to suggest that he has feeling for a couple standing next to me at a merely underestimated the potency of the liquor, Manhattan bar. The bar was not one of my or that his behavior is being sadlY favourite watering holes. I had none but that misunderstood. At any rate, the clear implication time, not much caring where I drank or with of this vast vocabulary is that drunkenness is the whom. But this places was more familiar that most verbal of human conditions until it most, filled with an ill-assorted crowd of becomes the most unsPeakable. professional people, Hispanics, street people, What intrigues me is the allusion that so and the odd preppie. The couple, too, seemed many of these words make to the liquidity ot haphazardly matched, and it was evident that drunkenness. We drunks are all sailors, before this moment they had never spoken to stumbling and reeling from tavern to tavern’ But each other to us it is the world that totters and plunges. The man was black, with a Che beret Nothing stands still for us, no more than deck and wispy chin whiskers. A law school textbook furniture stands still in a storm at sea. Everything lay open beside his beer. She was drinking spins – the faces of friends, the bar, the streets, spritzers: a woman in her late twenties, in the bushes in the front yard, the stairs, the toilet, tweeds, and with plain gold hoops in her the bed. A drunk’s world is hopelessly fluid, now earlobes. She was white and, as I subsequently rocking us gently, now breaking over us with overheard, of lrish descent. They were making blind and cruelforce. friends, talking about his ancestors, and it came Perhaps my fascination with the liquidity out that one of his great-great-grandfathers had is of drunkenness idiosyncratic. certainly lt been a ship captain on the Liverpool – West doesn’t seem to be shared by my fellow drunks lndies run. And so, miraculously, had one of in A.A. At a meeting once, I tried to convey a hers. Alas, they couldn’t prove the link beyond a sense of my drinking career by comparing it to a doubt, for the law school student could not salmon’s epic voyage to the swimming pool. “l remember his ancestor’s last name. But I drank like that fish swam,” I said. I told them how remember how delighted they were to establish I dived into the tumbling waters with fervour and the possibility of one, and how their joy touched rose in glory. What was my quest? lt was

infraverbal, instinctual. And when I got there, before setting sail, they spent feasting on meat and wine; then at nightfall they lay down to sleep in Circe’s great hall. where the waters were still and warm, I found a All but Elpenor: heavy with wine, hot, he found a ladder and dreamy breeding ground of the self, with the climbed up onto the roof. He was still there when bright air just above, attainable (wasn’t it?) by a Odysseus, down below, roused his comrades in the mere flick of the tail. But then, immersed in the morning. Poor Elpenor! Springing up at the sound of pool, it seemed that my flesh was flaking off and voices, befuddled, he forgot the ladder he’d come up by and pitched headlong from the roof. “His neck,” as T.A. floating away before my eyes, until at last I was Murray translates Homer’s lines, “was broken away from all nerves and eyesight, staring into the his spine, and his spirit went down to the house of Hades.” fireplace, drinking Gallo from a gallon jug, trying But this was not the end of Elpenor’s story. When to remember or forget, neither of which I could Odysseus’s turn came to make his own descent into Hell, Elpenor was the first of all the shades to greet him. “Son of do, and weeping into my glass. Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus of many devices,” he It seemed a terrific analogy when I cried, “an evil doom of some god was my undoing, and launched into it at the meeting, almost a fable. measureless wine.” He begged a favor of his captain, that But long before I reached the spawning pool I when Odysseus gained again the common ground of sensed that many of my fellow alcoholics had mortals, “heap up a mound for me on the shore of the grey sea, in memory an unhappy man, that men yet to be may gone onto a different wavelength, and thereafter learn of me. Fulfil this prayer, and fix upon the mound my I kept my story plain. An analogy is a way of oar wherewith I rowed in life when I was among my fishing for the unfamiliar, of catching it on the comrades.” hook of the familiar. But nothing about drunkenness is unfamiliar to the people at an AA gathering. They want only to have the familiar An A.A. meeting is an answer to a plea made vivid, sharp, personal, immediate. They which everyone has heard and spoken: want conceteness: the kind of booze, the names My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. of the bars, what your wife said then, what the Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never cop looked like, how much, when, how long. speak? Speak. They want stories. Drinking, all we did was tell stories, if The ground rules differ from meeting to only to ourselves. Drinking, we built ourselves a meeting. Some are for alcoholics only, others for drunk’s ladder of words, one end propped on anyone at all. Some are “beginners’ meetings,” clouds, the other end floating on water. The but because beginners often tell the most whole ladder is important if you understand touching and dramatic stories, and because drunkards, but the fluid footing is where you veteran alcoholics want to keep their memories begin to understand AA. The fellowship exists to fresh and help those less experiences in the ground the drunk’s ladder on solid earth, on ways of sobriety than they are, these meetings common ground, and whether we extend one are usually packed with old-timers as well. The end of it back up into the heavens or simply lay it number of people varies greatly. In New York down to bridge the chasms between ourselves I’ve seen meetings of twenty-odd people and others, it is still made of words.* jammed into the cellar of a brownstone, and more than 200 crowded into the basement of a Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus’s companions, cathedral-sized church. Where I live now, is described in The Odyssey as an ordinary fellow, not meetings seldom draw more than fifty and overly brave, not particularly wise. He was also the first to sometimes only two or three. Twenty seems to die, doing so even before the ordeal of the great captain be the average. and his crew had properly begun. The circumstances, however, make his name irresistibly appealing to the writer This is a good number, to my taste, and of this essay, as a pseudonYm. the meeting where I feel most at home attracts What happened to Elpenor could have been about that many once week. We have a funny. For nine long years Circe, the goddess of human beginners, too, vanned in from a drying out farm speech, held the lthacans captive on her remote island, transforming them into dumb animals, slaves of their most back in the hills. The format of the meeting is the ignoble appetites. But then at last Odysseus persuaded open discussion group, with a lead-off- speaker Circe to give them speech again, to make them men, and telling his tale, the other members following up to let them begin their voyage home. One whole day,

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with bits and pieces of their own stories. I always freedom is a gift of strength, and strengih a gift speak, whether I want to or not. I think of it as a of going forth and suffering. The gift of the story kind of spiritual discipline: to attend to what’s to the listener is hope. being said, to keep one’s mind open to the spark Point for point, this is the story one hears of recognition, to wait in mounting tension for the over and over again at A.A. meetings. Not that moment when one will be called on, then finally anyone orders us to tell them in this form. All to hazard a link between one’s own story and we’re told is to share our “experience, strength, another’s. The sensation, when I have said my and hope” for ten or twenty minutes. There are bit, is what most of us came for, serenity. no other instructions: no one prompts, analyzes, But no one is under any compulsion to jeers, breaks in to tell his own story, or criticizes. speak. On the contrary, oldtimers tell you again But that’s the way they usually come out, and again that one of the great virtues they as quest stories, and one reason they do is that discovered in the program is the capacity to it’s so easy to construe the actual course of a listen, without making assumptions or jumping to drunk’s career in that way. The ism, alcoholism, conclusions, without analyzing, categorizing, is a disease. (l prefer to think of it as a gift, like glossing, or comparing (what I’m doing now, for the gift for music, but malign. Becoming an example), but with appetite, imagination, and alcoholic is like winning a recital at Carnegie sympathy. At an A.A. meeting, good listeners Hall: you must have the gift, but you must also become as little children listening to fairy tales. practice. Still, most drunks take it as a disease.) And a fairy tale of sorts is what, typically we But because the disease of alcoholism goes its hear. way in a seemingly purposeful fashion, it is a I imagine many of my feliow drunks simple matter to personify it. ln A.A. we call it would be infuriated to hear their stories, “true” “cunning, baffling, and insidious,” and having stories recalled with anguish and told quite gone that far, we might as well call it the demon. literally in fear and trembling, described as fairy When he first appears on the scene, he is frisky tales. Yet that’s what they are to the listeners and cute as Faust’s poodle, found on an idle and I don’t mean to belittle them. After all, as stroll. Later, revealed for what he is (charming, Walter Benjamin has told us, a fairy tale is helpful, always available at the crook of an usually the story of a quest, through which as elbow), he begins making promises and deals. children we may learn to confront the forces of And this Demon knows how to make a deal, how the mythical world, the dreadful projection of our to keep a promise. The stories I’ve heard! fears, our hurts, and our mistrust. ln quest Hardworki n g foremen, corporate swash bucklers, stories a child goes forih, a child much like the surgeons, interior decorators, bus drivers, listening child in his secret conviction of librarians, fishermen, submarine skippers, helplessness and oppression. And along the mongers of all sorts and kinds of things, all of way he discovers that the real world of them stewed to the gills morning, noon, and experience is much like the mythical world of night, yet never faltering on their upward climb, apprehension: peopled with witches, ogres, and never losing their jobs, never falling in the tyrants, rife with duplicity, danger, evil, and esteem of their fellows. death. But we all lost our souls, and in the But as the child battles through his typical story, sooner or later, everything else as ordeal, he also finds that nature is in secret well: jobs, money, family, friends, health, the lot. complicity with his struggle. Life himself wants We end up in a barroom, s?y, screaming a him to survive the ordeal, to defeat his challenge to take on any man in the place. enormous adversaries, to come into his Ludicrous: we might be blowing bubbles in the kingdom. Little people, common people, all bathtub. There are no takers. But out on the denizens of the earth, appear to help him. And street, the Demon’s little helpers are waiting, a the child must let nature’s secret complicators in, bunch of pint-sized muggers come to collect. trust them, and with them trust himself, his wits The deal was that you hold the liquor. With the and his high resolve. And with this access of grip reversed, you lose. trust, the last liberating secret is revealed: that

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So begins the most crucial episode in the never identify with this until a few months ago. I drunk’s career: hitting bottom. Everyone finds his was at a party, a small dinner where there was a own bottom. lt might be on the carpet of an man who I instantly realized was clever, more executive suite or in the backyard where the articulate, more entertaining, and more forceful pints of vodka are buried; it might be the gutter, than I could ever be. This would have been hard the slammer, or the bin. Wherever it is, it seems to bear under the best of circumstances, but somehow more textured with the actual than these were especially difficult. For one thing, the anything we’ve known since we first set out on hostess was a woman whose attentions I

this voyage. And the Demon is down there as coveted and my “rival” was winning. For well, delighted as always to help a drowning another, I had stopped smoking three weeks man. Voices reach US, urgent voices. One, before; this was my first foray into unfamiliar heroic in timbre (though strangely demonic), social territory without cigarettes. cries out, “Hold on!” Another, so close to the By dessert, I was in such a rage of envy bottom we’re lying on that it might be comlng that I grabbed a cigarette. (One of his cigarettes, from there, speaks in a croak. “Let’s go,” it says, needless to say.) I think I’d have grabbed his “let go.” These voices, this site, are the drama of wine bottle, too, if there hadn’t been another Alcoholics Anonymous. recovering alcoholic at the table. Still, I smoked, which was bad enough, I smoked out of envy. What quest were we on when we set Cleverer than I could ever be? Ever? Dear God, forth? What was it we wanted, really wanted? lt say it rsnt so/ Say that I could if I tried. That I wasn’t anything in particular. That was the could if I made myself new. That I could, by trouble. All we had was neediness and vision, some miracle, be someone e/se. But now, bottomless neediness and wondrous vision. Out wafted onward on my nicotine afflatus, I was of these we conjured a god – the god, in fact, another man – if nothing else, a man who had whose servant is the Demon. W.H. Auden called not smoked but did now. Exhaling, I could see him Possibility, and said that his idolaters were my self I wished in the moist clouds of smoke, legion in modern societies. But drunks have and a good deal less of the man I envied. always known about that god, long before there Booze, I now realize, did the same thing were modern societies, for on the downward leg for me. Looking back to when I began drinking, I of the drunkard’s quest it is Possibility who fills can see that I was no different from those others the sails. who say they drink to make themselves Possibility, after all, is simultaneously the agreeable, lovable, clever. We drank to spawn one great true thing (anything can happen), the new selves, to be reborn in Possibility, more great halftruth (l can do anything I want to), and charming, more persuasive, more resolute, more the great lie (l can be anyone I want to). There high-spirited – until at last our new selves swam are moments of Possibility-worship in everyone’s away and lost themselves in the darkness and story. ln most people’s lives, however, Possibility silence of the bottom. makes itself felt as more or less fixed object of lf spawning Possible selves is what the drunk desire, not the wind but the compass. riches, was up to during the first part of his quest, then celebrity, a lively love life. The more concrete “re-collecting” and “re-membering” those selves the desire, in fact, the more coherent the is what he is doing when he tells us about it. voyage, the story, and the “1” who is telling it. ln Recalling himself as he was, prostrate before a drunk’s story, Possibility appears as it is to the the idol, he remembers daring great deeds and true idolater: the achingly elusive element in speaking resounding words. But even if he did which we live and move and have our dreams, and said half of what he dreamed, even if he the pool, the drowning pool, of the self. was the selves he gave birth to, the lived I don’t know how many times I’ve heard experience eluded him, forever being dissolved an A.A. storyteller begin his story with the in the solvent of alcoholic Possibility. God does assertion that he began drinking to “get along,” save drunks and fools, but what he saves them because he was shy and ill at ease at parties from is experience. The story of a life devoted to and a snootful made it easier for him. I would

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Possibility sounds like a quest story with the bottom and goes into A.A. The quest should ordeals left out. lt’s just a haphazard move on from there, a quest for sobriety, but it accumulation of endings: triumphs or does not. lnstead, we see the drunkard lifting catastrophes, as the case might be (for anything himself up from the bottom time and again, only can happen), but completely severed from the to slip back. The pity of it is unbearable: the necessary middle, the traveled ground of rehab centers, halfway houses, asylums, experience. prisons, A.A. itself, in and out, in and out. These ln the rooms, then, where A.A. people are epics, heroic and terrible. The terror, of tell their stories, there are really two dramas course, comes from the hero’s willed going on, the events recounted in the narrative participation in his own doom. The heroism is and the narrator’s struggle to recover his the storyteller’s. Telling that story, groping in experience, to build a new ladder of words on a agonizing silence for words, the speaker firmer footing. The story emerges rung by rung, becomes an actor in his real life, the protagonist sometimes as farce, sometimes as melodrama: a in struggle between cynicism and trust, a situation comedy or a horror show. Often it is despair and hope, death and life, death and love I both. At one meeting used to go to, for – now enacted, in these rooms, in an agon of example, a tough little lrishman convulsed us remembrance. with an inexhaustible series of disaster stories involving run-ins with the police, tractor trailers, Therapies of the word, of course, are frosty bank managers, night nurses in the drunk almost as easy to come by as a drink. And it ward. He used to tell how he was cured of the might be asked, as alcoholics in A.A. meetings gambling addiction that overcame him after he do often ask, why it is that these other therapies, went into A.A. He and his wife were at a Florida psychoanalysis in particular, were never able to racetrack, and each had bet on a different horse. help them stop drinking. lt’s a good question, His horse, which had been in the lead, stumbled and I think the answer tells something about the and fell. His wife’s horse, which was second, kinds of people alcoholics are. (The question of tripped over the fallen favourite and broke its whether we were always that kind of person, or neck. “l took it as a sign,” he would say, “a bad became that way as a result of drinking, is a sign.” chicken-and- egg question, and not a good one.) But farce is easily transmuted into horror. What goes on in an analytic session is There are meetings where one feels beaten, quite similar to what goes on in an A.A. meeting. physically and morally, by the ingenuity, the Analyst and patient meet periodically, the patient persistence, the cruelty that human beings bring bearing his anxieties, some too deeply rooted or to the task of destroying themselves. Again and too painful for words, others already fixed in again you find yourself saying, “Now, dear God, words – too fixed, like a published text. The surly he’s reached his bottom!” He has not. But analyst brings his own experience, and in the the storyteller has. The storyteller is here now, encounter between the two, the patient warm and dry and safe, perhaps with a firm grip undergoes a kind of conversion, or rather a on sobriety, perhaps just digging his fingers into series of conversions, in the course of which he the beach against the pull of the slamming works out a new, illuminating, and presumably sucking surf. So the end of the story is always helpful version of his life story. So, too, at an both happy and tragic. Now, right this minute, he A.A. meeting: there, the newcomer learns to is in these rooms, telling his story among channel the maelstrom of his experience along common people, close to the world’s center of the lines of a quest story. And there are gravity. (Meetings seem always to be held in parallels, as well, between the dramas played basements.) But after the meeting he must go out in each kind of session. ln A.A. there is the out again into the fluid world of Possibility. And drunk’s mortal struggle to compose his life in out there, as he and every member of the words and the counterinsurgent denial of his gathering know, waits the certainty of death. need to stop drinking, as well as of the proffered ln some stories, the presence of death is way to stop. ln analysis the drama is the almost palpable. ln these versions the hero hits patient’s painful ordeal to become a maker of

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sense and his fierce resistance to the analyst crrminally insane. ln his story Ted is always who can help him. moving, stumbling from bar to bar, from doorurlay But it’s just there, in that element of to alley to flophouse, from courthouse to prison, drama, that the alcoholic finds analysis wanting. always on foot. Fondly, wryly, he ticks off the We alcoholics are intensely social, constantly names of the bars, their proprietors, their threatened by loneliness: we need to go out, mix regulars. Sober now, on the upward curve, he is it up with the crowd, see and be seen, perform. still moving, still on foot. “you’ve all seen me, What can an audience of one man or woman do haven’t you? ” he says. Everyone has once a for us? month., perhaps, they catch a glimpse of him, And we want sacrifice. Once we day or night, walking with his easy stride from sacrificed ourselves on the altar of Possibility; town to town along the shore road. He is walking now, giving ourselves to others like ourselves, to meetings mostly, and now in his story he we learn a new form of sacrifice, one with life names the meetings, recalls anecdotes he’s itself as the gift for giving. ln analysis there’s heard at them, laments the dead, sings the nothing like that, nothing so dramatic: if anybody praises of those members who stopped and is being sacrificed it is the therapist, who may be gave him a lift. Sometimes he’ll fix the date of an dying of boredom. But he is being paid for it, incident by something he read in the papers. “lt which rather spoils the fun. was the day they buried old Patrick P.” says Considered as theatre, moreover, Ted, or “the night they had that terrible fire up in psychotherapy in general (as a drunk might say) Galahanty.” is pretty small stuff, as primal as the quest story. Ted is a mythmaker. ln the usual fairy- Sophocles’ Oedipus is want we want; Freud’s is tale quest, the only name you hear is that of the too refined, too limited. Lacking experience, and hero (l’m Susan, and I’m an alcoholic”), a name in that sense childlike, we like our theatre crude so rudimentary that every individual can identify and dirty and full of miracles. But we also like it with it. And the action of these stories takes formal. lf a psychotherapeutic treatment has any place anywhere, somewhere in such and such a form, it’s usually apparent only to the therapist, kingdom, but really in the good listener’s head. and not necessarily even to him. The A.A. Myth, however, occurs in historicaltime, in a real drama seems as simple and straightfonrvard a country, among real people, and the men and container of meaning as the mind could devise. women of myth are the real heroes of that It has to be, for containing is precisely what it country and people. A myth is constitutive: it must do for us. We are the incontinent, those makes for a collective identification. That’s what whom Dante found wallowing in putrid slop, and Ted’s stories do. They weave a magic circle of what we crave is integrity, coherence, simplicity. words around our meetings, making a tribe out A.A. drama is oral, a tribal culture which gets of a group of lonely quest-heroes. ln his own passed on by means of stories and maxims. story, Ted is Odysseus; but in his manner of There’s an A.A. maxim for every contingency: telling it, he is our Homer. He offers himself up, Count your blessing, One day at a time, Easy a creature as wretched and glorious as the does it, Live and let live, First things firsf. The powers of speech, for us to identify with, to be at beginner finds them stupefyingly banal. Then he one with, to die with or to live with, if he can only learns that they are nothing more than go on telling his story. condensed stories waiting to be brought to life by his own experience. I have never yet had a slip. Ordinarily, I Some of our tribes even have bards. I think no more of slipping than I think of my dead think of Ted, a regular at some of the meetings I mother, who had a fatal one. Drink is something go to. The first time I heard him speak I thought I kissed goodbye. Hut one evening a man was the Ancient Mariner had grabbed me by the arm. telling us how he and his wife (also an alcoholic) His voice rumbles along the edge of a cough were driving home from a meeting when they and his story emerges with the beat and power decided to stop off at a roadside restaurant for a of epic verse. He takes us from the loafing idyll steak. lt was a wonderful steak, he said, and of his youth to the horrors of a bin for the they had just been to a wonderful meeting, and

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the two things coming together, the spiritual and thoughts. Like ninetenths of their fellow the physical well being, left him feeling, as he Americans, they are happy to declare (to ominously put it, “on top of the world.” Suddenly, pollsters, for example) that they believe in God the thought of how wonderful it would be to cap and that their God is in some sense a higher off the evening with a creme de menthe slashed power. At meetings, “Higher Power” is the way through his mind. Now, as it happens, he didn’t God is most frequently referred to : “My Higher have a crdme de menthe. lt also happens that I Power, whom I choose to call God.” The locution detest creme de menthe. Yet the word, the mere is tactfully existential. Still, at first I could never sound, gave me a taste of it, as real as the taste hear that word, God, without the abyss opening of the coffee in my hand, and the taste struck up just beneath my heart. There is no question me with terror. The essence of A.A. is contained that the Higher Power most A.A. people have in in that incident. What happened was something mind is the Judeo-Christian one; and neither is so simple as to be almost barbaric: a ritual there any question about what this power, this drama that transformed our anxiety into pity and high god, does for me. He gives me the jitters. terror, our pity and terror into awe. He’s bad for my nerves, the affliction with which I Awe is a reflex of the spirit, I think, and went into A.A. in the first place; and speech the spiritual is a dimension of existence that between us is quite impossible. drunks are especially vulnerable to. There are But the interesting thing is not only that I

many of us, however, myself included, for whom had difficulty getting the word spirit to sound spirit in all its uses (except, naturally, the liquid) right in my mind and heart. lt is also that no one had become a meaningless, a tiresome, even a in A.A. has ever attempted to “help” me by threatening word. By the time I went into A.A., I’d pointing the way to his notion of God. Never, for pretty well dropped it from my vocabulary. The example, have I heard anyone in A.A. refer to booze had been one cause of this, of course, Jesus Christ. This is astonishing, for most A.A. having drowned my spirit along with everything people are Christian (like most Americans). else, but my background had helped, too. Where Moreover, Jesus’ “story” has some rather close I come from, all the actualities and potentialities parallels to the typical A.A. story. Surely the of being human are parceled out to disciplined drunk’s agony of remembrance isalso licensees: mind the philosophers, psyche to the atonement; surely, too, the first leg of this quest psychologists, language to the linguists, and so is a descent into death, the second a on. Spirit, according to this scheme of things, transfiguration, though one that’s always at risk. belonged to the religionists, the devotees of a To me this only goes to show that the Crucifixion god, and my spirit’s experience at the hands of is not our only passion play, but a model, so to religionists had been uniformly depressing. speak, of the genre. But I am not a Christian, A.A. did nothing at first to disabuse me of and Christians, I should have thought, might find this. lt is true that when I went into A.A. I the temptation almost irresistible to call upon the miraculously rediscovered my spirit. But for a story of Jesus’ Agony and Resurrection to great many days thereafter, I could not have told illuminate, perhaps to confirm, their own. But in you what I meant by the word. Spirls (as in A.A. they never do. They never speak of it. “high spirits”) got at part of ii. So did morale. Yet The reason, when I found it out, revealed there was always something hollow in the sound to me what I had been missing in my sense of of the word when I spoke it, some dead spot of the spirit that moves in A.A. One day I took a failed resonance when I heard it spoken, where friend of mine, a poet, not an alcoholic, to a there should have been, though I hardly knew meeting in New York. lt’s a meeting that attracts why, a full and joyful understanding. a large contingent of theatre people, which My difficulty lay in my laggard belief that probably accounts for its being especially spirit had something to do with religion, that it emotional, even for A.A. I thought my friend had to be in the most conventional sense would be amused and moved. At the same time, transcendent, that it had to be somehow always I was a little afraid of what he might say. He is a straining upward, higher than man, toward God. man whose language is extraordinarily precise, Most A.A. people have no difficulty with these and one who ordinarily demands the same

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precision of his friends. He is also an agnostic, ln the event, my fears proved and these two qualities gave me pause. My hold groundless. For it was the talk that most touched on sobriety was then even more feeble than it is my friend: the stories told in the diction of the now (l’d been “in” for less than a month), and I suffering, the eloquence of shared experience, was high, rapturously high, on A.A., and felt I the rhetoric of hope against hope. ln the taxi on could take no criticism of it. I thought my friend the way back to his apartment he said, “The talk might despise the wide groping for words he’d of God? Well, what moved in that room is the hear from these people, and scorn the trite best working definition of God I’ve ever heard.” maxims by which we all tried to live. And I And it was then that I began to see that the true thought he’d be embarrassed by all those spirit of these rooms is the spirit of human life; a references to “my Higher Power, whom I choose thing godlike, perhaps, but not transcendent; not to call God.” “high;” a thing altogether human. ln A.A. we dry moist souls on the /ogos, the Word.

Source: Harper’s Magazine, October 1986.

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