Yet Another Poetic Diversion

Wisdom of a Goddess

Come lament Persephone, her decent into the darkness of the underworld Hades.

Her mirror, her sustenance, the breast to which she clung, woeful indeed.

Have no fear, you who send the blackness of your heart as a mark upon the land. It is, after all, only temporary.

Fools, declarations made by those whose fortune it has been to yet encounter the Fates, so unyielding in the pursuit of their woeful mandates.

For each a curse: Clotho, for the fiber she wove too short; Lachesis, for the hateful lot she tossed for us; finally, wicked Atropos, for the necessity which drove her to shear my thread.

Be balanced in your joy as in your grief, so say the sages of the ancient Ageans.

Balance be damned, proclaims Demeter.

Would that I possessed the unerring arrows of Apollo, or the unforgiving thunderbolt of Zeus.

Strike them all dead, universe fallow as the field of my heart.

And with them the insipid notion which holds that because tomorrow may improve today should be better than it is.

Come to me with your optimism, with your cherished, life giving delusions,

I would gladly remove your empty heads with one swift strike of my scythe.

Balance be damned and this day, too.

Poetic Insertion

Spiders in the Grass

Hidden, in the dewy hours prior to exposure,

The nocturnal admire their work.

Perilously woven between the verdant blades,

Having constructed such a dwelling,

Shame to have it fall so soon.

Diametrically opposed blades, spin, architecture eradicated.

Arachnid musing: if I make it to evening, another masterpiece I will weave,

With that the creature evacuated.

Sisyphus of the summer yard,

The spider makes meaning for himself, too.

Process, no telos.

Minions of survival, every stripe and affiliation,

They all pray to the absence at the center

From which all value erupts.

The Temporality of Addiction

Drug Time

Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: “the eternal recurrence.” Nietzsche

There are days when there is nothing but the drugs, and I do mean nothing. I awaken with the urge, an entirely inadequate word, even with the addition of the modifier consuming. I am awakened by the drive: Thanatos, Freud’s final contribution. How best to describe it? The “Snake”. That goddamn twisting in your innards, the slithering which one can sense, always fearing the strike, and desiring it, too. The terrible intermingling of fear and desire for that which is never forthcoming: paradox redoubled. Anxiety par excellence: indeed, despair

Kierkegaard must have been a drug addict. He must have enjoyed a nice push-off in Copenhagen once in a while, must have loved chasing that dragon. How else would he have known to so eloquently elaborate that irrepressible sickness unto death? How else become acquainted with that anxiety which is the refusal of death to come, and come now?

Time is entirely unhinged for the addict. Time is the absolute medium. There is the time of the fix. This is a sweet time. For no matter how sick one is, waiting for the boost to kick in is elating. It is perhaps even sweeter than the actual high. Anticipation: I know that in fifteen minutes I will feel it in my fingers. Soon enough it will spread to my midsection, the source of all life shining in beneficent ecstasy. It is a time to enjoy the best of one’s music collection, a beautiful time to rediscover one’s favorites. Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, blown away.

There is high time. This is the time beyond all time. The clock ceases to exist. This is a wonderful time to read. It is a good time for Nietzsche or Foucault, a period when one is beyond discipline and punishment, good and evil. It is also nice to write in this space of euphoric wonder at the world. There is the possibility of a certain oneness with the text, a togetherness with the entire world of the imagination. Perhaps one is a social creature within such a span. People are so much easier to be around when one is high, even one’s in-laws are acceptable. Well, perhaps not. A time for seduction. One is so full of life and not just because of the immediacy of the high. It is also a matter of knowing that the sickness is not coming, the snake is hibernating. This is the time of plenty, the jar is half full, and remains so until the last pill.

The time of withdrawal. This is time interminable. It is where time crushes all save the desire for the next fix, which demands to be now; the weight of being here seems unbearable. No one in the entire world is equal to this span of hours, of days, of the tiniest increments into which suffering can be divided. There is no way to withstand this time stoically. It is when suffering overtakes any possibility of pleasure. This is a period when one is closest to death in the lieu of any actually physical illness. It is a time of mental illness, of a sickness of the soul. Find an addict who is without and I will show you a man’s soul worn on his face. Time itself joins the soul in its timelessness, the infinity of the deathless gods, shade of Achilles his blood thirst unquenched. It is when anyone who has ever experienced it undergoes the most long suffering phobia of all, aierophobia. And who does not fear infinity, even the gods must when they are honest.

There are also various intermediate times. For example, the time with the doctor. This is also a time of high anxiety. How will he not know? How can he not see the pleading of each and every cell of my body? My epidermal cells must be arranged in patterns that clearly spell out DESIRE, NEED, DESPERATION. Is this doctor illiterate? Can he not hear the howls that have usurped my consciousness, reenacting the time of withdrawal? An eternal recurrence, indeed.

Indeed, I am a strange addict. I get all of my drugs legally. This is something that I will never understand myself. Perhaps Thanatos is simply not strong enough in His power over me. You see, I am addicted to morphine, actually oxycondone. My drug of choice, or is it simply convenience? There is never enough. I see the doctor once a month. He writes my script. I immediately have it filled and take four, maybe five: Oxycontin 40mg. Simply bite them in half and enter time of the fix. That transition from the time of withdrawal, a withdrawal in this instance which is only simulated since I have been without for at least two weeks, to the time with the doctor, the time of the fix, to high time, to the time of plenty is seamless. As a matter of fact, time remains seamless until the time of withdrawal, at which point one must certainly affirm with Sir Hamlet that time is out of joint. The ghost of the Father, morphine, wanders the ramparts of every cell, his specter warning away even the possibility of pleasure.

Certainly the worst stretch of hours is That Day. This is the twenty-four hour period which directly precedes the time of the doctor. It is that period during which the body is inscribed –can one really not see it? –with the language of longing and desire. It can only be compared to that point in a relationship when physical and emotional intimacy has reached the point of two animals boiling over into one another. The physical act of sex has been deferred to this point; but it can wait no longer. One’s entire body aches with the anticipation of the first touch that will signal an implosion, a joining, a oneness with Being. One’s entire being knows, in a way that can only be described as metaphysical, that the time of the coming has arrived. One’s hair lies perfectly, it too knows. This is one of the times in life when we come closest to godhood.

This same time is when one is nearest to the absolute fallibility of one’s humanity, paradox transforming itself, yet never changing. It is a Janus-faced event. After all, what if something goes wrong? What if we fumble through it to the anti-climax that so often characterizes firsts (to what extent, for example, has my tolerance reached?)? Is such a disappointment ever fully overcome? What if she sees through the mask of my pain all the way to my desire? And, what comes next? Do things become hopelessly entangled; do I become addicted? Anticipation is never straightforward desire for X. It always involves an equal and opposite desire to avoid anti-X. Thus, this is ultimately the time of the transgression of the law of non-contradiction.

So it is with That Day. The desire for the time of the fix, and that of the high and plenty is countered by the desire not to desire. The will is such that rather than not will it would will nothing at all. Why must I repeat the cycle? Will he see through this mask, the mask of the cool patient who simply needs his pain medication? Of course it hurts, but why? Will I sleep tonight?

The answer to that question is certainly and resoundingly NO. This is the prime characteristic of That Day. That Day turns into The Night where no cows are black. Everything is inverted except desire and its opposite. The clock ticks backwards; it tocks first. Food returns that same way that it entered. My dog, Dante, wags her tail from left to right and she skarb, which is certainly disconcerting. And more so, sdrawkcab nettirw era dna tfel ot thgir morf era skoob ym ni secnetnes eht, or may as well be; I certainly cannot read them.

The next thing that I read will be Oxycontin, 40 mg., #120. I will enter the time of the fix. It will all begin again. ETERNAL RECURRENCE: as uncertain as ever, my response to the demon-god.