Books and booze; my weapons of choice in the war against emotion
A confession about reading and drinking
Feelings can be tricky. Feelings you can’t name or don’t understand can drive you to irrational behaviour.
There’s a pertinent quotation from Toni Morrison that Patty Dann uses as the heading for chapter three of her book The Butterfly Hours. Toni Morrison writes:
Language alone protects us from the scariness of the things with no names.
It was reading that sentence earlier this morning — and I haven’t reached chapter three of Dann’s book yet — that set me off thinking about my reactions from childhood to those things with no names.
Nameless fears can take many forms. In my case it has always been feelings. I don’t know why. My parents lived the bulk of their adult lives — and probably their childhoods, too — in fear, without being able to fully describe what it was that scared them so. It boiled down to being scared of things they didn’t understand. For them, that was the outside world.
I inherited similar fears but in my case the scariness was internal. By the time I was ten, I think, I knew I had been off sick from school they day they handed out the manual to life. People around me — even kids my own age — appeared to know how to handle just about every situation, from making small-talk to dealing with problematic relationships. I, on the other hand, found every situation bemusing at best, shock-inducing at worst.
I retreated to books. As Morrison says, I was looking for the language to describe what I felt. I was searching for the missing manual.
From the start I read books that were above my chronological pay grade. There were not many books in the house but my granny had a cupboard in which were secreted — or at least hidden from view — a set of books that intrigued me. That they were hidden along with a WWI grenade of my grandfather’s made them even more attractive to a boy a couple of years shy of his teens desperate for instruction. I started with Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s stories are not possibly the way to find the language to describe feelings, unless desperate unrequited love and thoughts of longings beyond the grave are to be the norm.
I suffered a lot of unrequited love in my teens but I don’t blame poor dead Poe for that.
The pattern was set. I retreated into books in the way my parents later settled into the seclusion of their houses. I judged people by the way they talked about books, the books they liked, read, and recommended, and the seriousness with which they considered the role of books in life. In short, I related to people tangentially at best. Second-hand, as if everyone was the book jacket of a favourite novel rather than addressing the more messy subject matter within.
By the time I reached adulthood — by age, at least — I discovered that the books weren’t helping. The feelings I had and which arose continuously and against all efforts on my part remained both puzzling and indescribable. And, being indescribably, I didn’t know how to deal with them.
So I read more books. But, to be on the safe side, I washed each book down with increasing amounts of drink. That worked better. I thought it meant I was reading better books now or that I was getting smarter and able to handle the feelings. Of course I was killing the feelings at birth.
Forty years after that first brush with adulthood and I have been sober for seven years. There’s a saying in recovery that the best thing about it is that you get your feelings back and the worst thing about it is that you get your feelings back. In other words, I’m back where I started when it comes to feelings.
And for all the books I’ve read, I’m no closer to finding the missing manual that describes what each feeling is and the best way to respond. This time, though, I accept there’s no shortcut. Listen and learn is the new approach. Listen to what I feel and then try to learn — ever so slowly — what it means. And after I learn what each emotion means, I have a chance to devise ways to react that make me resemble other earthlings.
I have a library that is bloated and oppressive. (I’ve written of this from time to time in the weekly record of my book purges.) It’s not the fault of the books themselves, obviously. As with the drink, the secret seemed to be to buy and read another book. Some secret; it worked for a while and then gave up on me.
And as with drink, I’m giving up on my books. Not all of them. But I’m aiming to reduce the number to something that appears more healthy. The book equivalent of the normal drinker. There are books on my shelves that I have not opened in twenty years or more. There are books in the attic that I haven’t seen in twenty years. I think it’s clear that they’re serving a purpose that’s not about storing knowledge. My kids don’t want them — and they certainly don’t want to read them.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy to ditch them. I have feelings now, you know.
Wish me luck.
