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October 1965

The other day I happened to be leafing through some old Grapevines and came on an article by Gerald Heard, “The Search for Ecstasy,” in the May 1958, issue. It’s only three pages long, but it manages to say a lot—to me at least. I hope the Grapevine will reprint it sometime.

I—you—may not agree with everything Heard says about alcoholism and its relationship to the over-all social malaise of our times, but I think we can take gigantic warning from his article: we ought not to settle for tepid AA, for half-measures in taking the Steps, or for too much of the stale and flat in our sober days. Not if we want to stay sober.

No, I think we have to keep looking for something better than dullness, better than average living, better than mediocre spirituality. Heard’s use of that word ecstasy may bother a little: is it excessive? I think not; I think it bothers because it is the simple truth. He says, “… alcoholism (like all addictions) is not at base a search for utter sedation. It is a desire for that ecstasis, that ‘standing out’ from the landlocked lagoons of conformity, out onto the uncharted high seas where the only map is the star-set heavens.”

Breathes there anywhere a sober alcoholic for whom this passage is not deeply meaningful?

Once a few years ago I sat in a bar on a New York street talking to a newspaperman who had just lost another job for drinking. He was interested in my AA story. But he was lit up like a Christmas tree, and angry, and thoroughly uninterested in any gab about regenerating him—that day. I gave up at last. (I learned later not to try to throw the heavy AA pitch to someone who is still an active and altogether pugnacious drinker, but to save it for the sobering-up hours.) I relaxed. A thought came to me. I said, “You know, H_____, I think one of the great pleasures of way-out drinking is just that feeling of being miles apart from the boobs. You’re running on a different track. Different clock. Different music. Really existentialist kick. On the knife’s edge of pleasure-pain, progress-disaster.” And more stuff to that effect.

I saw that I had an attentive listener at last. H____ said that that was it exactly. It was living way-out that appealed to him, disasters or no. Living like the boobs was a bore, a drag, an accursed impossibility.

I think now that this thoroughly unsuccessful Twelfth Step effort (I pray H. may be in AA somewhere by now) helped me. I’ve never since stopped being aware of the fact that as an alcoholic I had better not set my sights on being just like everybody else, just as ordinary, just as unleavened. As a matter of fact, I don’t really know anything about being ordinary—that is, nonalcoholic—so I ought not to set up some phony idea in my mind about normal living. No, let me stick with Mr. Heard’s approach for a while. His emphasis is the one for me.

If as an alcoholic I am to “stand out from the land-locked lagoons of conformity,” and stay sober, how am I to do it? Join a revolutionary gang? Go beatnik? Take up yoga?

Ah, but I have an answer, Take the Twelve Steps. Dull? Have I tried it? I certainly didn’t attempt much beyond the first three Steps my first couple of years in AA. My reaction to the last nine Steps was that they were put in to round out the picture; they were pious rather than practical. One hardly needed to go that far … and so on.

But I had, along the way, a bit of perverse luck. I got into some rather heavy weather: job, health, family, everything seemed to go soberly haywire all at once. And I was moved (I see it now as a spiritual shove) to try the Fourth and Fifth Steps, inventory and confession. I didn’t do a good job. I wrote some of the inventory, but not all of it. I told some of the wrongs, the pressing ones—but not all. Nonetheless, I had an exciting year of spiritual progress out of it. I was in some important way changed.

There came a slowdown, as evidently there always must. I began to think Steps Six and Seven needed more work. Interesting. Difficult. Existentialist. Knife-edge of disaster-progress. Strange new awareness of God, of self.

I saw that there could be no “lagoons of conformity” for the man who will face his character, confess it, become willing to change it, and ask God to change it.

Dynamite! Dare I set it off? Can’t I just sort of let the whole thing go, and settle for modest, quiet, unexceptionable, not very spiritual, average living? After all, X can and Y can and Z can.

Are they alcoholics?

Well, no.

And do you really know anything about their spiritual life?

Well, no.

Back to me. I needed to be other. That’s why I drank. I still need to be other. Having tried the toxic way of drugs and excess, let me try the “tonic” (in Heard’s phrase) way of the Steps, the way of health and joy. The Steps are the specific medicine for the thing that’s wrong (or right—it doesn’t matter) with me: alcoholism. They are the way to be other, and sane into the bargain.

I’ve come this far: I know now that what is involved in taking the AA program entire, as the early AAs gave it to us, is not the prospect of turning into some sort of repulsive goody-goody. It’s the threat of being truly alive, aware, and even perhaps ecstatic. I’m coming to believe that if I do not accept all of what this program offers (demands?) but, instead, walk away from it as somehow more than I bargained for, I might get drunk.

Which is to say no more than that if I do not take AA’s Twelve Steps seriously and in full I cannot expect to be “on the program.”

ANONYMOUS

Vermont