IDENTITY

 

 

IDENTITY

 

The longer I remain in the rooms of AA the more that I am comfortable in hearing the stories of people with whom I identify.  Every day I will read or hear a story which, although differing in some substantial details, nevertheless is, at heart, my story and if boiled down to the essentials has me written all over it. Just this morning in fact, we started to read the beginning of the Big Book which is Bill W's Story and it starts with the premonitionary doggerel which he finds chiseled on the gravestone in the graveyard of Winchester Cathedral in England just prior to shipping off to the continent and to the Great War:

 

"Here lies a Hampshire Grenadier

Who caught his death

Drinking cold small beer.

A good soldier is ne'er forgot

Whether he dieth by musket

Or by pot." ¹

 

This event for Bill seems almost to predestine for him the way his life will turn out when he continues to drink, first a lot and then more heavily, until he becomes a daily drinker.

 

I have gotten so used to this story that it is almost welcome each time we come around to it as we do when we repeat the reading of it every several months in our cyclical reading of the Big Book. I used to think  incessant repetition  would bore me to tears but now I find it rather comforting.

 

A personal small sampling of the men in the rooms has given me the impression that this feeling is shared by the majority of the sober people in the rooms. I suspect that this is because we identify heavily with the stories of the Big Book as well as the stories that we hear among our fellow alcoholics.

 

Yesterday I went to see the movie "Flight", the story of an alcoholic airline pilot who gets discovered only because of his miraculous ability to fly his disintegrating aircraft out of a death dive and glide it into an empty field. And although this saves 98 out of 104 passengers and crew he accomplished this while he was legally drunk and high on cocaine; and despite the fact that simulations by stone cold sober pilots failed to reveal anyone who could duplicate the feat he attempts to extricate himself from this situation as due to equipment failure not pilot error.

 

This is not to excuse the pilot but to emphasize that drunks are sometimes extraordinarily talented people and this was one of those people whose skill could not be duplicated by normal folk. But it was because of that skill, that spawned this incredible ego and hubris, making it impossible to have this man face the fact that just because his skill was so great, that he was still a low down stinking alcoholic of the basest kind.

 

Before I went to see the movie I had perused the reviews and it seemed that there were some prevailing opinions that although Denzel Washington was brilliant in carrying the character, the subject of the movie was somewhat lugubrious. The implication was that a whole hour and forty-five minutes of addictive behavior with only one five minute death defying nose dive for the plane ride was too much to sit through. Watching a drunk was boring.  Or people don't really behave that way do they? 

 

People don't drink when they know that their whole careers are on the line and the appearance of sobriety is paramount! Do they? They present a sober front! Don't' they? Well the truth is harder than fiction to portray and the fact of the matter is that the movie did portray the truth and it almost seemed like fiction. People (drunks/addicts) do behave that way. This is what addicted people do!

 

To borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, this is the banality of Addiction.  There is nothing evil about it. There is nothing larger than life. It is very pedestrian and every day. It is banal, common place, trite, humdrum - ordinary.  We are ordinary people with an extraordinary propensity for self destruction, self-loathing, self-indulgence and just plain addiction and until we become unaddicted we can do nothing about all of the other things that plague our lives.

 

But every drunk I know who has seen this film has felt an identity with this character and  has seen his story in the story of this pilot.  When we see and hear our stories in the rooms of AA we begin to identify with the plight of others as brothers in arms, fellow sufferers who have what we have and who, if they have found a way of dealing with their addiction, have something that we want. So we listen. We want to learn to know what it is that they did so that we can emulate that.

 

For when we see ourselves in the story of others that is the first step to our own salvation. And when we pass on our own stories it not only helps us to tell them but we also hope that our stories will be a mirror for others; so that when they see the light, they can live again in its reflected glow.

 

© res 11/27/2012

 

 

 

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^{1 Alcoholics Anonymous p.1, Fourth Edition}