Years ago, when I was hopelessly addicted and surviving on the streets , I was hyperaware of the seasons despite otherwise having lost meaningful grasp of, and investment in, the passage of time. I would experience palpable dread in the final weeks and days until the winter arrived. Its difficult to survive winter in Chicago; owing to the obvious fact that spending the night walking the streets or seated on a CTA bench can lead to death by hypothermia (especially if one is a heroin addict who tends to nod off into deep narcotic stupor), but also owing to the psychic and spiritual ordeal of it. The Chicago street is hostile to life - metaphysically so. When summer ends, death slowly permeates the air. It insinuates itself into your pores. There is a final flourish of color when the leaves change into splendid autumnal hues, then everything abruptly dies. The landscape becomes ashen - as if one is viewing the world through a greyscale filter.
Immersion in the life and death cycles of the seasons can be edifying - or at least spiritually educational if not truly initiatory. It forces people to abandon puerile conceits, lest they incur the contempt of their fellow man and woman and find themselves in the solitary company of a fool. The streets of once great cities however are not the fields tilled by stalwart agrarians, stoically at peace with their inevitable fate as mortals. The Chicago street as I (and thousands like me) knew and endured it is a necropolis that is held together by an irresistible gravity and its decaying core. It is a death factory, the denizens of which are too hollowed out to experience panic or horror, save for at the truly critical moments when the supermassive black hole at the center of this strangely slow churning maelstrom catches one of the wretched and the damned in the undertow. I am a quick study, and always have been. And I have an unreasonably strong survival instinct. When I’d feel myself succumbing and being sucked towards the slow-churning oblivion at the center of the necropolis I desperately struggle to reach a safe distance from the event horizon.
There is nothing noble about addiction, nor is there anything lyrical about the experience of it or particularly instructive about the human condition. Not on its own terms. The simpleton and the brilliant man both succumb to addiction for similarly banal reasons. Injuries are not compelling - they’re only interesting to medical people and to primitive egoists who, owing to a stunted intellect and concomitant inability to understand the world around them, resent the fact that they are forced to endure injury. What is instructive, if unremarkable, is how humans respond to their injuries - the capacity to grow comfortable with pain and the process by which some among us are able to make a friend of death; or at the very least not cower before its long shadow.
I recalled hearing, years ago, of a deviant occultist and murderer in Paris who had taken to breaking into tombs - the great, above ground monumental structures that quite literally house the mortal remains of the decedent. This necrophile devised a means of opening the sarcophagus within the housing structure and, owing to his grotesque compulsions, lying beside the skeletal body within.
He did these things, by his own admission, in part to overcome an obsessive concern with death and fear of his own mortality. I had mixed emotions upon hearing of this, admittedly grotesque episode. Disturbing a corpse is as viscerally revolting as it is morally abhorrent, but I do harbor some empathy for an, at base, sad and frightened young person who finds himself at birth thrust into a culture in terminal decline that is as incapable of preparing people for the reality and inevitability of death as it is devoid of human intimacy and felling between persons that is only emergent among and within populations that live and exist historically.
I thought for a time, when I was quite a bit younger and less spiritually developed, that I was in Hell - or at least that I was imminently going to die and thus was seeing what remained of my mortal life (including my own flesh and organs) being torn away by malevolent, quite possibly demonic beings. In reality, falling into the sin of addiction and paying for sin through suffering allowed me to make a friend of death, and in doing so allowed me to return to the grace and favor of God. For those reading who do not believe in God in the conventional sense, you can think of what I am describing as the process by which I was shorn of any fear of and aversion to death - the Aryan Buddhism that characterizes Nietzschean thought, perhaps, if you cannot bring yourself to accept Christ (or give yourself to Islam if that is the faith of your forefathers).
I behoove you to be a soldier of the apocalypse in lieu of a casualty of it.
I also used to be a heroin addict. That palpable dread of the daily addict grind is all too familiar. I was also saved by Christ, who came to me in a vision. That took me by surprise because I was not raised Christian.
Beautiful piece. H is a bitch. Whsn you have nothing else it is always there to look forward to. I don't have the physical sickness without it. But it's always there ready to tempt me. I'd be interested to know more about the circumstances that lead to your use, how you turned that around and how you keep it off your back.. If that's something you would ever want to talk about. Was stoked to get that t777 email notification. Your a beast man, thanks so much.