Chicago Typewriter III

Peckerwood Seppuku

I’d get asked during the nadir of my addiction - and I am asked today - a very basic yet very difficult question to properly answer. I do not mean that I am offended in any way by it being posed, nor that any purported trauma nor pride somehow stays my willingness to answer honestly - what I mean is that it is frankly difficult to articulate the answer, even for one (such as myself) who generally is not ever at a stark loss for words. The question I am speaking of is simply, ‘‘Why did you become an addict?’’ Or, alternatively, ‘‘How could a reasoned person ever inject heroin?’’.

I’ve concluded over many years that in order to truly understand this question, the interrogator must be willing to accept multiple premises - not merely about the human condition (and forgive me if that appears an attempt to obscure the matter - I simply can NOT conceive of a more concise terminology) but about how people respond to hyper-modern conditions. Not accidentally, nor incidentally, I - a White, Anglo-Protestant man with no real remaining familial bonds - became addicted to heroin in his 30s. What premises must be accepted in answering the ‘‘How’’ and ‘‘Why’’ of heroin addiction for a person with my ethnic, Confessional, generational background?

The first (and essential) premise that must be accepted is that the mind is in FACT its own ‘‘place’’. It is literally the setting of one’s life and conscious waking existence. If that place becomes corrupted (on grounds of organic mental illness, brain damage, changes in brain chemistry and thought processes due to external trauma etc.) it profoundly compromises the ability of the person to physically and psychically SURVIVE, but also changes that person’s relationship to the world. It is VERY possible for a person’s inner mental place to become so thoroughly corrupted, that they CANNOT find any reprieve from pain, from ongoing discomfort, from paranoia and anxiety, or from existential terror - mere knowledge of the fact that they WILL ultimately DIE and no longer having the psychic skin nor armor to protect against this monolithic, all-powerful, singularly brutal reality.

I realize that there is a very peculiar and seemingly contradictory irony that asserts itself in suggesting that an inability to armor one’s own psychic constitution vis a vis fear of the imminent reality of death and oblivion would lead one to engage in pathological behavior that is likely to result in death immediately in lieu of in the (presumably) distant future but this is not in fact as contradictory as would appear at casual glance so to speak. Heroin intoxication is something that neutralizes fear of oblivion by HABITUATING the user to it - I am aware that poets - particularly Orientalists and Romantics - WERE and remain very fond of conflating death with Eros and it particular suggesting that sexual climax somehow partakes of ‘‘death’’. I do NOT accept this at all - erotic coupling makes one feel very much ALIVE, even if it is depleting. Heroin intoxication, in contrast, causes the user to quite literally feel his life slipping away - and to not care as it is happening.

Everyone I am certain - especially at present - of the very real physiological phenomenon of humans building immunity to pathogens by way of exposure. Metaphorically speaking, a similar process can and does condition men and women to neutralizing psychic responses of shock, fear, anxiety and disgust. Prizefighters are conditioned to be game (as are fighting dogs) in large part by learning to absorb punishment and take power punches from an opponent, combat infantrymen (and at one time cavalry horses) are exposed to life-fire exercises so as to adapt to the sights, sounds, choking miasma of the battlefield. In rather debased and grotesque terms, Iceberg Slim wrote - as I’m sure many more men are aware of than would admit it - of the process of ‘‘breaking in’’ girls that he had slated for dominating personally and subsequently pimping. ALL of these existential processes are very real, and very much share in common a conditioning process that is specifically tailored to cause human beings to tolerate (if not outright embrace) traumatic stressors so as to overcome a universally predictable response.

Aren’t these things that I have listed all highly traumatic though? And is Heroin not extraordinarily pleasurable and cathartic? Yes and no - to reiterate, heroin intoxication is not (despite the popular mythology) an experience similar to erotic climax. It is not similar to the satisfaction of consuming food that one craves after period of fasting. It is not emotionally gratifying - in the way it is to be in the company or embrace of a human paramour or to be amongst close friends nor family. Heroin in fact is quite traumatizing -from the fact that first time (or inexperienced) users WILL unfailingly become violently ill upon administration of the drug. Human biology initially rejects it. The means of administration - assuming one is not merely an addict who snorts the powder form - is physically painful and damaging to soft tissues. It is a flagrant form of self harm to intravenously inject drugs.

Finally, Heroin - by peculiar mechanism - robs the addict of his metaphysical vitality - I am being quite serious. People in the throes of addiction are no longer fully human - in the sense that their capacity to feel, to value LIFE itself or the myriad rewards of living in the world. The addict feels no ‘‘pain’’ (save the crushing, intolerable pain of WITHDRAWAL) of the heart, of the mind, of the physical body - because he feels nothing at ALL. He no longer pines for a woman, he no longer misses nor laments the fallen, he no longer mourns his ruined life, his wrecked ambitions, the devastation of his most beloved attachments. ALL that remains is the incessant, endless, vampyric, quest to procure MORE of the Heroin that his body craves, that his mind demands, that the void where his spirit is aches to be filled with - and NOTHING else.

Some of you will read this I am certain and dismiss it as the lamentations of an aging weak individual. I am MANY things - virtually none of them admirable, but I am absolutely NOT weak. You want to know how the White Man commits Seppuku? The White Man walks alone, he fights alone, he prays alone, and he DIES alone - THAT is both the discipline of his Faith and the savage, always controlled, fury of his racial heritage instantiated. It is ALSO his aesthetic path - it is the role he fulfills lest he dishonor every man who walked ALONE before him. We are NOT permitted to fail - not because we are victims, but because we are apex PREDATORS. Heroin allows us to cease to exist without forcing spectacle nor explanation.

Did I FAIL in my suicide mission? I thought so for a LONG time - then I realized I am a Shaman. I am here because of you. Thank you, very much. I love you - I always will.