Ian Brown – on a moment of clarity.

Toronto, Ontario
July 21, 2000

Old pal,

I write to you from the point of view of the depressed but clear-eyed, from the not-so-distinctive but at least plain, unvarnished, Ikea-like point of view of a man who has suddenly understood that his various addictions are all symptoms of and defences against his self-hatred. The kind of man who drinks and drugs and marries and wanders and possibly even fathers mainly to escape the anxiety of being his own flawed self, a being he despises and can never please. The sort of man who gets up in the morning and makes breakfast and feeds his kids – having worked until one the night before on some asinine charity essay he has said he will write (and which is bloated, swollen with the bad water of self-indulgence, and which he hates, but will not change, because he isn’t being paid for it, and because it’s good enough, which is only cause for more self-hatred, as anything he wrote would be) – only to find that by ten he is longing for drugs. This is the kind of man we’re talking about, okay? Not a creep, not even really an asshole (there’s a difference), but not your favorite neighbour by any distance.

He’d like cocaine, preferably, or speed, but grass would do. Anything to take his consciousness away, anything to relieve his self-loathing. He knows it is self-defeating. Still. He wants drugs. He doesn’t get drugs, and will not get drugs, but he wants drugs.

That’s all we need to say about the self-hatred and the drugs, thank Jesus in his cradle. Because it doesn’t matter anymore. Because, you see, something has happened.

The crack appeared, to be honest, quite some time ago. It was an afternoon in April. The man was hung over, and instead of doing his job, which entailed convincing people to do something they didn’t want to do, he reread a short story he had written a year earlier. The story was about a man who stages a surprise party for his wife’s birthday, against her wishes, and in so doing drives her into the arms of his best friend. For a year the man had believed it was a pretty good story, even though he had never submitted it for publication (he feared having work he liked rejected). But that April afternoon when he looked at his work, something new happened.

He looked at the story, and then he thought: Gee, where’s my drink? For the first time ever he really did care more about the whereabouts of the drink than he did about the story. Others had said it better. He was bored by his own words. Not depressed or made angry, just…fatigued.

Surprising as it sounds, this was a new experience for him. Before, no matter how much he hated what he wrote, he always felt there was a point in carrying on as a writer. Though he had always talked the loser talk, walked the loser walk, tugged the self-deprecating loser forelock – which he now, thanks to (gack) therapy, understood was simply a form of psychological pre-planning, a way out of his mistakes, a habit to pre-empt any criticism that might have made him hate himself more than he did on his own – this, this new sense of quietude and resignation, was something different.

This very morning, for instance, he reread yet another story he had written not long before, and an unfamiliar and frosty certainty of judgment descended upon him. It was as if he was looking at someone else’s words, someone else’s mind. He had no emotional connection to what he was reading, though it was nothing less than the child of his own brain. He should have cared, would have cared in the past, but he didn’t care now. The writing was perfectly okay; perfectly serviceable; it did the job. It was not shite. It did not, however, reverberate with the sound of music in the distant hills, as Chandler once put it; it did not hold his interest, stylistically, contextually, for what it said or for how he said it.

And yet none of this troubled him. He simply thought: well: where’s my drink? That’s that. It’s done. The Word is gone and done with me. Whatever Tongue I had to speak it has fallen from my Head. (This was the way his mind spoke to him, always in a cadence that aped the Biblical.) Nor – and this was the strange thing, the new thing, the for-the-first-time fantastic thing, the cataclysmically original development in his thinking – nor, he thought, is it my fault.

Not only the ability to speak in the tongue had left him; so had the desire. And now that the desire was gone, a lovely peace spread through him, and he imagined himself in deeper pleasures, such raptures of mere being as he had never known before. Skiing, for instance, but not thinking about skiing, with the bright snow up in the black branches of the fir trees, and the sun on the snow in the trees, and no sound except the hiss of his skis through the light snow. Or swimming in truly cold water, the kind that you think could snap your bones, and then stepping out on the rocks, the sun on his upper arms, on the outside of his upper arms, where the shoulder rounded; this had always been one of his favorite sensations, the hot sun on his arms, and now he could enjoy it, instead of saving it for – what? Not for some story any more, that was for sure. He did not feel the need to write this down. Even when the sun on his arms made him remember someone from years before who made him feel that way, he thought: nothing. She was gone, had lifted off and left him alone, to himself, to be calm, to simply be. She was no longer necessary to his peace of mind. Neither was the storage of the details. All that mattered now was the sensation, and maybe, once in a while, a few thoughts about the sensation. But nothing more.

He sat very still. He no longer had to do anything.

But here’s my question to you. How long do you think it will last?

Ian Brown