Open Mike: The Unwillingness List (OT)

Old joke:

Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Only one, but the lightbulb has to be willing to change.

I'm a member of the recovery community. I'm an alcoholic, and my drug of choice was beer. I switched to bourbon whiskey when I was 19, because it was more efficient and easier to manage, but I never liked bourbon. In fact I rather hated it. I drank for 19 years, and it took eight of those to quit. As of today I've been sober for 34 years, two months, and 19 days. My sobriety date (first day sober) was a Monday.

Anyone can get help getting sober, and the help available is usually enough. But there's one thing no one can help an addict or alcoholic with, and that's willingness. It's the one thing no one else can supply. The addict/alcoholic has to be willing to change. It's often said in my 12-step program that all you have to do is show up and bring willingness.

If you have experienced the power of willingness in one sphere or another, you might find that it is a gift that keeps on giving. A lot of our impediments in life are self-imposed, and, often, willingness is the one crucial thing that's lacking or absent. We might be unwilling to forgive ourselves; unwilling to make up with a family member or friend we haven't spoken to in years; unwilling to try or make an attempt at something we wish we could do; unwilling to face our limitations or deficiencies; unwilling to give up bad habits, old dreams, or old defense mechanisms; unwilling to see ourselves clearly; unwilling to measure ourselves against the world (Ezra Pound put this sharply when he said writers must "dip their metal in the acid of known or accessible fact"*). There are all kinds of things that might be holding us up because we cannot bring willingness to bear. Getting sober or drug-free is just one example, albeit a vivid one. 

A modest exercise
My suggestion here is that it could be profitable in the long term for us to take a look at what we're unwilling to do, be, or try. An unwillingness list, if you will. Think about it, then make a real pen-to-paper written list of the things you're most unwilling to do in your life. Take a few days to think about it more and add to the list. Then put them in order.

(Looked at from the other angle, the list might give us a good idea of where we are being the most pigheaded, or stubborn, or hateful, or fearful, or weak, or unforgiving. People of my type who cannot get sober usually will not—they're stubborn and recalcitrant. And determined to stay that way.)

I only have about eight things on my own unwillingness list. But it sure was eye-opening, and clarifying, to put them on paper and let them stare back at me. The question the list begs, of course, is, can I bring myself to become willing to set these things right? ...Or give them up? (Yoda said, "Do. Or do not.") How much do I want the rewards that willingness might bring? What have I got to lose if I become willing, but fail?

Just a suggestion.

Mike 

*That's from The ABC of Reading, an uncompromising but enlightening and enjoyable book. In it Pound has very high standards for readers and writers. You get to, I guess, if you are the mentor of James Joyce and the editor of The Waste Land, helped found the Imagist movement, and helped discover and encourage major writers from Robert Frost to H.D. to Ernest Hemingway. The two greatest photographs of him are by Alvin Langdon Coburn and Richard Avedon, the latter of which I have hanging on my wall but (usually) obscured by frosted glass.

Avedon's Pound
behind a sliding door

Pound's reputation is in permanent nadir because of his collaborations with the fascists in Italy. After the war he was imprisoned for treason and placed in custody (in a mental hospital) for many years, yet never recanted. In the filing cabinet of my mind, he's part of a whole category of people no one pays proper attention to because they or someone else ruined their reputations, whether deservedly or not. The list includes, for example, Joan Crawford, an amazing actress whose reputation was permanently injured by the hatchet-job performed on her by one of her adopted children, Christina, whom Joan evidently didn't like much at all, probably for good reason. Curiously, the "wire hanger" scene that everyone knows about and remembers, which permanently stains any retrospective estimation of Joan Crawford's work, isn't even in the book! Christina Crawford told many lies in her book, but she never alleged physical abuse. Joan Crawford simply didn't like wire hangers, probably because they could leave creases that would remain visible when the garment was worn, something a perfectionist, detail-oriented actress would be concerned about. (My grandmother had clothes hangers that were padded and covered with satin. Like these.) Did Joan fly into a rage because Christina used wire hangers? Probably. Did Christina think that was extremely petty and unreasonable? No doubt. Did Joan beat the child with a wire hanger over it? Almost certainly not, or it would have been in the book. So it's not sufficient reason to not watch Sudden Fear, say. Another writer whose best work is forever marred and blocked from consideration, at least in the West, is Karl Marx, whose critiques of capitalism were spot-on and useful—or would be, if anyone read them. It's his other ideas, chiefly his predictions for what he considered a necessary future, that made him anathema, a fate from which he cannot be rehabilitated. It's too bad, because even Adam Smith believed capitalism had to be tempered with stronger altruistic values. Smith didn't conceive of capitalism without Christianity as a counterbalance, and says so, in so many words, in The Wealth of Nations.

I'll at least think about it before throwing babies out with the bathwater...although I understand the impulse, and I appreciate the feelings of people who differ with me on this score, or in any particular case. It's simply too much to demand both great art and that artists be great people in every respect and for their whole lives. I still think Annie Hall is a masterpiece, for example. Artists can certainly put themselves beyond the pale for me (the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the photographer Joel Peter Witkin are people whose work I prefer never to look at). And sometimes the reputation thing can even work the other way around; for instance, I'm deeply convinced that Michael Jackson was a serial child molester on a large scale, but the public, by and large, declines to believe the obvious or to hold him accountable. The point is that I will reserve judgement, look into it myself, and make up my own mind about creative people and their art. It's part of having an open mind, in my view. In any event, it's far too late to erase the influence The ABC of Reading had on me in my middle teenage years, sitting, absorbed, on the old couch in the room we called the "bookroom."

That's an awful long apologia for simply mentioning The ABC of Reading! Mike is being all Mike-y this Black Friday morning. Sorry. But, as Wikipedia puts it, Pound's "economic and political views have ensured that his life and literary legacy remain highly controversial."

B&H Photo Black Friday Deal

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Featured Comments from:

Sean: "My father was an alcoholic from the never-complain-never-explain section of the Irish immigrant community in my city. He met a kindred spirit, my mother, in a bar a couple of years before I was born. They had each crossed the sea safely and without company after leaving their hometowns for what they hoped would be a life of greater freedom and opportunity. Freedom to do what they wanted, to put themselves first, to be out of the shadow of Irish catholic guilt and shame, to make a pub their church, its bar their altar, Guinness their communion wine, and the barman their priest.

"Now, those who have ever sat in the dark, in a house without heating, or gone to bed hungry or to school with holes in their shoes will, understandably, develop a healthy unwillingness to forgive enduring the consequences of another's self-indulgence.

"Here’s a suggestion for anybody struggling to forgive. Be willing to be OK with not forgiving. You don’t have to turn yourself inside out trying to turn the other cheek; you’re not Desmond Tutu or Jesus Christ, and you don’t have to listen to sermons. You are not a station of the cross for someone's tale of redemption."

Tulio Emanuele: "Your insights on willingness are truly amazing. I don’t know enough superlatives to adequately express that…I have practiced medicine for 42 years, and now I am writing a memoir about my career. You know that drug abuse is a big problem in this country. As a 'prescriber' I am required to take a course about safe practices on the use of narcotics. That would be fine, except that the brainless 'experts' who write the compendiums for those courses are absolutely unwilling to admit that the people who become addicted are at least in part responsible for their condition. These 'experts' should hire you as a consultant…seriously!"

Mike replies: Let me tell you a short story about a real guy. Call him Jason (not his real name). He's an able craftsman in one of the building trades. Married with four children of various ages—and by the end of this story, at least one grandchild. The rumor I hear is that his father and one of his brothers, and maybe an uncle, died of alcoholism. Jason comes into a 12-step program and stays for a few weeks or months, but then disappears again, and does this over and over. Eventually he succumbs to the idea of going to inpatient rehab. He returns from rehab very full of himself, insisting his problem is solved and gone for good. After a while he's drinking again.

Meanwhile, he simply doesn't follow the program of the group. Get a sponsor? "Nah, I don't need that." Do the steps? "That God crap isn't for me." He goes into rehab a second time. He comes back quiet and angry. Still refusing help. He doesn't need any of our "bullshit." At one meeting, he lectures the group angrily and then storms out. One of his remaining brothers drives into a tree at high speed with a BAL way over the legal limit. Jason really tries for a cycle or two. He can be friendly and coöperative at times, but sooner or later he backs away, or starts spewing grievances again, and then disappears.

I asked to speak to him once and he came over and we talked recovery for an hour and a half on my patio. It went so well I thought for sure he would ask me to sponsor him. But then nothing. When I broached the subject a couple of months later: "Thanks. It's all taken care of."

My favorite book on alcoholism is Under the Influence by Ketcham and Milam. Despite, not because of, the fact that they take a dim view of 12-step programs. They insist that the disease is entirely physiological. They miss the fact that some of us refuse timely treatment and go on drinking, for far longer than any reasonable person ever would, because of character traits like stubbornness, pride, personal exceptionalism (that is, we think we're different), and ego. We think the rules don't apply to us. We teem with grievances, anger, and resentments. It's everybody's fault but our own. We can be almost unbelievably selfish, without thinking we are. Half of us went through half our lives thinking we ourselves were the "higher power." We pick and choose from among the remedies that are known to work, accepting only those we approve of, and sometimes then only grudgingly. We will not simply do what we're told. The Sinatra effect: "I'll do it my way." Or, "maybe you can't do it by yourself, but I can." (I actually used to say that.) We have a thinking problem as well as a drinking problem. That's what the 12-step programs are are designed to help with: what they offer, at their best, is what Carl Jung called "a transformative spiritual experience," sometimes also called a "profound personality change." Some of us who suffer from the disease also have to change our thinking. It requires work, sometimes a lot of it.

Somewhere along Jason's path, his wife leaves him. He ends up attending a total of at least five 28-day rehab programs that I know of. At least he's persistent, right? Could be he's on the path to lasting sobriety—and it's just a very rocky path. On one of his return trips his new girlfriend accompanies him to meetings as a support person. But as far as I can see he's still got simmering resentments against the program, the people in the program, the clinics he attended, his doctors, former customers who will no longer hire him, the police, people who say things he doesn't agree with—could be anybody.

Finally we don't see him for two years or so. Then he comes back in about sixty pounds lighter, and he tells us this time it's for real, this time he has to get sober, this time he doesn't have any choice—he has advanced liver disease, and his doctors are telling him that unless he stops drinking he'll be dead within a year.

And STILL he won't follow the program.

I tell him my own story—"just try it. What have you got to lose?" He sure has a lot to gain. "I will. This time I will." Only a few weeks later he disappears again, and six or eight months after that the news goes around: did you hear about Jason? A few people in the program who knew him best attend the funeral. Early 50s. His obituary (I just reread it) doesn't mention alcohol or drinking or cirrhosis or anything of the sort.

So was Jason's problem entirely his disease? He certainly had that, but that wasn't all he had. You have to want what the sober alcoholics have. And you have to be willing to go to any lengths to get it. Jason might finally have become willing before the bottle chased him into his grave. But if he did, by then it was too late.

darlene: "I've always admired Ezra Pound, and like you, I don't let politics cloud my appreciation for art or writing. When it comes to Joan Crawford well, mothers often get unfairly blamed for all kinds of things in the name of being disciplinarians or authority figures. Honestly, mothers can't afford to be wimps! But I digress—I can't imagine what life as an actress entails. Personally, I'm much happier staying behind the scenes and living a quiet life. It's humbling to reflect on the walls we build for ourselves just by resisting a little openness or effort. I'm so happy you're in recovery because the world would be a dimmer place without you in it. I suffered a great loss to addiction this year—my niece and goddaughter. She turned 40 on January 23 and passed away from an overdose on January 25. We tried everything over the years, countless rehab programs, but addiction is a relentless struggle. Losing her took a piece of my heart and left a sadness that's hard to put into words. Your bravery in sharing your journey is inspiring and deeply meaningful. It's just one more reason I like you—not only as a writer and artist but as a person. Thank you for being such a light."

Mike replies: Very sorry for your loss. I can't speak to drugs, and there are so many of them, but most alcoholics either die drinking or die of drinking. It makes the work of recovery pretty serious.

Comments

[Tom Burke]

Have you read “Monsters: What do we do with great art by bad people?” by Claire Dederer? I haven’t (possibly yet), but she addresses the same question. I have browsed it, and I believe that her view on Manhattan is the opposite of yours. She brings a very female sensibility to her reactions; is it possible that women judge art by men differently from how men do so?

[I think it's different with different individuals. By the way, I was once instructed to put a portrait of Woody Allen on a magazine cover, and my refusal to do so was one of the few things I went to the wall for. So don't imagine that I've completely forgiven him or that I indulge his transgressions; it's merely that I don't also condemn all of his art. (I also thought "Manhattan" was creepy, but that was just my personal reaction.) --Mike]

[John Krumm]

One of my favorite writers is Native American author Sherman Alexie (also my wife's favorite). He was canceled and pulled from many store shelves and classrooms a while back for having an affair with a student (an adult student, but much younger and someone whose work he promised to consider, the usual story). I still read and appreciate Alexie. He's brilliant, especially at memoir. I used to teach his short stories in my American Literature classes.

Karl Marx I've only come to appreciate the past couple years, but now I'm reading him with the same enthusiasm as I used to read Noam Chomsky. I'm in an online book group reading the new translation of Capital (Princeton edition), which is excellent when I understand it. The online group has over 150 readers, so lots of experts, and we go into breakout rooms for discussion. Early in life, Marx thought that revolution was inevitable. But he constantly revised his ideas and his major work, Capital. Later in life, he was more inclined to say we will either have some form of socialism, or common ruin. In other words, nothing is inevitable, but he could see the trend lines.

[Jeff1000]

Mike, you might want to peruse Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. It’s a lengthy tome but well worth the slog: around a thousand pages. Wallace’s novel is crammed with amazing insights about drug and alcohol addiction, including a deep dive into Alcoholics Anonymous.

[Joseph Kashi]

Some people have been validated or rehabilitated by history, although usually posthumously. Van Gogh is one such example - he never sold a painting while alive.

Bach is another example: it appeared that Bach's music would gradually become lost until revived by Mendelsohn in the late 1830s.

Civil War general and post-war President Ulysses Grant is yet another example. Grant was trashed by early historians, mostly Southern partisans of the "Lost Cause", in the first few decades after the Civil War as a drunk who headed a corrupt administration and as a butcher who bludgeoned "noble" Robert E. Lee with mass attacks that caused massed casualties among his own men.

Now, though, after more thoroughly researched and objective histories by the likes of Ron Chernow, Grant emerges as a champion of fair policies and reconciliation and also is seriously studied by professional military officers as the first successful modern general, who broke with the Napoleanic past and incorporated grand strategy and modern tactics into everything that he did.

[Yonatan Katznelson]

You're letting Ezra Pound off very easy, with your mention of, as if in passing, "his collaborations with the fascists in Italy", with no further details.

Pound was a passionate antisemite, a fan of eugenics ("to conserve the best of the race") and an admirer of both Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, to mention just a few of his better qualities.

Does any of this diminish Pound's talents as a poet, or the importance of his opinions on writing? Not a bit. On the other hand, defects of character such as these are not something to gloss over.

[John Sullivan]

Yes, willingness. My Alanon program requires it.
I was unwilling to continue working at my job after my department was eliminated. I became willing to work in my new position for a year training my fellow workers and controlling my temper until my birthday when I retired. It was difficult not to storm out with curses but was the best thing I could do for myself and my family. My sponsors talked me through it, but it wouldn't have been possible without willingness.
I am now happily retired and get to do art anytime I want!

[Paul]

I think 12 step helps a lot of people but the idea of willingness is pretty judgemental for the people it doesn't work for.

Ideally we are all willing to fix the things that are wrong with us, but are we able? I am willing to eat less, exercise more, be smarter, be kinder. It is just that doing those things I find very difficult.

Addictive things are addictive because they are addictive. I'm staring at this phone at the moment instead of practicing the guitar in my hands because, for one, it's designed to take my attention. I have to fight with it every day to claw back part of my brain and I've been doing so for like 11 years. I'm willing to change it but to incorporate something into my life that is designed to be addictive is a daily challenge and I don't think pure willingness is really the issue.

[Robert Roaldi]

I read an article once that stated that Woody Allen and his ex-wife were already estranged when she adopted Soon-Yi so that she was never in any sense his daughter. The article stated that Woody did not come to date Soon-Yi till she was already 21. They're still together, which should say something, but that fact is almost never dwelt on. She seems to be an intelligent independent woman, should it not be the default to think that she knows what she is doing. It seems incorrect to assume that she has no agency. Now I have no idea how true any of these details are, but they at least cast some doubt on the commonly held notion of him being a (near) pedophile. At the very least it makes me think twice when I read media, even more so these days.

OTOH, yes the film Manhattan creeps me out too.

Given the behaviour of many public figures these days, it seems almost quaint to worry about Allen's actions. It's no excuse of course, if he did do the worst things that are attributed to him, but he's no Weinstein, is he?

[Mike G]

I looked up the synopsis of Mommie Dearest on Wikipedia. It appears that the scene containing the coathanger beating is in the movie adaptation.

Maybe the movie's embellishments and fictionalizations can be considered as unfair treatment, but I have to wonder if the denials of the accounts in the book, made by interested parties, are substantial enough that we can choose not to believe the book?

People are generally predisposed to disbelieve victims when they don't fit the description of an ideal victim (presumably Christina got to live in Joan's house for free and benefit in her career from Joan's reputation and connections, and she may have actually been an unlikable person). There is a constant pipeline of (mostly female) celebrities we can judge for not showing the gratitude we'd imagine ourselves to have when given the same material privileges, and the ingrained mistake is to think they have what they need to live fulfilling lives despite their upbringing.

---

On the topic of Ezra Pound, there is an interesting profile of the English painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis, also a contemporary of Pound's and a fascist. It's titled "The Art of Being Wrong".

I highly recommend the new translation of Volume 1 of Capital!

[Jim K]

I saw your photo of Pound behind frosted glass and thought--why is he showing a picture of Elmo. Not that Elmo isn't a profound philosopher in his own right...

[Scott]

I agree that reasonable people can disagree about how to treat each individual artist. When I saw Manhattan shortly after its release, it was generally socially acceptable yet I felt uncomfortable with the main character’s behavior, which of course was Allen reflecting on his own behavior (I do not claim any moral superiority from this. I took no action at the time and both sought out and enjoyed Allen’s other works). Today I can’t bring myself to watch any of it, nor do I try.

Similarly, I agree with your assessment of Michael Jackson. Yet I can’t resist his music. He was most likely a despicable human being, but was one of the premier musicians and performers of his time. I’m an amateur musician, and recently learned some of the parts to some of his most famous recordings. To me they are breathtaking in their simultaneous complexity and simplicity.