Ride the Snake (God on Ice)

Handsome devil, isn't he? Look at that hair!

I'm re-re-re-reading (probably a couple more re's in there) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. If I think about it, that book, next to Dale Pendell's Phamako/Poeia, is one of the most influential books on my life and way of thinking.

Sidebar: Scott's Honest List of Books that Influenced His Thoughts and Actions For Better or Worse
(in no particular order)
1. Dale Pendell - Pharmako/Poeia (introduced me to most of the drugs I have known and loved)
2. Roberto Calasso - The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (the past is not gone; in fact, it isn't even past)
3. Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising (what's your octave?)
4. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings (heroism, sacrifice, romance, and other bad habits)
5. Hans Kung - On Being a Christian (introduced me to the process of thesis/antithesis/synthesis)
6. Idries Shah - Learning How to Learn (and others. Education in the care and maintenance of one's brain)
7. Mark Helprin - Winter's Tale (New York is a beautiful, magical place)
8. John Crowley - Little, Big (what makes us happy, makes us wise)

Anyway, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Just got to the part where they talk about the hoax of Glycon the Snake God and Alexander the Charlatan. I remembered something about Alan Moore worshiping a snake headed deity. Being, in my most basic mental form, a literalist, and subsequently a skeptic (since I'm so gullible, I've developed a defensive reaction formation that makes sure I won't get fooled again, which of course means that I am sometimes too skeptical, and miss what's in front of me, which prompts me to try to be more open and accepting, which means I get fooled, etc. ad infinitum), I was delighted to think that I'd found a hole in my hero's belief system. His god wasn't real!

But of course Moore knew that his "god" was a hoax. In fact, having a god you know is a hoax is the best possible scenario, because if He gets out of line, and you need to put Him on ice for a bit, you can, because he isn't "real." The Catholics have it right on this one. Here's Moore on his snake-god:

When it comes to my spiritual beliefs that’s perhaps why I worship a second century human headed snake god called Glycon, who was exposed as a ventriloquist’s dummy nearly 2000 years ago. Famed throughout the Roman Empire, Glycon was the creation of an entrepreneur known as Alexander the false prophet, which is a terrible name to go into business under.”

A live, tame boa constrictor provided the puppet’s body, while its artificial head had heavy-lidded eyes and long blond hair. In many ways Glycon looked a bit like Paris Hilton, but perhaps more likeable and more biologically credible.

Looks aside, I’m interested in the snake god purely as a symbol, indeed one of humanity’s oldest symbols, which can stand for wisdom, for healing, or, according to etho-botanist Jeremy Narby, for our spiralling and snake-like DNA itself.

But I’m also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist’s dummy. After all, isn’t this the way we use most of our deities. We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.

The big advantage of worshiping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them back in the box. And you know, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go back in the box, they have to go back in the box.

Anyway, thank you very much for listening and from both me and Glycon, a very happy new year to you all.

God needs to chill out most of the time, anyway.

Kratom and PAWS, a follow up post

Update: The original post referenced in this post can be found here. Please check it out.

So, not to get too inside baseball on things, but the post on this blog that has received the most hits in the past year is a post I wrote back in November about getting off kratom. Mostly from people looking up information on how to use kratom to get over their own issues with Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. This suggests a couple of issues to me:

1. People are doing a lot of drugs (duh)
2. People are looking for information on what they assume is a slightly less dangerous substance to do some of the heavy lifting of recovery from arguably more dangerous substances (I'm guessing alcohol and opiates).

Now, anybody who knows me knows that people using plants (technically called ethnobotany) is a hobby of mine. I've done a lot of research, and at the risk of sounding like an idiot, I'd like to state something very clearly - kratom is a very temporary fix for opiate addiction maintenance. Please note that just because it's "natural" (e.g. less processed, closer to the original plant) doesn't mean that it's "safer." It can be just as addictive as anything processed.

Kratom is a very mild narcotic, and most people can do it with little to no problems. People have used it for hundreds of years to enrich their lives and make living on earth a little nicer. The plants are not the problem.

The problem is you.

By you, I mean the person that is looking for relief from the pain of withdrawal, which presupposes that you have already managed to addict yourself to something or other. If you are addictive, your relationship to plants with abuse potential is, let's say, problematic. Another good word is dangerous.

What all the convoluted logic above amounts to is this - if you're trying to get off opiates, be very careful doing kratom. It may temporarily relieve your depression and the physical symptoms of withdrawal, but ultimately it can flip on you, and you will be no better off than when you started. It is easy to develop tolerance to kratom, and there are new processing methods, including extractions and reinforced strains, that up the ante in a big way. It is less expensive, and the social stigma of stirring powder into juice or brewing a relatively inexpensive legal tea is a lot lower than trying to score pills or snorting heroin. I'm not saying it doesn't work. If you are only in mild trouble, you might be able to hang. I'm just saying that, instead of turning to another substance, you might want to address behavioral and chemical issues (i.e. your internal neurochemistry, depression, anxiety) that might be better taken care of by a doctor. If you're self medicating in this way, you risk addicting yourself to a different substance. 

This might leave you saying "Well, dammit, what am I supposed to do, here? I am in pain!" You need to do what keeps you from killing yourself. All I'm saying is that at some point, like with methadone, really you are just extending the amount of time that you will be kicking. It is a risk/benefit analysis. If you're here looking for advice, I don't have a lot to offer, except please, please talk to somebody who's smarter than me. Don't get your advice for getting off drugs from some random guy off the internet. Please take care of your self, and know that with help, you can get through this. Please don't try to do it by yourself.

Checking in after checking out

I celebrated my two year anniversary (and they said it wouldn't last!) with Katie last week by going up to Vermont. It was lovely and fun and boring in all the right proportions, so that we were really happy to be hanging out, just the two of us, and had a great, relaxing time, and then were really glad to get back to the familiar environs of Brooklyn.

One thing I discovered, and I never thought I would say this, is that I think I've had enough of driving for a while. I can't say what changed, but the guy that was really into driving hundreds of miles when Katie and I met on that children's theater tour seems to have had his fill. I came back from the trip exhausted, enervated, and just sort of ready to walk places for a while. That was a week ago, and I feel like I'm just starting to recover.

Since my return I've been working on the novel, which I basically took apart and started over. The structure is profoundly different - to the better, I believe. I'm considering posting a sample chapter up here as it gets closer to finish. Anybody reading this? Feel free to voice your approval. Or disapproval. Or profound indifference.

The Brooklyn Book Festival was this weekend, and I got to meet an author I've been corresponding with on Twitter named J.R. Angelella. He wrote a book called Zombie which I highly recommend. It's pretty grim, and has fewer actual zombies in it than the title might suggest (i.e. none), but it's well written, and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. On a personal note, he's been super encouraging of my writing, and I'd like everybody who reads this (you, especially. Yes, you.) to check out his work.

My currently reading project is The Essential Jung which I've owned for literally 15 years and never cracked, carrying it around with me from place to place. Well, I'm almost through it now, and I'll say this: I'm glad I'm reading it now, rather than when I was younger and expecting every goddamn book I read to somehow solve my life. It's interesting, complicated, dense, deep, and well-written, but I don't feel like it's really life-changing. This is a good thing. I'm a lot calmer now than I have been in a number of years. Maybe ever, and so there is a self, a boundaried I-ness that allows me to reflect on what I read and decide what I may eventually take in. Previously, any given book would be absorbed whole, and then, maybe, assimilated into a world view and behaviors. This was, you can imagine, rather destabilizing. So now I can read and enjoy and absorb without the ache of trying to fill some void inside me (hint: not possible, at least not with words, books, other people's world-views, drugs, sex, relationships, food, projects, art, beauty, poetry, magick, religion, or any of the million other ways that I've tried).

Regardless, I think it will inform a lot of my upcoming reading, which includes finally getting through The Golden Bough and Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Don't worry, there's some fiction in there, too, including some more Murakami, and Brautigan. So there's that. Hope you're well.

Review of Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem

No, really! What if it's all just a, you know, simulation, or whatever? Like The Matrix, right? So we're all just brains in a jar. I mean, how would you know?

Chronic City is aptly named, no coincidence, I'm sure. The characters spend almost their entire narrative life stoned out of their minds in an alternate reality Manhattan full of mysteries and strange phenomenon. Escaped tigers roam the streets, destroying buildings and (possibly) enacting the agenda of the powerful rich Mayor (modeled on Bloomberg), conspiracies seem to crop up at every turn, and the very fabric of reality is called into question. Just like you used to do in your dorm room between epic bong rips.

Chase Insteadman, a bland actor, almost aggressive in his deference, wanders through this buddy-movie of a book, learning a sort of pop-culture midrash from his new friend Perkus Tooth, and trying to find consolation as his fiancee, Janice Trumbull, languishes in orbit, trapped aboard a malfunctioning space station. The story of the lovers separated by an unbridgeable distance has captured the nation, distracting them from wars about which they no longer wish to read.

The love letters between Janice and Chase (all one way, since Chase isn't allowed to write back) provide the emotional center to this otherwise fuzzy, and fuzzy-headed, book. Lethem has an amazing way with a sentence, and his missives from the doomed station are poignant and beautiful (Janice calls herself Chase's "lostronaut"). But they aren't enough to give weight to a story that is essentially about the weightlessness of the artificially created worlds with which we pull the wool over our own eyes.

Ultimately, the shaggy dog story winds up connecting the dots and revealing the story beneath the surface, but there's such a lethargic movement to it that it's difficult to care. The stakes are too low.

The island of Manhattan, almost a character in itself, is well drawn and it's obvious that Lethem is working from a very detailed internal map, both of places and of ideas. Just what we're meant to gain from all the pop-culture and worlds within worlds is another thing entirely. Even though parts of it read with the obsessiveness and wackiness of Pynchon, there's very little of Pynchon's urgency in this book, nor is there the languid discursiveness of summer, urgent in it's desire to negate urgency. No, this book seems locked in stasis, a winter book, a letter from the coldest part of the year, where it seems impossible to believe that the ice and snow and darkness will ever end. That makes for a very particular kind of read. It's all good enough, and in places it's great, but it's so downbeat that it's hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm. It simulates, almost too well, the sensation of being just too stoned to care.