“…hope not being hope
until all ground for hope has
vanished…”
The Hero, Marianne Moore
As I come to the completion of this draft of The Eyes of Addicts, I work hard not be overwhelmed with sadness. This is the story of my son Will’s last thirty years before his death in 20017. I am also exploring the tortured topic of our treatment of those relatives and neighbors we call addicts.
What is the meaning of this term? Why have we never been able to find solutions? Has this term led to a wholesale abandonment of these people?
I am finding fascinating new books and articles that shed light on these questions. Most recent is an article in the September edition of Harper’s. The cover shows a naked brain with a red bullseye on it; the article, “A Hole in The head” by Zachary Siegel, describes the harrowing operation said to cure drug addiction: two holes the size of nickels driven into the patient’s skull with wires run through them to deliver electrical impulses to his nucleus accumbens.
I remember not long ago when depressed women also had picks driven into their skulls to remove parts of the frontal lobes of their brains after which they stopped complaining or having any human reactions at all.
This fix-it society, now that nothing mechanical can be fixed because everything is computerized, will always finds mechanical means of solving spiritual problems.
So, at the beginning of my research, I’m looking for encouraging counter examples. One I’ve found here in Santa Fe is littleglobe. It is a city program involving all kinds of community projects; my friend Doug has just completed months of riding the Cerrillos Road bus, interviewing the riders and putting together a short video. Since buses everywhere in this country, where they exist, are largely used by poor and unhoused people, his video gives us privileged ones a glimpse of lives we routinely ignore.
And, as the City of Santa Fe begins to dismantle the homeless encampments that had been permitted here for years—some time ago, the sheriff made a habit of visiting one of them and handing out food—I turn for inspiration to an initiative in Las Cruces called “Tents of Hope.” This is a city-sponsored encampment where tents are allowed with a central kitchen, bathrooms and social services. As winter approaches, money is being raised to construct three-sided wooden sheds to protect these tents from the bitter cold.
And then there’s the hope I find in surging resistance to the Supreme Court’s axing of Woe V. Wade in the Dobbs decision. Kansas is the first but not the last example of the backlash at the poles the Republican Party should now expect. And this reminds me, due to an email from my dear cousin Melinda, of the single vote cast in Congress by a Tennessee legislator that finally, after decades of struggle, “allowed” us the vote. The story goes that it was this man’s mother who persuaded him to do the right thing.
For me, a recent example of human kindness—the kindness of strangers, as Tennessee Williams called it in the final lines of A Streetcar Named Desire—turned what might have been a lonely and desolate experience into one filled with light. A slight mishap and the attention of strangers landed me in an ambulance where two men, one of them at the end of a forty-hour shift, made certain I was all right. I will never forget their light touches, their concern and their reassurance.
So there is always light in the darkness, some of it coming, for me, from a book of Camille Pissarro’s paintings, and from the light shed on the issue of addiction from a tiny portrait of an unknown man surrounded by the flames of passion (shown above) in the 17th century Ham House I recently visited in England.
This almost entirely unrenovated house was built by William Murray, who was forced to flee abroad in 1649 because he was a supporter of King Charles I who was executed during the English Civil War. Ham House was saved through the brilliant political manipulations of William’s daughter Elizabeth, later Duchess of Lauderdale, who was described by Bishop Burnet as having a “restless ambition, living at vast expense and being ravenously covetous.”
Just the kind of woman I want to know.
And now after days of welcome rain, the sun is shining.
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