The Booze and Me

I had an interesting experience yesterday morning. I was putting a couple of clean glasses back in their cupboard and as I turned back towards the other part of the kitchen my attention was caught briefly by a corner cupboard I am normally barely aware of, a glass enclosed space whose contents are generally invisible to me. "The bar", a cupboard with a pretty good collection of liquors: whisky, gin, vodka, rum, etc. Lonely bottles that haven't been touched in all the fifteen months we've lived in this apartment. For whatever reason, those bottles got my attention. Their absurd stature as ignored objects, their complete lack of seductive power, their petty ordinariness.  (Well, I strongly suspect the reason for this sudden awareness is that the night prior I had been watching tv and there was an alcoholic character whose early experiences in recovery made me chuckle. And wince.) In any case, it was a brief diversion, a few seconds. But it got me thinking. After I stopped drinking (14 years ago, time flies!), and even though sobriety produced all kinds of wonderful effects for my general well being, my mind was shadowed by the notion that abusive drinking was just part of my nature, that I was hard wired for it. I accepted that notion, even embraced it, and lived happily with the knowledge that, regardless of my hard wiring, in sobriety I had been granted freedom over the tyranny of the bottle. It was wonderful to have gained the knowledge, a knowledge only attainable through experience, that "nature is not fate". Until many years into sobriety and given the right conditions, the image of a bottle could still produce in me something akin to cold sweats. Not often at all, to be sure, but it could happen. But when I noticed those bottles yesterday it occurred to me that the wiring in my brain is perhaps not so hard after all. It's not just that I have absolutely no desire to drink (that went away long, long ago), but that yesterday's experience seemed to produce a new insight: even those parts of our brain that seem most immutable and most determinative of our identity can be subject to revision. But it's quite a paradox, for at the same time the surprising change seems to bring me to something even "truer" about myself, something that really does ease my mind and spirit. It reminds me of an article I read a few years ago by a philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment, but it was a defense of a non-narrative, non-lineal orientation towards selfhood. It made sense at the time. (Richard Rorty argued along those lines in his chapter on the contingency of selfhood in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, but this was someone else I was reading.) So, I raise my glass of sparkling water and proclaim that today everything is contingent. Long live the nanometer motors inside our brain cells! Surely if the socratic injunction to know thyself is to be taken on, well oiled nanometer motors will drive the journey. Embrace the moment.