Live and Let Be(come)
Article by Phil Sroka
Today was the last day of my intensive outpatient treatment. Not that this was due to the medical practitioners having felt that I had successfully fulfilled my treatment plan but rather that the insurance company would no longer cover my stay. I have managed to stay clean and do feel as if I have gained coping skills that will help me to continue on this path. The question of whether or not I am stable is another issue. New medication takes between four to six weeks to take effect, and that’s just to determine if it is working. More often than not it isn’t, and then you are back to square one. Medication is of course not a panacea. There can be a lot of stigma around using psychotropic drugs, and this is understandable. It is often the case that psychiatrists overprescribe. But in the same way that, just because opiates have been overprescribed, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who are in pain; so is it the case with mental illness. The metaphor we use for the mind is typically that of a muscle, but it is much closer to an organ. And just as diabetics suffer from their pancreas not creating enough insulin, so too do those who have mental disorders need dopamine and serotonin.
There is a lot of value to be had in therapy as well. If physical ailments require lifestyle changes, it is only natural to accept that mental issues would require changes in thought. The problem that I do have with therapy, in its transmogrification from psychoanalysis to self-help, is in its acceptance of how things are. In a lot of ways this can be helpful. During my last inpatient stay (I have been Baker-Acted three times), I was told by a particularly insightful social worker that my primary problems are low self-esteem and a fear of the forces in the world that I cannot control. But in other ways this is problematic. If we all just accepted “how things are” nothing would ever change. Due to this I often get frustrated and antagonistic with therapists. Sometimes it seems to me like neo-liberal boot camp, and this causes no end of conflict. Due to my antagonism with such a paradigm, I have caused two therapists, in both group and private settings, to tell me to fuck off. One of the appeals of music is in its transgression. Music pushes boundaries and questions values. Music isn’t a merely a ‘fuck you!’ to the system but begs the system to say ‘fuck you!’ right back. Like my therapists. And the trick in both situations is in having the offensive and catching the other off guard. It is not always the case that we need to have the answers ready-to-hand to solve the problem. It can sometimes be enough just to acknowledge that a problem exists.
In Quincey Jones’ interview with Vulture’s David Marchese, he says that “God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” There is a lot to be said about this. Money has everything to do with commodification, and commodification deals in absolutes – with what “is.” It is about definitions and labels. For me what Jones’ words mean is that once you start trying to “sell” something you have ceased to grow. To transgress. One of my biggest pet peeves is in thinking that ‘survival of the fittest’ means ‘domination by the most fit.’ Natural selection is actually the inverse of majority rule in that those who are the common denominator are less likely to adapt (read: change) to new conditions and therefore perish. More often than not we are doing the best we can with what we have. That in and of itself can be enough. But being transgressive or “new” doesn’t mean ignoring the past. In Jones’ interview he talks about how contemporary pop is plagued by its lack of discipline and ignorance of the history and lessons of music. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky was noted as saying, “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.” There is a myth that genius happens in a bubble, whereas we are actually immersed in a milieu of creative adaptations. And there is nothing wrong with that. If we accept that the human condition is universal it is only natural to assume that we are not necessarily improving on the past but rather are finding new ways to express similar ideas in the present, i.e., re-contextualizing the same lessons.
Whenever someone looks at, say, modern art, you hear things such as “Oh, my child could have done that.” But this misses the point of the image and ignores the world in which it is being displayed. The world is composed of not just what is ‘now’ but also what came before and speaks towards what will be. In our obsession with the present we often lose sight of the fact that the future more often than not determines the past. In this regard I would like to take a look at a passage by Hans-Georg Gadamer from his work The Beginning of Philosophy:
“I think it is necessary at this point to adhere precisely to the fact that something is only ever a beginning in relation to an end or goal. Between these two, beginning and end, stands an indissoluble connection. The beginning always implies the end. Whenever we fail to mention what the beginning in question refers to, we say something meaningless. The end determines the beginning, and this is why we get into a long series of difficulties. The anticipation of the end is a prerequisite for the concrete meaning of beginning.”
Here’s an example: only the future can determine whether my recent treatment was successful. Granted, we can quibble about what we mean by ‘success.’ If my goal is to be clean, we can rewrite the narrative to say that was a stepping stone to my future recovery. But in that, again, are we not rewriting the past? The significance of what has happened to us changes according to where we end up. We fixate on particular moments not only because we need to compose a narrative for ourselves that makes sense of our actions but also because there is so much that happens to us that we cannot possibly take it all in. To put this in context, the average person makes over 30,000 conscious decisions a day. It would be impossible to remember all of them, let alone ascribe them significance. However, if we, say, get in a car accident, we later tell ourselves that had we not misplaced our keys that morning we wouldn’t have been there. Maybe misplacing your keys is something you do regularly or maybe not. Either way we give that moment more import than we otherwise would have had something later not happened. This is also what is sometimes termed ‘fate.’
One of the beauties of a song is that it is contained. It has composite parts – a beginning, middle, and end. One of the ubiquitous lessons of ancient Greek drama is that one cannot measure the value of a life until it is complete. We relish music because it seems to offer an answer. The tragedy of life, however, is that we only ever answer the question of our own after it is already over; from whence we no longer are. But the idea that life only gains significance from other’s perspective is not a diminution. We’d like to think of our story as this overarching epic in which every moment is a potential denouement. But it is more like loosely interconnected short stories in which we briefly, however (in)significantly, touch other peoples’ lives. Music is in essence closure, something real life is short of. Yet if you can break away from this obsession with the now, which invariably focuses on the self, we are better equipped to realize our significance to others.
I often find myself haunted by the chorus from the song “Fireworks” by Animal Collective in that, “I’m only all I see sometimes.” We are all only a collection of perceptions from a particular vantage. If all that was just an isolated occurrence, then none of it would mean anything. In order to ascribe significance, our actions need to bear on another. Society is not something superadded onto us. It is an epiphenomenon of our mutual interaction. Yes, we have individual responsibilities. Yes, we are responsible for our actions. But until you know where your path leads, the significance of those moments will forever be in abeyance. And that significance is not necessarily within our control. We need each other. Just as we need songs to make sense of the periods of our lives where we couldn’t quite see who we were. Or would be(come).