Notes On Addiction

Aline Duriaud

[Glamour Bomb]

"The addict is a non-renouncer par excellence...; yet, however, haunted or hounded, the addict nonetheless establishes a partial separation from an invading presence."

"Of course, we no longer exist in a way that renders manifestation possible: we have lost access to what it is to be manifested and even to manifestation itself. Nothing, today, can be manifested."
Both quotes from Crack Wars, Avital Ronell

"At first I thought it was a surface technique but it went beyond technique...it didn't always work, and sometimes she would tire of it and it was as though her radar had failed; but when it did work, it was magic."
Marilyn Monroe, An Appreciation, Eve Arnold, as quoted in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Church

What if knowledge in the Western tradition, pitched over a fault line splitting mind and matter into irreparably separate and unequal entities, is, in its essence, addiction? Addiction as compulsive acquisition of external substances and elements to materialize a solid, contained self. Or the reverse: what if the modern disease of addiction and the voyeuristic fascination with it prevalent in all areas of contemporary culture mirror a fundamentally addictive process of thinking and acquisition of ideas/knowledge in the Western tradition?

A mirror elucidates and throws into relief but does not necessarily critique. Many contemporary references to addiction, particularly drug addiction and particularly cocaine and heroin addiction, perhaps also amphetamine addiction, are vicarious, fascinated views operating from inside the mirror, reflecting addiction as fizzy, glamorous lure connected to thinness, to a voracious, vampiric consumption that paradoxically abnegates materiality, to a fantasy feminine that swallows and gobbles and wastes away. Trainspotting. Permanent Midnight. CSI episodes. Tabloid obsessions with Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Anna Nicole Smith (obsessions which conflate death, whiteness/blonde-ness, consumption and femininity underpinned in all three examples by the unacceptable spectre of uncontrolled food consumption and excess flesh. Food addiction symbolizes an abject, shameful aspect of excess and doesn't reflect light with comparable glitter. All three women are/were, for better or worse, survivors); celebrity rehab stories; movies such as Rush, Blow, Candy, Traffic, reveal nothing except addiction, which cannibalizes metaphor because it is, and is about, stuff.

Addiction means taking outside inside to fill a hole. I don't pretend to have access to a space beyond the logic of addiction: like the TV show The Prisoner, whenever I imagine I am outside addiction I am back inside. I, too, write from within the mirror. And yet, I want to believe in a different way of knowing; a soul-connected, embodied way, which provides space for new metaphors and forms of materiality, of manifestation.

A strong desire, here, to list iconic images and narratives of drug addiction. To use. To be invaded, obliterated, held hostage. To be fascinated. To replicate to infinity like a filmed video monitor screen.

"In his more restrained estimations, Freud has characterized the addict as evoking the charm of cats and birds with their inaccessibility, their apparent libidinal autonomy. This is not very far from his description, in another context, of women."
Crack Wars

A compulsion to parasitically quote. To chase, jump on the back of, hitch a ride on other sources.

Marilyn Monroe represents Whiteness as Ultimate Femininity. I chew up critiques of the myth of Monroe, which fan my dreams of being "outside". Monroe is Snow White (pure drugs).

"Although the story insisted that Marilyn was Cinderella, she was always much closer to Snow White, down to the iconography of her look: skin as white as snow, lips as red as cherries, eyebrows black as ebony. First childishly innocent, then terrified, fleeing victim, then beautiful corpse encased in a coffin made of glass. ... The myth of Marilyn Monroe makes her both wicked queen and persecuted heroine... the tale is one of self-division. The story opens with a mirror, and the fatal need for sexual perfection. The conflict in the mirror is between mother and daughter, and between self and image: as the clever, skilled, deceptive performer grows older, she fears the waning of her desirability. This fear leads her to kill the beautiful young daughter, an image of her own lost perfection".
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

In Snow White, the Evil Queen is an adult (ageing) woman threatened by the arrival of Snow White, a beautiful virgin child with alabaster skin and red lips. The Evil Queen trades on her beauty. Snow White risks supplanting her in the eyes of the King so the Queen turns to witchcraft to destroy her enemy, disguising herself as a crone and employing corset laces, a poisoned comb and, finally, a drugged apple to destroy Snow White. Still, after she believes Snow White dead, a mirror reports implacably to the Queen that she is not the fairest of them all.

The mirror rules. Snow White's powerful mix of purity/white-ness is simultaneously currency and product.

The Queen's need to envision herself solely through the lens of male attention (in Snow White the King is the off-the-scenes mover and shaker) is her undoing. Jealousy is a useful emotion, which signals the awakening of creativity. Constructively chanelled, jealousy is a source of action and creative force. Turned in on itself into obsession, jealousy is destructive. So the Evil Queen's creativity (witchcraft and sorcery) is used in the service of the mirror, which kills her.

Mirrors, explains Lexa Rosean's comprehensive The Encyclopedia of Magickal Ingredients, are ruled by Hecate and Narcissus. In magickal terms, mirrors are portals to the past and the future. Hecate, "The Queen of Ghosts", is the Goddess of liminality. Liminal states are states of transition. Derived from the latin limen (threshold), liminal recalls a wavy heat haze rising off asphalt, simultaneously palpable and substanceless, neither here nor there. A blind spot located on a seam.

Hecate is a Crossroads Goddess, of untamed spaces, and of graveyards. As such, she protects inhabitants of the in-between -- stateless people, especially illegal immigrants, and those of no fixed orientation or gender. She connotes witchcraft and sorcery as expressions of creative (feminine) power. Furthermore she is a reminder that the power of metaphor, originally a Greek word meaning transfer (meta "across" and pherein "to bear, or carry") resides in-between.

Mirrors symbolise the veil between time (past and present) and worlds, and between the metaphorical and the literal. In Cocteau's filmed version of Orpheus, Jean Marais (Orpheus) passes through a mirror to find beautiful Death. They are also used to scry. Scrying is a form of divination. Traditional scrying instruments include polished crystals, animal livers, well water and black molasses; surface and depth together, a reprieve from Narcissus' locked closed circuit loop.

A conflict between desires and desirability. To be desired/to honour her desires. To attempt control of what is desirable about one, ones' image, to eternally regard oneself from the outside -- leads to fragmentation. Resistance is possible, a space of in-between presided over by Hecate and sorcery as creative manifestation, although to ascribe to magic and witchcraft fantastic access to an untrammeled "feminine" is naive. One foot in and one foot out might be more realistic.

Rocks. A sunny late afternoon. Sunlight catches a water puddle. A husky with blue eyes on the grass. A rose bush, pale pink and orange cream roses give off a trailing smell. Thick clumps of grass border a thin path on the edge of the field. The path is fenced off. Grass is dotted with flowers. Along the river trees and bushes are hung with small, purple, dusty bunches of inedible berries.

"Capote remarks flippantly: "Poor innocent me. And all this time I thought you were a bona fide blonde." To which Marilyn retorts, "I am. But nobody's that natural. And incidentally, fuck you.""
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

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Footnotes:

[1] Crack Wars (Literature, Addiction, Mania) by Avital Ronell 1992 University of Nebraska Press

[2] The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Church, 2004 Granta Books

[3] The Encyclopedia of Magickal Ingredients by Lexa Rosean, 2005 Paraview Pocket Book

Drawing © "Light/Dark" Aline Duriaud 2007