I’ve been reading and writing history all my adult life, and one of the things I’ve learned is that the wisdom of the ages is sometimes worthless. The vicarious experience supplied by the study of the past can be pointless, functioning as the itinerary of the tourist who returns home with all his assumptions about foreign customs confirmed by what he hasn’t bothered to understand about them.
In other words, experience in and of itself tells us nothing. The event, any event, has to be commemorated if it is to remain an event with lasting effects—which is to say that the past as such is meaningless, that either we keep responding to what has happened, keep remembering and recording this or that moment as a significant event, or its effects will be lost on us in the present. The historian is then the analogue of the psychoanalyst who provides a talking cure: he or she (or they) is telling a story that, by establishing a primal scene from which perceived trauma still derives, creates a coherent narrative out of the random remnants of the client’s memory.
But often enough, a coherent narrative—one with a beginning, middle, and end—can’t be constructed from the raw materials of memory, or of archival research. The continuities disappear, and you know that because history isn’t repeating itself, there’s nothing more you can learn from the past. At that point, you can leave it behind. In fact, you have to. Otherwise you can’t respond adequately or inventively to the thick, coming future that is always obliterating the abiding present.
The great revolutionaries of the modern epoch understood this imperative more acutely than most of us will ever have to. James Madison is my favorite example. His close study of ancient and modern republics, which he undertook in 1786 as a way of finding a way beyond the “elective despotism” that threatened the new United States of America, convinced him that all previous republics had failed because they had allowed the rights of property to trample the rights of persons: “In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots & lawgivers the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”
Madison was able, as a result, to design a republic that kept these rights in balance, by departing in every respect from the specifications of earlier political theorists, from Aristotle and Polybius to Machiavelli, Harrington, and Montesquieu. For example, where they had seen historical time (the metaphor they typically used was “commerce”) as the solvent of republics because it brought social differentiation and conflict—the division into “the Class with and the Class without property,” as Madison put it the constitutional convention of 1787—the young American saw it as the bulwark of political stability, because it would produce more factions, that is, more diverse interests, and thus less likelihood of a despotic majority. He left the past behind by enlisting historical time, by harnessing the inevitable—economic growth and development, social change— to the project of preserving popular, republican government.
This thinking, call it original intent or a founding principle, was anything but exceptionalist. A recent fad of historians has been their solemn denunciation of “American exceptionalism,” by which they mean the belief of the founders and their descendants among intellectuals and policy-makers that the US was, and somehow remains, exempt from the vicissitudes of time or the laws of history. It’s a preposterous idea, as a merely cursory examination of the historical record shows. I can’t think of one important thinker, writer, or policy-maker who shared this belief—not even the darling of the anti-modernists, Henry Adams—but historians continue to attribute it to them.
In any event, we alcoholics understand what the revolutionaries did, down bone deep and for good. We know that the received wisdom can’t do us any good. Sure, we read the Big Book and cite or quote it at every opportunity, and we keep telling each other war stories about the human wreckage we’ve left in the wake of our drinking days. We also claim to speak from our own experience, and only on that basis do we recommend working the 12 Steps (“It works if you work it!”). But we live by a variation on the law of dreams: we know that either we leave the past behind or we die. And as we keep moving beyond it, we’re constantly reminded that our individual experiences don’t make us an exception to any rules, whether the laws of history or of thermodynamics (old Henry Adams deployed the latter to suggest that the US would sooner or later arrive at the inevitable evolutionary stage of socialism).
All this by way of preamble—yes, I buried the lede again—to congratulating one of my mentors in AA, Brian Good, with whom I spent two weeks in rehab, on his one-year anniversary as a sober citizen of this world. I arrived at Walton House, one of the residences that Legacy, the rehab facility, runs for full-time program participants, on November 1, 2021, after a a week in detox further north in Jersey, still sick, still exhausted, still on the verge of panic. Brian and his sidekick, Byron, were clearly in charge of the place, making dinner for Jeff, Bobby, Eric, Jacob, Tillis, and the office tech working the 4-12 shift, meanwhile supervising the choice of TV show and reminding everybody that we’d be leaving for a meeting in the Pine Barrens soon after dinner, long drive to make the 8:00 start time. They were the elder statesmen of the house, 40 and 50 years old, respectively, the resident geezers until I showed up, at age 72.
That first night was a disaster. I realized that Jacob, probably my roommate, was a bona fide schizophrenic—he informed me that God fucked him in the ass as He explained His worldly purposes—and that I was back in the locker room, a.k.a. the meat locker, where female flesh was treated as something to be tenderized by the violence of our language. I called my girlfriend to tell her I couldn’t stay in this asylum, and her response was calm, matter of fact: “Where you going to go?” At 10:30 PM, after that meeting in the wilds of darkest New Jersey, this was a practical question.
I hung up, went into the kitchen where Brian and Byron were finishing their dinner cleanup, and said, not calmly, “What do you guys know about Jacob? You think he’s maybe a little, I dunno, strange? I mean, I asked him about the wireless password and he starts in with how God fucks him in the ass, also there’s wolves or demons or some goddamn thing out there in the yard in the dark.”
“Yeah,” Brian said, Byron just nodding, “He’s a little strange all right. You should hear what he tells Eric. Kinda scary. He doesn’t belong in rehab, he belongs in a psych ward.”
Byron added, “Yeah, we lock our doors at night.”
“That’s just fucking great,” I said. “I gotta sleep five feet away from this guy? Have you said anything to management about him? Jesus.”
“Nah,” Brian said, “We just figure that everybody knows—he’s not an addict, he’s crazy, it’s pretty obvious. You could mention it tomorrow at headquarters [where we spent six hours a day in AA meetings or focus groups].”
I did, and by the time we got back to Walton House that afternoon, Jacob was gone, packed off to the addict’s equivalent of an ICU. That made my reputation at Legacy, as the guy who makes things happen because he’s got the ear of some big shot; total bullshit, of course, but a useful urban legend. Jeff Cavuoto, who has since died of an overdose, almost certainly of fetanyl, became my roommate.
By that second night, I knew I’d last in rehab because I’d seen Brian and Byron in action, at a couple of meetings at headquarters, and then watched them as they again prepared dinner for the crew. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and why. They said things that rang true, like when I asked Brian how he got to be so fearless in talking about his own fears in front of strangers (some of whom would become friends). “When I left home for detox, my dad drove me, that was embarrassing,” Brian said, “My wife told me, ‘I’m with you on this, but you have to promise me one thing—you’re going to be totally honest. You don’t have to hide from yourself in there. Just be honest.’ So, I made her the promise, and I’m trying to keep it. You see what I mean?”
I did, and I decided, as a result, to imitate him, to do what he did, to see if I could acquire his attitude. This is a guy 30 years my junior, once a high-school science teacher, then a stay-at-home husband, a former track star in college, now bulked up and rounded off like ex-jocks tend to get. Always going on about some esoteric bit of astronomical lore, sometimes drawing up the celestial phenomena he was explaining as if he were back at the chalkboard in front of a class. Somehow, he had gravitas; he became the moral center of Walton House by setting an example for the rest of us, performing the “rigorous honesty” the AA regimen requires, keeping that promise to his wife.
We left rehab the same day, November 15, 2021. He’d been there since mid-October, two weeks before I arrived. The protocol of departure is simple to the point of absurdity: when you get home, find a meeting, get a sponsor, start on the steps. I tried to over-simplify it the night before, by asking Brian to be my sponsor. “What, me?” he said, “Jesus, Jim, I’m thirty years younger than you are, I don’t know shit except that I gotta stay sober.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, saying a line you’ll hear a lot in AA meeting, “I want what you got, Brian, you seem to know how this thing works. I’m betting that you’ll stay sober, and I don’t have a choice, I have to, so I want to be able to talk to you, every fucking day if that’s what it takes. I don’t care how old you are, you’re a whole lot more grown-up than I am. You see what I mean?”
He didn’t, he declined my kind offer of surplus responsibility. But we text each other about once a week, and we organized one Zoom reunion of the guys from Walton House. I think about Brian every day, and I’ll never forget him, not even as I lay dying: after all, he saved my life.
Masterful work professor. I like Brian, and Jacob too.