The truth of addiction and co-dependence - Elliott Smith's lyrics (Part 3)

It's a lot easier to tell the truth usually.
Elliott Smith

While there are many different themes present in Elliott Smith's music, the one overriding thing which dominates his lyrics is a sense of wanting to present the truth of a situation, no matter how grim or difficult to look at it may be. In a way, I think he wants us - the listener - to play the role of the uncomfortable voyeur. In Needle in the Hay from his self-titled second album, we are most definitely in that role. But we are seeing the truth in a desperate person's situation.

He's wearing your clothes
Head down to toes, a reaction to you
You say you know what he did
But you idiot kid, you don't have a clue

This can be interpreted in different ways but essentially it seems to be saying that an addict, a desperate person, can look like you or me 'he's wearing your clothes'. Or it's also saying that the addict in this scenario is mimicking his/her naive partner who doesn't really know or understand how manipulative this person they are with is being. Hence, the 'you idiot kid, you don't have a clue'. Non drug users are sometimes ignorant of the world that the addict inhabits. It is a world of continually spinning lies and half truths so as to represent themselves as normal or the same as you or me. This stops them being discovered, or so they think. However, as I have said above, Elliott Smith wants us to see the truth of this situation and so we are taken on a journey with the addict as he goes to 'score' and, in his fevered brain - 'get well'.

Now on the bus
Nearly touching this dirty retreat
Falling out 6th and powell, a dead sweat in my teeth
Gonna walk walk walk
Four more blocks, plus the one in my brain

The addict is in the throes of withdrawal but knows that he just needs to make it to his dealers house. The line that stands out here is the mental, extra mile he has to go to overcome that psychological barrier, 'Four more blocks, plus the one in my brain' - this is the block that tells him he really shouldn't be doing this but he can't help himself because the addiction is controlling his behaviour. When he is able to finally use, the sense of relief pervades him and he almost turns on those who might criticise his behaviour:

And I don't want to talk
I'm taking the cure
So I can be quiet whenever I want
So leave me alone
You ought to be proud that I'm getting good marks

We can almost believe that he's talking to a parent here as the play on words of 'getting good marks' suggests a double meaning of marks as in school grades but also the needle marks from IV injection. He is mocking society's sense of competition and achievement as a contributing factor to why he is like this himself. Again, this is the truth of how a sub culture sees themselves. Smith is trying to shine a light into this area and allow us to see the truth of what is in there. No it isn't pretty but are addicts less valid or somehow less important because of the choices they make? Some might say this is the case but others might argue there is a certain hypocrisy in criticising their lifestyle choices when addiction is so prominent in so called 'mainstream' society. It's just better hidden there and less obvious because it's not concentrated in an alienated, sub culture of downtown Portland.

Needle in the Hay, is a good example of a Smith lyric which appears to not say much on the surface but reveals a lot when you delve into the motivations surrounding it. Also, it is as much a song about addiction as it is a song about codependence because the addict is with a person who either wilfully or naively does not see the issues with their behaviour. They are too wrapped up in the relationship to notice the huge elephant in the room which is sucking the life out of both of them.

The most obvious parallel to this song is The White Lady Loves You More which comes at the issue of addiction and codependence from a slightly different perspective. This time the partner of the addict knows about their behaviour but it powerless to stop it. They believe they are being sidelined by the power and hold that the 'White Lady' has over their partner:

You just want her to do anything for you
There ain't nothing that you won't allow

The barriers are gone, as are all inhibitions but the song poses a question as to why does the partner choose to stay with the person? They know they will always be second to the drug. And it doesn't seem to matter that the addict knows that their partner is aware of their addiction:

It's a long time since you cared enough for me to even be discrete
I know what this metal is for

The song switches perspectives rapidly, going from the partner to the addict and back again. It seems to end with the conclusion that the addict is a willing slave to the white lady. He wakes up from a disturbing dream where his addiction will be uncovered by the law, hence the policeman flashing the light but deals with this disturbance by running into the comforting arms of the drug.

You wake up in the middle of the night
From a dream you won't remember flashing on like a cop's light
You say she's waiting and I know what for

Again, however, it is important to stress that we shouldn't take literally everything Smith is saying or depicting. In his songs, metaphor is important. Both Needle in the Hay and The White Lady Loves You More are songs that highlight issues of addiction, codependence, truth, relationships, secrecy and lies. The songs are not autobiographical. Smith stated in several interviews that he wrote what he saw whilst living in different places. At the times these songs were written, he was living in Portland, Oregon. He was prominent in the musician community of the time (mid 1990s) and saw a lot of these issues in people around him. Later on, his songs take on a distinctly more autobiographical slant but his early days were all about the metaphor and the characters he liked to paint into the background of his songs.

Bioshock: No Gods or Kings, Only Man

“A man chooses

A slave obeys”

Andrew Ryan

The story of Bioshock is one of several overarching metaphors, reaching out across the infinite space of video game lore and culture. One such metaphor is the idea of the player and the creator: where does the creator’s role end and the players begin? Who is the true slave? The player who has to abide by the rules set down by the creator? Or is the creator enslaved by his own creations? Sander Cohen, one of Bioshock’s more elaborate villains, could certainly be labelled in this way, victim as he is to his own explosive ego. The elaborate death scene he creates for Fitzpatrick, all for the sake of his art, tells the tale of a man driven mad by something which motivates and inspires many other much more sane people.

For those of you not in the know (and I doubt there are many who don’t know the big story “twist” of Bioshock) I suggest you look away now but the essence of the trick in Bioshock is that you have been controlled all along to do the bidding of a character called Frank Fontaine, masking himself as the mysterious insurgent - Atlas, no doubt a reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a novel which explores the “role of man’s mind in existence” Is he truly free if he is at the whim of society? A man chooses. A slave obeys. In Atlas Shrugged, top Industrialists have chosen not to be a part of the hyprocrisy anymore and leave the nation behind, causing things to collapse behind them. In Bioshock the player moves through the crumbling dystopia of Rapture, an underwater city created by Andrew Ryan to act as a haven for the intellectual elite to pursue their own ends, away from the corrupting influence of government and commerce. The broken edifice of Rapture is the metaphor for Ryan’s idea coming apart and breaking down. You cannot exist in isolation from the creative source: the world.

At the entrance to Rapture lies a giant statue of Ryan holding aloft a banner with the words: No Gods or Kings, Only Man (See Below). A quote that is further explained by Ryan himself during the game:

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

Of course, the truth is that by leaving only man as the creator and driver of his own fate, he is still compelled to share his vision with other men and if you fill a city with only selfishly motivated people, you shouldn’t be surprised when they no longer choose to cooperate and all start fighting each other. Although society relies on certain roles and conventions to work, human greed is endemic, according to Bioshock and creating an artificial society makes it harder for those conventions to be applied anyway. And don’t expect intellect to save. If anything, it manages to make things a hell of a lot worse especially in the cases of Dr Steinman and Sander Cohen.

So, the player, upon discovering he is the slave of Atlas’ bidding, desperately tries to free himself from the bond created. Although this proves painful, he is able to do it and wake up to the true knowledge of his fate and his existence. Bioshock presents an interesting moral choice to the player. Be the saviour of the little sisters who you encounter in the game, harvesters of the material called Adam which makes plasmids work, or kill them to harvest more Adam for yourself, making yourself more powerful in defeating the big Daddies (machines that protect the little sisters), and also for the ultimate showdown with Fontaine himself. The choice is yours and the creator is the moral guardian of this choice. What’s interesting is that although Ryan’s idea of Rapture does not abide by any imagined morality or moral necessitude, the fate of the player is tied to the moral choices he makes as someone who comes from outside of Rapture. He is of the world and the world has moral constructs that are unavoidable. A man cannot isolate himself from his own morals which brings mockery to Ryan and Rand’s central idea. No matter how utopian a world may seem where man lives and works only amongst his intellectual peers, such a world would be cold, hard, rational and free of the guiding morality of societal structures such as religion. As controversial as ideas of religion and faith may be, they do offer a way of keeping peace. A man chooses a religion, a slave obeys this religion? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on your world view.

In many countries we are free to pursue certain interests and just as fictional industrialists such as Andrew Ryan are free to create their own utopian world of industry and commerce, we are free to watch it tear itself apart as the man who chooses his destiny can also be an unwitting slave to it as well. That is the beautiful contradiction which is so elegantly explored in the Bioshock series. I wholly recommend you take a trip back to Rapture. Not so long ago, I did so myself. Sure, the paint was peeling off the walls a bit more and the damp smell had gotten worse but there’s still the same sense of dark foreboding to keep you wondering if that’s really a splicer waiting around the corner or just the flickering shadow of another broken promise.

A Distorted Reality: Understanding Addiction

“A distorted reality is now a necessity to be free”

- Elliott Smith

In Sam Quinones’ recent book Dream Land about the opiate epidemic in America he touches on this idea that heroin turns individuals into a hyper-consumer. This is because, once you become addicted, your only focus is on consuming the drug and getting money to purchase it. The addict has gone beyond the average consumer, who spreads their habit amongst many different items or objects of desire. The addict is single minded and driven beyond a mere need to consume. Maintaining their reliance on the drug becomes the very single minded essence of their existence.

So why does an addicts life become like this? It may seem obvious on the surface and the average person on the street may well say “Well it’s because they come from a poor, deprived background. They haven’t known anything else apart from poverty and misery.” Yet as Sam points out in his book, this simply isn’t true in the case of the American opiate epidemic where a lot of white, middle class, affluent communities are becoming and have become hooked on heroin. Mostly as a result of an initial addiction to pain pills becoming too expensive to maintain so they end up switching to a cheaper, more effective drug that is abundantly available: heroin.

Heroin is an escape from misery. Well, that is the illusion it sells. The truth is somewhat different. But, initially, it works very well as a temporary relief mechanism from whatever difficult situation you find in life. Yes, a lot of heroin addicts are from poor, deprived backgrounds and areas but there are also a lot of affluent, seemingly comfortable middle class people who succumb to its grip. This is because the roots of addiction can stem from emotional trauma, often experienced in very early childhood. This trauma can take many forms, and in those with a genetic predisposition to addiction, it can plant a seed that develops into the chaos of the drug using lifestyle in adolescence or adulthood.

I use the word ‘seemingly’ there because, ultimately, addiction is no respecter of class or status. You can appear on the surface to have everything: a loving family, a good job, a home, a car. Symbols of middle class success. But if there is an emptiness that gnaws away at the centre of your being then addiction can attempt to fill the hole. Addiction does not care who you are or where you come from. It is there to try and control you and pull your strings. It is up to you how far or how deep you let it take you. Also, I have met many addicts who have experienced no emotional trauma, physical abuse or difficult upbringing but they all shared a common theme: an absence of emotional contact or hands on parenting while growing up. This is crucial. We all need love, whether we think we do or not. This is especially important when it comes to a child’s development. Without love and contact, a child grows up emotionally stunted, confused and disorientated by adult life. Often, they will not know how to handle their emotional responses - they become distorted. Pain dissolves into anger, frustration, rage and other extreme responses to difficult life situations. It takes intervention, learning and gentle coaxing to attempt to repair this damage. Often, it cannot be completely repaired, only managed - much like addiction itself. Those who follow a 12 step recovery programme will know that a central tenet of their philosophy is that active addiction can be arrested and transformed into recovery but the addict remains an addict for life, managing their recovery on a daily basis using spiritual tools of the programme to stay clean.

So, again, we go back to the central question: why do addicts become addicts? Why does heroin take such a grip? This is a simple question with a complex answer. There is no one size fits all response that would suffice. However, as I have outlined above, the common theme is a need to escape, to rise above earthly problems, to provide a temporary relief. For some, addiction is also a romantic notion. Some will look on history’s great artists, musicians, writers and philosophers and seen that they were copious consumers of narcotics; they then elevate this use into a spiritual realm, believing that they were carving their own, distorted reality out of a necessity to be and feel free in the material world. The only problem with this notion is it conveniently neglects to consider the consequences of addiction and the effects on not only the life of the addict but those who love and surround them. Addiction unravels lives, pulls families and relationships apart and causes isolation and misery. The tragic irony is that by attempting to escape misery, neglect or trauma in the first place, the addict actually ends up creating more and more misery, neglect and trauma through the consequences of their addicted lifestyle.

Addiction is an insatiable need or lust. Gabor Mate likens it to the Buddhist idea of living in the realm of hungry ghosts. These beings eat and eat and eat but they are never satisfied because, being non corporeal they cannot properly consume food but they are constantly driven to attempt to feel satisfied. This mirrors a lot of western society you could argue. We are compelled by a need to consume, yet advertising and marketing promotes the idea that we can never be satisfied because there is always something better to purchase that can improve our lives or our social status. When the very nature of our being is exposed as inadequate on a relentless, daily basis then it is not hard to see why addiction is so prevalent in our society.

If you can't change the world, change yourself

"Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself"
- Tony Benn

If the election result on May 7th left you feeling disillusioned, downtrodden, defeated and any other word beginning with ‘D’ that you can think of then…don’t despair! There is hope. And hope is a word that doesn’t begin with ‘D’.

What struck me about the election campaign was that it was very much driven by a culture of fear. The Conservatives peddled a very effective fear mongering warning regarding Labour’s potential management of the economy and any likely deal they may have to do with the SNP to gain power. This fear drove moderate voters in key English marginals away from Labour and into the arms of the far right UKIP, in some cases, and the Tories themselves, in others, splitting their vote in the process. Additionally, the Liberal Democrats took a huge electoral bashing, seemingly punished disproportionately for daring to get in Bed with the Conservatives in a 2010 Coalition arrangement.

But this post isn’t about politics as such. We know the reasons for the election result very well by now. They have been discussed and dissected (there goes the ‘D’ words again!) at great length in the media. If anything is more clear, it is that a vast number of people vote with their own interests at heart. I was taught this in my A Level Politics course many years ago. The primary question they ask themselves is: “Do I feel better off now than I was 5 years ago?”. If the answer is yes, or even if they feel the same, they will be reluctant to vote to remove the incumbent government. If the answer is a fundamental no and they are in fact much worse off, then they are more likely to change their vote. But there are, of course, qualifying factors to this. It isn’t quite so simple as to boil everything down to one economic equation. The follow up question may be: “Do I believe the opposition party will help improve my standard of living?” In other words, can they be trusted with the economy and, can they be trusted full stop?

Herein, lies the problem. We are firmly immersed in a politics - and a society - of selfishness. We strive to hang on to our economic gains and get nervous about any threats to that sense of social and economic mobility. Fear of the abstract monsters of immigration, the EU and “benefit scroungers” are leapt on by political parties to both manage the status quo and attempt to disrupt it.

Why does fear and selfishness take such starring roles on the stage of our daily lives?

The answer is, they don’t have to. At all. When I refer to ‘We’ above, I am not naturally talking about everyone. I am referring to the silent middle class majority who are not necessarily politically active but choose to make their feelings clearly known when it matters most - at the ballot box.

We have a very real choice in this country and in other countries around the world. We can change this status quo. We can change ourselves, our attitudes and our goals. We can form communities of like minded people who actually care about each other, the environment and, gosh, being compassionate to each other. That would be pretty radical eh? Not really. Some might say it’s in line with our natural human values and how we should be behaving, it’s just that our technologically saturated and over privileged society has marginalised us into a disparate and fractured bunch, increasingly wary of our neighbours instead of genuinely concerned for their welfare.

In pockets of the UK, people are already beginning to choose another way that is against the grain and in line with ideas of compassion, cooperation and kindness. We have a choice as to how we vote and the things that matter to us. You may well be economically better off than you were 5 years ago and you might feel that the Tories help protect that wealth, but what if you got sick or became disabled and reliant on welfare? Would you feel safe and content knowing that your access to benefits could be affected by government austerity cuts?

I want to move towards a world where small, active community groups share knowledge, skills and resources. The more we work with each other the better off we are - our mental health and feeling of well being begins to expand and we gain that important sense of meaning that a lot of people seek in their lives.

A great man once said (Matt Johnson of The The): If you can’t change the world, change yourself. You alone have that power.

The Whole of our Soul

Many of us, at some point in lives, will question the meaning of our own existence. And whether this questioning takes a spiritual or more rational form, there's no doubt that this is a natural human curiosity. Sometimes, you catch yourself in a moment of quietness or self-reflection asking the question: What am I supposed to be doing?

I noticed myself doing this recently. Suddenly, it seemed like the colour drained out of all the usual things I found interesting that filled my time. It was as if the point or the meaning of them became lost and, instead, they were replaced by a kind of radio interference that was begging me to fiddle with the dial and find the right frequency so I could hear the message underneath.

I'm still in that void, that place of shadows where time has slowed down and the days don't seem to hang together properly. My mind is either empty or full of the detuned radio chaos. I can't help but think I need a tool to tune this radio. A simple hand gesture isn't going to cut it.

And it got me thinking: How do we solve the riddle of our own existence?

The trick is to look inside. In our culture, there is a tendency to think that we can solve our problems in the external reality - the voices of the world. We live in a society that reveres logical, rational thinking and the science of progress. After all, we have created many great tools and gadgets to solve our problems and answer the question of: How can we make our lives easier?

But what about the great question of existence? Technology is not asking how it can solve that question so there is no way it can provide an adequate answer. So we have to be brave and walk into the dark places, the areas inside ourselves which define our history, our ego, our self and our being. We have to take a walk through the whole of our soul and learn to be comfortable with our own complex characters.

This is a difficult thing for a lot of westerners to comprehend. They dismiss self-reflection and self-examination as futile or package it up into a neat course of therapy or psychoanalysis when really there is no better person to explore who you are than you yourself.

Something tells me that my crisis is calling me to make that journey and that discovery right now. My life has reached a point and a place where I need to really find out a little more about who I am.

I might not like the answers but, if I don't take a look, then I'll never really know.

And that would be a tragedy.

Birdman: The Unexpected Triumph of Myth and Magic Realism

*WARNING* - This blog post contains minor spoilers for the movie Birdman, so if you haven't watched it yet and don't want to be spoiled, stop reading now.

I had forgotten how art could surprise me. Maybe because I had gotten out of the habit of being open to surprise. My first surprising revelation whilst watching Birdman, was how much I enjoyed the very unsubtle dig at the Superhero franchise machine. After all, I am myself a recent convert to these bombastic, ludicrously flashy triumphs of style over substance that are The Superhero Movie. I sat and watched all three Iron Man movies over a weekend recently whilst getting over an illness and found myself transfixed yet unable to understand why. They are, after all, for want of a better phrase: vapid nonsense and yet I still can't quite put my finger on why I like watching them. Maybe it's because, as Joseph Campbell points out, they speak to us on an inner level, raising the promise of our own potential and the superhero that lies in all of us.

In the movie Birdman, Michael Keaton is a washed up actor whose career up until the point we discover him, has been defined by playing a superhero called Birdman on the big screen. Resisting the calls for a fourth installment of the superhero franchise, he instead puts his literal heart and soul into a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story - something that has never been attempted on stage before.

We see throughout the movie Keaton's character (Riggan Thomson) struggle with the voice of his superhero alter ego who lambasts him for attempting to make something credibly artistic. Then it came to me with cohesion and clarity. In making this delightful, jauntily downbeat movie the creative people involved were not trying to mock the Superhero franchise machine at all. They were, in fact, raising some valid and interesting questions about these movies in the process and the journey:

Why are they not taken seriously as 'art'? If they were, then Riggan wouldn't feel so unfulfilled as an actor and be driven to prove himself as a serious artist by trying to woo the Broadway inner circle of critics and theatre goers. Or, maybe, that is not the real reason he is producing the play at all. At certain points throughout the movie he references a note left to him on a cocktail napkin by Raymond Carver which the author wrote after coming to see him in a school play. He cites it as inspiration and is mocked for it by Mike Shiner (Edward Norton); the golden boy of Broadway whose method acting skills Riggan sees as the answer to how he can get the play to be taken more seriously. Shiner points out that Carver left the note on a cocktail napkin so he was probably drunk. But we know this isn't the truth anyway when it comes to his real motivation for the play.

The truth lies in the moments of magic realism littered throughout the movie which build in intensity until Riggan reaches a point where he realises that he doesn't have to prove himself to anybody. These wonderful moments of fantasy where his Birdman persona speaks through him and he finds himself performing telekinetic tricks show us, elegantly how easy it is to let the myth of who you think you are become the dominant aspect of your personality and, ultimately, yourself. Myths are a part of us. They are part of our journey of life but they do not make us whole or even determine our deeper, abstract nature. They can hold a mirror to our innermost thoughts, feelings and fears which in Riggan's case causes him to rebel against and reject the myth of his Birdman persona. He rejects it because he knows Birdman does not define him. For years he had believed that the myth of Birdman had become so dominant, so powerful that he had come to believe that it defined who he was. But, in a moment of clarity where he realises he is artistically free to pursue his true desires he knows that this belief was a false manifestation of his ego. We see him meditate in an early scene of the movie (whilst also levitating, in a scene which reminded me of The Fountain) and his progression as a character and person allows him to see that the myth of Birdman's power and influence was really the shadow side of his swollen ego.

I don't want to discuss the ending of the movie in great detail as I believe it should be left as open to interpretation as the director clearly intended it to be. However, I have seen some interesting comments from observers who have suggested that much of the movie is in fact Riggan's dream as he lies on the beach recovering from a failed suicide attempt he references in a discussion with his ex-wife near the end of the movie. Whilst I do not agree with or adhere to this notion, it is an interesting one and does hold some credibility as there are some moments of magic realism in the film which could simply be seen as dream montages - the scene where is trying to find his way back into the theatre dressed only in his underpants, the flying sequence as he returns to the theatre after threatening to throw himself from a building; these are two such examples and characterised by some stunning cinematography which allows us to see several possibilities as Riggan's fantasy flows with beauty and fluidity into the world of the present and the painful.

Birdman is a movie which I believe warrants more than one viewing. It is rich with subtext, multiple layers of narrative space and its main character is burdened with the pain of cognitive dissonance. Yet it is not a depressing or downbeat movie to watch. In many ways its ending is full of joy, hope and liberation and it left this particular viewer touched at how its main characters journey had taken him through one which had started out being full of magic realism and mythical despair to ending with one that was touched with an abiding sense of magical realisation.