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Jim's Principles of Moderation have had a marked impact on my life:

Quite some time ago I turned an impressive corner with the emotion of wanting more consciousness. I wrote two pages called the Principles of Moderation, which had a wondrous, albeit slowly evolving, effect on my life.

Drinking causes drinking. Heavy drinking causes heavy drinking. Light drinking causes light drinking.

The ability to check yourself moment by moment has been discussed at length by wise folks from the old Ch’an masters of China all the way down to Ouspenksy. This assumes a willingness to be conscious.

The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever.

We don’t have much freedom in this life and it is self-cruelty to lose a piece of what we have because we are unable to control our craving.

Measurement is all. A 1½ ounce shot delivers all the benefits of a 3-5 ounce drink. A couple of the latter turns one into a spit dribbler. Spit dribblers frighten children and make everyone else nervous. On any sedative there is a specific, roomy gap between smoothing out and self-destruction. There is no self-destructiveness without the destruction of others. We are not alone.

Naturally there are special occasions. Generally one can’t have more than one a week due to the first paragraph. When you get older like me it’s once a month, if that.

It’s hard to determine pathology in a society where everything is pathological. The main content of our prayers should be for simple consciousness. The most important thing we can do is to find out what ails us and fix it. Often we need outside counsel, for clarity and to speed up the process. (I’ve had over twenty years with my mind doctor.)

In drinking, as in everything else, the path is the way. What you get in life is what you organize for yourself every day. There is an ocean of available wisdom from Lao-tzu to Jung to Rilke. It’s there in preposterous quantity. If you drink way too much it will kill you and the souls of those around you. If you moderate you can have a nice life.

There is another rather manly approach that has been useful, an offshoot of bushido I have drawn from occasionally (in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, etc.). It can sound corny but has been quite relevant for most of the history of human life on earth. The main point is that life is trying to kill you in hundreds of ways. You have to be alert by the millisecond. If it’s not wild animals, it’s your human enemies, your habits and conditioning, your lazy senses.

A lot of overdrinking comes from feeling bad physically. One overdrinks to feel better in physiological terms. This can be avoided by vitamins, exercise, and reasonable diet. Again, it’s a cycle: overdrinking causes overdrinking because you feel bad.

Another source of the problem is the unreasonable expectations we get from others and ourselves. Unreasonable expectations can be removed by thinking it over. They can’t be “downt”, pure and simple. Everyone can’t get to the top or even the middle.

The aim is to remove horrors. This really takes a specific level of attention. Pigs love mud and there is a real streak of muddiness in our psyches. It can be soothing to wallow. We prefer to be stunned rather than overwhelmed. Unfortunately the variations of self-pity are the most injurious emotions we have.

Oddly enough our main weapons in controlling drinking are humour and lightness. The judgment of others and self-judgment (stern) are both contraindicatory. When we fuck up we mentally beat ourselves up. It doesn’t work at all and has to be expunged. The reason to slow down is to feel better and it works real good.

You begin by cutting it all down by a third. After a few weeks you go down to a half. After that your soul will tell you when you listen. It helps to avoid pointlessly cynical camaraderie. Often it is actually a matter of one drink too many.

We need always to separate the problem of virtue from the problem of lack of control There are too many lies in circulation as always. Certain countries, France for example, drink more alcohol but have fewer problems. This is partly due to the predominance of wine which is less of a stun gun of behaviour but also that drinking isn’t connected to virtue or nonvirtue. It is a practical problem. Drinking has to be strictly self-controlled the moment it negatively affects our character and behaviour.

These are relatively mild pointers though the consequences of ignoring them are as fatal as shooting yourself in the head in a curious time warp wherein the bullet takes many years to reach its inevitable target.

Jim Harrison

https://groveatlantic.com/book/off-to-the-side/

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I can so relate and understand that sentiment and thought about poetry in the last paragraph.

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