Ross A. Laird

Alcohol offers the drinker a reverie, a nostalgia for the way things once were, or are imagined to have been. Alcohol halts the inner life, or guides it to splendors of the past, or comforts the lost self in the present. Whereas the stimulant user always gazes forward, hungry, the alcoholic seeks to look back. The here and now is unacceptable, it rankles, and the alcoholic possesses no solution for the future. Save one: to continue the fight, to reclaim lost dignity or power or pride, to sweep the old wounds away with a single, defiant gesture of omnipotence. For this is the underlying promise of alcohol, its unspoken secret: that we can remake the world.

More than the other substances, alcohol tends to pass between generations. It promotes the continuance of unfinished stories, incomplete dreams, unresolved impulses. Here in Canada, in the Great White North — suffused with mythology, cradled by nature, constantly reminded of the paucity of human endeavor — the stories swirl, returning to be re-imagined and re-told, continuing onward toward a future not yet clearly envisioned, not yet manifest from the simmering shades of the past.

The tincture of the tendency for alcoholism, the manner in which it captures people, is only somewhat variable across individuals and cultures. Most of the elements remain consistent. The first involves a difficult or traumatic past which, typically, cannot be openly discussed except while drinking. Second is a belief, learned in childhood from about age two to four, that emotional vulnerability is shameful. Third is a pervasive feeling of disempowerment, engendered by social hurdles or family secrets or a troubled personal history.

Among men of my father’s generation, who were inculcated with the catechism of the tough, invulnerable male, alcoholism was once rampant. It is less so now, with the popularity of Alcoholics Anonymous, but the emotional patterning of that generation remains: above all, do not show your weakness. It is not a coincidence that these men are the sons of men who passed through the most violent period of human history — the two World Wars — and returned home traumatized, unable to speak about the experience, silent, stoic.

When a story cannot be told, cannot be exorcised and transformed by telling, it turns into a secret history, a cold war passed down and unfinished.