Mankind has, for all of our recorded history, sought after something profound, magical, sublime and Goddish to believe in. We comfort ourselves with the idea that the incredible forces that brought us into being and gave us the power to ask questions, such as ‘What are these incredible forces?’, had a plan when they made us. We are not a mistake. There is a purpose to our being here and it’s not just buying shoes, eating cake and bickering over how we got here and who gets to hold the remote control. So, when I reached the chapter called ‘The Gap’ in The God Delusion, I felt some excitement. This bit will speak to my experience, I thought. This should explain why I feel like I do … It didn’t. This is my failing, not Dawkins’s. He’s written a few thousand well-researched words describing the desire for God and the mistake we make in seeing the hole as God-shaped and for many people I’m sure it was as satisfying and illuminating as the rest of The God Delusion. For me it was the point where I had to admit to myself that despite my desire to enjoy the book, I was struggling. I can summarize for you the essence of what I read in ‘The Gap’. Essentially Professor Dawkins seems to be saying: ‘Sometimes people have silly thoughts. Try not to.’ And that, unfortunately, is pretty much it. He’s a brilliant scientist, a diligent and eloquent evolutionary biologist, an engaging and talented writer, but that, to me, seemed to be the sum total of Professor Dawkins’s understanding of the emotional complexities of the human condition. ‘Occasionally, people have things called feelings. These are best avoided. They are slippery, non-scientific, cannot be proved and lead to confusion. If you wish to worship something, worship me.’
I don’t know for sure what this ‘gap’ or ‘hole’ is any more than Dawkins, Hitchens, the Pope, the Dalai Lama or David Blaine does. I know I have it in common with almost everyone I’ve ever come to know well enough to discuss such things, and I know that expecting scientists to explain what happens in those parts of my mind places an unfair burden on them which they are not briefed to deal with. Sometimes I’m sad, I need to get over it and read more. Or read less. Or read better books. Or not get over it, just feel it and be. It’s not the aim of the great secular thinkers of our time to make me feel better about myself, nor should it be (even if feeling better is a key concern for most people). I wouldn’t turn up to a science lecture, listen, enjoy, learn and then, during questions at the end, leap to my feet and ask, ‘I understand in essence how the CERN Super Collider works as a means by which we might begin to understand “dark matter”, but why am I unhappy? Eh? Riddle me that, Dr Brainiac! Why do I feel the tentacles of insanity wrapping their cold wet grip around my mind when I spend too much time alone? How’s that for dark matter? Does the dark matter? Yeah? Thought so. Not so clever now, are you, eh? No wonder one of you dropped your sandwich in the collider. You big Swiss weirdos! Ha! I’ve learned nothing here today, I am still alone in the universe.’ A waste of everyone’s time.
The hole is all the stuff I have doubts about from the trivial to the magnificent. Why do other people listen to Lily Allen? What was funny about Bo Selecta? Is there life that we would recognize somewhere else in space? Is love the greatest of all human achievements? Which is better, Gorgonzola Dolce or Stilton? Will my children ever forgive me? Amongst these and a million other questions, I have the creeping feeling that nothing matters. I don’t like that feeling. I wonder sometimes if we are no more than a brilliant accident wandering about trying not to break too much stuff before we die and that is it. Life’s like a narrow and fascinating antique shop. You pass through, you admire, reject, collect and inspect, and everywhere you look there are signs saying breakages must be paid for. All of what we touch is altered by our having been in contact with it, much of it gets broken and, if we’re lucky, some new things are created. In the end, the hope seems to be that you have improved more of the things you have encountered than destroyed. It’s no way to end your life, looking back over all you have done and seeing little more than a trail of destruction and feeling your face turn red as you mumble, ‘Sorry, it just came away in my hand …’
I feel fear when I indulge this nihilistic view of existence. It feels like a void that sucks you in and might make you go mad. Like when you lie out on a clear night and look at the stars, marvelling in the beauty and magnificence of it all. Staring at burning balls of light sending their radiance in all directions, content to wonder and to observe … then suddenly you feel a terrible sense of aloneness and insignificance. There is a feeling of panic, almost like the Earth might release its gravitational hold and eject you into the nothing. It’s best to do stargazing when you’re drunk, stoned or newly in love. It’s much safer then, you either black out, giggle or get it on. All much better feelings than a head full of ‘Oh Christ, I’m so alone. What’s the bloody point of anything? Why do people listen to Lily Allen?’ Infinite thoughts are impossible to hold in the human mind. It’s like trying to imagine a new colour. You can’t do it. Dulux can do it by adding the word ‘apple’ to existing colours but we mortals cannot. We have the menu of colours provided within the light spectrum and that’s all there is. You can’t go a la carte and start creating colours with ingredients that don’t exist. I sometimes think that if we saw a new colour we’d go mad. I think this may have happened to my wife when she encountered Straw Pebble by Farrow and Ball at just £90 a gallon! Maybe God is a new colour and that’s why we never see him.
When we consider the infinite, we have to imagine an end point and something beyond that and another end to that and something beyond that and eventually a fence with some disappointing graffiti on it. ‘Darrell sucks cocks … coz he’s an ARSEnal fan’ or some such poetic ribaldry. For me, allowing my mind to focus on the notion of the infinity of space and time feels like falling. I read A Brief History of Time and that felt like falling and failing. Inserting one paragraph into my head seemed to push the previous one out the other side. These thoughts of insignificance and fear and infinity and insecurity are what inform the notion that there is a hole. There are things the brilliant human mind cannot see, feel or understand and in those spaces there is a need to satisfy – with God, perhaps, if you don’t mind his mood swings, with scientific enquiry if you’re infinitely patient, with drugs and booze if you have really tolerant friends and plenty of money. I suppose the lesson I have learned is this – try not to think about things you’re too thick to understand. That works about as well as deciding not to think of an elephant. See, now all you can see is an elephant. In space with an infinitely long trunk.
For me, though, questions of eternity and where we all came from and the point to life and all that are not really the core of the problem. I wonder about them and they sometimes disturb me but they don’t make me envy the relative serenity of the devout. What I think about is something much closer to home and altogether more personal. Am I any good?
Even the simple act of typing those words makes my heart lurch a little in my chest. My brain floods with strands of enquiry that swirl, extend and congeal like blood in water. What is it to be good anyway? Sam Harris’s excellent book The Moral Landscape helps the atheist reader to identify morality in the secular world and argues that it’s not defined by religious observance or by messages from God but is innate in humanity and informed by scientific understanding. A.C. Grayling was kind enough to thrust copies of two of his best essays into my hands when I told him about my thoughts and struggles with faith and atheism. They helped me up to a point – as most books do, even if it’s only to reveal their worthlessness – but these didn’t seem to quell the voices of doubt within me. I think the good life is one that satisfies without excessive cost to others. For the idiot parked in the box junction, on the phone, smoking, with a child on the back seat, the cost to others doesn’t enter into the equation, but for the rest of us we’d like to have the things we want but not if they come with the burden of too much guilt.
Basic analysis might suggest that my mundane middle-class angst is just that, ordinary and trivial in its inevitability. Perhaps then i
t’s no more worthy of examination than the popularity of good wellington boots amongst the privately educated or the fact that a disproportionate number of my childhood friends have over-bites and have been in-patients at addiction rehabilitation centres. The view that someone’s angst is inevitable because of their upbringing and therefore not worthy of examination gets right up my well-proportioned but not obviously aristocratic nose. If a person feels discomfort and there is a way to relieve some or all of that dis-ease, then why not do it? Even if it amounts to no more than piping up to say, ‘Hey, me too, I feel like that.’ Most of us ultimately want to feel we are not alone and identification of feelings and thoughts seems a good place to start. Unless you’re on a train in rush hour, then it can be uncomfortable. Never again will I suggest a ‘break-out’ session and a group hug on the 08.19 to Victoria. It was not rewarding and no one felt comforted.
So am I any good? Well, I try to be, but I disappoint myself very often. I am a product of the things that have happened to me and the decisions I have made. I bought a copy of ‘Lifted’ by the Lighthouse Family and I must live with that choice for the rest of my days. Much of my life has been happy, some of it intensely sad, a fair bit of it very angry and a satisfying amount of it debauched and filthy. I’ve been frightened a few times. The most severe of these occasions was a visit to Dracula’s House of Horror in Niagara in Canada. A wrong turning in the darkness saw me end up in the ‘staff room’ or, more accurately, Dracula’s den of porn and half-smoked joints. That was frightening. Some of my life has been spent asleep and I make no apology for anything I’ve done in that state, including dreaming of naked vampires smoking spliffs. I am not a special case and make no claim to be. If you’re not spending your time satisfying the basic human needs for food, water and shelter, then life is often filled with reflection, much of which is useless.
I had cheese with fig jam and salad for lunch with a few marinated anchovies in the salad in an attempt to make it exciting. It worked. It was as exciting as a salad is ever likely to get – slightly. I had an apple that has flown further than I ever have, some tea and a glass of water from the tap. This was consumed in south-west London in my kitchen looking at the rabbit hutch in the garden and the willow tree. My needs are satisfied, I didn’t have to forage for the apple or stew the fig jam or milk something furious to get my cheese. I opened the fridge and there it all was with some organic yoghurts and the evil Cheestrings the children so enjoy. Lunch is pretty simple when you have a fridge and a few quid to spend on half-rotted milk – so I spent some time online seeking approval, distraction and amusement. I play music or have the radio on almost constantly; I don’t enjoy silence. With these needs all met, and in the few moments I’m not suspending reality through social networking or consuming media at the all-you-can-eat internet buffet, I spend time considering my navel … It’s really deep because I’ve been overweight for a long time. It gathers fluff with alarming speed and rarely stints on the portion size. Mine ought to be a blissful carefree existence and yet I need as many of you as possible to understand that I find a fair bit of life uncomfortable and shit. I’m not carefree and I’m happy less often than I’d like.
There are many things I’m aware of that have framed and defined my existence and doubtless a great many others I am totally unaware of. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t touched up as a child: my school wasn’t that religious and I was fat anyway so they’d have gone for the other boys first. I’m also confident that I’ve never been abducted by aliens or belonged to a cult. I was too overweight and atheist for the Scouts and too mannish for the Brownies. I’ve either had too much or too little therapy, depending on who you talk to. Too much if you ask most of my friends; too little if you ask the ones who are in therapy. Not even close to enough if you ask my therapist. I am finding writing this book intensely lonely and I feel insecure about the result. I’ve realized that the career I’ve chosen in stand-up comedy and acting involves a great deal of approval seeking and it works a treat. I write a bit, I take the bit I’ve written to a stand-up club or to the radio or TV studio, I say it to some people, the people laugh, then they clap. I know I am loved and approved of. No one claps when you finish a chapter. Much to my embarrassment, I seem to have become quite dependent on applause … Without it, how will I know if I’m any good?
If there’s a St Peter I’d like to think he’d understand where I was coming from before marking my paper a fail and pulling the lever. It seems to me I am more likely to be judged while I’m alive and the outcome will affect tangible things I know I believe in. You may have judged me by reading this far. You may have judged this book from just the dust jacket (a rookie reader’s error). I’d love to say I make no apology for the things I am but I’m English so that’s clearly not the case. The evidence for the defence looks like this.
I am a married father of two. I was born in Surrey in 1973. I have an older sister and a much younger brother who is probably my best mate. My parents are alive and still married. I was privately educated. I was expelled several times at ages seven, eleven and fourteen. The decision to expel me at age eleven was reversed after an appeal. With each expulsion I was moved further away from my family home (generally in a westerly direction) until we ran out of land. I think at this stage my parents would have been willing to look into educating me in the sea. I was sent to boarding school when I was seven years old and consequently spent two-thirds of every year away from my family. I saw my mother and father most Saturdays for the first few years, then less frequently after I was twelve and as little as possible after I was fifteen. I left home properly when I was sixteen, though I had spent very little time there after the age of fourteen, and what time there was could be classed as ranging between uncomfortable, disastrous and eventually criminal. This was punctuated by several very enjoyable holidays, some of which were spent together with my family and some alone.
My father worked in the City. My mother was a head teacher of a local private school (local to her, not to me). By the time I was seventeen I weighed a little over 24 stone and had problems finding trousers that would fit me. I had a 44-inch waist, sometimes 46. I was dangerously overweight because I couldn’t stop myself from eating, despite loathing the results of every day of over-indulgence. I made a solemn promise to myself every night, alone in bed, wheezing and prodding with revolted fingers the wobbly shame that was wrapped around my body, that tomorrow would be a new beginning. It wasn’t new; it was the same. I ate from bins if I couldn’t find anything else and I stole a lot.
I started drinking when I was twelve, though limited availability meant that until I was fifteen, drunkenness was infrequent, though not perhaps by comparison with my peers. I started sniffing solvents when I was thirteen and progressed to a limited range of other recreational drugs with a preference for downers or opiate-style highs. Marijuana was a favourite and the associated ‘munchies’ were negligible in the context of a 17-year epic munch. At age seventeen I had a breakdown and was admitted to a residential treatment centre where I stopped drinking, using drugs and eating compulsively. Today, I am still sober and clean from drugs and deal with the negotiation between necessity and compulsion to eat reasonably well. This has been the case for over twenty years.
Needless to say these experiences have framed much of who I am. I don’t wish to be evasive or to trivialize these important events, but neither do I want this to be a story about a poor little rich kid who missed his parents and then fell into a life of addiction, got saved by the do-gooders and blah blah blah. I didn’t want to out myself as an addict at all, but it would be dishonest or at least duplicitous of me not to mention it in this context. It’s too important to this story. I’m an addict. I’m not sure why. I doubt the reason for it, if there is one, is nearly as important as what I choose to do about it now. If you reached this section of my story and sagely nodded your head as if to say, ‘Ah, yes, this all explains why the boy is so needy, angry and fucked up,’ then you’ve missed at least 50 per cent of
the point.
Part of the suggested recovery process for addiction is to turn your will and your life over to a ‘higher power’. The literature explicitly avoids defining that higher power as anything other than a ‘power greater than yourself’ (Geoff Capes, for instance?), but after introducing the concept, refers to this power as ‘God’ for simplicity’s sake. Most people are happy enough with this description. I worked with this ‘God’ very easily when I first started life without mood-altering substances and processes. He was a good worker, punctual and smartly turned out. I was tired and scared at that time so I didn’t ask too many questions. Tired and scared seems a dangerous state to begin a new relationship in – I suspect that’s what led Paul McCartney to marry Heather Mills and then look … But that’s what I was, tired, scared and willing to be helped by anyone who was able to. I think God was. Those with more recovery and less recently insane lives than mine said, Turn your will and your life over to a power greater than yourself, so I did as I was asked. I was not in a position to negotiate, haggle or skip things that might later prove to be important. ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll agree to believe in God, if you agree that I should be allowed to smoke the odd spliff from time to time and still eat Mars Bars. Deal or no deal?’
My life was in danger, I was drowning, so I swam to where the people seemed to be climbing out of the stormy water and drying off in the sunshine. Had I not had the help I did, I believe I would not be alive now. Could this assessment possibly be overly dramatic? The evidence for it is pretty strong. Even if my addiction hadn’t killed me directly, I suspect that in a state of inebriated despair I might have tracked down the elusive courage I had sought on several previous occasions and taken my own life. I’ve known people whose addictions killed them. Close friends, some of them. Their stories were similar to mine. The drive in them to escape this reality took them to the grisly and undignified end point that most addicts reach. In any case, the ‘God’ I was asked to believe in bore no relation whatsoever to the one described in the Holy books, so I thought, well, what’s the harm in it? It might do me good. It did do me good. I got sober, clean from drugs and more than halved my body weight in seven months. I fell over a lot after I did that. I think my legs got over-excited and didn’t know how much blood they’d need to move me about so I kept blacking out at the top of staircases. In truth I quite liked it; it felt a bit like glue-sniffing does just before your brain shuts your functions down.
God Collar Page 21
