~ Tara Jill
Therefore I retract, And I repent in dust and ashes. ~Job 42:6
There is a photograph by Alec Soth called “Adelyn, Ash Wednesday” that, as a friend of mine says, exemplifies the look of trauma and understanding that haunts the hours immediately following Mardi Gras. She has been through something exhilarating and frightening, caught by a force in motion, and she rolled with it down Claiborne and through the Treme, along the Zulu route, through an eight ball done in Portalets and a joint smoked with brass bands and along the river at the end of the St. Ann parade and into the arms and pants of strangers, losing her panties and her champagne and her voice as the day went on and watching it all wind down on Frenchmen Street as the fog came in and the last traces of her high fluttered off.
She’d awoken that morning after two hours of sleep, not so much believing it would never stop, but forgetting it could. And so she rolled, reconciling with herself that she had no choice but to wander home, hollow finally, as if the aftershock of an intense orgasm has finally surrendered. Rituals are created at times to give us a script to follow when we no longer know the way. She will get ashes, not because she is a Catholic (although she may be), but because it is over. And she is still there.
Ashes symbolize a closure of sorts, as well as at least the acknowledgement of Lent. It’s the tax we pay on everything we abandon in the preceding days. Some feel that the amount one gives up for lent should be in direct proportion to the amount one partakes in Mardi Gras. This reasoning does not necessarily require a sense of spirituality or guilt (although it doesn’t hurt to have one), but rather a logic of health and finances: Mardi Gras makes us spend all our money getting sick, and we want to be healthy and have money when Jazz Fest and our out of town guests arrive.
Mardi Gras can leave a person with a lingering chaos of the heart, mind and body, worse than any regular hangover. Lent imposes a discipline that we can clutch at to cope with the unique silence of this period as we pack our costumes away. Our guests and our drugs are gone, and as much as we can say St. Patrick’s Day is coming, any transition demands a degree of mournfulness, in this case for something that’s come to a screeching halt. And we go to work.
Many of us give up drinking for lent or try a softer way and give up drinking everything except wine or drinking during the week or drinking at work. Some of us give up smoking. These offerings stem from a myriad of personal motivations, too many to list, but they all share a common dilemma. How does one fill the time between nicotine fits or alcohol cravings or crippling needs for cocaine or chocolate? What can a person do in that moment on the interstate when traffic comes to a halt and she is out of gum and fingernails to bite and remembers a cigarette she dropped under the passenger seat months ago, or when a co-worker kindly leaves a basket of candy in the employee break-room or a roommate is watching Barfly and doesn’t want the last two fingers in a bottle of Jim Beam that’s just sitting there? We can rationalize it by freely admitting that we are not Christ and 40 days is a long time. Our friends are breaking Lent, and we don’t even go to church. That benevolent decision that came to our ash adorned heads as the rain cleansed the alley beside the Cathedral strikes us as excessive now with moderation being a tempting alternative. Even the Mardi Gras Indians costume during Lent, and we can redeem ourselves with a catfish po-boy on Friday. Those minutes are so delicate that if we lapse in vigilance, a bad case of the fuck-its will leave a cigarette between our lips. The whiskey on our tongues will feel divine.
Those of us who want to stick it out may look for support systems to fight these urges. For the Catholic giving up drinking, there might be a suspicion, however muffled, that this form of abstinence should be a permanent thing. If you’re an alcoholic that is. For the smoker, Lent may prove to be a trial run at the ultimate test of will. If we haven’t given up gambling , we may have bet money on our own resilience.
Those who have been a bit singed by indulgence in vices may use this period to explore a more clean way of life and join a support group. The only desire for becoming a member of Alcoholics Anonymous is a desire to stop drinking. That desire and the desire to drink are hardly mutually exclusive. One does not even need to intend to stop altogether in order to attend an A.A. meeting. The fact that are many A.A. meetings in the New Orleans area seems at first a contradiction since New Orleans doesn’t exactly embrace sobriety. It’s something do while sobering up for 40 days. In Louisiana, there are a twelve step groups for eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, getting in debt, parenting, and sex.There is usually free coffee, which some say can wash the taste for liquor or chocolate or sex from mouth. One of the main things that happens in those rooms is that there is a push for self-honesty, which can never be a bad thing.
A few tricks older timers at twelve-step meetings suggest can translate to the abandonment of any vice. One is the controlling of time because the brain can’t handle more than 24 hour chunks of time (anyone who has stayed up through Lundi Gras night can attest to that). Some people live hour by hour or minute by minute when quitting. One woman filled a box of chocolates with slices of carrots and then ate an entire chicken but stayed away from sugar. But we all know this already, the same way we know we should exercise and eat more vegetables and should never have begun slaves to our vices to begin with. The more people I talk to, the more stories I hear about people breaking down because of traffic or a long commute, although unfortunately, no one I’ve spoken with has given up driving. Sex, it seems, is impossible to give up , unless you weren’t getting any to begin with. It also seems like a good idea to avoid Loews, specifically the one on Elysian Fields and to ignore phone calls from most relatives altogether. The important thing is to break patterns.
This leaves me wondering what Jesus would have done if he’d been addicted to anything. He was Christ, so of course he had the whole martyrdom thing a bit more together. If he had known we were going to spend each spring trying to emulate him, would he have given us some sort of a guidebook? Or would he have smiled and told us to take a hot bath and eat candy (if we hadn’t given that up). The important thing is to remember we were never expected to achieve divinity and shouldn’t beat ourselves up over a slip.
This leaves me wondering what Jesus would have done if he’d been addicted to anything. He was Christ, so of course he had the whole martyrdom thing a bit more together. If he had known we were going to spend each spring trying to emulate him, would he have given us some sort of a guidebook? Or would he have smiled and told us to take a hot bath and eat candy (if we hadn’t given that up). The important thing is to remember we were never expected to achieve divinity and shouldn’t beat ourselves up over a slip.
One of the easiest and most convenient techniques for overcoming the urge for vices is to bitch and bitch a lot. If nothing else, when you get a craving and really freak out, those around you will probably have known it was coming.
I write this with an urge to drink so powerful that I would prefer to be pursued by a pack of wild dogs. There are 31 days left.
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