I’m currently reading two books. (I probably do this in keeping with my Vatul nature; consider it an offering to my ancestors, if you will.) They are Bob Woodward’s Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.
The books have nothing to do with one another and I picked each up for completely different reasons, but there are a couple of questions that both books bring up.
1) Is addiction a personality trait? I understand addiction as various things – habit gone bad, a genetic predisposition and certainly as a disease – but is addiction / can addiction become a part of you such that it is something to describe you? Think about that question for a second. See, I view John Belushi as a great actor and an addict, neither which are necessarily part of his personality. I am trying to get at the distinction (or lack thereof) between what you are and what you do. If you think I am going about this the wrong way, read Question 2.
2) In his foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie remarks, “I have treated my writing simply as a job to be done, refusing myself all (well, most) luxuries of artistic temperament.” Easy for him to say when he is a great writer who came gifted with the tools. Just like it’s easy for me to treat exploration geophysics as a job when I come with the necessary geological knowledge and technical abilities. But, how can Rushdie treat something as a job to be done that is such a part of him? Again, how do you plot that line between what you are and what you do?
I’m reminded of some of Mark Folse’s odd words, “Passion and discipline are two names for the same thing, aspects of the same cruel and delightful god that drove men to go to extraordinary lengths to plant a flag on the moon and to write Moby Dick.”
And Frank Sinatra, “Do Be Do Be Do.”
Update: Scientific American asks and answers similar questions this week. “… the link is not between creativity and addiction per se. There is a link between addiction and things which are a prerequisite for creativity … You don’t become addicted because you feel pleasure strongly. On the contrary, addicts seem to want it more but like it less.”
I’m with Frank. I have my addictions – they are part of what makes me me. Not all good and not all bad. They annoy some people, but I can live with that.
I think to the extent that behavior dominates the person, that is the extent to which it become who they are beyond just “what they do”. There comes a time in the progression of the addiction at which point the person is so shaped by it, human relations become severely and adversely affected by it. This is the point at which the term, for example, “junkie”, in the sense of “good for nothing but getting high and willing to do anything to get there”, find employment. “Ex-junkie” or “Recovering junkie” testify to the recoverable nature of personality lost to addiction.
I haven’t read the Belushi book, but I get the impression that (partly due to his wealth) his substance abuse didn’t decimate his personal relationships. Therefore, he was John the actor, John the friend, and John the addict – until the addiction took his life and then he was no more.
I think who we are is far more than just what we do, but the only thing that matters in the world around us, is our actions or inactions. After we are gone, nobody knows and few people care why we did or didn’t do something.
There are many high-functioning junkies who go about their business everyday despite their extreme addiction. In that regard, you are and you aren’t what you do. You can separate your addiction from what needs to be done and are doing something else. I know it’s extremely hard and ultimately fruitless to try and separate personality and actions, but motivators are interesting to study.
After commenting, I read the Scientific American article and had I the talent, I would draw a cartoon of their explanation. Who you are is a garden: the soil being your genes (40%), the fertilizer, sunshine, and rain (quantities of which if too much or too little, harmful stress) with plants of personality and little weeds of addiction. The gardener being our parents and then later, ourselves.
To your point, certainly Bubbles, for example, was not lacking personality in anyway in spite of his overwhelming addiction that had destroyed his relationship with his family. Then again, D Simon mentioned that he was a special and very rare junkie (alluding to the fact that we might see a much bleaker character in Sonny in upcoming seasons – something we never discussed at BoT).