White God: Michael W. Clune’s White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin – Manuel Marrero
November 11, 2024
I read this book last year. My memories of the experience are washed in unrelated contemporaneous associations. Talking with Clune, I found him the genuine article. Cloistered in academia, family-oriented, a careerist (non-slur) who is only a writer some of the time, but one who demonstrably cares deeply for his craft. This book is a tiny iceberg of his published and unpublished work. He’s not a writer all the time because that’s a junkie habit. He writes from hindsight, after the allure’s worn off and sobriety has hit its stride, as though looking back on a ravaged body with a mixture of awe, fascination, and probing authoritative insight, hands in the air. A sense of defeat and aporia prevails. I’m a mark for a drug memoir. Every piece of the drug addiction experience ambrosial to my curiosity. I’ve been through it. You don’t need to be like me to glean wisdom from it or feel it. The book could almost as easily be about anything that might occupy the memory centers of the brain, from relationships to lifestyle practices around which eating, hygiene and sleeping must adapt to accommodate. The fix is infrangible from the spring-coil mechanism of rebound and withdrawal and cyclical recidivism. Hypergraphia is often called the writing disease. He uses “memory disease” to classify what he describes as a whitening, or superimposition of whiteness on memory, a totalizing habit. One thing that happens to addicts is sheer exhaustion, fatigue from always doing it, a boredom about its trappings that may be key to recovery, although Clune is adamant about the elusiveness of what separates those able to recover from their counterparts. It’s not that your memories are gone, but that they’ve been “infected,” and therefore, clouded by the euphoria and desperation of the fix. There isn’t anything more pointed and charged for me than watching a tightly wound person become “normal” after several drinks. And yet, it’s unconditionally, universally human. You can be addicted to anything, even the best and most sophisticated drugs. You’ll be changed in places and parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. But that’s about all that’s definitive. The experience is so variable. Unlike many drug memoirs, nothing ever really goes to shit. Clune maintains a career and profound relationships around the habit. And there’s a violent contrast throughout stylistically and in terms of plot momentum. Yet there is nothing the habit does not touch, does not make white. It seems insidious, but it is end to end commonplace. Today, nearly two decades since it was written, White Out remains relevant by the utter ubiquity and mundanity of what it describes. “The reality of death is something you don’t see until you are cured. When you can see it, it’s a sign you’re cured.” In losing addiction, you gain something to lose.