The book was at the bottom of a box, waiting there for years, after it had finished its little work of symbolization with my son. The voidAnna Llenas’ youth album, released in 2016, resurfaced in my life this week, just when Quebec was experiencing a vast collective “morning after” by learning about the new recommendations on alcohol consumption. .
Every night of the week, I read and reread The void to my six-year-old daughter, who gave me the greatest spectacle by reacting to her reading. The beauty that can be read on a human face, at the moment when meaning is deposited on an experience which, until then, was like an “orphan of language”, will never cease to move me.
It was the first time that someone had come to legitimize for her the existence of this void, this little hole in the center of herself, which she felt without being able to designate it. It is indeed the strength of this magnificent album to remind us that this void exists in each of us, that it is a source of anxiety, but also of attachment, imagination, creation. There is even a question of “caps”, in a nod to everything that we put inside, so as not to feel it anymore, this emptiness.
Emptiness, lack, absence, this little soft center, eternally vacant in us, which frightens us as much as it is likely to light us up, propel us, make us desiring, incarnate, living humans.
The void.
This void, a sort of fragment of nothingness deposited within us, the one that swallows us up on certain January evenings, at blue hour, on returning from work, is it really the one whose tremors we sensed when we learned that to seek to fill it with delicious substances could throw us into it much more than save us from it?
This emptiness, the one we don’t talk about or very little about, although it is hidden behind many contemporary psychopathological symptoms, this emptiness, which we say is spiritual, emotional or existential, isn’t it what we all fear? to meet, somewhere between the only two glasses of wine allowed according to the new recommendations?
A little face-to-face with his emptiness, his life, his failures, his relationships and his aspirations, on an empty stomach, is obviously frightening.
The need to question our relationship to all these substances that sometimes allow us to support the weight of existence – including those obtained by medical prescription – is essential. The data is shocking and calls once again for us to question these ethically dubious links between state corporations generating revenues from the emotional miseries of an entire population and a health system still on the verge of collapse.
However, what strikes me this week in the eagerness, the fear, the rise of justifications on the one hand and the moralizing condemnation on the other, is the reaffirmation of the Apollonian myth so dominant in our culture which, empiricism fists, dictates the new standards of life without fault, without shadow, without emptiness, without tragedy – without Dionysus, obviously – and almost without finitude.
If abstinence is, without a shadow of a doubt, an experience that facilitates self-awareness and the taking care of many emotional wounds, it is sometimes only driven by a “variation on the same theme”: the flight from empty, the very one that, the minute before, we were trying to fill with big shots of pinot noir.
The desire to correspond to perfection, the cult of the irreproachable being omnipresent today, it is sometimes out of fear, conformism or an illusory desire to escape the void that we become ayatollahs of good living, as if we we were going to escape death, illness, the tragedy of existence, because we followed the recommendations.
If fleeing the vacuum in alcohol is useless, avoiding it by a disembodied submission sometimes keeps us in the same psychoaffective immaturity, a sub-posture of self, an infantile position in front of our own life.
Our time is warlike and cherishes its warrior language. We wage war on viruses, cancers, certain substances and waiting lists. We will henceforth wage a tighter war on alcohol. These struggles are not only noble, but they lead to notable advances. We’re learning that Gen Z are drinking less, especially in Britain, which is obviously heartening.
Still, clinical work with adolescents tends to dampen our celebrations, not allowing us to ignore what’s also going on, in the shadow of our triumphs. We collect the stories of a youth inhabited by a search for absolute control which, unfortunately, juggles with the psychopathologies attached to it: anxiety and depression at the top of the list, eating disorders, image obsession, isolation and other addictions. modern such as that on the screen or to other substances.
To drink or not to drink, that may not always be the question. Above all, it is our history with substance, our collective and intimate relationship with it, that is important to question. This relationship is complex, full of paradoxes, ambivalent and fascinating, as the human psyche always is. Excess is sometimes on the side of morality, which, in a compensatory way, tends to set up even more destructive bacchanalia.
As in Llenas’ book, it seems to me that what matters most has something to do with the intimate and deep story that everyone has with this “emptiness in oneself”, the one we all try to avoid, but from which, nevertheless, could spring formidable universes full of meaning.