What would Keith Richards do_ - Jessica Pallington West [5]
1) Accept your addiction and know that the experience of it has made you who you are and has enhanced you individually.
2) Have a sense of humor toward your own darkness.
3) Screw the guilt.
Number three is what bangs it all into place.
And ultimately, what is important is where you come out on the other side. The real thing is facing the problem, dealing with it, and working it out.
Know, too, that addictions are not necessarily weaknesses.
They are afflictions, diseases. It can be any number of things. An inability to stop sneezing. Anxiety. OCD. Depression. An intestinal system in love with diarrhea. A bum leg. They all come upon us as weakening monsters, take hold, and don’t easily let go until they do. Because we can defeat them.
It is not our addictions that kill us. Not if we survive them. As Keith said, “I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve only had a problem with policemen."
We all have our metaphorical heroin problem. Maybe we all have our metaphorical policemen too.
9. MAKE USE OF THE MUSIC AROUND YOU, YOUR ANTENNA, AND YOUR INNER GUITAR.
“I don’t think I write the songs; I’m an antenna. Actually, you receive the songs … You just sit around a piano or pick up a guitar, and for me, after about ten or fifteen minutes, something that I haven’t heard before starts to come out, and then I just sort of put it into shape and then I transmit it, you know.”
Keith’s instrument of choice, the guitar, is more than wood and strings. The instrument connects with an inner antenna and then picks up waves from the world around it, transforming those waves into something new.
“I look at that guitar sometimes and think, there’s only six strings and twelve frets, man. But the more you play it, the more things come out of it … Things arrive in a strange order. If you can retain the mystery and turn-on of finding things out, then you can’t put the goddamn thing down. It’s too intriguing. ”
Find an instrument. An instrument can be a voice, writing, painting, woodwork, pot holders. You’d be surprised what an antenna can transmit onto a pot holder.
And then put up the antenna, and let the waves come back.
“The songs are already out there. They’re there … People think you’re a songwriter, they think you wrote it, it’s all yours, you are totally responsible for it. Really, you are just a medium, you just develop a facility for recognizing and picking up things and you just have to be ready to be there, like being at a séance—they just plop out of the air. Whole songs just come to you, you don’t write it. I didn’t do anything except to happen to have been awake when it arrived. ”
Channel the ether’s song whether it’s coming out of the wind, or the smoke elegantly wafting from the burning toaster, or the flickering bits of fire as the house, once again, goes up in flames. The beautiful accidents are waiting.
10. PUT THE ANCIENT ART OF WEAVING TO WORK.
“We had two guitars weaving around each other. We’d play these things so much that we knew both guitar parts. So when we got to the crucial point where we got it really flash, we’d suddenly switch. The lead picks up the rhythm, and the rhythm picks up the lead. It’s what Ronnie and I call the ancient art of weaving. We don’t even have to look at each other, almost. You can feel it.”
With weaving, there is no lead or rhythm guitar. Players trade back and forth. No one takes the reins of ultimate control. This is a key metaphor for communication in any relationship, be it father-son, teacher-student, or dealer-addict.
Onstage, it’s a matter of two guitars. Offstage, it’s a matter of two people. Two people dancing with each other on a physical, spiritual, and musical level.
There’s a democracy to it, an equality. It’s a dance, and the dance ultimately teaches you to accept the individual in others, and to dance with the people around you.
“There’s one guy, he’s just got four arms. ”
“At our best, me and Ronnie make the Bayeux Tapestry onstage.”
You can learn a lot from guitars. The guitar can be used as a metaphor